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about, away from our Father in heaven, to lie down, at last, in death, with the fallen leaves to cover us.

The spirit of Christianity is, secondly, a spirit of devotion. God, who compasseth the path of his servants, is also in all their thoughts. The idea of God can never present itself to the mind of a real Christian, when he is not prepared to entertain it; therefore it is never unpleasant, never oppressive. He sees God in everything; the ordinary, as well as the extraordinary; the minute, as well as the vast; the painful, the pleasant, the material, the intellectual. To him all other objects are secondary; God is ultimate. Therefore, while God lives, he lives within his influence, and can lose nothing, can want nothing. He cannot look out upon nature without carrying his thoughts to its Author; and all the happiness which meets his observation, the activity and health of the inferior orders of creatures, even the fruitfulness of the soil, the sunshine, the rain, the seed-time, the harvest, remind him of God, as we see an absent friend in the place where he sat, the books he has read, the lines he has written, or the tokens he has left us of his remembrance.

The world, the Christian lives in, is God's; the beings, he loves and converses with, are God's; the joys, he reaps, are God's gifts; the disappointments, he encounters, are God's arrangements; the changes in external nature, in his affections, his pleasures, his pains, are to him perpetual indications of God's superintending care.

A devotional spirit gives also a cast of sublimity to the most ordinary character. It is this spirit which consecrates the habits of a man's mind, and lifts him into such a sphere that angels may hold converse with him. He takes a station among the orders of God's creatures, which earthly

and sensual men, however dignified by fame or honor, may look up to with reverence. The peculiar character of Christian devotion, unlike all other, is filial. The access to God is free. Every embarrassment is removed from the sincere votary, and his worship must be frank, filial, simple, and reverential.

The spirit of Christianity is, thirdly, a spirit of love. I need not here repeat the passages which assure us that "he, that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him." If there ever was a scheme which had love for its origin, its tendency, and its consummation, it is that of the gospel. The man, who embraces it, shares a benefit with millions of individuals, it may be of worlds. It is impossible for a man, who is interested in the mediation of the Son of God, ever to feel as if he were alone in the world; for, in his relation to Jesus, he is bound to others by that fine union of sentiment, which cannot be felt in the perishing connexions of time.

Christianity binds us so closely to the happiness of the universe that the Christian rejoices continually in the prospect of good. He sacrifices, without a sigh, innumerable personal accommodations to that comprehensive object of benevolence, the recovery of human nature. He must inevitably grow rich himself, as well as enrich others, by every privation to which he submits for the sake of those for whom Jesus died.

He must also find perpetual satisfaction in the exercise of Christian love; because there is not a man on earth, who has not some claim to his interest. In the prospective benevolence of God, we are all equally dear. And even now, when we find ourselves among innumerable pilgrims, travelling to the same grave, wanting the same consolations,

exposed to the same fearful changes, the same heart-rending sorrows, and even the same final loss, and, at last, brought forth by the same resurrection to stand before the same Judge, with an untried region of life before us; and when we add to this the single word, eternity, even the poor embryo, who scarcely may be called an intellectual being, is to the Christian a precious life.

Once more; the spirit of Christianity is a spirit of joy. Not that the tranquillity of a Christian is not liable to be disturbed by the pains and sufferings of human nature, or that he exhibits the inconsiderate folly of the perpetually riotous and gay. But the state of his affections should be that of humble and devoted traquillity. To rejoice in the paternal character of a Being of whose presence you can never be unconscious, to adore a Being of whose protection you can never despair, or whose direction of your lot you can never suppose to be otherwise than merciful and just, is, surely, all that can be necessary to permanent joy.

It is the spirit of Christianity, to rejoice in the present, the past; and the future. In the present, because our joys and sorrows are not, at this moment, ultimate, but means to a future end. What we call calamity, or good fortune, in the affairs of states, or of individuals, in the eye of a Christian, are only footsteps of the revolutions of Providence, which are not to be dwelt upon with anxious interest. He rejoices in the past, because he has found, in his own experience, that what he dreaded, as sufferings, are truly pleasures in retrospection; and what he regarded as disappointments proved blessings in disguise. He rejoices in the future, because it is God's, and God's only; and, as he approaches the period of his own dissolution, he

finds the western hemisphere lighted up with streaks of setting lustre, and he looks forward, with humble hope, to an eternity of progressive improvement and happiness.

My friends, I can extend these remarks no further. Believe me, whatever we may call ourselves, whatever, in the hour of occasional reflection, we may wish to be, — it remains as certain as the word of God, "if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his ;" and the fruit of this spirit will always be "righteousness, and peace, and joy in the holy ghost." May God correct our errors, inspire our breasts, and teach us to feel the spirit of his religion!

SERMON VIII.

MATTHEW Xxii. 5.

BUT THEY MADE LIGHT OF IT, AND WENT THEIR

WAYS.

THE difference in the circumstances of Christians at the present day, and at the introduction of the gospel, is truly astonishing. The change in the external circumstances of the church, and, of course, in the nature of the temptations to which men are exposed upon assuming the Christian name, merit, my friends, our most serious consideration. Then it was a name of unequalled reproach. Christians were everywhere, at first, confounded by the pagan world with the Jews, among whom the new religion took its rise; and the name of Jew was then synonymous with all that was base, odious, and despicable. The situation of Christians among the Jews themselves was even less tolerable than among heathens. They were regarded as apostates from Moses, and traitors to God. The assemblies of the persecuted disciples were, at first, held in secret, often under ground, and usually in the night. He, who had the courage to enter this community, renounced, by this single act, every worldly prospect, and, not seldom, all the peace and credit of his life. Often was the Christian obliged to sever the tenderest ties of consanguinity, and, instead of love, to meet with hatred; instead of honor, with reproach; instead of peace, with persecution; instead of consequence,

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