1

And, oh that every unbeliever, subdued by the sceptre of redeeming grace, fleeing to Jesus, from the curse and condemnation of a broken law, would be arrayed beneath his banner, and made partaker of his victory! For if these things be so, then is unbelief a dreadful state, and its portion an appointment of misery. It hath an awful character-" Without Christ, without hope, and without God in the world." "He that believeth not the Son hath not life, but the wrath of God abideth on him." Sodom was not more awfully endangered by its pollutions, than Capernaum by refusing Christ. Let no man therefore, in whose hand the Scriptures of salvation are providentially placed, imagine, that if he be free from the guilt of sensuality, and a lover of the order, moralities, and charities of life, but yet turns his back upon Christ, in contempt or indifference, he shall escape the judgment of God. The mere formal words of prayer from infidel lips can no more enter the ear of God, than the unbelieving Israelites could enter Canaan. Unbelief is the fountain of all sin; and the bitter waters flowing from it are unto death. As faith purifies the heart; so infidelity fills it with iniquity.

As faith works by love to God; so unbelief lives in a dreadful atmosphere of hatred towards Him. It turns away from the only possibility of victory over sin, and union with Christ Jesus, without whom fallen man can do nothing. It makes a league with the enemies of God; and rejects the sinner's only Friend, in order to obtain this dreadful peace. It repels and repudiates every promise and denunciation of the word of God; and if He be not believed, then faith must be exercised in the assurances and seductions of Satan; for man can have no other object of trust and confidence, than He is who "so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, to the end that all who believe in Him should not perish, but should have eternal life" or than that lost Spirit, whose business of unceasing malignity it is to ruin men, soul and body, for ever. Unbelief then, changes, if I may so speak, the devil into a God; a liar from the beginning into an utterer of unerring truth; and the truth of God into a lie. Is unbelief then a state, in which a man, with death, judgment, and eternity before him should abide one moment, while Christ, and all that He hath may be that man's by faith? Judge ye.

SERMON X.

ABRAM'S ENTRANCE, AND WELCOME INTO

CANAAN.

GENESIS XII. 6, 7.

AND ABRAM PASSED THROUGH THE LAND UNTO THE PLACE OF SICHEM, UNTO THE PLAIN OF MOREH. AND THE CANAANITE WAS THEN IN THE LAND. AND THE LORD APPEARED UNTO ABRAM, AND SAID, UNTO THY SEED WILL I GIVE THIS

LAND.

"A CHRISTIAN is one that believes things his reason cannot comprehend; hopes for things which eye hath not seen: labours for that which he knows he shall not obtain on this side the grave: yet in the issue, his belief is evidenced to be true; his hope makes him not ashamed; and his labour is not in vain." Such a follower of God was Abram; and such, in an eminent degree, his paradoxical experience.

1 Lord Bacon's Works, Vol. vii. p. 21.

Such is the experience of every spiritual descendant of Abram, in a greater or less proportion. "His life is hid with Christ in God." The secret sources of his spiritual being lie deep, infinitely deep, beyond the reach of any estimate of them, which the men of this world can form. His consolations are equally far out of the sight of all carnal observation; and his whole walk seems to involve contradictions, to those who judge after the sight of the natural eye, and the hearing of the natural ear, instead of forming their opinions by the unerring rule of the Holy Volume, which teaches, that however rough and thorny the believer's path may be, he has joys which a stranger doth not intermeddle with, and that as his "sufferings abound for Christ, his consolations also abound by Christ." This very important truth is amply unfolded in the history of Abram. Having therefore closed for the present the digression, which it appeared necessary to make into a consideration of the mighty principle of faith, which upheld him in all difficulties, made him more than conqueror in trial, and solaced him, by the immediate presence of the Comforter in

1 2 Cor. i. 5.

all his afflictions,-I proceed to examine his more immediate history, as a full and unquestionably practical exhibition of the power of faith. I notice then,

I. HIS ENTRANCE

LAND.

INTO THE PROMISED

Ur of the Chaldees, and Haran itself were now left behind; dear as one naturally was to him, as the land of his birth and early attachments, with all that tenderness wherewith the heart dwells upon its first recollections; and fondly as he would think of the other, from being the last earthly resting place of his father Terah.1

He went forth, however, from both, to go into the land of Canaan; and into the land of Canaan he came. But here perhaps the father of the faithful may be met in his way of God's bidding, with a sceptical objection. Where, it may be asked, was the advantage gained to Abram, even in a spiritual point of view, by leaving Chaldea, wherewith to counterbalance

1 Jewish tradition, reluctant to admit the possible error of the national ancestor, held that Abraham had first openly declared his hostility to idols; and thus rendering himself the object of persecution, was at once led from Chaldea by the Divine Voice, and driven by the popular resentment.—Judith v. 6. Dr. Croly's Divine Providence, p. 308.