SERMONS.

SERMON I.

TRUST IN THE LORD.

PSALM Xiii. 6.

My trust is in thy mercy, and my heart is joyful in thy salvation. I will sing of the Lord because he hath dealt so lovingly with me: yea, I will praise the name of the Lord most Highest.

THESE were the words, not simply of one who had tasted that the Lord was gracious, but of one to whom it was a present comfort to pour out the song of fervent thanksgiving; and these will be the words, through all time, of the faithful soul in its course onwards, when musing on the dealings of its benevolent God and Saviour towards itself, till songs of gratitude shall, beyond the grave, issue in hymns of triumph

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and victory. A sweeter and a purer joy on this side of that stepping-stone to eternity, it is not in the power of any of God's children to enjoy. They are here walking (it is true) in all the sustaining and cheering confidence of those who know in whom they have believed, and who, on the safest possible ground, are privileged to feel confident that "He who hath begun a good work in them will complete it even unto the end;"they are authorized to indulge a sure hope, that "henceforth there is laid up for them a crown of righteousness, which the Lord the righteous judge shall give them at the day of his appearing;"they are led to foster the scriptural assurance, that they shall be carried on further from strength to strength, and be more and more fitted and made "meet for the inheritance of the saints in light;"-they have the inward warmth and light and testimony of God's Spirit, sealing and witnessing that they are his children in their renewed heart and nature;-they have within themselves going on and increasing, a conformity with the image of their adored and risen Lord; they have a savour of heavenly things pervading and elevating all their views and desires; they evince, in short, in their walk and conversation, the legible definite stamp of the effectual work of grace in the holy, lovely, tangible and gentle features of a spiritually-minded believer;—and in all this they doubtless find a

peace and a blessedness words could never yet describe, and the unconverted man could never yet conceive; but still (with a confident appeal to those who are most experienced in the Christian life) we recur to the position, that the heart of the purest saint has no joy like that of recounting the mercies of its covenant God,-and the lips of the dearest and the most devoted of his children on earth, pour forth no strain so rapturous as that of the song of gratitude, to their ever tender, ever watchful Father.

This, the sweet singer of Israel seems energetically to assert in the words of our text: "My heart is joyful in thy salvation!" Surrounded as he had been by active and malignant foes,betrayed by faithless and treacherous friends,deserted and left in nearly hopeless despair at junctures the most critical and dangerous,provoking the Lord by his own sins to withdraw the shield with which he had long been covered, -wandering forlorn and comfortless over the crags and the deserts of a country remarkable, not more for its wild sublimity than for its bleak, inhospitable and defenceless solitudes, and while himself harassed by the penury of his resources of every kind, assailed by legions opulent in arms, in numbers and in power, all concentrated to the one object of his own personal destruction, reviewing, in a word, all the circumstances of his most eventful history, -as there passed before his

memory each successive incident, pregnant with evidence of the vigilant protection and unfailing providence of his God, well could he exclaim, with the emphasis of a soul overflowing with gratitude, "I will sing of the Lord because he hath dealt so lovingly with me!"-Yes, he could go, as he did go, to his beloved minstrelsy with a heart full charged with the theme of his heavenly preserver's goodness, and at an hour when the night wind's sigh was concurrent with his own soft strain, and the starlight of the eastern heavens beamed mildly on his uplifted eye-at such an hour he caused the still valleys of Judea to re-echo the music of his praise,-and a richer melody to float upon the air than that of the martial blast of the past anxious day,-at such an hour, while his wearied followers lay confusedly before him, locked in the chains of welcome and longed for sleep,-he, more mindful of his never-sleeping benefactor, swept from the strings of his harp that sweet anthem of allcheering trust in Israel's God, whose sounds indeed we never shall hear below, but whose deep instruction it is our happiness to discover and appropriate to our own eternal good!

Now, my brethren, how are the motives to a similar outpouring in songs of adoring love multiplied upon us !-How are we called on by considerations ten thousand times more stirring at the fountains of the heart, to declare that "the

Lord hath dealt most lovingly with us! With what increased velocity and strength must we feel the pulse of our soul beat, in the remembrance of the salvation wrought out for us by the mercy of the Lord! David felt that a special providence continually shielded him from danger, -and that between his life and death a hair's breadth was broader than the interval he was daily carried safely through: in his very weakness he was made more powerful than his leagued foes, he was forcibly led to the conclusion that a wisdom and a mercy beyond all human reach had raised him up for great ends among the people of his nation, and recollecting all this and, more than all this, remembering the Lord's long forbearance and entire pardon of his own great crimes, he was bowed to the dust in a sense of his own extreme unworthiness and of the unfailing goodness which had always hung over him. Of God, as a Saviour of his body, he knew much and he thought profoundly; but of God, as the Saviour of his soul, all he knew was seen through the (by no means transparent) robe of prophecy,-and therefore in the moments of his most ardent thanksgiving, and in the experience of his deepest-toned spirituality, he wanted that true stimulus to a believer's gratitude, which we have in the records of redeeming love towards lost and undone sinners. Consequently, his fervent declaration, that his "trust