plan, is too beautiful, too captivating, to suffer one indifferent or heedless moment. Living in this manner, every turn of your experience will be a discovery to you of God, every change a token of His fatherly counsel. Whatever obscurity, darkness, trial, suffering, falls upon you: your defeats, losses, injuries; your outward state, employment, relations; what seems hard, unaccountable, severe, or, as nature might say, vexatious—all these you will see are parts or constitutive elements in God's beautiful and good plan for you, and, as such, are to be accepted with a smile. Trust God! have an implicit trust in God! and these very things will impart the highest zest to life. If you were in your own will, you could not bear them; and if you fall, at any time, into your own will, they will break you down. But the glory of your condition, as a Christian, is, that you are in the mighty and good will of God. Hence it was that Bunyan called his hero Great Heart; for no heart can be weak that is in the confidence of God. See how it was with Paul: counting all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge; enduring, with godlike patience, unspeakable sufferings; casting everything behind him, and following on to apprehend that for which he was apprehended. He had a great and mighty will, but no self-will: therefore, he was strong, a true lion of the faith. Away, then, with all feeble complaints, all meagre and mean anxieties. Take your duty, and be strong in it, as God will make you strong. The harder it is, the stronger, in fact, you will be. Understand, also, that the great question here is, not what you will get, but what you will become. The greatest wealth you can ever get will be in yourself. Take your burdens, and troubles, and losses, and wrongs, if come they must and will, as your opportunities, knowing that God has girded you for greater things than these. Oh, to live out such a life as God appoints, how great a thing it is!-to do the duties, make the sacrifices, bear the adversities, finish the plan, and then to say with Christ (who of us will be able?)—." It is finished!”

II.

DIGNITY OF HUMAN NATURE SHEWN FROM ITS RUINS.

ROMANS iii. 13-18-" Their throat is an open sepulchre: with their tongues they have used deceit: the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: their feet are swift to shed blood: destruction and misery are in their ways: and the way of peace have they not known : there is no fear of God before their eyes."

A MOST dark and dismal picture of humanity, it must be admitted; and yet it has two sides or aspects. In one view, it is the picture of weakness, wretchedness, shame, and disgust; all which they discover in it who most sturdily resent the impeachment of it. In the other, it presents a being higher than even they can boast; a fearfully great being; great in his evil will, his demoniacal passions, his contempt of fear, the splendour of his degradation, and the magnificence of his woe.

It is this latter view of the picture to which, at the present time, I propose to call your attention, exhibiting—

The dignity of man, as revealed by the ruin he makes in his fall and apostasy from God.

It has been the way of many, in our time, to magnify humanity, or the dignity of human nature, by tracing its capabilities and the tokens it reveals of a natural affinity with God and truth. They distinguish lovely instincts, powers, and properties allied to God, aspirations reaching after God; many virtues, according to the common use of that term; many beautiful and graceful charities; and, by such kind of evidences or proofs, they repel, sometimes with scorn, what they call the libellous, or even the insulting doctrine of total depravity. And this they do, as I will add, not without some show of reason, when the fact of our depravity is asserted in a manner that excludes the admission of any such high aspirations and amiable properties,

or virtues, as we certainly discover in human conduct, apart from any gifts and graces of religion. And it must be admitted that some teachers have given occasion for this kind of offence; not observing the compatibility of great aspirations and majestic affinities with a state of deep spiritual thraldom; assuming, also, with as little right, the want of all appropriate sensibilities and receptivities for the truth, as a necessary inference from the complete destitution of holiness. They make out, in this manner, a doctrine of human depravity, in which there is no proper humanity left.

I am not required by my subject to settle the litigation between these two extremes; one of which makes the gospel unnecessary, because there is no depravation to restore; and the other of which makes it impossible, because there is nothing left to which any holy appeal can be made; but I undertake, in partial disregard of both, to shew the essential greatness and dignity of man from the ruin itself which he becomes; confident of this, that in no other point of view will he prove the spiritual sublimity of his nature so convincingly.

Nor is it anything new, or a turn more ingenious than just, that we undertake to raise our conceptions of human nature in this manner; for it is in just this way that we are accustomed to get our measures and form our conceptions of many things; of the power, for example, of ancient dynasties, and the magnificence of ancient works and cities. Falling thus, it may be, on patches of paved road here and there, on lines leading out divergently from ancient Rome, uncovering and deciphering the mile-stones by their sides, marked with postal distances, here for Britain, here for Germany, here for Ephesus and Babylon, here for Brundusium, the port of the Appian Way, and so for Egypt, Numidia, and the provinces of the sun; imagining the couriers flying back and forth, bearing the mandates of the central authority to so many distant nations, followed by the military legions trailing on to execute them; we receive an impression of the empire, from these scattered vestiges, which almost no words of historic description could give us. So, if we desire to form some opinion of the dynasty of the Pharaohs, of whom history gives us but the faintest remembrances and obscurest traditions, we have only to look on the monumental

mountains, piled up to moulder on the silent plain of Egypt, and these dumb historians in stone will shew us more of that vast and populous empire, measuring by the amount of realised impression, more of the imperial haughtiness of the monarchs, more of the servitude of their people, and of the captive myriads of the tributary nations, than even Herodotus and Strabo, history and geography, together.

The same is true, even more strikingly, of ancient cities. Though described by historians in terms of definite measurement, with their great structures and defences and the royal splendour of their courts, we form no sufficient conception of their grandeur, till we look upon their ruins. Even the eloquence of Homer describing the glory and magnificence of Thebes, the vast circuit of its walls, its hundred gates, and the chariots of war pouring out of all, to vanquish and hold in subjection the peoples of as many nations, yields only a faint, unimpressive conception of the city; but to pass through the ruins of Karnac and Luxor, a vast desolation of temples and pillared avenues that dwarf all the present structures of the world, solemn, silent, and hoary, covered with historic sculptures that relate the conquest of kingdoms—a journey to pass through, a maze in which even comprehension is lost-this reveals a fit conception of the grandest city of the world as no words could describe it. Beheld and judged by the majesty of its ruins, there is a poetry in the stones surpassing all majesty of song. So, when the prophet Jonah, endeavouring, as he best can, to raise some adequate opinion of the greatness of Nineveh, declares that it is an exceeding great city of three days' journey; and, when Nahum follows, magnifying its splendour in terms of high description that correspond; still, so ambiguous and faint is the impression made, that many were doubting whether, after all, “the exceeding great city” was anything more than a vast inclosure of gardens and pasture-grounds for sheep, where a moderate population subsisted under the protection of a wall. No one had any proper conception of the city till just now, when a traveller and antiquary digs into the tomb where it lies, opens to view, at points many miles asunder, its temples and palaces, drags out the heavy sculptures, shews the inscriptions, collects the tokens of art and splendour, and says, "This is Nineveh, the 'exceeding great city,'" and, then, judging of its

extent from the vast and glorious ruin, we begin to have some fit impression of its magnitude and splendour. And so it is with Babylon, Ephesus, Tadmor of the Desert, Baalbec, and the nameless cities and pyramids of the extinct American race. All great ruins are but a name for greatness in ruins; and we see the magnitude of the structure in that of the ruin made by it in its fall.

So it is with man. Our most veritable, though saddest, impressions of his greatness, as a creature, we shall derive from the magnificent ruin he displays. In that ruin we shall distinguish fallen powers that lie as broken pillars on the ground; temples of beauty, whose scarred and shattered walls still indicate their ancient, original glory; summits covered with broken stones, infested by asps, where the palaces of high thought and great aspiration stood, and righteous courage went up to main tain the citadel of the mind,-all a ruin now- -"archangel ruined!"

And exactly this, I conceive, is the legitimate impression of the Scripture representations of man, as apostate from duty and God. Thoughtfully regarded, all exaggerations and contending theories apart, it is as if they were shewing us the original dignity of man from the magnificence of the ruin in which he lies. How sublime a creature must that be, call him either man or demon, who is able to confront the Almighty and tear himself away from His throne. And, as if to forbid our taking his deep misery and shame as tokens of contempt, imagining that a creature so humiliated is inherently weak and low, the first men are shewn us living out a thousand years of lustful energy, and braving the Almighty in strong defiance to the last. "The earth also is corrupt before God, and the earth is filled with violence." We look, as it were, upon a race of Titans broken loose from order and making war upon God and each other; beholding, in their outward force, a type of that original majesty which pertains to the moral nature of a being endowed with a self-determining liberty, capable of choices against God, and thus of a character in evil that shall be his own. They fill the earth, even up to the sky, with wrath and the demoniacal tumult of their wrongs, till God can suffer them no longer, sending forth His flood to sweep them from the earth. So of the remarkable picture given by Paul, in the first chapter of the Epistle to the

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