sight, if we are of Christ, but by faith, because we know that the things which are seen are temporal, and the things which are not seen are eternal.

O thou, who didst in thy great love and compassion, sustain them who had forgotten home and earthly things, that they might follow and hear thee, with bread enough and to spare, give unto us the same trusting and loving spirit, and the same hunger and thirst after divine truth. Be unto us, O Lord, not only the giver of that daily bread which thou wilt not withhold from them who serve thee, but the bread and water of life, nay, the very life itself, and the resurrection and the glory which shall never pass away! Amen!

179

SERMON VIII.

JER. v. 22-24.-"Fear ye not me? saith the Lord: will ye not tremble at my presence, which have placed the sand for the bound of the sea, by a perpetual decree that it cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it?

"But this people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart; they are revolted and gone.

"Neither say they in their heart, Let us now fear the Lord our God, that giveth rain, both the former and the latter, in his season: he reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest."

AND so this was the end of all the privileges with which the people of Israel had been crowned, from one generation to another! that they had a revolting, and

a rebellious heart. And as

heart, so was the life; they

was the were re

volted and gone from their God and Father! There was to them no Lord of heaven and earth, to fear for his power, or love for his goodness.

And yet we should have thought beforehand, that the more blessings they enjoyed, the more thankful they would have been. The greater the light that shone round about them, the more perfectly they ought to have kept the right path. The more compassionate and long-suffering God had been to them, the more ardently they ought to have loved Him, and the more heartily they ought to have obeyed Him in all things. At least, so we should have thought, did we not know the exceeding perverseness and unaccountable ingratitude of the human heart, not in Israel only, but in all men. And this I am afraid would lead us to an opposite conclusion! If we looked at things, not as they ought in reason to be, but as

they are, we should fear more than hope, in most cases, from this very abundance of God's mercies. Experience would teach us to presume, till we knew the contrary, that the more gracious our heavenly Father is, the more thoughtless are his children; and the more boundless his love, the stronger is men's resolution to show that their ingratitude can always exceed it. Their will to sin, is a match for his that they should be holy!

At all events so it was in Israel. They were at once the most blessed, and the most accursed: the nighest to God, and yet the farthest from him, of all the nations of the earth; the most loved, and the most hated. This is an awful contradiction, yet how true it is! not only how possible, but how true, our own consciences can tell us! And mark well how the Prophet speaks of these thankless and rebellious people, and implies more than he speaks! After describing their perverseness, it would have been

very natural and reasonable to have spoken thus: "But seeing that they thus forget the Lord that made them, and hath so wonderfully separated them from among the nations, and crowned them with mercy and loving-kindness, God hath stretched out his hand upon them to destroy them! He has made the earth iron to them, and the heavens as brass! He hath forbidden his sun to shine, and his rains to fall; and the earth's womb hath been smitten with barrenness, so that she shall no more bring forth her fruits in their due season." Had God said so, this would have been very just. But God's ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts, as our thoughts. "Be ye like your Father which is in heaven," says our Lord: "for he maketh his sun to shine on the evil, and on the good; and sendeth his rain upon the just, and upon the unjust." And so it was in those former days, of which the prophet was speaking as well as now. There was no difference in the seasons, in spite of all the sins of