if he has not from his own personal experience discovered, the (a) sufficiency of the Scriptures in all knowledge requisite for a right performance of his duty as a man and a christian. Of the labouring classes, who in all countries form the great majority of the inhabitants, more than this is not demanded, more than this is not perhaps generally desireable" They are not sought for in public counsel, nor need they be found where politic sentences are spoken.-It is enough if every one is wise in the working of his own craft: so best will they maintain the state of the world."

But you, my friends, to whom the following pages are more particularly addressed, as to men moving in the higher class of society:-You will, I hope, have availed yourselves of the ampler means entrusted to you by God's providence, to a more extensive study and a wider use of his revealed will and word. From you we have a right to expect a sober and meditative accomodation to your own times and country of those important truths declared in the inspired writings for a thousand generations,' and of the awful examples, belonging to all ages, by which those truths are at once illustrated and

confirmed. Would you feel conscious that you had shewn yourselves unequal to your station in society-would you stand degraded in your own eyes; if you betrayed an utter want of information respecting the acts of human sovereigns and legislators? And should you not much rather be both ashamed and afraid to know yourselves inconversant with the acts and constitutions of God, whose law executeth itself, and whose Word is the foundation, the power, and the life of the universe? Do you hold it a requisite of your rank to shew yourselves inquisitive concerning the expectations and plans of statesmen and state-counsellors? Do you excuse it as natural curiosity, that you lend a listening ear to the guesses of state-gazers, to the dark hints and open revilings of our self-inspired state fortune-tellers, the wizards, thai peep and mutter' and forecast, alarmists by trade, and malecontents for their bread? And should you not feel a deeper interest in predictions which are permanent prophecies, because they are at the same time eternal truths? Predictions which in containing the grounds of fulfilment involve the principles of foresight, and teach the science of the future in its petual elements?

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But I will struggle to believe that of those whom I now suppose myself addressing, there are few who have not so employed their greater leisure and superior advantages as to render these remarks, if not wholly superfluous, yet personally inapplicable. In common with your worldly inferiors, you will indeed have directed your main attention to the promises and the information conveyed in the records of the evangelists and apostles: promises, that need only a lively trust in them, on our own part, to be the means as well as the pledges of our eternal welfare information that opens out to our knowledge a kingdom that is not of this world, thrones that cannot be shaken, and sceptres that can neither be broken or transferred! Yet not the less on this account will you have looked back with a proportionate interest on the temporal destinies of men and nations, stored up for our instruction in the archives of the Old Testament: not the less will you delight to retrace the paths by which Providence has led the kingdoms of this world through the valley of mortal life-Paths, engraved with the footmarks of captains sent forth from the God of Armics! Nations in whose guidance or chastise

B

ment the arm of Omnipotence itself was made

bare.

Recent occurrences have given additional strength and fresh force to our sage poet's eulogy on the Jewish prophets:

As men divinely taught and better teaching
The solid rules of civil government
In their majestic unaffected style,

Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.
In them is plainest taught and easiest learnt
What makes a nation happy and keeps it so,
What ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat.

PARADISE REGAINED, iv. 354.

If there be any antidote to that restless craving for the wonders of the day, which in conjunction with the appetite for publicity is spreading like an efflorescence on the surface of our national character; if there exist means for deriving resignation from general discontent, means of building up with the very materials of political gloom that stedfast frame of hope which affords the only certain shelter from the throng of self-realizing alarms, at the same time that it is the natural home and workshop of all the active virtues; that antidote and these means must be sought for in the collation of the present with the past, in the habit of thoughtfully assimilating the events of

our own age to those of the time before us. If this be a moral advantage derivable from history in general, rendering its study therefore a moral duty for such as possess the opportunities of books, leisure and education, it would be inconsistent even with the name of believers not to recur with pre-eminent interest to events and revolutions, the records of which are as much distinguished from all other history by their especial claims to divine authority, as the facts themselves were from all other facts by especial manifestation of divine interference. Whatsoever things,' saith Saint Paul (Romans xv. 4.) were written aforetime, were written for our learning; that we through patience and comfort of the Scrip tures might have hope.'

In the infancy of the world, signs and wonders were requisite in order to startle and break down that superstition, idolatrous in itself and the source of all other idolatry, which tempts the natural man to seek the true cause and origin of public calamities in outward circumstances, persons and incidents: in agents therefore that were themselves but surges of the same tide, passive conductors of the one invisible influence, under which the total host of billows, in the whole line of suc