monitor to guard our conduct from offence, rather than a universal law to impregnate all the sources of thought and action. My brethren, doth the hand ever forget its cunning, or the tongue its many forms of speech, or the soul its various states of feeling and passion? Is there an interval, in the wakeful day, when the mind ceases to be in fluctuating motion, and is bound in rest like the frozen lake? I do not ask, is it always vexed like the troubled sea-but doth it ever rest from emotion, and remain steadfast like the solid land? Doth not thought succeed thought, impression impression, recollection recollection, in a ceaseless and endless round? And, before this pleasant agitation of vital consciousness can compose itself to rest, the eye must be sealed to light, and the ear stopped to hearing, and the body become dead to feeling, and the powers of thought and action, done out, surrender themselves to repose. Nay, even then, under the death-like desertion of all her faculties, and the oppressive weight of sleep, the mind in her remoter chambers keeps up a fantastical disport of mimic life, as if loath for an instant to forego the pleasure she hath in conscious being. Seeing, then, not even the sleep-locked avenues of sense, nor the worn-out powers of thought and action, nor slumber's soft embrace, can so lull the soul that she should for a while forget her cogitations, and join herself to dark oblivion; seeing that she keeps up the livelong day a busy play of thought, feeling, and action, and during the night keeps vigils in her mysterious chambers, fighting with the powers of oblivion and inertness a battle for existence-how should she be able for any instant to do without the presence and operations of her Creator's laws-from which being at any instant exempted, she is a god unto herself, or the world is her god? From their authority to be detached, however brief a season, is for that season to be under foreign control, and rebellious to the Being of whom her faculties are holden, and by whom her powers of life are upheld.-His laws should be present in our inward parts, yea, hidden in our hearts, that we offend him not. They should be familiar as the very consciousness of life. Into the belief being received, they should pass into the memory, grow incorporate with the hidden sources of nature; until the array of our purposes and actions learn to display itself under the banners of the Supreme; until instinct, blind instinct himself, have his eye opened and purged by the light of Heaven, and come forth submissive to Heaven's voice!

If any one who heareth me have the Word so believed, so treasured, so incorporated, the same is a perfect man, and needeth only to preserve himself so. But as there is no one or hardly any one so instated, I take the benefit of these arguments and illustrations, to press home upon you the reading of the Word in another style than you are wont.

And, First, That which I have sketched of the soul's necessities needeth something more than to rake the scriptures for a few opinions, which, by what authority I know not, they have exalted with the proud name of the doctrines: as if all scripture were not profitable for doctrine.-Masterful men, or the masterful current of opinion, hath ploughed with the word of God, and the fruit has been to inveigle the mind into the exclusive admiration of some few truths, which being planted in the belief, and sacrificed to in all religious expositions and discourses, have become popular idols, which frown heresy and excommunication upon all who dare stand for the unadulterated, uncurtailed testimony. Such shibboleths every age hath been trained to mouth; and it is as much as one's religious character is worth, to think that the doctrinal shibboleths of the present day may not include the whole contents and capacity of the written Word. But, truly, there are higher fears than the fear even of the religious world; and greater loss than the loss of religious fame. Therefore, craving indulgence of you to hear us to an end, and asking the credit of good intention upon what you have already heard, we summon your whole unconstrained man to the engagement of reading the Word ;-not to authenticate a meagre outline of opinions elsewhere derived, but to prove and purify all the sentiments which bind the confederations. of life; to prove and purify all the feelings which instigate the actions of life; many to annihilate; many to implant; all to regulate and reform ;-to bridle the tongue till its words come forth in unison with the word of God, and to people the whole soul with the population of new thoughts, which that Word reveals of God and man-of the present and the future. These doctrines, truly, should be like the mighty rivers which fertilize our island, whose waters, before escaping to the sea, have found their way to the roots of each several flower, and plant, and stately tree, and covered the face of the land with beauty and with fertility-spreading plenty for the enjoyment of man and beast. So ought these great doctrines of the grace of God in Christ, and the help of God in the Spirit, and fallen man's need of both-to carry health and vitality to the whole soul and surface of christian

life. But it hath appeared to us, that, most unlike such widespreading streams of fertility, they are often, as it were, confined within rocky channels of intolerance and disputation, where they hold noisy brawl with every impediment, draining off the natural juices of the soul; and, instead of fruits and graces, leaving all behind naked, barren, and unpeopled! Which makes us lament,

In the Second place, That the catechetical books of any church should have come to play such a conspicuous part in the foreground of the Christian stage, and have not kept their proper inferiority, and served as handmaidens to the book of God. They are exhibitions not of the whole Bible, as is often thought, but of the abstract doctrines, and formal commandments of the Bible: and this not upon any superhuman testimony, but after the judgment of fallible mortals like ourselves. We are not discontented with them on that account, but, on the other hand, we are proud to possess such as our church doth acknowledge: but we are very discontented that they should have stepped from their proper place of discerning heresy, and preserving in the church a unity of faith that from this useful office they should have come to usurp it as the great instrument of a religious education, and the great storehouse of religious knowledge, in our families, in our schools, and even in the ministry of our churches. Now they are not good instruments of education, being above the level of youth and the most of men, and addressing only the intellect, and that only with logical forms of truth, not with narrative, with example, with eloquence or with feeling. And as to their being storehouses of religious knowledge-they want the most essential staples of our religion; for there is in them no authoritative voice of our God that we should fear them; no tender sympathetic voice of our Saviour, that we should tenderly affect them in return; no unction of the Holy One, that we should depend upon them for healing power. All we do is to believe them, and this not until we have carried an appeal to the word of God, which surely were as worthy a first appeal and a maiden faith. Moreover there is in them no feature of Christian imagery, to catch the conception; nor patterns of holy men, to awaken the imitation of excellence, and draw on the admiration of holiness; no joyful strains of hope and promised bliss, to rouse Nature's indolence; nor eager remonstrances against the world's ways; nor stern denouncements, like the thunder of heaven upon the head of its transgressions; nor pathetic bursts of sympathy over Nature's melancholy condi

tions, and more melancholy prospects. On these accounts most indubitable it is that the rich and mellow Word, with God's own wisdom mellow, and rich with all mortal and immortal attractions, is a better net to catch childhood, to catch manhood withal, than these pieces of man's wording, however true to Scripture, or compounded of the ingredients of human wisdom. From the prevalence of this taste for doctrinal and catechetical statements, there hath sprung,

In the Third place, This succession of practical evils, over which we most bitterly lament. The Scriptures are not read for the higher ends of teaching the soul practical wisdom, and overcoming the practical errors of all her faculties, of all her judgments, and of all her ways. Then the Word, which is diversified for men of all gifts, cometh to be prized chiefly as a treasure of intellectual truth, elements of religious dogmatism-often an armoury of religious warfare. Then our spirits become intolerant of all who find in the Bible any tenets differing from our own, as if they had made an invasion upon the integrity of our faith, and were plotting the downfall of religion itself. Then an accurate statement of opinion from the pulpit, from the lips of childhood, from the death-bed of age, becomes all in all; whereas it is nothing if not conjoined with the utterances of a Christian spirit, and the evidences of a renewed life. Who can bear the logical and metaphysical aspect with which Religion looks out from the temples of this land, playing about the head, but starving the well-springs of the heart, and drying up the fertile streams of a holy and charitable life! An accurate, systematic form is the last perfection of knowledge; and a systematic thinker is the perfection of an educated man. Therefore it is high intolerance of the far greater number, whose heart and whose affections may be their master faculty, to present nothing but intellectual food, or that chiefly: and moreover it is a religious spoliation of the heavenly wisdom, which hath a strain fitted to every mood; and it is an unfeeling, unfaithful dealing between God and the creatures whom he hath been at such charges to save. And to look suspicious upon those who are attracted to the sacred page by its gracious pictures of the divine goodness, and love it with a simple answer of affection to its affectionate sayings, or a simple answer of hope to its abundant promises-to undervalue those who feed their souls with its spiritual psalmody, or direct their life by its weighty proverbs, reckoning an authority and grace of God to reside in every portion of it-to suspect those who live on devotion, on acknowledg

ments of Providence, and imitation of Christ, because they cannot couch their simple faith and feeling in technical and theological phrase, but sink dumb when the high points of faith are handled-all these-the baneful effects of holding so much acquaintance with formularies of doctrine, and so little with the Word itself-so much acquaintance with the religious spirit of the age and country, and so little with the spirit of God, argue a narrow form of religion, and an uncharitableness of spirit, from which we pray God to deliver all who pertain to the household of faith!

Oh! brethren, let me now drop this strain of censure which the honour of the Bible hath forced me to maintain against my better liking, and speak persuasively in your ear for a noble and more enlarged perception of the truth. Pour ye out your whole undivided heart before the command of God. Give your enlarged spirit to the communion of his word. Be free; be disentangled. Let it teach; let it reprove; let it correct; let it instruct in righteousness; let it elevate you with its wonderful delineations of the secrets of the divine nature, and of the future destinies of the human race, higher than the loftiest poetry: and let it carry you deeper, with its pictures of our present and future wretchedness, than the most pathetic sentiment ever penned by the novelist and let it take affection captive by its pictures of divine mercy and forgiveness, more than the sweetest eloquence: let it transport you with indignation at that with. which it is indignant, and take you with passion when it is impassioned; when it blames be ye blamed; when it exhorts be ye exhorted; when it condescends to argument, by its arguments be ye convinced. Be free to take all its moods, and to catch all its inspirations. Then shall you become instinct with all Christian feeling, and pregnant with all holy fruits, "thoroughly furnished for every good word and work."

Why, in modern times, do we not take from the Word that sublimity of design and gigantic strength of purpose which made all things bend before the saints, whose praise is in the Word and the church of God? Why have the written secrets of the Eternal become less moving than the fictions of fancy, or the periodical works of the day; and their impressiveness died away into the imbecility of a tale that hath been often told? Not because man's spirit hath become more weak. Was there ever an age in which it was more patient of research, or restless after improvement? Not because the Spirit of God hath become backward in his help, or the