been confirmed, and received the Holy Communion, that you have thereby been more highly exalted in the kingdom of God, and if you have fallen, have fallen more deeply. If God has spoken in your hearts more distinctly; if your affections have been moved, and your hearts have been drawn, as they were never drawn before, to Christ upon the Cross--how blessed an opportunity for binding yourselves for ever to your Saviour have you lost! How great is your sin! How terrible is your misery! Come to your right mind, and you will feel it now, and, by the grace of God, you may escape enduring it for ever: but if you persevere in indifference, or fall deeper and deeper into sin, your full misery will come upon you when you are called upon to undergo judgment for the use of those precious opportunities which God has given you so abundantly.

Look

Fear then, dear brethren, the approach of that state of hardness and indifference for which there is no remedy, and guard against its first beginnings. Use this solemn Lent season for self-examination. back upon the past and see wherein you have failed. Did you first come to holy ordinances with the sins of your past life still upon you, unrepented of, unforsaken? Do so no more; but repent, and forsake your sins at once, and seek the face of Him whom you have so grievously offended, in a deeper selfhumiliation, and give yourselves up to Him unreservedly, as you have not yet done.

Have you fallen again into sin since your first Communion? And does Satan seem to have wound

his chains again around you? Or has your heart grown cold, and have your affections returned again to the earth from which you had for awhile raised them? Then consider from whence you have fallen! Oh, how deep a degradation! how miserable a downfall! To leave the heavenly places, and return again to earth! To seek Christ first, and then to forsake Him! To love the truth and peace, and then to turn again, and love the world, and sin, which destroys peace!

Ah! my brethren, if you can bring yourselves to feel how great your sin has been, and how certain your misery will be unless you repent, and how possible it is you may never repent if you allow the present opportunity to pass by, this may soften your hearts and prepare them for the roots of His divine life to strike more deeply.

I should suppose that one great reason why so many fall back from their first promise of a holy life, receiving the word of God with joy, but in time of temptation falling away, is because they do not think deeply of these things alone. They do not, like the Blessed Virgin, keep all these sayings in their hearts and ponder them there. Is it not so, my brethren? You come to your clergyman to be prepared for Confirmation; you present yourselves before the Bishop; you join our services at Church; you kneel with your fellow-Christians around the Holy Table; and in these sacred duties, while holy words are sounding in your ears, and sacred objects are all around you, your hearts burn within you, and your spirits long for greater holiness of life, and

and meditate alone.

the vision of God; but you do not fast, and pray, You do not sit down seriously to count the cost. You do not watch yourselves in all your daily thoughts, and words, and works. Now, so long as you thus deal with your own hearts, they will be stony, and shallow, and lack moisture, and in times of temptation you will fall away from your early promise; and if this goes on repeatedly, indifference, deadness, and judicial blindness will creep over you, until the time for penitence at length passes, and judgment alone remains. Think of what our Lord says of certain possessions: "This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting," and remember that it is in some sense true of all sins which have habitually had dominion. Meditate, then, upon your past sins, seek their remedy according to your Saviour's teaching, and try to put it in practice this Lent. "By nothing," He says, "but by prayer and fasting." If nothing else will do, in your case, then try this, and try it resolutely; for surely anything is better than incessant falling away into sin, increasing hardness of heart, and final reprobation.

11

Let us confess, dear brethren, before it is too late, our misery; a burden too heavy for us to bear, but borne for us by Another, if we repent. Let us pray God to remove from us the misery which we have brought upon ourselves, to remove it while the day of mercy lasts, and before the day of judgment comes. For every purpose there is a time: now, therefore, let us hope, is the time for repentance. If the time

11 St. Mark, ix. 29.

G

for the preservation of a spotless innocence is passed; if the time to make amends is passed; if those whom we have wronged are removed far from us; if the wretched effect of our bad example is working itself out in the downward course of those who are beyond the reach of our influence-yet our deep and earnest repentance God will not reject; our heartfelt supplications He will not refuse to hear; our steadfast purposes of amendment He will further. Let us

turn to Him before it is too late.

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SERMON X.

THE DEATH OF CHRIST THE PENITENT'S SUPPORT AGAINST THE FEAR OF DEATH.*

ST. MATTHEW, xxvii. 59, 60.

"And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock."

WHEN God's awful visitations spread fear and sorrow through our cities, and towns, and villages, we feel most sensibly our fellowship in the sufferings which afflict our common race. Even though the pestilence may not yet have reached us, we cannot but sympathize with those who are exposed to its ravages and suffering its terrors. For we know that we may soon be in their condition. The fearful announce

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ment may soon be heard among us, The plague is begun." It may, indeed, please God to spare us wholly; but the fear that it may be otherwise we

* Preached during the prevalence of the Cholera in the year 1849. The probability of the return among us of this terrible visitation, seems a sufficient justification of the insertion, in a practical volume, of a sermon applicable to the state of men's minds during the progress of any fatal epidemic.