to do. We display its inventions, recount its victories over nature. We represent, as vividly as we can, and by computations as vast and far-reaching as we are master of, in our finite arithmetic, the meaning of the word eternity. All in vain. What are you still but the insect of some present hour, in which you live and flutter and die? But here we take another method, we call you to the battle-field of sin. We shew you the vestiges. This, we say, is man, the fallen principality. In these tragic desolations of intelligence and genius, of passion, pride, and sorrow, behold the import of his eternity. Be no mere spectator, turn the glass we give you round upon yourself, look into the ruin of your own conscious spirit, and see how much it signifies, both that you are a sinner and a man. Here, within the soul's gloomy chamber, the loosened passions rage and chafe, impatient of their law; here huddle on the wild and desultory thoughts; here the imagination crowds in shapes of glory and disgust, tokens both and mockeries of its own creative power, no longer in the keeping of reason; here sits remorse scowling and biting her chain; here creep out the fears, a meagre and pale multitude; here drives on the will in his chariot of war; here lie trampled the great aspirations, groaning in immortal thirst; here the blasted affections weeping out their life in silent injury; all that you see without, in the wars, revenges, and the crazed religions of the world, is faithfully represented in the appalling disorders of your own spirit. And yet, despite all this, a fact which overtops and crowns all other evidence, you are trying and contriving still to be happy-a happy ruin! The eternal destiny is in you, and you cannot break loose from it. With your farthing bribes you try to hush your stupendous wants, with your single drops, (drops of gall and not of water,) to fill the ocean of your immortal aspirations. You call on destruction to help you, and misery to give you comfort, and complain that destruction and misery are still in all your ways. Oh, this great and mighty soul, were it something less, you might find what to do with it; charm it with the jingle of a golden toy, house it in a safe with ledgers and stocks, take it about on journeys to see and be seen! Anything would please it and bring it content. But it is the god like soul, capable of rest in nothing but God; able to be filled and satisfied with nothing but His fulness and the confidence

of His friendship. What man that lives in sin can know it, or conceive it? who believe what it is?

O thou Prince of Life! come in Thy great salvation to these blinded and lost men, and lay Thy piercing question to their ear-"What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Breathe, oh, breathe on these majestic ruins, and rouse to life again, though it be but for one hour, the forgotten sense of their eternity-their lost eternity.

Even so, your lost eternity. The great salvation coming, then, is not too great; nought else, or less could suffice. For if there be any truth that can fitly appal you, rive you with conviction, drive you home to God, dissolve you in tears of repentance, it is here, when you discover yourself and your terrible misdoings, in the ruins of your desolated majesty. In these awful and scarred vestiges, too, what type is given you of that other and final ruin, of which Christ so kindly and faithfully warned you, when, describing the house you are building on these treacherous sands, He shewed the fatal storm beating vehemently against it, with only this one issue possible-And immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great.

III.

THE HUNGER OF THE SOUL

LUKE XV. 17—" And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!"

THIS gentleman's son that was, and is now a swine-herd, brings his meditation to a most natural and fit conclusion. His low occupation, and the husks on which he has been feeding to save his life, recall his father's house, and the hired servants there that have bread enough and to spare, and, no longer able to contain himself, he cries, in bitter desolation, "I perish with hunger." And so, in this story of the prodigal, Christ teaches all men their hunger, by means of that on which they feed, and the necessary baseness of their sin, by the lowness of the objects to which they descend for their life.

The swine, according to Jewish opinion, is an unclean animal, not to be eaten as food, and therefore is not raised, except by those idolaters and men of no religion who live as outcasts in their country. Hence it is looked upon as the lowest and most abject of all occupations to be a swine-herd. He is the disgust of all men, an unclean character, who is, among other men, what the swine is among other animals. He may not enter the temple, or even come near it.

By the husks on which the prodigal is said, in his hunger, to have fed himself, we are not to understand exactly what is meant by the English word husks, but a certain fruit, the fruit of the carob tree, which grows in pods, and has a mealy and sweet taste. It is described by Galen as a "woody kind of food, creating bile, and hard of digestion ;" useful, as acorns are with us, in the feeding of swine, and sometimes eaten by the poorer sort of men, to escape starvation. Still it can work no injury, since this kind of fruit is unknown to us, to retain the word husks; a word that comes nearer producing the true impression

of the parable, which is the principal thing, than any other which might be substituted.

The important thing to be noted, as regards my present object, is the prodigal's hunger. About this central point, or fact, all the other incidents of the parable are gathered. And by this wretched figure of destitution, the Saviour of the world represents man under sin; he is one who forsakes the life of duty and religion, to go after earthly things. He is, therefore, reduced to the lowest condition of want, or spiritual hunger. His food is not the proper food of a man, but of a swine rather. A highborn creature, as being in God's image, he descends to occupations that are unclean, and feeds his starving nature on that which belongs only to a reprobate, or unclean class of animals. In this lot of deep debasement and bitter privation, there is no language in which he may so naturally vent his misery as when he cries, "I perish with hunger!"

What I propose, then, for our meditation, is the truth here expressed, that a life separated from God is a life of bitter hunger, or even of spiritual starvation.

My object will be, not so much to prove this truth as to make it apparent, or visible, as a real fact, by means of appropriate illustrations. But, in order to this, it will be neces

sary,

I. To exhibit the true grounds of the fact stated; for, as we discover how and for what reasons the life of sin must be a life of hunger, we shall see the more readily and clearly the force of those illustrations by which the fact is exhibited.

The great principle that underlies the whole subject and all the facts pertaining to it is, that the soul is a creature that wants food, in order to its satisfaction, as truly as the body. No principle is more certain, and yet there is none so generally overlooked, or hidden from the sight of men.

Of course it is not meant, when the soul is said to be a creature wanting food, that it receives by a literal mastication, and has a palate to be gratified in what it receives. I only mean to universalise the great truth that pertains to all vital creatures and organs-viz., that they differ from all dead substances, stones for example, in the fact that they subsist in a healthy state of vital energy and development, by receiving, appropriat

ing, or feeding upon something out of themselves. Every tree and plant is, in this view, a feeding creature, and grows by that which feeds it; that, viz., which it derives from the air and clouds, from the soil, and the changing influence of day and night. In this larger sense, every organ of the body is a receptive and feeding organ. Sometimes it is fed by other organs, which prepare and furnish to it the food that is needful for its growth and subsistence. In this manner even the bones are feeding creatures. So the senses are fed by the elements appropriate, the ear by sounds, the eye by the light. And so true is this, that an eye shut up in total darkness, and probably an ear cut off from all sound, will finally die, or become an exterminated sense; even as that whole tribe of fishes discovered in the cave are found to have no eyes. Now what I mean to say is, that all these vital creatures, vegetable and animal, are only so many types of the soul, which is the highest, purest form of vital being we know; and that, as they all subsist by feeding on something not in themselves, and die for hunger without that food, just so the soul is a creature wanting food, and fevering itself in bitter hunger when that food is denied.

Hence it is that, in that most unnatural of all modes of punishment, regarded unaccountably with so great favour by many, the punishment I mean of absolute solitary confinement, a very large proportion of the prisoners become idiotic. Cut off from all the living sights and sounds, the faces of friends, the voices of social interchange, and the works and interests of life; shut away thus from all that enters into feeling, or quickens intelligence, or exercises judgment, or nerves the will to action, the soul has no longer anything to feed upon, and, for want of food, it dies-dies into blank idiocy.

Neither let this want of food in souls be regarded as a merely philosophic truth, or discovery. It is a truth so natural to the. feeling of mankind, that it breaks into language every hour, and appears and reappears in the Scripture, in so many forms, that I cannot stay to enumerate half of them. Job brings it forward, by a direct and simple comparison, when he says, "For the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat;" where he means by the ear, you perceive, not the outward but the inward ear of the understanding. So the Psalmist says, "My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness." And so also the prophet, beholding his apostate countrymen dying for hunger and thirst in their