find that even in time the kindliness of every eye will be drawn towards him, and all hostility and violence, as if arrested by the omnipotence of a charm, will be cleared away from his footsteps.

Before I conclude, I cannot but point your attention to the beautiful harmony that subsists between all this experience and the promises of Scripture. The meek, one would think, are ready to be overborne by surrounding violence, and yet God says the meek shall inherit the earth. The man who fears God, and reads this passage of His communication, will love his enemies; and God says-I will make the enemies of him who fears me to be at peace with him. Oh! pause, pause, my brethren, ere you suffer any apprehension whatever to mutilate the entireness of that prescriptive code which the Author and Finisher of our faith has bequeathed to us; and when I think of duties being ours and events being God's-when I think of His absolute control over the events of human society, and how He can turn the heart of man whithersoever He will-when I think of the way in which He has shielded the human species from the violence of the inferior creation, even by putting the fear of man and the dread of man upon all animals—when I think of the way in which He has shielded the passive recipients of a blow from the violence of their own species, by all those checks of delicacy and feeling which He hath laid on the whole mass of human society-when I further think of the harmony between this portion of human experience and the promises of the Bible, and I take a survey of the extent of these promises, I must protest against admitting the fear of any consequences whatever from trenching on the entireness of our purpose to yield an undeviating adherence to the precepts of the Bible; but knowing that all these consequences are in His hand and under His absolute direction, let us prove how fearlessly we confide in the providence and faithfulness of God by the evidences of a close, an assiduous, and an unexcepted observation carried round the whole compass and extent of the revealed law of God.

VOL. VI.

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SERMON XX V.

[PREACHED at Glasgow in February 1817.]

ACTS XIX. 24, 25.

"For a certain man, named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen; whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth."

THERE are two ways in which a certain air of secularity and of week-day earthliness might be imparted to a pulpit demonstration. It might be done by a preacher who pitches no higher than at a worldly system of morals-who founds it on the inferior principles of interest and a reputation among men -who banishes away from it all that is heavenly and all that is peculiar in the spirit of the gospel-and who, while he pursues the details of civil, and social, and domestic economy, seems animated by nothing else than that bare consideration of propriety which it is competent for any man to entertain, though he neither look upward to God nor onward to the judgment that is in reserve for him. Let it never be forgotten, that even in that heart where the spiritualities of faith have no occupation-that even in the bosom of him who never heeds his God, or casts one earnest regard towards the book of that message which reports to us His doctrine and His will, there may be a strong sense of moral rectitude, and a strong susceptibility to many of the finest touches of moral delicacy, and a ready movement of consent and of obedience to the impulses of

honour and compassion and generosity, and all that is laudable or engaging in such a character may be either exemplified in the life, or urged, and urged most eloquently, from the pulpit ; and yet, neither in the one nor in the other may there be a single thought beyond the world, or a single virtue which shall not find in the world all its acknowledgment and all its reward.

But again, there may to the eye and the apprehension of some be the very same air of secularity in the lucubrations of him who wants to preach the whole system of human life with the entire spirit of the New Testament-of him who is for carrying forward its strictest and its loftiest requisitions into all the manifold varieties of human experience of him who would like to exalt the character of the species from their affection for the things which are below to a supreme and predominant affection for the things which are above-of him who would not be for letting down by a single step the spiritual character of Christianity, but would like to fix and to realize it on all the concerns of life and on all the actual business of society. For, you will observe, that the lessons of theology may be dealt out to an audience in the terms of an abstract and lofty representation, and its well-built system of articles may be made to carry along with it the consent of every understanding, and its paramount authority over all the wishes of nature and of interest may be strenuously asserted on the one side, and be as unresistingly acquiesced in on the other, and all this without one stretch of application to the familiarities of the living and the acting man. And when this work of application is attempted-when the effort is made by the preacher to transplant this style of Christianity from speculation into practice—when, for this purpose, he follows your everyday path, and steps over the threshold of your family, and takes account of your doings in the market-place, and thrusts himself into the very heart of the secularities which engage you, and haunts the very footsteps you take from one transaction to another and from one company to another, and keeps a wakeful eye on all the details of your ever-moving history, and, in a word, holds the faithful mirror to all that meets you, and takes you up from Sabbath to

Sabbath, why, it may be felt by some that in the act of doing so the teacher of Christianity is inflicting upon it an offensive desecration that he is spreading a hue of earthliness over it— that he is debasing his subject by the vulgarities of tame and ordinary experience that he is letting in upon a hallowed field such a plain familiarity of colouring as goes to mar and to violate the sanctity of its complexion, and making an invasion on the dignity of that pulpit which should be consecrated to the promulgation of religious truth in its most abstract, general, and elevated form.

Now, before I proceed to any further explanations, I must offer my protest against the whole drift and tendency of such. an argument as the one I am now adverting to. I assert, with the most unqualified earnestness, that Christianity is the religion of life, and will bear to be carried in the whole extent of her spirit and of her laws throughout all the haunts and varieties of human intercourse-that her high pretension is to subordinate the every doing and the every interest of man to the regimen of her own unbending authority—that in her strictest and most essential character she may be introduced into the busiest walks of society, and there uphold her disciples in the exercise of that simplicity and godly sincerity which she lays upon them; and in opposition to all the alleged impracticabilities which are conceived to lie in the way of her full establishment over the acts and the consciences of our species, do I aver, that if she cannot be practical neither ought she to be preached that if there be some invincible necessity why she should be banished from any one of your employments through the week, then she ought to be banished from every one of our pulpits upon the Sabbath-that she is either everything or nothing-that she knows of no compromise between her own laws and the maxims of the world by some expedient of time-accommodating conformity-that she disclaims all these midway adjustments entirely—and if she is deposed from her right of paramount control over all the conceivable cases of human conduct, then let her also be deposed from the ostensible place she now holds in the eye of the country—let her

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very name be given up to public scorn-let her forthwith be abandoned to the utter contempt and negligence of mankind.

Let me assure you that there is no safe alternative between an entire Christianity and no Christianity at all-that the religion of the New Testament admits of no partitioning whatever -that what it professes to do is either thoroughly to reform the world, or to bring the world under the burden of a righteous and unescapable condemnation-and that whoever the individual be who refuses to give up his conformities, and to drink in the pure and unqualified spirit of the gospel, and fearlessly to renounce all for eternity, and to give his honest and aspiring energies to the love of God and a patient waiting for Christ, let him plead obstacles and impossibilities as he may, he has chosen to abide with a world which the Bible represents to be lying in wickedness-he keeps him by the broad way which leadeth to destruction-he turns a deaf ear from the call to glory and to virtue-he winds not up his resolves to the pitch of a fair and honest consent to Christianity he is not willing to forsake all in the act of following after Jesus, or to be entirely what He would have him to be, or to do entirely what He would have him to do.

I feel urged to these observations by the power and the prevalency of a sentiment which I know to exist among you—that the realities of actual experience offer an insurmountable barrier against the lessons of Christianity in all the fulness and variety of their application-that what may sound very well from the pulpit on the Sabbath is altogether inapplicable to the familiar and everyday practice of the week-that what the preacher can dress out to your delighted imaginations in the form of a very specious and imposing plausibility, must just be thrown aside and forgotten when you repair to the scenes of ordinary merchandise, and get involved in the common run of its calls and its temptations and its cares-that some mysterious necessity exists upon earth for binding down all who live in it to a certain degree of conformity-that it is utterly impossible, under the actual habits and arrangements of society, to sustain the lofty practice or the lofty tone of a morality that