and to improve the life. All speculations, except very general ones, on a future state, are idle and unprofitable. The joys of heaven are not as the joys of earth, they are wholly spiritual; and of spiritual things our souls, being chained down in a material prison,, can form but a very distant and inadequate idea. How our vile body shall be changed into his glorious body, we know not; we know not how our intellects shall be enlarged; how perfect bliss shall flow through a variety of senses, with the very ideas of which we are necessarily unacquainted "Beloved," says the Apostle, " now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; and every man that hath this hope, purifieth himself, even as he is pure." And can we be more powerfully urged to conform ourselves to the resemblance of God in this world, than by the assurance that we shall resemble him in the next? In the image of God was man created, and till that image of holiness, which has been defaced by sin, shall have been renewed in our minds, we are incapable of the rational anticipation of that moment, when we shall be as he is. Would man but consider from what he fell, and to what he is to be restored, every gross and corrupt affection must vanish before him. Few

of us entertain rational and scriptural hopes of future bliss; we are not contented with the extension of the general prospect, but we must contract it to the scale of our narrow imaginations. Hence, in all our anticipations of heaven, our earthly affections have too large a share. We fancy scenes of joy, which resemble, though in a higher degree, our earthly qualifications; we forget the imperfections of our faculties to bear the representation, even of spiritual glory; we forget that we shall resemble God, not man, hereafter; we forget, therefore, to resemble and to imitate him here.

Since then both reason and Scripture declare, that our future bliss will consist in our approximation to the purity of the Divine nature; reason and Scripture will also inform us, that the only means of enjoying the consolation of this hope, in its full extent, is by an humble imitation of the divine perfection here. The anticipation of such a state is unwelcome, and insipid, to any but a pure heart. The pure in heart alone, can conceive, even in imagination, those purified joys, from which every earthly impurity and affection are essentially excluded. Thus, then, between a purified hope, and a purified life, is an intimate bond of union and connection. They grow with each other's growth, they strengthen with each other's strength; though

purity of heart springs from hope, yet hope again is nourished, strengthened and enlarged by its very offspring. Who is there, who shall have carefully read those portions of the Bible where the Christian hope is pourtrayed in its most vivid colours, without rising under the influence of heavenly grace, purified in his affections from the dross of corruption? who is there who feels not his mind enlarged, and his heart expanded for the reception of that holiness, without which no man shall see God? There is a characteristic mildness, an humility, an innocence, in Christian hope, which essentially distinguishes itself from all the throes, and convulsions, of heated fanaticism. Purity of heart is to be attained by too many gradations to suit the flighty and precipitate fancies of enthusiasm. From the Christian hope, Christian perfection and purification alone can spring. All other boasted fountains of purity, fail even in their first stream; they are dried up by the fever of passion, and become noisome by their own stagnancy.

The high and airy pursuits of philosophy were recommended in ancient times, as purifiers of the affections from the contagion of passion, from the corruption of mortality. But few ever professed to be philosophers, and fewer still really were so. And that principle which extends not its influence from the highest to the lowest, from

the most elegant and cultivated mind, to the meanest and modest intellect, is, at all events, but a very meagre and inefficient principle of action. But philosophy is no principle of action at all, as is best proved, not from the words, but from the lives of those who profess it; those lives are a standing and notorious example of its utter inability to direct the moral conduct of its possessors. It may enlarge the conceptions, it may abstract the intellect for a time from earthly affections, but it affords no security against its return from the noblest flights of the soul, even to the lowest sink of corruption. Genuine and permanent purification can only be effected by Christian hope, and "he that hath this hope, purifieth himself even as its Great Author and Finisher is pure."

SERMON XIX.

PSALM xlii. 6.

Why art thou so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why art thou so disquieted within me?

So impregnated with calamity is the condition of life, so constituted for the reception of misery is the moral construction of man, that common observation alone is required to inform us of the universality of the evil, and common experience to teach us how large a share each individual, in his own person, is doomed to undergo. In following this train of thought, and viewing the life of man under all the various circumstances incident to it, every step we take will the more and more assure us of this momentous truth, "that all the days of man are sorrow, and his travel grief: yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night."

Nor are the modes of misery less various, than its dominion universal. There is a sorrow that springs from the consideration of our spiritual infirmities, from a sense of our own iniquity, and