such a system may have, it is certain that no scholar was ever made by it. For even now (notwithstanding our intellectual advance) there is no royal road to knowledge; and those who would really and truly know must still submit to the condition of laborious and gradual discipline; "line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, and there a little."

But do not the great majority even of good and useful sermons resemble in their principles and objects these popular lectures? Do not those sermons especially resemble them, which it is now the fashion to preach to the masses, and from which we expect some great results, as if they were the one religious agency of the day? If we were to define modern sermons as "popular expositions of Holy Scripture, with a warm and stirring application to men's consciences," should we go far wrong? They are designed to make, and often (under Grace) they do make, wholesome impressions of a spiritual character, and the people who are touched by them go away pleased, thinking "they have got good." And good they have got, no doubt; but then it is good which is not followed up. If the good should go in some cases as far as real conversion, or change of will, there seems to be no provision for edification, that is, for building on the foundation thus laid. They have been exhorted to religion; but they have not been instructed in it. There is in our exercise of the ministry no systematic plan on which people are taught, and brought on gradually towards "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." And the results are most mischievous. Piety degenerates into a series of shallow emotions, which evaporate in the absence of stirring appeals to the conscience. The souls of our people become like Bethesda's pool. Periodically they are impregnated with an healing influence; "an angel goeth down into the pool, and troubleth the water." But, alas! the virtue of the stirring is but momentary; the dregs quickly fall again to the bottom, and the water becomes dead, stagnant, and unprofitable as before.

Thus we seem to have found that one of the causes of the low standard of Personal Religion among us, is probably the want of any definite direction of conscience, after it has been once awakened. If we carry our inquiry still further back, and ask the reasons why this part of the ministerial work has been neglected, we shall probably find that it is owing to reactions from a state of things wrong in itself. Before the Reformation, the confessional existed as a living power in the Church; it exists still in the communion of the Church of Rome. Frightful as are the evils and abuses inseparably connected with the system of regular compulsory confession, there was at least this advantage connected with it, that under such a system the minister could not forget the duty imposed upon him of directing the awakened conscience. Counsel he must perforce give, counsel practical and definite for the eradication of those sins, the avowal of which was poured weekly into his ear. The Protestant clergyman on the other hand, confined to the pulpit, is thereby, of course, thrown back to a much greater distance from the minds of his flock. He does not know, and cannot know, except in those very rare cases, where a revelation of such things is voluntarily tendered to him, what is the nature of their difficulties, or the quarter in which their trials lie. Hence arises a temptation (though surely not a necessity) to do as the certain man in the passage above referred to did, to let fly his word of counsel without any definite aim, to be general and vague both in doctrine and exhortation. And it is well if the generality and vagueness do not go so far as to become unreality, if the portraitures of the believer and unbeliever are not so overcharged as that no man really resembles either of them, and if consequently the discourse, being meant for nobody in particular, does not fare worse than the death-shaft of Ahab, and hit nobody in particular. But why, because we rightly reject the odious system of the confessional, are we to abandon the attempt to direct the human conscience from the pulpit, or from

the press? The Apostles had no confessionals. And yet were not the Apostles ever making such attempts as we speak of? What is the nature of the Apostolic Epistles? Are they not all addresses to believers in Christ, whose consciences had already received the primary impulse of true religion, with the view of guiding them in their perplexities, confirming them in their convictions, forewarning them against their temptations, encouraging them in their troubles, explaining to them their difficulties, and generally building them up in their most holy faith? And are not the Apostolical Epistles the great model of what stated Christian teaching in a Christian country should be?— a process, be it observed, widely different from the evangelizing of the heathen, and recognized as different in the great baptismal commission given by our LORD in the last verses of St. Matthew's Gospel, where He bids His Apostles first "teach" as a preliminary to baptism,-teach with the view of making disciples,and subsequently to baptism "teach" the converts so made to observe all things, whatsoever He had commanded." Those two teachings are quite distinct. The object of the one was to arouse the conscience of the heathen; the object of the other was to direct the conscience of the Christian.

The state of things on which we have been animadverting is also probably due in part to a reaction from the hard and dry style of preaching, which was in fashion some half-century ago. Some of us can remember the time when sermons were nothing more than moral essays, setting forth some duty, or some grace of the Christian character, with little or no reference to those evangelical motives from which alone an acceptable obedience can spring, and no suggestions of any value as to the method in which the particular grace recommended might be obtained. You were told that humility, and self-denial, and contentment were excellent things, and worthy of being pursued by all men; but as to the considerations which alone can move to the pursuit, and as to any practical method of

maintaining them under difficulties, you were left in ignorance. But when it pleased God to quicken the dry bones of the Church with new life, men began to see that to divorce the moral code of Christ from His constraining love, which alone can enable us to keep it, was an unhallowed act, upon which God's blessing can never rest, and that the exhortations of the Christian preacher should be something warmer, and more genial, and more persuasive than the moralizings of Seneca. Since that time, with the usual precipitancy of men to extremes, our divines have chiefly busied themselves with doctrine, and relinquished (or but feebly occupied). the ground of precept. The impression has been that people know every thing about Christian duty, and have no need to be enlightened on that head. And if by Christian duty he meant simply the moral law of God, in its outward, literal aspect, perhaps the impression is more or less correct, at least as regards the educated classes. But if by Christian duty be meant sanctity of life and character, and a growing conformity to the image of the Lord Jesus, we must be pardoned for expressing our conviction that our best and most respectable congregations have very little insight into the thing itself, and still less into the method of its attainment.

We devote these pages, then, to giving some suggestions on the nature of Personal Religion, and the method of cultivating it, a subject for the treatment of which by the ministers of Christ it appears to us that the circumstances of the time urgently call. We address our remarks more especially to those who perceive the hollowness of a religion of merely good impressions, and who feel that, if there be vitality in the Christian principle within them, they ought, as years roll on, to be making progress. The mere earnest desire for a holier life, which is often found in such souls, is something,--nay, it is much, it is the fruit of grace, it is the working in the inner man of the instinct which Baptism implanted. Take courage, brother! Earnest desire of holiness is holiness in the germ thereof.

those of children. Particles of matter are continually flying off from our bodies, and being replaced by others; so that, according to a very old and oftenquoted computation, the whole mass of the human body undergoes an entire change,—becomes, in fact, a new body, once in every seven years. This constant discharge of old particles, and accretion of new ones, though accompanied with no change of feature or stature, is growth; and it is a sign of the vitality of the body. A dead body lacks the principle of life, by which alone nourishment can be taken in from air and food, and transmuted into the substance of the human frame.

Now we know that nature is every where a parable of grace. Its being so is the basis of all those beautiful illustrations which are called the parables of our Lord. And in the case before us, nature furnishes a most important parable of religious truth. There is no organic life without growth in nature; and there is no spiritual life without growth in grace. I say, no spiritual life, no continuous state of life. Spiritual impulses there may be many. Impulses, however, are not life, though they may originate or restore life. Here again we resort to nature for an illustration. There is an agency connected with life called galvanism. You may galvanize a paralyzed limb, and by galvanism may restore the circulation, and so restore life, to it. But the galvanism is not the life; it only rouses the dormant powers of life. Galvanism is a certain development of electricity, the same mysterious agent which, in another form, darts to and fro among the clouds of heaven. The life of the limb, on the other hand, consists in its answering the purposes for which it was made, in its habitual subservience to the will, in the power of contracting and relaxing its muscles, when the will gives it notice to do so. Now the professing Christian, who is not spiritually alive, is a paralyzed member of the Body of Christ. Impulses from a heavenly agent, the Holy Ghost, are ever and anon sent through the medium of God's ordinances into this