telligent creatures of every class. They are admired by angels, they console the aged, they direct, regulate, comfort, and animate youth. These truths have a thousand times been' placed before you, in the most affectionate manner. Your preachers have developed your character, and described your sins; they have declared the spirituality of the law; they have led you to the cross; they have exhibited the love and invitations of a bleeding Saviour; they have opened to you the christian path, apprized you of its dangers, and charmed you with the relation of its pleasures; they have given you rules for the government of your lives, and animated you to exertion by pointing to the rewards of the righteous. After their addresses, they have retired to their closets and poured out their hearts to God for you. Can you have enjoyed all these advantages and feel no responsibility? Wilt thou not from this time say unto me, My Father, thou art the guide of my youth?

You have received instruction from religious parents. O remember their solicitude to bring you under the sound and influence of the gospel. What joy they have felt when they saw the tear of affection or penitence glisten in your eye; what grief they have endured when they witnessed your indifference!" Trace them to the spot of retirement, where all their soul melted over you; listen to their ardent petitions; can you resist their tender force? Some of you have attended them in their dying moments, and have heard their last advices! Can you resist these imposing recollections? Whatever may have been your former thoughtlessness, we beseech you from this time to cry unto God, and say, My Father, thou art the guide of my youth.

Let us recur to the convictions which have often pierced your hearts. It is almost impossible for a person to attend a faithful ministry without experiencing, at times, some violent and uncontroulable emotions of heart. You have often heard your sins described with agony-an exhibition of the Saviour's Jove has excited your affection-and a display of the believer's future triumphs has induced you to form the most solemn resolutions. But surely, you cannot imagine you became religious at such times, unless those sentiments of terror, love, and decision were rendered lasting and influential. O consider your past convictions, your tender impressions, as the yearnings of the Spirit of God over your souls. O let not those feelings expire like the tremblings of Felix, and the acknowledgements of Agrippa; but say from this time, My Father, thou art the guide of my youth.

We wish you seriously to consider these things, and cordially to surrender yourselves to God. But that you may do this with propriety, it will be necessary to apprize you how needful it is to abide by the directions of the Gospel. One evil into which some young persons fall, is that of an unwarrantable confidence in the circumstances of their birth and education. Some of you, who have been so happy in these advantages, are ready to contrast yourselves with those to whom Divine Providence has been less beneficent. You plead that your parents were pious, that you were taught at an early period to revere religion, &c.; but do you confide in those privileges? You must be aware that they do not constitute you the children of God; for to THEM gave he power to become the sons of God, even to THEM that believe in his name. How awfully did John warn the Jews who had been practising this deception on themselves, Think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our father. Great as your religious advantages may have been, if your hearts are unrenewed, you are still in the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity!

Would you cry unto God, My Father? How can you, when your hearts are so corrupt? Your nature is sinful, your carnal mind is enmity against God; you have discovered this in your dispositions, and in your unwillingness to submit to the restraints of religion: how then, in your present state, can you claim a relationship with so pure and awful a Being as God? Would you have God for your Father? You must be brought by the Spirit of God deeply to lament your sin and to cry,God be merciful to me a sinner. Would you have God for your Father? You must submit to the terms of grace, and embrace the tidings of salvation, through a crucified Saviour.. Behold him extended on the cross, and saying for your encouragement, Look to me and be saved; bring your sins to me, I will pardon them; bring your guilty souls to me, I will cover them with a robe of righteousness; bring your hard hearts to me, I will soften them! O come to him-listen to the music of his voice, and remain no longer an enemy to bleeding love

If you would surrender yourselves to God, you must break off your attachment to sin. To prove that sin is a very great evil, were apparently a useless attempt; but to convince an unrenewed mind that its opposition to the Gospel, its indifference to immortal realities, or its indulgence in secret or open vices, is a great sin, is an undertaking of no small difficulty. What is sin? Sin is a privation of the moral image of God, a want of Vol. IV.

B

:

conformity to him and is there no harm in this? Was there no harm in that for which God expelled our first parents from Paradise? Was there no harm in that for which divine justice deluged the ancient world? Is there no harm in sin, when for one crime, the rejection of Jesus Christ in the days of his humiliation, the Jews were visited by the most signal judgments, and were crucified by thousands in the view of their burning and ruined city? Is there no harm in sin, when the justice of God required the amiable and glorious Jesus to die the death of the cross; when the imputation of our guilt pressed so many groans from his heart, and so much blood from his expiring frame? Is there no harm in sin? Approach the wicked man in his last moments, hear the groans that are heaved from his tortured bosom, behold the glare of his eyes, the frightful despair that reigns over all his features; trace him down to the regions of woe, and contemplate his introduction to the society of the damned! Say then is there no harm in sin? Can that creature make God his guide who indulges so destructive a foe: You see, therefore, when God requires you to break off your league with sin, it is not because he is opposed to your happiness, but that you may enjoy the felicity of his children. You cannot enjoy him in connection with sin. Examine yourselves; see, to what sins you are most addicted; remember if you do not put them to death, they will be your murderers, and range around your dying bed, a thousand spectres. O how the condescension and grace of Christ should operate on your minds, and induce you to abhor those crimes which occasioned him so much grief and horror. Let the love of Christ constrain you to say, to every solicitation of sin, I am not my own, for I am bought with a price!

Let us urge you, lastly, to dissolve your attachment to improper associates. We urge you in the language of inspiration, Come out from amongst them, and be ye separate. If you have any inclination to religion,the conduct of irreligious companions will grieve you. If your principles are not fixed, here they will be shaken and ruined. If your habits of religion are not formed, here they will be rendered more undecided. Let your associates be such as you would wish to attend you, if Christ were to visit you. Let them be such as you would wish to surround you in the hour of dissolution. Such as by their conversation will correct the improprieties of your conduct, confirm your principles, and invigorate every pious feeling. Then

you will be prepared to say to a holy God, Thou art my Fa ther, thou art the guide of my youth.

Mr. Editor,

Is it a day of small things!

AZUR.

I have enjoyed real happiness when providence has favoured me with the company of the Ministers of Jesus, and esteem it not among the least of the privileges the Head of the Church has given to his people; but of late it has proved to me a source of much sorrow, I heard, and heard it with sar prise, from several, that the present day was a day of small things; that there was very little heart religion among Professors.

But who hath

After the surprise this occasioned subsided, I began to reficct on what has been said, and to try if I could and out what these gentlemen meant. Did they mean that the visible number of the elect was not so great now as in former times? Alas! who can remedy this? Is not this a cause for sorrow? known the mind of the Lord? It was well for me that it occurred to my mind, that those geatlemen may be as much mistaken as Elijah was. Or, did they mean that in our days, grace did not produce the same effects as formerly? Is the power of grace then become feeble? Does it make any less than new creatures in Christ Jesus? Alarming thought! tremble ye stout hearted; alas! what shall the feeble saint do? Hang all your harps upon the willows, and wrap sackcloth around you, ye who have professed to love our Jesus; it this be true, that grace is not followed with the same effects as ever it was.

But perhaps, they meant that our churches are encumbered with nominal christians, and that their number was so great, that real believers were obscured by them. I reached down my register and magazines, and there I read of churches added to the old associations, and their numbers annually increasing; new churches formed, where, a few years ago, gross darkness covered the minds of the people; ministers more active in itinerating; anniversaries and ordinations enjoying the presence of the Lord; praying seamen; soldiers buried with Christ by baptisin; and the wilderness of the east beginning to blossom.-Is all this false and hollow? Ungenerous thought! Did these gentlemen consider that they resembled certain Jews,

who, though they saw the hand of the Lord fulfilling his pro mise, sat down at ease, and said, the time is not come.

There has been, in every age, a spirit of complaining, some complained of the apostle Paul, and withdrew from him, and their conduct has been often imitated; the craftsmen of Ephesus, and the complaints of the old Monks about the "new learning," as they called the gospel, are proofs that if men are so disposed, they can easily find subjects to complain of. Our ancestors, who beheld their brethren at the reformation, pleasing the state by defiling the purity of the institutions of Christ, endeavouring to compel and ensnare them to partake of the muddy waters,and some through fear, others loving the praise of men, or filthy lucre, complying; the honest non-conformist stripped of his property, groaning in prison, or driven for an asylum into foreign climes, by men professing the religion of Jesus; complained, and with reason too: how would they have rejoiced to see our day? They travailed, and we are entered into their rest, while their complaints furnish a topic for barren minds.

It is true, some things are declining in our day; and where is the soul that loves Jesus that does not rejoice in it. Bigotry, the engine by which Satan has often divided the saints, hastens to decay; the image of our Jesus in the hearts of his people begets mutual love, and loving those that are begotten, we rise above the little differences that used to separate the saints. Yes, the saints may magnify these differences, they are but little compared with a view of Christ formed in each others hearts, the hope of glory. With bigotry, little verbal disputes, an attachment to peculiar phrases, and allegorizing the Scriptures, till the intent of the Holy Ghost was quite obscured, these things have declined. Peace to their memory, may no rude hand ever rifle their graves.

Is not the spirit of censoriousness an invasion of the divine prerogative? Who art thou that judgest another man's sercant? The heart is alone the Lord's. Besides, does not this conduct give the enemies of the gospel occasion to triumph ? Do they not rejoice to hear of the decline of heart-religion? Will not the socinian catch at the concession with pleasure, and produce it as a proof of the growing weakness of the evangelical sect?

Are not the hearts of the weak of the flock made sorrowful by these means? Do they hear ministers gravely assert that heart-religion is on the decline, and our churches are half chaff ?