unto God, and the prayer that comes up from th centre of its being is, "Lord, give us thy truth. Blessed be his name, the answer to that pray

comes in the Gospel of Christ, that Gosp which is not after man, but is taught by the re elation of him of Nazareth- that pearl of pric less value that cordial to the wounded, blee

ing heart that balm to the smitten spir God help us to hold it fast, and say with t Poet:

"Should all the forms that men devise,

Assault my faith with treacherous art,

I'd call them vanity and lies,

And bind the Gospel to my heart.”

up from th s thy truth

that praye that Gospe by the re

arl of price nded, blee

itten spir y with the

SERMON VIII.

COMING TO GOD.

BY REV. A. G. LAURIE.

O that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat."-JOB XXxiii. 3.

So exclaims Job under the pressure of his great calamity. The successive and crushing disasters, so dramatically related, which had rapidly brought him down from the height of prosperity and enjoyment, and overwhelmed him with wretchedness, though all of them, immediately traceable to merely material agencies, were clearly and truly recognized by him, if not as the operations of divine grace, at least, as the ordinations at a Divine Providence. Unlike too many of ourselves, with all the advantages of a Christian instruction, Job could look through and

beyond the action of intermediate and secondary causes, to him who is the prime cause of all; and whether the occurrences of his life were con ducted through a prolonged series of visible media, or were the results of those viewless forces, whose effects are more readily seen to b the workings of Omnipotence, he felt good and evil, - -the prosperity of his former, and th various misery of his subsequent state-to b attributable finally to God? "Shall we receiv good at the hand of God, and shall we not receiv evil?" is the response to his wife, in which h at once vindicates God's justice, and acknow edges His sovereignty.

This distinct and direct apprehension of Go as the Author and Conductor of all the arrang ments of the world, is undoubtedly, to son extent, to be attributed to the imperfection physical science in the early ages. The India of our own Continent, the partially civilized ma in all lands where a Deity is owned and w shipped, feels himself in closer contact with G by the absence of all those interposing process of which he knows nothing, than the partial instructed resident of a more enlightened lar

nd secondar
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seen to be

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we receiv

not receive

which he I acknowl

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e arrange

to some fection of he Indian

lized man

and wor with God

processes partially

ned land

We do not say that his piety is so intelligent, but it is more prompt and unquestioning, more credulous, to be sure, but more confident and devoted, too. While we have little sympathy with that pusillanimous faith which deprecates the advance of scientific discovery, as if the triumphs of science were the calamities of Christianity, we cannot be blind to the fact, that a superficial progress among the disclosures of science, unless accompanied by a corresponding cultivation of the devotional sentiments, and a more vigorous grasp of the principles of religion, has a tendency to alienate the mind and heart from God, by the obtrusion of such a multitude of intermediate agencies, as increase our distance, and divert our attention, from the primal Originator and Author of them all. It is true that much of this arises from our previous ignorance, and from the sudden and surprised sensations with which we find ourselves displaced from our fancied contiguity to God, the intermediate space becoming occupied with material dispositions and arrangements, of which we had not dreamed, while our eye, yet unaccustomed to the larger sweep now necessary to include him,

falls short of the mighty Being who sits behin them, projecting his works, harnessed with the controlling laws, upon the broad theatre of h creation. It is also true, that when we ha made sufficient advance, when we have reach such an elevation on the high grounds of disco ery, as to enable us to take a more commandi survey of the fields of Nature and Providence, position from which the various details th have hitherto stood in detached prominen monopolizing our attention, are seen to sink in place, and to blend in an economy of order a harmony, held together by the controlling lin of a few great principles, converging from eve quarter to one point of combination, centering the throne, and gathered in the grasp of Go then indeed the religious perceptions, hither obstructed in their way to him by the interve tion of material processes, lately reckoned fin but now seen to be intermediate and subor nate, resume their true direction, and rest their rightful object, and the religious conv tions, trampling down the barriers of a sup ficial scepticism, lay hold more ardently a tenaciously than ever before, on the glorio