number of those righteous men that need no repentance, we are not among those whom Christ comes to save; those whom He most loves; those over whom, together with Him, the Angels rejoice. But so far as we have in us this temper of mind, fearful of offending, and clinging to Him Who hath brought us home to Himself, there is that within us which pleads for mercy, and is in the sight of God of great price.

And now let us again consider and take up with the fresh virtue and energy of this application, the instructive advice which the inspired Apostle has given us in the Epistle for this Sunday, that we be practising all humility among ourselves and before God, "casting all our care upon Him, for He careth for us;" ever on our guard against the surprises of the great enemy of souls, “stedfast in the faith" amidst the "afflictions" that are to be " accomplished in us;" thus looking forward through the vale of tears to the glory which is beyond, as supported by the rod and staff of the good Shepherd. But now all these duties of self-humiliation, watchfulness, trust in God, and submission to His will in the trials He is pleased to lay upon us, these would be impossible, were not God such as He is revealed to us in the Gospels in relation to ourselves. For a sense of sin raises such a barrier between us and the most Holy God, that such loving confidence in Him would seem to be more and more far from us as we become more sensible of our own sinfulness, and of His holiness. And the exercises of repentance would render this distance only the more known and felt; and the best of men would become the more miserable on account of his becoming more sensible how far he has fallen from the holiness of God. Nor would the doctrine of the Atonement, by itself only, and standing alone, be sufficient to

remove this effect, much as it might do towards it by the assurance it brings of God's infinite mercy.

It is the loving and pitying character of our Blessed Saviour Himself, by which He condescends to the most abject of sinners, and represents Himself in most wonderful compassion, as loving, beyond all the rest, him who has most need of His love. It is this that knits us to Him more and more, and will continue to do so, the more we humble and debase ourselves, and become more deeply conscious of our true condition. Pity and love will bring down the highest and greatest of all, and put him on an equality with the meanest and lowest. And thus the great doctrines of Revelation, and the history of our Lord's humiliations, from the throne of His glory to the Cross, do not stand alone; but even now, in the soul of man, wherever there is a poor and distressed penitent, He is acting over again the same part; and this is to each one of us perhaps the most endearing, the most affecting of all, when we know and feel, each one of us, that He is to us as we read of Him of old; nay, the doctrines of the faith which we receive, and the narrative of our Lord's life and death of which we read, become in this way full of living efficacy, because our own experience falls in with the same, and gives us a heart to understand. When among the many thousands that are hurrying and hurried on together to the Great Day of Decision, each in his own bitterness of heart and sad remorse comes to know, it is I, it is I, whom He hath come to seek, it is I who am the lost sheep; it is not I that have sought Him, but it is He all the while that hath been seeking for me; I am the lost one that He hath found.

And oh if this be so, what humiliation of ourselves before Him, what humiliation of ourselves to each other

for His sake, can be too great, as St. Peter on this day calls on us to practise. Loving humiliation, this is the highest crown to which such as we can attain. And what sobriety and watchfulness also for the future does it call for, while, in the words of the same Epistle, the roaring lion walketh about seeking for that stray sheep again which hath been once rescued from his devouring jaws?

SERMON LI.

The Fourth Sunday after Trinity.

Rom. viii. 18-23. St. Luke vi. 36-42.

MERCY THE BEST PREPARATION FOR JUDGMENT.

What manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness,

Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of GOD.-2 ST. PET. iii. II, 12.

THE

HE Epistle for this Sunday, in character with the Collect, consists of a passage exceedingly sublime and eloquent, wherein St. Paul, after his manner, compares the present state of suffering with the glory which is to be hereafter; the purport of which, in short, is this: what if as Christians we are called upon to suffer with Christ, we do but partake of the common lot of mankind, for "man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward;" all nature itself has likewise to labour under this heavy burden of I deem it a matter of very little consequence; it is but for a moment; it will soon be all explained; all will have gone by; all will be utterly lost and swallowed up in the greatness of those eternal realities which are about to appear.

sorrow.

I reckon, he says, that the sufferings of this present time

are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. 66 'Light and but for a moment," they are not to be set in the balance with the "eternal weight of glory," a glory which is even now hidden with God and existing, and only waits to be "revealed."

For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. The inspired Apostle sees the whole of the creation, like one living being, in intense desire and earnest expectation, stretching forth the head and straining the eyes in awful waiting for something that is to appear. He beholds all things that are around us in one vast image or personification, and in one bold figure or expression he sums up all the appearances of this visible universe; day and night, seasons and years, trees and animals, skies and seas, clouds and rivers, and all the generations of men, the whole of created beings around us, and the human soul,-on all these alike there hangs one awful suspense, looking for the manifestation of God's children. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him Who hath subjected the same in hope. For this mysterious subjection to vanity under which the creation labours is evidently one of constraint, from not having its own object in which it can rest; not fulfilling its appropriate end; not finding its true and final good. But God has been pleased to subject it to the same for wise reasons in hope of release, and stamped upon it the expectation of that deliverance which it shall share. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption, into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For vanity and death, which hath passed upon all the visible creation, "the covering" and "the vail that is spread over all nations on account of

1 Isa. xxv. 7.