God further me, may urge, may awaken a soul that God may send to drop in and hearken. But if you will search yourselves, know yourselves, fear yourselves, and pray, you may awaken the overflowing love, the abundant forgiveness, the supporting graces of the blessed Lord Jesus, the full consolations of the Spirit of the Lord.

These thoughts shew us how much we can do for ourselves, and how rich is the reward if we labour in our appointed work, if we keep God's Sabbath and sanctify it, as God's Church would lead us to do, by striving to sanctify in her exercises our hearts

and lives.

Finally, my brethren, the text, which I have taken from the Lesson for the Evening Service, teaches us, in the first place, that the sanctification of the Sabbath was the first law laid down by the Lord God; and from this we learn that to break this law is not to commit, as we sometimes call it, a little sin, but it is wilfully to reject obedience, and to cast away reverence of the Lord. It is plainly to say, "That law on which the honour due to Thy Name, O Lord, mainly stands, that law I will not keep, whenever either pleasure, or temptation, or idleness come in my way. I do not think it is of any great consequence if I say Thou mayest claim the seventh day, O Lord, but I will take it!' This is what a Sabbath-breaker does; it is what he says in his own heart, when he makes the Lord's day his own day. And I do tenderly but earnestly ask him to think

what his answer for these sayings and doings is to be, when he stands before God in the judgment-day? Next, we cannot but see, that when a man thus puts aside obedience to this law, that then he puts himself very much out of the grace and assistance of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps he does not think this any great matter either. Let him, however, as I have said, look to the histories of great criminals, and of persons put to death for grievous offences, and he will find that their first step in evil was a neglect of God's day. All they who are at all in the grace of God will know at once how necessary are the constant renewals of it; they know how weak they always are in themselves, and how much weaker they constantly become, if they let slip their religious observances.

Lastly, in our observances let there be holy forms, prepared to meet every human want and frailty, and fully and deeply founded on the Word of God. Because, where these forms are, there is something by which to exercise yourselves. You cannot use them without examining how they fit your own hearts; and no man ever made that examination without a turning towards the mercies of the Lord Jesus Christ. Study, my brethren, and learn these holy forms, and you will esteem them far beyond exhortation. Preaching may do much good or much harm; if it is sound it will be a comfort, a stay, a guide to your souls ; but a knowledge of your religious services is far better; you carry about with you their holiness

in your bosoms. Exhortation may give you warm feelings, strong and proper thoughts, good resolutions, but these, as you may all have to confess, will yield before strong temptation. Satan is the first to represent to you that preaching is, after all, only the sayings of a man, and that every man may be in error. But that which you learn and follow yourselves cannot thus be put aside. You pray for forgiveness because you have measured your lives by God's services and Word, and you feel that you want forgiveness; you beseech God to give you His grace and guidance, because you have looked to your unstedfast steps, and you know that you cannot stand without it; you confess your sins, because you know that you have sins, and you are weary of the burden of them. Then when you are tempted, you make answer at once, and firmly say, 'I will not add to this weight of sin; I will not defeat the grace of God; I will not thrust my forgiveness back; I will not fight against my own work; but I will resist this temptation in the strength of the Lord, and I will go forward in my way, thanking Christ the Lord, who is unto me "a means of grace, and a hope of glory."

My brethren, it is in this firm, this steady, this safe course that the Church would have you walk. I feel sure, if you will enter upon it, and follow it with true hearts, that you will find the Lord in it; and I, as one sent unto you from the Lord, beseech you always thus to walk with God, and always to stay upon Him.

SERMON XV.

Sexagesima Sunday.

GENESIS vi. 8, 9.

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

WHEN we are told that Noah was perfect in

stand that he was sprung from a line of forefathers who had been stedfast and faithful worshippers of the Lord, and had been kept pure from the sins which stained the rest of mankind; this remark seems to me to explain the only part of my text which is not perfectly clear. The text, as you may remember, is taken from the first Lesson of the Evening Service, a Lesson which informs us that the Lord had determined to bring a flood over the earth and to destroy man from the face thereof, but that Noah found grace, because "he was a just man, and walked with God."

Any chapter in the Bible, or any verse, which declares to us the Mind of the Lord God, and which gives us the reasons which have moved the Lord to any course, is of the utmost value to us; because in

such statements we have the "veil" lifted up, as it were, and we are able, in so far, to look into the Holy of Holies, and to see God as He is. We can then tell to a certainty how the Lord will deal with ourselves, when we find that we are living the lives which we have found the Lord either blessing or punishing. When the Lord saith, "I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, because every imagination of the thoughts of his heart are only evil continually," and "I will spare righteous Noah, because he is a just man and walketh with God," then it is impossible not to see that sin is the direct cause of God's wrath and punishments, and that a faithful obedience will be blessed of the Lord. These sayings tend to make religion a simple and plain thing, to make it, what a revelation surely is, a thing made clear, and they strip it of many distinctions and nice questions, most of which arise from human ingenuities. To plain readers, then, chapters like this before us are among the most valuable parts of the Bible; and we can never be thankful enough to God in that He hath revealed Himself in them to mankind.

I will now, therefore, go on to consider one or two plain statements which the text either contains or alludes to, and will so take the chief matter of the chapter itself. When the text says that "Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord," it refers to the flood which the Lord was about to bring upon the earth. Now from this we receive a lesson which I will first