If it

strive immediately after the philanthropy of Jesus. attacked your piety, learn immediately to see "God in every thing, and every thing in God." If it sought to enchain you among the joys, the cares, the pursuits of earth, immediately "let your conversation be in heaven."

II. Another evil with which we have to struggle is THE EVIL WHICH IS CAST UPON US BY OUR FELLOWS. Some by open violence, others by secret craft, and, the greatest robbers of all, a third class, under form of law and invoking the spirit of the constitution, despoil us of our property, for purposes which we disapprove, and by the exercise of an authority which we never bestowed. Some do us a greater injury still; they endeavour to abstract from us our unsullied reputation, of more value to an upright man, to a true Christian, than "gold seven times tried in the furnace." Some attack us in our liberties, making us in matters theological to doff the cap of our spirits, and to bow the neck of our understandings, before king or bishop, before priest or presbyter; and, in matters political, because we hold not the same creed, or possess not the same rank, or hoard not the same wealth, or have attained not the same learning, deny us rights which are ours simply because we are men and Britons. Some stand between us and the sunshine, casting a baleful shadow still upon our pathway, permitting not the light of heaven, which brings wisdom and love and liberty, to shine fully upon us, though we have watched long, with prayer and faith, for the dawn of the morning. Some (but this happens rarely) smite us with the fist of violence, so that our fleshly bride is grievously wounded, or we ourselves perhaps defrauded of our fair proportions, or untimeously done to the death. Some, by their upholding of needless war (and this happens almost annually), take our sturdiest children; send them to foreign and to hostile lands; make them commit what God regards as murder; leave them, unassoilzied from their crimes, dead upon the battle-field; or return them to us, morally the fit tools of the despot, or physically curtailed in limb and broken in constitution.

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Such are a few of the evils which our fellow-citizens inflict upon us, and the tendency of them all is to make us sin. Few of them can we bear without being angry; and it is one of the most difficult of all things (yet not the less our duty) to “be angry and sin not." If we injure another simply because he has injured us, not with a view to his repentance, not with a view to his reformation, not with a view of giving moral medicine to his soul, we manifest the spirit of revenge, and overcome of evil." There is a quaint yet faithful saying of one of our old divines (whose name I regret to have forgotten, for it would please me to do it reverence)-"To render evil for evil is man-like; to render evil for good is devil-like; to render good for good is angel-like; but to render good for evil is God-like." Dear friends, we must not suffer ourselves to be "overcome" by the wrongs which others do us, in our persons, our properties, our reputations, or our franchises. I do not say we are not to avoid them; I do not say we are not to prevent them; I do not say we are not, by force purely spiritual, to resist them; but I do say we are not to avenge them; and I do say, moreover, we are not to suffer them to beget in us emotions and passions which, even if unmanifested in action, are malignant and therefore vicious. Eat of "the true bread which came down from heaven;" drink of "the living water which shall be unto you a well of water springing up unto everlasting life." Hear what, by Jesus of Nazareth, "the Spirit saith unto the churches :"-" If any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also." "Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." "But I say unto you, love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you."

This last injunction informs us not only how we shall ourselves remain unconquered by a brother's iniquity, but also how we shall ourselves conquer a brother's iniquity. If you have an adversary, kill him-with kindness; that is, destroy

his malefactions by your benefactions-reclaim him by love. There is not only much generosity, there is not only a prophetical anticipation of the spirit of the gospel,—there is not only so far an antetype in a son of David of the son of David, —there is even much worldly wisdom in the advice of Solomon, "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; and if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head." And is it desirable for him and for us, is it therefore our duty, to "heap coals of fire" upon the wrong-doer? Yes, it is; but what kind of fire? Fire, not of hell,-fire, not even of earth, whose office is to destroy, to agonize, to injure, or even needlessly to pain; but fire, like that of Prometheus, stole from heaven; coals, like those of the prophet, live from the altar,―to subdue, to warm, to soften, to melt,-to liquefy the stony places of the heart, till they flow like dew-drops, possessing a mission to fertilize and to bless! We are now more than half through the nineteenth century of the Christian era, and the outer world, and we also, have yet to learn the power of KINDNESS as a renovator of the moral wilderness. By it in our families, by it in our social relations, by it in our public or professional concerns, by it in our conduct towards our individual foes, by it in the demeanour of Government towards those who violate the laws of our country, is this nation, is the world, if ever, to be "redeemed, regenerated and disenthralled." Let us become as little children; let us learn of them who are fresher from the hand of God than we are. There is a book written for their instruction, from whose title we may gain a Christ-like lesson, that the only way of overcoming with good the evil which others cause us, is in every instance to return "A Kiss for a Blow." The act to which these words point, and the feeling of which that act is the son, have power to make the gates of heaven move on their hinges. III. A third evil with which we have to struggle is THE EVIL WHICH PREVAILS AROUND US, though it does not do us immediate or direct injury. The economical, the political, the moral and the religious reformer, finds himself impeded on every side by

an inert mass of ignorance, into whose shades no light can penetrate, and which there is no prospect of removing for one or two generations still. Of crime, the legitimate offspring of ignorance, there is, God knows (and we, criminal as we are, ourselves also know), abundance behind and before, on the right hand and on the left. Neglect of parents, murder, adultery, false-witness, and covetousness, which is the prolific cause of many of them; with neglect of ordinances, taking the name of God in vain, worshiping the likenesses of things in heaven above and earth beneath and the waters under the earth, and esteeming other gods more than Jehovah who redeemed us out of Egypt-to wit, our own ease, or passion, or ambition, or pleasure; these abound at each of the four cardinal points, and are to be discovered whether we turn to the north or to the south, to the east or to the west. Added to this, we behold on every side a lamentable want of conscientiousness; men believing one thing, and professing the opposite-men knowing and feeling one course to be the right, and yet following the contrary, which they equally know and feel to be the wrong. How often, for instance, do we find persons admitting in secret some great principle, say the Paternity of God, and thence the brotherhood of man, and thence the civil and religious equality of every member of the human family, and, as a deduction from the first fountain, the duty that all chastisements shall be purely remedial,-and yet, by act and life if not by speech, denying, gainsaying, blaspheming, "from the house-tops," the very truths which they "whispered in the ear in closets."

Such a quantity and such a quality of guilt there is besetting us, and its tendency is to make us guilty. It possesses this tendency, not merely by the power of contagion-not only by the force of moral, or in this case of immoral, attraction, where all the lesser bodies are compelled to gravitate towards the greater but also by deadening our hopes, and consequently benumbing our energies and decreasing our powers of resistance. Seeing how much ignorance, how much thoughtlessness, how much wickedness, does exist,—a well-meaning man, a

man anxious enough for the amelioration of his species, a man desirous enough of the exaltation of his countrymen, is but too apt to despair of effecting any good in his own day and generation. Such an individual thinks the task too great for him, and talks of Hercules cleaning the Augean stable, and of Hannibal cutting his way through the Alps. The heartgarden of the world (for, blessed be God! a garden still it is) seems, to the over-nervous and over-sentimental reformer, so thoroughly possessed by thorns and brambles, that vain shall be all his endeavours to uproot them, and therefore he had as well not endeavour at all. To all the voices of the awake, the hopeful and the faithful, he has but one response-“Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep!" Such an one, witnessing the sin that is around him, though it do not positively harm himself, and dispirited from taking up not only a defensive but an aggressive position, has been " overcome of evil."

Let us, my friends, not recline indolently under our vines and our fig-trees; let us not consign

The noon of manhood to a myrtle shade;

let us believe and feel that action is not only the life of the body but of the soul, and moreover the destiny and the duty of man. Let us war with the untruth and the unrighteousness that are about us; and if we be cast twelve times to the earth, let us there draw nourishment and strength from the bosom of our primeval mother, and rise cheerfully the thirteenth time to renew the onslaught. Let us let fall, from the full cistern of our affections, drop after drop unceasingly upon the rock of human sins and sorrows; no impression may be made for many days, but we know that at last it will be worn to the core. Have faith in Human Nature-that it came from God pureand that though it has been grievously soiled and distained by adverse things with which it has come in contact, yet these soilings and distainments are all capable of being removed by a more favourable arrangement of circumstances. Have faith

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