implicit belief, and reverent love have lost their earthly object, too often without having transferred themselves to that Heavenly object on whom alone they can feed perfectly and eternally.

With the sense of right and wrong, however, still subsisting within us, even if time has lessened or destroyed our sense of obedience and trust, such as we entertained them towards our earthly parents, we now go forth upon the various scenes of life. Everywhere we hear the sense of right and wrong equally acknowledged; the whole homage of human language at any rate is paid to good. Evil is the object of universal obloquy and dislike. O safe and happy world, where all seem to be of one mind! How can any one but follow that good which all acknowledge, but shun that evil which all seem to hold infamous? So we advance, still abhorring wrong, still loving right; surely then if we are questioned, we may say, still serving God, still keeping on God's side. But what is good, and what is evil? Have we made out clearly to ourselves the full delineation of each? Is strictness of life good or evil? Is devotedness to our friends good or evil? Is submitting to wrong good or evil? Is bearing affronts good or evil? Is singularity good or evil? Before we have settled all these questions, the world settles them for us; and we know how it settles them, and by what penalties it enforces the observance of its

own interpretation. Will a man make out for himself a different creed, and stake every thing on the issue of it? Few are found to do so, for philosophy in these days has lost her old power, and few will be martyrs for her truth; nay, it is not clear that she would always urge such martyrdom ; the doctrine of outward compliance shown in pity or in scorn to practices which we inwardly condemn, has on merely philosophical grounds much to say in its defence. The freedom of the inward man is not encroached upon by his outward condescension to the folly which he cannot enlighten.

And then at last where are we? In private life or in public, at home or abroad, in peace or in war; what are we but followers of we know not what, of a motley thing mixed up of good and evil; expediency, and so called honour, or liberality, dividing our homage with what is acknowledged to be right, and not uncommonly supplanting its image in our minds altogether, and denying that there is any right at all, distinct from them? And thence it comes that evils are tolerated and upheld with no shame to their supporters, but much laughter against the fantastic enthusiasm which would pull them down; that practices are followed without scruple at which those taught in Christ's school shrink in horror; that eighteen hundred years are gone, and yet Christ's kingdom is not established on earth except in name; that all that

men admire and love, mixed as it is, and still retaining something of good, is yet essentially earthly; that death is therefore the object of constant dread, because it cuts us off from all that we know and value; that we turn away our minds from it even if unbelief has stripped it of its greatest terrors; that decaying faculties can find no comfort but in looking back upon what is gone for ever; that truth and love, the very lights of our being, and which when united in God are the seed of life eternal, die away visibly even before we die ourselves, lost to our enfeebled minds and chilled affections; lost, and lost for ever.

What I have sketched briefly, and therefore perhaps to some obscurely, might indeed be drawn out into a long detail, following our common life into all its varieties; painting that which you will severally become in your various courses, if you do not hold fast the consciousness of God and Christ. But what strength amidst weakness, what decision amidst endless wavering, what pure singleness amidst the vain striving to please God and mammon together; what a spring of blessing to the world and of peace to ourselves; what joy in life, what hope in death, are to be found in this consciousness! The consciousness of God and Christ, God in Christ, of ourselves living in God and to God for ever and ever, redeemed, sealed, sanctified, blessed. May we not dwell on this too? for it is no less real; it is

the life of Christ's people, the life of the children of God. Neither has God's promise to His Son ever failed; in every age there have been those to whom Christ has given power to become in Him God's sons also. May we look at the true picture of their life, following up this subject yet once more, and seeing what it is, and knowing that it may be ours. May we pray and labour with all our hearts that it shall be ours here and hereafter.

May 1, 1842.

SERMON XXXI.

APPROACHING TO GOD IN CHRIST.

ROMANS, vii. 24, 25.

0, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

THESE words, if we consider them, comprehend exactly all that I was saying in my last sermon, and all that I proposed to say to-day. For they speak of a state of death and of a state of deliverance the state of death being that in which sin got the better of all good resolutions and occasional good actions, and of a strong consciousness of the difference between right and wrong, and of a very sincere preference of right to wrong; and the state of deliverance being that in which the mind is possessed with a lively and abiding sense of God in Christ. The state of death was the state in which a man loved right but did not love God in Christ; it was a state in which the