: namely, Seek communion with God, by Faith. Never, never will you overcome the world by mere resolve, and struggle, and endeavour; its toils are far too closely twined around you to be broken by your utmost force; rather raise your thoughts, your feelings, your desires, gradually, almost perhaps imperceptibly, above them. It is with us as with an infant mind. The vision of the better must beguile us from the worse. Set before an infant some attractive object; it will forget immediately the toy it holds it drops unnoticed from its grasp. Brethren! Faith unlooses our grasp from the world! Faith occupies us with a father's love, and satisfies us with a Father's smile, and sets before us high and heavenly things, and even while we know it not, our hold upon the earth is weakening, and we are letting it fall with all its paltriness from our embrace. Would that I could win the young, the gay, and the aspiring, to try this method of deliverance! to look off for a moment from the base imitations, the mere paste of earth, to the bright realities, the splendid jewels of Heaven! Why! there is not one single thing, Brethren, which most attracts you in the world, but I can show you it in all its fulness in Religion: For, let me P ask, what is it makes you love the things of earth? is it for themselves, or for the feelings they produce within your own minds? for the sense of joy and hilarity, the sense of power and possession, the sense of dignity and grandeur, the sense of satisfaction and of ease, which you find they can in some degree excite in you? ? I believe there is not one thing in all the treasures of riches, honour, power, pleasure, -in all the infinite variety which worldly minds can contrive,that can do more than minister, (and O how poorly, how insufficiently, how transiently minister!)-to one or other of these sensations. Well, then, I will change the causes, and you shall then have these effects, these same effects, but raised to all their fulness and stability: the Joy of God's countenance and favour; the Power of God's Spirit; the Dignity of God's child and heir; the Satisfaction, the ease, the peace that passeth understanding, of God's friend and favourite! And now, then, where is the world, with all its blandishments? It has stolen heavily away! So long as you are in this heavenly frame of mind, it cannot choose but steal away it has no hold upon you: it has nothing to offer you, no bait to set before you nothing that you have not got already in your mind in far greater perfection. It is baffled therefore; it is overcome; and this has been the victory whereby you conquered it, your Faith!-your Faith, which brought you near to God, and led you up to holy Elevation! SERMON XIII. FAITH, THE SOURCE OF LOVE. GALATIANS v. 6. For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but Faith which worketh by Love. "THE exactest knowledge of things, (says Archbishop Leighton) is to know them in their causes. It is, then, an excellent thing, and worthy of their endeavours who are most desirous of knowledge, to know the best things in their highest causes: and the happiest way of attaining to this knowledge is to possess those things, and to know them in experience." Therefore it is, Brethren, that I have endeavoured to set forth to you so much at length the great cause of all Christian Morality, not only in the general, but in the particular dispositions which it produces,-which cause is Faith this Faith itself having for its higher and more inscrutable cause the Holy Spirit of God, which works, not without faith, but in and by and through faith, in the heart of man; and the knowledge of which faith, therefore, can never be a merely theoretical or doctrinal knowledge, but what Leighton so well calls the knowledge of possession, the knowing by experience. I proceed, then, now to notice a third most important and influential disposition of the soul, the very existence of which in its adequate extent, and the liveliness and efficacy of which, will depend upon the existence and liveliness of Faith-the disposition, I mean, of Love; or Benevolence and Goodwill. For, this disposition (and therefore all the manifold actings of it in candour, forbearance, forgiveness, help, and charity,) is asserted by St. Paul in our text, to be not only grounded in faith, but to be the express form and method in which Faith exhibits and manifests itself to the eye of man. The reality of our Faith cannot be known by others in any other way but this by ourselves it may be experienced in its workings; by our God it must be known and |