natural aversion of the heart to spiritual things, and being always present, always ready to minister to our immediate gratification, are too often victorious in the contest. But the circumstances of the man who is living at ease, in the midst of abundance, able to command all the enjoyments which the world affords, are not favourable circumstances. Their effect is to increase his natural indisposition to spiritual things. He is too well content with his present state to wish to be reminded that he is destined to exist in another; he would rather exclude futurity from his thoughts, because he cannot think of it without having the unwelcome consideration forced upon him that his career of pleasure and self-indulgence must have a close. But further, a long career of worldly prosperity not only has a tendency to make men forget GOD, to cause them to live without Him in the world, in a total disregard of His worship and of all the duties arising out of their relation to Him; it too often engenders an evil heart of unbelief, and betrays them into an open denial of GOD, of his superintending providence, and of their own dependence upon Him; they say in their prosperity as the Psalmist describes himself to have said, "I shall never be moved;" but without referring, as he referred, their strength to the LORD. It is among the rich and voluptuous, among those who are living in a continued round of pleasure and dissipation, that we generally observe the prevalence of a scoffing temper, of a disposition to turn sacred things into ridicule, to treat the awful truths revealed in Scripturea judgment to come, and a state of retribution—as fables, the offspring of superstitious fear, or of a crafty design to gain ascendancy over the minds of men, and to reduce them to bondage. Such persons are not merely indifferent to religion, they are not content to look down with

an eye of contemptuous pity upon those who are weak enough to be influenced by its promises and threatenings; they regard it with aversion, and resent its exhortations to temperance, chastity, purity, and its restraints upon the indulgence of their appetites, as personal injuries; as unwarrantable interferences with them in their career of enjoyment; as encroachments on their freedom. A A very slight acquaintance with the state of society must be sufficient to satisfy us that to too many,,not merely of the wealthiest, but of what is termed the middle class, the description of the Prophet is as applicable as it was to the Babylonians-that they are given to pleasures and dwelling carelessly, and that luxury has produced among us the same effect as at Babylon; the effect which, whatever the external form under which it may exhibit itself, it will always produce; the effect of betraying numbers into a forgetfulness of GOD; some into a denial of his superintending Providence, of his very existence.

The other charge brought by the Prophet against the daughter of Babylon is, that her wisdom and her knowledge had perverted her; she was wearied in the multitude of her counsels; she had put her trust in her astrologers, her star-gazers, and her monthly prognosticators. The Assyrians had from the earliest times been celebrated for their astronomical knowledge. The clearness of the atmosphere in which they lived, and their boundless plains in which no obstacle intervened to prevent the eye from sweeping the whole expanse of heaven, were in the highest degree favourable to the observation of the celestial bodies. But with the study of astronomy appears to have grown up the belief that the planets exercised an influence over human affairs, and that by observing the positions and what are termed

the configurations of the stars, the destinies of individuals and of empires may be foretold; a belief which might appear to derive some sanction from the influence visibly exerted by the great luminaries of our system over the physical state of our globe. Instead therefore of taking the measures which ordinary prudence would have suggested to arrest the progress of Cyrus, the Assyrian monarch, relying on the predictions of his diviners, dwelt as securely as if no enemy were at his gates, and was surprised and slain while engaged in feasting and revelry. Thus were the wisdom and knowledge on which he placed his reliance the causes of his destruction. We, it is true, are as a people in little danger of being perverted by the knowledge on which the Babylonians especially prided themselves. Still if we were required to name the besetting sin of the nation, should we not all agree in naming the pride of intellect? We are filled with an overweening conceit of our advancement in every kind of knowledge; we speak with contempt, a contempt wholly unjustifiable, of those who have gone before us; and that too perhaps when we are merely raising a superstructure upon foundations which they had laid; merely carrying out their inventions; merely applying, sometimes misapplying, principles which they had discovered.

There is, in particular, one branch of science in which the superiority of the present to all preceding ages is assumed to be incontestable, mechanical science. In consequence of the more accurate knowledge which has been obtained of the properties of matter, and the continued improvement of machinery, results have been produced which never entered into the contemplation of our forefathers; plans which they regarded only as the visions of speculative men, enamoured of their

own fancies, not capable of being realized, have been carried into execution; and if time and space have not been annihilated, yet the facilities of passage from one country to another have been so much increased, that the most distant have been approximated, and the proverbial inconstancy of the winds and waves no longer presents an insuperable obstacle to the progress of the mariner. But we need not look beyond the spot on which we are now assembled for a striking example of the results of the advancement of mechanical science; the population around us may, without exaggeration, be said to have been called into existence by it. Confining ourselves then to the particular species of knowledge to which the occasion of our present meeting seems more immediately to direct our attention, let us enquire whether the Prophet's description of the Babylonians is not applicable to the people of this country; whether our wisdom and knowledge have not perverted us; whether they have not produced in us a forgetfulness of GOD, nay, more, a sceptical and infidel temper.

It might at first be supposed that the study of the phenomena of the natural world, bearing as they do the visible impress of infinite power and wisdom, would awaken man to a consciousness of his own weakness and insignificance, and impart a submissive and reverential tone to his feelings. It might be supposed that, while he is engaged in combining the various properties. of matter for the accomplishment of the ends which he has in view, the conviction would be forced upon him that he is unable to call into existence a single particle of the matter which he uses, and he would thus be disposed to a ready recognition of an all-powerful Author of nature, the Creator and Preserver of the universe. Above all, it might be supposed that one

who is continually conversant with machinery, employing his faculties in its invention, its improvement, its adaptation to the production of various results, that such an one would be the first to admire the most perfect of all machinery, that by which the manifold processes of the vegetable and animal creation are carried on, or the heavenly bodies are retained in their orbits, and that he would pass from admiration of the work to that of its Author, of Him who designed the machinery, and adapted it to its several ends. What should we think of a man who, while we were contemplating the ingenious structure of the different parts of any one of the machines by which we are surrounded, should tell us that they afforded no evidence of an intelligent mind which designed them and presided over and directed their construction? Should we not pronounce him to be labouring under some strange infatuation, some gross perversion of the understanding? yet wherein would he differ from one who should contend that the various contrivances in the natural world, the nice structure of the human frame and the adaptation of the different members to the different functions which they are designed to perform, afford no proof of a contriving mind; that matter must assume some form, and that these are among the many possible combinations of material forms, or are the necessary results of some principle or law existing in matter, and causing its parts to arrange themselves in the form and situation in which we see them? Yet so it is that men, who have made the greatest advances in the different branches of physical science, and would feel no slight surprise or indignation at any attempt to deprive them of the honour which they deem their due, by describing their discoveries as the offspring, not of an acute understanding,