food is gone, it is of no use to tell us to eat, or to put food before us; we must first get the appetite, and then we shall eat naturally and healthfully. And we know that there are means by which our appetite, when lost, may be regained. If we are sick and weak, it does not follow that we shall never be well and strong, if we use those means which common sense, and the experience of others, have told us to be useful. So also there are means by which the appetite of our souls may be recovered; there is a way by which they may become well and strong and common sense, and the experience of all good men, and the word of God himself, has declared to us what these means are. You all know that I speak of the habit of prayer: you want the will to come to Christ; you want to love good more strongly than you now love it; you want to love it so much as never to love any sin better. But you want what neither others nor yourselves, by yourselves, can give you. "No man can come unto God, unless God will draw him." You may say, Perhaps he will not draw me; and, therefore, I never shall be able to come to him.' Nay, but hear his own promise, as it was read to you this very morning in this place: :-" No father will give his son a stone, when he asks for bread; and if we, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto our children,"-if you know, by

experience, how kind are your earthly parents, how much they would give up for your good, how carefully they would do all in their power to benefit you," how much more shall your Father that is in heaven give his Holy Spirit to them that ask him?"

Be assured that no request which you can make to the kindest of earthly fathers will ever be so sure to be readily granted, as the request which you may make to your heavenly Father, that he will teach you to love him. Pray to him constantly for his help to open your eyes, and soften your hearts; and be sure that such prayers will not be in vain. Pray to him to show you what he thinks of the evil that you are every day committing, and to make you think of it in the same manner; and, depend upon it, that you will judge of it, ere long, very differently from what you now do. And this is in your own power. You can if you choose, bend your knees, and utter words to God; you can speak to him in your hearts at certain seasons, whether you have opportunity to bend your knees or no. You can make a point of so speaking to him every day; of forcing yourselves to do it, if you cannot do it willingly: and then if you go on in this way, merely resolving and practising to speak to God,-I care not in how few words, so that they are the words of your own

hearts, asking him to be merciful to you, and to make you his own true children,-be assured that the will and the love of his service will very soon be given to your prayers, and you will be brought, by the Holy Spirit, to know and to love the Father, and his Son Jesus Christ.

SERMON VII.

2 KINGS, ii. 24.

There came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

I SAID, some time since, that as the Bible was written chiefly for grown-up persons, and the faults of grown-up persons are different from those of boys, so many things that are said in the Bible may seem not directly to concern you. And, in particular, what is difficult for all to form to themselves any full notion of, is, in the case of the young, still harder to enter into fully: I mean, the great consequence of what we do;—the very great rewards that will follow it, if good; and the equally great punishments which it will bring upon us, if bad. This, I say, is hard for every one to conceive and it is well said, that the very first temptation ever offered to men, took advantage of this common feeling: "The serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die." But it is still harder for you to fancy that your conduct can be either so immensely rewarded, or so heavily punished,

because it seems to relate to things of such little consequence. You may hear grown-up people talk afterwards, in a laughing manner, of the faults which they committed at school,-of their idleness, and of the various acts of mischief, and worse than mischief, which they committed. They speak of their school faults as of things which, indeed, it was very proper for the master to punish, when he found them out; but which, if he did not find them out, were never in danger of being punished by any one else. And when boys hear older people speak in this manner of their own past conduct, it naturally makes them think that it does not really matter much whether they behave well or ill at school, excepting always in certain points which they think are dishonourable; and that they are just as likely to be respectable and amiable men hereafter, if they are idle and careless now, as if they were ever so attentive and industrious.

Now, I would beg those who think so to attend a little to the story in the text:-As Elisha, the prophet, was going up to Bethel, "there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said to him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them." Now, some say that the word, which