and strive without presumption. He should be animated with zeal, but his zeal should be tempered with caution; he should be resolute, but his resolution should be moderated by a godly fear. As we are totally dependent, every moment of our lives, on the will of him who made us, it is our duty in all we do, plan or attempt, to implore him to work together with us, and to direct our steps in that way in which it is best for us to go.

11. The growth of holiness into a habit, or a settled, undeviating disposition of goodness, is not the effect of some momentary glow of devotion, or of some transient longing after God. It is and must be a work of time, as all must know, who understand the evil of their own hearts, the temptations to which they are perpetually exposed, and the conflicts which are necessary in order to overcome the world. Salvation is indeed a work of more difficulty and danger than is generally imagined; because it depends conditionally on the habits of goodness which we form in this mortal life, and which, amidst the temptations by which we are surrounded, and to whose influence we are

almost every hour exposed, seem difficult to acquire, and more easy to lose than to retain.

12. It often happens that men are prone to neglect those parts of the covenant of salvation, on which no clouds and darkness rest, and pay an exclusive attention to the most obscure and mysterious passages in the epistles of St. Paul; to dive into the profoundest depths of theology, and incautiously to pass over the practical commands of christianity, such as our Saviour's excellent sermon on the mount, the writings of the evangelists, &c. forgetting that secret things belong to God; that if some things in St. Paul's writings were hard to be understood in the age in which they were written, as St. Peter confesses, they must certainly be more obscure after a lapse of so many centuries, than they were in the period when the facts to which they alluded were recent, when the dissentions which they were intended to pacify, the heresies they were to combat, and the sophisms which they were to refute, were matters of public notoriety,

and topics of common conversation. There are pas

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sages in the scriptures which are clear, as they are useful, and which relate to those duties that are of universal obligation. To attend to these, is our first interest. At the great day, it will not be inquired how logically any man has reasoned, but only how virtuously he has acted; and to have possessed that love to God, the first fruits of which were benevolence and good will to men, will be then of more importance to us, than to have acquired all knowledge and to have understood all mysteries.

13. Forgetting this plain and obvious truth, how often has the fair face of christianity been disfigured, and that religion which is designed to be a rule of life, and a system of consolation, been converted into a chaos of mystery, in which the wise and the foolish are alike bewildered....doctrines received as divine in proportion to their obscurity, and important in proportion to their impracticability.... reason, that light of heaven shining into the mind of man, to enable him to distinguish truth from error, and what is practical, from what is speculative, rejected as depraved, and the importance of doctrines magnified in proportion as

as they are unintelligible and irrational.* In such a case, religion is not clothed in less awful terror, than profound mystery. God is represented as being angry with men as soon as they are born into the world, only because they are born; and Jesus Christ as trying to appease his wrath, and to calm his resentments. Hence it is obvious to remark how these persons whose education, or constitutional gloom of mind have led them to embrace such a system, are often the prey of religious terrors, and corroding anxieties. And hence they pay less homage in their devotions to the Father than to the Son, and often address their petitions to the last, without any reference to the first. They characterize the Father by the inflexible severity of justice, and to the Son they assign exclusively the

* If reason be set aside as a judge of truth, all religions have equal claims to faith, the mahometan as the christian, and any absurdity, however gross, stands upon an equal footing with the most rational religion, equally entitled to faith, equally entitled to confidence, equally entitled to credit. Thus should we shut our eyes on the very light which God has given to enlighten our darkness, throw away the compass designed to guide us through the sea of life, and relinquish the only distinction between ns and the brutes.

winning attribute of mercy. Whereas it ought to be remembered, that the love of the Father was prior to the mercy of the Saviour. For God so loved the world, says the apostle, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

14. Those religious opinions, which are productive of the most bitter dissentions, usually relate, not to the weighty matters of religion, but to some inexplicable tenets or frivolous forms; not to essential matters of belief, but to points about which men may differ without erring from the way of righteousness. As members of the same family may think very differently on many little points of domestic interest without any reasonable deduction from those tender regards which the ties of family prescribe, so among christians, diversity of sentiments, on many questions of uncertain doctrine, such as the coeternity and coequality of the Father and the Son, the formalities of the future judgment, and the eternity of future punishments, ought not to engender bitter animosities; for all men cannot think alike, and when another differs from us