pacified from inward contention, and fed with the river of God's pleasure, enjoys a health and strength, a peace which passeth all understanding, and a joy which the world can neither give nor take away.

These and many other rewards, whereof the Scriptures contain the constant promise, are ever addressing the feelings and interests of man, in order to win him over to be a free man and denizen of the divine government: and, as he enters himself with heart and hand to the duties of the same, these spiritual rewards grow apace, and he feels himself more and more emancipated from the bondage of all other laws and customs into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. It feels with his soul as when a slave escapes from his stripes and weary toils unto his rightful liberty; as when a free man of this land escapes from the spies of police, the inquisitions of prefects, the passports of men in power, and the thousand other degradations with which foreign nations are impeded and perplexed. There needeth no one to point out the new happiness which he possesseth. Nature speaks within; he is as man should be: he feeleth his state; he useth it; he rejoiceth in it. So doth the soul under divine government, compared with which the best human administration of law and the most sweetly regulated intercourse of social life, is a masterful rule and a degrading servitude.

Nor are there wanting, upon the other hand, many foul degradations and cleaving curses to disturb the mind and wreck the peace of him who

keeps aloof from this Goshen of the soul, which none of these plagues afflicts.

The accidents of life come upon him like an armed man upon his sleeping foe. He has no consolation when the sight of his eyes is taken from him with a stroke, when the beauty of his health doth fail, or when disaster hath smitten the four corners of his house; but he feeleth like a dismantled ship upon the troubled waters, or like a desolate wreck upon the naked shore. And though the outward estate of ungodly men should be prosperous, they are ever liable to be scorched and consumed within the soul by many fires. The fever of passion, the rage of appetite, the heat of riot and intemperance, the ardour of unregulated love, the glow of indignation and the burning of revenge, and the other furies of unregenerate nature, are ever waiting an occasion to set the breast in a flame. And anon, like those unhappy regions of the earth which are alternately invaded by the pestilent Siroc of the South and the biting blasts of the North, the souls of such ungodly men are liable to as many invasions of an opposite kind. Disappointment of fond hope, defeat of strong desire, weariness of pleasure, the coldness of malice and hatred, the cruelty of wit and satire, and the indifference which every earthly good oft tasted begets -these, like scornful and deriding demons, lie in wait at the extremes and issues of all their eager pursuits, to reward them with mockery and cold disdain for yielding such willing obedience. To these outward and inward grievances, to which

they doom themselves that know not God, must be added many fears and intrusions from the world around:-the fear that fortune may desert those channels which now with full tide she filleth, and leave us naked and waste;-the fear that our hypocrisies may be detected, and our concealments disclosed to the eye of public scorn or legal. justice;--the fear of death, which will not be parried, but aye makes head again with every sickness; the intrusion of social customs upon our domestic liberty-the intrusion of fashionable follies upon our own good sense-the intrusion of rivals upon our beloved path-the intrusion of another's rights upon our rights, and the legal contentions to which this giveth rise; these, with many other fears and intrusions which it were tedious to enumerate, are ever trespassing upon that mind which is not placed under the regimen. of God-which is the only regimen that arms the soul and body at all points to meet its disasters, and gives it to dwell in a land from the border of which these invaders are scared away, as the frights and terrors of darkness are scared from the borders of light.

It doth therefore appear, that this government of God, whose unseen rewards we are about to disclose, is patronized during the whole of human life, by all the watchmen and guardians of our spiritual welfare; and that the adverse government of the world, whose unseen miseries we are also about to disclose, hath many warnings of an unhappy mind and an uneasy condition, to remove

men away from the evil. star under which they pass their lives. These goods and ills with which the soul is visited, according to the choice it makes, are the arguments which God has employed in order to make way for his revealed law, and being so sustained by every noble feeling and high interest of the soul, it argues in the man who remains impassive under such overpowering influences, a stupidity or obstinacy which cannot long coexist with the finer parts of human nature, or it argues him to be so over-mastered by some adverse sinful influence, as will likely carry him headlong into evil excesses. Accordingly it will be found that the fruit of deliberately rejecting the constitution of God, when conscience hath presented it in its proper amiable bearings, is either to sink the unfortunate party out of the region of the noble and the good, into besotted callousness and brute-like indifference to honourable avocations, or to drive him into the arms of some restless prone ambition, which pricks him with constant discontent, and urges him onward without control. There are, indeed, multitudes in every Christian land who get so involved with other knowledge and with other affairs, as never during the whole of life to come to the knowledge or the feeling of its value; these do not pay so dear a forfeit to their offended conscience and their despised God, but remain under the guidance of unrenewed nature and the sanction of worldly profit. But coolly to reject this dispensation of law and grace, when once it hath been known and felt, is to

commit a suicide upon the highest faculties of our nature and the highest hopes of our being. While to remain in voluntary ignorance of so sacred a treasure is the sign of barrenness and poverty of soul; and when some are found of a spontaneous fertility, they are incident to many a chilling and hostile invasion from the cold and scornful world, and deprived of that resource and consolation which the smile and sustenance of their good Father would have afforded them.

I know how boon Nature of her own self hath suggested deeds which blaze through dark ages like stars in the vault of night, and I know how bountiful a mother she is still in bearing sons and daughters strong in virtue and desirous of glory. But very often " they come to their own, and their own acknowledge them not." Their nobler parts disqualify them for vulgar sympathies, and their nobler aims draw down upon them vulgar envies and evil speakings. Power, rude power, often strips their early blossoms, and nips in the bud a new and noble fruit which might have propagated its kind over the fertile earth; or they languish for want of kindred, like exiles upon a foreign shore, whose noble nature the barbarous people never know. Their devices are abortive, or drop still-born, or die immature for want of fostering care. In proof of which I might adduce the unhappy sons of genius, " fallen on evil days and evil tongues;" patriots crushed as rebels by arbitrary power; discoverers treated as innovators by calculating self-interest, and inventors, whose