On every side yawns the unglutted grave: everywhere some new corpse or coffin meets the eye: and, little as we now think of it, we too must go. We know not what a day may bring forth. To-morrow the harvest may be past; the summer ended, and we not saved. "O, that my head were water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my peo. ple!" O, that I had a voice that could reach and renovate the natural heart, and persuade it to be reconciled to God! I would depict the Cross of Calvary, and the agonies of Jesus, and the bar of the Judgment Day. I would compel it to come in. Yes, I would; but God alone can do it, and in His hands I leave the decision.

SERMON XIII.

"Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom."

Jeremiah, ix., 23.

THE history of the Church, to one who will take the trouble of turning it over, presents a most interesting subject of reflection. Time was, when no man ventured to wear the guise of Christianity, without carrying all its warm and thoroughgoing spirit along with it; when the thirsty axe, the crimsoned scaffold, and the dripping cross, offered to the mind such an appalling dissuasive from professing the name of Christ, that nothing short of a renovated heart would embark in the transaction. But now the tables are turned. Now, almost every man, according to his conscience, is more or less a nominal Christian, and the visibility of religion is as common as the spirit of it is rare. I say, the spirit of it; for certain it is, that in the matter of that earnest, active, absorbing principle, which made the primitive saints look on every thing in the impressive light of eternity, we find the great mass of mankind, now-a-days, most conspicuously lacking. True, indeed, they do not withhold the tribute of their respect, nor an occasional loan of their time or influence in pushing forward the march of Christianity; but all the while, as for any personal experimental exercises, they know nothing. They have no heart for getting down upon their knees in the single attitude of sinners crying for mercy. An alarming majority move along in the career of impenitence, unmelted and unimpressed, and taking just as wide a swing in the pleasures of the world, as if it brought upon them no corresponding condemnation of being the enemies of God. Now, at all this, in the general, we need not be surprised. We need not wonder that a large portion of mankind should put away from them the spirituality of religion, and content themselves with the very flimsiest profession. The drunkard will put it away from him, because it bids him forsake his cups; and the volup. tuary will do so, because it restricts the indulgencies of the table; and the gamester will do so, because it debars him the fascinations of play; and the profligate will do the same thing, because it prohibits the round of his midnight debaucheries; and so we might go out into a hundred individualities of application. You can easily see that all these men will shun the urgencies of personal Christianity, and yet all of them may find it very convenient, both for character and for conscience' sake, to keep up something like the show of an external pretension. But there is another class of persons, about whom the explanation is by no means so easy. They are those who seem to be embraced by the language of our text, men of accomplished and cultivated minds, who, as the prophet has it, "glory in their wisdom;" who go the whole length of assent to the great doctrines of the New Testament, and yet contrive to keep every thing like evangelical religion entirely away from their hearts. I say this is not so easily explained, although for every form of impenitence, seen no matter where, and garnished with no matter how many visible accomplishments, we find an account on the pages of the Bible. We find that the nature which all of us inherit, is impaired and corrupted, and that none of the aberrations into which we may run from the line of duty are to be wondered at, if the grace of God do not keep throwing in a counteractive influence upon our course. But all this, however true it may be, is talking only in general terms.

Upon the subject which our text brings before us to-day, there are many particular views to be taken; and therefore

it is, that we shall set about finding the reasons why persons of reading and taste are disposed to receive Christianity in the main, and yet turn away from all the strict and experimental features which belong to it. I apprehend we cannot better start upon this inquiry, than by beginning with the force of education. Among those, indeed, who have been brought up without any religion, it is quite plain that we need not look for a feeling of cordiality towards the mortifying demands of the Gospel; but confining myself to such of you as have been piously educated, I think there may be drawn from the nature of the case some explanation of your repugnance to experimental Christianity. Urged upon you at an age when all the gaiety of youthful impulse led you in an opposite direction, you grew up with a distaste for it proportioned to the zeal with which it was enforced. You felt it to be a restraint upon your indulgencies. You looked upon it in the light of a most uninviting, not to say repulsive, damper of your pleasures. You believed, from the mere habit of hearing, and you maintained, from the mere habit of believing; until at last, when you came to form your own opinions, you found yourselves unarmed with a single argument on the side of strict evangelical godliness. Here it was, that the mind underwent the process of a complete revulsion. You looked abroad, and saw that Christianity was divine. You admired the splendid and majestic renovation which she shed over society, but the spirituality of the thing you were unable to understand. You began first to halt, then to doubt, then to be perplexed, and finally to settle down into an immoveable indifference; while, the whole time, you were governed by mere early associations re-acting on the mind, without going for an hour into the work of a personal and thorough investigation. I appeal to yourselves, if this be not the actual arithmetic of your religious history? Has not the custom of believing doctrines without argument in youth, thrown over you an almost involuntary presumption, that there is no such thing as an important doctrine supported by argument at all? Have not the prejudices of education taken a counteractive effect, and created as much antipathy on the one hand, as they formerly did reverence and credit on the other? And while I am about it, allow me to say, that much as we may look back and smile over the lessons of childhood, as the dotings of parental fondness, the day is coming, when the prayers and tears of our godly parents will recur to us, and bring along with them a bitterness just in proportion to our present feelings of neglect.

But to return. Go a step further. You will find, I suspect, that an additional repugnance to strict Christianity has been insensibly insinuated into your minds by the peculiarities of Christian professors. There is, I know not what disposition in the world, to take up every eccentricity and imperfection which may linger around a pious man, and charge the whole at once to his religion. Instead of inquiring what his religion has done for him, how many impurities it has wiped away, and how many high and lofty sentiments it has inspired, the question commonly is, whether it has left any thing undone, any thing like a relic of those foibles unsubdued, which before had complete and undisputed possession of him. Now, my hearers, on this point, let us go into a computation of absolute matters of fact. Make out a catalogue of those repulsive features which piety has presented to our view upon the different walks of life. Put down upon the list a set of preachers, gifted with none of the charms of eloquence, laying aside in their discourses every elegance of diction, and every suavity of manner, and urging in their most discouraging form the doctrines of an unbending orthodoxy. Put down upon this list the phraseologies in vogue among Christians, but out of date in the common in