course the strength of our resolutions will depend not only upon the skill with which they are woven, but the material of which they are made. Let our rules take in as much as possible of our principles and be in fact identified with them, and they bind us securely. They are then not capricious, temporary, changeful, doubtful. They are not, like whims and fancies, or arbitrary and unmeaning plans, at the mercy of every new freak or every fresh occurrence. They are durable, stable, and unyielding; for they embody unalterable truth and righteousness. We therefore retain them through a thousand inconveniences; we cleave to them in spite of many a temptation to relinquish them; and we confide in them in the hour of perplexity, discouragement and darkness. We can trust them to the verge of the grave. How desirable then to "understand what the will of the Lord is!" How needful to form our rules and plans of acting under the clear blaze of truth. Upon this will depend the wisdom of our regulations, and the uniformity of our adherence to them. Formal resolutions made without the presence and prevalence of great principles, will be like lines and figures drawn on sand, which every wind effaces and every foot treads out; while regulations framed by the aid of essential principles well understood and fully recognised, resemble inscriptions on tablets of marble, or deep engravings on masses of solid gold.

The power of grand and main principles of practical truth to guide us in the varying, or the new and untried circumstances of human life, render a thorough understanding of those principles exceedingly important. What endless scrupulosity, what

frequent difficulty, what tormenting perplexity, what suspense of judgment, what vacillation of purpose, are often created by the want of an easy, ready, direct, simple appeal of the mind to the all rectifying and all guiding principles of righteousness! From how many an embarrassment would such a reference free us! How many a knot would it untie ! Through how many a maze would it guide us! And then, what a saving of time, of thought, of strength! What a waste and misappropriation of these would be prevented! But the facility and success with which we shall bring great practical truth to bear upon indi vidual circumstances and specific cases must depend upon the strength and completeness with which it holds our minds. These should be occupied, conversant and familiarized with it, in order to make of it a wise and successful use.

This accuracy and transparency in our apprehensions of practical truth, may be shewn to be equally conducive to christian comfort. The attempt is as impolitic, as it is unfaithful, to obscure or lower the standard of experimental religion in order to gratify the ravenous and symptomatic cravings for consolation indulged by a certain class of religionists. Such empiricism will ill satisfy the genuine thirsting, the rational desire of the humble christian for increase of spiritual joy and hope. It is surely ill-advised and dangerous, studiously to bring down the marks of grace to the lowest possible point, just to meet the hollow pretensions of false religion, or the furthest ebbings of declension. The christian is little aided by such manoeuvres. He is far better assisted in his search for consolation, by a clear, unobscured,undis

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guised exposure of the real and required qualities of the spiritual mind. If a christian, he is more likely to ascertain it, when the christian is openly and plainly before him, in judicious, faithful, artless, simple, scriptural statements; and his consolations and hopes are likely to be the stronger and the more lasting. The trimming, softening, accommodating method of presenting the features of spiritual character leaves its own uncertainty and confusion upon the mind; whilst manly and uncompromising representations leave their own strong cast of defined, settled and satisfying conclusions.

It is also important to specify, define, describe, and apply to their proper ends the great practical and experimental principles of piety in order to shew the objector and the caviller, that the peculiarities of a believer, are not mere points of religious opinion,-empty speculations, inoperative and barren notions. If these practical requirements are not prominent, strongly marked, put in bold relief, but exist only in dim and distant perspective; the objector will be apt to think that we should not exhibit them at all, but to save our creed from disrepute— that they are the mere filling up in the back ground of the picture, to take off its abrupt, naked and unattractive appearance. It is important that he be convinced that we hold the essentiality of these things -that a believer is distinguished by what he feels as well as what he believes by his motives as well as his notions by his tastes as well as his tenets-by the character of his affections as well as the cast of his creed-by the order of his moral actions as well as the system of his theology-by the nature, aim,

and tendency of his course of life, as well as by his religious persuasions. And whilst it is important that the incredulous disputant should become satisfied that we do not regard these things as the fanciful and convenient filling up-the mere accidents-the appendages-the ornament and drapery-the inferior and subordinate parts of christianity, but as the very substance, the essence, the spirit and life of religion-the thing itself; he ought also to be convinced that we no further value our tenets than as they have power to yield these fruits of righteousness -that truth no further wins us than as it is "according to godliness." Such an individual should be made to feel when he comes out to oppose our sentiinents, that he has to meet, not a shadow-not an empty form of words, but a living, active body, with bone and muscle, and nerve and blood. Unhappily there is no want of evidence of the truth of these observations. How often have men been encouraged to reject the specialities of the christian faith, by the feeble views which have been presented to them of their working and results. When great practical

principles have been frittered down to powerless formalism, reduced to unimpressive generality, or exhausted of their life and energy, and presented in cold and inanimate exterior; it has not been found difficult to bring them within the power, and province and proprietorship of views the widest and most antiscriptural. And when those who have given these feeble representations of practical piety, have presented doctrinal truth in its own majesty, it has been asked, and not unreasonably, why this vast and wonderful arrangement-this amazing provision

-this stupendous apparatus-to effect what is completely within the reach and capability of means less operose and less marvellous? It is not difficult to see that this is the probable effect of that strange combination of lofty doctrine and grovelling character which Antinomianism presents. A similar result must flow from that stately orthodoxy and that spiritless and withered form of piety which we sometimes see so unnaturally associated. Were we honestly to exhibit practical principles in their radiancy, their comprehensiveness and their authority, we should vindicate our faith from the charge or suspicion of being but a cumbersome and needless machine; whilst we should destroy the pretensions of every false system, and drive its abettors to despair of working out effects so good and so vast, with instruments so feeble and so ill adapted. Were we thus carefully, wisely, as well as meekly to instruct those that oppose themselves, we should go far towards bringing them to repentance to the acknowledging of the truth, that they might recover themselves from the snare of the devil who have been led captive by him at his will?

By the same means we shall secure our own minds from error with respect to the great peculiarities of christian doctrine. We judge of truth by its influence; but if its effects are undefined in our views, our conceptions of the nature and power of the instrumental agency by which these effects are produced, must be proportionably enfeebled. If these effects lose, in our apprehension of them, their distinctive features, and shade off into such mere generalities as may result from one creed as well as