powerful in operation on the other six days either for good or for evil. If you have carefully and heartily done your best to improve its sacred hours, you may humbly trust to have God's blessing go with you into your lawful business, to have His help if any great trial or temptation awaits you in the course of the week. But if you have given way to sloth or indifference on Sunday, if you have not borne your part in the services, you will find that the same carnal and indolent, spiritually indolent, spirit will go with you through the week; and whatever be the snare which the Enemy of your souls may have prepared for you, you have done nothing to strengthen yourselves against his devices. You cannot look for God's help and strength to be bestowed upon you when you have shewn no anxiety, taken no trouble to obtain His help. Try to think of Sundays and of the Church Service, as you will think of them on your dying bed. You may be indifferent now, you may satisfy yourselves with idle excuses now, you may do many things which you know to be wrong on the Lord's day, and yet be able to quiet or stifle conscience now; but the time must come when all this will be over for ever. When flesh and heart are failing, and you feel that before the clock strikes again you will have stood in the presence of Him to whom all judgment hath been committed, who when He was on earth declared

m

Himself the Lord of the Sabbath, what would you give then to feel that you were passing from the toil and strife of earth into that rest which remaineth for the people of God?"

m St. Mark ii. 28.

n Heb. iv. 9.

SERMON VII.

PREACHED ON THE FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY, 1839.

ST. LUKE vii. 16.

And there came a fear on all; and they glorified God, saying, That a great Prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited His people.

THE Evangelist has here told us the effect which was produced by that exertion of our Lord's miraculous powers of which we have read in the Second Lesson of this morning's Service.

The raising of the son of the Widow of Nain from the dead, is one of the facts in the Evangelical history which is found only in St. Luke. The resurrection of Lazarus is peculiar to St. John. It is only by comparing the four Gospels, therefore, that we shall be possessed of all the instances in which Jesus Christ showed His authority over the world of spirits. The soul of the daughter of Jairus was called back almost as soon as it had left its house of clay. In

the case before us, Death had held his victim much longer before it was torn from his grasp. And when Lazarus was raised again, decay had already begun: the body was actually passing back into its original elements, "earth to earth, and dust to dust." So very true were those words of our blessed Lord shown to be: I am the Resurrection and the Life. It mattered not how long the King of Terrors might have been allowed to assert his gloomy prerogatives: it mattered not how far Corruption might have done her hideous work: the dead needed only to hear the voice of the Son of God; and they arose and lived.

It came to pass the day after, we read, that He went into a city called Nain: i. e., the day after He had cured the servant of that Centurion who was pronounced by Him who knew what was in man, to have greater faith than He had found even in Israel. Few and far between are the notices of the life of our Blessed Saviour which have been preserved for us. It is of a few only of His days that we have any record whatever. And yet what abundant proof we have that no single day was allowed by Him to pass unimproved. He went about doing good; and day after day still saw Him unwearied in His labours of love.

Of the city which was the scene of this remarkable miracle we have no other mention made in

a St. John xi. 25.

the New Testament. It was situated in Galilee, that part of the Holy Land in which our Saviour spent the greatest part of His time; and it lay not very far, about twelve miles, from Capernaum, which was made His abode so much that we find one of the Evangelists speaking of it as Christ's own city. Nain is famous for little else than the presence of Christ on this occasion, and the miracle which He was pleased to work there.

To a careless eye, it might seem a mere accident that our Lord should reach the town at the precise moment when the dead man was being carried out. But the work of mercy which awaited Him there was present, we may be quite sure, to His mind, before He left Capernaum. It was not matter of chance, that He by whom the very hairs of the head of His children are numbered, was on the spot to call the young man back to life, and to turn his mother's tears to joy. The constant and active superintendence of Divine Providence is not usually to be seen in violent and occasional interferences. It may always be traced by the eye of faith in quiet and steady operation. The will of man is left free and unfettered; and the purposes of God hold their course, adapting to their own high objects all that appears to us so intricate and contingent. A most striking illustration of this is furnished by one of the best known histories in Holy Scripture. You recol