SERMONS

PREACHED IN ST. JOHN'S CHURCH,

GLASGOW.

PREFACE.

THE following Sermons are of too miscellaneous a character to be arranged according to the succession of their topics, and they are, therefore, presented to the reader as so many compositions that are almost wholly independent of each other.

Two of the Sermons treat of Predestination, and the Sin against the Holy Ghost. There are topics of a highly speculative character, in the system of Christian Doctrine, which it is exceedingly difficult to manage, without interesting the curiosity rather than the conscience of the reader. And yet, it is from their fitness of application to the conscience, that they derive their chief right to appear in a volume of Sermons; and I should not have ventured any publication upon either of these doctrines, did I not think them capable of being so treated as to subserve the great interests of practical godliness.

The Sermons all relate to topics that I hold to be strictly congregational, with the exception of the thirteenth and fourteenth in the volume, which belong rather to Christian Economies, than to Christian Theology-to the "outer things of the house of God," rather than to the things of the sanctuary, or the intimacies of the spiritual life. I, perhaps, ought therefore to apologize for the appearance of these two in a volume of Congregational Sermons, and yet I have been led by experience to feel the religious importance of their subject, and I think that much injury has been sustained by the souls of our people, from the neglect of obvious principles both in the business of education, and in the business of public charity. I have, however, more comfort in discussing this argument from the press, than from the pulpit, which ought to be kept apart for loftier themes, and which seems to suffer a sort of desecration when employed as the vehicle for any thing else than the overtures of pardon to the sinner, and the hopes and duties of the believer.

SERMON I.

The Constancy of God in His Works an Argument for the Faithfulness of God in His Word.

"For ever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: thou hast established the earth, and it abideth. They continue this day according to thy ordinances: for all are thy servants."-Psalm cxix. 89, 90, 91.

IN these verses there is affirmed to be an afterwards. And then, as if to perfect the analogy between the word of God and the assimilation between them, it is said of both works of God. It is said of his word, that it in the 91st verse, "They continue this day is settled in heaven, and that it sustains its according to thine ordinances, for all are faithfulness from one generation to another. thy servants;" thereby identifying the sureIt is said of his works, and more especially ness of that word which proceeded from his of those that are immediately around us, lips, with the unfailing constancy of that even of the earth which we inhabit, that as Nature which was formed and is upholden it was established at the first so it abideth | by his hands.

multiplying along the journey of human observation: insomuch, that when we come to manhood, we read of Nature's constancy throughout every department of the visible world. It meets us wherever we turn our eyes. Both the day and the night bear witness to it. The silent revolutions of the firmament give it their pure testimony. Even those appearances in the heavens, at which superstition stood aghast, and ima

The constancy of Nature is taught by and her ordinances, and that she continueth universal experience, and even strikes the therein. And the proofs of this are ever popular eye as the most characteristic of those features which have been impressed upon her. It may need the aid of philosophy to learn how unvarying Nature is in all her processes-how even her seeming anomalies can be traced to a law that is inflexible how what might appear at first to be the caprices of her waywardness, are, in fact, the evolutions of a mechanism that never changes and that the more thoroughly she is sifted and put to the test by the interroga-gined that Nature was on the eve of giving tions of the curious, the more certainly will way, are the proudest trophies of that stathey find that she walks by a rule which bility which reigns throughout her proknows no abatement, and perseveres with cesses of that unswerving consistency obedient footstep in that even course, from wherewith she prosecutes all her movewhich the eye of strictest scrutiny, has never ments. And the lesson that is thus held yet detected one hair-breadth of deviation. forth to us from the heavens above, is reIt is no longer doubted by men of science, sponded to by the earth below; just as the that every remaining semblance of irregu- tides of ocean wait the footsteps of the larity in the universe is due, not to the moon, and, by an attendance kept up withfickleness of Nature, but to the ignorance out change or intermission for thousands of of man-that her most hidden movements years, would seem to connect the regularity are conducted with a uniformity as rigorous of earth with the regularity of heaven. But, as fate--that even the fitful agitations of the apart from these greater and simpler enerweather have their law and their principle-gies, we see a course and a uniformity every that the intensity of every breeze, and the where. We recognise it in the mysteries of number of drops in every shower, and the vegetation. We follow it through the sucformation of every cloud, and all the occur- [cessive stages of growth, and maturity, and ring alternations of storm and sunshine, and decay, both in plants and animals. We disthe endless shiftings of temperature, and cern it still more palpably in that beautiful those tremulous varieties of the air which circulation of the element of water, as it our instruments have enabled us to discover, rolls its way by many thousand channels to but have not enabled us to explain-that the ocean-and, from the surface of this still, they follow each other by a method of expanded reservoir, is again uplifted to the succession, which, though greatly more in- higher regions of the atmosphere-and is tricate, is yet as absolute in itself as the there dispersed in light and fleecy magaorder of the seasons, or the mathematical zines over the four quarters of the globecourses of astronomy. This is the impres- and at length accomplishes its orbit, by fallsion of every philosoph..al mind with re-ing in showers on a world that waits to be gard to Nature, and it is strengthened by each new accession that is made to science. The more we are acquainted with her, the more are we led to recognise her constancy; and to view her as a mighty though complicated machine, all whose results are sure, and all whose workings are invariable.

But there is enough of patent and palpable regularity in Nature, to give also to the popular mind, the same impression of her constancy. There is a gross and general experience that teaches the same lesson, and that has lodged in every bosom a kind of secure and steadfast confidence in the uniformity of her processes. The very child knows and proceeds upon it. He is aware of an abiding character and property in the elements around him-and has already learned as much of the fire, and the water, and the food that he eats, and the firm ground that he treads upon, and even of the gravitation by which he must regulate his postures and his movements, as to prove, that infant though he be, he is fully initiated in the doctrine, that Nature has her laws

refreshed by it. And all goes to impress us with the regularity of Nature, which in fact teems, throughout all its varieties, with power, and principle, and uniform laws of operation-and is viewed by us as a vast laboratory, all the progressions of which have a rigid and unfailing necessity stamped upon them.

Now, this contemplation has at times served to foster the atheism of philosophers It has led them to deify Nature, and to make her immutability stand in the place of God. They seem impressed with the imagination, that had the Supreme Cause been a being who thinks, and wills, and acts as man does, on the impulse of a felt and a present motive, there would be more the appearance of spontaneous activity, and less of mute and unconscious mechanism in the administrations of the universe. It is the very unchangeableness of Nature and the steadfastness of those great and mighty processes wherewith no living power that is superior to Nature, and is able to shift or to control her, is seen to interfere-it is this which

seems to have impressed the notion of some blind and eternal fatality on certain men of loftiest but deluded genius. And, accordingly, in France, where the physical sciences have, of late, been the most cultivated, have there also been the most daring avowals of atheism. The universe has been affirmed to be an everlasting and indestructible effect; and from the abiding constancy that is seen in Nature, through all her departments, have they inferred, that thus it has always e been, and that thus it will ever be.

together, the invariableness wherewith these two terms of the succession have followed each other. Or, in other words, God, by putting this faith into every human creature, and making it a necessary part of his mental constitution, has taught him at all times to expect the like result in the like circumstances. He has thus virtually told him what is to happen, and what he has to look for in every given condition-and by its so happening accordingly, he just makes good the veracity of his own declaration. But this atheistical impression that is de- The man who leads me to expect that rived from the constancy of Nature, is not which he fails to accomplish, I would hold peculiar to the disciples of philosophy. It to be a deceiver. God has so framed the is the familiar and the practical impression machinery of my perceptions, as that I am of every-day life. The world is apprehended led irresistibly to expect, that every where to move on steady and unvarying principles events will follow each other in the very of his own; and these secondary causes train in which I have ever been accustomed have usurped, in man's estimation, the to observe them-and when God so sustains throne of the Divinity. Nature in fact is the uniformity of Nature, that in every inpersonified into God: and as we look to the stance it is rigidly so, he is just manifesting performance of a machine without thinking the faithfulness of his character. Were it of its maker, so the very exactness and otherwise, he would be practising a mockcertainty, wherewith the machinery of ery on the expectation which he himself creation performs its evolutions, has thrown had inspired. God may be said to have proa disguise over the agency of the Creator. mised to every human being, that Nature Should God interpose by miracle, or inter-will be constant-if not by the whisper of fere by some striking and special manifesta- an inward voice to every heart, at least by tion of providence, then man is awakened the force of an uncontrollable bias which to the recognition of him. But he loses he has impressed on every constitution. So sight of the Being who sits behind these visible elements, while he regards those attributes of constancy and power which appear in the elements themselves. They see no demonstration of a God, and they feel no need of him, while such unchanging, and such unfailing energy continues to operate in the visible world around them; and we need not go to the schools of ratiocination in quest of this infidelity, but may detect it in the bosoms of simple and unlettered men, who, unknown to themselves, make a god of Nature, and just because of Nature's constancy; having no faith in the unseen Spirit who originated all and upholds all, and that, because all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.

that, when we behold Nature keeping by its constancy, we behold the God of Nature keeping by his faithfulness-and the system of visible things, with its general laws, and its successions which are invariable, instead of an opaque materialism to intercept from the view of mortals the face of the Divinity, becomes the mirror which reflects upon them the truth that is unchangeable, the ordination that never fails.

Conceive that it had been otherwisefirst, that man had no faith in the constancy of Nature-then how could all his experience have profited him? How could he have applied the recollections of his past, to the guidance of his future history? And, what would have been left to signalize the wisdom of mankind above that of veriest Such has been the perverse effect of Na- infancy? Or, suppose that he had the imture's constancy on the alienated mind of plicit faith in Nature's constancy, but that man: but let us now attend to the true in- Nature was wanting in the fulfilment of it— terpretation of it. God has, in the first in- that at every moment his intuitive reliance stance, put into our minds a disposition to on this constancy, was met by some caprice count on the uniformity of Nature, insomuch or waywardness of Nature, which thwarted that we universally look for a recurrence of him in all his undertakings-that, instead the same event in the same circumstances. of holding true to her announcements, she This is not merely the belief of experience, held the children of men in most distressful but the belief of instinct. It is antecedent uncertainty, by the freaks and the falsities to all the findings of observation, and may in which she ever indulged herself—and be exemplified in the earliest stages of child- that every design of human foresight was hood. The infant who makes a noise on the thus liable to be broken up, by ever and table with his hand, for the first time, anti-anon the putting forth of some new fluctuacipates a repetition of the noise from a re- tion. Tell me, in this wild misrule of elepetition of the stroke, with as much confi- ments changing their properties, and events dence as he who has witnessed, for years ever flitting from one method of succession

to another, if man could subsist for a single | as well as of laws that never are rescinded. day, when all the accomplishments without, It is for us that he upholds the world in all were thus at war with all the hopes and its regularity. It is for us that he sustains calculations within. In such a chaos and so inviolably the march and the movement conflict as this, would not the foundations of those innumerable progressions which of human wisdom be utterly subverted? are going on around us. It is in rememWould not man, with his powerful and per- brance of his promises to us, that he meets petual tendency to proceed on the constancy all our anticipations of Nature's uniformity, of Nature, be tempted, at all times, and by with the evolutions of a law that is unalthe very constitution of his being, to pro- terable. It is because he is a God that canceed upon a falsehood? It were the way, not lie, that he will make no invasion on in fact, to turn the administration of Nature that wondrous correspondency which he into a system of deceit. The lessons of to- himself hath instituted between the world day, would be falsified by the events of to- that is without, and our little world of morrow. He were indeed the father of lies hopes, and projects, and anticipations that who could be the author of such a regimen are within. By the constancy of Nature, as this and well may we rejoice in the he hath imprinted upon it the lesson of his strict order of the goodly universe which own constancy-and that very characterwe inhabit, and regard it as a noble attesta-istic wherewith some would fortify the untion to the wisdom and beneficence of its great Architect.

godliness of their hearts, is the most impressive exhibition which can be given of God, as always faithful, and always the same.

This, then, is the real character which the constancy of Nature should lead us to assign to him who is the Author of it. In every

universal instinct, by which all are led to believe that Nature will persevere in her wonted courses, and that each succession of cause and effect which has been observed by us in the time that is past, will, while the world exists, be kept up invariably, and recur in the very same order through the time that is to come. This constancy, then, is as good as a promise that he has made unto all men, and all that is around us on

But it is more especially as an evidence of his truth, that the constancy of Nature is adverted to in our text. It is of his faithfulness unto all generations that mention is there made and for the growth and the discipline of your piety, we know not a bet-human understanding, he hath planted a ter practical habit than that of recognising the unchangeable truth of God, throughout your daily and hourly experience of Nature's unchangeableness. Your faith in it is of his working--and what a condition would you have been reduced to, had the faith which is within, not been met by an entire and unexpected accordancy with the fulfilments that are without! He has not told you what to expect by the utterance of a voice-but he has taught you what to ex-earth or in heaven, proves how inflexibly pect by the leadings and the intimations of the promise is adhered to. The chemist in a strong constitutional tendency-and, in his laboratory, as he questions Nature, may virtue of this, there is not a human creature be almost said to put her to the torture, who does not believe, and almost as firmly when tried in his hottest furnace, or probed as in his own existence, that fire will con- by his searching analysis, to her innermost tinue to burn, and water to cool, and matter arcana, she, by a spark, or an explosion, or to resist, and unsupported bodies to fall, and an effervescence, or an evolving substance, ocean to bear the adventurous vessel upon makes her distinct replies to his investiga its surface, and the solid earth to uphold tions. And he repeats her answer to all his the tread of his footsteps; and that spring fellows in philosophy, and they meet in will appear again in her wonted smiles, and academic state and judgment to reiterate summer will glow into heat and brilliancy, the question, and in every quarter of the and autumn will put on the same luxuri- globe her answer is the same-so that, let ance as before, and winter, at its stated pe- the experiment, though a thousand times riods, revisit the world with her darkness repeated, only be alike in all its circumand her storms. We cannot sum up those stances, the result which cometh forth is as countless varieties of Nature; but the firm rigidly alike, without deficiency, and withexpectation is, that throughout them all, as out deviation. We know how possible it is she has been established, so she will abide for these worshippers at the footstool of to the day of her final dissolution. And I science, to make a divinity of matter; and call upon you to recognise in Nature's con- that every new discovery of her secrets stancy, the answer of Nature's God to this should only rivet them more devotedly to expectation. All these material agents are, her throne. But there is a God who liveth in fact, the organs by which he expresses and sitteth there, and these unvarying rehis faithfulness to the world; and that un-sponses of Nature are all prompted by himveering generality which reigns and con- self, and are but the utterances of his imtinues every where, is but the perpetual mutability. They are the replies of a God demonstration of a truth that never varies, who never changes, and who hath adapted

so fixed, that we apprehend the God of Nature to be so faithful. He who never falsifies the hope that hath arisen in every bosom, from the instinct which he himself hath

the whole materialism of creation to the constitution of every mind that he hath sent forth upon it. And to meet the expectation which he himself hath given of Nature's constancy, is he at each successive instant communicated, will never falsify the hope of time, vigilant and ready in every part of his vast dominions, to hold out to the eye of all observers, the perpetual and unfailing demonstration of it. The certainties of Nature and of Science are, in fact, the vocables by which God announces his truth to the world-and when told how impossible it is that Nature can fluctuate, we are only told how impossible it is that the God of Nature can deceive us.

The doctrine that Nature is constant, - when thus related, as it ought to be, with the doctrine that God is true, might well strengthen our confidence in him anew with | every new experience of our history. There is not an hour or a moment, in which we may not verify the one-and, therefore, not an hour or a moment in which we may not invigorate the other. Every touch, and every look, and every taste, and every act of converse between our senses and the things that are without, brings home a new demonstration of the steadfastness of Nature, and along with it a new demonstration both of his steadfastness and of his faithfulness, who is the Governor of Nature. And the same lesson may be fetched from times and from places, that are far beyond the limits of our own personal history. It can be drawn fom the retrospect of past ages, where, from the unvaried currency of those very processes which we now behold, we may learn the stability of all his ways, whose goings forth are of old, and from everlasting. It can be gathered from the most distant extremities of the earth, where Nature reigns with the same unwearied constancy, as it does around us-and where savages count as we do on a uniformity, from which she never falters. The lesson is commensurate with the whole system of things-and with an effulgence as broad as the face of creation, and as clear as the light which is poured over it, does it at once tell that Nature is unchangeably constant, and that God is unchangeably true.

And so it is, that in our text there are presented together, as if there was a tie of likeness between them-that the same God who is fixed as to the ordinances of Nature, is faithful as to the declaration of his word; and as all experience proves how firmly he may be trusted for the one, so is there an argument as strong as experience, to prove how firmly he may be trusted for the other. By his work in us, he hath awakened the expectation of a constancy in Nature, which he never disappoints. By his word to us, should he awaken the expectation of a certainty in his declarations, this he will never disappoint. It is because Nature is

that shall arise in any bosom from the express utterance of his voice. Were he a God in whose hand the processes of Nature were ever shifting, then might we conceive him a God from whose mouth the proclamations of grace had the like characters of variance and vacillation. But it is just because of our reliance on the one, that we feel so much of repose in our dependence upon the other-and the same God who is so unfailing in the ordinances of his creation, do we hold to be equally unfailing in the ordinances of his word.

And it is strikingly accordant with these views, that Nature never has been known to recede from her constancy, but for the purpose of giving place and demonstration to the authority of the word. Once, in a season of miracle, did the word take the precedency of Nature, but ever since hath Nature resumed her courses, and is now proving by her steadfastness, the authority of that, which she then proved to be authentic by her deviations. When the word was first ushered in, Nature gave way for a period, after which she moves in her wonted order, till the present system of things shall pass away, and that faith which is now upholden by Nature's constancy, shall then receive its accomplishment at Nature's dissolution. And O, how God magnifieth his word above all his name, when he tells that heaven and earth shall pass away, but that his word shall not pass away-and that while his creation shall become a wreck, not one jot or one tittle of his testimony shall fail. The world passeth away-but the word endureth for everand if the faithfulness of God stand forth so legibly on the face of the temporary world, how surely may we reckon on the faithfulness of that word, which has a vastly higher place in the counsels and fulfilments of eternity.

The argument may not be comprehended by all, but it will not be lost, should it lead any to feel a more emphatic certainty and meaning than before, in the declarations of the Bible-and to conclude, that he who for ages hath stood so fixed to all his plans and purposes in Nature, will stand equally fixed to all that he proclaims, and to all that he promises in Revelation. To be in the hands of such a God, might well strike a terror into the hearts of the guilty-and that unrelenting death, which, with all the sureness of an immutable law, is seen, before our eyes, to seize upon every individual of every species of our world, full well evinces how he, the uncompromising Lawgiver, will execute every utterance that he has made