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LECTURE LXIX.

ROMANS, ix, 3.

"For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ, for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh."

AND first, it may be employed to rectify that meagre theology which is so far satisfied with man as he is, that it would hold a few slight and superficial amendments to be enough of themselves for changing him into man as he ought to be. This is one use to which we should turn what we have just observed of the parental affection. The earthliness of its whole drift proves man to be a creature altogether earthly; and the very strength of the affection serves to aggravate this lesson the more, and to betray all the more palpably our state of spiritual destitution. That the same parent who is so intent on the preferment of his children in the world, should be so utterly listless of their prospects, nor put forth one endeavour to obtain for them preferment in heaven-that he who would mourn over it as the sorest of his family trials, should one of them be bereft of any of the corporeal senses; and yet should take it so easily, although none of them have a right sense of God or a right principle of godliness-that he, who would be so sorely astounded did any of his little ones perish in a conflagration or a storm,

should be so unmoved by all the fearful things that are reported of the region on the other side of death, where the fury of an incensed Lawgiver is poured upon all who have fled not to Christ as their refuge from the tempest, and they are made to lie down in the devouring fire and to dwell with everlasting burnings-that to avert from the objects of our tenderness the calamities, or to obtain for them the good things of this present life, there should be so much of care and of busy expedient, while not one practical measure is taken either to avert from them that calamity which is the most dreadful, or to secure for them that felicity which is the most glorious-Why there is indeed such obvious demonstration in all this, of time being regarded as our all, and eternity being counted by us as nothing-so light an esteem in it of that God, an inheritance in whom we treat as of far less value for those who are dear to us than that they should be made richly to inherit the gifts of His providence-such a preference for ourselves, and for the fleeting generations that come after us, of the short-lived creature to the Creator who endureth for ever-As most strikingly to mark, even by the very loves and amiable sensibilities of our hearts, how profoundly immersed we are in the grossest carnality-that after all it is but an earthly horizon that bounds us, and an earthly platform we grovel on-that nature, even in her best and most graceful exhibitions, gives manifest token of her fall, proving herself an exile from Paradise even in the kindest and honestest of the sym

pathies which belong to her-that, retaining though she does many soft and tender affinities for those of her own kind, she has been cast down and degraded beneath the high aims and desires of immortality— accursed even in her moods of greatest generosity, and evil in the very act of giving good gifts unto her children.

But another lesson than that of rectifying the meagre theology of the general public, is that of rebuking those peculiar few who disown this theo logy, and hold themselves to be sound in the faith. We greatly fear, that, in many instances, this soundness in the faith is little more than a holding of the form of sound words. The expression of the truth is acquiesced in, but the truth itself is not realised. A mere holding of the dogmata of a creed is not faith. It is not the substance of things hoped for, neither is it the evidence of things not seen. The man who looks onward to some station of emolument for his son, who provides him with the best education to qualify him for its duties, who himself superintends the preparation and strenuously plies him with the fit exercises for his training and future habits, who bestirs himself in the work of securing friends and soliciting patronage—this man may be laudably employed, but he is walking by sight. To look onward for your children to a place in heavento enter them accordingly into a process of spiritual education to watch and examine and labour, until the spiritual principles be established and the spiritual character be formed in them-to besiege in

VOL. III.

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prayer the upper sanctuary, that you may obtain the patronage of the great Intercessor who is there in behalf of your family, and through Him the grace and liberality of the King upon the throne-Let me practically see this, and I would say of it that it was walking by faith. It is not the mere verbiage of an orthodox phraseology that constitutes you a believer. You believe substantially only if you do. It is not by the professing of these things that you show faith. It is by proceeding on the reality

of these things. The man, upon whose work and upon whose walk the futurities of the unseen world have the same deciding power, as the futurities of the seen and the sensible world that is before him -he it is who has the substance and not the shadow, the faith unfeigned. It will show itself in the regulation of the family, as much as in any other of his personal affairs. The man whose heart is set on the conversion of his children-the man whose house is their school of discipline for eternity-He it is, and we fear he only of all other parents, who lives by faith. If you love your children and at the same time are listless about their eternity, what other explanation can be given than that you believe not what the Bible tells of eternity? You believe not of the wrath and the anguish and the tribulation that are there. Those piercing cries that here from any one of your children would go to your very heart, and drive you frantic with the horror of its sufferings, you do not believe that there is pain there to call them forth. You do not think

of the meeting-place that you are to have with them before the judgment-seat of Christ, and of the looks of anguish and the words of reproach that they will cast upon you, for having neglected and so undone their eternity. The awful sentence of condemnation—the signal of everlasting departure to all who know not God and obey not the gospel-the ceaseless moanings that ever and anon shall ascend from the lake of living agony-the grim and dreary imprisonment whose barriers are closed insuperably and for ever on the hopeless outcasts of vengeance -These, ye men who wear the form of godliness but show not the power of it in your training of your families-these are not the articles of your faith. you they are as the imaginations of a legendary fable. Else why this apathy? Why so alert to the rescue of your young from even the most trifling of calamities, and this dead indifference about their exposure to the most tremendous of all? O, the secret will be out. The cause bewrayeth itself. You have not faith; and, compassed about though you be with sabbath forms and seemly observations and the semblances of a goodly and well-looking profession, yet, if you labour not specifically and in practical earnest for the souls of your children, your doings short of this are we fear but the diseased and lame offerings of hypocrisy-your Christianity we fear is a delusion.

To

Let me therefore, in the third place, charge it upon parents, that they make proof of their own Christianity by looking well to the Christianity

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