thoughts for any continued period of time to a direct act of supplication or thanksgiving to God. It is easy enough to reflect on religious questions, to engage in controversy, to pursue a speculation, or to study a doctrine. But these are not acts, which bring us into direct intercourse with God; and this is what the love of God would naturally prompt. Try yourselves with this one experiment! Endeavor to fix your minds steadily upon God and eternity, and to occupy yourselves fervently in supplication and thanksgiving without a wandering thought for one hour! Try it for half an hour, for a quarter of an hour, for ten minutes! and according to the success of the experiment think, how you could bear the rebuke of that searching question of our lord to his slumbering disciples-What! Could ye not watch 'with me one hour?'-! You may say, that it is weakness, not want of will, which hinders you from being thus devout, that it is difficult to fix the thoughts steadily for any continued period upon any other object, and especially upon one, that is removed from the observation of the senses, as well as upon the concerns

of religion. But if the mathematician has no such difficulty in pursuing a train of reasoning, if the real difficulty with respect to absent friends or absent pleasures be not to direct the thoughts into that channel, but to divert them from it, the inference is not overstrained, that our difficulty in sustaining the attention, when God is the object of our thoughts, proves, that he is not, as he ought to be, the first object of our love, that, if we loved him better, we should think of him with less difficulty, and should find the act of prayer and praise an ever welcome exercise, a never failing refreshment amidst other less delightful employments.

This is a consideration, which applies to men, who are really seeking to love God, who desire to fulfil his law, who know, how worthy he is of all their affection, and are solicitous to bestow it upon him. But, alas! few of us can profess so much as this of ourselves, at least in reference to the whole course of our lives. Are you not conscious, brethren, of many sins, by which you have violated some known command of your maker? But no sin can be

committed against him, while the heart really loves him, as it ought. The two things are incompatible. As well might you love your neighbour sincerely, and yet murder him, as love God sincerely, and yet disobey him. Whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected. Every transgression of known duty, all indisposition towards it, any omission of it is a proof, that you do not love God with all your strength, because, if you did, you would not be able to bear the thought of displeasing him, but would rather be anxious by every sacrifice in your power to manifest your gratitude to so great and holy and gracious a benefactor.

Then again the law of God requires you to love your neighbour, as yourselves. Do you do so? Can any one of you pretend to say, that he rejoices as much at a neighbour's, a stranger's prosperity, as at his own, and feels an equal disappointment at his reverses? This indeed is so far from being the case with any of us, it is so opposite to the tenour and current of natural appetite and feeling, that men are inclined to think it cannot be the meaning

duties to discharge to one fellow-creature, as our child, or parent, or tried friend, which cannot be claimed from us by strangers. But we must have a love for them, which would prompt us to befriend them to the same extent, if their situation and ours made it proper and contingencies do sometimes arise to call for such an exercise of universal philanthropy, as sudden danger levels all distinctions, and gives to every individual the claim of a brother; and then, as in a wreck for instance, but more especially (I would say,

if

you were prepared to admit it) in that moral wreck, which has befallen the species, it is seen, whether we do or do not love our neighbour, as ourselves.

But, if this be the case, I fear, it follows, as an undeniable truth, that none of you keepeth the law. I say to you in the words of the text without fear, that any of you will be disposed in his heart to contradict me,'Did not Moses give you the law? and yet ' none of you keepeth the law.' He gave you law, by the observance of which you might live and yet none of you keepeth the law.

This indeed is the unvarying doctrine of scripture. Men have received a perfect law from the hands of their maker; and they have not kept it. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in the sight of God.

Moreover, if I may be allowed to advance one step further into the subject, for this universal defection from the pure and holy law of God the scripture assigns an origin and a cause. It describes the original righteousness of our nature, when it says, that God formed our first parent in his own image and likeness. It describes also its original sin, when the man, whom he had created upright, ventured to transgress that single command, which was his only restriction in Paradise. That first transgression was an inlet to all corruption. It changed the condition of our nature. It rendered it a sinful nature, as a single grain of arsenic will render a wholesome draught poisonous. The human mind had then consented to disregard a positive law of its maker: and it could thenceforward no longer stand upright in