attachment to the life of this world; and cannot, of necessity, infer a want of preparation for the heavenly inheritance, or a disesteem of its blessedness and value.

But the love of life, however generally and palpably disproportioned to the happiness which life communicates, is far from being independent of the control of the judgment. In common with other affections of the mind, it is not only susceptible of restraint from considerations of a general nature, but may be actually, and even permanently suspended by the force of a master-motive. The religious principle, for example, or the sense of obligation to Almighty God, connected as it is with the dread of his displeasure, and the desire of a happiness extending through the whole duration of our being-a being never to be annihilated-is all-sufficient to burst asunder the complicated ties which bind us to this world, and to exterminate in the reasonable mind the love of life; for "what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"* Such was the ruling principle, and such the peculiar effect of its ascendency, in the minds of the * Matt. xvi. 26.

first Christians. They were especially prepared to entertain the desire, and to rejoice in the expectation of a future state, because the successful prosecution, the actual attainment of their salvation, involved the necessity of sacrificing the present world, and abandoning the hopes of life.

The Christian religion, on various accounts, exposed its earliest professors to the certain enmity of their fellow men, exasperated even to an unsparing cruelty, and a deadly animosity. Whatever intervals of quiet they might have enjoyed from the persecution of their adversaries, or whatever might have been the amount of their actual suffering, it is unquestionable, that in assuming the name of Christ, they were premonished to expect the worst afflictions that could befall them; and, as far as any hope of happiness in "this life only" could attach to them, to be, as St. Paul indeed described them, "of all men most miserable."* They were called upon to make a mental, prospective surrender of whatever confers a value on our merely earthly existence; to renounce their mortal self; to forego the welfare and the consolations of this world. Our Saviour expressly and peremp

* 1 Cor. xv. 19.

torily demanded in his disciples a readiness to resign their entire property, to separate from their nearest connexions, and to lay down their lives for his sake. He exacted a disregard, a contempt of life altogether — (an exaction which, it may be justly inferred, must have exposed his pretensions to a rigorous scrutiny)" He that loveth his life shall "lose it, and he that hateth his life in this "world shall keep it unto life eternal.* He "that findeth his life shall lose it: and he "that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. "He that loveth father and mother more than

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me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth

son or daughter more than me is not worthy " of me."-The spirit of these declarations is for all time. The principle of allegiance to Christ must be supreme and absolute in the minds of his disciples, and can suffer no abatement in its force. That principle, however, operated in the first Christians under especial circumstances, and therefore in a peculiar manner. The sense of obligation to their Redeemer was necessarily associated with a feeling of exposure to violence, imprisonment, to torture, and to death; and consequently tended to suppress the growth of earthly

*John xii. 25.

attachments, and to extirpate the love of life.

It is possible so to preconceive and antedate the doom of mortality, as to surmount the fear of it, and even to spurn the instinct of self-preservation: as was exemplified in a plague of this city, when numbers, looking on themselves and their neighbours as inevitably foredoomed to die, sunk into an utter and profound insensibility to the world and its concerns abandoned all defensive precaution against the pestilence that was raging around them-sought no help, and offered nonebut tarried on the earth like spirits lingering near their unburied remains. There are passages in the Epistles which seem to manifest a similar excision of the affections from all merely sublunary objects; and to be the expressions of a mind to which the world was accounted, in no qualified sense, to have been "crucified." It is to be accounted as "crucified" to all believers, inasmuch as it is their inalienable obligation to forsake and abhor the evil that is in it-the sin which was at once expiated and condemned in the crucifixion of their Redeemer. But for the reason which we have stated, the world was crucified to the first Christians, not in its sinful

pleasures only, but in its lawful pursuits and most innocent enjoyments. Hence they were singularly capacitated, not merely, in common with ourselves, to appreciate the necessity and value of their redemption by Jesus Christ, but to welcome its nearer approach, and to hail every harbinger of a glorious immortality. They saw the repose and beatitude of the heavenly world in complete and most alluring contrast with their earthly state and prospects, and were enabled with the full stretch of the soul's desire after happiness, with the entire grasp of their affections, to "lay hold on eternal life."

But farther, as it was in virtue of the promise and expectation of their reward in heaven, that they had voluntarily consented to this abandonment of temporal interests, the strength and liveliness of that expectation, or the prospect of its speedy accomplishment, was essentially necessary to sustain their determination, and enable them "to endure to the end." They stood in urgent need of the assurance that "their salvation was nearer than when they believed;" for what was to encourage them in their great, but lone and perilous enterprise?-to assuage the remembrance of all which they had parted from

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