men,—not, what have you done at the mere impulse of sensibilities however amiable, or of native principles however upright, and elevated, and manly,but what have you done unto me? how much of God, and of God's will, was there in the principle of your doings? This is the heavenly measure, and it will set aside all your earthly measures and comparisons. It will sweep away all these refuges of lies. The man whose accomplishments of character, however lively, were all social, and worldly, and relative, will hang his head in confusion when the utter wickedness of his pretensions is thus laid open,-when the God who gave him every breath, and endowed him with every faculty, enquires after his share of reverence and acknowledgment, when he tells him from the judgment-seat, I was the Being with whom you had to do, and yet in the vast multiplicity of your doings, I was seldom or never thought of,-when he convicts. him of habitual forgetfulness of God, and setting aside all the paltry measurements which men apply in their estimates of one another, he brings the high standard of Heaven's law, and Heaven's allegiance to bear upon them.

It must be quite palpable to any man who has seen much of life, and still more if he has travelled extensively, and witnessed the varied complexions of morality that obtain in distant societies, it must be quite obvious to such a man, how readily the moral feeling, in each of them, accommodates itself to the general state of practice and observation, that the practices of one country, for which there is a most complacent toleration, would be shuddered at as so many atrocities in another country, that in every

given neighborhood, the sense of right and of wrong, becomes just as fine or as obtuse as to square with its average purity, and its average humanity, and its average uprightness,-that what would revolt the public feeling of a retired parish in Scotland as gross licentiousness or outrageous cruelty, might attach no disgrace whatever to a residenter in some colonial settlement, that, nevertheless, in the more corrupt and degraded of the two communities, there is a scale of differences, a range of character, along which are placed the comparative stations of the disreputable, and the passable, and the respectable, and the superexcellent; and yet it is a very possible thing, that if a man in the last of these stations were to import all his habits and all his profligacies into his native land, superexcellent as he may be abroad, at home he would be banished from the general association of virtuous and well ordered families. Now, all we ask of you is, to transfer this consideration to the matter before us,-to think how possible a thing it is, that the moral principle of the world at large, may have sunk to a peaceable and approving acquiescence in the existing practice of the world at large,—that the security which is inspired by the habit of measuring ourselves by ourselves, and comparing ourselves amongst ourselves, may therefore be a delusion altogether, that the very best member of society upon earth, may be utterly unfit for the society of heaven,— that the morality which is current here, may depend upon totally another set of principles from the morality which is held to be indispensable there ;—and when we gather these principles from the book of God's revelation,-when we are told that the law of

the two great commandments is, to love the Lord our God with all our strength, and heart, and mind, and to bear the same love to our neighbour that we do to ourselves,—the argument advances from a conjecture to a certainty, that every inhabitant of earth, when brought to the bar of Heaven's judicature, is altogether wanting; and that unless some great moral renovation take effect upon him, he can never be admitted within the limits of the empire of right

eousness.

SERMON VIII.

CHRIST THE WISDOM OF GOD.

1 CORINTHIANS i. 24.

"Christ the wisdom of God."

WE cannot but remark of the Bible, how uniformly and how decisively it announces itself in all its descriptions of the state and character of man,-how, without offering to palliate the matter, it brings before us the totality of our alienation,-how it represents us to be altogether broken off from our allegiance to God, and how it fears not, in the face of those undoubted diversities of character which exist in the world, to assert of the whole world, that it is guilty before him. And if we would only seize on what may be called the elementary principle of guilt,—if we would only take it along with us, that guilt, in reference to God, must consist in the defection of our regard, and our reverence from him,-if we would only open our eyes to the undoubted fact, that there may be such an utter defection, and yet there may be many an amiable, and many a graceful exhibition, both of feeling and of conduct, in reference to those who are around us, then should we recognize, in the statements of the Bible, a vigorous, discerning,

and intelligent view of human nature,—an unfaltering announcement of what that nature essentially is, under all the plausibilities which serve to disguise it,—and such an insight, in fact, into the secrecies of our inner man, as if carried home by that Spirit, whose office it is to apply the word with power into the conscience, is enough, of itself, to stamp upon this book, the evidence of the Divinity which inspired it.

But it is easier far to put an end to the resistance of the understanding, than to alarm the fears, or to make the heart soft and tender, under a sense of its guiltiness, or to prompt the inquiry, if all those securities, within the entrenchment of which I want to take my quiet and complacent repose, are thus driven in, where in the whole compass of nature or revelation can any effectual security be found? It may be easy to find our way amongst all the complexional varieties of our nature, to its radical and pervading ungodliness; and thus to carry the acquiescence of the judgment in some extended demonstration about the utter sinfulness of the species. But it is not so easy to point this demonstration towards the bosom of any individual,-to gather it up, as it were, from its state of diffusion over the whole field of humanity, and send it, with all its energies concentered to a single heart, in the form of a sharp, and humbling, and terrifying conviction,-to make it enter the conscience of some one listener, like an arrow sticking fast,-or, when the appalling picture of a whole world lying in wickedness, is thus presented to the understanding of a general audience.