full of worldly fear and spiritual hardness, trembling at the thought of pain and sickness and death, careless of sin and of eternal judgment, we pour out our unholy prayers to be delivered merely from worldly sufferings. And should God hear such prayers so offered? Nay, verily, the worst scorn with which unbelievers regard this day's solemnities, would be deserved by us, and more than deserved, if our devotion be no more than cowardice, if our desire be for worldly and not for spiritual deliverance.

But the evil of disease is neither the only, nor by any means the worst evil which at this moment threatens our country. In this there are even to the actual sufferers,-the friends I mean of those whom it carries off,-many circumstances of great comfort; and to society at large it will be, and indeed has been already, as I said before, the means of calling forth a larger measure of mutual kindness and charity. But the other evils have nothing whatever to palliate them; they are bad and merely bad from the beginning to the end. I speak of those violent passions, that impatience, and pride, and covetousness, and revenge, and brute ignorance, and hatred of law and authority, and selfish indifference to the degraded state of our brethren, and insolence, and extortion, and oppression, which becoming more aggravated every hour, must inevitably ere long lead to the destruction of our pro

sperity at once nationally and individually, at once as far as regards this world, and as far as regards the world to come. All these different kinds of wickedness, not existing of course in the same persons, but according to the party or class of society to which we belong, some being the besetting sins in one case, and others in another, are yet all conspiring together to bring about the same ruin. And together with all these, or rather as the very fountain from which they all spring, there is the bitter root of ungodliness; existing not exactly under the same form, but with the same fatal power, in the unprincipled and wicked of both parties; showing itself on one side in a bitter hatred of all the forms of religion, because they may sometimes be accompanied with the spirit also; attended on the other with a great semblance of attachment to these same forms, because experience has shown, that they do not necessarily ensure the spirit; and so long as they do not do this, bad men on one side find them politically convenient, just as bad men on the other hold them to be a political evil. We find on one side, the blasphemy occasioned by worldly discontent and distress, as when Job was advised to curse God and die; and on the other, the inward blasphemy of the gay and luxurious, who say in their hearts, "Tush, the Lord shall not see, neither doth the God of Jacob regard it." All this evil is so great and so pre

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valent, that we may almost use the words of the prophet, "I looked, and there was none to help: I wondered that there was none to uphold."

But the difficulty of turning this to profit on occasions like the present, arises from the mixed nature of our common congregations; and from the absolute harm which is done to either side, or class, or party, by dwelling in their hearing upon the faults of the other. One is restrained, therefore, from going into the particulars of the evil on either side so fully as we might do, because the other side would hear it with pleasure, and would but be confirmed in their own faults the more. Here, however, the congregation consists so much of one particular class in society, the higher or richer class, that their faults may be safely dwelt upon; not that the poor have not their's also, but because it does us nothing but harm to think of these, as it seems to afford a sanction to our own. Every one must have noticed the delight with which they who want an excuse for selfishness and a grudging spirit lay hold of any alleged instance of ingratitude or improvidence on the part of the poor. The faults of the poor, the sins of the avowed enemies of religion and of our national institutions, however great they may be, do not concern us; our true business is with our own. I have before, in this place and elsewhere, noticed our great sin,-our's, that is, as belonging to the

richer classes, that we measure ourselves by one rule and our neighbours by another; we think that a very little will do for others, while for ourselves we think we can never have enough; and this is the case with intellectual enjoyments as well as with bodily; a very little knowledge, a very scanty measure of social enjoyment, very little show of civility, and next to none of respect and attention to their feelings, are enough, in our judgment, for those beneath us; while for ourselves, sea and land are ransacked, the utmost ingenuity of man is exercised, to furnish us with new information, with new excitement, to carry to the utmost possible perfection the polish and refinement of our own social intercourse. And this spirit infects us all more than we are aware of; it is a habit gained in childhood, and it goes on with us in after life, in many instances without our being aware of it. I have known good and kind hearted persons speak so coldly and behave so distantly to those of an inferior station, that a foreigner, not acquainted with our manners nor with the character of the individuals, would have ascribed it at once to insolence and pride. But though the excuses for individuals doing this are many, from the cause that I have mentioned, namely, that they do it from habit, and without thinking of it; yet it is no less wrong in itself, and like all other wrong things tends to produce evil to society at large. This manner is

practised unintentionally on one side, and received as a matter of course on the other; but even while it breeds no ill will, it effectually checks any feelings of positive regard; and when in process of time this cold and neutral state of feeling comes to be tampered with by those who wish to change it into active hatred, they find it but too easy a ground to work upon. Then the reserve and distance which had before only prevented cordiality, comes to be looked upon as an actual insult, and as such awakens resentment; nor is the length of time which it has lasted considered in any other light than as swelling the amount of the wrong, and therefore adding to the violence of their hoped for vengeance.

True it is that manner is but an outward thing, and does not always show the state of the heart. But when our notice is called to it, it is at least a good ground for examining a little anxiously whether indeed all is right and sound within. I cannot but think, that if we really possessed a true Christian love of our brethren, if we felt towards them as brethren, not as towards what are called, and most sadly miscalled, objects of charity, that we should insensibly assume towards them a very different outward manner also. At any rate this is certain, that the national evil produced by the behaviour I have been speaking of, is most enormous. It is a folly to think that any money