ping one of these pursuits in any way else, [tics, another affection has been wrought but by stimulating to another. In attempt into his moral system, and he is now lorded ing to bring a worldly man, intent and bu- over by the love of power. There is not sied with the prosecution of his objects, to one of these transformations in which the a dead stand, you have not merely to en- heart is left without an object. Its desire counter the charm which he annexes to for one particular object may be conquered; these objects-but you have to encounter but as to its desire for having some one the pleasure which he feels in the very object or other, this is unconquerable. Its prosecution of them. It is not enough, adhesion to that on which it has fastened then, that you dissipate the charm, by your the preference of its regards, cannot wilmoral, and eloquent, and affecting exposure lingly be overcome by the rending away of of its illusiveness. You must address to the a simple separation. It can be done only (eye of his mind another object, with a by the application of something else, to charm powerful enough to dispossess the which it may feel the adhesion of a still first of its influence, and to engage him in stronger and more powerful preference. some other prosecution as full of interest, Such is the grasping tendency of the huand hope, and congenial activity, as the man heart, that it must have a something former. It is this which stamps an impo- to lay hold of-and which, if wrested away tency on all moral and pathetic declamation without the substitution of another someabout the insignificance of the world. A thing in its place, would leave a void and a man will no more consent to the misery of vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger being without an object, because that object is to the natural system. It may be dispos is a trifle, or of being without a pursuit, be- sessed of one object, or of any, but it cancause that pursuit terminates in some frivo- not be desolated of all. Let there be a lous or fugitive acquirement, than he will breathing and a sensitive heart, but without voluntarily submit himself to the torture, a liking and without affinity to any of the because that torture is to be of short dura- things that are around it, and in a state of tion. If to be without desire and without cheerless abandonment, it would be alive to exertion altogether, is a state of violence nothing but the burden of its own conand discomfort, then the present desire, sciousness, and feel it to be intolerable. It with its correspondent train of exertion, is would make no difference to its owner, not to be got rid of simply by destroying it. whether he dwelt in the midst of a gay and It must be by substituting another desire, goodly world, or placed afar beyond the and another line or habit of exertion in its outskirts of creation, he dwelt a solitary place-and the most effectual way of with- unit in dark and unpeopled nothingness. drawing the mind from one object, is not The heart must have something to cling to by turning it away upon desolate and un--and never, by its own voluntary consent, peopled vacancy-but by presenting to its regards another object still more alluring.

These remarks apply not merely to love considered in its state of desire for an object not yet obtained. They apply also to love considered in its state of indulgence, or placid gratification, with an object already in possession. It is seldom that any of our tastes are made to disappear by a mere process of natural extinction. At least, it is very seldom that this is done through the instrumentality of reasoning. It may be done by excessive pampering but it is almost never done by the mere force of mental determination. But what cannot be thus destroyed, may be dispossessed--and one taste may be made to give way to another, and to lose its power entirely as the reigning affection of the mind. It is thus, that the boy ceases, at length, to be the slave of his appetite, but it is because a manlier taste has now brought it into subordination-and that the youth ceases to idolize pleasure, but it is because the idol of wealth has become the stronger and gotten the ascendency--and that even the love of money ceases to have the mastery over the heart of many a thriving citizen, but it is because drawn into the whirl of city poli

will it so denude itself of all its attachments, that there shall not be one remaining object that can draw or solicit it.

The misery of a heart thus bereft of all relish for that which wont to minister enjoyment, is strikingly exemplified in those, who, satiated with indulgence, have been so belaboured, as it were, with the variety and the poignancy of the pleasurable sensations that they have experienced, that they are at length fatigued out of all ca pacity for sensation whatever. The disease of ennui is more frequent in the French metropolis, where amusement is more exclusively the occupation of higher classes, than it is in the British metropolis, where the longings of the heart are more diversified by the resources of business and politics. There are the votaries of fashion, who, in this way, have at length become the victims of fashionable excess-in whom the very multitude of their enjoyments, has at last extinguished their power of enjoy ment-who, with the gratifications of art and nature at command, now look upon all that is around them with an eye of tastelessness-who, plied with the delights of sense and of splendour even to weariness, and incapable of higher delights, have come

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to the end of all their perfection, and like Solomon of old, found it to be vanity and vexation. The man whose heart has thus been turned into a desert, can vouch for the insupportable languor which must ensue, when one affection is thus plucked away from the bosom, without another to replace it. It is not necessary that a man receive pain from any thing, in order to become miserable. It is barely enough that he looks with distaste to every thing-and in that asylum which is the repository of minds out of joint, and where the organ of feeling as well as the organ of intellect, has been impaired, it is not in the cell of loud and frantic outcries where you will meet with the acme of mental suffering. But that is the individual who outpeers in wretchedness all his fellows, who throughout the whole expanse of nature and society, meets not an object that has at all the power to detain or to interest him; who neither in earth beneath, nor in heaven above, knows of a single charm to which his heart can send forth one desirous or responding movement; to whom the world, in his eye a vast and empty desolation, has left him nothing but his own consciousness to feed upon-dead to all that is without him, and alive to nothing but to the load of his own torpid and useless existence.

it bare of all its regards, and of all its preferences, were a hard and hopeless undertaking-and it would appear as if.the alone powerful engine of dispossession, were to bring the mastery of another affection to bear upon it.

We know not a more sweeping interdict upon the affections of Nature, than that which is delivered by the Apostle in the verse before us. To bid a man into whom there is not yet entered the great and ascendant influence of the principle of regeneration, to bid him withdraw his love from all the things that are in the world, is to bid him give up all the affections that are in his heart. The world is the all of a natural man. He has not a taste, nor a desire, that points not to a something placed within the confines of its visible horizon. He loves nothing above it, and he cares for nothing beyond it; and to bid him love not the world, is to pass a sentence of expulsion on all the inmates of his bosom. To estimate the magnitude and the difficulty of such a surrender, let us only think that it were just as arduous to prevail on him not to love wealth, which is but one of the things in the world, as to prevail on him to set wilful fire to his own property. This he might do with sore and painful reluctance, if he saw that the salvation of his It will now be seen, perhaps, why it is life hung upon it. But this he would do that the heart keeps by its present affections willingly, if he saw that a new property of with so much tenacity-when the attempt tenfold value was instantly to emerge from is, to do them away by a mere process of the wreck of the old one. In this case there extirpation. It will not consent to be so is something more than the mere displacedesolated. The strong man, whose dwell- ment of an affection. There is the overing-place is there, may be compelled to give bearing of one affection by another. But way to another occupier-but unless ano-to desolate his heart of all love for the ther stronger than he, has power to dispossess and to succeed him, he will keep his present lodgment inviolable. The heart would revolt against its own emptiness. It could not bear to be so left in a state of waste and cheerless insipidity. The moralist who tries such a process of dispossession as this upon the heart, is thwarted at every step by the recoil of its own mechanism. You have all heard that Nature abhors a vacuum. Such at least is the nature of the heart, that though the room which is in it We hope that by this time, you undermay change one inmate for another, it can- stand the impotency of a mere demonstranot be left void without the pain of most tion of this world's insignificance. Its sole intolerable suffering. It is not enough then practical effect, if it had any, would be to to argue the folly of an existing affection. leave the heart in a state which to every It is not enough, in the terms of a forcible heart is insupportable, and that is a mere or an affecting demonstration, to make good state of nakedness and negation. You may the evanescence of its object. It may not remember the fond and unbroken tenacity even be enough to associate the threats and with which your heart has often recurred terrors of some coming vengeance, with the to pursuits, over the utter frivolity of which indulgence of it. The heart may still re-it sighed and wept but yesterday. The sist the every application, by obedience to arithmetic of your short-lived days, may which it would finally be conducted to a on Sabbath make the clearest impression state so much at war with all its appetites as that of downright inanition. So to tear away an affection from the heart, as to leave

things of the world, without the substitution of any love in its place, were to him a process of as unnatural violence, as to destroy all the things he has in the world, and give him nothing in their room. So that, if to love not the world be indispensable to one's Christianity, then the crucifixion of the old man is not too strong a term to mark that transition in his history, when all old things are done away, and all things are become new.

upon your understanding-and from his fancied bed of death, may the preacher cause a voice to descend in rebuke and

destroy the old character, and to substitue no new character in its place. But when they take their departure upon the ingress of other visitors; when they resign their sway to the power and the predominance of new affections; when, abandoning the heart to solitude, they merely give place to a successor who turns it into as busy a residence of desire, and interest, and expectation as before-there is nothing in all this to thwart or to overbear any of the laws of our sentient nature-and we see how, in fullest accordance with the mechanism of the heart, a great moral revolution may be made to take place upon it.

mockery on all the pursuits of earthliness the seat of them unoccupied, would be to -and as he pictures before you the fleeting generations of men, with the absorbing grave, whither all the joys and interests of the world hasten to their sure and speedy oblivion, may you, touched and solemnized by his argument, feel for a moment as if on the eve of a practical and permanent emancipation from a scene of so much vanity. But the morrow comes, and the business of the world, and the objects of the world, and the moving forces of the world come along with it-and the machinery of the heart, in virtue of which it must have something to grasp, or something to adhere to, brings it under a kind of moral necessity to be actuated just as before-and in utter repulsion towards a state so unkindly as that of being frozen out both of delight and of desire, does it feel all the warmth and the urgency of its wonted solicitations-nor in the habit and history of the whole man, can we detect so much as one symptom of the new creature -so that the church, instead of being to him a school of obedience, has been a mere sauntering place for the luxury of a passing and theatrical emotion; and the preaching which is mighty to compel the attendance of multitudes, which is mighty to still and to solemnize the hearers into a kind of tragic sensibility, which is mighty in the play of variety and vigour that it can keep up around the imagination, is not mighty to the pulling down of strong-holds.

This, we trust, will explain the operation of that charm which accompanies the effectual preaching of the gospel. The love of God, and the love of the world, are two affections, not merely in a state of rivalship, but in a state of enmity-and that so irreconcilable, that they cannot dwell together in the same bosom. We have already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from it, and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The heart is not so constituted, and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection, is by the expulsive power of a new one. Nothing can exceed the magnitude of the required change in a man's character-when bidden as he is in the New Testament, to love not the world; no, nor any of the The love of the world cannot be expung- things that are in the world-for this so ed by a mere demonstration of the world's comprehends all that is dear to him in worthlessness. But may it not be supplant- existence, as to be equivalent to a comed by the love of that which is more wor-mand of self-annihilation. But the same thy than itself? The heart cannot be pre- revelation which dictates so mighty an vailed upon to part with the world, by a obedience, places within our reach as simple act of resignation. But may not mighty an instrument of obedience. It the heart be prevailed upon to admit into brings for admittance, to the very door of its preference another, who shall subordi- our heart, an affection which, once seated nate the world, and bring it down from its upon its throne, will either subordinate wonted ascendency? If the throne which every previous inmate, or bid it is placed there, must have an occupier, and side the world, it places before the eye of the tyrant that now reigns has occupied it the mind, him who made the world, and wrongfully, he may not leave a bosom with this peculiarity, which is all its own which would rather detain him, than be that in the Gospel do we so behold God, left in desolation. But may he not give as that we may love God. It is there, and way to the lawful sovereign, appearing there only, where God stands revealed as with every charm that can secure his will- an object of confidence to sinners-and ing admittance, and taking unto himself his where our desire after him is not chilled great power to subdue the moral nature of into apathy, by that barrier of human guilt man, and to reign over it? In a word, if which intercepts every approach that is the way to disengage the heart from the not made to him through the appointed positive love of one great and ascendent Mediator. It is the bringing in of this betobject, is to fasten it in positive love to an- ter hope, whereby we draw nigh unto God other, then it is not by exposing the worth--and to live without hope, is to live withlessness of the former, but by addressing to the mental eye the worth and excellence of the latter, that all old things are to be done away, and all things are to become new.

To obliterate all our present affections, by simply expunging them, and so as to leave

away.

Be

out God, and if the heart be without God, the world will then have all the ascendency. It is God apprehended by the believer as God in Christ, who alone can dispost it from this ascendency. It is when he stands dismantled of the terrors which belong to

him as an offended lawgiver, and when we pose to the ready recognition of his hearers are enabled by faith, which is his own gift, the desires of worldliness-but with the to see his glory in the face of Jesus Christ, tidings of the gospel in commission, he and to hear his beseeching voice, as it pro- may wield the only engine that can extirtests good will to men, and entreats the pate them. He cannot do what some have return of all who will to a full pardon, and done, when, as if by the hand of a maa gracious acceptance-it is then, that a gician, they have brought out to view, love paramount to the love of the world, from the hidden recesses of our nature, the and at length expulsive of it, first arises in foibles and lurking appetites which belong the regenerating bosom. It is when re- to it.-But he has a truth in his possession, leased from the spirit of bondage, with which into whatever heart it enters, will, which love cannot dwell, and when admit-like the rod of Aaron, swallow up them all ted into the number of God's children, and unqualified as he may be, to describe through the faith that is in Christ Jesus, the spirit of adoption is poured upon us-it is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominant affection, is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires, and in the only way in which deliverance is possible. And that faith which is revealed to us from heaven, as indispensable to a sinner's justification in the sight of God, is also the instrument of the greatest of all moral and spiritual achievements on a nature dead to the influence, and beyond the reach of every other application.

the old man in all the nicer shading of his natural and constitutional varieties, with him is deposited that ascendent influence under which the leading tastes and tendencies of the old man are destroyed, and he becomes a new creature in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Let us not cease, then, to ply the only instrument of powerful and positive operation, to do away from you the love of the world. Let us try every legitimate method of finding access to your hearts for the love of him who is greater than the world. For this purpose, let us, if possible, clear away that shroud of unbelief which so hides and darkens the face of the Deity. Let us insist on his claims to your affection-and whether in the shape of gratitude, or in the shape of esteem, let us never cease to affirm, that in the whole of that wondrous economy, the purpose of which is to reclaim a sinful world unto himself-he, the God of love, so sets himself forth in characters of endearment, that nought but faith, and nought but understanding, are wanting, on your part, to call forth the love of your hearts back again.

Thus may we come to perceive what it is that makes the most effective kind of preaching. It is not enough to hold out to the world's eye the mirror of its own imperfections. It is not enough to come forth with a demonstration, however pathetic, of the evanescent character of all its enjoyments. It is not enough to travel the walk of experience along with you, and speak to your own conscience, and vour own recollection of the deceitfulness of the heart, and the deceitfulness of all that the heart is set upon. There is many a And here let me advert to the incredulity bearer of the Gospel message, who has not of a worldly man; when he brings his own shrewdness of natural discernment enough, sound and secular experience to bear upon and who has not power of characteristic de- the high doctrines of Christianity-when scription enough, and who has not the talent he looks on regeneration as a thing imposof moral delineation enough, to present you sible-when feeling as he does, the obstiwith a vivid and faithful sketch of the ex- nacies of his own heart on the side of isting follies of society. But that very things present, and casting an intelligent corruption which he has not the faculty of eye, much exercised perhaps in the obserrepresenting in its visible details, he may vation of human life, on the equal obstinapractically be the instrument of eradicating cies of all who are around him, he proin its principle. Let him be but a faithful nounces this whole matter about the cruciexpounder of the gospel testimony.-Un-fixion of the old man, and the resurrection able as he may be to apply a descriptive of a new man in his place, to be in downhand to the character of the present world, right opposition to all that is known and let him but report with accuracy the mat-witnessed of the real nature of humanity. ter which revelation has brought to him We think that we have seen such men, from a distant world,-unskilled as he is in who, firmly trenched in their own vigorous the work of so anatomizing the heart, as and homebred sagacity, and shrewdly rewith the power of a novelist to create a gardful of all that passes before them graphical or impressive exhibition of the through the week, and upon the scenes of worthlessness of its many affections-let ordinary business, look on that transition him only deal in those mysteries of peculiar of the heart by which it gradually dies doctrine, on which the best of novelists unto time, and awakens in all the life of a have thrown the wantonness of their deri-new-felt and ever-growing desire towards sion. He may not be able, with the eye God, as a mere Sabbath speculation; and of shrewd and satirical observation, to ex- who thus, with all their attention engrossed

upon the concerns of earthliness, continue | giving him up unto the death for us all. They unmoved, to the end of their days, amongst do not see the sufficiency of the atonement, the feelings, and the appetites, and the pur- or of the sufferings that were endured by suits of earthliness. If the thought of death, | him who bore the burden that sinners and another state of being after it, comes should have borne. They do not see the across them at all, it is not with a change blended holiness and compassion of the so radical as that of being born again, that Godhead, in that he passed by the transthey ever connect the idea of preparation.gressions of his creatures, yet could not They have some vague conception of its pass them by without an expiation. It is a being quite enough that they acquit them- mystery to them, how a man should pass selves in some decent and tolerable way to the state of godliness from a state of naof their relative obligations; and that, upon ture-but had they only a believing view the strength of some such social and do- of God manifest in the flesh, this would remestic moralities as are often realized by solve for them the whole mystery of godlihim in whose heart the love of God has ness. As it is, they cannot get quit of never entered, they will be transplanted in their old affections, because they are out safety from this world, where God is the of sight from all those truths which have Being with whom it may almost be said, influence to raise a new one. They are like that they have had nothing to do, to that the children of Israel in the land of Egypt, world where God is the Being with whom when required to make bricks without straw they will have mainly and immediately to-they cannot love God, while they want do throughout all eternity. They admit all the only food which can aliment this affection that is said of the utter vanity of time, when in a sinner's bosom-and however great taken up with as a resting place. But they their errors may be both in resisting the deresist every application made upon the mands of the Gospel as impracticable, and heart of man, with the view of so shifting in rejecting the doctrines of the Gospel as its tendencies, that it shall not henceforth inadmissible, yet there is not a spiritual find in the interests of time, all its rest and man (and it is the prerogative of him who all its refreshment. They, in fact, regard is spiritual to judge all men) who will not such an attempt as an enterprise that is al-perceive that there is a consistency in these together aerial-and with a tone of secular errors. wisdom, caught from the familiarities of But if there be a consistency in the errors, every-day experience, do they see a vision-in like manner is there a consistency in the ary character in all that is said of setting our affections on the things that are above and of walking by faith; and of keeping our hearts in such a love of God as shall shut out from them the love of the world; and of having no confidence in the flesh; and of so renouncing earthly things as to have our conversation in heaven.

truths which are opposite to them. The man who believes in the peculiar doctrines, will readily bow to the peculiar demands of Christianity. When he is told to love God supremely, this may startle another, but it will not startle him to whom God has been revealed in peace, and in pardon, and in all the freeness of an offered reconciliaNow, it is altogether worthy of being re- tion. When told to shut out the world from marked of those men who thus disrelish his heart, this may be impossible with him spiritual Christianity, and, in fact, deem it who has nothing to replace it--but not iman impracticable acquirement, how much possible with him, who has found in God of a piece their incredulity about the de- a sure and a satisfying portion. When told mands of Christianity, and their incredulity to withdraw his affections from the things about the doctrines of Christianity, are with that are beneath, this were laying an order one another. No wonder that they feel the of self-extinction upon the man, who knows work of the New Testament to be beyond not another quarter in the whole sphere of their strength, so long as they hold the his contemplation, to which he could transwords of the New Testament to be beneath fer them-but it were not grievous to him their attention. Neither they nor any one whose view has been opened up to the loveelse can dispossess the heart of an old af-liness and glory of the things that are fection, but by the impulsive power of a new above, and can there find, for every feeling one-and, if that new affection be the love of his soul, a most ample and delighted ocof God, neither they nor any one else can cupation. When told to look not to the be made to entertain it, but on such a re-things that are seen and temporal, this were presentation of the Deity, as shall draw the blotting out the light of all that is visible heart of the sinner towards him. Now it is just their unbelief which screens from the discernment of their minds this representation. They do not see the love of God in sending his Son into the world. They do not see the expression of his tenderness to men, in sparing him not, but

from the prospect of him in whose eye there is a wall of partition between guilty nature and the joys of eternity--but he who believes that Christ hath broken down this wall, finds a gathering radiance upon his soul, as he looks onwards in faith to the things that are unseen and eternal.