pened to us, either outwardly or inwardly? Have we prayed the less or the more? For where spiritual life is not predominant, the best sparks and fragments of it which can be found are our prayers, if they have been frequent and earnest. For such prayers show that we have known our danger and have dreaded it, and have desired to escape from it. What number, then, of prayers spoken from the heart, could the angels record of us from the past year? Or, again, what fruits could they find of such prayers? What evil habit overcome or weakened, what sin laid aside, what temper corrected, what generous or humble or kindly feelings entertained, what deeds of positive and willing duty rendered to man or to God? Do not be afraid of remembering such, lest they should make you proud: you are far more apt to be proud if you do not remember them. I mean that pride belongs to our common state; if we do not look into our hearts at all, we are quite willing to take it for granted that we have much to be proud of. But the actual search, and the finding some few fragments of good amidst a wide waste of unfruitfulness or of sin; if this makes us proud, we must be mad. Much rather, as I believe, would it fill us with humility, to see how little of good our careful search could discover, yet with hope, with zeal, with gratitude to God, that we had tasted even thus slightly of His gracious pro

mises, that we had found Him faithful when we had turned to Him, that He had given us an earnest of what He would do in us more perfectly, if our faith and watchfulness had been stronger. Yes, remember, I entreat you, whatever good thing has appeared in you; observe it well, weigh it, value it, and you will surely see how little there is in it to make you proud, how much to make you penitent and yet thankful, humble and yet full of hope.

So, gathering up the fragments which remain, let us pray, ere the new Christian year dawns upon us next Sunday, that beginning with these we may be enabled so to add to them by Christ's Spirit, that our account next year may speak of more than scattered fragments; may bear witness rather to portions of holy and spiritual life large and frequent, interrupted only by occasional falls. May we grow in grace, and in the faith and love of our Lord Jesus Christ, that we may be His, not only at some few moments of our lives, but habitually and for ever.

November 21, 1841.

SERMON XX.

ST. THOMAS-FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN DOUBT.

ST. JOHN, XX. 27.

Then saith He to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.

HEBREWS, iv. 3.

We who have believed do enter into rest.

Two sorts of language are held respecting faith and belief, each combining in itself, as often happens, a curious mixture of truth and error. The one insists that belief is a thing wholly independent of our will, depending simply on the greater or less force of the evidence set before our minds; and that therefore, as faith can be no virtue, so unbelief can be no sin. The other pronounces that all unbelief arises out of an evil heart, and a dislike to the truths taught; nay, that if any

man even disbelieves any proposition not properly religious in itself, but generally taught along with such as are religious, he cannot be considering the truth or falsehood of the particular question, simply as it is in itself true or false, but must disbelieve, because he has a dislike to other truths which are really religious. Now, to those who hold their belief to be one of the most precious things of their whole being, it is by no means a light matter to know the truth concerning it; whether it is indeed a thing about which we are not at all responsible, or whether it has nothing to do with our mind's perception of truth, but depends wholly on certain moral feelings, or rather on an arbitrarily assumed connexion between such feelings and our judgment upon all points taught as a part of religious knowledge, whether in themselves religious or no.

The two passages which I have chosen together for my text, will illustrate the question before us. The belief by which we enter into God's rest is clearly something moral. The unbelief of the apostle Thomas, which could not at once embrace the fact of our Lord's resurrection, assuredly arose from no wish or feeling in his mind against it. There is a belief, then, which is moral, and the want of which is a sin; there is an unbelief which does not arise out of an evil heart, and which is not a sin; but it may be a great misfortune, and

a very heavy trial, the heaviest, indeed, with which God can visit us.

The unbelief which is a sin, to speak generally, is an unbelief of God's commandments, or of any thing which He has told us, because we wish it not to be true. The unbelief which may be no sin, is a disbelief of God's promises, because we think them too good to be true; in other words, the believing not for joy. Or again, the disbelief of such points about which our wishes are purely indifferent; we neither desire to believe, nor have any reluctance to do so, but simply the evidence is not sufficient to convince us. I do not say that such unbelief as this is never a sin, but that it need not be so always; and that when it is a sin, and when not, is a point for God to judge rather than man; remembering only, that as God will judge it, and may declare that it is sin, we are bound, each one for himself, to examine his own heart and mind carefully respecting it.

But whether of one kind or another, there must be clearly a great amount of unbelief in the world, because we by no means see generally existing, that victory over sin and the world which the Scriptures speak of as the fruit of faith. There is, for instance, as we cannot doubt, a great deal of unbelief amongst us here. And of which sort do we think it is? Is it the unbelief of the apostle Thomas, or is it that evil heart of unbe