effect, if it led any one to consider whether now or at any former time of his life, he feels, or can remember ever to have felt, any such struggle within him, between his sinful nature and God's grace, as can in any respect be worthy of the name of dying. Whether he remembers any such process of anxiety and great watchfulness, in which he beheld death as it were on one side of him and life on the other, and so fled from the manifest danger of his state, and resolved that his sin should die and not himself, lest if it continued alive he should himself die for ever. This conflict takes place sooner or later; its length is longer or shorter, as it may be, but it exists, and exists perceptibly at some time or other in the life of every soul whom Christ redeems.

Two deaths, my brethren, we must die, every one of us. One is the death of our body, which will happen alike to us all; but what the other death is, is the great matter of salvation or of destruction. Our bodies, our natural bodies, will die alike in all of us; this is one death; but besides this shall all die another, we shall all feel the death of our sins, or the death of our souls. We shall feel the one or the other, for no death can happen without our feeling it, only whilst the death of our sins is felt most at its beginning, so the death of our souls is often felt only in its last stage, when its stroke can no more be repelled, and its victory

is certain.

Remember that one of these two deaths, both I cannot deny painful, we must die every one of us. Which shall it be then? Shall it be the death of our sin or the death of our soul? The death whose pain comes at first most, yet even then, by Christ's grace, it is endurable; but afterwards the suffering and the struggle lessen, and there comes the rest of death, and the vigour and the freshness and the glory of that divine and eternal life which the death of our sins has given birth to or shall it be the death whose first strokes are silent and painless, which pours in its poison and we feel it not,-more and more triumphant, and we more and more insensible; till behold, its work is accomplished, and then the agony is neither to be uttered nor conceived, and Christ is gone from us for ever, and life and death are become one for our destruction;-a death of all good, a life of all evil.

May 9, 1841.

SERMON IX.

THE DEATH OF SIN.

PSALM 1XXXv. 8.

I will hear what God the Lord will speak: for He will speak peace unto His people, and to His saints: but let them not turn again to folly.

THIS is the Bible version of these words; the Prayer-book version gives the last part differently: "He shall speak peace unto His people and to His saints, that they turn not again." It was not, we may feel sure, intentional: yet had the same men been engaged in both translations, and if they had felt that there was some doubt as to the exact rendering of the original, they could not have done better than give the above two versions, which represent so faithfully the two different aspects, if I may so speak, under which the Scripture represents God's mercies; sometimes describing them as things which must absolutely hinder

us from sinning: "He shall speak peace unto His people, &c., that they turn not again." "What shall separate us from the love of Christ? Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." And at other times pointing out the great wickedness if we do sin in spite of them, and after them: "God will speak peace unto His people and to His saints: but let them not turn again to folly." "If I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor;" and "there remains no more sacrifice for sin, but a fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation which shall devour the adversaries." Thus it is that the more certainly the Scripture speaks of God's grace, producing its fit effect upon us, the more grievous and the more hopeless does it consider our sin, if, after all, the effect is not produced.

And yet we find that God's grace, although the rejection of it does doubtless put us in a worse case than we ever could be else, is spoken of in the Scripture as a great mercy and a great blessing. Nor are we ever permitted to withhold the knowledge of it from others, lest they should become worse than they were before by refusing it. So it is with all instruction; so it is with all attempts

to make instruction impressive; so it is with all solemn services, with confirmation, with the holy communion. We know that all these things have a power of death in them, as well as a power of life; we cannot but fear that if to some they are as they should be, a means of grace and salvation, yet that to others they may be a hardening of the heart, and an occasion of greater sin; yet, as I said before, we must offer them; God will speak His gracious message of peace; be it our care that we turn not again to folly.

Now the object of what I said last Sunday was to impress upon you, if possible, that the turning to God must sooner or later involve in it a painful effort; that what is called "dying to sin" cannot be a process to be gone through easily and unconsciously. I wished to impress this also, that what is thus called death is mostly a gradual process; a thing going on for a long time, and not beginning and ending in one sharp single struggle. Yet neither is it true that it goes on quite evenly; on the contrary, it has its sharper seasons and its gentler ones; it has times when it destroys much of the principle of sin within us, it has times also when it does little more than hold its ground; and the struggle scems suspended. Now if at this present time, during the preparation for confirmation, and for the communion which will immediately follow confirmation, any progress in the