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of the house five years, which is found to be the time requisite for their education. They are provided with lodging, board, and washing; and the only expense that falls upon the parent or the parish is in the article of clothing. proficiency of those admitted at the first institution, in November 1792, exceeds the most sanguine expectations of their benefactors; and the progress of those who have been admitted at subsequent periods is in full proportion to the time. The number at present exceeds not twenty. There are at this time at least fifty candidates for admission; the far greater part of whom the slender finances of the society will not permit to be received.

I am persuaded that this simple statement of the object of the charity, the success with which the good providence of God has blessed its endeavours, within the narrow sphere of its abilities, and the deficient state of its funds, is all that it is necessary or even proper for me to say to excite you to a liberal contribution for the support of this excellent institution, and the furtherance and extension of its views. You

profess yourselves the disciples of that Master who during his abode on earth in the form of a servant went about doing good,-who did good in that particular species of distress in which this charity attempts to do it, and who, seated now at the right hand of God, sends down his blessing upon those who follow his steps, and accepts the good that is done to the least of those whom he calls his brethren as done unto him. self.

SERMON XII.

JOHN, Xiii. 34.

"A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one ano ther."

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In that memorable night when divine love and infernal malice had each their perfect work,— the night when Jesus was betrayed into the hands of those who thirsted for his blood, and the mysterious scheme of man's redemption was brought to its accomplishment, Jesus, having finished the paschal supper, and instituted those holy mysteries by which the thankful remembrance of his oblation of himself is continued in the church until his second coming, and the believer is nourished with the food of everlasting life, the body and blood of the crucified Redeemer; when all this was finished, and nothing now remained of his great and painful undertaking but the last

trying part of it, to be led like a sheep to the slaughter, and to make his life a sacrifice for sin, -in that trying hour, just before he retired to the garden, where the power of darkness was to be permitted to display on him its last and utmost effort, Jesus gave it solemnly in charge to the eleven apostles (the twelfth, the son of perdition, was already lost; he was gone to hasten the execution of his intended treason),-to the eleven, whose loyalty remained as yet unshaken, Jesus in that awful hour gave it solemnly in charge, "to love one another, as he had loved them: And because the perverse wit of man is ever fertile in plausible evasions of the plainest duties, lest this command should be interpreted in after ages as an injunction in which the apostles only were concerned, imposed upon them in their peculiar character of the governors of the church, our great Master, to obviate any such wilful misconstruction of his dying charge, declared it to be his pleasure and his meaning, that the exercise of mutual love, in all ages and in all nations, among men of all ranks, callings, and conditions, should be the general badge and distinction of

his disciples." By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another." And this injunction of loving one another as he had loved them, he calls a new commandment. "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another."

It was indeed in various senses a new commandment. First, as the thing enjoined was too much a novelty in the practice of mankind. The age in which our Saviour lived on earth was an age of pleasure and dissipation. Sensual appetite, indulged to the most unwarrantable excess, had extinguished all the nobler feelings. This is ever its effect when it is suffered to get the ascendant; and it is for this reason that it is said by the apostle to war against the soul. The refinements of luxury, spread among all ranks of men, had multiplied their artificial wants beyond the proportion of the largest fortunes; and thus bringing all men into the class of the necessitous, had universally induced that churlish habit of the mind in which every feeling is considered as a weakness which terminates not in self; and those generous sympathies by which every one is impelled to seek VOL. I.

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