succeed, and showing by your demonstrations that your objects, whether gained or lost, have no relation to your want; but your understandings are holden from any true. discovery of your sin. It is as if you were under some dispossession, even as the Saviour intimates in his parable. He looks upon the prodigal described, as one that has lost his reckoning, or his reason; and when he discovers the secret of his misery, speaks of him as just then having come to himself. Could you come thus to yourselves, how quickly would you cease from your husks and return to your Father! How absurd the folly, then, of any attempt to satisfy, or quiet your hunger, by any inferior, merely external good!

O, ye prodigals, young and old, prodigals of all names and degrees; ye that have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, and have fallen away; ye that have always lived in the minding of earthly things; how clear is it here that no swine's food, no husks of money, pleasure, show, ambition, can feed you; that you have a divine part which none, or all of these dry carobs of sin can feed, which nothing can supply and satisfy but God himself?

And what should be a discovery more welcome than this. In what are you more ennobled, than in the fact that you are related thus, inherently, to God; having a nature so high, wants so deep and vast, that only he can feed them, and not even he by any bestowment which does not include the bestowment of himself. Would you wil lingly exterminate this want of your being, and so be rid eternally of this hunger? That would be to cease from being a man and to become a worm; and even that worm, remembering what it was, would be a worm gnawing itself

with eternal regrets. No, this torment that you feel is the torment of your greatness. It compliments you more, even by its cravings and its shameful humiliations, than all most subtle flatteries and highest applauses. Nay, there is nothing in which God himself exalts you more than by his own expostulation when he says "wherefore do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which satisfieth not; hearken diligently unto me and eat ye that which is good. Incline your ear and come unto me, hear and your soul shall live." Why should we humble ourselves to so many things that are ashes and call them bread; doubling our bodily pleasures in vices that take hold on hell; chasing after gains with cancerous appetite; torturing our invention to find some opiate of society, applause, or show, that will quiet and content our unrest. All in vain. O, ye starving minds, hearken, for one hour, to this, and turn yourselves to it as your misery points you,-God, God, God alone, is the true food. Ask it thus of God to give you the food that is convenient for you and he gives you Himself. And that is bread, bread of life, bread of eternity. Take it for your true supply, and you hunger no more.

V.

THE REASON OF FAITH.

JOHN vi. 36. "But I said unto you, That ye also have seen me and believe not."

It is the grand distinction of Christianity, that by which it is separated from all philosophies and schemes of mere ethics, that it makes its appeal to faith and upon that, as a fundamental condition, rests the promise of salvation. It is called the word of faith, the disciples are distinguished as believers, and Christ is published as the Saviour of them that believe.

the boast of apostles, is the Were the word any thing

But precisely this, which is scandal and offense of men. but a word of faith; a word of rhetoric, or of reason, or of absolute philosophy, or of ethics, or of grammar and lexicography, they could more easily accept it; but, finding it instead a word of faith, they reject and scorn it. As if there were some merit, or could be some dignity in faith! What is it but an arbitrary condition, imposed to humble our self-respect, or trample our proper intelligence? For what is there to value or praise, say they, in the mere belief of any thing? If we hold any truth by our reason, or by some act of perception, or by the showing of suffi cient evidence, what need of holding it by faith? If we undertake to hold it without such evidence, what is our belief in it but a surrender of our proper intelligence?

This kind of logic, so common as even to be the cant of our times, has all its plausibility in its own defect of

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insight, and nothing is wanting, in any case, to its com plete refutation, but simply a due understanding of what faith is, and what the office it fills. In this view, I pose a discourse on the reason of faith; or to show how it is that we, as intelligent beings, are called to believe; and how, as sinners, we can, in the nature of things, be saved only as we believe.

I select the particular passage, just cited, for my text, simply because it sets us at the point where seeing and believing are brought together; expecting to get some advantage, as regards the illustration of my subject, from the mutual reference of one to the other, as held in such proximity. In this verse, (the 36th,) they are brought together as not being united,-ye have seen me and believe not. Shortly after, (in the 40th verse,) they are brought together as being, or to be united,-every one that seeth the Son and believeth on him.

Now the first thing we observe, for it stands on the face of the language, is that faith is not sight, but something different; so different that we may see and not believe. The next thing is that sight does not, in the scripture view, exclude faith, or supersede the necessity of it, as the common cavil supposes; for, after sight, faith is expected. And still, a third point is, that sight is supposed even to furnish a ground for faith, making it obligatory and, where it is not yielded, increasing the guilt of the subject; which appears, both in the complaint of one verse and the requirement of the other.

Thus much in regard to the particular case of the per sons addressed; for they were such as had themselves seen Christ, witnessed his miracles, heard his teachings, and

watched the progress of his ministry. In that respect, our case is different. We get, by historic evidences, what they got by their senses. The attestations we have, are even more reliable evidences, I think, than those of sight; but they bring us to exactly the same point, viz., a settled impression of fact. That such a being lived they saw with their eyes, and we are satisfied that he lived by other evidences addressing our judging faculty, as sight addressed theirs. We take their case, accordingly, as the case proposed, and shape our argument to it.

Suppose then that you had lived as a contemporary in the days of Christ; that you had been privy to the dialogue between the angel and Mary, and also, to all the intercourse of Mary and Elizabeth; that you had heard the song of the angels at the nativity, and seen their shining forms in the sky; that you was entirely familiar with the youth of Jesus, was present at his baptism, saw him begin his ministry, heard all his discourses, witnessed all his miracles, stood by his cross in the hour of his passion; that you saw him, heard him, ate with him, touched him after his resurrection, and finally beheld his ascension from Olivet. You have had, in other words, a complete senseview of him, from his first breath onward. What now loes all this signify to you?

Possibly much, possibly nothing. If received without any kind of faith, absolutely nothing; if with two kinds of faith which are universally practiced, it signifies the greatest fact of history; if with a third, equally rational and distinctively Christian, it signifies a new life in the soul, and eternal salvation.

Let us, in the first place, look at these two kinds of