quite separate from the intercourse of earthly friendship; although the strongest cement tc it, and its best ingredients when they are found together. And because a believer's hopes, and joys, and expectations, and desires, are common to all believers, and their object of deepest interest is the same, the language of his heart will be understood, and his feelings find sympathy, where by nature there would have been no bond of union. From our great defectibility, this enjoyment is not what it might be; perhaps never so little what it might be as at this time. But there are those still, who fear the Lord and speak often one to another; and there is a sweetness in such intercourse, a holy joy in such communion, to which Christ is a party, and God himself a listener,* which cannot be equalled by anything in the ordinary intercourse of life. It makes, indeed, as every experienced Christian knows, the intercourse of common society seem very palling and insipid. Accustomed among themselves to communications of such deep

* Mal. iii. 16.

and heart-touching interest, the children of God are very sensitive to the littleness of all common talk; and in contact with the world are thence exposed to be sometimes thought offended when they are really only uninterested.

"If any man be in Christ Jesus, old things are passed away, all things are become new." From this renovating process flows a perpetual current of increasing joy into the bosom of God's people. Their possessions are all new possessions. Their house, their lands, their friends, their children, the common air they breathe, the bread they put into their mouths: O it is all new, when sanctified by the blessing of the Lord, when divine love has taken possession of the heart. It is like that enchanter's touch which turned everything to gold. We all know the magic influence of some newlyacquired bliss to embellish everything around us. How it changes the scene, and changes the actors, and changes the most common incidents and occupations, by the "couleur de rose" it spreads over them. This is but a

faint resemblance of the sober, calm, abiding tinge of heavenly blessedness, that shines on everything in the Christian's way. Would we could say effectually to the hearts of all men, "Taste and see."

Su his Death.

"If we are dead in Christ, we believe that we shall all also live with him."-ROM. VI. 8.

The

It is commonly said that man was born to die; yet this was never true but once. children of Adam are born indeed, since their first father's fall, in a condition in which they must die, or perhaps we should say better, are to die; for of the necessity we know nothing; the translation of Enoch and Elijah are unexplained, as also that future transmutation of which St. Paul speaks-"We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." The sons of Adam, then, are to die, but this was no purpose of their first creation. Life, not death, was the gift that God bestowed upon his creatures, when he placed them in what we now so justly call a passing, perishing world. "Death," natural and spiritual death, "has passed upon all men, for that all have

sinned;" but unless we are to say that man was designed for sin, we cannot say that he was designed for death. It tends to no conclusion, that science finds in every new-born child the symptoms of fore-doomed decay; that the anatomist perceives the nice machinery of the human frame is not calculated to work on unimpaired forever. The same sen tence that called thorns and thistles from the soil accursed, called disease and decay into the dust-consigned body;-the same concussion that altered the whole arrangements of the natural world, smote the machinery of the human frame. And who can say how it altered it? how instantly it became unfit for its original purpose, incapable of its first destination, and unmeet to serve the spirit that animated it, as that spirit itself became to serve its Maker, Whether the likeness of

God, in which he

created man, was a corpo, real as well as a moral similitude, revelation does not intimate, By analogy we might be led to suppose it; and the rather that the term man, "Let us make man in our own likeness," designates the compound being, soul