injuring themselves; and that, whenever they do good to others, they always increase their own enjoyments, and elevate their own character. This is evident from the facts, that an unintended evil, occurring through our means, never degrades us in the estimate of our own conscience; and that an undesigned and uncontrived good, transpiring through us to others, never gives us the complacency and satisfaction, which we feel when it is the result of our own plans and purposes. Whenever we are the means of benefit to others without having designed it, we are in danger of being shrivelled with envy, or puffed with empty importance, or swelled with hollow merit. By accidental and undesigned usefulness, our character is not improved, and our solid happiness is not increased. The element of good-nature, if it pervaded our constitutional habits, might, indeed, neutralize the bad tendencies of accidental benefits, as it always promotes the meliorating influences of intended good. If the mind becomes injured by the success of contrived and intended benefits, nothing can restore it to a right state, but a sense of the despicableness and criminality of selfishness, and a deep conviction of its responsible stewardship to God.

Unhallowed talents have done much injury to many churches, and many have been ruined by unhallowed power; but what has destroyed its thousands is, unsanctified prosperity. With all her canvass spread to the swelling and impelling gale, the safety of the church is in the ballast and weight of her holy character. When a church is as the garden of the Lord, a paradise of revivals, with all her virtues luxuriating in beauty and goodness, and her graces impregnating the atmosphere with their sweet scents and odors, then, frequently, has the demon of spiritual pride entered its enclosures, and covered it with the enchantments of brilliant illusions, which vanished in "sin and all our woe." Even paradise, without holiness, became a desert; and revivals without holiness are a howling wilderness, the lairs and the dens of prowling beasts, that alarm where they do not devour the flock.

The Holy Spirit has designed and arranged that the usefulness of the church should have a reflex influence on its own character and happiness. "There is that scattereth and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty. The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth shall be watered also himself."

Some winters ago two friends were travelling in Lapland. To protect themselves against the extreme rigor of the season, they had enveloped themselves in thick foldings of garments, and were well wrapped in fur. Notwithstanding all these precautions the cold was almost insufferable. In the course of their journey through one of the glens of that country, they perceived the body of a man nearly covered with snow. When they reached him he appeared frost-bitten and dead. What was to be done? They were both enfeebled by the frost, breathing an atmosphere of snow, and shivering with the cold. One of the travellers proposed, that, as they could do the frost-bitten man no good, they should leave him, and make the best of their way to the distant inn. The other felt the spark of compassionate benevolence kindling in his breast, and began the work of restoring animation, while his companion shivered and shuddered on to the distant village. His efforts were at first very feeble, but as he persevered he became warm. His benevolent labor was crowned with success animation was restored, and a "soul was saved from death." How pure and solid was his joy! He had saved a man from dying, and in the glorious effort he had benefited himself. By his benevolent activity he had restored a healthy glow in his own system, and then continued his journey, not trembling and shivering like his friend, but brisk with the impulse of generous spirits, and with the dignified port, and the cheerful step, of a man that had done good. At the inn, which of these travellers would my reader wish to have been? - Go, and do likewise! There is a world before you ready to perish. The Holy Spirit says you can save it from death. You feel weak only from your own coldness and apathy. Make the attempt, continue the effort, and your own life-blood will glow with a more healthy vigor, and your own frame will be cheered with a more generous vitality, and ransomed souls will live and bloom in the crown of your rejoicing.

To be the instrument and means of benefits to others without improving ourselves, graduates among the same low degrees of contempt, with the talent of appropriating all advantages to self, without diffusing any to others. It were awful to be the means of saving others, and ourselves to be cast away to minister saving health to others, and ourselves perish of the plague: to gather, like the burning-glass, rays to inflame the world with the love of Christ, and we ourselves remain cold and insensible. The only security against

this danger is Holiness. Holiness is the life of the church; it is this that makes the church a living body, and consequently the means and agent of its own growth and happiness. A living thing grows from itself, and not by accession from without, as a house or a ship grows. A flower does not grow by adding a leaf to it, nor a tree by the fastening of a branch to it, nor man by fixing a limb to his frame. Every thing that has life in it grows by a converting process, which transforms the food into means of nourishment and of growth and enlargement. A holy church lives, and its holiness converts all its ordinances and provisions into means of deeprooted, solid, enlarged, and beautiful usefulness.

Enlarged usefulness, without the beauty of holiness, will make the church to be the ridicule, and the scorn of the world. Pure and undefiled religion is unspotted from the world. The world, where the church is stationed, is a scene of filth and uncleanness. Holiness is the church's best robe, her bridal dress. While the church is in the world, there is great danger of her sullying and spotting her beautiful garments. Unholy usefulness always makes religion appear ridiculous; just as spots on a delicate dress are more marked than the dress, and marked the more, in proportion to the superb beauty of the robe itself. Unhallowed success unfits the church for the glorious rewards of its labors. Meetness for the Master's use is the best and surest meetness for the Master's reward in the inheritance of the saints in light. All the rewards to be conferred are holy, and only holy laborers have a relish for them. Holy usefulness is the best preparation for these holy rewards, because usefulness is itself the sweet foretaste of the heavenly recompense.

SECTION III.

The Spirit of Love.-On travailing in birth for the souls of Men.

In the history of intellectual enterprise and mental achievements, for six thousand years, it is probably impossible to find out one mind that has employed and devoted its energies to the research of ITS OWN WORTH. Of everything else, mind endeavors and labors to discover the worth. It no sooner finds out an element or a power, than it immediately inquires into its worth, tries to discover what it is good for, what it can do, and in what way the world can be benefited by its operations. Though the mind may have a sublime pleasure

in the discovery of the mere existence of a principle or power, independently of all its adaptations and utilities, yet generally it does not rest in that simple acquisition. Indeed, when we minutely analyze our knowledge, we value it only in proportion as it ascertains what the thing known is good for, and discovers to us what it is worth. Probably our knowledge of the blessed God consists in our conceptions and imaginations of what He can do, and of what he can perform and effect, not for ourselves merely, but for the interests of the universe. It is certain that our knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ consists in our estimate of the availableness of his mediation to the interests of men, and to the happiness of the universe.

Intellectual philosophers have endeavored to penetrate into the arcana and the recesses of the mind, to explore its powers, and discover the modes of their action, but not to estimate their worth. No inquirer into mind has set himself to a sober and resolute investigation of the latent and occult adaptations and capabilities of the mind, that he might realize vividly, and portray distinctly to himself and others, what a soul would be if perfected; if all its capacities were disciplined to their most ample and most graceful action; and what would be the state of society and of the world, if every soul in existence displayed all its powers in this conceived finish of culture and power. It will not be pretended that the worth and the adaptations of elasticity, magnetism, or of steam, have higher and nobler claims to inquisitive research than the worth and the powers of the soul. It is, indeed, only by the capacities, which constitute the worth of the soul, that the worth of all things else is ascertained. They, indeed, who value and mind earthly things only, pay no regard to the worth of the soul: but, even Christians who profess to know this worth, to feel it, and to teach it, are comparatively little alive to its transcendent value.

Suppose my reader, from the moment in which this page has caught his eye, will consecrate one uninterrupted hour to this stupendous inquiry-how full of eternity would that hour be! A metaphysical plunge into the profound and unfathomable abyss of this question is not the best means of ascertaining its boundless grandeur. Gradual ascent to some of the eminences, which rise in its vicinity, will enable us to take a more enlarged view of its magnitude, and to look further into its unending destinies. We may, perhaps, approach the

"height of this great argument," by ascending the grades of our bodily organs, senses, and capacities. It is difficult for us to realize fully the amount of consequences, that would result from the loss of a bodily limb. It would cost the mind an effort, to account to itself what would be the probable state of art and civilization in the present day, had TITIAN, Angelo, and the CLAUDES been deprived of a hand or an arm; or what would be the accumulated distress of mankind if every man carried with him a withered limb, or was deprived of a useful member of the body. The loss of a sense is more grievous, and entails more misery. Here the mind would soon tire in inquiring what would have been the results had HANDEL, MOZART, and PURCELL, the great masters of music, been deprived of hearing; or had the master-spirits among painters, sculptors, and architects, and engineers, been afflicted with the loss of sight. If every man in the world suffered from the loss of one sense, as of either hearing, sight, or feeling, and all. "knowledge at one entrance quite shut out," the aggregate of detriment to the world would be indescribable. There is one loss that is greater still-it is the loss of mind. The mind recoils from the details of this painful investigation. Who can estimate what would have been the present state of science had BACON, GALILEO, or NEWTON been, in their boyhood, frightened into idiocy by their young playmates, or by older murderers of intellect? What would have been the present state of the world had this occurred to Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, Paul, Luther, &c.? Let the mind make a strenuous effort to realize the condition of the world, if the majority, and if all of mankind, were deranged and infuriated maniacs; everything would be lost, the powers of the mind, the use of the senses, the exercise of the limbs, the elements, the furniture, and the adornment of the creation,— all would be vain, all would be lost, as to the ends for which they were made and adjusted. Ascend one elevation more, and survey the wretchedness and desolations which are scattered around the loss of life-life lost to a family, lost to a country, lost to science, lost to God and heaven. All is hopeless woe; all is desperate grief, and all the feelings muster all their energies to die.

Few have sympathized with the exclamation of NEWTON on the death of the young philosopher, COTES: "Had that young man lived he would have taught something to us all." No mind now attempts to realize the loss which science sus