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on my arrival: ye sequester me from happiness and heroism, closeting me with sickness and infirmity: ye make not of me, nor use me for, your guide to wisdom and prudence, put me into a place in your last of duties, and withdraw me to a mere corner of your time; and most of ye set me at naught and utterly disregard me. I come, the fulness of the knowledge of God; angels delighted in my company, and desired to dive into my secrets. But ye, mortals, place masters over me, subjecting me to the discipline and dogmatism of men, and tutoring me in your schools of learning. I came not to be silent in your dwellings, but to speak welfare to you and to your children. I came to rule, and my throne to set up in the hearts of men. Mine ancient residence was the bosom of God; no residence will I have but the soul of an immortal; and if you had entertained me, I should have possessed you of the peace which I had with God, "when I was with Him and was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him. Because I have called you and ye have refused, I have stretched out my hand and no man regarded; but ye have set at naught all my counsel, and would none of my reproof; I also will laugh at your calamity, and mock when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind, when distress and anguish cometh upon you. Then shall they cry upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me."

THE VOICE OF SCRIPTURE-Continued.

EDWARD IRVING.

Go visit a desolate widow with consolation, and help, and fatherhood of her orphan children-do it again and again, and your presence, the second of your approaching footstep, the soft utterance of your voice, the very mention of your name, shall come to dilate her heart with a fulness which defies her tongue to utter, but speaking by the tokens of a swimming eye, and clasped hands, and fervent ejaculations to Heaven upon your head! No less copious acknowledgment of God, the Author of our well-being, and the Father of our better hopes, ought we to feel when His Word discloseth to us the excess of His love. Though a veil be now cast over the Majesty which speaks, it is the voice of the Eternal which we hear, coming in soft cadences to win our favor, yet omnipotent as the voice of the thunder, and overpowering as the rushing of many waters. And though the veil of the future intervene between our hand and the promised goods, still are they from His lips who speaks and it is done, who commands, and all things stand fast. With no less emotion, therefore, should this Book be opened, than if, like him in the Apocalypse, you saw the voice which

spake; or, like him in the trance, you were into the third heaven translated, company and communing with the realities of glory which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived.

DAVID'S SIN.

BISHOP WHITE.

Ir sometimes happens in a human government that, in the administration of its powers, there is expected to be kept in view some prominent object, connected perhaps with local interests, or perhaps with a certain cast of national character, associated in idea with former events, and with reverence of the wisdom of former times. In estimating the merits of the chief ruler of such a country, we should contemplate him with some reference to the peculiarities of his station, not to the excusing of him from the law of moral right, suited to all persons, and places, and times; but to the making of favorable allowances on the score of his sacred regard to the principles of the constitution. In the theocracy administered by David, the highest duty lying on him was the sustaining of the prerogative of the Great King under whose delegated authority he reigned. In either of the cases stated, our commendations of the ruler in his public acts are not to be tested exclusively by the rule of moral right, and without regard to the claims of official character. It was on a different ground that he stood accountable at the bar of God.

BELIEF IN GOD'S EXISTENCE.

JONATHAN MAXCY.

NEVER be tempted to disbelieve the existence of God, when everything around you proclaims it in a language too plain not to be understood. Never cast your eyes on creation without having your souls expanded with this sentiment, "There is a God!" When you survey this globe of earth, with all its appendages-when you behold it inhabited by numberless ranks of creatures, all moving in their proper spheres, all verging to their proper ends, all animated by the same great source of life, all supported at the same great bounteous table; when you behold not only the earth, but the ocean and the air, swarming with living creatures, all happy in their situation-when you behold yonder sun darting a vast blaze of glory over the heavens, garnishing mighty worlds, and waking ten thousand songs of praise-when you ⚫ behold unnumbered systems diffused through vast immensity, clothed in splendor, and rolling in majesty-when you behold these things, your affections will rise above all the vanities of time, your full souls will struggle with ecstasy, and your reason, passions, and feelings, all

united, will rush up to the skies, with a devout acknowledgment of the wisdom, existence, power, and goodness of God. Let us behold Him, let us wonder, praise, adore. These things will make us happy. They will wean us from vice, and attach us to virtue.

As a belief of the existence of God is a fundamental point of salvation, he who denies it runs the greatest conceivable hazard. He resigns the satisfaction of a good conscience, quits the hope of a happy immortality, and exposes himself to destruction. All this for what? for the short-lived pleasure of a riotous, dissolute life. How wretched when he finds his atheistical confidence totally destroyed! Instead of his beloved sleep and insensibility, with which he so fondly flattered himself, he will find himself still existing after death, removed to a strange place; he will then find there is a God, who will not suffer his rational beings to fall into annihilation as a refuge from the just punishment of their crimes; he will find himself doomed to drag on a wretched train of existence in unavailing woe and lamentation. Alas! how astonished will he be to find himself plunged into the abyss of ruin und desperation! God forbid that any of us should act so unwisely as to disbelieve, when everything around us proclaims His existence!

ness.

THE GOSPEL FOR THE POOR.

JOHN M. MASON.

FROM the remotest antiquity there have been, in all civilized nations, men who devoted themselves to the increase of knowledge and happiTheir speculations were subtile, their arguings acute, and many of their maxims respectable. But to whom were their instructions addressed? To casual visiters, to selected friends, to admiring pupils, to privileged orders! In some countries, and on certain occasions, when vanity was to be gratified by the acquisition of fame, their appearances were more public. For example, one read a poem, another a history, and a third a play, before the crowd assembled at the Olympic games. To be crowned there, was, in the proudest period of Greece, the summit of glory and ambition. But what did this, what did the mysteries of pagan worship, or what the lectures of pagan philosophy, avail the people? Sunk in ignorance, in poverty, in crime, they lay neglected. Age succeeded age, and school to school; a thousand sects and systems rose, flourished, and fell; but the degradation of the multitude remained. Not a beam of light found its way into their darkness, nor a drop of consolation into their cup. Indeed a plan of raising them to the dignity of rational enjoyment, and fortifying them against the disasters of life, was not to be expected: for as nothing can exceed the contempt in which they were held by the professors of wisdom; so any

human device, however captivating in theory, would have been worthless in fact. The most sagacious heathen could imagine no better means of improving them than the precepts of his philosophy. Now, supposing it to be ever so salutary, its benefits must have been confined to a very few; the notion that the bulk of mankind may become philosophers, being altogether extravagant. They ever have been, and, in the nature of things, ever must be, unlearned. Besides, the grovelling superstition and brutal manners of the heathen, presented insuperable obstacles. Had the plan of their cultivation been even suggested, especially if it comprehended the more abject of the species, it would have been universally derided, and would have merited derision, no less than the dreams of modern folly about the perfectibility of man.

THE SOCIETY OF HEAVEN.

GREGORY T. BEDELL

WHAT a glorious society! Innumerable company of angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim! Thousands of thousands ministered unto Him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him. This is

a part of the society. The spirits of just men made perfect; believers made perfect; their labors finished; their trials over; their race run; the goal reached; the prize obtained; the crown won; the general assembly and Church of the first-born.

What a glorious society! Saints who have served the Lord during every successive period of the world, from righteous Abel to the very last of those who, when the Lord shall come a second time, shall be caught up to meet Him in the air, and so to be ever with the Lord. There is a degree of melancholy grandeur in the idea of a heathen of old, who, amid all the darkness, and ignorance, and superstition in which he lived, could compose his mind to death in the supposition that, in the Elysian fields of his mythology, he should meet with Plato, and with Socrates, and with Homer, and with Hesiod, and a host of other illustrious worthies, and spend his eternity with them in a philosophy refined from the grossness of earth. Miserable comfort! his Elysian fields were fables, not even cunningly devised. "But we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens;" and in those mansions of eternal glory are to be found the martyred Abel; that patriarch who walked with God, and was translated without tasting death; that father of the faithful, Abraham, with Isaac and Jacob, Moses, Joshua, prophets, priests and kings, apostles, martyrs, and innumerable servants of the Lord less distinguished; thousands of thousands, gathered out of every tribe, and kindred, and people, and from every age and generation of the world.

INFLUENCE OF HEAVENLY GLIMPSES.

II. MELVILL.

Ir were a strange thought, that a glimpse of heaven will make one less alive to the afflictions of earth. Shall the having gazed, though but for an instant, on what is pure, and peaceable, and bright, diminish his sensibility to the pollution and turmoil of the scene in which he still dwells? Shall he, when he returns from his lofty flight, and comes down from his splendid excursion, to engage once more in the business of probation, and be again occupied with keeping under the body, and disciplining unruly passions-shall he, think you, feel less than before the irksomeness of the combat with corruption, or be more at home in the wilderness through which his path lies? Oh, it is not the view of heaven which will lighten the burden laid on us by our sinfulness. I had almost said, it will increase that burden. Indeed, it is not possible that a believer should have gazed on the fair spreadings of the saint's home, and contemplated, however distantly, what God hath prepared for him as a member of his Son, and not have strengthened in the feeling, that heaven is worth all his strivings, and in the resolve, that he will wrestle for its happiness. But I cannot think that he will be more at ease than before in a world which will only seem drearier by contrast. I cannot think that the having listened to the harpings of angels will make the storm and the discord sound less offensively. I cannot think that because he has tasted the fresh waters of the river of life, he will find less bitterness in the wormwood which sin will yet infuse into his cup. I cannot think that, with the earnests in possession, he will be other than more intense in his longings for the perfect fruition. And therefore do I believe that, the richer his anticipations of heaven, the deeper will be his cry, "O that I had the wings of a dove! for then would I flee away and be at rest." So that an apostle, and that apostle, St. Paul, who had actually trodden the firmament, and seen what saints enjoy, and heard what seraphs sing, was of all others the most likely to feel the pressure of spiritual anxieties, and to sigh for deliverance; and who then shall wonder at his using language which shows that he included himself, and other true believers, in his description of a groaning and waiting creation, "The earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God ?” From "Sermons.”

THE IMPORTANT TRUTH.

II. MELVILL.

Ir there be a cause of exultation, a motive for rejoicing, to a fallen creature, must it not be that he is still dear to his Maker, that notwithstanding all which he hath done to provoke Divine wrath, and make

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