that they are playing with their own destruction: and that it is no light thing whether good thoughts are habitually neglected or stifled, or whether they be entertained and carefully improved. It is no light thing that the impressions which you may sometimes receive in this place should vanish almost as soon as you go out of its doors. You may not be hard now,-none of you, I trust, are so; but you will assuredly soon become so, if you go on neglecting the means of becoming otherwise. Of all deadly errors, I know of none so widely mischievous as that notion that we can repent at any time; that it is always in our own power to be good. Undoubtedly we can always, with God's blessing, repent if we will; but it is that very will to repent which we are surely destroying by a continual perseverance in unholiness. The appetite for good is as surely destroyed by long-continued habits of evil, as the appetite for our wholesome bodily food by a long continuance of bodily excesses.

Once more then I entreat all those who have had any serious thoughts and wishes to be good, to resolve to seize the means of grace now offered. Pray, that as Christ invites you to partake in the outward signs of his redemption, so you may be made one with him in heart and in spirit, and may be partakers of his redemption in deed. Remember that "as often as we eat this bread and drink

this cup, we do show the Lord's death till he come." It brings to our minds the night just before Christ was betrayed, when he was assembled with his disciples, and holding to them that language of counsel and of comfort which has been recorded by St. John from the thirteenth to the seventeenth chapters of his gospel, for our everlasting benefit. While we read those words, we feel as if, had we been with Christ's first disciples at that last supper, we could have resigned our whole souls without reserve into the care of our gracious Saviour. "Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head!"-every affection, every desire, every hope and thought of our nature, let them be wholly thine, and purified by thy blessed Spirit. We feel as if indeed we could lay down our lives for his sake; we feel that we do then believe. But, my brethren, it is no vain superstition, it is no extravagant fancy, but the very simple truth, that if we, with contrite and humble hearts, do meet together at that holy table, there indeed is Christ in the midst of us; there is his Spirit shedding down upon us the peace that passeth all understanding, and enkindling within us a strength of holy resolutions, and an entireness of resignation to the will of God, such as we might have felt at that last supper, when our Lord was yet amongst us in the body. Not manifest indeed to the world, not manifest to any who approach his table with careless hearts;

Judas sat with him and saw him with his bodily eyes, and ate of the bread and drank of the cup; but Christ's Spirit was not manifest to him; and it is the Spirit alone that quickeneth. Even so, his bodily presence would profit us nothing: his Spirit is as truly with his faithful disciples now, when they eat and drink the bread and the wine in remembrance of him, as it was with his eleven faithful disciples, whom he then pronounced to be clean. Not clean indeed from all imperfection, not saved from all future sin and error, nor must we expect to be so; but strengthened to become better than they had been: not provided with an entire security against evil, but gifted with a more willing heart, and a firmer faith, to strive against it.

SERMON V.

(PREACHED ON ASH WEDNESDAY.)

1 CORINTHIANS, xiii. 11.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

THESE Words contain the reason why so many of the sermons delivered from the pulpit in our own times, and our own country, produce so little effect upon their hearers. They are the address of a man who speaks and thinks in one way, to persons who speak and think in another. It is only by experience that we find what strong barriers are raised by age, by education, by manners of living, between one class of men and another; so that what are the most natural and familiar thoughts to one set of persons, are to another strange and unnatural, and quite above their understanding. But the words of the apostle, although they will suit a great many other cases, are more particularly suited to ours, who are now here assembled:

"When I was a child, I thought, spake, and understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." And so it is daily found to be: we not only put them away, but forget them; insomuch that it is sometimes as hard for a man to put himself again into the place of a boy, and to remember what he once was, as it is for a boy to imagine what he will be when he becomes a man, of which he has hitherto had no experience at all. Our Lord himself seems, in one place, to speak of this particular difficulty which his ministers would meet with; the difficulty of making themselves understood by their hearers. Every scribe," he says, "who is instructed unto the king

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dom of heaven, is like unto a man that is an householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old:" that is, as the people whom he will speak to are so different, he must be furnished with something to say to all of them; with things new and old; with things plain and things learned; with things solemn and things familiar; with things of heaven and things of earth. However good what he says may be of itself, it is worth nothing for practice, if it be not also suited to the particular understandings and feelings of those he is speaking to. It is not enough to speak of sin in general, and holiness in general, of God and Christ, of death and judgment. Something more clear and distinct is wanted; or else we do but fill the