social converse and communion be improved and multiplied--and fill up to overflowing the cup of human felicity.

When shall this bright scene be realized? Is it reserved only for the future abodes of the just made perfect? and shall eternal discord and suspicion reign below? No-let men become Christians, "not in name and in tongue, but in deed and in truth:" then shall the golden days of Christian Charity once more return; the same spirit shall revive which dwelt in Jesus Christ himself, in the blessed apostles, and in the multitude of the primitive converts who expressed so well in their lives and actions, the image of their gracious God, their benevolent Saviour.

SERMON XV.

THE EVERLASTING MERCY OF GOD.

PSALM Ciii. 17.—But the mercy of the Lord is, from everlasting to everlasting, upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's chil. dren.

HOW minute, how pitiably brief, appears this mortal life, contrasted with the Eternity of God! "Lord (says the Psalmist) wherefore hast thou made all men in vain?" Vain indeed, mysterious and unaccountable, were the condition of a creature, formed with thoughts "that wander through Eternity,"

yet doomed to perish in a few years, or months, or days; all his enjoyments tinged with the gloomy prospect of dissolution, all his sorrows aggravated by the rapid waste of his precarious existence-most melancholy were the lot which our reason discovers to us, -did it not also conduct us to a gracious and merciful Creator, in whose "everlasting" goodness, we may find that consolation, under the griefs and apprehensions of mortality, to which the powers and resources of our own minds, are so utterly inadequate. As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth: for the wind passeth over it, and it is gone-but the mercy of the Lord, is, from everlasting to everlasting, upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's children."

"From everlasting to everlasting!"-an' Eternal existence-a duration which had no beginning, and which shall have no end,-is too big for the human mind to grasp: of its vastness, we can form only a negative idea;

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but of its reality we cannot doubt: it is what we are compelled to recognize; though it is what we cannot comprehend.

We look back, through the scenes and occurrences of our former life-through the traditions of our progenitors-through the revolutions of our country; and all that history. records of the most ancient nations-we contemplate the period when the foundations of the earth were laid-we trace the sun to its origin; the heavenly orbs to the æra, when they were first clothed in brightness-we represent to ourselves a series of worlds, and suns, and firmaments, passing away and succeeding each other, millions of times-till, exhausted with the ineffectual effort, we perceive that the Eternity, which is unquestionably past, remains just as unfathomable, as it was before.

Again we give the reins to our imagination-we picture to ourselves the successive stages and probable events of our future lives