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Did he stand unmelted and unmoved over the scene of de. solation? Did he hesitate in the offer of a gratuitous relief? Did he say, as he might have said, I cannot leave the joys of Heaven to go down and bleed, and suffer, and die. Ah, no! He did leave Heaven. He did bleed, and suffer, and die. He looked upon a world of orphan sinners, unpitied and unprovided, and cried, Save them, O, save them, and I will be myself the ransom. While the prodigal was yet a great way off, the father ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him, and said, "This my son was lost, and is found." To-day, my hearers, we are called to imitate the high example of the Saviour. There are the little sufferers who are pleading for our help. They lift to us their imploring looks, as if to say, Do not blame us for our misfortune, for it was God, and not we, who laid our parents in the grave. There they sit, waiting the result of their appeal, with tearful eyes and throbbing hearts. And O, what a gladsome hour will it be, if this anniversary, which reminds them, on the one hand, of their dependence, should show them, on the other, that they can never want while you are living to provide for them.

SERMON XIX.

"And they all with one consent began to make excuse." Luke, xiv, 18.

You need not be reminded, my hearers, that the parable of the Supper, to which this passage belongs, was intended to represent the success of our Saviour's Gospel. A nobleman, on the marriage of his son, is supposed to have provided a magnificent entertainment. Invitations were issued through the circle of his acquaintance, and at the appointed hour, waiting only for the arrival of the guests, he despatched his attendants to inform them that all things were ready. And what think you was their return for this welcoming hospitality? Why, merely the hollow and hypocritical ceremony of pleading other engagements. When the time arrived for the festival, it appeared that what with farms, and what with merchandise, and what with domestic cares, all who were invited had with one consent made excuse. Very much in the same way, I repeat it, do mankind contrive to evade the invitations of the Saviour. Hence it seems to have been his aim, when he spoke the parable, to denote, primarily perhaps, the perverseness of the Jews in rejecting his Messiahship, but chiefly the perverseness of sinners, in every age, in putting away from them the blessings of evangelical religion. The feast of the Gospel is still open. Still does Christianity offer her repast of joys unspeakable and full of glory. Still the bountiful Provider of the entertainment is sending forth his repeated and encouraging invitations. But all this time we cling to some frivolous excuse, and while every preparation is made, and

nothing wanting but our acceptance, we turn unpersuaded

away.

There is, in the first place, a class of persons who palliate their neglect of religion by pleading the want of time to attend to it. This apology, ungrateful and ungenerous as it may seem, is frequently, I have no doubt, grounded in truth. Hundreds of men there are who parcel out life into those nice apportionments, which really absorb the whole, and leave the concerns of the soul entirely unprovided for. For example: they allot the morning to business and the afternoon to the hospitalities of the table, and the evening to a necessary relaxation, and a liberal portion of the night to the current amusements; and the plain arithmetic of the whole is, that they find not a single half-hour for the service of that Being whose goodness has given them the entire twenty-four. But suppose, after such a computation, we stand up at the bar of conscience and inquire by what right we involve ourselves in this bewildering maze of occupation on what principle do we multiply around us the cares of business and the calls of pleasure, and then, by a curious sort of reasoning, make them the excuses for our impenitence?

My hearers, let us not be blinded by this delusive sophistry. We can all husband time enough, if we would, for the concerns of religion; but the secret matter of fact is, that we look upon them as insipid; we have no heart for the undertaking; and we turn away, not for want of leisure, but for want of relish, the moment the subject is presented. When we come to make the calculation, our inconsistent apology stares us in the face. We find so many hours devoted to amusement, and so many to the table, and so many to doing nothing; and after all, we have no time for these famished and neglected spirits within us, which are travelling on to the retributions of an impartial eter

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 Chris. tians. 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

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