low their rejection of him, and the sight moved and affected his heart, even amid the triumphs and hosannas of his entrance into Jerusalem. Such real tears, from eyes that completely comprehended all the realities of the case, - from eyes that beamed upon sinners with good-will and mercy, from eyes that were pained and offended by their opposition and impenitence, - eyes that pitied and lamented even to the last, such tears, and the emotions which produced such tears, could not be extravagant or irregular. He would not have wept for a slight and trifling matter. The Fount of Mercy himself sent forth tears, on account of the deep ex-. panse of man's misery, and the incurable hopelessness of the case; and these tears proceeded from his own sincere and fervent compassion, and from his intense anxiety to save to the uttermost, all who were in a lost condition.

The servant is not above his Lord, and the feelings of the church are not of a higher order than those of Christ. If views and reflections, which made Christ weep, do not make us weep, the fault must be in us. In the progressive accomplishment of the measures of salvation, Christ sees "of the TRAVAIL of his soul." He shed real tears from genuine emotion; he shed his blood from real travail of soul for men's salvation; and he is still earnestly concerned, expecting till all his enemies be subdued. His dispositions and emotions are as tender and fervid now as they were when he was in the flesh: they are not now expressed by the same effects on his glorified body, as those which appeared in his material frame; but if they appear in his spiritual body, the church, in all the glowing and throbbing impulses, with which they once agitated his material and mental constitution, they are now as sober, as much called for, and as justifiable, as they were when exhibited in his personal ministry.

III. A deep and anxious concern for the souls of men has always been the invariable result of the influences of the Holy Spirit upon the church.

The love of the Spirit is the model and pattern for those who mind the things of the Spirit. He is the Spirit of compassion and pity: the well-spring of love, mercy, and zeal. This love for souls is the warmest bond of union between the Holy Spirit and the church. It constitutes an identity of sympathy, a union of feelings and dispositions towards the interests of the world. In such a state of feeling, the church is in full communication with the flowing tide of the love of the

Spirit. The fervent compassion of the Holy Spirit melts the church, and softens the world. The church feels as the Spirit feels; the church longs as the Spirit longs; and the church acts as the Spirit would have acted. Mark all the ministers who are distinguished for the unction of tenderness and pity: their hearts glow with love; their words breathe mercy, as if the Holy Spirit preached by them. They use words which the Holy Ghost teacheth, not that the Spirit forms their expressions or dictates their phrases, but he excites their feelings to give utterance to their sentiments, in such a manner, as if their words came forth, kindling and fusing from the love of the Spirit.

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These deep sympathies have always marked the character of men eminent for the influences of the Spirit, as may be instanced in Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. "Rivers of water," says David, "run down my eyes, because they keep not thy law." How deep, how large, and how full, must the fountains of emotions in the heart be, to emit gush after gush of such genuine sorrow, and to maintain an unceasing stream of pity and concern. Such were the feelings of Jeremiah: his reader might imagine that he had written his works with the tears of his countrymen, and had modulated the cadences of his diction to the sounds of the breaking hearts that were bleeding around him: "Oh! that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughters of my people!" And again he says, "My bowels! my bowels! I am pained at my very heart! my heart maketh a noise in me! I cannot hold my peace!" The same state of emotions is very conspicuous in Paul. Let all formalist conclaves try to make laws for the emotions that produced the following sentiments: "I say the truth in Christ; I lie not; my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart; for I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren." He was not ashamed of his tears; for, even in a passing allusion to the enemies of the cross of Christ, he mentions them "even weeping." To express his intense concern for the salvation of men, he employs a figure, the strongest, and the most vivid, that the chamber of imagery could furnish. To explain his unutterable anguish for souls, he says, "I TRAVAIL in birth again till Christ be formed in you." This imagery is expressive of his strong desire to save souls, his

continued and undiminished anxiety on the subject; an anxiety that could not be diverted to other considerations; an anxiety that oppresses more and more until deliverance comes, or until it is extinguished in agonizing death. If sinful men are now in the identical state, the view of which produced these emotions in Paul, the contemplation of it ought to produce in us feelings of the same character, and to the same degree. After the apostles were baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire, they all felt in this manner; for unawed and undaunted by the menaces of the sanhedrim, they boldly declared, "We can NOT but speak the things which we have seen and heard." The more we have of this Spirit, the more seraphic will our ministry be: love will be its alpha and omega; love will beam in the looks, melt in the tears, tremble in the voice, burn in the words, gleam in the smiles; and, even when it frowns, it will put its bow in the cloud.

IV. The relation between our mental constitution and the moral universe in which we are placed, renders us susceptible of painful impressions and distressing emotions, from a survey of the guilt and misery around us.

The body feels not only the touch and pressure of matter, but it can feel from mind and from thoughts. Certain thoughts can exhilarate like the most generous wine, or the most balmy air; and another class of thoughts can depress and wither the bodily frame as effectually as masses of matter, or the simoom of the desert. Thoughts produce emotions, and emotions affect the muscular frame. The mind is constituted to be affected by the thoughts, the feelings, and the conduct of others. When man witnesses an act of disinterested benevolence, complacency springs up in his mind as promptly, and as certainly, as the figure of the agent is formed on the retina of the eye; and when he beholds oppression, anger and disgust are produced with equal certainty. Though this constitution is impaired by sinful habits, it is not annihilated; for man cannot exist without thinking that there is something that is wrong, and its opposite right; and there exists not a man who is not, in some circumstances or other, susceptible of self-condemnation.

Every one is conscious that the guilt of others, and the misery of others, make us feel for them. We cannot avoid feeling thus while we continue to reflect and think on them; and, therefore, whenever we wish to rid ourselves of these

to us,

emotions, we, according to common parlance, try to dismiss the subject from our minds. We thus practically prove that our emotions are much under our own control; and that we know that they are always in close connection with a certain class of subjects. We feel from the atrocity of men's guilt when their acts have proved injurious to one who is dear to us. We feel for the misery of the guilty when we reflect what they once were, how their distress was acquired, what they might have been,- how nearly they are related - how we ourselves were once in their state, how lately we were rescued from it, and how liable we are still to fall into it. To feel concerned, and warmly and intensely concerned, for the injury offered to the feelings and character of a friend, by the atrocities of others, is in common affairs, a warrantable and a sober act of the passions; if it be in proportion to the malignity of the offence and to the warmth of our attachment. In a well-balanced mind, the zeal for a friend's character does not extinguish compassion for the wretchedness of the guilty man who has injured him. When our friend's character is vindicated, we may rationally become concerned, even to agony, for the reprieve of the condemned criminal, and for his restoration to society and happiness. No one supposes, that persons, thus affected by the guilt and misery of others, are in a state of morbid excitement, or mental irregularity, or moral deliriousness, or of benevolent and philanthropic hypochondria. Why- when this friend is God - when the offenders are our own brethren when their guilt is abhorrent to his disposition and injurious to his character — when they are condemned to a misery for

which eternity has no measure when God pronounces his character vindicated by his Son when he has intrusted us with the overtures of his mercy to them when, unless these overtures are communicated promptly and accepted readily, they will perish under judgments unutterable-when Christians heartily believe all this, and feel all the emotions which such views are calculated to produce; why such emotions in the affairs of God and the miseries of man are called hypocritical, fanatical, visionary, enthusiastic, extravagant, while they are tolerated and applauded in every other connexion of life, demonstrates how deeply and how inveterately mankind are "haters of God." If the guilt of this horrible and flagitious disaffection can admit of accumulation, it is when a church of

Christ truckles to such an opinion, or when Christians themselves entertain such sentiments.

Such a state of the emotions is perfectly philosophical: the men, who travail in birth for souls, are men of like passions with those for whom they feel. Their feelings are excited by the wretchedness of others, and they are disposed to manifest their emotions by devising and supplying, according to their power, help and relief. The gospel was not intended to destroy their psychological sympathies and instinctive feelings, but rather to quicken, excite, and purify them. There is no misery so distressing, no misery so calculated to excite these feelings of our nature, as the misery of an outcast from God. These emotions are as rational as they are philosophical. They are produced by clear intellectual perception of real danger, and of true wretchedness; they result from a sense of responsibility to God for our brother's blood, and from the force of a sober adjudication of conscience; and they are in perfect accordance with the scenes and the facts of the judgment-day. The scale of our emotions of travail for men's salvation never CAN reach a height, for which the scale of the world's guilt and misery will not afford a sufficient account and adequate reason. Even when they seriously affect the bolily frame they are neither unphilosophical nor irrational. In many common cases of great interest to the mind, the bodily structure is frequently too feeble to support the internal conflict of emotions. Such effects on the body are mere physiological phenomena resulting from affections highly excited, and put forth in great struggles and effort. As these phenomena occur in every-day affairs, they may occur in the momentous affair of religion; and as, in circumstances of interest, they never derogate from the grandeur of their cause, so, in the realities of religion, they are no disparagement to the agency of the Holy Spirit. At the sight of danger and distress we expect, not emotion only, but a strong EXPRESSION of emotion. At the sight of shipwreck, we might be overpowered with agony: this would be neither madness nor enthusiasm — it would be what the view of great distress would spontaneously call forth. A woman is seen on the bank of a river, she is wailing, and rending the air with the cries of her anguish; you run to her, and ask her why she is in such agony? She replies "Oh my child, my child has fallen into the stream!" Would you think this emotion extravagant and enthusiastic? In both of these