a comedian, who had put all the world in ecstacies. But it turned out, that the patient was the comedian himself-and that while his smile was the signal of merriment to all, his heart stood uncheered and motionless, amid the gratulations of an applauding theatre-and evening after evening, did he kindle around him a rapture in which he could not participate-a poor, helpless, dejected mourner, among the tumults of that high-sounding gaiety, which he himself had created.

the kingdom---and have conceived the va- from his physician. The unhappy patient rious ideas of which it is composed---and was advised to attend the performances of have embodied them in words---and have poured them forth in utterance--and yet be as little spiritualized by these manifold operations, as the air is spiritualized by its being the avenue for the sounds of his voice to the ears of his listening auditory. The living man may, with all the force of his active intelligence, be a mere vehicle of transmission. The Holy Ghost may leave the message to take its own way through his mind---and may refuse the accession of his influence, till it make its escape from the lips of the preacher---and may trust for Let all this touch our breasts with the its conveyance to those aerial undulations persuasion of the nothingness of man. Let by which the report is carried forward to it lead us to withdraw our confidence from an assembled multitude---and may only, the mere instrument, and to carry it upafter the entrance of hearing has been ef-wards to him who alone worketh all in all. fected for the terms of the message, may only, after the unaided powers of moral and physical nature have brought the matter thus far, may then, and not till then, add his own influence to the truths of the message, and send them with this impregnation from the ear to the conscience of any whom he listeth. And thus from the workings of a cold and desolate bosom in the human expounder, may there proceed a voice which on its way to some of those who are assembled around him, shall turn out to be a voice of urgency and power. He may be the instrument of blessings to others, which have never come with kindly 'or effective influence upon his own heart. He may inspire an energy, which he does not feel, and pour a comfort into the wounded spirit, the taste of which, and the enjoyment of which is not permitted to his own---and nothing can serve more effectually than this experimental fact to hum-am Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos"-not of ble him, and to demonstrate the existence idolizing the servant, while the Master is of a power which cannot be wielded by all forgotten,-but let us hold by the Head, the energies of Nature--a power often re- even Christ. He is the source of all spiritfused to eloquence, often refused to the ual influence-and while the agents whom might and the glory of human wisdom--- he employs, can do no more than bring the often refused to the most strenuous exer- kingdom of God to you in word-it lies tions of human might and human talent, with him either to exalt one agency, or to and generally met with in richest abun-humble and depress another--and either dance among the ministrations of the men with or without such an agency, by the of simplicity and prayer. demonstration of that Spirit, which is given unto faith, to make the kingdom of God come into your hearts with power.

Some of you have heard of the individual, who, under an oppression of the severest melancholy, implored relief and counsell

Let it reconcile us to the arrangements of his providence, and assure our minds, that he can do with one arrangement, what we fondly anticipated from another. Let us cease to be violently affected by the mutabilities of a fleeting and a shifting worldand let nothing be suffered the power of dissolving for an instant, that connection of trust which should ever subsist between our minds and the will of the all-working Deity. Above all, let us carefully separate between our liking for certain accompaniments of the word, and our liking for the word itself. Let us be jealous of those human preferences which may bespeak some human and adventitious influence upon our hearts, and be altogether different from the influence of Christian truth upon Christianized' and sanctified affections. Let us be tenacious only of one thing-not of holding by particular ministers--not of saying, that "I

SERMON IX.

On the Reasonableness of Faith.

"But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed."-Galatians iii. 23.

and of mercy laid before us in the New Testament.

"SHUT up unto the faith." This is the expression which we fix upon as the subject of our present discourse-and to let you But this is not the only example of that more effectually into the meaning of it, it peculiar way in which St. Paul has managed may be right to state, that in the preceding his discussions with the enemies of the faith. clause "kept under the law," the term kept, He carried the principle of being all things is, in the original Greek, derived from a to all men into his very reasonings. He had word which signifies a sentinel. The mode Gentiles as well as Jews to contend with; of conception is altogether military. The and he often made some sentiment or conlaw is made to act the part of a sentry, viction of their own, the starting point of guarding every avenue but one-and that his argument. In this same epistle to the one leads those who are compelled to take | it to the faith of the Gospel. They are shut up to this faith as their only alternativelike an enemy driven by the superior tacties of an opposing general, to take up the only position in which they can maintain themselves, or fly to the only town in which they can find a refuge or a security. This seems to have been a favourite style of argument with Paul, and the way in which he often carried on an intellectual warfare with the enemies of his master's cause. It forms the basis of that masterly and decisive train of reasoning, which we have in his epistle to the Romans. By the operation But there is a fashion in philosophy as well of a skilful tactics, he, (if we may be al-as in other things. In the course of centulowed the expression) manoeuvred them, ries, new schools are formed, and the old, and shut them up to the faith of the Gospel. with all their doctrines, and all their plausiIt gave prodigious effect to his argument, bilities, sink into oblivion. The restless apwhen he reasoned with them, as he often petite of the human mind for speculation, does, upon their own principles, and turned must have novelties to feed upon-and after them into instruments of conviction against the countless fluctuations of two thousand themselves. With the Jews he reasoned as years, the age in which we live has its own a Jew. He made a full concession to them taste, and its own style of sentiment to chaof the leading principles of Judaism-and racterize it. If Paul, vested with a new this gave him possession of the vantage apostolical commission, were to make his ground upon which these principles stood. appearance amongst us, we should like to He made use of the Jewish law as a senti- know how he would shape his argument nel to shut them out of every other refuge, to the reigning taste and philosophy of the and to shut them up to the refuge laid be- times. We should like to confront him with fore them in the Gospel. He led them to the literati of the day, and hear him lift his Christ by a school-master which they could intrepid voice in our halls and colleges. In not refuse-and the lesson of this school- his speech to the men of Athens, he refers master, though a very decisive, was a very to certain of their own poets. We should short one. "Cursed be he that continueth like to hear his reference to the poetry and not in all the words of this law to do them." the publications of modern Europe-and But, in point of fact, they had not done while the science of this cultivated age them. To them belonged the curse of the stood to listen in all the pride of academic violated law. The awful severity of its dignity, we should like to know the argusanctions was upon them. They found the ments of him who was determined to know faith and the free offer of the Gospel to be nothing save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. the only avenue open to receive them. They were shut up unto this avenue; and the law, by concluding them all to be under sin, left them no other outlet but the free act of grace

Romans, he pleaded with the Gentiles the acknowledged law of nature and of conscience. In his speech to the men of Athens, he dated his argument from a point in their own superstition. In this way he drew converts both from the ranks of Judaism, and the ranks of idolatry; and whether it was the school of Gamaliel in Jerusalem, or the school of poetry and philosophy in countries of refinement, that he had to contend with, his accomplished mind was never at a loss for principles by which he bore down the hostility of his adversaries, and shut them up unto the faith.

But all this is little better than the indulgence of a dream. St. Paul has already fought the good fight, and his course is finished. The battles of the faith are now

in other hands-and though the wisdom, | that sinneth not.". It is not to open, shameand the eloquence, and the inspiration of less, and abandoned profligacy, that we are Paul have departed from among us, yet he pointing your attention. We make our conhas left behind him the record of his princi- fident appeal to the purest and loveliest of ples. With this for our guide, we may at- the species. We rest our cause with the tempt to do what he himself calls upon us most virtuous individual of our nature. to do. We may attempt to be followers of We enter his heart, and from what passes him. We may imitate him in the intrepid there, we can gather enough, and more than avowal of his principles-and we may try, enough to overthrow this tottering and unhowever humbly and imperfectly, to imi- supported fabric. We take a survey of its tate his style of defending them. We may desires, its wishes, its affections; and we put accommodate our argument, to the reigning the question to the consciousness of its posprinciples of the day. We may be all things sessor, if all these move in obedient harto all men-and out of the leading varieties mony even to the law of natural religion. of taste and of sentiment which obtain in The external conduct viewed separately and the present age, and in the present country, in itself, is, in the eye of every enlightened we may try if we can collect something, moralist, nothing. It is mere visible display. which may be turned into an instrument of Virtue consists in the motive which lies conviction for reclaiming men from their behind it; and the soul is the place of its delusions, and shutting them up unto the essential residence. Bring the soul, then, faith. into immediate comparison with the law of There is first, then, the school of Natural God. Think of the pure and spiritual serReligion a school founded on the compe-vice which it exacts from you. Amid all the tency of the human mind to know God by busy and complicated movements of the the exercise of its own faculties-to clothe inner man, is there no estrangement from him in the attributes of its own demonstra-God? Are there no tumultuous wandertion-to serve him by a worship and a lawings from that purity, and goodness, and of its own discovery-and to assign to him a mode of procedure in the administration of this vast universe, upon the strength and the plausibility of its own theories. We have not time at present, for exposing the rash and unphilosophical audacity of all these presumptions. We lay hold of one of them, and we maintain, that if steadily adhered to, and consistently carried into its consequences, it would empty the school of natural religion of all its disciples-it would shut them up unto the faith, and impress one rapid and universal movement into the school of Christ.

The principle which we allude to makes a capital figure in their self-formed speculations; and it is neither more nor less than the judicial government of God over moral and accountable creatures. They hold that there is a law. They hold the human race to be bound to obedience. They hold the authority of the law to be supported by sanctions; and that the truth, and justice, and dignity of the Supreme Being are involved in these sanctions being enforced and executed. One step more, and they are fairly shut up unto the faith. That law which they hold to be in full authority and operation over us, has been most unquestionably violated. We appeal, as Paul did before us, to the actual state of the human

truth, which even philosophers ascribe to him? Is there no shortcoming from the holiness of his law, and the magnificence of his eternity? Is there no slavish devotion to the paltry things of sense and of the world? Is there no dreary interval of hours together, when God is unfelt and unthought of? Is there no one time when the mind delivers itself up to the guidance of its own feelings, and its own vanities-when it moves at a distance from heaven; and whether in solitude or among acquaintances, carries along, without any reference to that Being whose arm is perpetually upon me; who, at this moment, is at my right hand, and measures out to me every hairbreadth of my existence-who upholds me through every point of that time which runs from the first cry of my infancy, to that dark hour when the weight of my dying agonies is upon me---whose love and whose kindness are ever present to give me every breath which I draw, and every comfort which I enjoy? We grant the disciples of natural religion the truth of their own principle, that we are under the moral government of the Almighty; and by the simple addition of one undeniable fact to their speculation, we shut them up unto the faith.

The simple fact is, that we are rebels to heart, and of human performances. We ask that government, and the punishment of them to open their eyes to the world around these rebels is due to the vindication of its them to respect, like true philosophers, the insulted authority. To say, that God will evidence of observation, and not to flinch perpetually interpose with an act of oblivion, from the decisive undeniable fact which would be vastly convenient for us; but this evidence lays before them. Men are what then becomes of that moral governunder the law, and that law they have vio-ment which figures away in the demonstralated. "There is not a just man on earth, tions of moralists? Does it turn out, after

if any man enter in, he shall be saved. In the appointment of this Mediat r-in his death, to make propitiation for the sins of the world-in his triumph over the powers of darkness-in the voice heard from the clouds of heaven, and issuing from the mouth of God himself, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased"—in the resistless argument of the Apostle, who declares God to be just, and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus-in the undoubted miracles which accompanied the preaching of this illustrious personage, and

hath concluded all to be under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe.

all, to be nothing more than an idle and unmeaning declamation, on which they love to expatiate; without any thing like real attention or belief on the part of the thinking principle? If they are not true to their own professed convictions, we can undertake to shut them up to nothing. This is slipping from under us; but it is by an actual desertion of their own principle. If you cannot get them to stand to the argument, the argument is discharged upon them in vain. If this be the result, we do not promise ourselves that all we can say shall have any weight upon their convic-his immediate followers-in the noble train tions; not, however, because they have of prophecy, of which he was the object gained a victory, but because they have be- and the termination-in the choir of angels taken themselves to flight. At the very mo- from heaven, who sung his entrance into ment that we thought of shutting them up, the world-and in the sublime ascension and binding them in captivity to the obe- from the grave, which carried him away dience of the truth, they have turned about from it-in all this we see a warrant and a and got away from us-but how? By an security given to the work of our redempopen renunciation of their own principle. tion in the New Testament, before which Look at the great majority of infidel and philosophy and all her speculations vanish demi-infidel authors, and they concur in into nothing. Let us betake ourselves to this representing man as an accountable subject, way. Let us rejoice in being shut up unto it. and God as a judge and a lawgiver. Ex- It is passing, in fact, from death unto life; or, amine then the account which this subject from our being under the law, which speaks has to render; and you will see, in charac- tribulation and wrath to every soul of man ters to glaring to be resisted, that with the that doeth evil, to being under the grace purest and most perfect individual amongst which speaks quietness and assurance for us, it is a wretched account of guilt and de-ever to all that repair to it. The Scripture ficiency. What make you, of this? Is the subject to rebel and disobey every hour, and the King, by a perpetual act of indulgence, to efface every character of truth We now pass on from the school of naand dignity from his government? Do this, tural religion to another school, possessing and you depose the legislator from his distinct features; and of which we conthrone. You reduce the sanctions of his ceive the most expressive designation to be, law to a name and a mockery. You give the school of Classical Morality. The les the lie to your own speculation, You pull sons of this school are given to the public the fabric of his moral government to in the form of periodical essays, elaborate pieces; and you give a spectacle to angels dissertations on the principles of virtue, elowhich makes them weep compassion on quent and often highly interesting pictures your vanity--poor, pigmy, perishable man, of its loveliness and dignity, the charm that prescribing a way to the Eternal, and bring-it imparts to domestic retirement, and its ing down the high economy of Heaven to happy subservience to the peace, and order, the standard of his convenience, and his and well-being of society. It differs from wishes. This will never do. If there be the former school in one leading particular any truth in the law of God over the crea- It does not carry in its speculations so distures whom he has formed, and if that law tinct and positive a reference to the Suwe have trampled upon, we are amenable preme Being. It is true, that our duties to to its sentence. Ours is the dark and un-him are found to occupy a place in the catasheltered state of condemnation-and if logue of its virtues, but then the principle there be a single outlet or way of escaping, on which they are made to rest, is not the It cannot be such a way as will abolish the will of God, or obedience to his law. They law, and degrade the Lawgiver; but it must are rather viewed as a species of moral acbe such a way as will vindicate and exalt complishment, the effect of which is to exthe Deity-as will pour a tide of splendour alt and embellish the individual. They over the majesty of his high attributes-form a component part of what they call and as in the sublime language of the pro- virtue; but if their virtue be looked upon in phet, who saw it from afar, will magnify no other light than as the dress of the mind, his law, and make it honourable. To this we maintain, that in the act of admiring way we are fairly shut up. It is our only this dress, and of even attempting to put it alternative. It is offered to us in the Gos-on, you may stand at as great a distance pel of the New Testament. I am the way, from God, and he be as little in your says the Author of that Gospel, and by me, thoughts, as in the tasteful choice of your

The tasteful admirer of eloquent description and beautiful morality, turns with disgust from those mortifying pictures of man, which abound in the New Testament. We only ask them to combine, with all this finery and eloquence, what has been esteemed as the best attribute of a philosopher, respect for the evidence of observation. We ask them to look at man as he is, and compare him with man as they would have

apparel, for the dress and ornament of the with the vices and the degradation of the body. The object of these writers is not species. Grosser beings may be satisfied to bring their readers under a sense of the with the average morality of mankind; but dominion and authority of God. The main if their be any truth in their high standard principle of their morality, is not to please of perfection, or any sincerity in their asGod, but to adorn man-to throw the pirations after it, it is impossible that they splendour of virtue and accomplishment can be satisfied. By one single step do we around him-to bring him up to what they lead them from the high tone of academic call the end and dignity of his being-to sentiment, to the sober humility of the Gosraise him to the perfection of his nature-pel. Give them their time to expatiate on and to rear a spectacle for the admiration virtue, and they cannot be too loud or eloof men and of angels, whom they figure to quent in her praises. We have only a sinlook down with rapture, from their high gle sentence to add to their description: eminence, on the perseverance of a mortal The picture is beautiful, but on the whole in the career of worth, and integrity, and surface of the world we defy them to fasten honour. This is all very fine. It makes upon one exemplification; and by every a good picture; but what we insist upon is, grace which they have thrown around their that it is a fancy picture; that, without the idol, and every addition they have made to limits of Christianity and its influence, you her loveliness, they have only thrown manwill not meet with a single family, or a sin-kind at a distance more helpless and more gle individual to realize it-that the whole irrecoverable from their high standard of range of human experience furnishes no duty and of excellence, resemblance to it-and that it is as unlike to what we find among the men of the world, or in the familiar walks of society, as the garden of Eden is unlike the desolation of a pestilence. The representation is beautiful; but it is still more flattering than it is fair. It is a gaudy deception, and stands at as great a distance from the truth of observation, as it does from the truth of the New Testament. There is positively nothing like it in the whole round of hu-him to be. If they find that he falls miserman experience. It is the mere glitter of imagination. It may serve to throw a tinsel colouring over the pages of an ambitious eloquence; but with business and reality for our objects, we may describe the tour of many thousand families, or take our station for years in the market-place, and in our attempts to realize the picture which has been laid before us, we will be sure to meet with nothing but vanity, fatigue, and disappointment. Now, the question we have to put to the disciples of this school is, are they really sincere in this admiration of virtue? Is it a true process of sentiment within them? We are willing to share in their admiration and to ascend the highest summit of moral excellence along with them. We join issue with them on their own principle, and coupling it with the obvious and undeniable facts of man's depravity, we shut them up unto the faith. Virtue is the idol which they profess to venerate; and this virtue, as it exists in their own conceptions, and figures in their own dissertations, they cannot find. In proportion to their regard for virtue, must be their disappointment at missing her; and when we witness the ardour of their sentiments, and survey the elegance of their high-wrought pictures, what must be the humiliation of these men, we think, when they look on the world around them, and contrast the purity of their own sketches,

ably short of their ideal standard of excellence, what is this but making a principle of their own the instrument of shutting them up unto the faith of the Gospel, or, at least, shutting them up unto one of the most peculiar of its doctrines, the depravity of our nature, or the dismal ravage which the power of sin has made upon the moral constitution of the species. The doctrine of the academic moralist, so far from reaching a wound to the doctrine of the Apostle, gives an additional energy to all his senti ments. "My mind approves the things which are more excellent, but how to perform that which is good, I find not." "I delight in the law of God after the inward man." "But the good that I would, I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do."

But the faith of the Gospel does not stop here. It does not rest, satisfied with shutting you up unto a belief of the fact of human depravity. That depravity it proposes to do away. It professes itself equal to the mighty achievement of rooting out the deeply seated corruption of our nature-of making us new creatures in Christ Jesusof destroying the old man and his deeds, and bringing every rebellious movement within us under the dominion of a new and a better principle. If sincere in your admiration of virtue, you are shut up unto the only expedient for the re-establishment