present state of imperfect knowledge it is, I imagine, utterly impossible to comprehend the height and the breadth, the depth and the length of the love of Christ. For passing over the consideration of the dignity of his person, and the depth of his humiliation, and the cruel form in which death was inflicted, and the ignominious circumstances attending it; there was, in the Saviour's death, a sting, the venom of which is unknown to us; there was in it, the curse of the law, the wrath of justice, the inconceivable and indescribable agony and anguish which the punishment of sin occasioned; for on him were laid the iniquities of us all, and he bore the mighty load! and this was his own free and unconstrained proceeding the compassion of his own soul prompted him to this. It was love to perishing sinners that brought the Saviour from heaven to earth, and which led him through a series of sufferings, indignities, and insults, to the cross on Calvary. The tongue of angels cannot express, the mind of angels cannot conceive, the Saviour's love. And Oh! how low are man's ordinary conceptions of this amazing subject.

At times, indeed, when the terrors of an awakened conscience flash in a man's face; when death, and hell, and the unknown horror and miseries of the invisible state cross the imagination; the feeling of gratitude for deliverance is a little aroused, and the perception of the Saviour's love somewhat sharpened. When heaven and eternal bliss, and the rivers of pleasure near the throne of God and of the Lamb, are vividly seen by faith, the workings of a grateful heart to the Saviour indicate some sense of his love; and the Christian mourns with shame on account of his past forgetfulness and daily inattention to so grand a theme; but, after all, O how feeble the impression, how indistinct the perception of the love of Christ which usually exists in the hearts and understandings of Christians. But according to the Apostle, the love of the divine Redeemer should originate in the hearts of Christians a corresponding sentiment, which shall be the master principle, the strongest motive that operates in a man's breast; the constant, never-wearied feeling of attachment and devotedness, which shall grow

more intense as the believer advances in life, and go with him through the vale of death, into the eternal world. In the life, the labours, and sufferings of the Apostle Paul, a striking example is exhibited of the constraining power of divine love. He forsook all, took up his cross, and followed Christ. Being called to the work of the Lord, neither kindred, nor country, nor ease, nor respectability, could allure; nor contempt, nor reproach, nor penury and want, nor bodily sufferings, nor mental anxiety, nor death could intimidate him. In the history of many of the other apostles and disciples, and confessors and martyrs, in every age, there have been bright examples of the constraining power of the Saviour's love; it has carried his servants (sometimes the weakest lambs of his flock) onward with an overpowering force, through all that was becoming, and dignified, and faithful, even in the midst of the keenest opposition, and persecu tion, with fire and sword; and has made them more than conquerors. He that loved them and redeemed them by infusing his own Spirit into their souls, made them equal to the conflict against earth and hell, and gave them the victory. Ask, in the memoirs of faithful men of God in every age, who have endured afflictions, for the cause of the Redeemer, who have borne great persecutions, who have been exiled from kindred, or banished from their country, or resisted to blood striving against sin? ask, what was the principle that actuated them? and invariably will it be found that the love of Christ was that which constrained them, was that which supported them and carried them through.

The dedication of our persons and services to God might be inculcated on the ground of what is called natural religion. For we belong to the great Creator of all; His property we are, and Him, it is reasonable we should serve. No man can justly say, my tongue is my own, and I will use it as I will, to oppose the truth, or to revile, or to blaspheme. No mere steward can justly say, the property I have in keeping is my own, and I will use it as I please. Divine authority, and Divine right and justice forbid these pretensions; and hence, I say, we might argue

self-dedication to God, on the ground of simple duty, as creatures. And even in this view of the case, the heart and the affections, and cheerful obedience and devoted ness, are by the law justly required. But notwithstanding that these claims on the part of Heaven can be fairly urged; the blessed Gospel of God our Saviour, as set forth in our text, prefers resting the claim on the powerful influence of the Saviour's love: and it is the recognition of this principle, or spirit of love, as the ruling principle, which is the prominent mark. by which all true disciples are distinguished. A spirit of frigid philosophism, and visible disaffection to the Saviour, amounting sometimes to a palpable loathing, and dislike of the very mention of love to Christ, especially mark the formalist, the mere moralist, and the fallacious pretenders to a superior degree of rational Christianity. But he who has not the love of God in him, is in heart a rebel against the Most High; and he who is not constrained by the love of Christ, who does not make this his glory and his delight, is heretical and antichristian. If any man in the Christian church. love not the Lord Jesus Christ, he is anathema maranatha : He is accursed, and shall be destroyed, unless he repent of his unnatural resistance of divine love. Love to God is essential to the happiness of an immortal spirit; and to win the human soul, what more could have been done than has already been done? God so loved the world in its ruined condition, as to give his Son Jesus Christ, to suffer and to die for its salvation-that whosoever will, may restored to the Divine favour; Christ Jesus loved us, so as to die for our guilty race. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us. Here is God manifest in the flesh dying for rebel man ;-and here is wretched, puny, proud man, standing aloof and unmoved, and his heart unaffected, and callous and hard, and cold as a stone; but, for a human heart not melted, not influenced by the Saviour's love, it is not possible, we believe, for all heaven, nor will it be possible to all eternity, to furnish a stronger moral motive. If Christ's love melts not man's heart-if it remove not the heart's enmity to God, nothing can; it

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must be, (we say it not in anger, but in grief,) in that unhappy case, the soul must be under an anathema; for it has resisted the utmost means that Heaven can employ to subdue its enmity, and remove its curse. As far as the exhibition of the most powerful motives can go, the utmost has been done; and the condemnation of that soul must appear, to the pure and holy intelligences of Heaven, as doubly just-just in the first instance, on account of sin; and just in the second instance, for having neglected, or rejected, so great a salvation.

Oh! the infatuation of sinners, who remain careless, and secure, and unmoved, and destitute of grateful love to the Saviour, after having heard the joyful sound. Alas, who are they that are "beside" themselves! The Christian zealots, as they are called, who knowing the terror of the Lord, endeavour to persuade men to flee from the wrath to come? or, they who seem indifferent and at ease, whilst they yet have reason to fear that the wrath of God abideth upon them? Who are they that are "beside" themselves? those who, knowing that we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, are ever exercising themselves to preserve a conscience void of offence towards God and towards man? or, those who live as they list, as if man were not accountable to heaven's great Lord; and who, notwithstanding, yet dream of attaining to the bliss of heaven after death? It were, perhaps, only to irritate the feelings, to retort the charge of mental aberration back from the zealous Christian, on the secure and self-sufficient worldling; but it is not difficult to see the folly and insanity of passing through time, absorbed totally in its pleasures, or its business, and entirely neglecting eternity; or, of maintaining a careless spirit of indifference to the cause of God and of Christ, and of the eternal welfare of millions, and the destinies of our own immortal spirits. The supposition and allegation that Paul's zeal approached to madness, or that the zeal of Christians, in every age, exceeded the requirements of the case, must arise from a disbelief of the alleged facts and principles to which the case refers; there must be a lurking disbelief of the evil of

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sin; of the danger of everlasting punishment; of the necessity of the Saviour's mediatorial work; there must be a disbelief, that he actually was a divine person clothed with humanity, suffering and dying for the redemption of men; there must be a lurking presumption in the mind, that heaven's future happiness can be attained without Christ's salvation. We thus judge, because we do not think it possible that a right understanding of the case, and a firm belief of the facts and principles adverted to, are compatible with indifference, or an unexcited state of mind. I think it is said of the sceptic Hume, when he heard the zealous Whitfield preach, that if he believed what Whitfield did, he would act as Whitfield acted. The truth is, that both in respect of our personal salvation, and of the salvation of other men, and the evangelization of other lands, the utmost zeal that has ever been manifested in the use of means, such as Paul employed, has not at all equalled what the most sober and dispassionate view of the subject evidently demands. It is the neglect of means, such as teaching and preaching, and the distribution of Bibles, and of pious books, in every accessible part of the world, with a view to instruct, and convince, and convert the children of men, which is chargeable with mental aberration; because it is expecting the end without the means; it is expecting a harvest without sowing the seed; and to act thus, may indeed be denominated fanatical, if that term denotes a totally unfounded expectation of some wished-for good. But he who diligently sows the seed of divine truth early and late, who begins in the morning of life, and in the evening withholds not his hand; who is instant in season and out of season in disseminating God's word; who reproves, and rebukes, and exhorts his kindred, and his friends, and his neighbours; or who goes to the savages of the Southern Sea, or to the civilized millions of Eastern Asia, with Christ's Gospel in his heart, and on his tongue, is not "beside" himself; but is doing what the soberest mind, that is at all well-affected to God and Christ, and the souls of men, must approve. A practice like that of the Apostle Paul;—that is, continually, and at all risks,

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