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tendance would give offence to scrupulous brethren.

Now though Christians might eat at the social festivities of heathens, yet they might not eat at a social and convivial feast of an excommunicated brother, might not accept an invitation from him, nor give him an invitation to attend such a feast; because this would be to mingle with him as a companion, and countenance him in his vice and impenitence. Such companying with him they should avoid, that he may be ashamed. But those duties which result from family relation; those civilities, which be long to common neighbourhood; to social connexion, to ordinary intercourse, ought still to be paid him, that we may win him by our goodness, may admonish him by our conversation, may reprove him by our example, and thus encourage his repentance. L. J.

To instruct and to persuade may comprehend the whole duty of a preacher. Men are ig norant of their Maker and of themselves; of their various relations to God, and of the duties arising from those relations. The preacher is to pour upon them the light of truth, derived from the sacred scriptures. Men are indisposed to good, borne away by passion, and unwilling to follow the convictions of their minds. He is to stop them in their mad career, and to entreat them by every pressing consid eration to walk in the sober path of wisdom and uprightness. Useless indeed will be his instructions, and unheeded as the idle wind the exhortations of his lips, unless the Spirit of grace carry them home to the heart; but this Spirit is promised, and when he is tempted to despond in the view of the inefficacy of his labours, the cheering voice of "Lo, I am with you should exhilarate his mind and quicken

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ON PREACHING.

THE man, to whom is committed the delightful task of preaching the everlasting gospel, is placed in a situation interesting and vastly important, both with respect to himself and his hearers. If he be an unfaithful steward of the mysteries of our holy religion; if he impart not truth to the ignorant, and warn not the sinner of his danger, of him will the blood of transgressors be required by his Master. On the contrary, if from the treasures of wisdom he scatter abroad and dispense food to the hungry; his reward is with his God.

As, then, the exhibition of truth is the first great duty of the preacher, it is worthy of inquiry what truths are best calculated to make men holy and happy, and what manner of exhibiting them will be most likely to impress.

For instruction on both these points we must have recourse "to the law and to the testimony;" and the apostles are examples, which should be carefully fol lowed by all their successors. While we were yet sinners, it is written, Christ died for us. that believeth not on the Son of God hath not life, but the wrath of God abideth on him. Except a man be born again, he cannot see

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and perishing condition of men, the atonement of Christ, the necessity of believing in his name, and of a change in our moral characters by the grace of God, are truths asserted in these passages, inculcated throughout the gospel, and which were constantly proclaimed and insisted upon by our divine Master and his disciples. They are therefore foundation stones, on which modern preachers should build the goodly edifice of Christian morality.

These truths should now be preached as formerly; not with words of man's wisdom, but with plainness, clearness, and faithfulness. Let not the pure light be reflected from a thou sand gilded words, which dazzle the eye, and render the perception confused; nor let it be put under the bushel of learned obscurity. Let it shine, unreflect, ed, directly upon us to lighten our path to the kingdom of heaven.

The most happy style of preaching is that, which is least noticed, and which, like the deep and gentle stream, carries us si lently and imperceptibly along from one object to another. So far therefore as any singularity of attitude or gesture, any contortion of feature, peculiar modulation of voice, or strangeness of composition tends to withdraw the attention from the subject to the manner; so far is the speaker removed from perfection.

Figurative language, when in troduced for the purpose, not of embellishing the discourse, but of illustrating the subject, has the most happy effect. It embodies our ideas and presents

them to the eye. It relieves the mind from the pain of abstraction by permitting it to rest upon a sensible object, and it pleases, while it instructs, by pointing out a resemblance between this object and the subject of thought.

Our Saviour frequently spake in figurative language, but his speech always distilled as the dew.

All his illustrations were natural, easy, familiar, and appropriate, and therefore beautiful. But when rhetorical figures are evidently the fruit of labour, and when they are awkwardly introduced, they tend not to instruct, for they withdraw our attention from the subject, and lead us ir resistibly to notice the talents of the writer.

Another aim of the preacher should be to persuade. Instruction is of no use, it is worse than useless, unless it be followed; and to induce compliance with it is the object of persuasion.

Every one, who observes man, must be convinced that the affec tions do not always conform to the dictates of the understanding, and that the mind may be well furnished with truth, for which the heart has a total disrelish.

The ground work of persua sion is the presentation of some motive, which will interest and excite to action. These motives will crowd upon the speaker. Let him alarm the fears of his hearers by pointing out the con sequences of sin, the disgrace, the pain, the anguish, the ruin which will follow. Let him hold up before them their insensibility, their ingratitude, their madness and folly. Let him appeal to every natural sentiment in their minds, and let him dis

play to them that high and inestimable reward, that glory, honour, and perfection, which are laid up in store for the righteous.

It was in this manner that St. Paul preached. But a minister can never affect the hearts of his audience, unless he feels himself the truths, which he delivers; and his usefulness will be abridged in proportion as his sincerity and piety are doubted. Persuasion hangs only upon sincere lips. When a preacher exhorts us by the most solemn considerations to follow the light of truth, to repent and to believe, and exhorts us in a cold and inanimate manner, which gives us no conviction of his sincerity and earnestness; his words will be ineffectual; and the strange combination of interesting motives and cold presentation of them will leave upon the mind a confused impression of wonder, and a kind of incredulous belief, which can hardly force the mind to exertion.

But in order to true pulpit eloquence it is not necessary to display all the gesticulations of the theatre; nor will the powers of persuasion be increased in any proportion to careful attention to manner. Art can never affect us like nature; and would the preacher draw the bow with such energy as to impel the arrow to the heart, his own soul must first be impressed with the truths, which he delivers. Without the fervour of benevolence in his delivery even a truly eloquent discourse would lose its effect; and without warmth of feeling in the composition of his sermon, in vain would he introduce in it the most alarming considerations, and

adorn it with all the flowers of rhetoric.

Men are keen-sighted in observing improprieties, and can. easily distinguish the warm effu sions of passion from the unaffecting productions of labour and Ꮓ Ꮓ. taste.

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(Continued from p. 152.)

IN Japan the priests and nobility have the title of Cami. The country is called the kingdom of Chamis. Chamis was Scin, or San, the sun, who was Cham, or Ham, the son of Noah. The laws of the empire are the laws of Chamis, and all their gods" are styled Sin or Chami. The founder of the empire is said to have been Tensio Dai Sin, or Tensio the god of light. Near his temple is a cavern visited for religious purposes, on account of his having been once hidden, when neither sun nor stars appeared. A common method of representing the time when Noah was shut up in the ark.~

charac

One of their principal gods is Jakusi, similar to Tacchus of the west. He is the Apollo of Japan, and his ter is like Orus in Egypt. Half a large scollop shell forms his canopy, and his head is surrounded with a crown of rays. He was Noah.§ Canon, another deity of the Japanese, is the reputed lord of the ocean, represented coming out of a fish, crowned with

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Rowers. In India the same deity is called Vishnou, and Macauter. He is known in other parts of the East. The Indians have al20 a tradition of a flood in the days of Vishnou, which covered the whole earth.* The Bramins say there was a time when the serpent of a thousand heads withdrew himself, and would not support the world, because it was so overburdened with sin. Immediately the earth sunk into the great abyss of waters, when mankind and all that breathed were destroyed; but Vishnou raised the earth from the flood. The oldest mythological books of the East Indies give an account of a universal deluge, sufficiently corresponding with that of Moses.*

The Parsees mention a time of great wickedness, when there seemed to be an universal opposition to the supreme Deity, when it was thought proper to bring an universal inundation over the face of the earth, that all impurity might be washed away. This being accomplished, every living creature perished, and the earth was for some time entirely covered.§

the dead, did not return for some time, but finally came back with a green branch. The people of Terra Firma had received a tradition of the flood; that it was universal, that one man and woman, and their children were preserved in a canoe, from whom the world was again peopled. The Peruvians gave information that they had heard from their ancestors, that many years before they had kings or Yncas, when the world however was very populous, there happened a great flood; the sea, bursting over its bounds, covered the earth, and destroyed all the inhabitants. The people of the inland parts of Brazil had little knowledge of God or religion; yet they had distinct traditions of the flood, when all mankind perished, excepting two brothers, and their wives, who became the heads of two distinct people. The inhabitants of Otaheite have a tradition that their island was broken from the continent a long time ago, when the supreme God was angry, and dragged the earth through the sea.

The natives of New-England had a tradition of the universal deluge, when all mankind perished, excepting one man and woman, who escaped by ascending one of the White hills, supposed to be the highest summits in North America.

The Mexicans have a tradition of a flood in which all men were drowned. The Iroquois say, that a lake of their country once overflowed, and in a short time covered the whole earth. The original inhabitants of Cuba had much information concerning a So uniformly have the inhab flood, which destroyed the whole itants of the world maintained world, excepting an old man, a remembrance of the flood. who foreseeing the deluge, built Though their accounts are difa great ship, went into it with his ferent, as might have been exfamily, and abundance of ani- pected, as to immaterial circummals; after a season he sent stances, yet they all coincide in forth a crow, which feeding on proclaiming an universal deluge,

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If, not satisfied with the testi- Noah. We add only one proof

more.

mony of every age and country, we dig into the bowels of the earth, there we behold traces of the deluge; if we appeal to the world itself, the world, the rocks, the hills, and mountains reply, there has been an universal deluge. In the Andes of South America, ten thousand feet above the level of the ocean, are found marine shells in abundance. In the Alleghany mountains of North America the stones are full of sea shells; not only those in the vallies, but those on the summits are marked with these marine substances.* In one place among the Alleghany mountains are forty thousand acres covered with oyster and (To be concluded in the next number.) cockle shells.

From the institutes of Menu, an ancient work on Hindoo jurisprudence, written in the Sanscrit language and translated by Sir W. Jones, it appears, not only that the Hindoo account of the creation confirms the relation of Moses, but that the Hindoo puranas contain the history of the deluge, and of Noah. They relate that he was preserved in an ark from a deluge which destroyed all mankind. The story which follows, respecting him and his sons, exactly corresponds with the history of the Hebrew Legislator.

If from America we pass to the eastern continent, the mountains of Scotland, of Switzerland and Italy, Atlas and Ararat still exhibit on their summits, the spoils of the ocean; mountains of every region from Japan to Mexico proclaim the same fact, recorded in scripture, that the waters of the flood once overflowed their highest summits. The moose deer of America is found buried in Ireland; the Elephant of Asia and Africa is found in England and NorthAmerica. Crocodiles of the Nile are dug up in the heart of Germany. What is more, the ruins of plants, trees, and animals, now not known in the world, are discovered in various countries.

These are facts which give all possible support to the history of Moses respecting the universal inundation in the time of

Evang.

CONTEMPLATIONS

PHILO.

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(Concluded from p. 209.)

IN describing his office as Mediator, the scriptures particularly reveal him as the prophet of the highest, who came immediately from God. "Never man spake like this man." Friends and foes, the wise and unwise, were astonished at his wisdom. The Jewish rulers expressed their surprise thus: "How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" His answer solved the difficulty, and is the only solution of it. "My doctrine is not mine, but his who sent me." It could not otherwise be, that a person of his obscure birth and education should excel, beyond comparison, every teacher who had gone before him-confound the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

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