Page images
PDF
EPUB

ted, confiding without measure? Rear up that child in the fear of the Almighty. Let him imbibe ingenuousness from intercourse with the Omniscient; purity and tenderness and nobleness of spirit from the pattern of all excellence. He who knows God can best appreciate the worth of all the friends of God; he whose heart is moulded properly toward him, will seldom fail to act an appropriate part in all the relations of the son, the friend and citizen. In the hour of your prosperity you need not distrust his smile. In the hour of your adversity his magnanimity will not fail you. In an hour like this which crushed the heart of Abraham, you will find every thing to reconcile you to the behests of Providence. And in the day of the last judgment, when all destinies shall be fixed, when all the advantages of education and of fortune shall have perished as a dream, he will bless the wiser care which led him to a covert by which he stands shielded from the desolations of that hour.

Such were the tempers to which Isaac had been trained.. And such were their fruits when the hour of trial came. He questioned not the tenderness or integrity of the parent whose piety he knew, whose hope he inherited. He murmured not at the requisition of eternal sovereignty. It was God who commanded, and God could do no wrong. Under impressions like these he stretched forth his hands. His father bound them. He then laid him on the pile, and reached forth for the knife that was to end this scene of agony. And now one single minute and the palpitating heart of Isaac would cease its maddening throbs. One little minute and the conflicting emotions of an unhappy father would give place to the calm of desolated feeling. It was a moment consecrated in heaven and on earth to.

the unparalleled devotion of a parent and a child. Ethereal spirits survey the ways of men; and doubtless had the film that dims our mortal sight been brushed from the eye of Abraham, looking up as he did before he drew the mortal stroke, he would have seen the battlements of heaven crowned with beings innumerable waiting the catastrophe in breathless expectation. But that catastrophe it was not theirs to witness. For there also rested the Eternal Father's eye-there rested the eye of God our Saviour; and having evinced before creation the devotion of this pair, having justified the honors with which he designed to load them, his mandate arrested the intended stroke. "Lay not," he said, "thine hand upon the lad; neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me."-We may imagine, but it were folly to attempt a description, of the feelings which agitated this firm but hapless pair when the authority that had bound them pronounced the unhoped release. There is an agony that surpasses the common forms of woe, and mocks the expressions to which common woes give birth. We have seen the lip quiver while the tongue refused all utterance-we have seen the eyeball roll and stare, while the fires of desperation dried up the tears that should have moistened them. We have seen such a being unexpectedly relieved, and placed upon the footing of ordinary men. And we have seen his mighty sorrows, as if then only brought down to the level of common grief, when nothing more remained to be apprehended, gush forth from the eye in deluges of tears, and from the bosom in expressions of the most clamorous sorrow. We have seen these things, and we can imagine to ourselves the conduct of A

braham, the conduct of that son, when they first obtained deliverance from so mighty an oppression.

[ocr errors]

But the father of the faithful acted with consistency whatever were his circumstances. Borne along as he was on the full tide of his joy, straining to his bosom the son for whom he had prepared far different destination, he was not unmindful of him whose voice he had obeyed to the hazard of all he loved-whose voice had now relieved him. "A ram caught in a thicket by his horns," arrested Abraham's attention; a ram "for a burnt offering," of heaven's own providing, as he had prophetically but unwittingly suggested to his son. "And Abraham," says our narrator, "went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering, in the stead of his son." Its life went for his life-a lamb of heaven's providing. Well might this deliverance be commemorated by the patriarch. Well might the spot become sacred in his sight. Well might he designate it by a prophetic name. Jehovah-jireh, "the Lord will provide." It was Jehovah-jireh, "the holy hill of Zion;" the spot where afterwards stood the temple of Jerusalem; where the solemn services of Israel were per formed; where innumerable lambs offered up upon the altar, shewed forth the substitution of that Lamb of God whose life went for our lives, and whom God himself provided that the world in him might have peace. It was Jehovah-jireh, the holy hill of Zion, where the nations, reconciled by the Lamb of God's providing, were taught to disclaim all confidence in idols, taught to confide in their all-sufficient friend, taught to rely on the bounty of his providence and on the riches of his grace, and to say of all their temporal as well as eternal wants, Jehovah-jireh, the Lord will provide."-AMEN.

NA

SERMON XIX.

"I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

Job xix. 25.

THERE are few men so hardened in iniquity as to calculate with certainty and without emotion on taking up their residence in hell. However greedily they may indulge themselves in sin, they are rarely found to do it under the idea that the fruit of their doings shall be exacted at their hands. There is a secret something in the breast of every man that prompts him to cherish the hope that he shall yet return from following after vanities in time to redeem his soal from death. And though there are very few who cannot perceive the fallacy of this expectation in relation to their fellows, there are fewer still who find the least difficulty in admitting it in its most extended application to themselves. Had we none other, this circumstance alone would afford a striking and irrefragible proof of the infatuation consequent on sin. It is notorious that of the ma ny millions who have, in every age, silenced the monitions of conscience, and calmed the occasional perturbation of their minds with these fallacious hopes, there are but com. paratively few who have been so happy as to realize their expectations, while a vast majority have sunk without a struggle into all that horror and all that woe their iniqui: ties deserve.

If we turn our attention to the innumerable multitudes that compose the visible church, where alone we are authorized to look for those who have escaped this dread infatuation, and where alone we may expect to find an hope full of immortality, we shall perceive that even there there are not wanting numbers who solace themselves through life with a like delusive hope, and at last are made partakers in a like condemnation. O, how often has the church seen men who towered high in the estimation of their fellows, and equally high in their own estimation, against whom the sentence has been issued from the throne, "cut them down; why cumber they the ground?" How many has she seen who started out with a fair profession, and gave gladness to the hearts of them who wished her well, and yet, after a promising course of many years, have "turned from the holy commandment," "denied the Lord that bought them," and openly, avowedly, "gloried in their shame!" How many has she seen earnest, zealous, inde fatigable in their preparation for the world to come, who yet have wandered through life among the dark mountains of error, and stumbled, and fallen to rise no more!

Viewing these things barely in relation to those who have been thus deluded, the lesson they afford is awful and impressive; but when we reflect that we too are in the body, that sooner or later our hope also shall be sifted, and that our own most precious interests are suspended by that hope, they propound the question with inimitable emphasis to every son of earth, and where shalt thou be in eternity ?— Ah! where indeed shall I be in eternity? responds the trembling spirit. If there be so many now cast out from the presence and enjoyment of God, who once looked forward to the other world with all the serenity of hope; if the

[ocr errors]
« PreviousContinue »