must go to the poor man's cottage, though no verdure flourish around it, and no rivulet be nigh to delight you by the gentleness of its murmurs. If you look for the romantic simplicity of fiction you will be disappointed: but it is your duty to persevere, in spite of every discouragement. Benevolence is not merely a feeling, but a principle; not a dream of rapture for the fancy to indulge in, but a business for the hand to execute. amusement, and to have nothing to spare It is not the impulse of high and ecstatic for human suffering but the tribute of an emotion. It is an exertion of principle. You indolent and unmeaning sympathy. Many of you must be acquainted with that corruption of Christian doctrine, which has been termed Antinomianism. It professes the highest reverence for the Supreme Being, while it refuses obedience to the lessons of his authority. It professes the highest gratitude for the sufferings of Christ, while it refuses that course of life and action, which he demands of his followers. It professes to adore the tremen- It must now be obvious to all of you, that dous Majesty of heaven, and to weep in it is not enough that you give money, and shame and in sorrow over the sinfulness add your name to the contributors of chaof degraded humanity, while every day it rity-you must give it with judgment. You insults Heaven by the enormity of its mis- must give your time and your attention. deeds, and evinces the insincerity of its You must descend to the trouble of examinawilful perseverance in the practice of ini- tion. You must rise from the repose of conquity. This Antinomianism is generally templation, and make yourself acquainted condemned; and none reprobate it more with the objects of your benevolent exerthan the votaries of fine sentiment-your cises. Will he husband your charity with men of taste and elegant literature-your care, or will he squander it away in idleepicures of feeling, who riot in all the lux-ness and dissipation? Will he satisfy himury of theatrical emotion, and who, in their self with the brutal luxury of the moment, admiration of what is tender, and beautiful, and neglect the supply of his more substanand cultivated, have always turned with tial necessities, or suffer his children to be disgust from the doctrines of a sour and trained in ignorance and depravity? Will illiberal theology. We may say to such, charity corrupt him by laziness? What is as Nathan to David, "Thou art the man." his peculiar necessity? Is it the want of Theirs is to all intents and purposes Anti-health or the want of employment? Is it nomianism-and an Antinomianism of a the pressure of a numerous family? Does far more dangerous and deceitful kind, than the Antinomianism of a spurious and pretended orthodoxy. In the Antinomianism of religion, there is nothing to fascinate or deceive you. It wears an air of repulsive bigotry, more fitted to awaken disgust than to gain the admiration of proselytes. There is a glaring deformity in its aspect, which alarms you at the very outset, and is an outrage to that natural morality which, dark and corrupted as it is, is still strong enough to lift its loud remonstrance against it. But in the Antinomianism of high wrought sentiment, there is a deception far more insinuating. It steals upon you under the semblance of virtue. It is supported by the delusive colouring of imagination and poetry. It has all the graces and embellishments of literature to recommend it. Vanity is soothed, and conscience lulls itself to repose in this dream of feeling and of indolence. he need medicine to administer to the diseases of his children? Does he need fuel or raiment to protect them from the inclemency of winter? Does he need money to satisfy the yearly demands of his landlord, or to purchase books, and to pay for the education of his offspring? To give money is not to do all the work and labour of benevolence. You must go to the poor man's bed. You must lend your hand to the work of assistance. You must examine his accounts. You must try to recover those debts which are due to his family. You must try to recover those wages which are detained by the injustice or the rapacity of his master. You must employ your mediation with his superiors. You must represent to them the necessities of his situation. You must solicit their assistance, and awaken their feelings to the tale of his calamity. This is benevolence in its plain, and sober, and substantial reality, though eloquence may have withheld its Let us dismiss these lying vanities, and regulate our lives by the truth and sober-imagery, and poetry may have denied its ness of the New Testament. Benevolence is not in word and in tongue, but in deed and in truth. It is a business with men as they are, and with human life as drawn by the rough hand of experience. It is a duty which you must perform at the call of principle, though there be no voice of eloquence to give splendour to your exertions, and no music or poetry to lead your willing footsteps through the bowers of enchantment. graces and its embellishments. This is true and unsophisticated goodness. It may be recorded in no earthly documents; but if done under the influence of christian principle-in a word, done unto Jesus, it is written in the book of heaven, and will give a new lustre to that crown to which his disciples look forward in time, and will wear through eternity. You have all heard of the division of la conjunction with poverty; and well do they know that there is an eloquence in the imploring looks of these helpless poor, which no description can set before you. Oh! my brethren, figure to yourselves the calamity in all its soreness, and measure your bounty by the actual greatness of the claims, and not by the feebleness of their advocate. bour, and I wish you to understand, that the | Sad union! they are called to witness it in advantage of this principle may be felt as much in the operations of charity, as in the operations of trade and manufactures. The work of beneficence does not lie in the one act of giving money; there must be the act of attendance; there must be the act of inquiry; there must be the act of judicious application. But I can conceive that an individual may be so deficient in the I have trespassed upon your patience; varied experience and attention which a but, at the hazard of carrying my address work so extensive demands, that he may to a length that is unusual, I must still say retire in disgust and discouragement from more. Nor would I ever forgive myself if the practice of charity altogether. The in- I neglected to set the eternity of the poor stitution of a Society, such as this, saves in all its importance before you. This is this individual to the cause. It takes upon the second point of consideration to which itself all the subsequent acts in the work I wish to direct you. The man who conand labour of love, and restricts his part to siders the poor will give his chief anxiety the mere act of giving money. It fills the to the wants of their eternity. It must be middle space between the dispensers and evident to all of you that this anxiety is the recipients of charity. The habits of little felt. I do not appeal for the evidence many who now hear me, may disqualify of this to the selfish part of mankind-there them for the work of examination. They we are not to expect it. I go to those who may have no time for it; they may live at are really benevolent-who have a wish to a distance from the objects; they may nei- make others happy, and who take trouble ther know how to introduce, nor how to in so doing; and it is a striking observation, conduct themselves in the management of how little the salvation of these others is all the details; their want of practice and the object of that benevolence which makes of experience may disable them for the them so amiable. It will be found that in work of repelling imposition; they should and by far the greater number of instances, try to gain the necessary habits; it is right this principle is all consumed on the acthat every individual among us, should commodations of time, and the necessities each, in his own sphere, consider the poor, of the body. It is the meat which feeds and qualify themselves for a judicious and them-the garment which covers themdiscriminating charity. But, in the mean the house which shelters them-the money time, the Society for the Relief of the Des- which purchases all things; these, I say, titute Sick, is an instrument ready made are what form the chief topics of benevoto our hands. Avail yourselves of this in-lent anxieties. Now, we do not mean to disstrument immediately, as, by the easiest courage this principle. We cannot afford part of the exercise of charity, which is to it; there is too little of it; and it forms too give money, you carry home to the poor refreshing an exception to that general selall the benefits of its most difficult exercises. fishness which runs throughout the haunts The experience which you want, the mem- of business and ambition, for us to say any bers of this laudable Society are in posses- thing against it. We are not cold-blooded sion of. By the work and observation of enough to refuse our delighted concurrence years, a stock of practical wisdom is now to an exertion so amiable in its principle, accumulated among them. They have been and so pleasing in the warm and comfortlong inured to all that is loathsome and dis- able spectacle which it lays before us. The couraging in this good work, and they have poor, it is true, ought never to forget, that nerve, and hardihood, and principle to front it is to their own industry, and to the wisit. They are every way qualified to be the dom and economy of their own managecarriers of your bounty, for it is a path they ment, that they are to look for the elements have long travelled in. Give the money, of subsistence-that if idleness and prodiand these conscientious men will soon bring gality shall lay hold of the mass of our it into contact with the right objects. They population, no benevolence, however unknow the way through all the obscurities bounded, can ever repair a mischief so irreof this metropolis, and they they can bring coverable-that if they will not labour for the offerings of your charity to people whom themselves, it is not in the power of the you will never see, and into houses which rich to create a sufficiency for them; and you will never enter. It is not easy to con- that though every heart were opened, and ceive, far less to compute the extent of hu- every purse emptied in the cause, it would man misery; but these men can give you absolutely go for nothing towards forming experience for it. They can show you their a well-fed, a well-lodged, or a well condiregisters of the sick and of the dying; they tioned peasantry. Still, however, there are are familiar with disease in all its varieties cases which no foresight could prevent, and of faintness, and breathlessness, and pain.-no industry could provide for-where the blow falls heavy and unexpected on some devoted son or daughter of misfortune, and where, though thoughtlessness and folly may have had their share, benevolence, not very nice in its calculations, will feel the overpowering claim of actual, helpless, and imploring misery. Now, I again offer my cheerful testimony to such benevolence as this; I count it delightful to see it singling out its object; and sustaining it against the cruel pressure of age and of indigence; and when I enter a cottage where I see a warmer fire-side, or more substantial provision, than the visible means can account for, I say that the landscape, in all its summer glories, does not offer an object so gratifying, as when referred to the vicinity of the great man's house, and the people who live in it, and am told that I will find my explanation there. Kind and amiable people! your benevolence is most lovely in its display, but oh! it is perishable in its consequences. Does it never occur to you that in a few years this favourite will die-and that he will go to the place where neither cold nor hunger will reach him, but that a mighty interest remains, of which both of us may know the certainty, though neither you nor I can calculate the extent. Your benevolence is too short.-It does not shoot far enough a-head.—It is like regaling a child with a sweetmeat or a toy, and then abandoning the happy, unreflecting infant to exposure. You make the poor old man happy with your crumbs and your frag. ments, but he is an infant on the mighty range of infinite duration; and will you leave the soul, which has the infinity to go through, to its chance? How comes it that the grave should throw so impenetrable a shroud over the realities of eternity? How comes it that heaven, and hell, and judgment, should be treated as so many nonentities, and that there should be as little real and operative sympathy felt for the soul which lives forever, as for the body after it is dead, or for the dust into which it moulders? Eternity is longer than time; the arithmetic, my brethren, is all one side upon this question; and the wisdom which calculates, and guides itself by calculation, gives its weighty and respectable support to what may be called the benevolence of faith. Now, if there be one employment more fitted than another to awaken this benevolence, it is the peculiar employment of that Society for which I am now pleading. I would have anticipated such benevolence from the situation they occupy, and the information before the public bears testimony to the fact. The truth is, that the diseases of he body may be looked upon as so many outlets through which the soul finds its way to eternity. Now, it is at these outlets that the members of this Society have stationed themselves. This is the interesting point of survey at which they stand, and from which they command a look of both worlds. They have placed themselves in the avenues which lead from time to eternity, and they have often to witness the awful transition of a soul hovering at the entrance-struggling its way through the valley of the shadow of death, and at last breaking loose from the confines of all that is visible. Do you think it likely that men with such spectacles before them, will withstand the sense of eternity? No, my brethren, they cannot, they have not. Eternity, I rejoice to announce to you, is not forgotten by them; and with their care for the diseases of the body, they are neither blind nor indifferent to the fact, that the soul is diseased also. We know it well. There is an indolent and superficial theology, which turns its eyes from the danger, and feels no pressing call for the application of the remedy-which reposes more in its own vague and selfassumed conceptions of the mercy of God, than in the firm and consistent representations of the New Testament-which overlooks the existence of disease altogether, and therefore feels no alarm, and exerts no urgency in the business-which, in the face of all the truths and all the severities that are uttered in the word of God, leaves the soul to its chance; or, in other words, by neglecting to administer every thing specific for the salvation of the soul, leaves it to perish. We do not want to involve you in controversies; we only ask you to open the New Testament, and attend to the obvious meaning of a word which occurs frequently in its pages-we mean the word saved. The term surely implies, that the present state of the thing to be saved is a lost and an undone state. If a tree be in a healthful state from its infancy, you never apply the term saved to it, though you see its beautiful foliage, its flourishing blossoms, its abundant produce, and its progressive ascent through all the varieties incidental to a sound and a prosperous tree. But if it were diseased in its infancy, and ready to perish, and if it were restored by management and artificial applications, then you would say of this tree that it was saved; and the very term implies some previous state of uselessness and corruption. What, then, are we to make of the frequent occurrence of this term in the New Testament, as applied to a human being? If men come into this world pure and innocent, and have nothing more to do but to put forth the powers with which nature has endowed them, and so rise through the progressive stages of virtue and excellence, to the rewards of immortality, you would not say of these men that they were saved, when they were translated to these rewards. These rewards of man are the natural effects of his obedience, and the term saved | power of God through faith unto salvation, to every one who believes them. is not at all applicable to such a supposition. But the God of the Bible says differently. If a man obtain heaven at all, it is by being saved. He is in a diseased state, and it is by the healing application of the blood of the Son of God, that he is restored from that state. The very title applied to him proves the same thing. He is called our Saviour. The deliverance which he effects is called our salvation. The men whom he doth deliver are called the saved. Doth not this imply some previous state of disease and helplessness? And from the frequent and incidental occurrence of this term, may we not gather an additional testimony to the truth of what is elsewhere more expressly revealed to us, that we are lost by nature, and that to obtain recovery, we must be found in Him who came to seek and to save that which was lost. He that believeth on the Son of God shall be saved, but he that believeth not, the wrath of God abideth on him. We know that there are some who loathe this representation; but this is just another example of the substantial interests of the poor being sacrificed to mismanagement and delusion. It is to be hoped that there are many who have looked the disease fairly in the face, and are ready to reach forward the remedy adapted to relieve it. We should have no call to attend to the spiritual interests of men, if they could safely be left to themselves, and to the spontaneous operation of those powers with which it is supposed that nature has endowed them. But this is not the state of the case. We come into the world with the principles of sin and condemnation within us; and, in the congenial atmosphere of this world's example, these ripen fast for the execution of the sentence. During the period of this short but interesting passage to another world, the remedy is in the gospel held out to all, and the freedom and universality of its invitations, while it opens assured admission to all who will, must aggravate the weight and severity of the sentence to those who will not; and upon them the dreadful energy of that saying will be accomplished, "How shall they escape if they neglect so great a salvation?" We know part of your labours for the eternity of the poor. We know that you have brought the Bible into contact with many a soul. And we are sure that this is suiting the remedy to the disease; for the Bible contains those words which are the To this established instrument for working faith in the heart, add the instrument of hearing. When you give the Bible, accompany the gift with the living energy of a human voice-let prayer, and advice, and explanation, be brought to act upon them; and let the warm and deeply felt earnestness of your hearts, discharge itself upon theirs in the impressive tones of sincerity, and friendship, and good will. This is going substantially to work. It is, if I may use the expression, bringing the right element to bear upon the case before you; and be assured, every treatment of a convinced and guilty mind is superficial and ruinous, which does not lead it to the Saviour, and bring before it his sacrifice and atonement, and the influences of that spirit bestowed through his obedience on all who believe on Him. While in the full vigour of health we may count it enough to take up with something short of this. But-striking testimony to evangelical truth! go to the awful reality of a human soul on the eve of its departure from the body, and you will find that all those vapid sentimentalities which partake not of the substantial doctrine of the New Testament, are good for nothing. Hold up your face, my brethren, for the truth and simplicity of the Bible. Be not ashamed of its phraseology. It is the right instrument to handle in the great work of calling a human soul out of darkness into marvellous light. Stand firm and secure on the impregnable principle, that this is the word of God, and that all taste, and imagination, and science, must give way before its overbearing authority. Walk in the footsteps of your Saviour, in the twofold office of caring for the diseases of the body, and administering to the wants of the soul; and though you may fail in the former-though the patient may never arise and walk, yet, by the blessing of Heaven upon your fervent and effectual endeavours, the latter object may be gained-the soul may be lightened of all its anxieties, the whole burden of its diseases may be swept away-it may be of good cheer, because its sins are forgiven -and the right direction may be impressed upon it, which will carry it forward in progress to a happy eternity. Death may not be averted, but death may be disarmed. It may be stript of its terrors, and instead of a devouring enemy, it may be hailed as a messenger of triumph. THOUGHTS ON UNIVERSAL PEACE. A SERMON, DELIVERED ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 18, 1816, THE DAY OF NATIONAL "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."-Isaiah ii. 4. THERE are a great many passages in Scripture which warrant the expectation that a time is coming, when an end shall be put to war-when its abominations and its cruelties shall be banished from the face of the earth-when those restless elements of ambition and jealousy which have so long kept the species in a state of unceasing commotion, and are ever and anon sending another and another wave over the field of this world's politics, shall at length be hushed into a placid and ever-during calm; and many and delightful are the images which the Bible employs, as guided by the light of prophecy, it carries us forward to those millennial days, when the reign of peace shall be established, and the wide charity of the gospel, which is confined by no limits, and owns no distinctions, shall embosom the whole human race within the ample grasp of one harmonious and universal family. shall offer or not to help it forward by our co-operation. But if the object is to be brought about, and if, in virtue of the same sovereignty by which he determined upon the object, he has also determined on the way which leads to it, and that that way shall be by the acting of human principle, and the putting forth of human exertion, then, let us keep back our co-operation as we may, God will raise up the hearts of others to that which we abstain from; and they, admitted into the high honour of being fellow-workers with God, may do homage to the truth of his prophecy, while we, perhaps, may unconsciously do dreadful homage to the truth of another warning, and another prophecy: "I work a work in your days which you shall not believe, though a man declare it unto you. Behold, ye despisers, and wonder and perish." Now this is the very way in which prophecies have been actually fulfilled. The But before I proceed, let me attempt to return of the people of Israel to their own do away a delusion which exists on the land, was an event predicted by inspiration, subject of prophecy. Its fulfilments are all and was brought about by the stirring up certain, say many, and we have therefore of the spirit of Cyrus, who felt himself nothing to do, but to wait for them in pas- charged with the duty of building a house sive and indolent expectation. The truth to God at Jerusalem. The pouring out of of God stands in no dependence on human the Spirit on the day of Pentecost was foreaid to vindicate the immutability of all his told by the Saviour ere he left the world, announcements; and the power of God and was accomplished upon men who asstands in no need of the feeble exertions of sembled themselves together at the place man to hasten the accomplishment of any to which they were commanded to repair; of his purposes. Let us therefore sit down and there they waited, and they prayed. quietly in the attitude of spectators-let us The rapid propagation of Christianity in leave the Divinity to do his own work in those days was known by the human agents his own way, and mark, by the progress of of this propagation, to be made sure by the a history over which we have no control, word of prophecy; but the way in which the evolution of his designs, and the march it was actually made sure, was by the of his wise and beneficent administration. strenuous exertions, the unexampled heroNow, it is very true, that the Divinity ism, the holy devotedness and zeal of marwill do his own work in his own way, but tyrs, and apostles, and evangelists. And if he choose to tell us that that way is not even now, my brethren, while no professwithout the instrumentality of men, but by ing Christian can deny that their faith is to their instrumentality, might not this sitting be one day the faith of all countries; but down into the mere attitude of spectators, while many of them idly sit and wait the turn out to be a most perverse and disobe-time of God putting forth some mysterious dient conclusion? It is true, that his pur- and unheard of agency, to bring about the pose will obtain its fulfilment, whether we universal diffusion, there are men who have |