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lead lives not less unholy in the next stage of their trial, in more advanced youth and in manhood? Who can doubt, farther, that unholiness thus confirmed is apt to be strengthened yet more as life goes on, till the man is hardened altogether? Therefore the call is made to you not without reason, to listen to Christ this day, and to harden not your hearts. We call on you to take Christ's arms to strengthen your weakness; to watch and pray with Him and to Him that ye enter not into temptation. We call on you to come to Him truly and without reserve, to learn from His cross what a thing that sin is which you commit so carelessly; to throw aside every weight;—we each have one or many that are weighing down our souls;-to arise and come to Him for salvation. Then indeed you will soon find how false is that excuse of weakness which now you are so apt to plead; how certainly you will be strong enough, to overcome the evil which now overcomes you, to do the good which now you cannot do. I will hope that some who have been careless will even now turn; that they will think what it is to be in some sort like to Judas, to be in any matter with a wilful heart betraying their Lord. I will hope that there will be those who, resolving to come to Christ in all sincerity, and imploring His help to cleanse every corner of their hearts, may be in His sight as clean;

and being so, may, with their sins forgiven, be accepted as welcome guests at Christ's holy table, receiving from His love a full forgiveness for what is past, and effectual strength for what is to come.

April 4, 1841.

SERMON V.

(PREACHED ON GOOD FRIDAY.)

CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE.

PSALM 1xxxviii. 15, 16.

I am in misery, and like unto him that is at the point to die: even from my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind. Thy wrathful displeasure goeth over me, and the fear of Thee hath undone me.

THESE are the words of one of the Psalms appointed to be read in the service of this day. The other Psalms which we have heard read contain also much language of the same kind; language which is very familiar to us, and appears very natural in its own place, but which is infinitely remote, I imagine, from the habits of our own minds, and could not be adopted by them as their own without great insincerity. And it is to this fact that I would wish to draw your attention, as being capable of reading to us one of the most useful

lessons which we could learn on this day. What is it that the Psalmist declares of himself in these words, but that God's judgments have always and habitually possessed his mind; that the fear of them has hung like a weight upon him; that even from his youth it has been present to him? Observe also the words of the Psalmist in the fortieth Psalm, which was read this morning: "My sins have taken such hold upon me that I am not able to look up; yea they are more in number than the hairs of my head, and my heart hath failed me." We cannot but see how strongly this is expressed; we cannot but perceive that here is a feeling to which our own hearts are often strangers. Yet it is not a feeling by any means confined to the Psalmist. If we look into any books of prayers or meditations of good men, though of very different times and countries, the same feeling presents itself; we meet with expressions of sorrow and uneasiness under the consciousness of sin, as if sin were an evil no less real to them than we could conceive of some severe and continued bodily pain, the sense of which would occasionally escape from us even in our letters to others, and would at any rate be perpetually present to our own minds. And to the same purpose are all those various acts of penance and self annoyance which have been often practised in heathen countries as well as in Christian; acts which I am not com

mending altogether, but which do at any rate bear testimony to a certain liveliness of conscience, to a sense that sin was neither a small nor a passing evil. Nor is it by any means true that such acts are merely to be set down to the ignorance of the times, and to the arts of those who made out of them their own profit. The particular character of the acts no doubt did arise from these causes: but all the arts of priestcraft would have been applied in vain, had there been the same indifference to sin in men's minds which there is commonly amongst us. It was because men felt the pain of an accusing conscience keenly, that they were eager to listen to any one who promised relief from it, and being ignorant, and misled by others, they mistook a false remedy very often for the true one. But they had thus much in common with the best of God's servants, that the sense of sin was exceedingly painful to them.

It is this feeling which appears to me to be so commonly wanting amongst us; wanting amongst us all, wanting perhaps, especially amongst us here; and that for many reasons into which I need not now enter. The fact, I suppose, cannot be denied, and if we are inclined to ask whether the fact be good or bad, whether it is well or ill that we are so little moved by a sense of our sins, this day above all others in the whole year can answer the question. I need not say, for the very

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