worker for Christ will not. Spinoza and Hegel may lose sight of the beauty of holiness, but John Bunyan and William Brainerd never can. How precious the prospect of heaven, how beautiful, how inexpressibly beautiful the crown of glory which fadeth not away, to the eye of the dying martyr, falling asleep, amid agony and shame, in the full vision of the glory of God!" And now, Lord, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation ?"

O God, thy thoughts are very deep! But O how precious! how tender and kind! With trembling and joy we receive them, as our hearts' best treasure. We receive especially the doctrine of the Cross, and glory in it, as the light and life of our sin-stricken but immortal spirits. And now to Him that hath loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood-to the only wise God and our Saviour Jesus Christ-be glory for ever and ever, Amen!

"For we ourselves were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost; which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; that being justified by his grace we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life."-TITUS, 3: 3-7.

THE method which God has adopted of conveying instruction to mankind is singularly adapted to the human mind. Avoiding the abstract and the general, so common and so unsuccessful in human teaching, our great Divine Instructor liberally uses illustration. One instance of this occurring so frequently as to be scarcely thought of as elevated above the plainest style, is contrast, antithesis.

Even in the external world, God adds impressiveness to His instructions by this very method of contrasting. The beautiful is made to appear more beautiful by being placed by the side of the deformed, and the fruitful more fruitful by being placed by the side of the sterile, and the useful more useful by being placed by the side of the noxious. And all the three become in the same way more expressive of God's goodness and munificence. The lessons of Divine Providence have this same character of contrast. Every man's way of life has its roughnesses to make its smooth passages more valued, and every man's allotments of good follow close upon the heels of many evils to make him

take more careful note of them and more gratefully enjoy them. In the Scriptures, God has to a still greater extent followed this mode of instruction. The contrast abounds in the Psalms, and Proverbs, and prophetical books, where the good and bad qualities, the prosperous and adverse conditions, the bright and dark prospects of men, are set over against each other. Most of our Saviour's parables are striking contrasts. The good Samaritan and strait-hearted Levite-the boasting Pharisee and contrite Publican-the seed upon unpropitious places and that which fell upon good ground-they who are doers of the word which they hear and they which do it not-the rich man in hell and Lazarus in Abraham's bosom-the wise who took oil with their lamps and the foolish who neglected it-he who by good use multiplied his talents and he who hid his lord's money in the earth and gained nothing. These are a few out of numerous instances from our Lord of this manner of teaching.

Our text is a specimen of this same method. We have first, man in his ruin, foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. Then we have a reference to man in his recovery as visited by the kindness and love of God our Saviour, as purified by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost shed on him abundantly, as justified by grace, as believing in God and careful to maintain good works.

I propose to contemplate now these two conditions of mankind, his ruin and his redemption, in accordance with the scriptural method by setting them over against each other.

I. Man Ruined.

1. One thing observable in the ruined condition of man is a bad state of his intellectual powers.

A serious injury has been done to the human understanding, a sad deterioration been wrought upon it. Great intellectual power and accomplishment by men involved in moral ruin, do not disprove this statement in respect to a general influence. And these individual achievements, in most cases, remind us, painfully, how much brighter luminaries their authors would have been if sin had not obscured them. As an illustration of the influence which depravity is exerting over the understanding, you find men constantly who are ready to follow your intellectual processes, admit your positions, feel the force of your conclusions, only when your logic rebukes none of their sins, sweeps away none of their fond justifications of darling indulgencies. The moment your reasonings in their uncompromising course reach their entrenchments; show them they are untenable and dangerous-to drop the figure, the moment they demonstrate to them that their tempers

are wicked, their habits vices, their conduct destructive, then their minds are all dark to your discussion-your conceptions become inconceivable, your premises mere assumptions, your syllogisms fallacies, your conclusions arrogant assertions, and your own confidence ignorant effrontery. The intemperate man cannot easily see any force in the most conclusive argument against intoxicating drinks. A perfect demonstration of the absurdity of expecting remission of sins short of a Divine pardon through Christ, will have no effect on a Roman Catholic hearer intent upon unloading his conscience of a recent crime by carrying it to confession. Your exhortation to a company of misers to let go the world and raise their thoughts and affections to a treasure in heaven, though based upon the most just and weighty reasons, would be little more felt and obeyed than a call on the rocks to leave their everlasting foundations and rise upward. Such facts show undeniably that the bad state of the heart affects injuriously the understanding, and therefore that on the intellect of the race, there has been before and must be still a blighting influence, extensive and great in proportion to the moral ruin in which mankind are involved. As troubled waters show the imaged heavens broken up and irregular, so does the heart in commotion by sins and passions, present the human mind above disjointed, confused, perverted!

The same truth is farther confirmed by an observed regular increase of mental obliquity and debility as the inner man grows in corruption. Byron is a melancholy illustration of this remark. During the last ten years of his life his intellectual faculties were so overborne and crushed by his internal debasement, as to be wholly incapable of the great clear thoughts and lofty aspirations of Childe Harold, and his feelings were grown too coarse and low to have permitted the tenderness and delicacy of his pathetic compositions. Many who have in early life written what will live and be admired wherever the English tongue is spoken, after a greater growth of depraved tempers and deeper settlement of sin in the heart, have written only ribaldry, sickly sentimentalism, useless vagaries of the imagination, destined to be once read by those of kindred debasement, and then to sink into eternal forgetfulness. Salt waters at the roots of our trees are not more sure to scorch and kill the foliage above, than are iniquities in the heart, to wither and despoil the intellectual powers.

A brief survey of the world proves how universally the mental powers have felt the touch of sin, the general destroyer. In every place, in all time, wherever morals and manners have sunk, the human intellect has fallen also, just as the floating buoy settles when the waters ebb away underneath it. At the present time, wherever there is moral degradation there is a prostration of the intellectual powers: wherever the altars fail to burn with holy

fire, there light is feeble in the human understanding. The great mass of men at this moment present the spectacle of mind over shadowed, diseased, and disabled, by the fog and miasma which come up from the stagnant places of the heart, and envelop it in darkness, and imbue it with pestilence. Egypt is a mummy; Greece is a corpse-mind has almost departed from both ; India is a vast prison-house, where intellect is shut up and bound. Mind in China is still more entirely prostrated by depravity. There have been intellects enough already in this latter country, probably, to people the earth as densely as it now is, ten times, making ten thousand millions of minds. These intellects, which might have lighted up the world, what have they accomplished? Scarcely one ray has shone out from them all, to instruct or bless mankind.

Of the one thousand millions now on the earth, not one mind in thirty thousand produces during life one useful treatise, one valuable invention, one important improvement, one good moral effect. Nothing is plainer than that the moral nature, in its fall, has dragged down the intellect with it; has given it a shock which has very seriously deteriorated all its powers. The mind was nobly built at first: spacious it was, grandly proportioned, strong, manageable, of a masterly movement, of great accomplishments. But it is a wreck now, foundered, dismasted, bestormed.

The evil that has been done to man, in breaking down his intellect, is one of great magnitude; nothing but the corruption of his moral powers, the immediate cause of it, can be a greater mischief. A vast physical convulsion, that should sweep down our whole heavens, and leave them in perfect darkness, would not be a more striking desolation than that which sin has effected, in drawing into darkness the intellects of the world.

2. A second thing observable in the ruined condition of man is, the subjugation of his reason to passion.

Reason is that part of the intellectual man which observes facts and makes conclusions; acquires data, and establishes principles. It is the mind's eye, to open for man his mental and moral pathway it points him, when uninjured, to the course where lie his interests and his duties: it marks the right and good for his pursuit, and, with equal accuracy and fidelity, points out the wrong and bad, for his avoidance. Reason in man, original and uninjured, is thus the central light of all the other attributes, the eclipsing honor of the whole intellectual being.

The subjugation of this high power of man to passion, to corrupt propensities, so that bad affections shall govern and direct him, instead of right reason, is a deep degradation, an exceeding abasement. It is no relief to our regret and pain, to be told, what is undeniable, that there is no being alive who is not, in some degree, in this unhappy condition. It is no relief to hear it affirmed