about honest scruples, or put on the embellishment of an unimpeachable exterior, but to all these things I plead the single offset, that "what God hath spoken He will do it."

Look at the case: Sinners as we are, has not a flood of light been poured upon the road we are travelling to eternity? Has not a Saviour expired in disgrace and agony upon the cross? Have not the arches of Heaven almost audibly rung with the news of an unmerited pardon, without money and without price? Is there one excluded from the offer, or has there ever been, on this side the grave, a single suppliant banished from the footstool of mercy? I lay the appeal upon every individual in the reach of my voice. Much as you have relied on some favorite set of evasions and excuses, would you not, this hour, become an experimental Christian but for your sins? Answer it in the sight of Heaven-is there any thing that looks like an obstacle, besides the stubbornness of your reluctant and unyieldng heart? And, while you say this, are you not admitting the charge laid against you by the text of "loving darkness rather than light, because your deeds are evil?" And what is the consequence? Why, if we miss of salvation, it is a business of our own, and the fault will lie entirely with ourselves. I put it to your souls, my hearers, after Calvary has been steeped in blood, after Inspiration has laid its treasure at our feet, after the warnings and entreaties of the Gospel have been pressed upon us from childhood to this hour, and after conscience has added to all the rest its most impressive and affecting confirmation, what excuse can we devise for our impenitence? With what feelings can we lie down upon our dying beds when the glittering pageantry, of this world shall have vanished? How can we raise our eyes before the judgment-seat of Christ when we have gone there, beating back, step by step, as we pass along, the arm of his offered salvation?

SERMON XXVIII.

"We love Him, because He first loved us."

1 John, iv., 19.

THIS passage would seem at first sight to import, that a Christian's love to God is the mere exercise of gratitude. If it were so, every thing like evangelical theology is laid at once in ruins. All of us know that gratitude is a feeling of nature alone; it is a tribute which bad men, as well as good men, pay to the evidence of kindness in a benefactor. It may be awakened, as upon any other subject, so on that of religion; and hundreds there are, who in hearing that Christ for their sakes underwent a painful and humiliating death, will find their eyes to fill, and their hearts to melt, at the story of his generous humanity, and all the time remain just as far away from the point of being real Christians as they were before. Gratitude, therefore, does not constitute that love to God which our text had in view. There is somewhere another meaning to the words, and I take it to be simply this: that mankind were sunk too deeply in sin to be reclaimed to the love of God, unless He had first felt towards them the yearnings of mercy, and devised a plan by which their sins and their stubbornness might be subdued. That such is the true import of the passage, we ascertain from the scope of the chapter to which it belongs. In the 9th verse, the apostle says, that "God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him." Here the fact stated is, that Christ has come into the world; and the consequence of it is that we may now live, whereas, if he had not come, we must have perished. A little further along it is added, that "we love God, because He first loved

loved us." Here the fact stated is that He loved mankind; and the consequence of it is that they may now be brought to cherish a reciprocal affection, whereas, if He had not loved them, and sent to them the provision of a Saviour, they must have remained as they were, with their enmity unsubdued, and their impenitence unawakened.

Thus you see for yourselves the meaning of the text. We shall aim, upon what the apostle has affirmed, to raise two points: the first, that if any of us have really the love of God, we are indebted for it to His mercy in sending us a Redeemer; the second, that besides our veneration in general for the attributes of God, we must love Him, as He is made known through a Redeemer in the Gospel. As to the first point, when I speak about "really" having the love of God, I mean to exclude the feeling of gratitude entirely from the appellation. Gratitude is one thing, and affection another thing. They are based upon different principles; the one on the mere reception of favor, the other on the consideration of merit. Gratitude, sensibility to kindness, is perhaps the last virtue, if it be a virtue, which deserts human nature, even in its lowest debasement. It keeps a lingering hold upon our hearts, when they have bidden farewell to nearly every other sympathy, and every other kindly emotion; and experience has shown, that among the most abandoned of malefactors, there is uniformly some softened part which gives way at the approach of tenderness. But surely a feeling like this, the companion of the darkest bosom, will not be trumpeted into identity with the breathings of a warm and confiding attachment! By no means. It is altogether a different impulse. To the man who lends me his relief in the hour of misfortune, I may tender the return of the most grateful acknowledgment, and yet, when the single attribute of his benevolence is taken from him, I may look upon the whole of what is left of his character with positive disgust. The entire emotion in me is but a kind of qualified and embellished selfishness, and nothing pertains to it which can claim the dignified rank of a pure and lofty affection. By "really" having the love of God, I mean the looking upon Him with satisfaction-the thinking of Him with delight, aside completely from an estimate of the favors which we have received from His bounty. In every heart there is some ruling passion, and what I say is, that in our hearts that passion should be a paramount cordiality, and a spontaneous gladsomeness in contemplating the character of God, without giving to Him at all the aspect of our personal benefactor. This is precisely the principle which holds dominion over a Christian's bosom, and I repeat, that he is indebted for it to the Divine mercy in providing a Redeemer. Christ Jesus came into the world to save us, not in our sins, but from our sins-to reconcile, not God to man, but man to God. He saw us fixed in the attitude of a most unbending defiance towards the Almighty, and he aimed to soften our obduracy, and bring us back to our deserted allegiance. Some there are, I know, who suppose the process of becoming the friends of God to rest entirely on their own exertions, and who, as they have never tried in earnest to dislodge the corruptions of the heart, so have not yet learned that it must be God who worketh in them both to will and to do of His own good pleasure. But surely every Christian will bear me witness, and their evidence alone it is which the nature of the case admits of, that the depravity of an unregenerated bosom does not, and will not, give way, unless all the urgencies of the Holy Spirit are matched against it -that the carnal mind is to so deadly an extent "enmity against God," that, until Divine grace interferes, every attempt we make to subdue it is futile, and serves only to show us more and more forcibly the distance of our moral alienation. If this be true, and true it is upon every fair and legitimate testimony, if we ourselves be helpless, where should we have been but for Jesus Christ? If the work of giving us an affection for God result, as we all confess it does, solely from the mercy of God, was not the apostle right in saying that we love Him because He first loved us, and sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins? Then our first point is established, and the second remains: that as God has made Himself known through a Redeemer, in that character must we love Him. It is altogether useless to set before the imagination a being invested merely with natural perfections, and to make him the object of our worship. Such an one may be the God of reason, or the God of poetry, or the God of an admiring philosophy, but he is not the God of the Bible. There are those who will talk with eloquence about the great or the magnificent attributes of the Almighty, and yet, come to remind them of God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, and they find the charm at once dispelled.

They look with a sort of rapture upon the splendors of creation, or the scenery of external nature, or even the sublime moralities of the Bible; but there the curtain falls. When they are told that God, in maintaining the dignity of His government, was induced to surrender His Son to the agonies of the Cross, and that even now He can offer salvation only to the contrite and broken-hearted sinner, when they hear this, the subject throws off all its appendages of grandeur, and sinks down into a tame and unmoving religiousness.

But, my hearers, it is exactly in this character that God must be loved, as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in and through him the Father of him that believeth. We must put away from us every idea of receiving a pardon, or of standing on the ground of acceptance, or of averting the positive sentence of death issued against us,