gion which we make known to others, and if we have a due sense of that high vocation with which we are honoured of God. May that God, who has conferred this honour upon us, vouchsafe to endow us with that illumination, and with those virtues, without which it is impossible for us to discharge the duties of it, in a becoming manner! May he vouchsafe to bestow upon us that courage, that intrepidity, which are necessary to our affectually resisting the enemies of our holy reformation, nay those too, who, under the name of reformed, do their utmost to thwart and to undermine it! May he vouchsafe to support us amidst the incessant difficulties and opposition which we have to encounter, through the course of our ministry, and to animate us by the idea of those supereminent degrees of glory, which await those who, after having turned many to righteousness, shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and as the stars for ever and ever!

Merchants, ye who are the support of this Republic, and who maintain in the midst of us prosperity and abundance, may God vouchsafe to continue his blessing upon your commerce! May God cause the winds and the waves, nature and the elements, to unite their influence in your favour! But above all, may God vouchsafe to teach you the great art of placing your heart there where your treasure is; to make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness to sanctify your prosperity by your charities, especially on a day like this, on which every one ought to prescribe to himself the law of paying an homage of charity to God who is love, and whose love has spared us to behold the light of this day!

Fathers and mothers, with whom it is so delicious for me to blend myself, under an address so deeply interesting, may God enable us to view our children, not as beings limited to a present world, but as beings endowed with an-immortal soul, and formed for eternity! May it please God to impress infinitely more upon our hearts the desire of, one day, beholding them among the blessed in the kingdom of heaven, than going on and prospering on the earth! May God grant us the possession of objects so endeared, to the very close of life, objects so necessary to the enjoyment of life! May God vouchsafe, if he is pleased to take them away from us, to grant us that submission to his will, which enables us to support a calamity so severe !

My

My dearly beloved brethren, this reflection chokes my utterance. May God vouchsafe to hear all the wishes and prayers which my heart has conceived, and which my lips have uttered, and all those which I am constrained to suppress, and which are more in number than the tongue is able to declare! Amen.

SERMON

SERMON X

THE TRUE GLORY OF THE CHRISTIAN.,

GALATIONS vi. 14.

But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.

HE solemnity which, in a few days, we are going to celebrate, I mean the Ascension of Jesus Christ, displays the triumph of the cross. The Saviour of the world ascending in a cloud, received up into heaven, amidst the acclamations of the church triumphant, removes the offence given by the Saviour of the world hanging on a tree. The period of the crucifixion, I acknowledge, was precisely that in which he carried magnanimity to its most exalted pitch. Never did he appear so truly great as when descended into the lower parts of the earth: Eph. iv. 9: humbled, made of no reputation, obedient unto death, even the death of the cross; Phil. ii. 7, 8: he accomplished what was most repulsive to nature, in the plan of redemption. But how difficult is it to recognize heroism, when the hero terminates his career upon a scaffold !

The darkness, which overspread the mystery of the cross, is passing away; the vails, which concealed the glory of Jesus Christ begin to withdraw; heaven, which seemed to have conspired with earth and with hell, to depress and overwhelm him, declares aloud in his favour; his splendour bursts out of obscurity, and his glory from the very bosom VOL. VI.

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of shame because he made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant; because he humbled himself; because he became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross: therefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth. Phil. ii. 9, 10.

What circumstances more proper could we have selected, Christians, to induce you to seek your glory in the cross of your Saviour, than those which display it followed by so much pomp and magnificence? I am going to propose to you as a model, the man who, of all others, best understood the mystery of the cross: for my part, says he, in the words which I have read, God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. Let us meditate on this subject, with all that application of thought which it so justly merits.

And thou, great High Priest, Minister of the true tabernacle! thou holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners. and made higher than the heavens; set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, Heb. vii. 26. viii. 2, 1. graciously look down on this people, now combating under the banners of the cross! It is impossible for us to call to remembrance the great day of thy exaltation,. without fixing our eyes upon thee, with those blessed disciples of thine who were the witnesses of it, without following thee, as they did, with the bodily organ, and with all the powers of thought, and without crying out, Draw us, Lord, we will run after thee: Cant. i. 4. But in giving way to such desires, we misunderstand the nature of our vocation. We must combat as thou hast done, in order to triumph with thec. Well, be it so! Teach my hands to war, and my fingers to fight: Psa, cxliv. 1. Teach us to make thy cross a ladder, whereon to mount to thy throne. Amen.

The text which we have announced, is, as it were, a conclusion deduced from the chapters which precede it. We cannot possibly have a clear comprehension of it, without a general recollection of the whole Epistle from which it is taken. St. Paul, in writing to the Galatians, has this principally in yiew, to revive the spirit of Christianity, which he himself had diffused over the whole province of Galatia.

Never had preacher greater success, than the ministry of our apostle was attended with, in this city of the Lesser Asia. He himself gives this honourable testimony in favour of the Galatians, in chap. iv. ver. 15. that they had received him as an angel of God, and, which is saying still more, even as Christ Jesus. But the Gauls, of which this people was a colony, have, in all ages, been reproached with the faculty of easily taking impressions, and of losing them with equal facility. The sentiments with which St. Paul had inspired them, shared the fate of all violent sensations; that is, they were of no great duration. With this he upbraids them in the very beginning of the Epistle. I marvel, says he to them, chap. i. 6. I marvel, that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ, unto another gospel. Mark the expression, removed unto another gospel.

We are not possessed of memoirs of the first ages of the church sufficiently ample, to enable us to determine with precision, who were the authers of a revolution so deplorable. But if we may give credit to two of the earliest historians, to whom we are indebted for the most complete accounts which we have of the first heresy, I mean Philostratus and St. Epiphanius; it was Cerinthus himself, in the first instance, and his disciples afterwards, who marred the good seed which St. Paul had sown in the church of Galatia. One thing is certain, namely, that respect for the ceremo nial observances which God himself had prescribed, in a manner so solemn, and particularly for the law of circumcision, was the reason, or rather the pretext, of which the adversaries of our apostle availed themselves, to destroy the fruits of his ministry, by exciting suspicions against the soundness of his doctrine. St. Paul goes to the root of the evil: he conveys just ideas of those ceremonial institutions : he demonstrates, that however venerable the origin of them might be, and whatever the wisdom displayed in their esta blishment, they had never been laid down as an essential part of religion, much less still, as the true means of reconciling men to God. We perceive, at first sight, this design of the apostle, in the words of my text, and through the whole Epistle, from which they are taken.

But what is, perhaps, not so easily discoverable in it, but which ought to be very carefully observed, is; that as St. Paul was maintaining his thesis against opponents of different sorts, so he likewise supports it on different principles.

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