as we earnestly desire your Christian growth and holiness, with greater skill, and influence, and energy, and faith, cultivate and cherish it ;would you only-as in your secret hearts you feel you ought, and as in private conversation are not ashamed to acknowledge it-try in good truth, with faithful and continual prayers, to do your duty to God and man, in the station to which you are called;-would only the more earnest and religious among you do all that comes to your hand to do, by encouraging the younger to keep themselves holy and undefiled, to discourage and put down unholiness of word and deed, to uphold the truth in opposition to the wretched perversion of morals that often passes for honour and good faith among you,-we should soon see other things, and hear other things, than now often wound our eyes and ears. Have we improved? are habits of word and deed better than they were? are prayers more recognised and commoner among us? Oh! that instead of boasting and comforting ourselves in our improvement, we would humble ourselves as we ought, to think how those who have so far acknowledged their Christian obligations, and so far confessed that they ought and that they desire to lead Christian lives, how they, I say, can acquiesce in this imperfect, half, or not half im

provement, and make no real effort to cleanse still further their society from evils, the existence of which they well know, and knowing allow, and allowing are guilty of!

But on these points I will not dwell at present. I will only now, in conclusion, say to such as have hitherto lived, and such as design, by the blessing and grace of God, hereafter to live, in this their first scene of trial, holy lives, and are ready, if need be, to confess before men, that, whether to old or young, to persons in quiet or unquiet times, to those assailed by trials apparently great or apparently small, the promise of Christ is equally assured, that those "who confess Him before men, He also will confess before His Father which is in heaven." They have the same prospect, the same hope, the same encouragement which has strengthened confessors in the times of the most trying confessions, and martyrs in the moments of the most painful martyrdom; the hope and assurance, that in the greatest and most awful day that man shall ever see,—the day of the Lord Jesus Christ,-He will confess and acknowledge them for His own, in the presence of His Father which is in heaven.

SERMON VI.

DENYING CHRIST BEFORE MEN.

ST. MATTHEW X. 33.

"But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven."

HAVING considered the former part of this verse, in its application to our own particular state and dangers, last Sunday, I proceed, in pursuance of the same design, to explain the latter and more awful part of it. To be confessed by our Lord, acknowledged as His own, and presented to His Father in the great day, was the one alternative, a glorious and happy lot, not to be obtained by slumbering over our privileges, or taking the world easily; not by resting on our baptismal gift, or rendering easy and average obedience to God's law, but by a strict and life-long confession; a confession

not to be withheld or declined, however wearisome, however painful, however trying and terrible the worldliness and sinfulness of the world might make it. The other dark alternative is to be denied, to be disowned, to be refused; to knock at the door, crying, "Open unto us," and to receive for answer, "Verily I say unto you, I know you not1;" to urge our gifts, our graces, our baptismal blessings, our ministerial successes, it may be our casting out of devils even, or our other mighty ministerial works, and to hear nothing in reply but that dismal profession, "I never knew you,”-never, in your days of easy living, cheerful talking, quiet hoping, half obeying, and whole denying. "I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity"."

not even

As with the great confessions, so with the great denials; they have belonged to turbulent and troubled times. When the Church was persecuted by heathen princes or people, or when the truth within the Church has been oppressed by ungodly violence by those who themselves claimed to be her children,-as, on the one hand, many, in such days, have confessed, and

1 St. Matt. xxv. 12.

2 Ibid. vii. 23.

borne with cheerful thankfulness the painful consequences of their confession, so some have denied have fallen away from their first faithhave denied the Lord that bought them, have fallen into plain and unquestionable apostasy.

Of such persons we are in the habit of thinking and speaking without any hesitation or mercy: they are to be absolutely and unquestionably condemned. And, undoubtedly, they are so. For a man who has once entered upon the Christian profession, who has once in Holy Baptism taken the sign, and, as it were, the oath of a new allegiance, has bound himself to be a faithful soldier and servant of Christ unto his life's end, and, as the reward of this sacred service, believes himself to be already gifted with the germ of immortal life, union, and happiness; for such a man, at the sight of human opposition, or in terror of human fears, deliberately to deny his Lord, to remove, as far as he can, the eternal Cross from his forehead, and be, as far as he can, the heathen that he was before, what is this but an apostasy so dark, so total, and so hopeless, that there can be nothing left for such a man, except (unless by long, and toilsome, and weary repentance he have time and grace given him to win a hardly-assured peace upon the earth) the "fearful looking for of