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and let us doubt not but that He, who reinstated Peter once more in his holy office, will restore us to his favour in this world, and elevate us finally to his kingdom of glory in the world to come!

SERMON XIII.

66

GOD THE FATHER OF LIGHTS."

JAMES i. 17.

Every good gift, and every perfect gift, is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

ST. JAMES is here discussing a most important subject. Those to whom he was writing had experienced a variety of fortune-had already struggled with many trials, and had the prospect of more and greater before them. Now, like most other men, they saw the hand of God in evil, and forgot it in good. Instead of applying the doctrine of an almighty superintending Providence to a beneficial end, by considering him as their guardian

in danger, and their merciful and judicious Father in the greatest evils and temptations of life, they seem to have viewed him as an austere and rigid governor, trying his people by calamity beyond their endurance, and even tempting them to sin in order to ascertain the strength of their virtuous resolutions. To these errors St. James replies, by assuring them, that one class of trials of which they complain, cannot justly be styled evils at all, but may proceed from a God of the most perfect benevolence and mercy; and that therefore, while they are right in attributing them to God as their author, they are not at the same time justified in arraigning his justice or his kindness. These are, worldly evils, losses and pains, disappointments and cares. These may all be said to come, in a secondary sense, from above, and are trials by which the Lord chasteneth those whom he loves-they are as necessary for the soul's health as medicine is for that of the body, and instead of being real evils, are the truest marks of our heavenly Father's kindness

and care. "My brethren," says St. James, "count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience 1." Trials like these, then, we may justly assign to the Author of all good, because herein he afflicts us "for our profit, in order that we may" hereafter "be partakers of his holiness 2." But there is another class of temptations to which we are subject, of a very different nature, which it would be blasphemy to ascribe to the Almighty, but which, notwithstanding, we, as well as the Jews of old, are most anxious to remove from our own conscience and responsibility. These are, in one word, temptations to sin. We find within us a strong inclination towards every thing that is evil, and an almost unaccountable distaste for every thing that is good. We perceive how readily our passions seize upon every opportunity of criminal indulgence, and, instead of avoiding the most obvious snares, with what alacrity

we seek for opportunities and excuses for

going wrong.

There is in this something so mortifying in its nature, and so alarming in its tendency, that we are most anxious to shift off the responsibility of it from ourselves, and place it on some inevitable necessity. We say that this weakness arises from the defect of our nature-we acknowledge that God is the author of nature-and thus, if not in words, yet secretly, and in spirit, we make the Creator of the universe to be answerable for all the evil which it contains. This was the error of the Jews; and against it St. James most solemnly protests. "Let no man say, when he is (thus) tempted, I am tempted of God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man; but every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed1." Having thus seriously warned his readers against turning the grace of God into lasciviousness, and

1 James i. 13, 14.

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