truth increase; your hatred of sin, your love of the Saviour, your resignation of your own will, your devotedness to the will of God, grow and strengthen while you hear?

hear? And do you act honestly and faithfully according to your convictions, renouncing such things as the word of God forbids, and cultivating such affections of heart, and practising such duties, as it commands? These are proofs of hearing and attending to the word preached; proofs, without which your bodily presence in this house of prayer will be found, at the last day, to have profited you nothing.

But we must conclude this instructive story;-Lydia was converted, truly converted to the faith of Jesus Christ, and received "the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace," for she was baptized with her household:her children-for she rightly believed that the promises are to us and to our seed, and that in bringing them to bap

tism, she was, as far as in her lay, bringing them to Christ; her servants—for it would appear that it pleased God to bless the preaching of the apostles in due time, to the conversion of her whole house.

The fruits of her own change of heart were immediately apparent in her life and conversation, for she thus addressed St. Paul and his companions 66 If If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house and abide there. And she constrained us." It was thus that as soon as her heart was opened to receive Christ, her house was opened to receive His people as soon as her affections were united to the Saviour, they were united to the saints: demonstrating that hers was "a faith which worketh by love," and which made her willing, for the sake of her divine Master, to entertain the poorest and most despised among his servants, and this at the obvious hazard of contempt and obloquy, and even of persecution and death itself. My brethren,

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if yours be the faith of Lydia, it will be as lively, as operative, as influential; it will rejoice in every good and holy work, especially towards them which are of the household of faith;" it will induce you to seek the society and friendship of those on earth with whom you hope to dwell throughout eternity; you will love the poorest and meanest of the people of Christ, in proportion to the clearness with which His image is impressed upon them; you will delight in alleviating their sorrows, in supplying their necessities, in administering to their comforts; thus, according to our Lord's most remarkable injunction," making to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; turning the devil's weapons against himself, by employing the wealth with which he would overwhelm and suffocate your spiritual life, into an instrument to advance the glory of God, the happiness of His people, and the measure of your own temporal and eternal felicity.

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LECTURE X.

ACTS XVI. 25.

"AND AT MIDNIGHT PAUL AND SILAS PRAYED, AND SANG PRAISES UNTO GOD; AND THE PRISONERS HEARD THEM."

AFTER the conversion of Lydia, which formed the subject of our last lecture, we find St. Paul remaining still at Philippi, no longer in obscurity, but brought, by the incident upon which we are about to comment, into great and painful notoriety.

For the purpose of spreading still more widely in Philippi the good seed, of which he had made a commencement "at the river's side," St. Paul appears to have

gone thither every day to speak upon the same blessed and profitable truths. Perhaps the little company of devout women who worshipped there had added to their numbers, and were daily bringing others, from among their relatives and friends, to listen to the life-giving words which fell from the lips of the apostle.

However this may have been, one thing is certain, that our spiritual enemy began to envy his success, and determined, so far as in him lay, to obstruct and to ruin it. The method by which he attempted to carry into effect his guilty design was a very remarkable one; it was not, as he had done in the case of our Lord and the apostles, by ridiculing and degrading the teachers, and by controverting and bringing into contempt the doctrines; far from it: his present plan of attack was infinitely less obvious, but in proportion more dangerous and destructive. You shall hear it in the evangelist's own words: "As we went to