amendment, and hope the best possible concerning them, than to find here a ground of self-gratulation at their expense. Without these humbling considerations ever present with us, and penetrating us, every meditation on the good which we have done, or the evil which we have been able to avoid, must partake of a pharisaical character.

I would touch but on one abuse of this parable, which is nevertheless but too possible, and in the present day by no means uncommon. I mean the inference that all strictness of religious practice, and all reasonable care of the external as the vehicle for the spiritual, is to be shunned under the name of Pharisaism; and that a life careless in all these respects, but interspersed occasionally with earnest applications to God for mercy, is the right path of the publican that we should follow. One single consideration is sufficient to refute this most pernicious inference. It is that such humbling and heartfelt confession as the publican's cannot possibly subsist in any, without an earnest and a constant care to keep God's commandments. I speak here of habitual confession; not of that which may occur once in some lives, on the turning point of penitence from a course of contented sin; nor of what may possibly for a while follow this,-when the strong man armed that had so long kept his goods in peace, is disturbed by the stronger arm of the Son of man that would eject him. Possibly the co-existence of earnest confession of sin at one time, and the willing practice of it at another, may continue for

a while. But this will not subsist long: either will the confession, through the grace of the Saviour God whom it invokes, prevail to overcome the cherished practice of sin,-or the sin will prevail to banish the utterly unmeaning and infructuous confession. Then only will the confession continue, when, the dominion of sin being renounced, and a race of holy obedience truly pursued, each step in that obedience will reveal to us more fully the height that we have not reached, and the sinful imperfection that still cleaves to us. And as our obliquities and wrongnesses will be perceived in proportion as they are renounced, as they are more than we can by possibility know, or can perhaps in charity suspect, to exist in other men,the most careful strictness of practice will thus consist with the utmost absence of Pharisaism. We shall adopt without hypocrisy, or the consciousness of exaggeration, the humiliating language respecting ourselves which the Church daily puts in our mouths; and in the union of humility with exact obedience, will find the best earnest of our perseverance, and consequent salvation.

SERMON V.

THE TWO SEPULCHRES AT BETHEL.

(Preached at St Mary's, on the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, September 13, 1840.1)

2 KINGS XXIII. 17, 18.

Then he said, What title is that that I see? And the men of the city told him, It is the sepulchre of the man of God which came from Judah, and proclaimed these things which thou hast done against the altar of Bethel. And he said, Let him alone; let no man move his bones. So they let his bones alone, with the

bones of the prophet that came from Samaria.

THE proposer of this question, which occurs in one of the lessons of this day, was the exemplary king Josiah, while engaged in the pious work of destroying the altar of Bethel, with every vestige of the idolatry long since established there by the founder of the rival kingdom of Israel. The answer points to an event of that period, remote, even then, in time, yet fresh in the traditional recollection of all, as we may discern in the immediate recognition of the circumstance by the king of Judah. The history of the man of God that came from Judah, and of the Samaritan prophet buried beside him, is indeed a very memorable one: and as this recurrence to it, from a view of the sepulchral monuments of the parties, three hundred and fifty years after, is exceedingly

1 First preached in India, Sept. 5, 1830.

well adapted to fix its true character on our minds,— let this question and reply, in our evening lesson this day, be made the text of our meditation on a history, which was read in the services of the Church five Sundays since', and which is written, like everything else in the ancient Scripture, for our learning.

The mission of this man of God was to Jeroboam the son of Nebat, at Bethel: but his message of judgment was not the first which that wayward prince had received from the Almighty. His great sin, as it was not without denunciation of vengeance following, was not also without Divine warning preceding; nor is there anything more remarkable, in the history of this general apostasy of the ten tribes, than the care taken by the God of Israel to prevent its necessity, even after the separation of those tribes from their brethren of Judah and Benjamin. He immediately, by the mouth of a prophet, forbade all wars between these two portions of his inheritance: the sin of their separation He did not lay to the charge of the leaders of Ephraim, but rather of David's successors, Solomon and Rehoboam, whose grievous oppressions had provoked it. He said to the house of Judah, "Fight not against your brethren; for this thing is of me;" and to the other party, even to Jeroboam himself, he declared, even before the event, the conditions on which his new sovereignty might be the means of benefit to himself and to his people. "Behold," are Eighth Sunday after Trinity, Morning Lesson.

1

God's words to him, while the son of David was yet reigning," Behold, I rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and give ten tribes to thee; and to his son will I give one tribe, that my servant David may have a light always before me in Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen me to put my name there. And if thou wilt hearken to all that I command thee, to keep my statutes and commandments, as David my servant did, I will be with thee, and give thee a sure house, as I gave to David: and will give Israel to thee; and I will for this afflict the seed of David, but not for ever." Had, then, the new sovereign regarded in this the clear voice of the God of his fathers; had he respected the house of God at Jerusalem as he might have done, and remembered the religious promise made to David and his line, from whom the Christ should come hereafter; there was nothing, even in this unhappy separation, which should have made his condition, or that of any other in the ten northern tribes, the condition of an apostate from the God of Israel, and an outcast from the promise and hope of the fathers.

But instead of taking this wise and pious course, Jeroboam, as we well know, acted the part which all mere politicians, or worldly men, would act under the same circumstances; the part in which he stands as the representative of schismatical and sacrilegious sovereigns. He feared that the common worship at Jerusalem would lead his people to their old allegiance to David's house, whose seat of empire was still fixed there; per