tion of God, and the imitation of Christ, and the rewards of Heaven, but out of emulation of rivals, and ambition of the world's places. Companions are not sought according to their piety, their virtue, and their general worth, but according to their rank and their prospects in life. To which neglect of means, parents do often add the practical contradiction of religion, swearing perhaps, perhaps quarrelsome at home, entertaining worldly views of most subjects, religious views of almost none; and for six days in the week, banishing the face and form of religion from the eyes of their household. What glorious opportunities these for the despite of Satan to revel in. The mind, impressible as wax, wandering after novelty, and thirsting after knowledge of good and ill, unbound by habit and roving in its freedom, from within and from without solicited to evil-in this, the springtime of human character, when ye, the husbandmen of your children's minds, should be labouring the soil, and spreading it out to the sun of righteousness, and sowing it with the seed of the everlasting Word; ye are leaving it waste and undefended, for the enemy to enter in and sow it with the tares of wickedness, to take root and flourish, and choke any good seed which the ministers of grace may chance afterwards to scatter.

Have ye the conscience to think, brethren, that for this neglect an occasional visit to the church Catechism of a Sabbath night will compensate, or can you believe that certain words lying dormant in the memory during the years of budding manhood, will operate like an eastern talisman, or a catholic scapular, against the encounter of evil? Why should the wounded prejudices of any man wince while thus we speak, as if it were not God's truth we spoke? Have we not the experience within ourselves of having been mastered by this world's ambitious schools, albeit not untutored in the theological love of childhood, and have ye not the same experience? Feel ye not, when ye would set your hearts in order before the Lord,

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that they are all like an unweeded garden, and that you have to begin by tearing and lacerating the loves, admirations, and proprieties, which in early life cast their seducements over you without note of warning from parents, or from the books in which your parents and your masters schooled you ? Take heed, then, and resist the evil in its first beginning. Give the enemy the spring season, and you generally give him the summer, the autumn and the winter of life, with all eternity to boot; but tutor your children in the institutions of God, with a constant watchfulness, and a patient perseverance, beginning with restraint, then with the soft persuasion ledaing on, then with arguments of duty and interest confirming, and in the end, habit, which at first is adverse, will turn propitious, and the blessing of God, promised to the right training of children, will keep them from leaving his paths when they are old.

The want of a proper selection and application of means in early life, is a chief cause why we all find it such a task to conform our youth and manhood to the laws of God. It is not that these laws are ill adapted to our nature, whereof they are the guides, the sweeteners, and the perfecters; but that our nature hath got under adverse gov. ernment, and been fed up with indulgences, and degraded with services, from which we cannot now without great pain and exertion be delivered. It is not that God hath withheld his blessing, which blessing I understand to be like an atmosphere around every man, that he hath at all times free liberty to breathe in through the use of appointed means. But, it is that in our youth we were not properly applied to, and misthrove for want of proper spiritual treatment. Far from us be the unholy office of reflecting upon our pious parents, whose faults, whatever they be, their children should modestly hide, not rudely discover. Farther be it from us to excuse their unworthy children, who, had they listened to a father's council, or been softened by a mother's tears, had not far wandered

from wise and prudent paths. But farther from us than both, be the impious thought, that there is any son of man whom the Almighty doth not wish to become a son of light, and for whose growth in grace, from very childhood, he hath not set forth a sufficient supply in the everlasting gospel. We blame not our parents-ourselves we excuse not, while we justify our Father which is in heaven. Parents may be more parental, children may be more obedient, but our Heavenly Father cannot exceed the boundless dimensions of his love to all mankind. Therefore, wherever the blame is of the present wildness and inculture of our spirits, most certainly it rests not with him.

This our reluctance to divine institutions is a calamity to be accounted for and overcome, not a common place to be idly harangued of; and, instead of inditing popular truisms upon the corruption of human nature, we think it wiser to have pointed out to you the season at which that serpent within us may be most easily strangled. That season to most of us is past and gone; and here we are to contend against the mischief matured by time and confirmed by a thousand habits. To assist this struggle for conformity to the will of God, we brought forward on former occasions every solemn consideration of the honour done us, and the necessity laid on us, by his having ever condescended to become our law-giver. And now what more can we do, than set before you the consequences of resisting his revealed will, and craving you by every thing safe, manly, and honourable, to conform to his commandments, for the sake of all that is dear to you as immortal creatures.

You may despise above, you may

Obey the scriptures or you perish. the honour done you by the Majesty spurn the sovereignty of Almighty God, you may revolt from creation's universal rule to bow before its Creator, and stand in momentary rebellion against his ordinances; his overtures of mercy you may cast contempt on, and

crucify afresh the royal personage who bears them; and you may riot in your licentious libery for a while and make game of his indulgence and long-suffering. But come at length it will, when Revenge shall array herself to go forth, and Anguish shall attend her, and from the wheels of their chariot ruin and dismay shall shoot far and ' wide among the enemies of the king, whose desolation shall not tarry, and whose destruction, as the wing of the whirlwind, shall be swift-hopeless as the conclusion of eternity and the reversion of doom. Then around the fiery concave of the wasteful pit the clang of grief shall ring, and the flinty-heart which repelled tender mercy shall strike its fangs into its proper bosom; and the soft and gentle spirit which dissolved in voluptuous pleasures, shall dissolve in weeping sorrows and outbursting lamentations; and the gay glory of time shall depart; and sportful liberty shall be bound for ever in the chain of obdurate necessity. The green earth with all her blooming beauty and bowers of peace shall depart. The morning and evening salutations of kinsmen shall depart, and the ever welcome voice of friendship, and the tender whispering of full-hearted affection, shall depart, for the sad discord of weeping, and wailing, end gnashing of teeth. children, and father and mother, and wife and husband, with the communion of domestic love and mutual affection, and the inward touches of natural instinct, which family compact, when uninvaded by discord, wraps the live-long day into one swell of tender emotion, making earth's lowly scenes worthy of heaven itself-All, all shall pass away; and instead shall come the level lake that burneth, and the solitary dungeon, and the desolate bosom, and the throes and tossings of horror and hopelessness, and the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched.

And the tender names of

'Tis written, 'tis written, 'tis sealed of heaven, and a few years shall reveal it all. Be assured it is even so to happen to the despisers of holy writ. With this in arrear, what boots liberty, pleasure, enjoyment-all within the

hourglass of time, or the round earth's continent, all the sensibilities of life, all the powers of man, all the attractions of woman!

Terror hath sitten enthroned on the brows of tyrants, and made the heart of a nation quake; but upon this peaceful volume there sits a terror to make the mute world stand aghast.. Yet not the terror of tyranny neither, but the terror of justice, which abides the scorners of the most High God, and the revilers of his most gracious Son. And is it not just, though terrible, that he who brooked not in heaven one moment's disaffection, but launched the rebel host to hell and bound them evermore in chains of darkness, should also do his sovereign will upon the disaffected of this earth, whom he hath long endured and pleaded with in vain ? We are fallen, 'tis true we found the world fallen into ungodly customs, 'tis true-here are we full grown and mature in disaffection, most true. And what can we do to repair a ruined world, and regain a lost purity? Nothing-nothing can we do to such a task. But God hath provided for this pass. of perplexity; he hath opened a door of reconciliation, and laid forth a store of help, and asks at our hand no impossibilities, only what our condition is equal to in concert with his freely offered grace.

These topics of terror, it is very much the fashion of the time to turn the ear from, as if it were unmanly to fear pain. Call it manly or unmanly, it is Nature's strongest instinct-the strongest instinct of all animated nature; and to avoid it is the chief impulse of all our actions. Punishment is that which law founds upon, and parental authority in the first instance, and every human institution from which it is painful to be dismembered. Not only is pain not to be inflicted without high cause, or endured without trouble, but not to be looked on without a pang ; as ye may judge, when ye see the cold knife of the surgeon enter the patient's flesh, or the heavy wain grind onward to the neck of a fallen child, Despise pain, I wot not what