you

transcendently blessed through all the ages of eternity! “O that were wise that you understood this-that you would consider your latter end!"

As for you, brethren, who see one half of your days run out already, and yet are tempted by the corruption of the world, and your hearts, to mind nothing but the affairs of this life, you need, above all, to consider your latter end. Alas! you are too apt to forget that the better half of your days is gone, and gone for ever. Look back these thirty or forty years that you have lived. How short! it is a vapour which the wind has carried away. O, consider, that in thirty or forty years more, if you live so long, the whole of your days will look like the same dream; and learn, by what is past, to redeem what is to come.

But above all, forget not that eternity is at the end of your half-spent life. Eternity, that sea without either bottom or shore, in which a thousand years are swallowed up as a drop of rain in the ocean. Eternity, to which you hurry as fast as the wings of time can carry you. And what have you done for eternity? I do not ask, what have you done for time? The rivers of sweat that daily water your face in providing for flesh and blood, save you the trouble of an answer. (Nor are you to be blamed for caring for the body, if you do it always in subordination to the concerns of your soul.) But what have you done for eternity? Have you so much as shed one tear for the forgiveness of your manifold sins? Have you spent one hour in secret to entreat the Lord to prepare you for eternity? Or do you say by your lives, if not with your mouths, "There is time enough to think of that?" Ah! if this is your case, we pray in your behalf, "O that they were wise-that they understood this -that they would consider their latter end."

Here I would also address myself to those whose grey hairs are ready to descend with you into the grave, at the first touch of sickness. I would ask you if you have been wise, and if your souls are as ripe for heaven as your bodies for the ground? But if your broken constitution, and the infirmities of old age, have not yet been able to awake you into a constant preparation for your latter end-what reason is there to expect that words will do it? But I would hope better things of you; I would hope that you have long ago devoted your lives to the Lord; and stand now waiting for the coming of the Bridegroom, and ready for the marriage feast. Nevertheless, if among you there is a grey-headed sinner, let us with double fervour say over him, "O`that he were wise! O that he would understand this! O that he would consider his latter end!"

To conclude. Whosoever thou art, O sinner, whether young or old, rich or poor, in the name of the Lord I call upon thee to awake unto wisdom. Let not the god of this world blind thine eyes any longer. Consider ere it be too late. See death behind thee, and eternity at thy feet. Renounce trifles. Set aside the anxious cares of the world. Give up unlawful pleasures. Leave nothing untried to make thy calling and election sure. For, in the scenes of futurity which shall soon be dis. played in thy sight, there is no room for alteration; all is steadfast, unmovable, beyond the grave. Whether we are, then, seated on a throne, or stretched on a rack, a seal will be set to our condition by the hand of everlasting mercy or inflexible justice.

Now, then, that the present hour is still in thy power, use it to the best advantage. Throw thyself into the arms of a merciful Redeemer, and beseech him to prepare thee a place in his everlasting habitations, and to fit thee for the company of God and his angels. Fear not, (if thou art sincere,) far from casting thee away, he waits to be gracious, and to seal to thy heart by his Spirit the remission of thy sins. For with the Lord there is forgiveness that he may be feared. Come, then, wash thyself by faith in the blood of the Lamb-"the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world." And when thou art made clean, "go and sin no more."

I repeat it once more: tarry not; eternity is at stake. God, in the twinkling of an eye, may take away the breath that is in thy nostrils. The next hour sickness may impair thy reason, and deprive thee of all power to think or pray. The next day the Lord Jesus may come to judgment, and the trump of God may sound, to put an end to time and repentance. If not, the messenger of the Lord, which day and night advances toward thee, death, will most certainly do it, ere long; and what will become of thee, if thou art found in thy blood, in thy sins, unpardoned, unconverted? What horror! But I choose to draw a eurtain over the deplorable spectacle, and hope none of us will harden his heart against the prayer of Moses, and might not I say against the tears of the Lord Jesus? O let us remember him, as he considered the sinners of Jerusalem a few days before his death; he wept over them, says the Gospel, and cried out, like Moses, "O that they would know, in this their day, the things that belong to their peace." Let not those precious tears of the Son of God; let not the sacred streams that flowed from his hands, his feet, his heart, flow unregarded and despised by us. From this day, let us all be wise unto salvation. And when the wicked shall be destroyed with an everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power; when they shall call upon the hills to fall on them, and the mountains to cover them from the wrath of an offended God; in the inexpressible enjoyment of endless bliss we shall ascribe grace, mercy, and love to him that sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb; which may God grant for Jesus Christ's sake, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one eternal God, be ascribed all majesty and dominion, from this time forth for ever.

SERMON IX.-Causes of offence to our Lord's doctrine.

"From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him. Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away? Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life," John vi, 66-68.

IN opening these words, I shall endeavour, first, to show what offend. ed so much many of our Lord's disciples, that they walked no more with him. Secondly, I shall prove from St. Peter's words, by the grace of the Lord, that, as out of Christ there is nothing but eternal death for sinners, so in Christ there is eternal life for the chief of sinners that come to him. I shall then take occasion to make some practical reflections upon those two heads, by way of application. And may the Lord

Jesus so shine upon our understandings by the striking light of his truth, and so prepare our hearts by the softening power of his grace, that we may all join Peter in his glorious confession of faith: "To whom shall we go, O Lord? Thou hast the words of eternal life; and we believe, and are sure, that thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," who openest the kingdom of heaven to all believers.

I. I shall endeavour to show what offended so much many of our Lord's disciples, that they went back, and walked no more with him.

The sermons which our blessed Lord preached were plain, though deep; sharp as a razor, though smooth as oil; and the effect was the conversion or the confounding of his hearers. True doctrine will always cause a division between the chaff and the wheat of a congregation; it sifts the worldlings, puts the formalists at a stand, and makes the Pharisees and Sadducees, the secret and open infidels in all ages, to exclaim against the severity and depth of Gospel truths: so that some, unable to bear it, run away from the disagreeable sound, as many of our Lord's disciples did; or, if they come again, it is to seek an occasion against the preacher, and if possible, to catch him in his words as the Pharisees, Sadducees, and lawyers tried to do by our Lord himself.

Now, if the eternal wisdom, the lowly, meek Lamb of God, who knew how to suit his discourses to the capacity and wants of his followers, could not declare the counsel of God without exasperating many of his hearers, how can it be expected that we, who have hardly one ray of the wisdom of the Sun of righteousness, should preach the same Gospel without any of the same inconveniences? Do not then conclude, my brethren, that ministers are false teachers, because many rise up against them, and walk no more with them; and that a doctrine is contrary to truth, because it is hard to flesh and blood, and is exploded by the generality of the hearers. In so doing you would condemn Jesus Christ himself, to say nothing of his apostles, whose plain ministry met every where with the greatest opposition. And as for you, my brethren, whose heart speaks still the language of the prejudiced hearers of the Gospel in the days of our Lord; you who often say or think,-"This is a hard saying, who can bear it?"-consider that, as the heart of man is the same in all ages, so is also the Gospel: the same cause will produce the same effect in England as well as in Judea: search, therefore, your hearts; search the Scriptures; and you will find that the opposition which plain Gospel truths meet in you is not owing so much to the uncouthness or harshness of the preacher, as you think, as to a secret aversion which you have to the cross and the Gospel of Christ.

St. John, in the chapter out of which the text is taken, gives us a particular account of the sermon which caused the disciples of our Lord to murmur and depart from him. It is a close and deep one indeed, and contains many things which are foolishness to the natural man, though they are the wisdom of God to every awakened sinner. First in the twenty-seventh verse, "Labour not for the meat which perisheth, (says our Saviour,) but for that which endureth to everlasting life." This was more than the worldling and covetous could well bear. There are in every congregation people who bury themselves all the week in worldly cares; they think of nothing else but of adding field to field, or of enlarging their business; they have no time to say their prayers, or if

they say them, it is always in a hurry; as for death and judgment, hell and heaven, eternity, and such solemn points of meditation, they do not trouble themselves about them more than about the most impertinent story in the newspaper, perhaps not so much. Now, how could people of this stamp bear the doctrine of our heavenly Master? "Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth to eternal life.” No doubt they murmured secretly, or went away saying, "Did you hear this Galilean, this Son of Joseph? He tells us that we must not work. Can there be a more abominable doctrine?" And thus grossly mistaking our Lord, who only endeavoured, by those words, to damp their desires after earthly things that they might begin to provide heavenly food for their perishing souls, they ran away with part of a distorted sentence, made him an offender for a word, and represented him as a man whose doctrines interfered with the duties of people's calling, and tended to subvert the commonwealth.

In the next verse, the Jews asked, "What shall we do that we might work the works of God?" And they expected, no doubt, that our Lord would have said, "You must go regularly to the synagogue; you must take care to have your children circumcised the eighth day; you must religiously observe all the festivals and the Sabbaths; you must pay tithe, and give alms out of all you have ;"-for, thought they, if we do all this, who shall do the works of God better than we? But our Saviour, who knew there were hundreds of hypocrites and formal Jews among his hearers who did all this, and were nevertheless as far from the kingdom of heaven as the vilest publican present, answered, to their great surprise, "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he has sent." "This is the work of God that we believe! Why, this is a new doctrine, (thought some of them ;) how can faith be the work of God? That man with his doctrine of faith will set aside good works, and then what will become of the law and the prophets?" " This doctrine of salvation by faith never was, and never will be, understood by the world, because all the children of the world are self confident, proud, boasters, as St. Paul says, Romans i, thinking that they can do good works before their heart is washed and changed by faith in ‹ Christ Jesus, and little suspecting that what they call their good works are only their least iniquities. "Without me," says our Saviour, 66 you can do nothing." "If I give all my goods to feed the poor, and have not love," true faith, working by love, says St. Paul, "I am nothing." And now what good works can the best moralist do, what good fruit can the most flourishing bramble produce, till grafted in Christ the true vine ? Must not faith make us one with Jesus Christ, the tree of life, before we can bring forth fruit unto God; and is not this the work of God, that we believe on him whom he has sent,-that we come to Christ by faith, to have our hearts changed, and made fruitful in all good words and works? But this our Lord's hearers did not like. Some, no doubt, blamed him for discouraging people from doing, as they thought, good works; and others could not bear to hear him declare that they had not the true faith, and that therefore their best works were only the fruit of their virtuous and hypocritical pride.

In the fifty-first verse, our Saviour goes deeper yet, and tells the Jews, "I am the bread of life; if any man eat of this bread, he shall

live for ever." They could not conceive what he meant by the bread of life, if he did not mean the manna which their fathers had eaten in the wilderness. So in our days, thousands cannot conceive what our Church means by bidding us feed upon Christ in our heart by faith; they believe that it means just kneeling at the communion table, holding out their hand to receive the bread, and eating it with the mouth of the body; and they are ready to quarrel with ministers if they insist upon an inward, spiritual, sensible feeding, in the heart, on the heavenly virtue of Christ's hidden flesh, and of Christ's blood, whereby the soul is refreshed and strengthened, as the body by bread and wine. Nor could the Jews make any thing of that repeated invitation to come to our blessed Lord, in verses 37 and 65: "He that cometh unto me shall never hunger; he shall live for ever. No man can come unto me, except the Father draw him," &c. Strange doctrine! Some murmured at it, no doubt, and were ready to interrupt the heavenly Teacher by such words as these: "Why, what do you mean by coming to you? Are not we come to you, and some of us from far? Do not we now throng round you? We follow you by land and by water, and yet you say, no man can come unto you except the Father draw him. What unintelligible stuff!" Just so it is in our days. If ministers enforce the duty of coming to Jesus for salvation, of coming spiritually by an inward and constant motion of the heart toward Christ, they are accounted enthusiastic, or, or least, are supposed to affect new and strange methods of leading their flocks out of the beaten track. And if they go farther and declare that all going to church and going to the Lord's table, without this spiritual coming of the soul to Christ, is nothing but an empty form, a round of Pharisaical, hypocritical duties, which, like broken reeds, will pierce the souls of those that lean on them; the complaints run higher, and their hearers openly murmur against them, as the Jews did against our Saviour for the

same reason.

But the indignation of our Lord's disciples rose higher still, when he added, in verse 53: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." Except you get a Divine life, a life begun and preserved by feeding in an unspeakable manner upon my body, which shall be broken for you, and by drinking spiritually my blood, which shall be shed for you, you will remain dead to God, as you are dead in trespasses and sins, and ready for the second death, for you have no life in you. At this saying, many could no longer contain themselves, and went away complaining of the harshness of the Lamb of God, and the severity of his heavenly doctrine. How many do the same in our days, when we tell them, as our Lord did his followers, that they are dead, if out of Christ; that they have no life in them till they get a heavenly power to feed upon Christ in their hearts by faith; that though we enjoy an animal life, as the beasts of the field, and a rational life, as the prince of the air and his angels, yet till we are joined to Christ in one spirit, we are dead to God, and condemned already to the second death! But it is a comfort to us, under the opposition which we may meet with in enforcing this fundamental doctrine, to see that herein we only sip the cup which our blessed Lord and Master did before us; for the evangelist observes in the sixtieth verse, that many of our Lord's disciples, when they heard that we