Sunday traveller now breaks the Sabbath without any advantage gained in the safety or pleasure of his journey. It may seem, that the evil, grown to this height, would become its own remedy: but this is not the case. The temptation, indeed, to the crime, among the higher ranks of the people, subsists no longer; but the reverence for the day among all orders is extinguished, and the abuse goes on from the mere habit of profaneness. In the country, the roads are crowded on the Sunday, as on any other day, with travellers of every sort: the devotion of the villages is interrupted by the noise of the carriages passing through, or stopping at the inns for refreshment. In the metropolis, instead of that solemn stillness of the vacant streets in the hours of the public service, which might suit, as in our father's days, with the sanctity of the day, and be a reproof to every one who should stir abroad but upon the business of devotion, the mingled racket of worldly business and pleasure is going on with little abatement; and in the churches and chapels which adjoin the public streets, the sharp rattle of the whirling phæton, and the graver rumble of the loaded waggon, mixed with the oaths and imprecations of the brawling drivers, disturb the congregation and stun the voice of the preacher. These scandals call loudly for redress: but redress will be in vain expected from any increased severity of the laws, without a concurrence of the willing example of the great. This is one of the many instances in which a corrupt fashion in the higher orders of society will render all law weak and ineffectual. I am not without hope that the example of the great will not be wanting. I trust that we are awakened to a sense of the importance of religious ordinances, by the dreadful exhibition of the mischiefs of irreligion in the present state of the neighbouring apostate nation; and though our recovery from the disease of carelessness and indifference is yet in its beginning, appearances justify a sanguine hope of its continuance, and of its ultimate termination, through the grace of God, in a perfect convalescence: and when once the duties of religion shall be recommended by the general example of the superior ranks, then, and not till then, the bridle of legal restraint will act with effect upon vulgar profligacy. But, in the application of whatever means for the remedy of the evil,-whether of legal penalties, which ought to be enforced, and in some cases ought to be heightened-or of the milder persuasion of example— or of the two united, which alone can be successful,— in the application of these various means, the zeal of reform, if it would not defeat its own end, must be governed and moderated by a prudent attention to the general spirit of Christianity, and to the general end of the institution. The spirit of Christianity is rational, manly, and ingenuous; in all cases delighting in the substantial works of judgment, justice, and mercy, more than in any external forms. The primary and general end of the institution is the public worship of God, the Creator of the world and Redeemer of mankind. Among the Jews, the absolute cessation of all animal activity on their Sabbath had a particular meaning in reference to their history; it was a standing symbolical memorial of their miraculous deliverance from a state of servitude. But to mankind in general-to us Christians in some degree, the proper business of the day is the worship of God in public assemblies, from which none may without some degree of crime be unnecessarily absent. Private devotion is the Christian's daily duty; but the peculiar duty of the Sabbath is public worship. As for those parts of the day which are not occupied in the public duty, every man's own conscience, without any interference of public authority, and certainly without any officious interposition of the private judg ment of his neighbour,-every man's own conscience must direct him what portion of this leisure should be allotted to his private devotions, and what may be spent in sober recreation. Perhaps a better general rule cannot be laid down than this,—that the same proportion of the Sabbath, on the whole, should be devoted to religious exercises, public and private, as every man would spend of any other day in his ordinary business. The holy work of the Sabbath, like all other work, to be done well requires intermissions. An entire day is a longer space of time than the human mind can employ with alacrity upon any one subject. The austerity therefore of those is little to be commended, who require that all the intervals of public worship, and whatever remains of the day after the public duty is satisfied, should be spent in the closet, in private prayer and retired meditation. Nor are persons in the lower ranks of society to be very severely censured-those especially who are confined to populous cities, where they breathe a noxious atmosphere, and are engaged in unwholesome occupations, from which, with their daily subsistence, they derive their daily poison-if they take advantage of the leisure of the day to recruit their wasted strength and harassed spirits, by short excursions into the purer air of the adjacent villages, and the innocent recreations of sober society; provided they engage not in schemes of dissipated and tumultuous pleasure, which may dişturb the sobriety of their thoughts, and interfere with the duties of the day. The present humour of the common people leads perhaps more to a profanation of the festival than to a superstitious rigour in the observance of it: but, in the attempt to reform, we shall do wisely to remember, that the thanks for this are chiefly due to the base spirit of puritanical hypocrisy, which in the last century opposed and defeated the wise attempts of go-vernment to regulate the recreations of the day by au thority, and prevent the excesses which have actually taken place, by a rational indulgence. The Sabbath was ordained for a day of public worship, and of refreshment to the common people. It cannot be a day of their refreshment, if it be made a day of mortified restraint. To be a day of worship, it must be a day of leisure from worldly business, and of abstraction from dissipated pleasure: but it need not be a dismal one. It was ordained for a day of general and willing resort to the holy mountain; when men of every race, and every rank, and every age, promiscuously— Hebrew, Greek, and Scythian-bond and free-young and old-high and low-rich and poor-one with another-laying hold of Christ's atonement, and the proferred mercy of the gospel, might meet together before their common Lord, exempt for a season from the cares and labours of the world, and be "joyful in his house of prayer." SERMON XXIV. JOHN iv. 42. We have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world. 'TWAS in an early period of our Saviour's ministry -in the beginning of the first year of it, shortly after. his first public appearance at Jerusalem, that the good people of the town of Sychar, in Samaria, where he made a short visit of two days in his journey home to Galilee, bore that remarkable testimony to the truth of his pretensions, which is recorded in my text. "We have heard him ourselves," they say to the woman of their town to whom he had first revealed himself at the well by the entrance of the city, and who had first announced him to her countrymen. "We no longer rely upon your report: we ourselves have heard him. We have heard him propounding his pure maxims of morality-inculcating his lessons of sublime and rational religion-proclaiming the glad tidings of his Father's peace. We ourselves have heard him; and we are convinced that this person is indeed what he declares himself to be: we know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world, the Christ." This profession consists, you see, of two parts. The terms in which it is stated imply a previous expectation of these Samaritans of a Christ who should come; and |