of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love" (Eph. iv. 16).

PREPARATION FOR THE HOLY COMMUNION".

THE preparation of which I am speaking is the preparation of the heart; that state of heart which the true Christian habitually possesses, which does not consist in mere feelings, and which qualifies him at any time for a profitable partaking of the Lord's supper. Are persons really humbled under a sense of their sins, of their sinful nature, and sinful life? Do they sincerely desire to be freed from the punishment, the practice, and the pollution of sin? Do they look to Jesus Christ as the only sacrifice for sin; by whose blood alone their sin can be washed away, and their soul cleansed? Do they entertain a devout and thankful remembrance of what he has done and suffered for them? Do they desire, and through his grace resolve, to resist the devil, the world and the flesh, and to lead a righteous, sober, and godly life, a life of faith in Jesus Christ, and of obedience to his holy will? If such be their permanent convictions, desires, and resolutions, they have the preparation of heart of which I speak, and with which they may partake, and ought to partake, of the holy communion, whenever an opportunity may offer. Should persons, while such is the habitual state of their heart, be surprised, as the virgins were, while they slumber and sleep, with a summons to the marriage-supper, they should not on that account decline the invitation, and exclude themselves. Having oil in their vessels, they should trim their lamps as speedily as they can, and hasten to partake of the feast; though, of course, if a longer notice be given them, they will take the opportunity of more closely inspecting their weddinggarment, and of more studiously seeking to have their soul in that condition which will best qualify it for meeting their Lord, and for enjoying the provisions of his table. On the subject of preparation, indeed, there is one excuse so very generally urged against coming to the Lord's supper, that I feel it necessary to give to it a very distinct and prominent notice. When invited to communicate, persons justify a refusal, either openly or secretly, upon the ground of their unworthiness: "We cannot approach the Lord's table; for we have no fitness for it: we are unworthy."

Now, my brethren, if the person who pleads this excuse really pleads it under a deep feeling of genuine humility; if he is so truly sensible of the burden and defiling nature of his sins as to condemn himself on account of them, and with the humble publican to stand afar off, and to cry for mercy, I can only say that, of all persons in the world, such a one is most fitted to draw near with faith, and to take this holy sacrament to his comfort. For whom are the blessings of the gospel provided? To whom are its promises addressed? Is it not to the contrite in heart, the poor in spirit, the mourners for sin, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness? Are not these the persons to whom the invitations of the gospel are sent, and

• From [New York] Gospel Messenger.

who are pressed and urged, and in a manner compelled to accept them? And what is the sacrament of the Lord's supper but an exhibition of the grace and riches of the gospel? And who are the persons that are welcome there, but the very persons whom the gospel calls? To every one, then, who answers this description; to every one whose conscience is tender, whose faith is weak, whose fears are great, I would freely say, "Lay aside your doubts. It is for such as you that this table is prepared. Fear not. Talk not of your unworthiness. Only be willing; only believe; only come. You will be a welcome guest, and a meet partaker of those holy mysteries. The Lord hath already prepared your heart. O, turn not away from the feast which he has provided for you!" If, however, those who plead their own unworthiness urge this plea, on the supposition that they must bring with them to the table of the Lord some worthiness of their own, which will give them a claim-something belonging to themselves, which will make them worthy guests at his table— I must tell such plainly that they know not the first principles of Christianity. No man can ever have any such worthiness. If any one thinks that he has, or can have, any thing of this kind, he is vainly puffed up in his fleshly mind, and knoweth nothing as he ought to know. My brethren, what you are to bring with you is a broken and contrite heart. Pray to God to give you this. Renounce your own righteousness. Trust only in the great and manifold mercies of the Lord. Draw near to him with a humble spirit, and he will in no wise cast you out.

But those, who use this plea of unworthiness, have sometimes another meaning. Conscious that they are living in the allowed indulgence of some sinful practice, or some unchristian tempers, which they have at present no intention to discontinue and subdue, they know that they are not fit for communicating at the Lord's table. They have light enough to see that a course of sin is incompatible with receiving the sacrament; but they have not grace enough to break off from their sinful courses. They are determined to continue in them; and, therefore, they plead that they are not to receive the sacrament. And they plead aright: they are not fit for this sacred ordinance. And for what religious duty are such persons fit? Are they fit to join in the service of the church? Can they take a part in its confessions, petitions, and thanksgivings? Are they fit to say the Lord's prayer? Can they say to God, "Our Father"? No. The devil is their father; for, by their own confession, they are workers of iniquity, and consequently children of the devil. O, my brethren, if there should be any of you whose hearts at this moment tell you that this is your present state, think, I beseech you, how awful and perilous it is. Acknowledging yourselves unfit to come to the blessed Saviour of sinners for pardon and life, are you fit to die? You intend to repent hereafter, but you will not do it now. Now you will go on in sin against light and knowledge, against conscience and conviction. Now, when invited to Christ, you will refuse to come. O, beware lest, when you may desire to come, you find the door shut against you! "Now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation." May the Lord in his mercy grant you repentance unto the acknow

ledging of the truth, that you may recover yourselves out of the snare of the devil, who are thus taken captive by him at his will!

THE CHRISTIAN'S DUTY TOWARDS THE

HEATHEN WORLD:

A Sermon

(For the Fourth Sunday after Trinity),

BY THE REV. ABNER W. BROWN,

In the passage from which the text is taken, the Lord Jesus Christ is pressing upon us our duties towards our brethren of mankind; and he declares to us that we must expect, in the providence of God, to be dealt with as we deal with others. We are not to expect that every man will do to us exactly as we have done to that man, but that, as the government of all things in heaven and earth is in God's hands, and as he doeth according to

Dean. LUKE VI. 38.

the inhabitants of the earth, so we may feel assured that, in the end and on the whole,

Ir is clearly declared by the church of England (in Art. xi.), out of holy scripture, "that we are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by faith, and not for own works and deservings." And this is the grand and blessed doctrine for which our martyrs died, and for which thousands would now be willing to shed their blood. It is the fundamental doctrine of the Christian church, and has always been the standard by which its healthiness, in any age of its history, could be measured. But, while faith is thus important, the twelfth article saith: "Good works do spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith; insomuch that by them a lively faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by its fruits."

This inseparable connection between our salvation by the merits of our Redeemer, and our so living and acting as to adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour, and to prove that we have a new life given us, explains numerous passages in the word of God, which the unstable or the hasty imagine to be opposed to each other, but which only differ in speaking, one of the cause, the other of the effect; because they take, as it were, some the right-hand view, and others the left-hand view, of that great building of truth, of which Christ Jesus is at once the foundation and the head corner-stone.

In the last chapter of the scriptures, Jesus Christ saith: "Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be." At that day the books shall be opened, and the dead shall be judged, out of those things which are written in the books, according to their works; and another book shall be opened, which is the book of life; and whosoever is not found written in the book of life shall be cast into the lake of fire. And our warning, yea, and our comfort is, that these two awful books will not, cannot disagree, nor differ from each other.

will so come round, that with what judgment we judge our neighbours we shall be ourselves judged, and with what measure we mete it shall be measured to us again.

This is the portion of scripture which the church has selected for our meditation and instruction to-day, in connection with the collect of the day. The collect prays, "O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal: grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ's sake our Lord. Amen." Doubtless all who think seriously on religion, all who hope to attain to heaven, join in such a wish as this collect breathes. But the gospel for the day, chosen by the church, calls us to examine also our own spirit and ways towards our brethren of mankind, in order to take heed that we are so acting towards others as we here entreat God to deal with us.

Has the bearing of this subject upon our efforts for the conversion of the heathen ever occurred to the minds of my readers? Is our religion of a feeble, uninfluential kind? Is it of a dull, or dreary, or cheerless kind? Is it of a formal, lifeless, habitual kind? Is it unstable and changeable, devoid of that peaceful and steady, composed and practical tone, which we are entitled to seek and hope for? Perhaps we might discover that we have been too much forgetting how the poor heathen are of one blood with us; how that for them, as well as for us, the Saviour died; that the bible, and the two holy sacraments, and the everlasting gospel belong to them as much as to us. Perhaps we, to whom our gracious God hath entrusted the keeping and the spreading abroad of those precious means of grace, are thinking only of ourselves, and forgetting how inestimable are the treasures which have been committed to our stewardship for the benefit of the whole world as well as of ourselves. The tidings of the riches of

God's grace we have perhaps either not sent forth to others, or we have done so with a niggardly hand. Can we wonder that we ourselves obtain so scantily the benefit and comfort of them? for "with what measure we mete it shall be measured to us again.” I. What God hath done for us. II. What the heathen need from us. III. With what spirit we ought to perform our daily duties.

IV. With what feelings we shall hereafter look on these subjects.

I. Let me remind you what God our heavenly Father hath done for us. The beginning of the gospel for this day saith: "Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful." Hath he not been merciful unto us? and can we give any reason why he has been thus merciful to us more than to others? Has he not caused us to be born in a Christian land, to be baptized unto his name, to be taught good and useful truths, even the blessed knowledge which holy scripture contains? Have not our youthful lips been taught to pray? Have we not the house of God, and the public worship in it, and the holy sabbath-day of rest, and the sacraments, and the reading and preaching of his gospel in public? and are not the laws and customs of the nation so ordered that none can make us afraid for serving God? To all these privileges, as to an inheritance, God hath caused us to be born; whilst millions of souls, born into the world the same day or the same year with us, and in no respects in themselves either worse or better than ourselves, were born in heathen lands, where the Saviour's name is never named, the bible quite unknown, and dreadful and polluted idols are worshipped by all and among all. The scripture saith no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost. We forget in this land that this is true in its literal sense, as well as in its more spiritual meaning. We are taught from infancy, and by habit, to acknowledge that Jesus is the Lord; but not so the heathen: they know not that he is the Lord, and it needs a long and difficult struggle with all their infant habits and teachings before they are able to believe, even with the understanding, that Jesus is the Lord. But God hath given to us all these external mercies: he hath been kind to us in these matters-kind to the unthankful and to the evil, who have neglected and despised these mercies, as well as to those who have improved them; and he calls on us to be merciful to the heathen, as he hath been to us. We cannot change the hearts of the heathen, or make them believe on Christ; but we can do unto them as God in his general provi

dence hath done unto us. These great and blessed external means of grace do not neces sarily renew the heart, even in this country, and they may be, and are, often rejected among us; but usually God does not work upon the soul without these external means; and it is for us to do what we can for the heathen, by sending them the like blessings which God hath, by human means, sent to us: it is for us to be merciful to them, as our Father hath been mercirul to us.

Highly as we now are privileged, there was a time when this our native land was one of "the dark places of the earth, full of the habitations of cruelty." Our forefathers were poor and untaught savages, worshipping hideous idols of stone, wandering in the trackless forests which covered this country, or brought into a rude civilization by the iron hand of their heathen conquerors. No holy scriptures, no soul-comforting gospel, no knowledge of their Maker, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, had thrown light upon their dying moments-had given them the joyful hope of everlasting life, or purified their minds and habits from pollution, bloodshed, and unholy principles. And whence came the change? Did they find out their error themselves? Did God work a miracle to convert this nation? No it was the patient, laborious, gradual work of missionaries in the first or second century after Christ, who came partly from the east and partly from France, and did unto us what we are now called to do for other heathen lands-bringing us the holy scriptures, the two sacraments, and the public worship of God, planting a pure and hallowed church (even at first under more archbishops aud bishops than there now are), which never hath ceased, notwithstanding the horrors of the heathen invasions, and the restless and ceaseless efforts of the church of Rome to overpower it.

Have you ever asked yourselves why came these missionaries to this land? why came the gospel sixteen or seventeen hundred years sooner to this nation than to the nations of Africa, and India, and China, which are now fast bound in the chains of heathenism? Those nations were heathen then, just as this nation was. Why did we receive the unspeakable riches of the gospel, which they have not even yet received? Because God was merciful to us: he had mercy on us. Freely we have received, freely let us give. Let us be merciful to them, as God was merciful to us. Let us remember the awful warning in the text: "With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again." There are nations, which once were Christian, which are not so now-nations, which once

were protestant, which are Romanist, or even infidel now.

II. But what is it that the heathen need from us? for we cannot mete out unto them what we have not ourselves received from God; and I think, if we rightly weighed this point, we should not be so liable to fall into the error of expecting too much and too rapid fruit from missionary exertions.

What is it that the husbandman can do towards the harvest? He can work, and manure the ground: he can sow good seed: he can clear the growing crop from weeds: he can fence it from external injury. This is all he can do; but he cannot give the increase, he cannot cause the sun to shine, nor the rain to fall, nor keep off the mildew and blasting, nor cause the corn to ripen one day sooner than the appointed weeks of harvest. There will be no crop without his exertions; and yet the crop depends not on him, but upon the blessing of God-on those broad dealings of Providence over which we have no control, and which we cannot distinctly explain

or understand.

So it is with efforts to spread true religion, and especially with missions among the heathen. We must not expect that they will be converted to Christianity unless we go among them, bearing the word of God, giving them the glad tidings of salvation by Jesus Christ, baptizing them, setting up among them the outward and visible church of God, using the two appointed sacraments, teaching them the holy law of God, pointing out their sins, breaking in their wild and restless habits of evil and sin, and winning them by kindness and firmness and love and gentleness. This is what they need from us: this is what we are commanded to do for them. But, after we have done all this, will they be Christians in heart and reality? That is in the hand of God only, just as the sun and rain of the harvest are in his hands. We cannot expect the blessing except in the use of the appointed means; and, in general, God seldom wholly leaves the self-denying and faithful missionary, any more than he leaves the industrious and prudent husbandman, without the blessing of fruit on his labours, though it may be less than he desires, or may be slow or tedious in the ripening.

Some, perhaps, are ready to say, "Leave the heathen to themselves: we have more need of exertions at home: there is much heathenism at home." What would have been our case had the early missionaries to England reasoned thus? There was abundance of wickedness in their own lands; enough of idolatry, of false profession, of ignorance, of heresy. Yet they went forth to teach our forefathers,

and hence our blessings: not merely our religious privileges, but our greater comfort, our higher civilization, our skill and wisdom and greatness. Had they dealt upon this narrow and selfish principle, we had been now like the savage heathen of other lands. There will always be enough of evil, in any land, to afford an excuse for those who wish to do little; and such a reason would for ever stop any attempt to bring any other nations to the Saviour. Surely, of all nations, we should be the last even to mention such a reason for shrinking from missionary work; considering how much we owe to those who, in pity to our need, cast such chilly reasons behind them. Both duties are ours: to do what we can for religion at home, and to spread the Saviour's name in heathen lands. Not so did our Christian forefathers: one thousand or twelve hundred years ago, before the spirit of Romish error had enchained and frozen up what of spiritual life it had left unpolluted among us, missionaries from England went forth to heathen Germany, and preached the gospel, and baptized, and set up the early church in Germany, and joyfully sealed their testimony with their blood in the villages and towns where their lot called them to preach. There was abundance of wickedness left in this land when they went forth; and yet they went as missionaries; and the churches of Germany are witnesses of what English missionaries did for them a thousand years ago. And so shall it be hereafter. The church of Christ shall spread from one extremity of the earth to the other; and the churches of Africa, of India, of China, and of the islands of the western ocean, shall be witnesses of what England is now doing for the benighted heathen.

Some, perhaps thoughtlessly, if not wickedly, say, "Leave the heathen to themselves: they can find out what is good; they can practice it: missions do not improve their state; for they will only neglect the gospel which you send." Facts might disprove this, when we see how much good has actually appeared in those places where the gospel has been faithfully preached. But I wish to press upon you some higher considerations than mere experience, or expediency: I wish to touch upon principle.

The church of England declares, in the eighteenth article, that "they are to be had accursed, who presume to say that every man shall be saved by the law or sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that law, and the light of nature; for holy scripture doth set out unto us only the name of Jesus Christ whereby men must be saved." And doth not ordinary