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that we may use the means which Thou hast put within our reach, and that we may be truly benefited by all our teaching, and learn to know Thee and Thy Son Jesus Christ.

Bring home to our hearts with power the lesson of Thy Son's resurrection. Grant that we may

have our resurrection likewise, from the death of sin first, and also from the death of the body. Grant that we may hear Thy Son's call with joy, and obey it, when He bids us to arise from the death of sin to the life of righteousness, and when He bids us come out of our graves and come to judgment. May we too rise from death, and be with Thy Son ever.

Finally, we give Thee our humble thanks for all Thy goodness to us, as this day, so always. We bless Thee for all our many earthly blessings, our health and strength and plenty. Above all, we bless Thee for our spiritual blessings, and for the means of grace which Thou hast vouchsafed to us in the holy communion.

May all of us who went this day to Thy holy table retain Thy blessing in our hearts, filling us with love to Thee, and to one another. May we not be of the number of those who draw back from where they once stood, but of those who push forward to win their crown.

God be merciful to us sinners, and bless us, and

give us grace to follow our Lord Jesus Christ in life and in death, and to hold fast to Him in faith, and to cast our sins down, and to take up our cross daily at the foot of His cross, and to put our whole trust in Him to forgive us and to heal us.

Blessed be Thy holy name now and evermore, and hear us, and grant our petitions for the sake of Jesus Christ, our only Saviour and Redeemer.

D D

SERMON XXIX.

GOD AND CHRIST AND OUR OWN SOULS.

DEUTERONOMY, iv. 9.

Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons' sons.

THE veriest stranger who ever attends divine service in this chapel is apt to be struck with the peculiar character of the congregation here assembled. He sees almost the whole congregation to consist of persons in early youth, and exhibiting the various stages of youth, from the earliest boyhood to the very edge of manhood. He thinks too that those here assembled are not like a common congregation, the majority of whom are fixed for life, or at least for a term of which there is no definite limit, to the place where they are now assembled. But our congregation will of necessity within a few years be all scattered to the four

winds of heaven; we should look for its several members anywhere rather than here. Again, take even a congregation such as ours in any other country, and although we know that in a short time it will be dispersed from the place where we actually behold it, yet still it will be dispersed only within narrow limits, the limits of the country to which it belongs. But our country spreads forth her arms so widely, that the scattering of the members of an English school by the various circumstances of life, is literally a scattering over the whole habitable world; there is no distance so great to which it is not within probability that some of our congregation may betake themselves. And yet once again; those very distant countries, those ends of the earth to which some of us may in the course of things be led, are new settlements, with a small population, with institutions, habits, and national character unformed as yet, and to be formed; unformed, and capable therefore in their unsettled state of being influenced greatly by the conduct and character even of a single individual, so that, putting all these things together, a stranger does well to feel something more than a common interest in the sight of the congregation assembled within this chapel, as it is this day.

But if the sight so interests a stranger, what should it be to ourselves, both to you and to me?

It has not to us indeed the interest of novelty, we see it every week and every month; there is nothing in the sight of the congregation now before me differing from what I have seen now for many years. It is very true; and therefore if novelty alone can interest us, there is no interest for us in the sight around us. But if we are not such mere children as to be excited only by what is new; if the most momentous truths in the world are those which we have heard from our childhood, and have had repeated to us ever since continually; and if, even supposing that we are not habitually alive to their importance, yet surely we sometimes are so, not because they are more striking in themselves at one time than another, but because we are sometimes more awake to them; then the sight of you here, although familiar enough to us all, and often perhaps unregarded, has yet a real interest nothing lessened by its familiarity; an interest to which we may be at some moments peculiarly alive, and which we do well to indulge, because it is founded on the simplest truth, and may and ought to be useful in exciting us in our practice to what is right, and good, and holy.

Now whatever occurs of unusual interest in the world strikes in this way upon an answering key within our breasts here. Whatever of striking good or of evil happens in any part of the wide

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