kind, the human race) is born a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord!' and joining with all the past and present and future generations of the world, earth's nations and the 'multitude of the heavenly host' in the response of glory to God and love to man.

Away, then, with the notion that there is nothing moral, nothing practical, nothing which affects men's hearts and happiness at stake, in the religious differences which exist. Even if it could not be shown of any peculiar doctrines, that they are God's truth, and therefore worthy of man's earnest efforts for their dissemination, there is still ample inducement for benevolent and energetic exertion. But there are great

and simple truths, though long obscured, of which this can be shown; and the combination, mental and moral, is one which should leave no hesitation in our minds-no lukewarmness in our hearts-no inconsistency in our conduct. It is our clearest duty our best interest-our noblest aim-our highest happiness, to 'serve God with our spirits in the Gospel of his Son;' to advance Christ's spiritual kingdom; and by rightly striving to advance that in others, we also advance it in our own hearts; nor can we establish its full dominion in our own1 hearts while we are indifferent to its extension around

us.

Let us, then, pursue conjointly what the spirit of the Gospel declares cannot be sundered. It is said of the all-perfect God, that 'he is good and does good continually.' Nor can we really be good, without doing good; or do good, on Christian principles, without being good. By loving our neighbor as ourselves, we work out his benefit and our own salvation.

SERMON XX.

PROBATION AND JUDGMENT.

HEBREWS ix. 57.

'But after this (death) the judgment.'

To any one who should open the New Testament for the first time, and his eye fall on this passage, it would seem a very bold assertion. Man knows not what the morrow may bring forth. The changes of life are continually baffling his calculations. He frequently finds himself in circumstances, the imagination of which a few months or years before, would have been dismissed as a wild and most incredible romance. And, yet, here is one who assumes to tell us, not what will come after this week or year, but after this life itself shall have closed; and who affirms that, when we shall have been removed from all communication with the world in which we live, and the beings by whom we are surrounded; that when we shall have reached what seems to our senses and experience the final close of our existence, that after this will come the judgment.

But the notion of boldness vanishes when further examination shows the writer's authority. He was

a disciple of the man of inspiration, the man of miracle, the man of the resurrection, Jesus Christ. He had learned this after-death fact from one who was in an after-death existence. This truth of futurity was learned from the commissioned revealer of futurity. It comes through him to the world, from the author of life and death, the giver of time, the possessor of eternity. This assertion is not pretence, but reality; not assumption, but docility; not pride, but benevolence. In the name of Him who had risen from the dead, he repeats the prediction that to all, after death, should come the judgment.

And while the simple and conclusive evidence of historical fact had thus furnished authority for the declaration, and divested it of all that would have looked like arrogance, it may be further observed, that it is not so devoid of indications and corroborations in the course of events in this life, as most would perhaps at first suppose. They take but a very imperfect view of the rationale of the subject who look only at the dead and dissolving body, though they may watch it from senselessness to decomposition, see it resolving into its orginal elements, and those elements entering into new combinations, springing up in vegetation, or becoming again incorporated in some other form of animal existence. The voice of nature utters oracles from other places besides the tomb. I would he write the history even of the corn-field who should only look at it after the seed was sown, and before that seed had sprung up; and who, on the strength of his negative. observation, should assert that after winter would come

no spring. The experience of another year, it may be said, would correct his error. True; and therefore, it should not be hastily concluded that the other error will not be corrected by the experience of another life. But I think that, could the case be supposed for a moment, the acute observer of a single year of vegetation would have some reason to anticipate, not very distinctly perhaps,but some reason to anticipate, that what he saw was not all; that something else was to happen; that he was not in the midst of a scene of mere destruction. And so I think also, that besides. its proof of fact, of revelation, and of miracle, the assertion in the text is not unsupported by what may be noticed in the world around us and within us; but that there are various considerations which give it a degree of rationality and probability. It is worth while to observe these. They may recommend the

doctrine itself to those who demur to the conclusiveness of the proofs on which it is rested by Christianity. They may react upon the evidences of the Gospel, and dispose the mind more readily to admit proof of a truth whose harmony with reason and fact has been evinced to it previously. And the correspondences which we are led to trace may be in themselves useful by suggesting various lessons of devout feeling and moral duty.

There is a reasonableness in the tenet that this life is a state of probation, and the next of retribution; because this life is itself made up of a succession of periods which bear alternately and mutually the relation of trial and of judgment. It is probable that after death comes judgment,because before, long before

death, also comes judgment; after each division of our being comes another division which is as a judgment to that which preceded; and as so we go on, from the cradle to the grave, it may be anticipated that so we shall go on from time to eternity.

The first world of humanity is the nursery: and the next little world of humanity is the school; the first passing of the child from one to the other is the great event of his short life, it is going into a new state of being; and the school stands to the nursery in the relation of a season of judgment to one of preparation and probation. The nursery life ends, never to be resumed, and after its termination comes a judgment upon it.

ness.

The child goes into a society, which he was not born into, as he was into that of the family; and the arrangements of which are constituted on a different principle, for a different purpose, and by a different authority. But every acquirement, faculty, disposition of his previous life, tells in his new condition, and becomes the source of pleasure or uneasiThe little tyrant of infancy has to pay for his former domination by learning to endure the control of others. The little idler suffers the penalty of shame for his comparative backwardness. Young kindness attracts kindness for its appropriate recompense, and selfishness is sentenced to dislike, and cowardice to scorn. There is a mighty variation of degree in the happiness or suffering which awaits a child at school, as the natural and necessary, but not less retributory result of its former little life. He takes his stand, according to his desert, as desert is estimated by his comrades. He is no longer shield