faith and hope lies between the ripeness of blessing and the deepening of sadness; between the crown and the cross of life. Do you think that so modest a place for so great an expectation is injurious to the dignity of religion? Perhaps it is in the better harmony with its humility at least it seems not unsuitable to a mind which is so grateful for the present, as to shrink from pressing anxious claims upon the future: which loves so well the given world of God, as not often to remind him of the promised one. Were this the only eclipse which the immortal prospect is liable to suffer, there would be little need to lament the languor of its light. That causes less excusable also intercept its influence, is not indeed to be denied: but where are we to seek the remedy? Shall we endeavor to loosen the affections from this life, and forbid all heart-allegiance towards a scene to which we are tempted so strongly to cling? Alas! we shall not love Heaven more for loving earth less this would be a mere destruction of one set of sympathies, in no way tending to the creation of another. The love of God may even find its root in the love of kindred; and admiration of his works and ways is the germ of adoration of himself. If it is from the blessings of the present that we construct our conception of the future; to enfeeble our sense of these blessings, is to take away the very materials of faith. No; the needful thing is not that we abate, but that we consecrate, the interests and affections of our life; entertain them with a thoughtful heart; serve them with the will of duty; and revere them as the benediction of our God. The same spirit which takes the veil

of Deity from the present will drive away the clouds that overhang the future; and he that makes his moments devout, shall not feel his eternity to be cheerless. And as it is the fascinations of affectionate memory that hold us back, they may be not a little counteracted by the creations of sacred hope. We shall be less servilely detained among things seen, when we are less indolent in our conceptions of things unseen; when we freely cast into them every blessed remembrance, every high pursuit, every unanswered aspiration, every image pure and dear; and invest them with the forms of a divine and holy beauty. If the particular good which we imagine should not arrive, it can only be because God will present us with far better. Without this free

license for the creations of faith, I see not how, while we are mortals yet, Immortality can exercise its due attraction upon our minds. To die, can never, without an enthusiasm which does violence to reason, and little credit to the heart, be an act of transport: so low as an act of submission it need not sink; for that would imply a belief that the change from the present to the future is for evil. It is most fitly met in the spirit of trust; an unbroken belief that it is for the better, but a feeling of reluctance, which we distrust and check, as though it were for the worse; a consciousness that, if we chose for ourselves, we should remain where we are, yet not a doubt of the greater wisdom and goodness of God's choice, that we should go. If this spirit of humble faith be not high-wrought enough, may God forgive the loving hearts that can attain no better!

IV.

GREAT HOPES FOR GREAT SOULS.

1 CORINTHIANS XV. 48.

AS IS THE HEAVENLY, SUCH ARE THEY ALSO THAT ARE HEAVENLY.

THE Contempt with which it is the frequent practice of divines to treat the grounds of natural religion, betrays an ignorance both of the true office of revelation, and of the true wants of the human heart. It cannot be justified except on the supposition that there is some contradiction between the teachings of creation and those of Christ, with some decided preponderance of proof in favour of the latter. Even if the Gospel furnished a series of perfectly new truths of which nature had been profoundly silent, it would be neither reasonable nor safe to fix exclusive attention on these recent and historical acquisitions, and prohibit all reference to those elder oracles of God, by which his Spirit, enshrined in the glories of his universe, taught the fathers of our race. And if it be the function of Christianity, not to administer truth entirely new, but to corroborate by fresh evidence, and invest with new beauty, and publish to the millions with a voice of power, a faith latent already in the hearts of many, and scattered through the speculations of the wise and noble few,—

to erect into realities the dreams which had visited a half-inspired philosophy, interpreting the life and lot of man; then there is a relation between the religion of nature and that of Christ,-a relation of original and supplement, which renders the one essential to the apprehension of the other. Revelation, you say, has given us the clue by which to thread the labyrinth of creation, and extricate ourselves from its passages of mystery and gloom. Be it so; still, there, in the scene thus cleared of its perplexity, must our worship be paid, and the manifestation of Deity be sought. If the use of revelation be to explain the perplexities of Providence and life, it would be a strange use to make of the explanation, were we to turn away from the thing explained. We hold the key of heaven in our hands ; what folly to be forever extolling and venerating it, whilst we prohibit all approach to the temple, whose gates it is destined to unlock !

The great doctrine of human immortality has received from Christianity its widest and noblest efficacy; has been lifted for many a generation from a low point of probability to the confines of certainty; and has found in the risen and ascended Jesus an answer to the difficulties which most embarrass the faith and hope of the human mind. But the influence which is most effectual in diffusing a truth in the first instance, is not always the best for creating the better and later faith of the reflecting heart: and when the historical illustration is exhausted of something of its power, it may be useful to the feelings and imagination to dwell on considerations, of feebler force, perhaps, but of nearer and

deeper interest. Thus it is with the natural indications of human immortality. Nature and life, our sins and sorrows, our virtues and our peace, have on them the traces of a great futurity; and to neglect these is to pay a dubious and even fatal honour to revelation. The Christian history is a matter long past; the resurrection of our great Prophet is viewed by us at the remoter end of a series of centuries; and the vibration with which it should thrill our affections is almost lost in traversing so vast a gulf. But if in the actual phenomena of human life and its distribution of good and ill, if in the very constitution of our own minds, there are evidences of a cycle of existence beyond the present, we have here a voice, not of history, but of experience, bidding us look up; a warning from the living present, not from the tomb of the past: and though it may be less clear in its announcements, yet may the gentlest whisper at our right hand startle us more than the loudest echo from afar. It is a solemn thing, when we gaze intently at the dial of our fate, and listen to the beats that number our vicissitudes, to see its index distinctly pointing to eternity. The exclusive appeal to the historical evidence of futurity is one great cause, I believe, of the feeble effect of this mighty expectation. Till it is felt that Heaven is needed to complete the history of earth, till men become conscious of capacities for which their present sphere of action is too contracted, till the wants of the intellect and the affections cry aloud within them for the boundless and the eternal, the distant words of Christian promise will die away, ere they reach their hearts: there will be no vis