not in name only, but in deed and in power,—and what before was the extremity of judgment becomes the utmost perfection of mercy. It is a grief for a parent to leave young children behind him, when he cannot but fear that the promise of their early years may in after life, when he can no longer watch over them, be wrecked for all eternity. But to be called to his Saviour with all those whom he most loves; to be released at once from all earthly care; to have done with earth not only for himself but for his wife and children also; to have reached his home in safety with all his treasures, not only with none to mourn as lost, but with none to fear for as yet in danger; the fondest range of hope could go no farther than to imagine such a rich abundance of blessing.

Or to come to our own experience. We know with what an unusual degree of sickness we in this place are at this moment visited; that there are now four persons lying dead in this town, all of whom one fortnight ago were in no more danger of death than any of us here assembled. Are we to call this a judgment of God in his anger? God forbid! Much rather is it a dispensation most mercifully designed,--would that it might be received by us in an answering spirit! It warns us indeed with a striking voice, to become Christians in earnest with all speed; to put on Christ, and to put off all our sinful affections. If we do not listen to it, be

assured that our continued health and prosperity is one of the most awful judgments of all. No sentence is so dreadful as that when God says of the sinner, "Let him alone." The pestilence may cut him off in the midst of his sin; but better even so, than to be year after year hardened and encouraged in it, and thus to be daily swelling its amount. But if we do become Christians indeed, then the voice which was so solemn is but the gracious call of a loving Saviour. The servants who were ready, busily employed in preparing for their Lord's coming, zealously assisting one another, and looking forward for the hour when he would visit them,they assuredly felt nothing but a bounding joy when, at whatever hour, in the deepest midnight, or the full noon day, they heard the signal of his presence.

If this day leads us to consider all this, to near both in the sickly season immediately around us, and in the disease which is prevailing elsewhere, nothing but God's warning and earnest call, the chastening of his love, not the judgment of his anger, then indeed it will be blessed to us. But it will be vain and worse than vain, if with hearts 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 prosperity 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 be

setting 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 prevalent, 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,-ours, 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