person tried for an offense, and know him to be innocent; if I hear the verdict of the jury, "guilty," and the sentence of the judge, "death ;" and if I have the secret that explains his innocence: for me to be silent is to be in my measure accessory to the death of that innocent man. If I see persons laboring under a fatal epidemic, while I possess the medicine that is its specific antidote, if such there be; and if, possessing that medicine, and knowing its efficacy, I withhold it from those who are perishing, most assuredly I am guilty, not only in the sight of man, but in the judgment of God, of manslaughter. If I possess a knowledge that illuminates the ignorant, conveys pardon to the guilty, plants regeneration in the hearts of the corrupt and the fallen, and if possessed of that light, I refuse to spread it; if acquainted with the secret of a world's restoration, I feed myself upon that secret and taste its sweetness, but resolve to monopolize it: I do say, that if peradventure safe through the blood of sprinkling, it will be a safety destitute of the repose, the happiness, the joy of them who, saints by grace, have toiled as servants to express their gratitude to him that loved them and died for them. But, in fact, it is scarcely possible to believe and accept a magnificent and saving truth, and yet to keep it in selfish monopoly to ourselves. A truth that we do not spread, either we scarcely believe, or we very inadequately appreciate. Whoever heartily believes a precious truth, that truth he never can keep to himself. The efforts that you make to spread God's truth are the exponents of the depth of the impression it has made on your hearts. What is selfishly retained or indolently enjoyed, we have never grasped as we should, or tasted its sweetness as it is, or appreciated justly in its own intrinsic magnificence and greatness. That man who honestly accepts an error, believing that error to be truth, is much more a truth-holder than the man who accidentally accepts the truth, but has never examined thoroughly whether it be a truth or a falsehood. Truth never is accepted as it should be until it be incorporated with our nature; the lights of our intellects, the scepter in our conscience, the life in our hearts, and a ceaseless missionary influence in our conduct and converse in the world. It is possible, but not frequent, that the word of life shall be held in its intrinsic vitality in a man's heart, and yet that he never has made an effort to spread it; just as seeds of corn have been kept in the Egyptian pyramids in the hands of mummies, shut up in their stony coffins, without germinating. Nevertheless, the instant that those seeds were brought to the light, under the rains, and the sunbeams, and the prolific earth, they did eventually grow; so if the seeds, the incorruptible seeds of living truth, have been scattered in your hearts, and honestly received, yet have remained torpid and unprolific hitherto; now that you are made to feel your responsibility, and what Christ has done for you, and what God commands you to do for him, are clearly and plainly impressed, those living seeds, if such have been really and truly received into your hearts, will begin for

the first time to bud, and grow up, and bear fruit in some thirty, in some sixty, and in some a hundred fold.

It is not improbable that the truth of God itself received into the heart as a dead, dry, and unprolific thing, proves not a blessing, but the reverse. The best and most nutritious food eaten, but not incorporated into our animal economy, by the process of digestion, becomes poison; the purest truth taken into the intellect, left there, never “read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested," instead of being nourishing food to the soul, becomes a destructive poison. The truth in every shape, within and without, is either a savor of life, or it is a savor of death. Truth believed, but not lived, loved, and acted out, is a savor of death; truth believed, lived, loved, incorporated into our hearts, cherished not as a dogma, but a life, not as a notion, but an experience, is the savor of life to ourselves and of life unto life among all with whom we come into contact. To hold forth the word of everlasting life is not only the duty, the privilege, but the instinctive desire, prayer, and effort of all that know the truth in its saving and sanctifying power. And when I open this blessed Book, and look at the characteristics of them who have received and believed the word of everlasting life as delineated there, I see that every figure under which a Christian is set forth, every light in which he is seen, every angle at which he is viewed by the sacred penmen, indicate that he is designed of God to diffuse the knowledge of that glorious gospel which he has received from God in his distinguishing grace. "Ye are the lights of the world," to spread around you its kindling splendors. Or, if yours be a lower position, "ye are the salt of the earth," silently and quietly to penetrate with its restorative and preservative powers the whole surrounding mass. Every Christian is made what he is in order that he may be a means of making others what they should be; we are by God's grace made lights, in order that in providence we may be luminous; we have received, in order that we may give. The means of giving, the mode in which we act upon the world, may be various as circumstances in this life are; but the force with which we act upon the world is just the measure of the vitality of living religion in our hearts; for he that is not a blessing must necessarily be a blot. No man can be a blank in a world so constituted as ours. God's great design in giving his grace, is to make us the privileged, and joy. ous, and consecrated distributors of what he has given. The largest recipient in the Church is meant thereby to become instantly the greatest giver among mankind. The Christian heart is not the barren sand that receives the sun-beams and dew-drops, and absorbs them, and yields nothing in return: but the fertile soil that, warmed by the sun, and in itself richly endowed by him that originally made it, is to respond to its privileges, and its possession, by many a joyous and golden harvest. And we know, too, by a very beautiful law that he that is the greatest giver is always the happiest man. What parts of the earth seem to

Not

smile with the richest joy and to reflect the greatest happiness? its barren sands, nor its deserts, but its most fertile, and prolific spots. And what are the words that denote the intensest happiness? Words that mean living out of self, and going from self. What is meant by the word ecstacy? the intensest joy that human nature feels-standing out of one's self; making self no more the center and the basis of our action, but sacrificing self in order to do good to others. And what is the meaning of the word transport, ecstatic joy? Being carried beyond one's self, and subdued, absorbed, floated into a current of irrepressible beneficence and love. And hence our blessed Lord has uttered what is deep thought, worthy of being deeply pondered: "It is more blessed," not, as it is sometimes read at the Royal Exchange, to receive than to give, but as they read it in heaven, and as it is felt by Christian hearts upon earth, "It is more blessed to give than it is to receive." Our Lord has thus so constituted them that are the recipients of his grace, that they shall be the greatest distributors of it. It is his own great plan for spreading upon earth the grand truths that are inspired from heaven; and he that fails to spread the truth, is just in that fact as criminal as he that refuses to accept the truth; for both are ordinances and appointments of Heaven. I must add what is equally true, that the man who refuses to give, will very soon discover that he has very little worth giving. A limb that is rarely used, loses its muscular power, and grows feeble; coins that are not in currency, soon become corroded; the keys that open not the stores of beneficence, will soon rust; and a Christianity, that lives in itself and for itself only, is a Christianity that gives very equivocal evidence of its birth-place, heaven, and contains very little that will enable it to last and outlive the strifes, the trials, and the temptations, of this present world. It is a law lasting as the economy of grace, "to him that hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, shall be taken, even that which he hath." The well of living water which is planted in every individual heart the moment it is inspired and taken possession of by the Holy Spirit of God, does not increase its water and augment its volume by remaining still; on the contrary, the more it wells up and pours forth in multitudinous rivulets upon this world's deserts, the more it draws from its parent depths of everlasting life. He that is made a saint by grace, will instantly become a servant by obligation; and the evidence, the greatest, brightest, evidence of his saintship, are the toils and sacrifices of his service to men for Christ's sake.

The great truth that Christ died a sacrifice for our sins, is the greatest motive that can possibly be urged for the great sacrifices that Christians can make. Jesus came from a height so high, that our soaring thoughts can not climb to it; and he came down to a depth of woe, and agony, and misery, so unfathomable, that no plumb-line of ours can sound it; and he endured a distress within and a torture without so far beyond

precedent, and above parallel, that he cried, in 'ts noontide agony, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" He lived for us, he died for us, he suffered for us, he sacrificed for us. What are we doing for him? It was these lips of ours that shouted, "Away with him, away with him!" It is surely right, it is surely proper they should be consecrated to say now, "Come, behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world." It was these hands of ours that crucified him; what more natural than that these hands of ours should now distribute the bread of everlasting life? He came to save us; we had no claim upon him; and he had no inducement out of himself to come to us, but in his great love, and for no other reason, he died for us: the least that we can do is to carry out as far as we can those unsearchable riches, and that blessed gospel which will bring others to the brightness of his rising, and make the rest of the world as happy as it has made us.

From Jesus we have received the words of eternal life. Let us reflect them on the wide world. Let us bring all we can within the hearing of this sweet music, these saving strains, these words of eternal life.

His words are going round the earth, and awakening echoes in its remotest districts. They are translated into every tongue. They are preached and heard by increasing thousands, from the pine forests of the North, to the palm groves of the East. They mingle with the hum of busy cities, and are reflected in the sheen of great rivers. They are carried in the soldier's knapsack, and give him happy thoughts amid the privations of the Crimea. They lie under the sailor's pillow, and make Sunday all sunshine on the Euxine and the Baltic. They are pronounced at our weddings; they hallow our graves; they give names and blessings to our children. Can these words be of earth, or of time, or of man, that so widely spread, so sweetly sound, so gloriously cheer? Is it reasonable to come to any other conclusion than that they are words of eternal life; that they come from heaven, and lead to heaven? Other words of poet, and novelist, and orator, come and go, and often leave no impression beyond the transient interest or amusement of the day. But these words are living; they strike deeply and last long. They have almost creative force. Applied by the Spirit of God, they prove incorruptible and living seeds in the heart in which they are sown. Very soon all that man fears or loves, in this world, will pass away. But the word of the Lord abideth forever, striking its roots deeper in the convictions of the thoughtful, and occupying a larger space in the affections of the good. Blessed thought! stones may fall and temples decay, and basilicas and cathedrals crumble into the dust, and the great pyramids descend into the sands that day by day accumulate about them. But thy word, O God, like thy throne, is from everlasting to everlasting; and thy truth, like thy kingdom, has no end.

DISCOURSE XLIX.

JAMES BUCHANAN, D.D., LL.D.

THE distinguished successor of Dr. Chalmers in the chair of Systematic Theology, in New College, Edinburg, was born at Paisley in the year 1804. His father, James Buchanan, Esq., was an elder of the Church, and a magistrate of the borough. Until the time of the disruption in 1843, Dr. Buchanan was attached to the Established Church of Scotland, when he joined the Free Church, of which he may, perhaps, be called the intellectual leader. He was educated in the grammar-school at Paisley, and in the University of Glasgow; and, in 1828, ordained to the charge of the Chapel of Ease, at Roslin. A year later he came to his charge in the parish of North Leith, where he continued till the year 1840, when he was transferred to the High Church of Edinburg. Three years later he became pastor of the Free Church of St. Stephen's, and in 1845 was appointed Professor of Apologetic Theology, in New College, on the translation of Dr. Cunningham to the chair of Church History. At the death of Dr. Chalmers, in 1847, he was appointed to the vacant professorship, a position which he has filled with honor ever since.

Dr. Buchanan is the author of several works; as, "Comfort in Affliction" (which has reached its twenty-first edition); "Office and Work of the Holy Spirit;" "Faith in God and Modern Atheism Compared ;" and several smaller works, such as "Address to the People of Scotland" (of which 200,000 copies were circulated), “On Tracts for the Times," and "On Church Establishments."

His "Modern Atheism," in part, has recently been printed in this country, and is received with very great favor. It is one of the ablest works of recent British authorship; and, as a specimen of profound, luminous, discriminating, and conclusive reasoning upon an abstract subject, is not often excelled. A leading journal remarks, that "we have nowhere met with a more clear and complete outline of the several systems he exposes. Comte's Positive Philosophy, Oken's Theories of Development, Kant's Transcendentalism, Fichte's, Hegel's, and Schelling's Pantheism, with other similar forms of disguised Atheism, which have originated on the Continent, and thence been disseminated throughout England and America, are explained in their essential features so plainly and fully as to make them comprehensible by the most unlettered reader. He is, besides, eminently fair and just in his outline, allowing the strong points of each system to appear. His argument, in considering them, is conclusive and convincing, affording a most satisfactory refutation of these fallacious theories."

Dr. Buchanan has published few sermons, as such; but we have his own authority for presenting the following as a specimen of his discourses.