Mass on the Sunday, attends, merely out of fashion, or for the purpose of joining, in more profligate intemperance, with his fellow-profaners of the holy Sabbath. A drunkard, in short, who sees the gates of heaven barred against him, and the jaws of hell yawning to receive his wretched soul; a drunkard, who is conscions of this, and yet who, insensible to both heaven and hell, seems to find no happiness-but in plunging, deeper and deeper, into the gulph of brutal sensuality.

Shall he, I say, shall a monster of this cast look up with confidence to his outraged God, and call upon his despised Redeemer for the miracle of a sudden and unprepared conversion? Shall he dare to think, that his will not be the doom so common to drunkards, of dying in the midst of their sins-in the very act of their crime? Shall he dare to fancy that for him is reserved that most uncertain, and in his case most unmerited, of all God's mercies-the mercy of a death-bed repentance? Shall the drunkard flatter himself with such a hope? If he do, let him remember what I have said on this subject in my ninth Sermon; let him remember also, that of all sinners, the dying drunkard most deserves to be the object of that terrible menace, which Solomon puts into the mouth of Wisdomthat is, of God: Prov. i, 24. "Because I called and you refused; I stretched out my hand and there was none that regarded. You have despised all my counsel, and have neglected my reprehensions. I also (in my turn) will laugh in your destruction, and will mock when that shall come upon you which you feared. When sudden calamity shall fall on

you, and destruction, as a tempest, shall be at hand-then shall you call upon me, and I will not hear-because you have hated instruction, and received not the fear of the Lord."

Unhappy Drunkards! if any of you be now present, let my parting words pierce the ears of your deaf and drowsy souls. The God, whom you offend; the Judge, who holds in his hands your eternal doom, warns you now by my voice-and warns you, perhaps, for the last time! -Repent; again I say, repent. Not by idle lamentations over your misery, when, from time to time, the woes you have brought upon yourselves, begin to gnaw your guilty and desponding hearts; lamentations, which are soon drowned in the very next cup of ebriety. Not by oaths against intemperance; oaths, which only aggravate, by the crime of perjury, the standing guilt of your habitual intoxication. No; it is not by these means, O Drunkard, that you are to conquer your inveterate vice.-Repent; but repent in the way that Christ has pointed out. Fly the places, the companies, the occasions of your profligacy; for he who loves the danger shall perish in it." Fly idleness. The time you have hitherto spent in revellings, spend it in prayer, in pious reading, in sorrow, in medi tation. Prostrate before your crucified Redeemer, cast yourself and all your sins into his bleeding wounds. There, hope-there weep for pardon. Mingle your tears with his saving gore, to wash away the stains of your past life. "Recount to him," with the Prophet," all your years in the bitterness of your soul" Adore him frequently, daily if possible, on his holy altars; where that same flesh and blood,

which hung upon Calvary for your pardon, is, according to his own onnipotent institution, hourly offered up by his ministers, not only to commemorate, but to apply the atoning merits of his death, to all who sincerely seek forgiveness. Do this, O Penitent; and above all, make use, the due and effectual use, of that penitential sacrament, which your Jesus has established for the express purpose of the sinner's justification; and of which I have spoken so amply in my eleventh Sermon-I mean the holy Sacrament of Confession. Approach that sacred tribunal; become your own humble accuser; follow the dictates of your Saviour's minister; amend; persevere; mcrit, by your change of heart, the happy sentence of absolution; receive the adorable body of your God-your powerful preservative against relapse; 'and-Oh! May He, who willeth not the death of the smner, but that he be converted and live," He, whoresists the proud, but gives grace to the humble," He, who looses in heaven, what his ministers loose on earth;”` He, who has roused me this day to a holy fury against this most abominable of his people's vices; may He, I say,-when the last scene of this fleeting life hath closed-receive, not with the terrible frown of his wrath, but with the consoling smile of his pardon, the once obstinate and criminal, but at length penitent and sanctified soul of the drunkard!

A blessing, &c.

The Twenty-fourth Sermon will be-On PRAYER,

SERMON XXIV.

OF

THE REV. RICHARD HAYES.

ON PRAYER.-MIRACLE OF PRINCE Ho

HENLOHE.

« Amen, amen, I say to you: if you ask the Father any thing in my name, he will give it you. St. John, c. xvi,

v. 23.

To exhort a Christian, my brethren, to pray to his God, would seem, at the first blush, to be, of all the duties of a preacher, the most un-called-for and superfluous. For, what else is it, but to say: You are weak-call for help to the strong; you are a creature-for your preservation look to your Creator; you are a sinner-demand pardon of your Redeemer. What else is it, but to say: You desire to be happy in your present state of being-beg that happiness of Him, who gave you that being, and with it all the blessings, which you enjoy; who not only gave that being and those blessings to you, but who has given and gives them to thousands of ungrateful and wicked men; men, who-instead of thanking him, or using his favours to the glory of the beneficent donor, or, as he intended, to their own and their fellow creatures' welfare, both temporal and eternal-convert the gifts of

Heaven to the insult of the Lord of Heaven, and to the ruin, as well in body as in soul, of themselves and their neighbours Even on these, his avowed enemies, has the Father of all good showered down, with a liberal hand, the abundance of his blessings; for "he makes his sun to shine alike for the good and the bad, and rains upon the just and the unjust."

If, then, he is so lavish of his beneficence, to those who hate and despise him; what will he not bestow upon the soul that loves him? And, if he is so prodigal of his temporal benefits; will he be stingy of those which are eternal? The former cost him but the word of his omnipotence; "He said, and- all was made;" but the latter stood him in a great deal more. It is the very nature of benevolence, it is the very essence of love, to delight most in bestowing on the beloved object, those marks of affection, which have cost most to the lover. Consider, then, O Christian soul, how much your loving God has done, to secure to you your eternal happiness, if you wish to obtain it. He became man; he was born, in poverty, of an humble virgin; he lived a lowly life; he suffered hunger, thirst, cold, and all the other temporal miseries, incident to a state little short of mendicity; he toiled, he laboured, he travelled, he preached; he left nothing undone to shew you the way of salvation; he exerted his omnipotence, by miracles, in order to convince you of the truth of his doctrine; and, in the establishment of that doctrine, he submitted to be persecuted, reviled, belied, treated as an impostor, scoffed at as a fool, bound as a felon, scourged as a