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for all that is manly in the accomplishments of nature, disjoined from the faith of Christianity. They take up a separate residence in the human character from the principle of godliness. Anterior to this re

our departure from the living God; and subsequently to this religion, they may blazon the character of him who stands out against it; but on the principles of a most clear and intelligent equity, they never can shield him from the condemnation and the curse of those who have neglected the great salvation.

them seeketh after God. It is, that he is deposed from his rightful ascendency. It is that he, who in fact inserted in the human bosom every one principle that can embellish the individual possessor, or maintain the order of society, is banished_alto-ligion, they go not to alleviate the guilt of gether from the circle of his habitual contemplations. It is, that man taketh his way in life as much at random, as if there was no presiding Divinity at all; and that, whether he at one time grovel in the depths of sensuality, or at another kindle with some generous movement of sympathy or of patriotism, he is at both times alike unmindful of him to whom he owes his continuance and his birth. It is, that he moves his every footstep at his own will; and has utterly discarded, from its supremacy over him, the will of that invisible Master who compasses all his goings, and never ceases to pursue him by the claims of a resistless and legitimate authority. It is this which is the essential or the constituting principle of rebellion against God. This it is which has exiled the planet we live in beyond the limits of his favoured creation-and whether it be shrouded in the turpitude of licentiousness or cruelty, or occasionally brightened with the gleam of the kindly and the honourable virtues, it is thus that it is seen as afar off, by Him who sitteth on the throne, and looketh on our strayed world, as athwart a wide and dreary gulf of separation.

The doctrine of the New Testament will bear to be confronted with all that can be met or noticed on the face of human society. And we speak most confidently to the experience of many who now hear us, when we say, that often, in the course of their manifold transactions, have they met the man, whom the bribery of no advantage whatever could seduce into the slightest deviation from the path of integrity-the man, who felt his nature within him put into a state of the most painful indignancy, at every thing that bore upon it the character of a sneaking or dishonourable artificethe man, who positively could not be at rest under the consciousness that he had ever betrayed, even to his own heart, the remotest symptom of such an inclinationand whom, therefore, the unaided law of justice and of truth has placed on a high and deserved eminence in the walks of honourable merchandize.

And when, prompted by love towards his alienated children, he devised a way of recalling them-when, willing to pass over all the ingratitude he had gotten from their Let us not withhold from this character hands, he reared a pathway of return, and the tribute of its most rightful admiration; proclaimed a pardon and a welcome to all but let us further ask, if, with all that he who should walk upon it-when through thus possessed of native feeling and constithe offered Mediator, who magnified his tutional integrity, you have never observed broken law, and upheld, by his mysterious in any such individual an utter emptiness sacrifice, the dignity of that government, of religion; and that God is not in all his which the children of Adam had disowned, thoughts; and that, when he does what he invited all to come and be saved- happens to be at one with the will of the should this message be brought to the door Lawgiver, it is not because he is impelled of the most honourable man upon earth, to it by a sense of its being the will of the and he turn in contempt and hostility away Lawgiver, but because he is impelled to it from it, has not that man posted himself by the working of his own instinctive senmore firmly than ever on the ground of re-sibilities; and that, however fortunate, or bellion? Though an unsullied integrity however estimable these sensibilities are, should rest upon all his transactions, and the homage of confidence and respect be awarded to him from every quarter of society, has not this man, by slighting the overtures of reconciliation, just plunged himself the deeper in the guilt of a wilful and determined ungodliness? Has not the creature exalted itself above the Creator; and in the pride of those accomplishments, which never would have invested his person had not they come to him from above, has he not, in the act of resisting the gospel, aggravated the provocation of his whole previous defiance to the author of it?

Thus much for all that is amiable, and

they still consist with the habit of a mind that is in a state of total indifference about God? Have you never read in your own character, or observed in the character of others, that the claims of the Divinity may be entirely forgotten by the very man to whom society around him yield, and rightly yield, the homage of an unsullied and honourable reputation; that this man may have all his foundations in the world; that every security on which he rests, and every enjoyment upon which his heart is set, lieth on this side of death; that a sense of the coming day on which God is to enter into judgment with him, is to every purpose of

practical ascendency, as good as expunged | by oceans and by continents; when he fixes altogether from his bosom; that he is far the anchor of a sure and steady dependence in desire, and far in enjoyment, and far in on the reported honesty of one whom he habitual contemplation, away from that never saw; when, with all his fears for the God who is not far from any one of us; treachery of the varied elements, through that his extending credit and his brighten- which his property has to pass, he knows, ing prosperity, and his magnificent retreat that should it only arrive at the door of its from business, with all the splendour of its destined agent, all his fears and all his susaccommodations-that these are the futuri-picions may be at an end. We know nothing

finer than such an act of homage from one human being to another, when perhaps the diameter of the globe is between them; nor do we think that either the renown of her victories, or the wisdom of her councils, so

does the honourable dealing of her merchants; that all the glories of British policy, and British valour, are far eclipsed by the moral splendour which British faith has thrown over the name and the character of our nation; nor has she gathered so proud a distinction from all the tributaries of her power, as she has done from the awarded confidence of those men of all tribes, and colours, and languages, who look to our agency for the most faithful of all management, and to our keeping for the most unviolable of all custody.

ties at which he terminates; and that he goes not in thought beyond them to that eternity, which in the flight of a few little years, will absorb all, and annihilate all? In a word, have you never observed the man, who, with all that was right in mer-signalizes the country in which we live, as cantile principle, and all that was open and unimpeachable in the habit of his mercantile transactions, lived in a state of utter estrangement from the concerns of immortality? who, in reference to God, persisted, from one year to another, in the spirit of a deep slumber? who, in reference to the man that tries to awaken him out of his lethargy, recoils, with the most sensitive dislike, from the faithfulness of his ministrations? who, in reference to the Book which tells him of his nakedness and his guilt, never consults it with one practical aim, and never tries to penetrate beyond There is no denying, then, the very exthat aspect of mysteriousness which it holds tended prevalence of a principle of integrity out to an undiscerning world? who attends in the commercial world; and he who has not church, or attends it with all the life-such a principle within him, has that to lessness of a form? who reads not his Bible, which all the epithets of our text may or reads it in the discharge of a self-pre- rightly be appropriated. But it is just as scribed and unfruitful task? who prays not, impossible to deny, that, with this thing or prays with the mockery of an unmean- which he has, there may be another thing ing observation? and, in one word, who which he has not. He may not have one while surrounded by all those testimonies duteous feeling of reverence which points which give to man a place of moral dis-upward to God. He may not have one tinction among his fellows, is living in utter carelessness about God, and about all the avenues which lead to him?

Now, attend for a moment to what that is which the man has, and to what that is which he has not. He has an attribute of character which is in itself pure, and lovely, and honourable, and of good report. He has a natural principle of integrity; and under its impulse he may be carried forward to such fine exhibitions of himself, as are worthy of all admiration. It is very noble, when the simple utterance of his word carries as much security along with it as if he had accompanied that utterance by the signatures, and the securities, and the legal obligations which are required of other men. It might tempt one to be proud of his species when he looks at the faith that is put in him by a distant correspondent, who, without one other hold of him than his honour, consigns to him the wealth of a whole flotilla, and sleeps in the confidence that it is safe. It is indeed an animating thought, amid the gloom of this world's depravity, when we behold the credit which one man puts in another, though separated

wish, or one anticipation, which points forward to eternity. He may not have any sense of dependence on the Being who sustains him; and who gave him his very principle of honour, as part of that interior furniture which he has put into his bosom ; and who surrounded him with the theatre on which he has come forward with the finest and most illustrious displays of it; and who set the whole machinery of his sentiment and action agoing; and can, by a single word of his power, bid it cease from the variety, and cease from the gracefulness of its movements. In other words, he is a man of integrity, and yet he is a man of ungodliness.

He is a man born for the confidence and the admiration of his fellows, and yet a man whom his Maker can charge with utter defection from all the principles of a spiritual obedience. He is a man whose virtues have blazoned his own character in time, and have upheld the interests of society, and yet a man who has not, by one movement of principle, brought himself nearer to the kingdom of heaven, than the most profligate of the species. The condemnation, that

he is an alien from God, rests upon him in f said, that prosperity, with some occasional all the weight of its unmitigated severity. variations, is the general accompaniment of The threat, that they who forget God shall that credit, which every man of undeviatbe turned into hell, will, on the great day ing justice is sure to draw around him. But of its fell and sweeping operation, involve what reward will you tell us is due to him him among the wretched outcasts of eter-on the great day of the manifestation of nity. That God from whom, while in the. God's righteousness, when, in fact, he has world, he withheld every due offering of done nothing unto God? What recompence gratitude, and remembrance, and universal can be awarded to him out of those books subordination of habit and of desire, will which are then to be opened, and in which show him to his face, how, under the delu- he stands recorded as a man overcharged sive garb of such sympathies as drew upon with the guilt of spiritual idolatry? How him the love of his acquaintances, and of shall God grant unto him the reward of a such integrities as drew upon him their re- servant, when the service of God was not the spect and their confidence, he was in fact a principle of his doings in the world; and determined rebel against the authority of when neither the justice he rendered to heaven; that not one commandment of the others, nor the sensibility that he felt for law, in the true extent of its interpretation, them, bore the slightest character of an ofwas ever fulfilled by him; that the pervad-fering to his Maker? ing principle of obedience to this law, which is love to God, never had its ascendency over him; that the beseeching voice of the Lawgiver, so offended and so insulted-but who, nevertheless, devised in love a way of reconciliation for the guilty,-never had the effect of recalling him; that, in fact, he neither had a wish for the friendship of God, nor cherished the hope of enjoying him, and that therefore, as he lived without hope, so he lived without God in the world; finding all his desire, and all his sufficiency, to be somewhere else, than in that favour which is better than life, and so, in addition to the curse of having continued not in all the words of the book of God's law to do them, entailing upon himself the mighty aggravation of having neglected all the of fers of his gospel.

But wherever the religious principle has taken possession of the mind, it animates these virtues with a new spirit; and when so animated, all such things as are pure, and lovely, and just, and true, and honest, and of good report, have a religious importance and character belonging to them. The text forms part of an epistle addressed to all the saints in Christ Jesus, which were at Philippi; and the lesson of the text is matter of direct and authoritative enforcement on all who are saints in Christ Jesus at the present day. Christianity, with the weight of its positive sanctions on the side of what is amiable and honourable in human virtue, causes such an influence to rest on the character of its genuine disciples, that, on the ground both of inflexible justice and ever-breathing charity, they are We say, then, of this natural virtue, what ever sure to leave the vast majority of the our Saviour said of the virtue of the Phari-world behind them. Simplicity and godly sees, many of whom were not extortioners, sincerity form essential ingredients of that as other men-that, verily, it hath its re- peculiarity by which they stand signalized ward. When disjoined from a sense of God, in the midst of an ungodly generation. The it is of no religious estimation whatever; true friends of the gospel, tremblingly alive nor will it lead to any religious blessing, to the honour of their master's cause, blush either in time or in eternity. It has, however, for the disgrace that has been brought on it its enjoyments annexed to it, just as a fine by men who keep its sabbaths, and yield an taste has its enjoyments annexed to it; and ostentatious homage to its doctrines and its in these it is abundantly rewarded. It is sacraments. They utterly disclaim all felexempted from that painfulness of inward lowship with that vile association of cant feeling which nature has annexed to every and of duplicity, which has sometimes been act of departure from honesty. It is sus- exemplified, to the triumph of the enemies tained by a conscious sense of rectitude and of religion; and they both feel the solemn elevation. It is gratified by the homage of truth, and act on the authority of the saysociety; the members of which are ever ing, that neither thieves, nor liars, nor exready to award the tribute of acknowledg-tortioners, nor unrighteous persons, have ment to those virtues that support the in- any part in the kingdom of Christ and of terests of society. And finally, it may be God.

DISCOURSE II.

The Influence of Christianity in aiding and augmenting the mercantile Virtues.

"For he that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to God, and approved of men."-Romans xiv. 18. WE have already asserted the natural ex-scenery of an ordinary landscape? Would istence of such principles in the heart of not you look for a gladder acclamation man, as lead him to many graceful and to from the fertile field, than from the arid many honourable exhibitions of character. waste, where no character of grandeur We have further asserted, that this formed made up for the barrenness that was around no deduction whatever from that article of you? Would not the goodly tree, comorthodoxy which affirms the utter depravity passed about with the glories of its summer of our nature; that the essence of this de- foliage, lift up an anthem of louder gratipravity lies in man having broken loose tude than the lowly shrub that grew befrom the authority of God, and delivered neath it? Would not the flower, from himself wholly up to the guidance of his whose leaves every hue of loveliness was own inclinations; that though some of these reflected, send forth a sweeter rapture than inclinations are in themselves amiable fea- the russet weed, which never drew the eye tures of human character, and point in their of any admiring passenger? And in a effects to what is most useful to human word, wherever you saw the towering emisociety, yet devoid as they all are of any nences of nature, or the garniture of her reference to the will and to the rightful more rich and beauteous adornments, would sovereignty of the Supreme Being, they it not be there that you looked for the deepcould not avert, or even so much as alle- est tones of devotion, or there for the tenviate that charge of ungodliness, which may derest and most exquisite of its melodies? be fully carried round amongst all the sons and daughters of the species; that they furnish not the materials of any valid or satisfactory answer to the question, "What hast thou done unto God?" and that whether they are the desires of a native rectitude, or the desires of an instinctive benevolence, they go not to purge away the guilt of having no love, and no care for the Being who formed and who sustains them.

But what is more. If the virtues and accomplishments of nature are at all to be admitted into the controversy between God and man, instead of forming any abatement upon the enormity of our guilt, they stamp upon it the reproach of a still deeper and more determined ingratitude. Let us conceive it possible, for a moment, that the beautiful personifications of scripture were all realized; that the trees of the forest clapped their hands unto God, and that the isles were glad at his presence; that the little hills shouted on every side, and that the vallies covered over with corn sent forth their notes of rejoicing; that the sun and the moon praised him, and the stars of light joined in the solemn adoration; that the voice of glory to God was heard from every mountain and from every water-fall; and that all nature, animated throughout by the consciousness of a pervading and presiding Deity, burst into one loud and universal song of gratulation. Would not a strain of greater loftiness be heard to ascend from those regions where the all-working God had left the traces of his own immensity, than from the tamer and the humbler

There is both the sublime of character, and the beauteous of character exemplified upon man. We have the one in that high sense of honour which no interest and no terror can seduce from any of its obligations. We have the other in that kindliness of feeling, which one look, or one sigh of imploring distress can touch into liveliest sympathy. Only grant that we have nothing either in the constitution of our spirits, or in the structure of our bodies, which we did not receive; and that mind, with all its varieties, is as much the product of a creating hand, as matter in all its modifications; and then, on the face of human society, do we witness all the gradations of a moral scenery, which may be directly referred to the operation of him who worketh all in all. It is our belief, that, as to any effectual sense of God, there is as deep a slumber throughout the whole of this world's living and rational generations, as there is throughout all the diversities of its mute and unconscious materialism; and that to make our alienated spirits again alive unto the Father of them, calls for as distinct and as miraculous an exertion of the Divinity, as would need to be put forth in the act of turning stones into the children of Abraham. Conceive this to be done then-and that a quickening and a realizing sense of the Deity pervaded all the men of our species-and that each knew how to refer his own endowments, with an adequate expression of gratitude to the unseen author of them-from whom we ask of all these various individuals, would you look for the halleluiahs of devoutest ecstacy?

above all control, and that refuses all rivalship.

Would it not be from him whom God had arrayed in the splendour of nature's brightest accomplishments? Would it not be from Now, we want to point your attention to him, with whose constitutional feelings the a distinction which obtains between one set movements of honour and benevolence were and another set of his requirements. By in fullest harmony? Would it not be from the former, we are enjoined to practise cerhim whom his Maker had cast into the hap-tain virtues, which separately from his inpiest mould, and attempered into sweetest junction altogether, are in great demand, and unison with all that was kind, and generous, in great reverence, amongst the members of and lovely, and ennobled by the loftiest emo-society--such as compassion, and generosity, tions, and raised above his fellows into the and justice, and truth; which, independently finest spectacle of all that was graceful and of the religious sanction they obtain from all that was manly? Surely, if the posses- the law of the Saviour, are in themselves so sion of these moralities be just another lovely, and so honourable, and of such good theme of acknowledgment to the Lord of report, that they are ever sure to carry the spirits of all flesh, then, if the acknow- general applause along with them, and thus ledgment be withheld, and these moralities to combine both the characteristics of our have taken up their residence in the bosom text-that he who in these things serveth of him who is utterly devoid of piety, they Christ, is both acceptable to God, and apgo to aggravate the reproach of his ingrati-proved of men. tude; and to prove, that of all the men upon earth who are far from God, he stands at the widest distance, he remains proof against the weightiest claims, and he, of the dead in trespasses and sins, is the most profoundly asleep to the call of religion, and to the supremacy of its righteous obligations.

It is by argument such as this, that we would attempt to convince of sin, those who have a righteousness that is without godliness; and to prove, that, with the possession of such things as are pure, and lovely, and honest, and of good report, they in fact can only be admitted to reconciliation with God, on the same footing with the most worthless and profligate of the species; and to demonstrate, that they are m the very same state of need and of nakedness, and are therefore children of wrath, even as others; that it is only through faith in the preaching of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ that they can be saved; and that unless brought down from the delusive eminency of their own conscious attainments, they take their forgiveness through the blood of the Redeemer, and their sanctification through the spirit which is at his giving, they shall obtain no part in that inheritance which is incorruptible and undefiled, and which fadeth not away.

But the gospel of Jesus Christ does something more than hold out a refuge to the guilty. It takes all those who accept of its overtures under its supreme and exclusive direction. It keeps by them in the way of counsel and exhortation, and constant superintendence. The grace which it reveals, is a grace which not merely saves all men, but which teaches all men. He who is the proposed Saviour, also claims to be the alone master of those who put their trust in him. His cognizance extends itself over the whole line of their history; and there is not an affection of their heart, or a deed of their visible conduct, over which he does not assert the right of an authority that is

But there is another set of requirements, where the will of God, instead of being seconded by the applause of men, is utterly at. variance with it. There are some who can admire the generous sacrifices that are made to truth or to friendship, but who, without one opposing scruple, abandon themselves to all the excesses of riot and festivity, and are therefore the last to admire the puritanic sobriety of him whom they cannot tempt to put his chastity or his temperance away from him; though the same God, who bids us lie not one to another, also bids us keep the body under subjection, and to abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul. Again, there are some in whose eye an unvitiated delicacy looks a beautiful and an interesting spectacle, and an undeviating self-control looks a manly and respectable accomplishment; but who have no taste in themselves, and no admiration in others, for the more direct exercises of religion; and who positively hate the strict and unbending preciseness of those who join in every ordinance, and on every returning night celebrate the praises of God in their family; and that, though the heavenly Lawgiver, who tells us to live righteously and soberly, tells us also to live godly in the present evil world. And lastly, there are some who have not merely a toleration, but a liking for all the decencies of an established observation; but who, with the homage they pay to sabbaths and to sacraments, nauseate the Christian principle in the supreme and regenerating vitality of its influences; who, under a general religiousness of aspect, are still in fact the children of the world-and therefore hate the children of light in all that is peculiar and essentially characteristic of that high designation; who understand not what is meant by having our conversation in heaven; and utter strangers to the separated walk, and the spiritual exercises, and the humble devotedness, and the

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