when he says, " Keep yourselves in the love of God, by praying in the Holy Ghost." Your first endeavours may be feeble, and fatiguing, and fruitless. But God will not despise the day of small things, nor will the light of his countenance be always withheld from those who aspire after it, -nor will the soul that thirsts after God, be left for ever unsatisfied, and the life and peace of being spiritually minded, will come in rich experience to his feelings, and the whole habit of his tastes and enjoyments, will be in diametric opposition to that of the children of the world, God being the habitation to which he resorts continually, God being the strength of his heart, and his portion for evermore.

SERMON XIL

THE EMPTINESS OF NATURAL VIRTUE.

JOHN V. 24.

"But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you.”

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WHEN it is said, in a former verse of the gos pel, that Jesus knew what was in man, we feel, that it is a tribute of acknowledgment, rendered to his superior insight, into the secrecies of our constitution. It was not the mere faculty of perceiving what lay before him, that was ascribed to him by the Evangelist. It was the faculty of perceiving what lay disguised under a semblance, that would have imposed on the understanding of other men. It was the faculty of detecting. It was a dis cerning of the spirit, and that not through the transparency of such unequivocal symptoms, as brought its character clearly home to the view of the observer. But it was a discerning of the spirit, as it lay wrapt in what, to an ordinary spectator, was a thick and impenetrable hiding place. It was a discovery

there of the real posture and habitude of the soul. It was a searching of it out, through all the recesses of duplicity, winding and counterwinding in such a way, as to elude altogether the eye of common acquaintanceship. It was the assigning to it of one attribute, at the time when it wore the guise of another attribute,-of utter antipathy to the nature and design of his mission, at the very time that multitudes were drawn around him, by the fame of his miracles, of utter indifference about God, at the very time that they zealously asserted the sanctity of his sabbaths, and resented as blasphemous, whatever they felt to be an usurpation of the greatness which belonged to him only.

It was in the exercise of this faculty, that Jesus came forward with the utterance of our text. The Jews, by whom he was surrounded, had charged him with the guilt of profanation, and sought even to avenge it by his death, because he had healed a man on the sabbath day. And their desire of vengeance was still more inflamed, by what they understood to be an assertion, on his part, of equality with God. And yet, under all this appearance, and even with all this reality of a zeal about God, did he who knew what was in man, pronounce of these his enemies, that the love of God was not in them. I know you, says he,—as if at this instant he had put forth a stretch of penetration, in order to find his way through all the sounds of godliness which

he heard, and through all the symptoms of godliness which he saw,-I know that there does not exist within you that principle, which links to God, the whole of God's obedient creation,I know that you do not love him, and that, therefore, you are utterly in want of that affection, which lies at the root of all real, and of all acceptable godliness.

It is mortifying to the man who possesses many accomplishments of character, to be told, that the greatest and most essential accomplishment of a moral being, is that of which he has no share, that the principle on which we expatiated in our last discourses, does not, in any of its varieties, belong to him,-that, wanting it, he wants not merely obedience to the first and the greatest commandment, which is the love of God, but he wants what may be called the impregnating quality of all acceptable obedience whatever,---the spirit which ought to animate the performance of every other commandment, and without which, the most laborious conformity to the law of Heaven, may do no more than impress upon his person the cold and lifeless image of loyalty, while in his mind there is not one of its essential attributes.

We know not a more useful exercise than that of carrying round this conviction, amongst all the classes and conditions of humanity. In the days of our Saviour, the pride of the Pharisees stood opposed to such a demonstration;

and in our own days too, there are certain pretensions of worth, and of excellence, which must be disposted, ere we can hope to obtain admittance for the humiliating doctrine of the gospel. For this gospel, it must be observed, proceeds upon the basis, not of a partial, but of an entire and universal depravity, among the men of the world. It assimilates all the varieties of the human character into one common condition of guilt, and need, and helplessness. It presumes the existence of such a moral disease in every son and daughter of Adam, as renders the application of the same moral remedy indispensable to them all. The formalists of Judea did not like to be thus grouped with publicans and harlots, under one description of sinfulness. Nor do men of taste, and feeling, and graceful morality, in our present day, readily understand how they should require the same kind of treatment, in the work of preparing them for immortality, with the most glaringly profligate and unrighteous of their neighbourhood. They look to the ostensible marks of distinction between themselves and others;--and what wider distinction, they think, can possibly be assigned, than that which obtains between the upright, or the kind-hearted, on the one hand, and the ungenerous, or dishonest, on the other? Now, what we propose, in the following discourse, is to lead them to look a little farther,---and then they will see at least one