character of our Almighty Father, will be the excellence or defectiveness of all our other religious impressions.

"No

man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him 1". declared him in his true character to his creatures, and made him known to us under the most endearing aspect by which God can be revealed to man. According as that aspect is impressed upon our memories and our hearts, will, for the most part, be determined the hue and influence of every other doctrine and precept of the Gospel. Let us, then, cultivate this root of all other virtues. Let us constantly look up to him from whom we came, and to whom we are going, with the feeling of grateful and dutiful children. Let us always remember that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is also our Father which is in heaven-that we are always in his handalways under his care-his redeemed on earth, and heirs of his heavenly kingdom.

1 1 John i. 18.

SERMON V.

ON THE NATURE AND EXTENT OF CHRISTIAN

OBEDIENCE.

JAMES i. 22.

Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.

MANKIND, in all ages, and on all subjects, have ever been disposed to rest in speculation rather than in practice. To some, indeed, is given an energy, or restlessness of body, which leads them to prefer a state of activity to one of rest, and corporal exertion to employment of the mind; who seem anxious to drown or to banish all thought in the turmoil of daily business, and thus may be said to prefer practice to speculation. But, then, this energy is always employed on subjects which concern their interest or their pleasure;

gained by activity, or some enjoyment arises from the bodily exertion. Let but the subject be one of remote or uncertain personal benefit-let it be one which may be neglected without worldly loss-let it be one to which we have no natural bias; -let it, though confessedly important, be a subject that we may escape from; and finally, let it consist of two parts, theory and practice which may be separated from each other without manifest absurdity; and then we shall soon find that, if such a subject win our attention at all, it will be as a matter rather to be reasoned than acted upon; as a question to employ the mind rather than a rule to guide the conduct. Such a subject is religion, the Gospel of Jesus Christ,— and such, accordingly, in all ages, has been its fate. Men have been excited by the wonderful truths which it reveals-they have been astonished by its marvellous revelations of the nature and attributes of God, and the relation in which they themselves stand to their Creator-they have been alarmed at the true and search

ing picture which it draws of the turpitude of their moral nature, and the consequences to which sin must inevitably lead-and they have been encouraged by the hope of an exceeding great reward which it holds out to the righteous beyond the grave. Thus they have been, and will continue to be, led by some of the strongest motives which can influence the human heart-by curiosity, by surprise, by fear and hope to listen to the wondrous things which are written in the law of God; but when they proceed one step further in their enquiries, and discover to what point all these doctrines necessarily tend; when they find that all that they have been thus learning, is to be reduced, without limitation, to practice, and that this practice will cost them many a struggle against passions which they have no wish to quell, and habits which they have no desire to renouncethen it is that they stumble at the word, and though they may not venture to deny the rule because they dislike its applica

admitting its truth without attempting to reduce it to practice;-they become not "doers of the word, but hearers only." This, as we all know, is too often the case in our own days; and so has it ever been. St. James, who wrote his Epistle to the general Church of Christ after such a lapse of time that error had had space to take root, and to show the nature of its produce, expresses himself in such a manner as to prove that the mistake, which is one of the leading characteristics of our day, was by no means rare in the times of the apostles; and that men were even then inclined to atone for their negligence of the practical precepts of Christianity, by a speculative and unfruitful investigation into the nature of its doctrines.

They were then, as now, anxious to settle with certainty points which are in their very nature indeterminate, and which, whether they may have this meaning or that, is, in truth, a matter of no vital importance. They thus listened to the word of God, rather as a subject proposed for the exercise of