SERMON XV.

"Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy."

Luke, ii., 10.

WITH the connexion, my hearers, to which this passage belongs, none of us, it is believed, can be unacquainted. It announces that most interesting event which was celebrated yesterday, as it is once in every year, by a very large proportion of the Christian world. We are informed, that on the night of our Saviour's nativity, a messenger was sent from Heaven to proclaim-what? why, that Jesus Christ was born. But, then, this single fact, irrespective of the results to which it afterwards led, was not so unusually joyful. Certainly not. It was another, and a far higher consideration. It was because the long-expected Messiah had come; because a Redeemer had appeared for sinners; because glory could then be ascribed to God in the highest, at one and the same moment that peace was published on our apostate earth, and good will to men. These were the reflections which animated the celestial herald, when he broke forth into the triumphant language of the text. But after all, my hearers, why so lively an exhibition of joy at the mere birth of Jesus Christ? Not, surely, because he brought along with him the ensigns of greatness, and splendor, and pomp, for he was indigent and obscure: not because he came to enforce the great principles of morality and virtue, -for this was nothing new, Jewish zeal and Pagan philosophy had done all this before: not, finally, because he was to confirm his religion by the surrender of his life,-for hundreds of others, from that period down to the present, the disciples of Latialis, of Thor, and of Juggernaut, have steeped their respective altars in their own blood. Where, then, is the peculiar, the distinctive object, accomplished by the coming of Christ, which deserves so warm an expression of joy as our text has conveyed? It is to this single inquiry that I wish now to be confined. I might name a thousand results which Christianity has brought about. I might say that it has abolished idolatry, and arrested human sacrifice, and alleviated the cruelties of war, and rescued the female character from contempt, and reared the first public institutions of benevolence, and wrought, in short, upon every department of life, the process of a salutary and lasting reformation. All this I might safely assert; but [ will waive it for the present, and simply ask, what results the introduction of Christianity has accomplished, which are entirely distinct from the results of any other religion, and peculiar to themselves? What has our Saviour, whose birth we commemorate, what has he ever said or done, which nobody had ever said or done before? This question may be answered in very few words. He has, 1st, by making an atonement for sin, opened a safe path for all of us to return to God. He has, 2dly, offered to help us along in it, by imparting the influences of his spirit to renovate our hearts. He has, finally, in becoming mediator between God and man, between the judge and the culprit, insured to all who trust implicitly in his merits, the reward of an everlasting salvation.

In the first place, then, Christianity alone proposes an adequate atonement for sin. Say what we will, my hearers, when degenerate man approaches his Maker for pardon, it must be through the medium of atonement. In every country, and every age, this has been, and it has been felt to be, the only method of reconciliation with God. We find it in the theology of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. We find it in the former worship of Europe and America; and to the present hour we find it through the largest part of Asia, Africa, and the Islands. A great deal, I am aware, has been said in modern times to brow-beat the idea of atonement. All of us have heard the light of nature cried up as a sufficient guide in our religious affairs. But what light, I would ask, can nature give; what has it ever given to a sinner, on the question of his hopes for eternity? It may teach him to repent; but this will not answer his object; for if repentance can cancel the sins which he has committed, a little more of it will cancel the sins which he may hereafter commit, which would be releasing him from all obligation to God whatever. It may also teach him to reform. But this, again, will not answer his object; for if reformation will ensure him forgiveness, he may put it off as long as he pleases, so he begins it at last; and besides that, begin it when he may, so far from cancelling his former guilt, he is merely discharging his duty, without undoing a single thing which he had done before. This is the light which nature furnishes, and it furnishes no more. It shows the sinner his helplessness, but it leaves him just as helpless as ever. It shows him all the danger, and all the violence of the disease, but it offers no remedy. Do not, if you wish to know the real amount of all this light of nature, do not inquire of those who have been basking for years in the sunshine of Revelation. Go, rather, through the universal history of the world before Christianity appeared; or go now to any known country whatever, which Christianity has not visited, and how much of it shall we find in such a survey? Where was the light of nature when the statute-books of all civi. lized antiquity were legalising human immolation? Where was it amidst the ferocious and bloody rites of Freyer and Woden in the middle ages? And where is it now on the banks of the Niger, or the plains of Ceylon, or the fields of Hindostan, or the cheerless wastes of India beyond the Ganges? When you or I, my hearers, are lying upon our death-beds, something else than all this must come forward to comfort us; and that something else must be the atone. ment of Jesus Christ, which lends confidence to the prayer of wretchedness, and hope to the tears of penitence. The all-sufficient Saviour of the New Testament must approach, and tell us that God can now be just, and yet the justifier of him that believeth. Nothing besides can satisfy the anxieties, and relieve the forebodings of the sinner. Nothing besides can send home to his laboring conscience the assurance of pardon. In entering upon the last hour of life, we shall find the eternity beyond it completely unprovided, unless Christ be in us the hope of glory; and when our neverdying spirits take their flight to the invisible world, it will be all our joy, and all our consolation, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins.

But, again: I have said that Christianity alone provides for the regeneration of the human heart. It affords the Spirit of God to give a new bias to all its propensities, and a change to all its affections. I speak, my hearers, as much the language of experience as the language of Inspiration, when I tell you that we are all gone out of the way; that there is none who doeth good, no, not one; that the carnal mind is enmity against God, not subject to His law, neither indeed can be. By this I do not mean that all men are as bad as it is possible, nor that there is little or no difference between the different classes of the unregenerate. But I mean, that we have naturally no holiness, and that, left to themselves, our hearts secretly disrelish holy things; and that the virtues, and duties, and accomplishments, we may put on in the world, do not, and cannot make up the one article of spiritual religion. But, admitting all this, we may, perhaps, imagine that we hold in our hands an adequate remedy. It may be, that, however unwelcome we now find that part of the Bible which tells of a new birth, and of sanctification, we still believe ourselves capable of gradually conquering our distaste for it. But just make the experiment. Carry your hearts through I care not how rigid a discipline, and see if you can implant in them that supreme love to God which the Gospel requires. See if you can drill yourselves into that state of mind, which shall draw from your lips in all its sincerity, and all its feeling, the exclamation of the psalmist, "Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire besides Thee!" You may, I admit, commence a very important and useful reformation. You may restrain the corruptions of nature, and enter on all the visible duties and devotions of Christianity. You may form the habit of prayer, and take your seat at the communion, and, if you will, encounter the ridicule and reproach which are heaped on the people of God. But while you are doing all this, let me inquire if you have made it your spontaneous and leading desire to do it? To borrow an illustration, you may easily make yourselves to eat wormwood, and by repeated trials, you may acquire a habit of eating it without any great reluctance. But the question, after all, will be, Can you make yourselves to love wormwood, so as to feel a sense of uneasiness and pain when it is denied you? No more can you discipline corrupt nature into the love of spiritual and experimental religion. These are results which nothing short of Divine power can accomplish, for we are dead in trespasses and sins; and we shall remain so, if the Bible be true, whatever we may think, or may hope, till we are roused by the thundering call of Omnipotence, "Awake, ye that sleep, and arise from the dead, that Christ may give you light." When this is done, our hearts will begin to throb with the pulsations of evangelical piety, and not before. Till then, we