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the sins of pride, and self-confidence, and forgetfulness of God, are at this very day only too common amongst ourselves. Too apt, as we are at all times, to leave God out of mind, and more especially so when we are prosperous; when riches increase, corruption of manners commonly increases with them. When men dwell securely, in full peace and health, they grow to be careless in religion: God is not much present with them, they seem to be in no need of God, they seem sufficient, of themselves to keep themselves, and to make themselves happy, they live as if they should never die, should never be summoned to appear before God, to give account of all their works, of all their possessions, or of how they have used those possessions. Oh! my brethren, what a warning to us, when such is the case, is the punishment that fell upon David and his people, for his pride and forgetfulness of God. Oh! how it behoves us to keep our hearts with all diligence, to watch against pride, against self-confidence, against forgetting God. We know not how near we may be to the day of our reckoning, we know not when the word may go forth, to break up our prosperity, to visit our careless living, to recall us as a nation to a deeper sense of what is due to God. Nay, are there not signs even now and for the last years, that God is displeased with the current of His favour is stayed?

two or three us, and that Certain I am

that there is much done day by day to provoke God to visit us-ungodliness enough of every kind, Sabbath breaking, drunkenness, strife, evil speaking, neglect of religion among us, quite enough to endanger our nation's welfare, quite sufficient to call down chastisement upon us from the Almighty, to cause Him to plague us with divers diseases, and sundry kinds of death.

Let us judge ourselves that we be not judged by the Lord. Let us fear more the Lord our God, and serve Him in truth with all our heart, for consider how great things He hath done for us.

We do not half know our mercies till we think them over, and hear what sufferings and calamities. befall our brethren in other lands: take the three sore judgments proposed to David-war, famine, and pestilence-how little do we know by experience of any of these! As for war in our land, there is not a man living who has seen it. It is now more than two hundred years ago that the last battle was fought on English ground. Since then there have been long and bloody wars abroad. Wars in the Crimea, in India, in Italy, in Germany, and in all parts of the world-but the sword has not come nigh us. The flaming homestead, the trampled fields, we have heard of them in other countries, but we have had no experience of them in our own dear favoured land, and that is one great mercy we have received

of the Lord. And who can tell of one single village where people have been pined, as they were in Ireland, as they have been in China, and even in India, for the want of a morsel of bread? Not onethen again I say it-the Lord's "mercies" to us at home" are great."

And once more-what do we know by actual experience of pestilence? Once or twice in my recollection the cholera has touched (and only touched) our shores. It has never raged among us, as it has raged in other countries. It is about two hundred and twenty years since the great plague devastated London, in the reign of Charles II.; that plague broke out in 1665, and in five months carried away about a hundred thousand souls. On the third January in that year half the houses in London were marked and inscribed with this inscription "The Lord have mercy upon us." But from that year to the present what have we or our fathers known of plague in England? So little, that but for the mention of it in our Litany, but for the prayer "from plague, pestilence, and famine, Good Lord, deliver us," it might be a thing forgotten.

Surely this is a matter for very great thankfulness; surely it is of the Lord's very great mercies-not for our own worthiness-that we have been kept these many years, from plague, from famine, from war. Yes! the Lord's mercies to us and to our forefathers

are exceeding great. Such mercies call for acknowledgment, call for our thankfulness, call for our praise!

And David-we read in 1 Chron. xxix. 20-and David said to all the congregation, "Now bless the Lord your God. And all the congregation blessed the Lord God of their fathers, and bowed down their heads, and worshipped the Lord." So let it be with us to-day: "Bless ye the Lord! Praise Him, and magnify Him for ever." "Bless ye the Lord, be telling of His salvation from day to day— for the Lord is great, and cannot worthily be praised, there is no end of His greatness. Blessed is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God." "The Lord Thy God, O Sion, shall be King, for evermore, and throughout all generations." Thou art a God that hast" pity upon thine inheritance, and refreshest it when it is weary." "Thou hast not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities."

"Let me now fall into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are great; but let me not fall into the hand of man."

SERMON XVII.

ASPIRATIONS.

PSALM XLIII. 3.

"O send out Thy light and Thy truth, that they may lead me; and bring me into Thy holy hill, and to Thy dwelling."

THIS forty-third Psalm, and the Psalm that goes before it, were composed by David under circumstances of great trouble. He was a fugitive, and an exile from Jerusalem, driven out by the rebellion of Absalom, deprived of his kingdom, a wanderer upon the barren hills of Judæa, shut out from his royal home, and from what he most cared for, from the house of God in Jerusalem. In his banishment, his heart turned to the privileges he had lost, and in strains of touching beauty he mourns his condition

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