universal family of God's obedient worshippers-the latter, to share in the everlasting pain and ignominy of the defeated hosts of the rebellious;-the people of this planet to be implicated, throughout the whole train of their never-ending history, with the higher ranks, and the more extended tribes, of Intelligence.

XVII.-GOD IS LOVE.-Richard Watson.

WHERE shall we go for manifestations of the tenderness, the sympathy, the benignity of God? The Philosopher of this world leads us to nature, its benevolent final causes, and kind contrivances to increase the sum of animal happiness; and there he stops with half his demonstration! But the Apostle leads us to the Gift bestowed by the Father for the recovery of man's intellectual and moral nature, and to the Cross endured by the Son on this high behalf. Go to the heavens, which canopy man with grandeur, cheer his steps with successive light, and mark his festivals by their chronology; go to the atmosphere, which invigorates his spirits, and is to him the breath of life; go to the smiling fields decked with verdure for his eye, and covered with fruits for his sustenance; go to every scene which spreads beauty before his gaze, which is made harmoniously vocal to his ear, which fills and delights the imagination by its glow or by its greatness: we travel with you, we admire with you, we feel and enjoy with you, we adore with you,-but we stay not with you. We hasten onwards in search of a demonstration more convincing that "God is love;" and we rest not till we press into the strange, the mournful, the joyful scenes of Calvary; and, amidst the throng of invisible and astonished angels, weeping disciples, and the mocking multitude; under the arch of the darkened heaven, and with earth trembling beneath our feet, we gaze upon the meek, the resigned, but fainting Sufferer; and exclaim, "Herein is love," herein, and nowhere else, is it so affectingly, so unequivocally demonstrated," not that we loved God, but that God loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

XVIII.—THE EFFECTS OF EVIL EXAMPLE.-O'Keefe.

LAMENTABLE as are the consequences of evil example in this life, the full extent of the injury cannot be ascertained, until the licht of futurity begins to dawn. Ascend in spirit to

the many mansions, where myriads of celestial beings sit en throned before the great and living God. Crowned with sur passing glory and bathed in eternal bliss, they are filled with the plenty of their Father's house; they drink of the torrent of delight, which springs fast-by the throne of the Eternal; and, rapt in the contemplation of boundless excellence, they enjoy all the felicity of which our nature is susceptible. Of this destined happiness, the giver of evil example deprives his victim. But the injury is not confined to the mere deprivation of happiness; he further brings down on his miserable victim a horrible damnation. Think on that dark prison whose smoke ascends for ever and ever; where human guilt is paying, to rigorous retribution, its eternal debt-where misery appears in every shape that can appal the firmestwhere the unsparing hand of Justice is lifted up for ever! Approach and speak to the victims of evil example.-No mortal voice could preach like those hollow tones of deep despair that load the accursed atmosphere of "hell." Ask that young man what direful causes concurred to plunge him in the dread abyss? He will tell you of the companions of his youth, who drew him into guilt, and gave his young mind the fatal bias; he will tell you that they met him in the morning of his days, when life was young and hope unbroken, and the chalice of guilty pleasure untasted-when youthful confidence saw in every face a friend, and youthful spirits tinged, with the richest colourings of fancy, the boundless prospect that stretched before him.

They met him, whilst his body was yet a living sacrifice offered to his God at morning and evening time; his heart a throne of living light, where Jesus loved to dwell; and his spirit a cloudless heaven, chequered by no dark shade of vice or crime. They met him in an evil hour, and led him to those scenes, where crowd, in full assemblage, all the seductions of vice, and all the blandishments that can soften and seduce-where the wicked combine, and the profligate associate where bloated intemperance and sickly dissipation riot in what is called "the festive chair," pouring out, from wanton and profane lips, offences against decency, and blasphemy against God-where rude and boisterous merriment, born in sin, and bred in folly and ignorance, ridicules the discipline of virtue and the sanctity of religion. There did he learn by degrees to join in the senseless cry raised against all that should be dear to man in time and eternity. His course was a short one-he brought down ruin on his circumstances,

infamy on his character, decay on his constitution, anger and sorrow and shame on the gray hairs of a father, destruction and final perdition on himself! He was hurried away while he slept in imagined security. Before the thought of eternity seriously took possession of his mind, he found himself sinking through its darkest depths: and, ere he had time to call on the name of the living God, he was standing in horror before his awful tribunal! There is no bosom so locked up against the entrance of humanity, as not to feel for thy sorrows, child of high and disappointed hopes!-no heart so hardened, as not to mourn over the stranded wreck of thy virtues and thy happiness, that lies so dark, so shattered, and so lonely, on the shores of eternal exile. If tears could ease thy torture, all who knew thy once kind and compassionate spirit would shed them for thee; if prayer and sacrifice could avail, the Church, that mourns thee lost, would make her altars blaze before her God with the burnt-offerings of Calvary.-But thou art lost; lost to thyself, to thy friends, to thy God! and lost for ever! Stretched on thy burning bed, thou art a beacon of fire to warn others from the rocks where all thy hopes are shipwrecked, to make them fly the associates whose converse is corruption,-whose company is dishonour, —whose example is death and final perdition!

XIX.-HUMAN AND DIVINE JUSTICE.

-Sherlock.

"UNTO whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required" is a general rule, the equity of which is so apparent to common sense, that it admits of no dispute, and calls for no explanation. A single mite offered by a poor widow, is a present fit for the King of heaven, which, from the hand of a rich man, would hardly be a decent charity to a poor widow. And thus in all instances to which the rule is applicable.

But, plain as this general maxim is, the weakness and wickedness of men have almost totally excluded it from human judicatures. For, as it is in every one's power to pretend ignorance of a law, or some other inability, in excuse for crime, so, if the excuse were as easily admitted as it could be pleaded, a door would be opened to all kinds of licentiousness; and that fear of punishment would be taken off, which is so necessary a restraint upon the depraved inclinations of men. And since the wisest and ablest judges cannot discern (some few cases perhaps excepted) between real and affected ignorance; or so distinguish between the powers and abilities of

one man and of another, as to proportion rewards and punishments according to this rule; therefore the law puts all (except those who are manifestly deficient in reason) upon the same level: it supposes every man to know the laws of his country: consequently, where a malicious act is proved, it presumes a malicious intention, and the criminal is sentenced accordingly.

But how justifiable soever this proceeding may be, upon the necessity there is for it in order to preserve some tolerable degree of peace and quiet in the world; yet it is evident that the general presumptions upon which all human judicatures proceed, do not leave reason for an exact distribution of justice; and it often happens that men are made equal in punishment, who, if all circumstances could be considered, are not equal in crime. But could you introduce a judge endowed with a perfect knowledge of men's hearts, there would be an end of all such general presumptions: he would do, in every case, what was exactly right and equitable; and the only standing rule of the court would be that of the text, "Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required."

One such court there is, in which He who knows the secrets of every heart will sit judge Himself; before whose tribunal there will want no evidence to convict the guilty, no advocate to defend the innocent: there, no pretended excuse will be admitted, no real one excluded: there, every man with all his actions, with all his talents and abilities, and all his opportunities of knowing the will of God, will be weighed in the balance; and "unto whom much was given, of him shall much be required."

XX. THE MAJESTY OF THE REDEEMER.-W. Archer Butler.

ON such a subject as this, what can one say which is not unworthy? It is far vaster than our vastest conception, infinitely grander than our loftiest; yet, overpoweringly awful as it is, how familiarity reconciles us to hearing it without awe! Perhaps even the overpowering greatness of the subject makes us despair of conceiving it. All the wonders of God fall deadly on unfitted minds. And thus men learn listlessly to hear words, without even an effort to attach ideas to them; and this is not least the case with those who dispute the most bitterly about the lifeless words themselves. In such a case all that can be done is, to endeavour to devise some mode of meeting this miserable influence of habit, by forcing the mind to make some faint effort to realise the infinite magnificence of the subject. Let us endeavour, then, to approach it thus.

You are wandering (I will suppose) in some of the wretched retreats of poverty, upon some mission of business or charity. Perplexed and wearied amid its varieties of misery, you chance to come upon an individual whose conversation and mien attract and surprise you. Your attention, enkindled by the gracious benevolence of the stranger's manner, you inquire; and the astounding fact reveals itself, that, in this lone and miserable scene, you have, by some strange conjuncture, met with one of the great lights of the age, one belonging to a different and distant sphere, one of the leaders of universal opinion; on whom your thoughts had long been busied, and whom you had for years desired to see. The singular accident of an interview so unexpected, fills and agitates your mind. You form a thousand theories as to what strange cause could have brought him there. You recall how he spoke and looked; you call it an epoch in your life to have witnessed so startling an occurrence to have beheld one so distinguished, in a scene so much out of all possibility of anticipation. And this, even though he were in no-wise apparently connected with it, except as witnessing and compassionating its groups of misery. Yet again; something more wonderful than this is easily conceivable. Upon the same stage of wretchedness, a loftier personage may be imagined. In the wild revolutions of fortune, even monarchs have been wanderers. Suppose this then,-improbable indeed, but not impossible surely. And then, what feelings of respectful pity, of deep and earnest interest, would thrill your frame, as you contemplated such a one cast down from all that earth can minister of luxury and power, from the head of councils and of armies, to seek a home with the homeless, to share the bread of destitution, and feed on the charity of the scornful! How the depths of human nature are stirred by such events! how they find an echo in the recesses of our hearts,―these terrible espousals of majesty and misery!

But this will not suffice. There are beings within the mind's easy conception that far overpass the glories of the statesman and the monarch of our earth. Men of even no extreme ardour of fancy, when once instructed as to the vastness of our universe, have yearned to know of the life and intelligence that animate and that guide those distant regions of creation, which science has so abundantly and so wonderfully revealed; and have dared to dream of the communications that might subsist-and that may yet, in another state of existence, subsist-with the beings of such spheres. Con