with attention to all parts of the service, and endeavour to fix in your minds the instruction which is addressed to you.

If instead of being ready to hear, any persons indulge in wilful levity of behaviour, they indeed act like fools, like persons destitute of common sense and reason; and they consider not that they do evil. They do evil against God, whose service and whose sanctuary they profane; they do evil against their neighbours, whose attention they distract, and whose devotion they disturb; they do evil to their own souls, when that service and that place, which should have been for their health, is by their wilfulness unhappily converted into an occasion of falling.

You, my friends, I trust, will guard yourselves, and guard your children, against doing evil in the manner just alluded to. By your general behaviour in Church, by your devoutedly joining in the prayers and Psalms, and by your attention to God's word, you will, I trust, show your sense of the service, in which you are engaged,

will show your reverence for God's sanctuary.

That you should entirely divest yourselves, while at Church, of all worldly thoughts can not indeed be expected, though you ought to divest yourselves of them. I believe the best men have ever felt and lamented, that they could not entirely get the better of the wayward wandering of the mind. They have confessed and lamented that during their religious exercises, that during even the most solemn offices, worldly, and perhaps even sinful, thoughts, would unawares creep in, and sadly distract their attention. Against these wandering thoughts we must incessantly watch and pray ;-must pray for the genuine spirit of grace and supplication. The more we get the better of such distractions, the greater will be the benefit which we derive from public worship; and the greater the pleasure and satisfaction which we feel in it. The more we succeed in showing proper reverence for God's sanctuary, both in our hearts and in our behaviour, the

more shall we feel the service, as well as the sabbath, of the Lord, to be "holy, "a delight, and honourable ';"—the more shall we be able to say with sincerity of heart, "Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place where thine "honour dwelleth."

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Having thus been mindful of God's presence here, may we humbly hope to derive fulness of joy from His presence hereafter. Having thus reverenced God's sanctuary on earth, may we hope, through Christ, to be admitted to His sanctuary in heaven, and to rest for ever in undiminished happiness upon His holy hill.

1 Isaiah lviii. 13.

SERMON XVII.

ON JOINING AUDIBLY IN PUBLIC WORSHIP1

ROMANS XV. 6.

"That ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."

In several places in his Epistles, St. Paul mentions the "continuing instant in prayer, as one of the leading features in the character of those, who have been called out of heathen darkness to the pure light of the Gospel.

The being constant and earnest in our addresses to the throne of grace, "praying

1

See an excellent and judicious sermon on this text and subject, published in 1825 by Bishop Mant, the worthy successor of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, in the Diocese of Down and Connor.

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always with all prayer and supplication,' we should all of us regard, not only as an important duty, but as a high and valuable privilege, a privilege, which we should rejoice to exercise, both in private, in our families, and in the public assemblies of the Church. Upon the manner in which we ought to take part in the public devotions of the House of God, I now wish to make some observations.

The assembling of ourselves together in the temple of the Lord, was instituted both for instruction in righteousness, for the improvement of the congregation in Christian knowledge, by the reading and preaching of the Word of God, and also, for uniting in social or common prayer and praises to the Author and Giver of all good things. This last object of public worship, is, perhaps, the most important of the two. My house "shall be called the house of prayer;" the house of prayer, emphatically, and chiefly.

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In order, however, that either of these objects of coming to Church may be answered, it is evident that a devout serious