curses of an offended Deity? Are we therefore to consider ourselves as wretched souls, the forsaken, the afflicted of God? Afflicted indeed we may be, but not forsaken; trials they may be of our faith, of our constancy, of our obedience; trials, not to overwhelm, but to discipline our souls, to purify our affections, and to strengthen our hearts. "What are these," said the apostle in his vision," which are arrayed in white robes, and whence came they?" let the answer sink deep into the heart of every faithful and afflicted follower of his Redeemer : " these are they which came out of much tribulation." How often,

before the end of a protracted life, do we find even here, and how much oftener is it probable that we shall discover hereafter, that those calamities, which we once thought the arbitrary infliction of an angry Deity, were proved by the event to have been the most gracious interferences of his preventive mercy. If then respecting ourselves we hesitate to pronounce hastily on the cause of our afflictions, much less, with rash presumption, shall we pass judgment on the heads of our fellow-creatures. There are instances it is true, when the judgments of the Lord both in public and in private life, stand recorded in too vivid characters for man to doubt even the immediate interference of the Almighty

arm. But when in every dubious event, which affects the lives, the characters, the fortunes of those around us, we attempt to trace its immediate origin and tendency, to the counsels of God, we shall stand convicted, no less at the bar of reason than of Scripture, of presumptuousand fatal ignorance. Let those who think themselves privileged to investigate and explain the source of all the Divine judgments upon their fellowcreatures, remember the awful sentence of their Saviour upon their idle and intemperate decrees: "Thinkest thou that those upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

Such then, being our notions of the Divine government, which the voice of reason and of Scripture proclaim alike to be just, where is our answer to the question of the philosopher or fatalist," Shall the Lord see, or shall the God of Jacob regard it?" It will not be in barren speculation or metaphysical distinctions, but in a practical and affecting acknowledgment of that one Supreme, self-existing moral Governor, who created the world by his power, preserves it by his wisdom, redeemed it by his mercy, and will judge it with equity, mercy, and truth : by whose power every contingency is directed; whose justice no art nor sophistry can evade;

to whose knowledge all hearts are open, and all desires are known; who is our moral Governor here, and according to that government which he has revealed to us, will reward or punish us hereafter.

SERMON XVII.

MATTHEW iv. 1.

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.

ONE of the leading defects observable in the various systems of ethics, taught by the philosophers of the Gentile world, was the absence of that authority which sanctions the doctrine by the example of the teacher. I speak not of the infamy which stands recorded in the lives of many of the first masters of ancient morals, which would have been a scandal and a disgrace even to the lowest of their followers, and was sufficient of itself to disannul the power, and discredit the influence of any moral code; but I would call your attention rather to the total disability, even among the purest and most innocent of them, of acting up to the principles which they professed, and of raising the practice of their life and conduct, to their own exalted standard of moral virtue.

P

Now this deficiency may arise either from the want of opportunity, or the want of power. The Stoic might enforce upon his hearers the contempt of pain, yet such a precept would proceed with but little authority from one, who had either in his own person never felt its anguish, or had sunk most unphilosophically under his sufferings. Thus then, in order to enforce the authority of any practical system of duties, it is necessary, not only that its teacher should be guiltless of offence against his own laws, but that the force of their severest enactments or prohibitions should be experimentally visible in his own person. The truth of this observation cannot be more powerfully illustrated, than in the Saviour of mankind, who in every stage of his existence upon earth, was in his own person both the bright exemplar and the practical proof, of the purity of that doctrine which he descended from heaven to inculcate and enforce. It is not only in the purity of his life, in the ardour of his love, and the activity of his benevolence towards man, that the truth of this assertion is founded: it rests more strongly on the resistance to those temptations, and the subjugation of those passions, the assaults of which, from the tenure of mortality, he was doomed to undergo. For "he took not on him the nature of angels," who were above the pains and passions