his own way, and will not have God to reign over us, and cast off from us the yoke of His authority, and walk in the imagination of our own hearts-and all this in the face of God warning and pleading and threatening and telling us, in language too solemn to be treated by us with mockery, that the man who continueth not in the words of the book of His law to do them, is accursed. O, my brethren, go not to dispose lightly and easily of the warnings of God. Go not to think of Him as of a God that can be mocked or turned from His purpose. It strikes me as an awfully emphatic description of God, when we are told of Him that He hath said it, and shall He not do it? Let us think of the solemnity and the number of His sayings directed against the children of iniquity; and let us farther think that it is enough to stamp us all the children of iniquity that our hearts are habitually away from God. What more damning iniquity than to refuse our hearts to Him who gave us them who set them and who keeps them beating-who requires them of us in these words, "My son, give me thy heart"-and who tells that He will at last set this sin in all its sinfulness before our eyes, and bids us consider, "we that forget God, lest He tear us in pieces, and there shall be none to deliver." Be assured that the threats of God have a meaning, that the warnings of God have an accomplishment, and that there is not a single denunciation He has uttered which does not carry a terrible reality along with it. As surely, my brethren, as these bodies of yours shall be carried to the grave, so surely shall these souls of yours return to the God who gave them. There is an account to be given in. There is a day for the manifestation. of God's wrath against all unrighteousness of men. There is a judgment-seat to be raised in the sight of men and of angels. There is a great convocation to be held, at which all of this world, and many of other worlds, shall be present. The angels who come in glory will not witness on that day the weakness of a degraded and an insulted God. O no, my brethren, there will be a terrible vindication of truth and justice and holiness and majesty. On that day

each unreconciled sinner will mourn apart; and I call on each who now hears to look home to his own bosom-not to stifle any movement of conscience which he may feel there, but to put and to press the high question of his acceptance with God, and not to give it over till he has thoroughly sought after the way of peace, and assuredly found "To-day, while it is called to-day, harden not your

it.

hearts."

III. And O that this prominent consideration of the text had its right influence upon you, my brethren. This is my third and my last head of discourse. Here you all are in life and in the exercise of your faculties-and what is the interesting point you occupy? Why, my brethren, there is not one of you who may not find peace with God if he will-who may not obtain eternal life if he will-who may not come to a gracious and accessible Saviour, who may not obtain mercy to pardon him, and grace to help him, if he will. All, if you will, my brethren. But you may not will to forsake all and come to Christ. You may not will to give up your evil deeds and your evil habits and return unto God, doing works meet for repentance. You may not will that that heart of yours should resign its own imaginations, and be devoted with all its affections to Him who formed and who redeemed you. You may not will to be altogether wrought upon by the constraining influence of the Saviour's love, and live no longer to yourselves but to Him who died for you, and who rose again. No; you may perhaps like better to go on in the old and wonted way, and then you just realize upon you the words of the Saviour when He said " And this is their condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.”

But O recollect, my brethren, that if this be your present state, it is not a state which it will do to die in; it is not that state which it will do to carry to the grave with you. Here we are alive and on the face of the world. Think of the ashes of the many generations that are below

you. We are surrounded by the monuments of the dead, and you are just now sitting on the dust of men of other times. In a little while, and you will lie down among them; and O how many souls which once owned these moldering bodies would prize the opportunity of you living men. O in what lively colors do they see the folly of that desperate infatuation which hung over them during their abode in the world, and in which I call on you, my brethren, no longer to harden yourselves. Go not to say, that it is time enough. The call is to-day. Let alone till tomorrow, and what may be the consequence? Some may be dead-many will be out of the way of those arguments which I am now bringing to bear upon you. The truths you meet with here you will not so readily meet with at the business of your shops and your farms and your workhouses. But, most impressive consideration of all, to-morrow comes, and it finds one and all of you who now resist the call still harder and more impenitent than to-day found you. You are hard indeed if you resist this day's call; but the very resistance will make you harder still. It is a mischief which grows upon you every hour. He who is proof against the solemnity of a present warning is likelier far to be proof against the solemnity of a future; and thus, my brethren, the evil grows upon you continually. Sin gains a firmer ascendency. Satan holds you more closely in his wiles; and never is the hardness of a human heart seen in more affecting colors than it often is in an old man at the brink of eternity. Hold out no longer. Feel the necessity of some great movement in the matters of religion ere you die, and begin at this moment to resolve, and to learn, and to stir yourselves in the work of going about it. I will not try any other eloquence upon such a subject than the eloquence of simplicity and affection; and I therefore conclude with urging it as my warmest, my friendliest, and most earnest adieu to you, to feel the impression of this one truth-that something must be done; and with the farewell voice of to-day, while it is called to-day, I beseech you, my dear friends, to take to the doing of it immediately.

SERMON XVI.

COLOSSIANS II. 6.

"As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him."

NOTHING can be clearer from both the doctrine and examples of the New Testament, than that a man changes the course of his life on his becoming, in the true sense of the term, a Christian. There is no such thing as receiving Christ, and after that walking just as you were wont to do. Paul tells us in the beginning of this epistle, that he was thankful to God when he heard of the faith of the Colossians. In the verse preceding the text he tells us that he joyed when he beheld their order. There was a method or line of proceeding which a man who adopts the faith of Christ must necessarily observe, and it was from their observance of this method indeed that he inferred the steadfastness of their faith in Christ. There is such a thing as learning Christ differently and receiving Him differently; and according to the way in which we receive Him will be the way in which we shall feel it our duty to walk in Him. Some receive Him as a dispenser of forgiveness only, and they walk securely on in the commission of sin; others add to His former capacity that of a teacher, but overlooking the doctrine of being able to do nothing without Christ, they satisfy themselves with such decencies of conduct as they can observe-such proprieties of civil and social life as they can act up to even on other principles than that of submission to the authority of Christ; and as for the more spiritual obedience of the devoted Christian, they make no attempt after it, but just do as they can in their own strength, and make over the mighty burden of all their deficiencies on the atonement of the Saviour. Others again receive

Him both as their Sanctifier and Saviour, and they never stop short at any one point of attainment under the feeling that they can get no farther; they do not rest satisfied with the civil and social proprieties of life under the impression that their nature is incapable of higher or larger measures of obedience. They know that the believing Christian is backed at all times by the promised aids of the Spirit of God, with the dispensation of which Christ their Saviour is intrusted, who has become Christ their Sanctifier also; and therefore counting on this mighty accession of strength to all their endeavors, they do not strike the low aim of lukewarm decency, but they devote themselves to the obedience of the Gospel in all the extent and spirituality of its requirement-their aim is to be perfect, even as their Father in heaven is perfect. From the more obvious right things which they begun with, and which in my last discourse I urged you to begin with immediately-such as fidelity and plain-dealing and courteousness, and the avoiding of all that is plainly wrong, and such other moral accomplishments as the world can admire, and as worldly men with the profession of Christianity can practice, and think they do enough I say, from all these moral accomplishments they proceed onward to higher and greater things than these. I know that at this point they are looked upon by the men that are without to have entered into the borders of fanaticism. They are abandoned by the respect and sympathy of neighbors; they are looked upon as having got into a visionary region of feelings and spiritualities and devotional sentiment; they are at one time accused of indifference to good works, not because they neglect them, but because, with every diligence in the doing of them, they aspire after still higher and better accomplishments; they are at another time charged with attempting a pitch of obedience far too strict and elevated and holy for the feeble powers of humanity, and so they readily allow it to be; but they have received Christ as the Lord their strength as well as the Lord their righteousness, and they go to Him daily upon the errand of getting power for the high achievements