ment, nor seeks to drown them either in business or in pleasure, but, amidst the varied concerns of human life, directs his serious anxious thought to that day which the impure and the unrighteous cannot abide, he may find the same refiner's fire which will consume the ungodly of the earth like dross, employed in cleansing his corruptions from him, and fitting him by a purification, perhaps painful in its process, for that holiness and righteousness in which his soul may be well pleasing to God. Thus through Him who endured the cross for us is the faithful separated from sin; thus is his service and self-sacrifice, in life and in death made acceptable to his LORD and Redeemer.

But whatever be the issue of these considerations on our personal conduct, yet one thing is certain, that the end of all is at hand. At what time or season the consummation of the present state of things shall take place in the earth, is concealed from our knowledge; but the hour of death, always uncertain and never distant, brings it close to every individual. Whatever be the objects on which the hopes of men may be placed, to the exclusion of what religion presents, the course of years is silently yet certainly displacing them every term of years in prospect, if it bear us not onward in that course in which the occupations, the cares, and sufferings of this life are purifying and fitting us for its blissful termination, is only carrying us on in an opposite direction,-placing us in a more melancholy and cheerless and hopeless condition respecting it. Since

then all may be said to depend upon the present direction of our hearts and thoughts on this subject, infinitely does it concern us to rectify them; to receive now by true faith and hearty obedience the Lord Christ as our own, through the appointed channels of grace; to become, by his inhabitation, living temples of the Most High, and capacitated, by the discipline and preparation of life, to meet Him joyfully at his second coming. The day of grace is fast closing, and that irreversible state advances, as announced at the close of the last book of the New Testament, when Christ shall again come with reward and judgment in his hand,-when he who is unjust shall be unjust still, and he who is filthy shall be filthy still, and he who is righteous and holy shall be righteous and holy still. And we are no further Christians than as our use of the means of grace, and the habitual direction of our thoughts and purposes, enable us to respond to this announcement in the words which conclude the volume of Revelation: "Amen. Even so come, Lord Jesus."

SERMON XII.

THE GAINSAYING OF CORE.

(Preached at St Mary's on Sunday, May 29, 1842, the Restoration of King Charles II).

ST JUDE, Ver. 11.

They have perished in the gainsaying of Core.

It is no common event by which the present anniversary is distinguished; and though inferior in authoritative sanction to those catholic solemnities which mark the periods of our redemption by Christ Jesus, and those in which we glorify his grace as displayed in his more eminent Saints and Martyrs, is yet commended as a national festivato our observance; an observance assuredly not superseded, but rather heightened in its religious associations to us all, by occurring, as it does this year, on the weekly feast of the resurrection of the Lord of life from the grave. Well in particular does it become our academical institutions, in carrying out the bequests of ancient piety and charity for the light and guidance of after generations, to maintain, as we see, by conspicuous tokens, the solemn remembrance of this day's mercy: when our constitution, ecclesiastical and civil, arose, as it were, from a temporary death, inflicted by the

sacrilegious hands of its own infatuated members. To rejoice in the restoration of our Church and State from extinction, is due alike to those who preceded and those who are to follow us: and in order that we rejoice with reason, it becomes us to be sure that we rejoice in the Lord; that our trust is in Him who gave, who rescued, and who secures all to us,-that our celebration is not a matter of party or of policy, but of religion.

In this therefore, christian brethren, lies our principal concern in this anniversary. The Providence of God has in every age been the disposer of all power and all events on this earth: but since Christ rose from the dead, and the kingdoms of the world have been given into his hands by the Father, the concerns of his Church and religion have ever had a most direct and manifest bearing on the destinies of states and empires. Such was markedly the case, both in the evil and in the good that now invites our attentive review. It was from certain religious notions, such as they were, the consequence of revulsion from older error or corruption-a penalty which the sins of the fathers entailed on the children,-that we trace the conduct of the unhappy men by whom our monarchy was overthrown: Christ and his Gospel were in their mouths, when Episcopacy and Liturgy were put down, replaced first by tyrannical synods of pretended divine right, and then by a Babel of all sects and denominations; and when, in mere furtherance of these religious schemes, in which they persuaded themselves they were doing God

service, they caused one estate of the realm to usurp the power and authority of the whole, imbrued their hands in the blood of the Lord's anointed, and by their lawless usurpations paved the way for a military despotism. And if we are glad at the overthrow of the strange medley of fanaticism and tyranny which the crimes of these men introduced, be assured that our triumph avails little, if our zeal for God's cause be not deeper and stronger, as well as truer in direction, than theirs; if our religion be not as really concerned in the restoring as theirs in the destroying. There is not in the aspect of this case a more melancholy and indeed awful one than this, that so large a proportion of our nation from that time to the present have habitually identified seriousness in religion with the rebellious side of this quarrel : and, in consequence, are inclined to treat as extravagances or excesses what, if there be any truth of God with us, can be no excess of religion, but a gross and detestable perversion of it. The worst fruit of this mode of thought, that which connected loose living and emancipation from strict religion with opposition to Puritan fanaticism, appears but too visibly in the personal life of the restored Monarch: and the reflections on this, and on the further divine judgments that befel his house, are often allowed an undue place in our thoughts when considering the great public mercy of this day, the restoration of the crown of legitimate sovereignty to the dismembered commonwealth. But amidst all the confusions of senti