ark, and had hourly opportunities of becoming wise unto salvation, we do not read that even one of them escaped. Such was its devastation. As to its certainty, (independent of the Mosaic record), traces have been found in almost every country under Heaven, corroborating its occurrence, and demonstrating its effects.

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We are Abraham's seed," was the declaration of the Jews: "we are God's own peculiar people: neither nationally, nor religiously, can harm happen unto us." Alas for their pride and presumption, neither nation, nor temple, nor king, nor country, nor home, remains!

Such, then, are a few out of innumerable instances which prove that God is true to his word, and that treachery in religion will finally and assuredly be punished. Which then will you copy? Demas, the apostate,

or Luke, the faithful?

come to a right

May God enable you decision! Weigh the

matter well. Try our assertions by the standard of Scripture. Calculate and see

whether the attractive pleasures of earth,

this present world, and all its various and alluring enjoyments combined, can console you for the loss of Heaven?

Moreover be persuaded that you cannot begin to serve your God too early. True, He disdains not to receive the aged sinner turning from the error of his ways; but oh! blessed, thrice blessed, are they who in the spring tide of youth can say,-" Lord, how I love thy law, all my delight is in thy commandments." True, God refuses not pardon even to those who, after long experience in the ways of wickedness, turn to him: but oh! transcendently radiant will be their crown, and blissful beyond conception their station near the throne, who, in the morning of life, boldly avow themselves the disciples of their merciful Redeemer ; and who, while the world spreads its fascinations around them, "hear the word of God and keep it."

SERMON IV.

INTRODUCTORY.

"DID you ever" said the late Dr. Andrewes to a young friend, who saw him in one of those intervals of ease, with which his latter days were but rarely chequered, and could not repress his surprise at the buoyant cheerfulness of his conversation-"Did you ever read Bishop Horne's Sermon on the Blessing of a Cheerful Heart?"...."No! then get it by all means. breathes a spirit, and embodies an argumentI know not any thing half so delightful. The very text is exhilarating: A merry heart doeth good like medicine.""

It

Those who had the happiness of knowing the late Dean of Canterbury, need no memento to remind them what an instructive companion he was; how cheerful, how com

municative, how indulgent to young persons, what an attractive and engaging form his advice to them always assumed. And his success with the young was proportionately great.

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Listen," he continued, “to the run of this passage: 'The Christian is cheerful in trouble, cheerful out of trouble; cheerful while he lives, cheerful when he dies; cheerful in using well the blessings of this life, cheerful in expecting the blessedness of the next; cheerful, through faith, while he believes the great and precious promises; cheerful through hope, which depends on their accomplishment; cheerful through charity, in doing acts of mercy and loving kindness, till he comes to that land of plenty, where none shall want to those regions of joy, from which sorrow shall be for ever excluded.'"

6

"I have a theory of my own on the subject. I am, then, very averse to believe in the existence of religious melancholy,' vulgarly so called. I am persuaded, that that morbid state of feeling which is so often, and so pertinaciously, ascribed to religion, has, in

ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, little or no connection with it at all. I have, in the course of my professional duties, been called upon to witness cases-some of them of the most painful and perplexing nature-of what was called, by the friends and byestanders, religious melancholy; but, in which, I felt confident that religion had nothing to do as to PRODUCING the disease. The sufferer did, it is true, talk rapidly and incessantly about religion during the continuance of his malady; but on his recovering his senses, showed the same utter indifference, and unconcern, and distaste to it, which he evinced before he lost them.

"And I do fully believe, further, that what is commonly called religious dejection, is, very, very frequently, the offspring of a GUILTY CONSCIENCE; of which, religion, so far from being the cause, is, in fact, the best, and, indeed, the only REMEDY.

"I well remember Dr. Baillie's remark to a lady, who consulted him on the malady of her daughter, which she characterised as sheer religious melancholy. 'Madam,' said he, after hearing, at length, the reasons which induced