checking, if not subduing, the lusts which war within us, chastening every guilty thought, banishing every evil suggestion, and, to perfect us in the work we have begun, imploring the assistance of that divine grace, without which all our exertions are vain and insufficient? And as in this our enterprise, a sincere and honest disposition prompts, so may the immortal spirit, shrouded for some short space,—who can tell how short a space, -from our view, assist, strengthen, and confirm us!-To whom, &c. SERMON IV. ON THE SABBATH. LUKE xiv. 1. And it came to pass, as he went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on the sabbath day, that they watched him. OUR Saviour's life and conduct was so very different from the life and conduct of those with whom and among whom he lived, that without considering the remarkable gifts he exercised, and the peculiar authority he laid claim to, these circumstances alone were quite sufficient to draw down upon him the hatred and jealousy of those who may have felt their own, to say the least, careless and irregular demeanour silently but severely reproved in his innocent and blameless one. We must not, however, indulging in a kind of self-complacency, seem to ourselves to stand, as it were, on some high ground, from whence, conscious of the excellencies that adorn our own age, we may look down with something of pity, something more of pride, on the defects of past generations. No; bad as the Jews may have been at that day, they were not a whit worse than many Christians, in the variety of worlds within worlds, which fill up our vast existence, have been and still are. But to proceed: "As he went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on the sabbath day, they watched him." The moment our blessed Lord entered on his public mission, proclaiming the repeal of the old law, and the commencement, in his own person, of a new and more perfect covenant, that moment suspicions darkened around him, every eye was fixed on him with an earnest and troubled look, every the slightest act of kindness and benevolence, seen with an aspect of prejudice, was made to assume an appearance the very opposite to that it naturally bore. Even in accepting the civilities of one of the chief Pharisees, who had invited him into his house to eat bread-even here, at the table of hospitality, to this spot even, malignity had penetrated, even here" they watched him."-"And, behold, there was a certain man before him which had the dropsy." I recollect once, on reading this passage, experiencing a difficulty in reconciling it with those ideas of propriety which naturally suggested themselves to me: it appeared to me as something strange, that, in the house of one of the chief Pharisees, who, it is not unreasonable to imagine, must have been a rich man, and his mode of living proportioned to his wealth,-it appeared to me, I say, as It is something strange, that in his house, and in the apartment in which he entertained his friends, persons should be received like him who is here mentioned, sick and afflicted with divers kinds of disorders, who, it is evident, merely came for the purpose of exciting our Saviour's compassion, and, if it were possible, to be healed from their infirmities. true, in the streets, in the market places, in the synagogues, in the villages, on the sea shore, crowds attended him for this purpose only-this is all no more than might have been expected; but was it to be expected that they should be found here, in the very guest-chamber of the rich man? At this moment my mind was occupied with the manners and customs of the country in which I lived-I was thinking of such houses as we have in England, such as rich men live in here; but the instant the wide difference between the general construction of the |