fugitive image-a disease which assails our spiritual and enduring nature, enervates the powers of virtue and true holiness, and threatens to extinguish our hopes of immortality We suffer a diminution in our gratitude for the offer of forgiveness in the Gospel-the forgiveness of all our iniquities, the first topic of thankfulness in the Psalmist's acknowledgment of the Divine goodness-not the least of which iniquities, but rather the head and front of them all, is the ingratitude of which we have spoken we suffer, we say, in our gratitude for the forgiveness of our sins, as offered us through the sacrifice of our Saviour, from the fact that we have been always accustomed to contemplate a merciful God, and that there never was a time when we judged our sins to be unpardonable, and were bereft of the hope of absolution. The like may be said of our Christian privileges in general; notwithstanding their absolute necessity to our well-being, their intrinsic and unspeakable value. It increases our acknowledged liability to become insensible to those privileges, and adds to our danger of neglecting to improve them, that we have heard of them times without number, and have never, it may be, been

placed in such circumstances as to fear that we had forfeited them entirely and for ever. It must suffice however to suggest the fact, fraught as it is with abundant matter for reflection; and calculated to enforce, in a most conclusive manner, the duty and necessity of frequently reviewing and considering the reasons for thankfulness to Almighty God, as motives to an unreserved devotion of our powers to his service: - calculated to enforce the appeal of the Apostle-" I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service."

Rom. xii. 1.

SERMON VIII.

HEBREWS XII. 9-11.

Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness. Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.

WE are assured in these words, as well as in numerous other passages in the sacred writings, that our sufferings-those, we mean, which necessarily result from the constitution of our nature, and the disposition of external circumstances-instead of presenting an obstacle to our conviction of the goodness of God, do but afford an additional and especial manifestation of that benevolence

which is so conspicuously apparent in the general phenomena of the universe: for this momentous reason-that those sufferings are essentially conducive to the attainment of that holiness, which constitutes our affinity to the Father of spirits, and our qualification for that eternal life which has been made known to us as the destined inheritance of his children.

Such an explanation of our pains and sorrows, the afflictive heritage of humanity, supplies, it must be obvious, a most powerful and conclusive argument for the love of God, and a life of rectitude; but, strange as it may seem, divines, as well as others, have not unfrequently pursued their inquiries into the origin of natural evil, as if the Scriptures were silent, or their testimony useless, on the subject; and, in their endeavours to reconcile the sufferings of mankind with the perfect benevolence of the Creator, have adopted a mode of reasoning, which conducts us to a conclusion at variance with the declaration of the inspired writers, and proceeds, as will appear in the sequel, on essentially inadequate views of our nature and destination. We are far from concluding that the prevalence of such reasoning precludes a belief of the

doctrine of the Scriptures; for it is very observable that persons-even those who are habituated to inquiry and discussion — can embrace opinions which not only have no perceptible coherence, but which are manifestly incongruous: for no other reason, it may be, than that their attention has never been fixed upon them in juxta-position. Nevertheless, we can hardly doubt that, in many instances, the reasoning to which we refer interferes with that full conviction of the final cause of our sufferings as revealed in the Scriptures, and that ready and habitual recurrence of it to the mind, which must be needful to impress it on the feelings, and to render it practically beneficial. Our purpose, then, in the first place, is to offer some proof of the doctrine of the Scripture itself—to show that our subjection to disease and calamity is an actual demonstration of the Divine goodness; and that the declaration of the Apostle in the text is highly conformable to human experience in general. Secondly, and more particularly, we shall endeavour to show that the reasoning by which it is frequently, if not commonly, sought to reconcile the sufferings of our species with the goodness of the Creator, betrays a departure from the doctrines