the side of religion. A man may love to have his understanding stimulated by the ingenuities, or the resistless urgencies of an argument; and argument the most profound and the most overbearing, may put forth, all the might of a constraining vehemence in behalf of religion. A man may feel the rejoicings of a conscious elevation, when some ideal scene of magnificence is laid before him; and where are these scenes so readily to be met with, as when led to expatiate in thought over the track of eternity, or to survey the wonders of creation, or to look to the magnitude of these great and universal interests which lie within the compass of religion? A man may have his attention riveted and regaled by that power of imitative description, which brings all the recollections of his own experience before him; which presents him with a faithful analysis of his own heart; which embodies in language such intimacies of observation and of feeling, as have often passed before his eyes, or played within his bosom, but had never been so truly or so ably pictured to the view of his remembrance. Now, all this may be done in the work of pressing the duties of religion; in the work of instancing the application of religion; in the work of pointing those allusions to life and to manners, which manifest the truth to the conscience, and plant such a conviction of sin, as forms the very basis of a sinner's religion. Now, in all these cases, I see other principles brought into action, and which may be in a state of most lively and vigorous movement, and be yet in a state of entire separation from the principle of religion. I will make bold to say, on the strength of these illustrations, that as much delight may emanate from the pulpit, on an arrested audience beneath it, as ever ema

along with it. The sacredness of the hallowed day, and the decencies of its observation, may engage the affections of him who loves to walk in the footsteps of his father; and every recurring Sabbath may bring to his bosom, the charm of its regularity and its quietness. Religion has its accomplishments; and in these, there may be something to soothe, and to fascinate, even in the absence of the appropriate influences of religion. The deep and tender impression of a family bereavement, is not religion. The love of established decencies, is not religion. The charm of all that sentimentalism which is associated with many of its solemn and affecting services, is not religion. They form the distinct folds of its accustomed drapery; but they do not, any or all of them put together, make up the substance of the thing itself. A mother's tenderness may flow most gracefully over the tomb of her departed little one; and she may talk the while of that heaven whither its spirit has ascended. The man whom death had widowed of his friend, may abandon himself to the movements of that grief, which for a time will claim an ascendency over him; and, among the multitude of his other reveries, may love to hear of the eternity, where sorrow and separation are alike unknown. He who has been trained, from his infant days, to remember the Sabbath, may love the holiness of its aspect; and associate himself with all its observances; and take a delighted share in the mechanism of its forms. But, let not these think, because the tastes and the sensibilities which engross them, may be blended with religion, that they indicate either its strength or its existence within them. I recur to the test. I press its imperious exactions upon you. I call for fruit, and demand the permanency of a religious influ-nated from the boards of a theatre-aye, ence on the habits and the history. Oh! how many who take a flattering unction to their souls, when they think of their amiable feelings, and their becoming observations, with whom this severe touch-stone would, like the head of Medusa, put to flight all their complacency. The afflictive dispensation is forgotten-and he on whom it was laid, is practically as indifferent to God and to eternity as before. The Sabbath services come to a close; and they are followed by the same routine of week-day worldliness as before. In neither the one case nor the other, do we see more of the radical influence of Christianity than in the sublime and melting influence of sacred music upon the soul; and all this tide of emotion is found to die away from the bosom, like the pathos or like the loveliness of a song.

The instances may be multiplied without number. A man may have a taste for eloquence, and eloquence the most touching or sublime may lift her pleading voice on

and with as total a disjunction of mind too, in the one case as in the other, from the essence or the habit of religion. I recur to the test. I make my appeal to experience; and I put it to you all, whether your finding upon the subject do not agree with my saying about it, that a man may weep, and admire, and have many of his faculties put upon the stretch of their most intense gratification-his judgment established, and his fancy enlivened, and his feelings overpowered, and his hearing charmed, as by the accents of heavenly persuasion, and all within him feasted by the rich and varied luxuries of an intellectual banquet!-Oh! it is cruel to frown unmannerly in the midst of so much satisfaction. But I must not forget that truth has her authority, as well as her sternness; and she forces me to affirm, that after all this has been felt and gone through, there might not be one principle which lies at the turning point of conversion, that has experienced a single

movement-not one of its purposes be con- | tain, and the wave of mighty forests, and ceived not one of its doings be accom- the rush of sounding waterfalls, and distant plished-not one step of that repentance, glimpses of human territory, and pinnacles which, if we have not, we perish, so much of everlasting snow, and the sweep of that as entered upon--not one announcement of circling horizon, which folds in its ample that faith, by which we are saved, admitted embrace the whole of this noble aminto a real and actual possession by the phitheatre? Tell me whether, without the inner man. He has had his hour's enter-aid of Christianity, or without a particle of tainment, and willingly does he award this reverence for the only name given under homage to the performer, that he hath a plea-heaven whereby men can be saved, a man sant voice, and can play well on an instru- may not kindle at such a perspective as this, ment--but, in another hour, it fleets away into all the raptures, and into all the movefrom his remembrance, and goes all to no-ments of a poetic elevation; and be able to thing, like the loveliness of a song. render into the language of poetry, the Now, in bringing these Astronomical Dis- whole of that sublime and beauteous imagecourses to a close, I feel it my duty to ad-ry which adorns it; aye, and as if he were vert to this exhibition of character in man. treading on the confines of a sanctuary The sublime and interesting topic which which he has not entered, may he not mix has engaged us, however feebly it may have been handled; however inadequately it, may have been put in all its worth, and in all its magnitude before you; however short the representation of the speaker or the conception of the hearers may have been of that richness, and that greatness, and that loftiness, which belong to it; possesses in itself a charm to fix the attention, to re-ed, and combines them into all the varieties gale the imagination, and to subdue the whole man into a delighted reverence; and, in a word, to beget such a solemnity of thought, and of emotion, as may occupy and enlarge the soul for hours together, as may waft it away from the grossness of ordinary life, and raise it to a kind of elevated calm above all its vulgarities and all its vexations.

up with the power and the enchantment of his description, such allusions to the presiding genius of the scene: or to the still but animating spirit of the solitude; or to the speaking silence of some mysterious character which reigns throughout the landscape; or, in fine, to that eternal Spirit, who sits behind the elements he has form

of a wide and a wondrous creation; might not all this be said and sung with an emphasis so moving, as to spread the colouring of piety over the pages of him who performs thus well upon his instrument; and yet, the performer himself have a conscience unmoved by a single warning of God's actual communication, and the judgment unconvinced, and the fears unawakened, and the life unreformed by it?

Who does not feel an aggrandisement of thought and of faculty, when he looks abroad over the amplitudes of creation— when placed on a telescopic eminence, his aided eye can find a pathway to innumerable worlds-when that wondrous field, over which there had hung for many ages the mantle of so deep an obscurity, is laid open to him, and instead of a dreary and unpeo

Now, tell me whether the whole of this effect upon the feelings, may not be formed Now what is true of a scene on earth, is without the presence of religion. Tell me also true of that wider and more elevated whether there might not be such a consti- scene which stretches over the immensity tution of mind, that it may both want alto-around it, into a dark and a distant unknown. gether that principle in virtue of which the doctrines of Christianity are admitted into the belief, and the duties of Christianity are admitted into a government over the practice and yet, at the very same time, it may have the faculty of looking abroad over some scene of magnificence, and of being wrought up to ecstacy with the sense of all those glories among which it is expatiating. I want you to see clearly the dis-pled solitude, he can see over the whole tinction between these two attributes of the face of it such an extended garniture of rich human character. They are, in truth, as and goodly habitations! Even the Atheist, different the one from the other, as a taste who tells us that the universe is self-exisfor the grand and the graceful of scenery tent and indestructible-even he, who indiffers from the appetite of hunger; and the stead of seeing the traces of a manifold wisone may both exist and have a most intense dom in its manifold varieties, sees nothing operation within the bosom of that very in- in them all but the exquisite structures and dividual, who entirely disowns, and is en-the lofty dimensions of materialism-even tirely disgusted with the other. What! must a man be converted, ere from the most elevated peak of some Alpine wilderness, he becomes capable of feeling the force and the majesty of those great lineaments which the hand of nature has thrown around him, in the varied forms of precipice, and moun-I

he, who would despoil creation of its God, cannot look upon its golden suns, and their accompanying systems, without the solemn impression of a magnificence that fixes and overpowers him. Now, conceive such a belief of God as you all profess, to dawn upon his understanding. Let him become

as one of yourselves-and so be put into the | all the creatures whom he has formed. A condition of rising from the sublime' of man may have an imagination all alive to matter to the sublime of mind. Let him the former; while the latter never prompts now learn to subordinate the whole of this him to one act of obedience; never leads him mechanism to the design and authority of a to compare his life with the requirements great presiding intelligence; and re-assem- of the Lawgiver; never carries him from bling all the members of the universe, how- such a scrutiny as this, to the conviction of ever distant, into one family, let him mingle sin; never whispers such an accusation to with his former conceptions of the grandeur the ear of his conscience, as causes him to which belonged to it, the conception of that mourn, and to be in heaviness for the guilt eternal Spirit who sits enthroned on the of his hourly and habitual rebellion; never immensity of his own wonders, and em- shuts him up to the conclusion of the braces all that he has made, within the need of a Saviour; never humbles him to ample scope of one great administration. acquiescence in the doctrine of that reveThen will the images and the impressions lation, which comes to his door with such of sublimity come in upon him from a new a host of evidence, as even his own philoquarter. Then will another avenue be sophy cannot bid away; never extorts a opened, through which a sense of grandeur single believing prayer in the name of may find its way into his soul, and have a Christ, or points a single look, either of trust mightier influence than ever to fill, and to or of reverence, to his atonement; never elevate and to expand it. Then will be esta- stirs any effective movement of conversion; blished a new and a noble association, by never sends an aspiring energy into his bothe aid of which all that he formerly look- som after the aids of that Spirit, who alone ed upon as fair becomes more lovely; and can waken him out of his lethargies, and all that he formerly looked upon as great, by the anointing which remaineth, can becomes more magnificent. But will you rivet and substantiate in his practice, those believe me, that even with this accession to goodly emotions which have hitherto plied his mind of ideas gathered from the con-him with the deceitfulness of their motemplation of the Divinity; even with that mentary visits, and then capriciously abanpleasurable glow which steals over his ima-doned him. gination, when he now thinks him of the majesty of God; even with as much of what you would call piety, as I fear is enough to soothe and to satisfy many of yourselves, and which stirs and kindles within you when you hear the goings forth of the Supreme set before you in the terms of a lofty representation; even with all this, I say there may be as wide a distance from the habit and the character of godliness, as if God was still atheistically disowned by him. Take the conduct of his life and the currency of his affections; and you may see as little upon them of the stamp of loyalty to God, or of reverence for any one of his authenticated proclamations, as you may see in him who offers his poetic incense to the genii, or weeps enraptured over the visions of a beauteous mythology. The sublime of Deity has wrought up his soul to a pitch of conscious and pleasing elevation-and yet this no more argues the will of Deity to have a practical authority over him, than does that tone of elevation which is caught by looking at the sublime of a naked materialism. The one and the other have their little hour of ascendency over him; and when he turns him to the rude and ordinary world, both vanish alike from his sensibilities as does the loveliness of a song.

To kindle and be elevated by a sense of the majesty of God, is one thing. It is totally another thing to feel a movement of obedience to the will of God, under the impression of his rightful authority over

The mere majesty of God's power and greatness, when offered to your notice, lays hold of one of the faculties within you. The holiness of God, with his righteous claim of legislation, lays hold of another of these faculties. The difference between them is so great, that the one may be engrossed and interested to the full, while the other remains untouched, and in a state of entire dormancy. Now, it is no matter what it be that ministers delight to the former of these two faculties: If the latter be not arrested and put on its proper exercise, you are making no approximation whatever to the right habit and character of religion. There are a thousand ways in which we may contrive to regale your taste for that which is beauteous and majestic. It may find its gratification in the loveliness of a vale, or in the freer and bolder outlines of an upland situation, or in the terrors of a storm, or in the sublime contemplations of astronomy, or in the magnificent idea of a God who sends forth the wakefulness of his omniscient eye, and the vigour of his upholding hand, throughout all the realms of nature and of providence. The mere taste of the human mind may get its ample enjoyment in each and in all of these objects, or in a vivid representation of them; nor does it make any material difference, whether this representation be addressed to you from the stanzas of a poem, or from the recitations of a theatre, or finally from the discourses and the demonstrations of a pulpit. And thus it is, that still on the impulse of

the one principle only, people may come you read of the Holy Ghost, by whom rein gathering multitudes to the house of God; newed in the whole desire and character of and share with eagerness in all the glow your mind, you are led to run with alacrity and bustle of a crowded attendance; and in the way of the commandments? Have have their every eye directed to the speaker; you turned to its practical use, the imporand feel a responding movement in their tant truth, that he has given to the believbosom to his many appeals and his many ing prayers of all, who really want to be arguments; and carry a solemn and over- relieved from the power both of secret and powering impression of all the services of visible iniquity? I demand something away with them; and yet throughout the more than the homage you have rendered whole of this seemly exhibition, not one to the pleasantness of the voice that has effectual knock may have been given at the been sounding in, your hearing. What I door of conscience. The other principle have now to urge upon you, is the bidding may be as profoundly asleep, as if hushed of the voice, to read, and to reform and to into the insensibility of death. There is a pray, and, in a word, to make your conspirit of deep slumber, it would appear, sistent step from the elevations of philosowhich the music of no description, even phy, to all those exercises, whether of doing though attuned to a theme so lofty as the or of believing, which mark the conduct of greatness and majesty of the Godhead, can the earnest, and the devoted, and the subever charm away. Oh! it may have been a dued, and the aspiring Christian. piece of parading insignificance altogetherthe minister playing on his favourite instrument, and the people dissipating away their time on the charm and idle luxury of a theatrical emotion.

This brings under our view a most deeply interesting exhibition of human nature, which may often be witnessed among the cultivated orders of society. When a teacher of Christianity addresses himself to The religion of taste, is one thing. The that principle of justice within us, in virtue religion of conscience, is another. I recur of which we feel the authority of God to be to the test. What is the plain and practical a prerogative which righteously belongs to doing which ought to issue from the whole him, he is then speaking the appropriate of our argument? If one lesson come more language of religion, and is advancing its clearly or more authoritatively out of it naked and appropriate claim over the obethan another, it is the supremacy of the dience of mankind. He is then urging that Bible. If fitted to impress one movement pertinent and powerful consideration, upon rather than another, it is that movement of which alone he can ever hope to obtain a docility, in virtue of which, man, with the the ascendency of a practical influence over feeling that he has all to learn, places him- the purposes and the conduct of human self in the attitude of a little child, before beings. It is only by insisting on the moral the book of the unsearchable God, who has claim of God to a right of government over deigned to break his silence, and to trans- his creatures, that he can carry their loyal mit, even to our age of the world, a faithful | subordination to the will of God. Let him record of his own communication. What keep by this single argument, and urge it progress then are you making in this movement? Are you, or are you not, like newborn babes, desiring the sincere milk of the word, that you may grow thereby? How are you coming on in the work of casting down your lofty imaginations? With the modesty of true science, which is here at one with the humblest and most penitentiary feeling which Christianity can awaken, are you bending an eye of earnestness on the Bible, and appropriating its informations, and moulding your every conviction to its doctrines and its testimonies? How long, I beseech you, has this been your habitual exercise? By this time do you feel the darkness and the insufficiency of nature? Have you found your way to the need of an atonement? Have you learned the might and the efficacy which are given to the principle of faith? Have you longed with all your energies to realize it? Have you broken loose from the obvious misdoings of your former history? Are you convinced of your total deficiency from the spiritual obedience of the affections? Have

upon the conscience, and then, without any of the other accompaniments of what is called christian oratory, he may bring convincingly home upon his hearers all the varieties of christian doctrine. He may establish within their minds the dominion of all that is essential in the faith of the New Testament. He may, by carrying out this principle of God's authority into all its applications, convince them of sin. He may lead them to compare the loftiness and spirituality of his law, with the habitual obstinacy of their own worldly affections. He may awaken them to the need of a Saviour. He may urge them to a faithful and submissive perusal of God's own communication. He may thence press upon them the truth and the immutability of their Sovereign. He may work in their hearts an impression of this emphatic saying, that God is not to be mocked--that his law must be upheld in all the significancy of its proclamations—and that either his severities must be discharged upon the guilty, or in some other way an adequate provision be

found for its outraged dignity, and its vio- | bitious description; as will attach him to Iated sanctions. Thus may he lead them the truth in its simplicity; as will fasten to flee for refuge to the blood of the atone- his every regard upon the Bible, where, if ment. And he may further urge upon his he persevere in the work of honest inquiry, hearers, how, such is the enormity of sin, he will soon be made to perceive the acthat it is not enough to have found an ex- cordancy between its statements, and all piation for it; how its power and its ex- those movements of fear, or guilt, or deeplyistence must be eradicated from the hearts felt necessity, or conscious darkness, stuof all, who are to spend their eternity in the pidity, and unconcern about the matters mansions of the celestial; how, for this pur- of salvation, which pass within his own pose, an expedient is made known to us in bosom; in a word, as will endear him to the New Testament; how a process must that plainness of speech, by which his own be described upon earth, to which there is experience is set evidently before him, and given the appropriate name of sanctifica- that plain phraseology of scripture, which tion; how, at the very commencement of is best fitted to bring home to him the docevery true course of discipleship, this pro- trine of redemption, in all the truth, and in cess is entered upon with a purpose in the all the preciousness of its applications. mind of forsaking all; how nothing short of a single devotedness to the will of God, will ever carry us forward through the successive stages of this holy and elevated career; how, to help the infirmities of our nature, the Spirit is ever in readiness to be given to those who ask it; and that thus the life of every Christian becomes a life of entire dedication to Him who died for us-a life of prayer, and vigilance, and close dependance on the grace of God; and, as the infallible result of the plain but power-ed to seriousness about the plain and affectful and peculiar teaching of the Bible, a life of vigorous unwearied activity in the doing of all the commandments.

Now, this I would call the essential business of Christianity. This is the truth as it is in Jesus, in its naked and unassociated simplicity. In the work of urging it, nothing more might have been done, than to present certain views, which may come with as great clearness, and freshness, and take as full possession of the mind of a peasant as of the mind of a philosopher. There is a sense of God, and of the rightful allegiance that is due to him. There are plain and practical appeals to the conscience. There is a comparison of the state of the heart, with the requirements of a law which proposes to take the heart under its obedience. There is the inward discernment of its coldness about God; of its unconcern about the matters of duty and of eternity; of its devotion to the forbidden objects of sense; of its constant tendency to nourish within its own receptacles, the very element and principle of rebellion, and in virtue of this, to send forth the stream of an hourly and accumulating disobedience over those doings of the outer man, which make up his visible history in the world. There is such an earnest and overpowering impression of all this, as will fix a man down to the single object of deliverance; as will make him awake only to those realities which have a significant and substantial bearing on the case that engrosses him; as will teach him to nauseate all the impertinences of tasteful and amР

Now, the whole of this work may be going on, and that too in the wisest and most effectual manner, without so much as one particle of incense being offered to any of the subordinate principles of the human constitution. There may be no fascinations of style. There may be no magnificence of description. There may be no poignancy of acute and irresistible argument. There may be a rivetted attention on the part of those whom the Spirit of God hath awaken

ing realities of conversion. Their conscience may be stricken, and their appetite be excited for an actual settlement of mind on those points about which they feel restless and unconfirmed. Such as these are vastly too much engrossed with the exigeneies of their condition, to be repelled by the homeliness of unadorned truth. And thus it is, that while the loveliness of the song has done so little in helping on the influences of the gospel, our men of simplicity and prayer have done so much for it. With a deep and earnest impression of the truth themselves, they have made manifest that truth to the consciences of others. Missionaries have gone forth with no other preparation than the simple Word of the Testimony-and thousands have owned its power, by being both the hearers of the word and the doers of it also. They have given us the experiment in a state of unmingled simplicity; and we learn, from the success of their noble example, that without any one human expedient to charm the ear, the heart may, by the naked instrumentality of the Word of God, urged with plainness on those who feel its deceit and its worthlessness, be charmed to an entire acquiesence in the revealed way of God, and have impressed upon it the genuine stamp and character of godliness.

Could the sense of what is due to God, be effectually stirred up within the human bosom, it would lead to a practical carrying of all the lessons of Christianity. Now, to awaken this moral sense, there are certain simple relations between the creature and the