error of deriving Church power from the civil magistrate, a statement confounding rather than uniting the Church and the State in these realms, as if they were necessarily one and the same body, because, being Christian, they ought to be so. But to prove how utterly inapplicable is this theory to the actual condition of things, we need only point to the case of the northern branch of this empire; where the sister Church, with which alone we can hold communion, on principles common to us with the whole catholic Christian world, has been for a century and a half disowned by the civil power of these realms, and reduced to the same condition with the Church before Constantine. And we may find a more immediate proof in what is now within very recent memory among us, the obliteration of the last vestige of that state of things in which the societies of the Church and the State were regarded as identical-and that feast of the LORD, which is the sole appointed pledge of unity in the former society, made the symbol of official incorporation in the latter. Now in whatever light we view that state of things which our ancestors possessed, whether as a confusion of distinct things now far better separated, or rather as what is ideally good, but of which our profaneness and other sins had rendered us unworthy and incapable, still it is idle to lament what it were equally hopeless and mischievous to aim at recovering. Our business is with the altered state of things in which it has pleased God to place us; to seek under it, and not any imaginary theory,

the sanctification of the whole body politic by the Church. It is now most inexcusable to confound in idea two things ever essentially different, but more easily identified in time past, the provinces of the State and the Church; or, what is the same thing, the provinces of Cæsar and of God.

Still may we use in faith the prayer for all estates which our academical usage requires us to adopt; and, while inviting united supplication for all the commons of the realm, continue to pray that in sincere and conscientious communion with the Church established among us, they may promote, by Christ's own appointed means, the brotherly love and Christian charity incumbent on all. Should this spiritual communion be unhappily still denied us, we may yet pray for the next best gift that charity could desire, viz. a heart-piercing sense of the unhappiness and the evil of our present divisions. Let our prayers ascend to God, the source of all unity in peace, for all ranks and orders in our Christian commonwealth; for her especially who in the State is supreme: that her counsels and proceedings be guided not by the wisdom of the world, which cometh to nought, but that which animated a David and a Josiah of old-a dutiful regard to God's will; the spirit of faith, zeal, humility, and charity. Thus, with the same spirit diffused through all inferior orders, may we hope that the ills we dread be averted, and happier times than our sins have deserved be the portion of our Church and nation.

SERMON II.

THE WHEAT AND THE TARES.

(Preached at St Mary's, July 12, 1840.)

MATTHEW XIII. 28, 29, 30.

The servants said unto him, Wilt thou that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay: lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.

THE deficient correspondence between the present appearance of the Church on earth and the declared purpose of its Divine Founder, is a very common subject of remark, and according as men's tempers incline them, of disappointment or of reproach. Viewing, on one side, either the stupendous magnitude of the means by which our redemption was effected, or the high terms in which the proper objects of that redemption are delineated by the inspired writers, the comparison with what we actually find on the other side in the existing household of faith, can scarcely fail to excite in earnest minds something of both these sentiments. The spouse of Christ is announced in Scripture as "all glorious within;" her children are "all righteous;" they are "a holy nation, a peculiar people, set forth to declare the praises of Him who has called them out of darkness into his marvellous light:" "they

have no need to teach each man his brother to know the Lord; for all shall know him, from the least to the greatest amongst them:" they are "the light of the world, a city set upon a hill that cannot be hid.” Now wherever in any degree these characters of holiness and illumination are found, there, it may be said, we are willing to recognize them: but what are we to think of the vast residue, whose state is a contradiction and plain mockery of this? It is confessed that the Son of man hath sown good seed in his field: whence then hath it tares?

The effects of this impatient process of thought in undisciplined and partially instructed minds are matter of ordinary observation. No age of the Church is without some share of them: and ours has its full proportion; much more indeed than could belong to it, if its boast of transcendent light and knowledge of religion were a well-founded one. The conclusion drawn by such persons is, that the existing Church cannot be that which the divine predictions embrace or contemplate; that what is thus copiously mixed with evil, however it may trace its rise to the Son of God, must be of merely human original; and that since these human means have failed of securing the purpose which God designed, the resource is to invent and try other means for that purpose. With the prouder and more daring spirits, the course accordingly is to strike out some new and specious heresy; with others, to frame some plan of sectarian exclusion, by which the field of God, may be, as it is imagined, kept more free from the noxious intrusion of tares.

Thus they proceed, even when it is evident to all, that the admixture of evil is not, and cannot be, wholly precluded by such methods; while to the scandals previously existing, the new and formidable one is added, of religious proscription and uncharitableness. Greatly indeed is the preceding confusion aggravated by these self-willed modes of proceeding: they tend to disturb and unsettle yet more grievously the weak Christians; who ask, where, amidst all this, is the holy community which the Saviour founded on the earth?

Now, to meet this perplexity, it is surely welcome and consoling to discover, that this state of things is not, as was suspected, unpredicted in Scripture; Christ has not left his people unapprised of it, or unprepared for it. Of the remarkable series of images, filling this thirteenth chapter of the first gospel, by which He illustrates the nature of his spiritual dispensation, two are peculiarly devoted to this point, the mixture of good and evil in the Church: both are adapted to rebuke and forbid that impatient dealing with the evil, which is, notwithstanding, so natural and accordant to many minds. One of these is that which closes the series in question, and runs thus: "The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: which when it was full, they drew on shore, and sat down and gathered the good into vessels, and cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace