TO

THE REVEREND EDWARD CHURTON, M. A.,

CANON OF YORK,

ETC., ETC.,

This Volume is inscribed;

IN GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

OF THE BLESSING

OF HIS FRIENDSHIP, HIS COUNSELS,

AND

HIS EXAMPLE,

PREFACE.

THE sermons in this volume being intended for Domestic Reading, it has been the writer's endeavour to make them as clear and simple as possible both in style and language.

In designating them as Sermons on duties of Daily Life, he does not mean to intimate that he has done more than dwell upon some few of those Christian graces on which the Churchman's character is built up. He has not even endeavoured to complete the circuit of the most eminent, but only to inculcate those which it seems specially needful, at the present time, to bring under the consideration of all classes.

Pulpit-instration must always take its tone, more or less, from the religious character of the age. Every generation has its distinguishing

form of error; for each, in succession, the tempter provides new snares or revives old ones. Against each heretical or schismatic tendency, as it arises, it is the duty of the Christian Priesthood to warn the faithful. Hence, at different times, some one class of doctrines has been more urgently insisted on than any other; and this, not so much on account of the relative importance of those doctrines in the scheme of Revelation, as because, from special circumstances, there was at some given period a special danger lest the children of the Church should be perverted in some particular respect.

Thus, at one time, the activity of Infidel writers has forced the current of Theology into a channel in which Apologies for Scripture and discussions on the Evidences of natural and revealed Religion have been multiplied, till other subjects of equal importance have seemed well nigh forced into the background. At another time, the maintaining and propagation of Socinian heresy has caused the Godhead of our blessed Lord to be as assiduously maintained and defended by the orthodox, as if that were almost the only point on which a right faith is necessary. In every age the Church warns her children against the