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submit your lives to Christ's judgment, that in questions of conduct, if any doubt or temptation arises, the appeal will be at once made to the light of Christ's will, and to the strength of Christ's Spirit. With this hope, knowing that such questions as may come before you are clear as day when this guide is consulted, we are led to believe further, that the will of Christ will be more and more obeyed, that your idols will be cast away, that there will be the power seen of discerning between good and evil. If, on the contrary, experience shews that Christ is not referred to, that the idol's lying voice is alone listened to, even by those who have had their hands on Christ's table, and we are sure not then with any treacherous purpose of betraying Him, must there not be a great disappointment, a wholesome it may be, yet a bitter humiliation, that while we perhaps were exulting, perhaps were beginning to feel proud, at the number of those who were openly professing themselves to be Christ's servants, the enemy laughs at our rejoicing, and sees that he can take away in an instant the seed out of their heart, and can keep Christ's name out of their sight, and can palm his own lies upon their conscience, and can make them do his bidding and serve his cause?

He will not indeed venture to do this openly, nor in a great matter, where the conscience must

be awake: he does not tempt to manifest and gross sin, nor ask those whose vows were so lately uttered at Christ's holy table to lie, or to be cruel, or to be drunken, or to be profligate. But he overthrows Christ's habitual dominion over the heart; he takes care that we shall not do common things in Christ's name; that in what we think little matters we shall not be guided by Christ's will and He who by His apostle commands us to do every thing in the name of the Lord Jesus, He knows that by forgetting Him in what we call little matters, and allowing ourselves to violate our duty, we give place to His enemy in our hearts, and incur the danger of listening to him in a greater matter hereafter; if indeed we do well to talk of great or little, when we know that all our actions are either acts of faith or acts of sin, and that no act of faith on the one hand, or of sin on the other, can properly be called little by those who know that for their sins Christ died, and that by faith they are justified through Christ to life eternal.

November 7, 1841.

SERMON XIX.

CLOSE OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR.

ST. JOHN, vi. 12.

Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.

HE who made all things once by His infinite power, and had again by His power, now freshly exercised, made food where there was none, to feed five thousand men in the wilderness, He yet desired His disciples to gather up the fragments which remain, that nothing be lost. It was in the same spirit that He told them that not a sparrow fell to the ground without their Father; that the very hairs of their heads were all numbered. And if He thus values the food of our bodies, and knows the number of the very hairs of our heads, still more will He value the bread that is the food of our souls; still more does He number and prize every little spark which He may find in us of spiritual life. And in this sense I would under

stand His words to-day; first, as addressed to ourselves, charging us to gather up every fragment of the bread of life; next, as addressed to His angels, bidding them to gather together, and to note against the last day whatever signs they may have seen in any of us of our being endowed with spiritual life. First, then, the words are spoken to us all: they bid us now, at the end of the Christian year, to gather up the fragments of spiritual food which may have been scattered in our way in the course of the year, to gather them up in our memories, to consider whether, if they have been hitherto disregarded, they are not yet too precious to be utterly lost.

And when I speak of fragments of the bread of life, it is manifest that I mean to speak not so much of regular ordinances, of God's word read or preached to us in this place, or of other opportunities which may have been given to us of regular prayer. Such things are our appointed spiritual food, and not fragments merely. But I mean by "fragments," means of grace which have been given us as it were accidentally, and arising out of the circumstances of our several lives; for we have each, unless I am much mistaken, received helps of this sort: lessons which came when we looked not for them; lessons which might have profited us at the time, but

which it is not too late to remember, and to derive a profit from even now.

By the very nature of the case, then, many of these can be known only to our several selves; and what or how many of them may have happened to each of you I know not. Nay, so soon do we forget what is once past, that I doubt whether at this moment you know yourselves. But some such each of you could gather up, beyond all doubt; and here too the word is true, "Seek and ye shall find." And surely we ought, from time to time, to require of our memories that they should keep watch over the portion of our lives that is past, that as nothing in them is forgotten before God, so all that is in them may not be forgotten by us. It cannot be safe or right, even in the youngest of us, to let our days pass away into utter forgetfulness: life hurries on with all of us too rapidly; the days of which it is so fast robbing us must not be lost altogether.

Consider, first, whether any great change has taken place within the last year in the state of our own immediate families. Such changes we cannot fail to remember, if they have taken place : to the question, whether any such have happened, it must be easy to answer yes, or no. And a great many of us perhaps might have to answer, no; that is, death may not have taken any near

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