There is another extreme. Instead of despising, You are desponding. You are tempted to curse perhaps you are fainting. You are at your wits' end. the day of your birth. Life has lost all its charm -it is a burden too heavy for you to bear. You turn to solitude; but there grief preys upon itself. You think of intoxication; this is drowning misery in madness. You glance at infidelity; but annihilation may be a fiction, and the present only the beginning of sorrows. You resolve on suicide; but you cannot destroy yourself. You take the pistol, and shatter to pieces the tabernacle, and your friends are aghast at the ruins; but the inhabitant has escaped, and the spirit feels itself still in the grasp of God. I am far from insulting your grief. I sympathize with you; and rejoice that I can show unto you a more excellent way. "There is One standing among Let me introduce him in you whom ye know not." He is equally all the fulness of his pity and power. able and willing to relieve you. He is the enemy of sin, but he is the friend of sinners. Cast thy burden upon the Lord: and say, Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me. He will not, he cannot refuse thy application. For he has said, and is now saying, "Come unto me, all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." See Manasseh. He was stripped of all, and carried away captive. But his salvation sprang not from his prosperity, but his adversity. "When he was in affliction, he besought the Lord his God, and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, and prayed unto him and he was entreated of him, and heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord he was God." Think of the Prodigal. Plenty had ruined him. The famine, and the husks which the swine did eat, made him think of home-" How many hired servants of my father have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger. I will arise, and go to my father." And that father, while he was yet "a great way off, saw him, and had compassion upon him, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him" and not only clothed and fed, but adorned and feasted him; and said, "Let us eat and be merry for this my son was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found." Despair not; but follow these examples, and you will be able to with the famous Athenian, "I should have been lost, had I not been lost :" and to sing with many a sufferer before you, say, "Father, I bless thy gentle hand; "How kind was thy chastising rod, "Foolish and vain, I went astray "Ere I had felt thy scourges, Lord, "I left my guide, I lost my way; 31 LECTURE VIII. THE CHRISTIAN, IN HIS SPIRITUAL SORROWS. "We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.” Psalm cxxxvii. 2. WE now pass from the condition of the Christian, to his experience. We have contemplated the changes that may take place in his outward circumstances. We have viewed him in his prosperity and in his adversity; and have seen him carrying his religion along with him through all the varying scenes of human life. But there are similar variations in "the inward man," ," "the hidden man of the heart." And these changes are no inconsiderable evidences of the reality of a work of grace, in distinction from religious pretensions. The picture of a tree is invariable; but the tree itself has its seasons. At one time it is leafless, and the sap, though not destroyed, retires into the roots. At another, it revives, and buds, and blossoms, and is filled with fruitfulness. I walk in my garden, and see the stones arranged there, always the same. But it is otherwise with the flowers and plants. And the reason is, because the former are dead, while the latter have in them a principle of life. And such is the difference between the form of godliness, and the power: between a man alive to God, and one that hath a name that he liveth, but is dead. Let us proceed to the part of the Christian's experience which we are pledged to consider this morning. And here, I can easily imagine, that the subject itself will hardly appear necessary to some. They are rather surprised by the very fact we have assumed as a clear and common verity. Young con. verts often wonder to hear of the believer's sadness. They are often indulged with a peculiar kind and degree of consolation to allure them on, till, whatever difficulties they meet with, they feel themselves too much interested, and too far advanced, to think of retreating. Because, from a regard to their weakness, their enemies are restrained, they seem to conclude that they are destroyed; and because, in the novelty of their views and the liveliness of their feelings, their corruptions are but little noticed, they hope to be vexed with them no more. They therefore wonder to hear older Christians complaining of distraction in duty, and languor of zeal; and weakness of hope, and conflicts with doubts and fears. Thus it was with Israel "in the kindness of their youth." See them on the shore of the Red Sea. They rejoiced in the Lord, and sang his praise, and thought they had only to go forward and possess the pleasant land-ignorant of the wilderness between ; and having no foreboding of the drought, and the bitter waters, and the fiery serpents, and the Amalekites and Moabites, and their long detensions, and their being led about, and their being turned back-by all of which the souls of the people were much discouraged because of the way. But if there are some to whom the intimation of these sorrows is surprising, there are others to whom it will be relieving, if not delightful. For there are some who are distressed and perplexed, owing to apprehensions that their experience is peculiar. They think none ever had such vain thoughts, such dull frames, such woful depressions, as they often mourn over. Therefore, in their communings with their own hearts, they are led to ask, "If I am his, why am I thus?" and anxiously turning to others, in whom they repose more confidence than they can place in themselves, say, "Ye that love the Lord indeed, "Tell me, is it thus with you?" Now these will not rejoice in the deficiences and distresses of others; but it yields them encouragement to learn, that there are some who can sympathize with them; and that what they feel, is not, though grievous, incompatible with a state of grace; since others, and even those who are far superior to themselves, utter the same sighs and groans. To return. The Psalm from which the words of our text are taken, is universally admired. Indeed nothing can be more exquisitely beautiful. It is written in a strain of sensibility that must touch every soul that is capable of feeling. It is remarkable that Dr. Watts, in his excellent versification, has omitted it. He has indeed some verses upon it in his Lyrics; and many others have written on the same. We have seen more than ten productions of this kind; the last, and perhaps the best, of which is Lord Byron's. But who is satisfied with any of these attempts?—Thus it begins: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion." These rivers were probably some of the streams branching off from the Euphrates and |