selves shall have been gathered to the grave. But at all events, we are to be urged by the noble motives of Christianity; by the love of Him who took compassion on an orphan world-toiled for it, and bled for it, and died for it, to give glory to God, and shew ourselves true followers of Christ by coming forward as the patrons of the destitute.

Again we say to all, that you may, if you have not yet repented, give glory before your feet stumble, and before the day closes. We are not yet on the dark mountains: if we are approaching them, if we seem to discern them on our horizon like the iron masses of the Alps in sackcloth, O! still the Sun of Righteousness is not gone down on our firmament; and there needs nothing but faith in Jesus, "delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification," and the beams of that sun shall edge, as with a line of gold, the black and frowning rampart, or rather throw a transparency into the shadowy prospect, so that it seems to melt into the garden of hope, the land where the river of life is ever flowing, and the tree of life is ever waving. May God grant that we may give him the glory that is due unto his name!" The night cometh, when no man can work:" and therefore "while it is called to-day" evil companions, let us break off from them; passions and lusts, let us strive to withstand them; injurious friendships, let us be bold to dissolve them; the Bible, let us be diligent in searching it; the aid of God's Spirit, let it be sought in prayer: and there then is no presumption, there is only just confidence in the hope, that having glorified God here by our imperfect obedience, we shall gain hereafter a richer eternity of unbroken consecration.

I know not if I can add any thing on behalf of the Institution which solicits your support. It is, we wish you to observe, the Christian education of the poor which we press on you as an imperative duty, and the hearty promotion of which may be taken in proof that you have given glory to God by genuine repentance. We have no faith whatever in any other education. We are no advocates whatever for enlarging the mind, and making no attack on the heart. We are no supporters of systems which cherish the intellect, and care nothing for the conscience. We would not give the inconsiderable assistance which it may be in our power to give to any plan which is to equip men with energy of examination and grasp of spirit in reference to what is temporal, and leave them the prey of every deceiver in reference to what is eternal. The land has enough of mere intellectual education. Look at our prisons, they are not filled with the absolutely uneducated: their cells are not swarming with those who never went to school, who cannot read and cannot write. The mass of prisoners have received all the rudiments of common knowledge, and the ignorant and uninstructed are only the exceptions. We do not then want a mere intellectual education, which would give us a mighty but an ungovernable population; a population taught its strength, but not its right use; a population which in its scorn of slavery will not stop short of tyranny; a population, therefore, which must spring out with the restlessness of a giant, and in the pride of its newly-found vigour level with the earth whatever is glorious, noble, and ancestral. We want not, we say, a mere intellectual education; we want a religious education; an education based on the old-fashioned, but irreversible principles, that the readiest mode of making a man a good member of society is to make him a good Christian that in teaching him to fear God

we bind him to the performance of every duty which devolves upon him in every relationship. And we commend the St. Ann's Society Schools to your liberal support, because we believe they labour to impart a religious education, and are therefore worthy your care, both as philanthropists and Christians. May God incline your hearts to give him glory by the manner in which you respond to this imperfect appeal!

THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD.

REV. S. SUMMERS,

CRAVEN CHAPEL, REGENT-STREET, JUNE 28, 1835.

"Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord."-JEREMIAH, Xxiii. 24.

THIS language may be considered as a strong affirmation of the sentence which it contains. The interrogatory form of speech is sometimes adopted by the inspired writers, and not unfrequently by ourselves, to give force and feeling to a sentiment which might be correctly expressed in the form of a proposition. The information conveyed in this passage is, that no man can hide himself in secret places that God shall not see him, because he fills heaven and earth. THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD is a high and sacred subject of meditation; it demands your most devout and reverent attention. The simple fact, that the Eternal God, whose we are and whom we are bound to serve, is present with us to-day-is in this house with each individual—that though we cannot see him, he is as essentially with us as he is in any part of the visible or invisible creation that he is more intimately present with each of us than we are to each other-that though distinct from us he is more perfectly acquainted with what transpires within us, with the thoughts and feelings of our hearts, than we are ourselves-should at least produce the deepest solemnity and the profoundest awe. Give me, then, my dear hearers, your fixed attention, while for a few minutes we meditate on this attribute of the Deity, and attempt to daw from it some of the practical lessons which it teaches.

And lest the least informed should stumble at the word omnipresence which I have used, the doctrine which I have to teach is that God is every where ; that there is no conceivable spot in the universe where God is not. You can easily understand this fact; as easily as you can understand that you are in this place, or that God is any where. If you can comprehend the terms, "God exists," you can comprehend the terms, "God exists every where." It is not more difficult to conceive of the Divine Being as present on earth, than it is to conceive of him as present in heaven. The terms in which the attributes of Deity are expressed are among the simplest forms of human speech, and convey a clear and perfect idea to the human mind. Every one understands the expression, "God knows all things." If you know any thing if there is one thing with which you are acquainted, you can easily understand what it is to know two things: and you can extend the thought infinitely by the negative form of expression, and say, "That there is not one thing with

which God is not perfectly acquainted." "God can do all things," is a proposition equally intelligible to you. You can do something: and without effort you can extend the idea to others, who can do more than you can; and yet further to God, and express his all-sufficiency by saying, that there is not any thing which God cannot do. The existence and attributes of God may thus be taught by a number of plain elementary propositions, the terms of which are intelligible to a child.

The philosophy, however, of these propositions is beyond our reach. Directly we begin to inquire, How can these things be? we meet with insurmountable difficulties; we arrive at bounds which we cannot pass; we at once perceive the limited nature of our capacities, that it is vain for the finite to attempt to apprehend the Infinite. "Who by searching can find out God? who can find out the Almighty unto perfection?" The mode by which a being is every where present is truly incomprehensible to us.

But the difficulty does not exclusively rest on the doctrine of the omnipresence of God. The simple fact of the presence of an immaterial spirit in any one place is likewise beyond our utmost efforts to comprehend. We know this fact we know the soul is united to the body of man; that this union is essential to perfect humanity; and until separated at death, this union is so intimate, that it may be affirmed, that where the body is there the soul is. At the present moment you see me, you hear me; but were the union of body and soul dissolved for the short period we remain together, you would neither see nor hear me. Your eyes and ears are but instruments which your soul employs; as completely instruments as the telescope and the hearing trumpet: they are the instruments by which your soul perceives objects and receives sounds. Now how the soul can be present with the body the wisest of men cannot ascertain: it is as inexplicable as it is true. We are utterly ignorant of the mode, or of the point of junction between body and soul. The most rigid anatomy of the brain, which is supposed to be the organ of thought and consciousness, will not enable the physiologist to say, that the seat of the brain is here, or that the seat of the brain is there. The soul is gone, but the brain is perfect in all its parts; and we learn nothing of the mode by which the immaterial spirit is present with the body to influence and affect it.

When we cannot comprehend in any degree how a spirit can be present in any one place, even in a human body, where we have most satisfactory proof of the existence, we must not be surprised if we cannot comprehend how the Infinite Spirit is present in every portion of the universe. Of the way by which mind is connected with matter we know absolutely nothing: how they can be united-how mind influences matter, how it can be present with it, are amongst the secret things that belong to God; the things only which are revealed belong to us and to our children.

Without, therefore, attempting to explain the doctrine, we must guard you against false ideas of the omnipresence of God, which might lead you into dangerous and fatal error. In conceiving of the fact that God is every where present, you must at once reject all those ideas which suggest themselves to your mind from your familiarity with matter. We know, for example, that the same matter, the same body cannot be in two places at the same moment of time; but we do not know this to be true of spirit. Our Lord said to Nico demus, "I came down from heaven, and yet am in heaven." He was on earth

and in heaven at the same moment of time. He spake not this of his body, nor of his human soul; but of his Deity. "God is a Spirit," and says in the text, "Do not I fill heaven and earth?" We know also, that matter occupies space, to the exclusion of other matter from the same space: but God exists in all space, in all matter, in its most solid masses and in its subtlest forms, in the primeval mountain, and in the ethereal firmament. His existence does not exclude other spiritual essences; for the universe of intelligent mind has its being in him. We know also that matter is a compound; that it may be decomposed, that it may be dissected; that it is also capable of infinite divisibility into parts: but God is uncompounded; he is a simple essence; he is incapable of either decomposition or divisibility. So that if he be every where present, he is wholly present every where; there is not part of him here, and part of him there—part of him in heaven, and part of him on earth; but his whole being is every where. He consequently does not move from place to place, as material bodies do; but at all times his infinite being is present in all places.

In every attempt to conceive of the divine omnipresence, you must therefore carefully distinguish between the properties of spirit and of matter. You must not attribute to the Eternal Spirit the ideas of extension, solidity, divisibility, or circumscription; but while his infinity fills heaven and earth, it is complete in every portion of space. It is not contained in or circumscribed to any thing, but it is present in every thing. It is perfectly consistent with all he has created, and with all he may yet create; and yet it is clearly distinguished from one portion, or the whole, of his works.

Neither must we conceive of the divine omnipresence as the diffusion of his essence, as matter is extended by the attenuation of its parts; but he is the one Eternal Spirit, whose living energy extends infinitely beyond the bounds of creation, and who yet preserves the totality of his essence in every portion of his works: so that he exists in his almightiness, and wisdom, and perfection, to display or to withhold the manifestation of his attributes, at all times, in all places, as he pleases. "He doeth as it pleaseth him in the armies of heaven, and amongst the inhabitants of the earth."

In meditating on this attribute of the Deity, you must also lay aside, for a time, those expressions of the Divine Word that speak of him as though he possessed a body, and attribute to him the different members, and the different properties, of the human body. Thus we read of " the eye," "the hand," "the arm" of God; of "the face of Jehovah :" not that, strictly speaking, he hath eye, or hand, or arm, or face. These expressions are to be regarded as stepping-stones to elevated and sublime conceptions of the Deity. They are not the ultimate objects of God; they are rather the resting-places of the mind; easy modes of transition, adapted to our weakness, by which we ascend in our conceptions from feebleness to power-from the limited range of human vision to the omnipresence of God, from the limitation of minds meted out to us in small capacities, to his hand and his arm, to the boundless perfections of Jehovah, who is represented as "measuring the waters in the hollow of his hand," as "meting out the heavens with a span," as "weighing the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance :" the "nations are but as a drop of the bucket before him, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: he taketh up the isles as a very little thing."