injunction "Love not the world" was of proportionate urgency and moment. We may conceive the nature of man to be so excellently constituted, his desires and inclinations so subordinated to reason, as to render such an injunction, comparatively speaking, unnecessary, or of perfectly easy obedience. He might be so inspired with sentiments of gratitude and devotion towards the Author of his being, as scarcely to be in danger of degrading himself from a subject of God, and a citizen of Heaven, into a slave of appetite, and a votary of the world. And yet, if men were in a state of trial-that is, if they were, to any extent, liable to form too high an estimate of this life, and to make unworthy sacrifices for its advantages, we should still consider the admonition before us to be valuable and useful. Notwithstanding a prevailing inclination to the right, we should hardly deem it fit that mankind should be entirely contented with the world, as long as it contained any incentives to the wrong. We should scarcely regard it as a state of unmixed satisfaction, until their integrity had been incontestably proved, and their happiness sealed for ever. One could not altogether banish concern and apprehension, or at least circumspection, from Paradise itself,

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while there stood in it a single tree that offered forbidden fruit, and suggested the thought the possibility of transgression. But to learn with what distrust and caution we should use the world," let us refer for a moment to the representations which the Scriptures have given us of human nature as subjected to its influence, and exposed to the force of its temptations.

The inspired writer, in adverting to the excesses already specified, seems, we have said, to consider them as lamentably prevalent in the world. For all that is in the world, he affirms, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." He does not for a moment pause to qualify his assertion, and to except from his condemnation the moderate and lawful indulgence of our worldly inclinations; and far less to commend a certain attachment to the present life, as a stimulus to universal activity, and consequently essential to the exercise and growth of the faculties, the progress of arts, and the general advancement of society. He was evidently too much affected with the general preponderance of the inferior passions over the rational and spiritual part of our nature, to make distinctions. Indeed, it is not

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the time to remark the uses and benefits of a noble river, when it has overleaped its banks, and is swollen to a desolating torrent. The Apostle looked upon the human passions as having far overpassed the bounds which God had prescribed to them, and saw in their unmeasured prevalence and wild commotion, the aspect and disaster of a moral deluge. And, truly, the rebukes and expostulations of the New Testament were amply justified by the vicious propensities and unholy deeds against which they were directed. They

seem but to reiterate and confirm the accusing judgment of the Almighty, that " every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually ;" and to recall that awful and pathetic declaration which he has left on record against our species, that "it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth."*

Our Saviour, moreover, consistently with the assumption of a natural and universal proneness to pervert "the things of the world" into instruments of sin and disobedience_ into weapons of rebellion against the divine authority, which he came forth from God to re-establish in the heart and conscience-our * Gen. vi. 5, 6.

Saviour instructed his hearers that a devotion of the affections to earthly objects was essentially incompatible with the service due to himself; and that in obeying him as their Master, they would be distinctly conscious of a preference of the privileges which he offered them, to the possessions and enjoyments of the world. This he taught them irrespective of the fact, that, as the professors of a new and most holy religion, they were destined to provoke the persecution of a world devoted to idolatry, and "lying in wickedness" as is manifest from the general tenor of his exhortations: "Labour not for the meat that

perisheth, but for that which endureth to everlasting life."-"Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

Indeed one cannot but be arrested by the earnestness and solemnity with which the original teachers of our religion conjure their contemporaries to withdraw their affections " from the world, and the things of the world." We do not find, it would seem, in the New Testament what we meet with on this subject in the instructions of uninspired men-of other teachers of religion and morality-the proposition, for example, that the pleasures of the world have their value, and ought not

to be despised, and encouragements to enjoy the good of life, though qualified with a praise of moderation, and cautions against excess. That mankind had a sufficient estimate of earthly good, the sacred writers evidently took for granted; or they omitted the consideration altogether, as an insignificant part of their subject. That Christians too, in after times, under the impression of their representations of the world, might entertain opinions regarding it too sombre for discrimination-too gloomy to allow them either to distinguish the characters of guilt and innocence in human enjoyments, or to collect the true, determinate sense of the word of God, by a comparison of one part of it with another; and, consequently, might be driven into a needless sacrifice of human happiness, into acts of self-denial dishonourable to the service of God, because unnecessary to the holiness of his creatures, and simply burdensome and painful to those who serve him; that Christians, we say, might thus understand and apply their language concerning the world, was a consequence which the sacred writers scarcely appear to have imagined; or this was a portion of possible, and even probable evil, which, it seems, they