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they emitted from them such an impression | the affections, that man, become the poor upon his feelings, as to fix and to fascinate slave of its idolatries, and its charms, puts the the whole man into a subserviency to their authority of conscience, and the warnings of influence-how in spite of every lesson of the Word of God, and the offered instigations their worthlessness, brought home to him at of the Spirit of God, and all the lessons of every turn by the rapidity of the seasons, and calculation, and the wisdom even of his own the vicissitudes of life, and the ever-moving sound and sober experience, away from him. progress of his own earthly career, and the But this wondrous contest will come to a visible ravages of death among his acquaint-close. Some will return to their loyalty, ances around him, and the desolations of and others will keep by their rebellion; and, his family, and the constant breaking up in the day of the winding up of the drama of his system of friendships, and the affect- of this world's history, there will be made ing spectacle of all that lives and is in mo- manifest to the myriads of the various ortion, withering and hastening to the grave; ders of creation, both the mercy and vindi-oh! how comes it that in the face of all cated majesty of the Eternal. Oh! on that this experience, the whole elevation of pur-day how vain will this presumption of the pose, conceived in the hour of his better Infidel astronomer appear, when the affairs understanding, should be dissipated and of men come to be examined in the preforgotten? Whence the might, and whence the mystery of that spell, which so binds and so infatuates us to the world? What prompts us so to embark the whole strength of our eagerness and of our desires in pursuit of interests which we know a few little years will bring to utter annihilation? Who is it that imparts to them all the charm and all the colour of an unfailing durability? Who is it that throws such an air of stability over these earthly tabernacles, as makes them look to the fascinated eye of man like resting places for eternity? Who is it that so pictures out the objects of sense, and so magnifies the range of their future enjoyment, and so dazzles the fond and deceived imagination, that in looking onward through our earthly career, it appears like the vista, or the perspective of innumerable ages? He who is called the god of this world. He who can dress the idleness of its waking dreams in the garb of reality. He who can pour a seducing brilliancy over the panorama of its fleeting pleasures and its vain anticipations. He who can turn it into an instrument of deceitfulness; and make it wield such an absolute ascendency over all

sence of an innumerable company; and beings of loftiest nature are seen to crowd around the judgment-seat; and the Saviour shall appear in our sky, with a celestial retinue, who have come with him from afar to witness all his doings, and to take a deep and solemn interest in all his dispensations; and the destiny of our species, whom the Infidel would thus detach, in solitary insignificance, from the universe altogether, shall be found to merge and to mingle with higher destinies-the good to spend their eternity with angels-the bad to spend their eternity with angels-the former to be readmitted into the universal family of God's obedient worshippers-the latter to share in the everlasting pain and ignominy of the defeated hosts of the rebellious-the people of this planet to be implicated, throughout the whole train of their never-ending history, with the higher ranks, and the more extended tribes of intelligence; and thus it is that the special administration we now live under, shall be seen to harmonize in its bearings, and to accord in its magnificence, with all that extent of nature and of her ter ritories, which modern science has unfolded.

DISCOURSE, VII.

On the slender Influence of mere Taste and Sensibility in Matters of Religion. “And lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one who hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument; for they hear thy words, but they do them not."-Ezekiel xxxiii. 32.

You easily understand how a taste for the delights of enthusiasm, as they sit in music is one thing, and a real submission to crowded assemblage around the deep and the influence of religion is another;-how solemn oratorio;-aye, and whether it be the ear may be regaled by the melody of the humility of penitential feeling, or the sound, and the heart may utterly refuse the rapture of grateful acknowledgment, or the proper impression of the sense that is con- sublime of a contemplative piety, or the asveyed by it; how the sons and daughters piration of pure and of holy purposes, which of the world may, with their every affection breathes throughout the words of the perdevoted to its perishable vanities, inhale all formance, and gives to it all the spirit and

all the expression by which it is pervaded; now; and on the day of reckoning, this is it is a very possible thing, that the moral, the ground upon which your religion will and the rational, and the active man, may be judged then; and that award is to be have given no entrance into his bosom for passed upon you, which will fix and perany of these sentiments; and yet so over-petuate your destiny for ever. You have a powered may he be by the charm of the vocal conveyance through which they are addressed to him, that he may be made to feel with such an emotion, and to weep with such a tenderness, and to kindle with such a transport, and to glow with such an elevation, as may one and all carry upon them the semblance of sacredness.

But might not this semblance deceive him? Have you never heard any tell, and with complacency too, how powerfully his devotion was awakened by an act of attendance on the oratorio-how his heart, melted and subdued by the influence of harmony, did homage to all the religion of which it was the vehicle-how he was so moved and overborne, that he had to shed the tears of contrition, and to be agitated by the terrors of judgment, and to receive an awe upon his spirit of the greatness and the majesty of God-and that wrought up to the lofty pitch of eternity; he could look down upon the world, and by the glance of one commanding survey, pronounce upon the littleness and the vanity of all its concerns? Oh! it is very, very possible that all this might thrill upon the ears of the man, and circulate a succession of solemn and affecting images around his fancy-and yet that essential principle of his nature, upon which the practical influence of Christianity turns, might have met with no reaching and no subduing efficacy whatever to arouse it. He leaves the exhibition, as dead in trespasses and sins as he came to it. Conscience has not awakened upon him. Repentance has not turned him. Faith has not made any positive lodgement within him of her great and her constraining realities. He speeds him back to his business and to his family, and there he plays off the old man in all the entireness of his uncrucified temper, and of his obstinate worldliness, and of all those earthly and unsanctified affections, which are found to cleave to him with as great tenacity as ever. He is really and experimentally the very same man as before-and all those sensibilities which seemed to bear upon them so much of the air and unction of heaven, are found to go into dissipation, and be forgotten with the loveliness of the song.

Amid all that illusion which such momentary visitations of seriousness and of sentiment throw around the character of man, let us never lose sight of the test, that "by their fruits ye shall know them." It is not coming up to this test, that you hear and are delighted. It is that you hear and do. This is the ground upon which the reality of your religion is discriminated

taste for music. This no more implies the hold and the ascendency of religion over you, than that you have a taste for beautiful scenery, or a taste for painting, or even a taste for the sensualities of epicurism. But music may be made to express the glow and the movement of devotional feeling; and it is saying nothing to say that the heart of him who listens with a raptured ear, is through the whole time of the performance, in harmony with such a movement? Why, it is saying nothing to the purpose. Music may lift the inspiring note of patriotism; and the inspiration may be felt; and it may thrill over the recesses of the soul, to the mustering up of all its energies; and it may sustain to the last cadence of the song, the firm nerve and purpose of intrepidity; and all this may be realized upon him, who in the day of battle, and upon actual collision with the dangers of it, turns out to be a coward. And music may lull the feelings into unison with piety; and stir up the inner man to lofty determinations; and so engage for a time his affections, that, as if weaned from the dust, they promise an immediate entrance on some great and elevated career, which may carry him through his pilgrimage superior to all the sordid and grovelling enticements that abound in it. But he turns him to the world, and all this glow abandons him; and the words which he hath heard, he doeth them not; and in the hour of temptation he turns out to be a deserter from the law of allegiance; and the test I have now specified looks hard upon him, and discriminates him amid all the parading insignificance of his fine but fugitive emotions, to be the subject both of present guilt and of future vengeance.

The faithful application of this test would put to flight a host of other delusions. It may be carried round among all those phenomena of human character, where there is the exhibition of something associated with religion, but which is not religion itself. An exquisite relish for music is no test of the influence of Christianity. Neither are many other of the exquisite sensibilities of our nature. When a kind mother closes the eyes of her expiring babe, she is thrown into a flood of sensibility, and soothing to her heart are the sympathy and the prayers of an attending minister. When a gathering neighbourhood assemble to the funeral of an acquaintance, one pervading sense of regret and tenderness sits on the face of the company; and the deep silence, broken only by the solemn utterance of the man of God, carries a kind of pleasing religiousness

along with it. The sacredness of the hal- the side of religion. A man may love to lowed day, and the decencies of its obser- have his understanding stimulated by the vation, may engage the affections of him ingenuities, or the resistless urgencies of an who loves to walk in the footsteps of his argument; and argument the most profather; and every recurring Sabbath may found and the most overbearing, may put bring to his bosom, the charm of its regu- | forth all the might of a constraining vehelarity and its quietness. Religion has its mence in behalf of religion. A man may accomplishments; and in these, there may feel the rejoicings of a conscious elevation, be something to soothe, and to fascinate, when some ideal scene of magnificence is even in the absence of the appropriate in- laid before him; and where are these scenes fluences of religion. The deep and tender so readily to be met with, as when led to impression of a family bereavement, is not expatiate in thought over the track of eterreligion. The love of established decencies, nity, or to survey the wonders of creation, is not religion. The charm of all that sen- or to look to the magnitude of these great timentalism which is associated with many and universal interests which lie within the of its solemn and affecting services, is not compass of religion? A man may have his religion. They form the distinct folds of attention riveted and regaled by that power its accustomed drapery; but they do not, of imitative description, which brings all any or all of them put together, make up the recollections of his own experience bethe substance of the thing itself. A mother's fore him; which presents him with a faithful tenderness may flow most gracefully over analysis of his own heart; which embodies the tomb of her departed little one; and she in language such intimacies of observation may talk the while of that heaven whither and of feeling, as have often passed before its spirit has ascended. The man whom his eyes, or played within his bosom, but death had widowed of his friend, may had never been so truly or so ably pictured abandon himself to the movements of that to the view of his remembrance. Now, all grief, which for a time will claim an ascen- this may be done in the work of pressing dency over him; and, among the multitude the duties of religion; in the work of inof his other reveries, may love to hear of stancing the application of religion; in the the eternity, where sorrow and separation work of pointing those allusions to life and are alike unknown. He who has been to manners, which manifest the truth to the trained, from his infant days, to remember conscience, and plant such a conviction of the Sabbath, may love the holiness of its sin, as forms the very basis of a sinner's aspect; and associate himself with all its religion. Now, in all these cases, I see observances; and take a delighted share in other principles brought into action, and the mechanism of its forms. But, let not which may be in a state of most lively and these think, because the tastes and the sen- vigorous movement, and be yet in a state sibilities which engross them, may be blend- of entire separation from the principle of ed with religion, that they indicate either religion. I will make bold to say, on the its strength or its existence within them. I strength of these illustrations, that as much recur to the test. I press its imperious delight may emanate from the pulpit, on an exactions upon you. I call for fruit, and de arrested audience beneath it, as ever emamand the permanency of a religious influ-nated from the boards of a theatre—aye, ence on the habits and the history. Oh! and with as total a disjunction of mind too, how many who take a flattering unction to in the one case as in the other, from the estheir souls, when they think of their amiable sence or the habit of religion, I recur to feelings, and their becoming observations, the test. I make my appeal to experience; with whom this severe touch-stone would, and I put it to you all, whether your finding like the head of Medusa, put to flight all upon the subject do not agree with my their complacency. The afflictive dispen- saying about it, that a man may weep, and sation is forgotten-and he on whom it was admire, and have many of his faculties put laid, is practically as indifferent to God and upon the stretch of their most intense gratito eternity as before. The Sabbath services fication-his judgment established, and his come to a close; and they are followed by fancy enlivened, and his feelings overpowthe same routine of week-day worldliness ered, and his hearing charmed, as by the as before. In neither the one case nor the accents of heavenly persuasion, and all other, do we see more of the radical influ- within him feasted by the rich and varied ence of Christianity than in the sublime luxuries of an intellectual banquet!-Oh! it and melting influence of sacred music upon is cruel to frown unmannerly in the midst the soul; and all this tide of emotion is of so much satisfaction. But I must not found to die away from the bosom, like the forget that truth has her authority, as well pathos or like the loveliness of a song. as her sternness; and she forces me to The instances may be multiplied without affirm, that after all this has been felt and number. A man may have a taste for elo- gone through, there might not be one prinquence, and eloquence the most touching ciple which lies at the turning point of or sublime may lift her pleading voice on conversion, that has experienced a single

movement—not one of its purposes be con- [tain, and the wave of mighty forests, and ceived not one of its doings be accom-the rush of sounding waterfalls, and distant plished-not one step of that repentance, glimpses of human territory, and pinnacles which, if we have not, we perish, so much of everlasting snow, and the sweep of that as entered upon--not one announcement of circling horizon, which folds in its ample that faith, by which we are saved, admitted embrace the whole of this noble aminto a real and actual possession by the phitheatre? Tell me whether, without the inner man. He has had his hour's enter-aid of Christianity, or without a particle of tainment, and willingly does he award this reverence for the only name given under homage to the performer, that he hath a plea- heaven whereby men can be saved, a man sant voice, and can play well on an instru- may not kindle at such a perspective as this, ment-but, in another hour, it fleets away into all the raptures, and into all the movefrom his remembrance, and goes all to no-ments of a poetic elevation; and be able to thing, like the loveliness of a song. render into the language of poetry, the Now, in bringing these Astronomical Dis- whole of that sublime and beauteous imagecourses to a close, I feel it my duty to ad-ry which adorns it; aye, and as if he were vert to this exhibition of character in man. The sublime and interesting topic which has engaged us, however feebly it may have been handled; however inadequately it may have been put in all its worth, and in all its magnitude before you; however short the representation of the speaker or the conception of the hearers may have been of that richness, and that greatness, and that loftiness, which belong to it; possesses in itself a charm to fix the attention, to re-ed, and combines them into all the varieties gale the imagination, and to subdue the whole man into a delighted reverence; and, in a word, to beget such a solemnity of thought, and of emotion, as may occupy and enlarge the soul for hours together, as may waft it away from the grossness of ordinary life, and raise it to a kind of elevated calm above all its vulgarities and all its

vexations.

treading on the confines of a sanctuary which he has not entered, may he not mix up with the power and the enchantment of his description, such allusions to the presiding genius of the scene: or to the still but animating spirit of the solitude; or to the speaking silence of some mysterious character which reigns throughout the landscape; or, in fine, to that eternal Spirit, who sits behind the elements he has form

of a wide and a wondrous creation; might not all this be said and sung with an emphasis so moving, as to spread the colouring of piety over the pages of him who performs thus well upon his instrument; and yet, the performer himself have a conscience unmoved by a single warning of God's actual communication, and the judgment unconvinced, and the fears unawakened, and the life unreformed by it?

Now, tell me whether the whole of this effect upon the feelings, may not be formed Now what is true of a scene on earth, is without the presence of religion. Tell me also true of that wider and more elevated whether there might not be such a consti- scene which stretches over the immensity tution of mind, that it may both want alto- around it, into a dark and a distant unknown. gether that principle in virtue of which the Who does not feel an aggrandisement of doctrines of Christianity are admitted into thought and of faculty, when he looks the belief, and the duties of Christianity abroad over the amplitudes of creationare admitted into a government over the when placed on a telescopic eminence, his practice and yet, at the very same time, aided eye can find a pathway to innumerait may have the faculty of looking abroad ble worlds-when that wondrous field, over over some scene of magnificence, and of which there had hung for many ages the being wrought up to ecstacy with the sense mantle of so deep an obscurity, is laid open of all those glories among which it is expa-to him, and instead of a dreary and unpeotiating. I want you to see clearly the dis-pled solitude, he can see over the whole tinction between these two attributes of the human character. They are, in truth, as different the one from the other, as a taste for the grand and the graceful of scenery differs from the appetite of hunger; and the one may both exist and have a most intense operation within the bosom of that very individual, who entirely disowns, and is entirely disgusted with the other. What! must a man be converted, ere from the most elevated peak of some Alpine wilderness, he becomes capable of feeling the force and the majesty of those great lineaments which the hand of nature has thrown around him, in the varied forms of precipice, and moun-I

face of it such an extended garniture of rich and goodly habitations! Even the Atheist, who tells us that the universe is self-existent and indestructible-even he, who instead of seeing the traces of a manifold wisdom in its manifold varieties, sees nothing in them all but the exquisite structures and the lofty dimensions of materialism-even he, who would despoil creation of its God, cannot look upon its golden suns, and their accompanying systems, without the solemn impression of a magnificence that fixes and overpowers him. Now, conceive such a belief of God as you all profess, to dawn upon his understanding. Let him become

as one of yourselves-and so be put into the all the creatures whom he has formed. A condition of rising from the sublime of man may have an imagination all alive to matter to the sublime of mind. Let him the former; while the latter never prompts now learn to subordinate the whole of this him to one act of obedience; never leads him mechanism to the design and authority of a to compare his life with the requirements great presiding intelligence; and re-assem- of the Lawgiver; never carries him from bling all the members of the universe, how-such a scrutiny as this, to the conviction of ever distant, into one family, let him mingle sin; never whispers such an accusation to with his former conceptions of the grandeur the ear of his conscience, as causes him to which belonged to it, the conception of that mourn, and to be in heaviness for the guilt eternal Spirit who sits enthroned on the of his hourly and habitual rebellion; never immensity of his own wonders, and em- shuts him up to the conclusion of the braces all that he has made, within the need of a Saviour; never humbles him to ample scope of one great administration, acquiescence in the doctrine of that reveThen will the images and the impressions lation, which comes to his door with such of sublimity come in upon him from a new a host of evidence, as even his own philoquarter. Then will another avenue be sophy cannot bid away; never extorts a opened, through which a sense of grandeur single believing prayer in the name of may find its way into his soul, and have a Christ, or points a single look, either of trust mightier influence than ever to fill, and to or of reverence, to his atonement; never elevate and to expand it. Then will be esta- stirs any effective movement of conversion; blished a new and a noble association, by never sends an aspiring energy into his bothe aid of which all that he formerly look- som after the aids of that Spirit, who alone ed upon as fair becomes more lovely; and can waken him out of his lethargies, and all that he formerly looked upon as great, by the anointing which remaineth, can becomes more magnificent. But will you rivet and substantiate in his practice, those believe me, that even with this accession to goodly emotions which have hitherto plied his mind of ideas gathered from the con- him with the deceitfulness of their motemplation of the Divinity; even with that mentary visits, and then capriciously abanpleasurable glow which steals over his ima-doned him. gination, when he now thinks him of the majesty of God; even with as much of what you would call piety, as I fear is enough to soothe and to satisfy many of yourselves, and which stirs and kindles within you when you hear the goings forth of the Supreme set before you in the terms of a lofty representation; even with all this, I say there may be as wide a distance from the habit and the character of godliness, as if God was still atheistically disowned by him. Take the conduct of his life and the currency of his affections; and you may see as little upon them of the stamp of loyalty to God, or of reverence for any one of his authenticated proclamations, as you may see in him who offers his poetic incense to the genii, or weeps enraptured over the visions of a beauteous mythology. The sublime of Deity has wrought up his soul to a pitch of conscious and pleasing elevation-and yet this no more argues the will of Deity to have a practical authority over him, than does that tone of elevation which is caught by looking at the sublime of a naked materialism. The one and the other have their little hour of ascendency over him; and when he turns him to the rude and ordinary world, both vanish alike from his sensibilities as does the loveliness of a

The mere majesty of God's power and greatness, when offered to your notice, lays hold of one of the faculties within you. The holiness of God, with his righteous claim of legislation, lays hold of another of these faculties. The difference between them is so great, that the one may be engrossed and interested to the full, while the other remains untouched, and in a state of entire dormancy. Now, it is no matter what it be that ministers delight to the former of these two faculties: If the latter be not arrested and put on its proper exercise, you are making no approximation whatever to the right habit and character of religion. There are a thousand ways in which we may contrive to regale your taste for that which is beauteous and majestic. It may find its gratification in the loveliness of a vale, or in the freer and bolder outlines of an upland situation, or in the terrors of a storm, or in the sublime contemplations of astronomy, or in the magnificent idea of a God who sends forth the wakefulness of his omniscient eye, and the vigour of his upholding hand, throughout all the realms of nature and of providence. The mere taste of the human mind may get its ample enjoyment in each and in all of these objects, or in a vivid representation of them; nor does it make any material difference, whether this To kindle and be elevated by a sense representation be addressed to you from of the majesty of God, is one thing. the stanzas of a poem, or from the recitaIt is totally another thing to feel a move-tions of a theatre, or finally from the disment of obedience to the will of God, under courses and the demonstrations of a pulpit. the impression of his rightful authority over And thus it is, that still on the impulse of

song.

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