human experience testify that, no acquisition can be made, and no excellence attained, without the application of industry and labour. And if this observation hold true in regard to all the secular pursuits in which you can engage, it is not less so in regard to the way of attaining a knowledge of the Word of God. For it has pleased its Divine Author, to record his will in a form which calls for the greatest diligence to know it, -the important doctrines it contains being scattered over the whole extent of the sacred volume, and being connected with a series of facts, that reach from the beginning of the world to the consummation of all things. And yet how many expect to acquire a knowledge of the Word of God, of the duties which he requires of them, and the means by which they may be fitted for heaven, without study or labour of any kind; contenting themselves with the faint traces of the elementary principles of the Bible they may have been taught in their youth, or with the knowledge they may have picked up in the casual intercourse of society; and though they have never sat down, for a moment, to peruse and investigate the record for themselves, lay the flattering unction to their souls, that they have acquired all the knowledge of it that is requisite both for present duty and future salvation. But nothing can be more foolish, or more inconsistent with their conduct in all other matters. Were the truths of the Bible naturally familiar to the mind of man, or did they meet us constantly in the ordinary communications of life, we might then trust, with less risk at least, to such accidental sources of obtaining our knowledge of them, as might be furnished by the circumstances of our daily experience. But since the Bible is a new revelation from God,-discovers to us new relations, with their corresponding duties, and contains doctrines, precepts, and prospects peculiar to itself, it is plainly impossible that we can ever acquire the knowledge of these, as we might learn imperceptibly by maxims of worldly policy, or by the same easy and cursory perusal we may give to the works of any human author. We must read it with diligence -with frequency-with the combined application of all the powers of our mind. And in persuading you, my friend, to do this, I might remind you that such was the manner in which the saints and worthies of old acquired a knowledge of the divine will. I might remind you of the diligent researches of Ezra,-of the devoted attention of David to the law of God, and of the comprehensive knowledge which Paul and his apostolic brethren obtained by a study of the Scriptures which they possessed. But I shall mention the names of some in more modern times, whose example, as being less exalted, may perhaps the more readily excite your desire to imitate it. It was the ordinary practice of John Knox, the great reformer of religion in our land, and who was almost incessantly engaged in public concerns of the weightiest nature, to read every day some chapters of the Old and New Testament, to which he added a certain number of the Psalms of David, and the whole of which he perused regularly once a month. Durham, who, after his conversion, became an eminent minister in Scotland, used, from an early period, to commit to memory a number of chapters daily, and repeat them over to his servant in the evening. John Scott, who became an eminent Christian, and wrote a

commentary, tells us, that after he came to know the value of the Bible, he read it over with as much care as if he had been to expound every verse. Dr Cotton Mather regularly read fifteen chapters every day. Sir Christopher Hatton, who was long Lord High Chancellor of England in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was distinguished for his high veneration of the Scriptures, and recommended his family, daily to search the Scriptures a practice which he himself invariably followed. "It is," said he, "justly accounted a piece of excellent knowledge to understand the law of the land and the customs of our country, but how much more excellent is it to know the statutes of heaven and the laws of eternity,-to know the will and pleasure of the great Monarch of the world." Salmasius, a man of extraordinary attainments in learning, acknowledged, in the evening of his days, that though he had read the Scriptures, he had not done it so earnestly as he now wished he had done; "Oh," said he, "had I but one year more, it should be wholly spent in reading David's Psalms, and Paul's Epistles." Of Sir Isaac Newton, we are told that amid the great variety of books he had constantly about him, that which he loved the best and studied with the greatest diligence and application was the Bible. In the posthumous papers of Sir William Jones, containing a delineation of his daily occupations, his biographer assures us a portion of his time was always allotted to the perusal of the Scriptures. Colonel Gardiner, I need scarcely say, was a diligent reader of the Bible, and had acquired a most intimate acquaintance with it; and Captain Wilson, a naval officer, to whom I have already alluded, was in the habit of committing many chapters and books of Scripture to memory, which, in the end, proved an invaluable acquisition, as he was subjected, in the course of Providence, to a long and dreary continuance of indisposition and blindness. Thus have I mentioned the names of persons in almost every rank and profession, who, under a strong impression of the truth and importance of the Scriptures, made that sacred book the subject of their frequent and earnest perusal. Let me persuade you, my friend, to imitate their example,-to set yourself to a regular, and diligent, and systematic perusal of the divine Word, that you may acquire so familiar an acquaintance with it, as will enable you to refer to and understand all the most important passages relative to the doctrines of your faith, or the branches of your duty; and thus you will not be liable to be carried away with every wind of doctrine; you will be enabled, with dexterity and effect, to wield the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, and, through the divine blessing, you will become thoroughly furnished unto every good work.

In order, however, to attain a consummation so devoutly to be wished, I must add, (and having already enlarged too much on this part of my exhortation, I shall do it with brevity,) that you should read the Scriptures with self-application, and with prayer. You should read it with self-application, for as it is a book of principles, by which you are to form your character and habits for eternity, it is evident that it cannot be of use to you unless you faithfully and with full purpose of mind endeavour to regulate your temper and your conduct by its high and unerring standard; and with the view of attaining this object, you should, in reading

ter brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God! My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear before God?"-Psalm xlii. 1, 2. These creatures are famed for their attachment to their young. They carefully conceal their offspring in a thicket, or amidst the soft and downy grass. They watch over it with great tenderness, and correct it with great care. They shield it from danger, and instruct it how to walk. They teach it how to leap from precipice to precipice; and do not leave off their fostering care until the young one is able to bound along its pathless way, and provide for itself. This instinctive principle, however, is sometimes overcome by the love of self-preservation. In the time of scarcity and famine, these animals have been known to leave their offspring to its fate, and go in search of provision for themselves. When the prophet Jeremiah described the desolations of Judah and Jerusalem by famine, he said, "Because the ground is chapt, for there was no rain in the earth, the plowmen were ashamed, they covered their heads. Yea, the hind also calved in the field, and forsook it, because there was no grass."-Jerem. xiv. 4, 5.

Their flesh was allowed to be eaten under the ceremonial law, and was highly esteemed by the orien tals. The savoury meat to which Isaac was much attached, and which was the occasion of much perplexity and sorrow, was supposed to be of this kind. And Solomon, who excelled all men in wealth, profusion and luxury, had the flesh of these creatures enumerated among his delicacies. "Solomon's provision for one day was thirty measures of fine flour, and threescore measures of meal. Ten fat oxen, and twenty oxen out of the pastures, and an hundred sheep; besides harts and roe-bucks, and fallow-deers, and fatted fowl."-1 Kings iv. 22, 23.

The orientals kept these animals in their dwellings, and nourished them with much tenderness. They washed, cleaned, and fed them, with great care. They adorned them with ornaments, with chaplets of flowers, and with chains of gold and silver. The roe and the hart were considered by them the most lovely objects of nature; the most comely in their appearance, and the most tractable in their dispositions. When the spouse, that is the Church, describes the excellence and beauty of Messiah's character, she says," My beloved is like a roe or a young hart."-Solomon's Song ii. 9. Again, the daughters of Jerusalem are besought by the roes and the hinds, as the most delightful objects, that they should not awake the beloved of the spouse, that is, that nothing should be done to provoke the withdrawal

of divine consolation. "I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.”—Solomon's Song ii. 7.

The fleetness of this description of animals, has been pointed out in the sacred volume as an example for men to follow in their escape from the snares of vice. They are commanded to make their escape as from the snare of the fowler: "Give not sleep to thine eyes, nor slumber to thine eyelids; deliver thyself as a roe from the hand of the hunter, and as a bird from the share of the fowler."-Prov. vi. 4, 5.

There is a beautiful allusion made to the hart by the Prophet Isaiah, when he describes the blessed effects of Christ's coming into the world: "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped; then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing; "for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert."

Isaiah xxxv. 5, 6. This prophecy was fulfilled, in one point of view, when Christ came into the world clothed with our nature, and caused the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak, and the blind to see. There was also a singular instance of the fulfilment of this prediction, when Peter cured

the lame man that lay at the gate of the temple, called Beautiful. We are informed, in the Acts of the Apostles, that when Peter took the lame man by the right hand and lifted him up, "immediately his feet and ancle bones received strength, and he, leaping up, stood, and walked, and entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God."Acts iii. 7, 8. It appears, however, that the prophecy to which allusion has been made, will have its full accomplishment when all men shall turn unto the Lord with all their beart, when God will open up rivers of water in high places, and fountains in the midst of the valleys; when man shall be loosed from the bondage of Satan, and shall walk with God in newness of life, with gladness and singleness of heart.

It will be seen by the preceding remarks, that the animals which belong to the deer kind, have been employed for the benefit of man in various respects; that their flesh has been highly esteemed as an article of food, and their habits have been detailed in order to teach man several important lessons. It also appears in a very prominent point of view, that man has obtained dominion over the beasts of the field. These creatures, whose nature and habits we have been describing, have been made subservient to the purposes of God, by affording nourishment to man; and also furnishing illustrations for instructing him in the most important doctrines of the Gospel. They are also emblematical of the events of the coming period, when all things will be made more effectually subservient to the promotion of the great purposes of grace, for the deification of the Church-the body of Christ," the fulness of him that filleth all and in all."-Eph. i. 23.

THE DEVASTATING RAVAGES OF DEATH:
A DISCOURSE.*
BY THE REV. NATHANIEL MORREN, A. M.,
Minister of the North Parish, Greenock.
"Thou carriest them away as with a flood."-
PSALM XC. 5.

THE Psalm in which these words occur, is the well-known prayer of Moses, the man of God. It is commonly supposed to have been written upon an occasion peculiarly trying to his faith, and painful to his feelings. He had been the honoured instrument of leading forth his captive countrymen, free and triumphant, out of the land of oppression, and the house of bondage. Yet, with the basest ingratitude, they forget the God who redeemed them, and lightly esteem the Rock of their salvation. By repeated acts of unbelief, murmuring, lust, idolatry, they not only provoke him once and again to cut down thousands of their number, but even compel him to swear in his wrath, that, with only two exceptions, none of that generation should enter into Canaan's rest; and that the carcasses of the countless host which came out of Egypt should fall and rot in the wilderness-a monument at once of the guilt and frailty of man, and the justice and wrath of God!

The remembrance of the bleached bones which already marked so many of the past stages of their journey and the prospect of the fell and sweeping devastation which was to annihilate an entire

To explain the local allusions in this Discourse, it may be proper to state, that it was delivered on the Sabbath after that terrible calamity with which the town of Greenock was recently visited, when, by the sudden bursting of an immense reservoir of water, great damage was done to property, and more than forty persons lost their lives.

race, himself not excepted, were no less solemn | than affecting to the mind of their pious and patriotic leader; and here, in most plaintive, yet submissive strains, he gives vent to the emotions of his bursting heart.

A scene which was in some respects similar to tais is recorded in profane history. When the immense hordes of Persia were about to invade Greece, they were reviewed by their sovereign, who vainly deemed them invincible. In passing along their crowded ranks, and beholding their perfect equipment and gallant bearing, his bosom swells with the certain hope of success, and his ambitious fancy is anticipating the easy conquest of the fair fields of Greece, and revelling amid the spoils of vanquished foes-when, suddenly! his countenance is seen to fall, and a tear drops from his eye. Arrayed in all the pride of royalty, and surrounded with all the pomp and circumstance of what men call " glorious war," he remembers that he is a man. 46 I weep," says he, "to think, that out of all these myriads, not a single individual will survive the period of a hundred years."

Between the mighty monarch of Persia, and the meek prophet of Israel, there was no resemblance in point of character; but their respective situations admit of comparison, and their conduct of a striking contrast. Each commands a numerous army—each, on surveying his hosts, is impressed with a sense of human mortality. But the views of the one reach forward to a hundred years the views of the other are limited to threescore years and ten, or at the most to fourscore years; nay, as to his own generation, the utmost term of life granted was but the half of that period. The Persian weeps for slaves-the Israelite mourns over the fate of friends, countrymen, brothers whose liberation having auspiciously begun, he had fondly hoped to be permitted to accomplish. Xerxes, though affected in behalf of others, has probably no very deep impression of his own frailty, and may be promising himself the utmost boundary of the defined period. Moses knows that he himself is personally included in the decree of death, and that he cannot outlive the prescribed moment. The grief of the king seems to have been a mere momentary sentimental effusion, which exercised no permanent influence, and produced no practical effects. But if tears fall from the prophet's eye, they are embittered by the consciousness of his own and his people's iniquities; and hence we find that his feelings unburdened themselves in prayer. While sense is affected by a view of the emptiness, the mutability, the vanity, the nothingness of the creature faith fixes its strong grasp upon Omnipotence, and stays itself on the faithfulness, the unchangeableness, the eternity of the great Creator; and thus does it sing: 'Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. Thou turnest man to destruction, and sayest,

Return, ye children of men: for a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood."

Called, as we lately have been, in the providence of God, to witness the most awful and overwhelming calamity with which this place was ever visited, we are in a situation not dissimilar to that of Moses, when he gave vent to these holy aspirations. The appalling event has agitated your feelings, has terrified your imagination, has excited your sympathy, has throughout the week engrossed your thoughts, and been the leading theme of your conversation. And surely, then, this is neither the time, nor the place, to dismiss it from your minds; but rather, it is here, even in God's sanctuary, where light is shed on his dark works by his own clear word, that we should seek, calmly and devoutly, to contemplate the visitation under its most important aspects, and in connection with those great moral lessons, which it is certainly fitted and designed to inculcate. On returning from that scene of devastation and death, we feel ourselves in the very condition of Moses when he penned this Psalm-we mourn with him over the wrecks of our common humanity-our townsmen and kindred, who are not— and, looking up to the Sovereign Disposer of all things, whose path is in these great waters, and adoring his dread power, and his terrible majesty, we instinctively exclaim, "Thou carriest them away as with a flood!"

Let us endeavour, shortly, to illustrate and apply the indisputable statement contained in the

text.

as

The sacred writers, when they would describe the brevity and uncertainty of our earthly existence, employ images the most varied and striking. According to them, the life of man is a shadow, a cloud, a breath. It resembles the swift ships, the weaver's shuttle, the eagle darting on its prey. Within the short compass of this very Psalm, Moses heaps figure upon figure, in order to express the sense which he had of his own and his fellow-creatures' speedy mortality. "They are," says he, " a sleep," that is, like a pleasing but baseless vision of the night, in which the events of many years are crowded into the space of a few minutes; but the sleeper awakes, and behold it is a dream! They are "like grass," which in the morning groweth up, and appears verdant and flourishing, but in the evening, before the expiry of one short day, it is cut down or withered. Again, spend our years as a tale that is told," -a mere fable or fiction, destitute of all substantial reality. And here, varying the metaphor, he says, "Thou carriest them away as with a flood!" And what is a flood? The allusion may have been to the great and universal flood-the deluge, which swept away a whole world of ungodly. In anticipating the wide-spread desolation which was to come upon his people, Moses can compare it with nothing but that ever-memorable infliction of divine vengeance, when all heaven's windows were opened, and

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