him an increase of fortune, and an improvement in his worldly circumstances. He will shrink from no labours, however arduous, by which he hopes to secure its attainment. Tell him that he shall be advanced to some important office, graced by some honorary title, or decked with some glittering bauble. He will move heaven and earth in his eagerness to secure these advantages; face dangers in a thousand forms; undermine his health by exposing himself to the greatest hardships; pass his days in labour, and his nights in restlessness, and not scruple, should it prove necessary, to sacrifice honour and principle themselves at the shrine of his ambition. Talk to him of the laurels of war, of the distinctions of science, of the blessings of liberty, of the rewards of patriotism, and he will listen to you with breathless attention; but speak to him of peace of mind through life, of hope in death, of renewed existence, of eternal life, of unspeakable and never-ending happiness, your words will seem to him as idle tales, as a threadbare and rather stupid fiction; his attention will begin to flag, and his thoughts to wander, and it is by no means improbable that before you have concluded your discourse, he will have fallen into a state of total insensibility, both to your subject and your voice. Here, and here only, does he become like the deaf adder, that hears not the

voice of the charmer, charming never so wisely. My brethren, these things ought not to be. If Christianity be not a mere counterfeit, it is the most interesting of all subjects. If the religion for which Christ was crucified, and apostles preached, and martyrs died, be any else than an impudent imposture, it is a religion, the very name of which should be sufficient to awaken, in the breast of every human being, recollections so interesting, and hopes so high, and aspirations so ardent, as to banish every earthly vanity from his thoughts, and assume, for a time at least, an undivided empire over his bosom. Give then, my brethren, to this blessed religion that station in your hearts which it was designed to occupy. Make it the regulator of your actions, the balm of your afflictions, and the anchor of your hopes, and labour every day of your existence to increase its power. "Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, press forward toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."

SERMON XXI.

THE GIFT OF ETERNAL LIFE.

I JOHN V., 11.

And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life; and this life is in his Son.

THERE are but few human beings so strangely constituted, as to feel no interest whatever in the concerns of futurity. The same mental powers by which man is enabled to recal the past scenes and circumstances of life, make him capable of looking forward to the future, and of representing to the eye of imagination pictures of happiness, far surpassing, in richness and beauty, the brightest of those to which he has hitherto been a witness. It is, indeed, scarcely possible for us to form any conception of a state of society in which the very idea of a future existence should have been unknown; in which the mind of man should have never, even for a moment, burst the barriers of its mortal existence, nor indulged in one single aspiration after a happier and more lasting abode. The

visionary notions of future happiness which, in every age and country, may be supposed to have not unfrequently suggested themselves, and which differ from the anticipations of earthly pleasure only in the still greater degree of dimness and uncertainty by which they are accompanied, cannot surely, however, admit of a moment's comparison with that deep and practical conviction of its own immortality with which the mind of every sincere Christian must be impressed. If you attend to the degree of knowledge with which mankind were furnished upon this most interesting of all subjects, at the time of our Saviour's appearance, you will be enabled to form some notion of the value of the gospel record," that God hath given to us eternal life." Mankind at that period, considered with reference to our present subject, may be divided into two great classes, philosophers and the vulgar. Among the former, a great variety of opinions existed, but none of them amounting to anything like a practical conviction of this most important doctrine. The wisest and best among them have expressed doubts of the soul's immortality in their writings; thus plainly proving, that a considerable degree of probability was the utmost limit to which unassisted human reason could advance. What idea will you be compelled to form of the degree of attention which

was generally paid to the philosophical arguments adduced in favour of this doctrine, when you are told that, a few years before our Saviour's appearance, in the capital of the then known world, and in its most august assembly, during a discussion, too, in which the life and death of men of the highest rank in society were involved, one of its most enlightened and best educated citizens did not scruple to affirm that, as death might be looked upon as a remedy for all the evils of mortality, so beyond it there was no place left either for sorrow or for joy, If such were the sentiments of those who had the best means of acquiring information, what must have been the condition of the generality of mankind? The torch of philosophy, which was insufficient for the illumination even of those who had kindled it, could not penetrate the darkness by which the earth was overspread. The fictions of poetry about the Elysian fields and islands of bliss, however pleasing to the imagination in hours of amusement, present but a straw for the sinking soul of man to grasp at. To the greater part of the world, futurity could have presented nothing but a cheerless blank. It supplied them with no motives to virtue. It opened up to them no sources of consolation. It blessed them with no prospects of happiness. Such, my brethren, was the melancholy condition of man, before the