gress the circumstances of the case, for its being a divine revela- tion, p. 291. The progress of Christianity cannot be ac- 1 COR. chap. xii. ver. 3. (latter part.) No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the In what sense, and to what extent the co-operation of the Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy king- Give us this day our daily bread. debts, as we forgive our debtors. temptation, but deliver us from evil; for thine is the HULSEAN LECTURES, 1820. DISCOURSE I. PROVERBS, chap. x. ver. 7. "The memory of the Just is blessed." I AM a believer in God, and in Jesus Christ whom he hath sent. This is the substance of my faith, the rock of my consolation, and my only hope, whether in time or eternity, for the attainment of that peace and happiness, which must be the ultimate desire of every being, who has the power to think, or the capacity to form a wish upon the subject of his own future destiny. That the kindness of Providence has cast the lot of my inheritance in a Christian land; but more especially, that it has granted me to draw the first breath of life under the influence of the Gospel in her purest form, and in a country, where she invi B gorates the soul by the brightest beams of her unclouded excellence ;-I look upon it as a great and unmerited blessing. I count it an equal mercy that, in days when the idol of unbelief had gathered round it the adoration of mankind, and a vain and earthly philosophy alone had power to scatter with unbounded profusion amongst her votaries, the senseless honours of human praise, there was yet piety enough in those to whom the formation of my early principles and the instruction of my maturer years were committed, to despise the idle applauses of the creature's tongue, and to refuse to burn the holy incense of their devotion before the unhallowed image which the madness of speculation had set up. It is necessary, indeed, but it is, at the same time, a very difficult duty, to glory in the shame of bowing before our Maker as the Lord of the Universe, at a moment when he is degraded or renounced by half the miserable worms that he has made. Nor is it a more easy task to cling with affection to our Redeemer in those seasons of infidelity, when his children do "hide, as it were, their faces from him," and he is become again as of old the "despised and rejected of men." I cannot, therefore, and I must not cease to thank the God of these my fathers for having preserved them pure in the midst of a general corruption, and for having been myself, through their instrumentality, so deeply imbued with a conviction of the same comfortable truths, that I have never yet quite failed in faith, even under circumstances of the greatest danger; but at all times been enabled, either to triumph when tempted, or to hope, believe, and rise again when fallen. Yet whilst I thus confess the extent of that gratitude which I owe to the great Creator of all things for the blessings and benefits that are past, far be it from me, and from every one who professes to submit his understanding to the doc trines of the Gospel, to forget the frailty of our common nature. We cannot look into ourselves, without trembling at the consciousness of infirmity. We cannot contemplate the shifting scenes of the world, without an awful perception of the snares which are there so thickly sown to draw the souls of men into perdition; and we cannot search the Scriptures, without remembering and musing upon the baseless confidence of Peter. Feeling therefore what I am, and fearing what I may be, I would turn my thoughts and my words up to the throne of grace, and, in the meek humility of an earnest prayer, beseech the Almighty Guardian of Spirits to preserve us all in the untainted profession of those principles in which we have been trained, to guide us by the light of the Gospel in the dangers and difficulties of life, and finally to grant that, after having reached, as others, the respective terms of our appointed pilgrimage, we |