nity. Well might the dying Wolsey regret that he had given to his king the service which he owed to his God; and when we, too, are lying on our death-beds, or, at all events, a little beyond that period, we shall look back with anguish upon days and months devoted to the world, which, had they been applied to another use, might have rescued our souls from the infliction of final punishment.

There is another description of men who evade the invitations of the Gospel by pronouncing religion unfriendly to their pleasures and enjoyments. If this were indeed the case, I would burn-I will not say the Bible, for that not merely offers us happiness but teaches us duty-but I would burn this parable, and with it a part of nearly every page in the volume which represents Christianity under the form of a gladsome and rejoicing festival. No, my hearers, there are few, if any of us, who have not seen the hour, even in our wildest career of folly, when the humble, unobtrusive Christian. with an eye kindling in the confidence of his faith and a hand sustaining the helplessness of poverty and misfortune, and a heart throbbing high with the hope of a blessed immortality-when such an one we have met upon the great journey of life, it has made us secretly wish as we passed him that we were in his situation. And such is the only pain which genuine godliness ever gives the pain of a deep and a festering disquietude to the men of the world, by reminding them of their madness in squandering away the treasure of eternity.

I admit, indeed, that there is a sense in which religion becomes unfriendly to our enjoyments, and it is when our enjoyments are unfriendly to us and to God. She will not go with us to the gaming-house, and give us license to play our property, our characters, our families, and our souls away. She will not sit down with us to the table of revelry, and smile at the boisterous excess of dissipation and the rapid interchange of obscenity and profaneness. And there are other places, too, where she will not attend us, or, if she does, it will be with closed lips and a drooping head, till the assembly disperses, when her appearance is hailed with joy, not because her presence is wanted, but because it gives a kind of sanction to the presence of the rest. If it be on such accounts as these that you complain of Christianity as the damper of your pleasures, go on complaining. She offers you not a moment's compromise. Pursue your own course. Not a word more need be said, unless it be that a day is coming when you may perhaps wish, too late, that you had back again the heavy price you are now paying for your favorite enjoyments.

There is another class of persons who ground their ne. glect of religion upon the improprieties of professed Christians. How often do we hear the triumphant remark going the rounds of impenitence-"These are your boasted saints. These are men who sit down at the communion, and yet are no better than hundreds around them, who make no such noisy pretensions to piety." Now, my hearers, I grant that all you say is true; that there are persons of the very stamp to which you allude. But why do you blame them? "Because," you reply, and very justly, " their conduct does not comport with the spirit of religion." This, then, is coming to the very point I wished to secure. I have found out that you understand what true religion is, so well that you can detect the smallest deviation in its professors.

I call upon you, therefore, to be Christians, without those failings which you find in others. You know what is right, and I tell you plainly, that if you perish, you will perish under the terrific condemnation of the servant in the parable, who knew his Lord's will, and yet did it not. Nor do I stop there. You have discovered that the professed disciples of Christ are inconsistent in their deportinent. You have seen that the Church is corrupt; and in the name of the Almighty God, I put upon you the responsibility of coming forward and helping to reform it. Come and pray for it. Come and tell its inconstant and unworthy members, that they are bringing reproach upon the cause which they pretend to have espoused. Come and tell them, that their conduct has long kept you back from the Saviour, and set before them an example of that purity, and heavenly-mindedness, and circumspection, which you so well know to be required of a Christian in his walk through life. This is the high and commanding purpose to which you are solemnly bound to devote the knowledge you possess of what religion ought to be; and I have a right to hope, and I do hope, that God will give no sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eye-lids, till you take up your Cross, and make it your first and great undertaking, to bring about a reformation in the Church of Christ.

There is, finally, another set of apologists among the men of the world, who palliate their neglect by pleading their inability to perform the duties of religion. We call upon them to begin the pursuit of experimental piety; and they tell us, if, indeed, they tell us anything, that they have no disposition to set about it. Again, we inquire, why they have no disposition for a business so alarmingly important; and they reply, that however desirous they may be of an interest in Christ, the work of changing their hearts is completely beyond their power, and, therefore, they can do nothing. As if the culprit at the bar of justice could extenuate his crime by alleging that he had no disposition to abstain from it. As if we can escape from the charge of sinfulness by pleading that we are sinful. As if we might ward off the unsparing curse of the Godhead in the judgment day, by urging the very hearts which had rebelled against Him as our apol. ogy! But where, my hearers, is the secret of all this pretended inability? Have we not a common Bible, a common Saviour, a common offer of mercy? Are we not moving on, one as much as another, to the tribunal of Christ? Are not our souls clothed with the same essential principles of immortality? Where, then, is the difference, except in this plain and simple point, that the children of God have done what the unregenerate of their own accord have left undone? But allow your excuse to be true, in all its dimensions; allow it legitimate reasoning, that because you have no heart to perform your duty, you are therefore unable to perform it, and because you have put the performance out of your power, you must therefore leave the transaction in the hands of God. Does it follow, that you have nothing to do? Are you calmly to settle down in the conclusion, that you may continue unconcerned, adding sin to sin, and waiting with indolent composure the interference of the Deity? Suppose your dwellings were on fire, while you were stretched help. less upon the bed of disease, would you look quietly on while the conflagration was roaring around you? or would you rally the most agonising efforts of nature to cry for deliverance? Suppose you were lying palsied and motionless, on the brink of a burning and bursting crater, would you take your ease, as you now do? Would you hug, as you now do, the eager hopes, and the fascinating expectancies of the world, and rest satisfied in the peril of your exposure, because you could do nothing? or would you shriek for help, and not once only, nor twice, but again, and again, and again, till you found it? You see, then, upon what footing your own acknowledgments will place you, in reference to the work of your salvation; and, O, if there should be, in the disclosures of futurity, one sentence more dreadful and

more damning than the rest, it must fall on his head, whose excuse is that he could do nothing himself, when the only object of Jesus Christ in expiring on the Cross was to do every thing for him, if he but wished it done, without money, and without price.

My hearers, you may think that the apologies I have been enumerating are too empty, too absurd, too outrageous upon decency, to influence a single one in the postponement of his preparations for a future life. But let me ask you to retire within the reach of a truth-telling conscience, and see if, after all, you yourselves do not find something about you which ought to awaken uneasiness? See if you have not lived months and years in the absolute character of unpardoned sinners, with apologies, to say the least of it, of close affinity with those I have named? I do not wish you to tell me, in so many words, but I wish you seriously and solemnly to tell your own souls, and to profit by the information. I wish you to look back on the chequered scene over which you have travelled up to this hour, and say if there has been one solitary day when you were prepared for the decisions of the judgment-seat? Say if the invitations of the Gospel, when, indeed, you have bestowed any attention on them, have ever accomplished a further effect than to set you all with one consent to making excuses. Say if you could rationally hope, were the present hour to be your last hour, that you have a friend to stand by you while you are dying, and to conduct your spirit through the solemnities of the final day, and to throw open for you the gates of that city whose builder and whose maker is God. These are questions which all of us, sooner or later, will pronounce important; and I have only to add, that before the heavy seal of eternity is set upon our fate, they must be unequivocally answered. The season of apologies is passing away. The period is approaching, when all the little evasions on which