altogether have prevented it, should at least have subjected its process to the control of reason and humanity. No, my reader, it is impossible to fully estimate our indebtedness to Christianity. Giving, as it does, value to our possessions, safety to our persons and rights, zest and perpetuity to our friendships, aliment and stability to that public virtue upon which the whole fabric rests, is it unreasonable to ask of you hearty acceptance and support of a cause which sustains the civilized world?

SERMON XVIII.

Love to God and Man-Christian Union.

BY REV. JAMES V. WATSON,

OF THE MICHIGAN CONFERENCE.

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.”— Luke x, 27.

THESE words are enforced in the context by a most startling commentary, and form the Saviour's reply to a "certain lawyer's" inquiry, "Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" An inquiry of the highest moment, though urged, perhaps, from the unholiest of motives. They teach, then, the way to heaven. They constitute the gospel touchstone of Christian character. Ages of weal or wo are here balanced upon a first and changeless truth. The final destiny of every man will brighten or blacken for ever, according as he may experience and practice "this scripture." Christ is not here to be understood as undervaluing the essential atonement, and reposing the condition of human salvation upon a sublime and immaculate morality. The holy affections and lofty virtue enjoined and taught in this text cannot purchase heaven; but they contitute the essential qualifications for its society and service.

The theme imbodied in our text is love to God and man; and, in drawing upon it for the matter of a discourse, we shall attempt, as far as we pursue them, a correct and practical answer to two inquiries:

I. WHAT IS IMPLIED IN LOVING GOD? and,
II. WHAT IN LOVING OUR neighbor?

First. What is implied in loving God? It is not merely to admit his existence and the truth of his Bible. It is not to discourse eloquently upon the majesty of his works and wonders of his providence. It is not to soar aloft on fancy's fairy wing, indulging the fervors of a mere poetic sentimentality. A love for flowers and stars may exist with a loathing of holiness. Fashionable oratory often says many fine things about the "Sovereign of the universe;" and poetry finds his name and his greatness inscribed all over the face of the firmament: but the spirit of oratory and poetry, with their beauteous creations and truthful effusions, may hold the heart spell-bound with enchantment; and still it may be "enmity to God." Can Satan himself fail to feel the overwhelming oratory of the mighty truth, that God is everywhere, and great and glorious in everything? But he never feels any moral approbation of God, yearnings after him, and clingings to him. "He believes and trembles." Bad men may fear God when danger threatens and thickens around them. When awakened conscience brings to their recollection their broken vows and lives of rebellion, tears may start, and a quaking may get hold upon them; but God is not loved: for, where love is, it casteth out fear." Love to God does not consist merely in the free flow of those generous sympathies and chivalrous impulses of our nature with which some characters are so highly endowed, and which prompt them to frequent and often daring deeds of mercy. It does not consist in those amiable qualities of the heart which throw such an attraction around some members of the social circle. It consists not in that philosophic fortitude-that magnanimity of demeanor-that rigid observance of some of the cardinal virtues, often so loudly praised. Various are the forms of corrupt nature. And as the human hand thrust into a dark room retains for a time some bedimmed rays of solar light; so the fallen human heart seems at times to reflect, in sullied lustre, rays of its primitive greatness and glory. A splendid exemplification of some single virtue often characterized the worthies of heathen antiquity. But the heart unrenewed by divine grace is ever antagonistic to God, "fully set in the sinner

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to do evil." To do everything "to the glory of God" is not the supreme motive to which every other is subordinate in any heart into which the Holy Spirit has not breathed a new life. But sensuality and selfishness, joint monarchs, sit enthroned upon every unrenewed heart, appropriating to themselves, with miserly monopoly, every affection and energy that rightly belongs to God: “ They worship and serve the creature more than the CREATOR, who is God over all, and blessed for evermore."

Men often testify the profoundest respect for the forms of the sanctuary, without sending up a single affection of the heart to that God to whom these services are offered; and they often relieve distress, in the indulgence of the sympa thetic impulses of our common nature, when " God is not in all their thoughts" or affections. A love of praise, a hope of gain, or fear of punishment, are restraints to which much, if not most, of the practical goodness, morality, and virtue, in the world, are attributable. These motives to virtue are not to be wholly reprehended. They have their place in the scale of what is laudable. But the error of men consists in making these motives supreme. They have usurped the claims of the Deity, when love to him should at all times be the sovereign impulse of our nature. "Thou shalt walk in the fear of the Lord, and love him with all thy heart.”

But with hearts that repulse God, love to forget him, continually prone to evil, how shall we obey this injunction? We cannot obey it without availing ourselves of the spiritual assistance tendered us in the gospel: "The Ethiop cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots." When Adam was first created, the innate impulses of his heart were toward the glorious "Father of his spirit;" the constitution of his nature was holy. And as it is a law of matter for kindred elements to attract each other and seek to mingle, so is it also a mental law for congenial minds to seek association and communion-and so also, morally, it is an eternal law for similar moral natures to attract each other, and flow together by kindred affinities. Adam was created in the "image of God." To love him, was coetaneous with his consciousness; and the heaven of his soul was to consist in the everlasting development of this affection. All the outgoing glories of the Godhead

were to reciprocate it-the infinitely varied achievements of Omnipotence to minister to its indulgence. But of this noble endowment of our nature, which would have lifted us toward God for ever, and changed us "from glory to glory," sin has shorn us. The diseased heart loathes the "waters of life." To speak of neutrality in the moral universe, is a solecism: "For he that is not for me is against me." The heart unsmitten by sin would have been synonymous with love; but now, unregenerate, it is a synonym for "enmity" to God. Here is the poisoned wound, of which a fallen world lies bleeding and fevered to madness! He, "in whom we live, move, and have our being," lives not in our love. And the heart that excludes God, "is dead in sin"-totally destitute of bliss and goodness. "In me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing." The possessor of such a heart-awakened to the consciousness of its disinclination toward God, perceiving the moral blessedness and beauty of loving God and his law, enthroned in eternal fitness-bewails his want of capacity. Writhing under the "bondage of sin and death," he exclaims in agony, "To will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good, I find not. For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver from the body of this death?" Such is the state of the fallen heart with the light of the divine law flashing full upon it. Penitently to feel, deplore, and confess its helpless guilt and depravity, and need of a Saviour, is conviction. For the heart to be retouched by the same all-powerful Spirit that made it at first-in Scriptural language, to be "created anew," "born of the Spirit”—is regeneration. And the first emotions of affectionate, moral approbation for God, his truth, and his image, that succeed this spiritual change, are the beginnings of love to God-the buddings of a new and blissful life—the gushings forth from salvation's well in the soul: "For the fruit of the Spirit is love." Sanctification is this love, reigning supreme and triumphing over everything that opposes. "All" the "mind" learns of God; "all the heart" loves, with "all" the outlay of its "strength." Knowledge is as fuel to this heaven-lit flame; and self-denial but prunes it to purer brightness. And this "beauty of the Lord

God" upon the soul may grow, ever developing new charms, through the longest life; the hues of immortal glory, in sweet and pensive mellowness, it will shed over the welcomed hour of mortal dissolution; and the soul it will fit for its flight to dwell among the "angels of God," and for the ever-endearing companionship of the ineffably glorious "Father of spirits."

Love to God, then, is not the offspring of nature or of earth. However chastening the educational discipline to which it may be subjected; however rich in scholastic embellishments; however excelling in social refinements; kind, bland, and fascinating in etiquette; the carnal heart has no attraction for God. There are some substances in chemistry which have no affinity for each other, and which will not coalesce until a third chemical agent is introduced. The agency of the Holy Ghost in the restoration of the fallen heart to a spiritual union with God is a great first truth of the Bible: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God." And hence the prayer which inspiration hung on the lips of the sceptred saint of Israel: "Create in me a clean heart, O God! and renew a right spirit within me take not thy Holy Spirit from me.”

This renewal of the heart involves the present happiness and future heaven of the soul. The relation between God and Christians is described in terms of the most touching tenderness. He is their "Father" and "Friend," whose faithfulness and love "are everlasting ;" and they are his "children" and "little ones," "led by his Spirit," and "heirs" of all the gifts of Infinity. In speaking of such a destiny, words become powerless, and the mind adores in silent, reverential awe. But supreme love to God is as essential to its fulfillment as existence. Love to God is the life, the law, the light and beatitude of angel natures. It binds all heaven in harmony, and prompts all its transports. As a vast central sun, it covers the celestial land with glory, and warms into life its eternal bloom. It is the element by which the soul was destined to be nourished and compassed. It is the great law it was at first made to obey. To seek to be happy without loving God, is as great folly as to seek to exist independent of God. When has the history of the world furnished an