of mind as an inclination to do right simply; he does not say that, smitten with a love and admiration of virtue, he resolves on a life conformable to her dictates. No! his soul is not dried up by contemplating abstract law, or an ideal standard of character. A present personal God is the source from which he draws the motives and the rules of his obedience. The soul that is saved has returned in reconciliation and love to the God of the Bible, not to abstract rectitude, to Stoical or Platonic perfection. It is a higher reason, with such a soul, for performing the statutes, that they are God's, than that they are right. And the statutes are right, in its estimation, not chiefly because they commend themselves to the reason, but because they emanate from a God whom it trusts.

We remark, once more, on these words, thy statutes, that the will of God presents itself to the mind under the form of fixed, unchangeable morality; for statutes are something not arbitrary or varying with caprice, but settled law, built on a lasting foun dation. If, indeed, God's will, without giving forth a general law, whispered to the soul, in each particular case, what to do and what to shun, the spirit of a child would rejoice in such communion with its all-wise Father. But, since this is not the kind of intercourse kept up between God and the soul, since general rules are given to it, to try its fidelity in special applications of them, and to suit its freedom and powers of thought, it rejoices that the nature of God has stamped his immutability upon his law. These statutes change not, like human ones, through experience of their defects, or because a new law-giver has come into power; but, drawing their nature from God, who alters not, and from the permanent nature of man, they continue as the days of heaven. And as their substance is, so also is their form, as it appeared in the written Word, which is the fixed code for man and for earth. Opinion varies; practices condemned in one age are praised in the next; the standard of character, even in the Christian Church, is for ever shifting. If God's will was to be derived from the marks of it which he has impressed upon our minds and natures, how should we grope after duty, and waver when we seemed to have reached it: but the written Word is a fixed light; it is a law not ambiguous, not temporary, not obscure, not hard to be applied, not difficult of access. Its essence is as immortal as the existence of God and his creatures.

And this performance of God's statutes, towards which the godly man inclines his heart, is to be perpetual. The word always in the text points to a contrast between a life of steady piety and a temporary as well as a fitful or periodical religion.

In the first place, the word implies something which is not a temporary religion. I am aware that the text does not declare the heart to be always inclined to obedience, but only affirms that, at the time when the Psalmist expressed his feelings, he was inclined to be always obedient. At another time, therefore, it might be said, he could, notwithstanding the feelings now expressed, be inclined in the opposite direction, and these changes might be passed through several successive times. There is indeed no impossibility, either in such veering and shifting of the affections, or in the final extinction of pious feeling, followed by a state of hopeless spiritual death. But still the tendency of the renewed nature is to be uniform and unwavering, like the truth on which it feeds and the Spirit which gives it life. The bent of the affections, too, is the immediate cause, in the hand of the Spirit, of obedience; and obedience reacts to add vigor to the affections. Perpetuity, then, is the law of Christian life; and that state of the affections at any one time, which secures the performance of the statutes, is the evidence that such a law is reigning in the soul. The apostle recognizes this law when he says, "if they had been of us, they would have continued with us.'

A temporary religion, then, is a religion without a root, which derives no nourishment from the Divine Word through the heart, but is sustained, while it continues, by something which is consistent with the reigning power of sin. It may be built upon hopes, and may have the form of a conversion for the groundwork of those hopes; and may look to God with joy and thankfulness as the author of the pleasant feelings which it entertains; and may cherish some kind of sympathy towards the people of God; and besides influencing the feelings, may exert some slight power over the temper and moral character. But in a little time, when the fire has gone out which made such a blaze, and the life has left the tree which seemed so fair, the worthless nature of such religion is manifest to all men; for all men of a sound mind estimate the value of religious character by the faithful performance of the statutes; and argue, from the short-lived existence of such religion, that it was not of the true kind.

The characteristic of piety contained in the text is equally opposed to periodical religion. And here we do not mean to condemn that kind of godly life, which at intervals takes a start and shows a new power of growth; which, having moved along for some time nearly on a level, ascends at once to a higher level, and afterwards to still a higher. It may be that this is the law of Christian improvement; that the religious life is to be compared, not so much to a uniform ascent, as to a series of advances; that the Spirit, present in greater power at one time

than another with the individual as with the Church, accomplishes his work by a succession of impulses, which constitute epochs long to be remembered. But this is far from what we intended by periodical religion; this is so far from implying suspension of religious life or retrogradation, that every change is for the better, and steady, perpetual vigor is insured and not obstructed. What we intend is the opposite of all this: it is a kind of life which, for the greater part of the year, or for a longer period, exhibits little difference between the professor of religion and the mere man of the world in regard to the principles on which daily business is conducted, or in regard to the interest felt for the truths and duties of religion. During this long winter of deadness, you would not know him to have any vitality; and instead of inclining his heart to perform the statutes always, he has no appearance of having a heart at all. By-and-by, however, the community where he lives is powerfully affected by convictions of the reality of Divine Truth; the true followers of Christ seize the occasion to rise to a higher standard of feeling and of duty; and he, like dead timber on the water, is borne along with the current, or like a body brought within the galvanic circuit, moves and acts as if some real vital power had been infused into him. His actings, however, are the copy and the effect of what he sees around him. But this galvanized life, having no higher source than sympathy and alarm, has no independence, and must cease as soon as circumstances change. Whenever the life of the true Christians around him is a little more hidden in its manifestations, influencing the whole sum of the actions more and the feelings less, it ceases to arouse any sympathetic feeling in him. He dies down again; he goes back to the same point of worldliness as before. Perhaps the process is repeated several times over, so that the amount of his religion consists in brief periods of pretended life, in which he reflects and apes the feelings of Christians, followed by a death, frozen and insensible as a Greenland winter. It is needless to say, that such a man is very far from the character described in the text of him who inclines his heart to perform the statutes always.

We are now arrived at the last words of this verse, in which the Psalmist declares, that his resolution to perform the statutes of God reaches to the end. It is impossible that a sincerely religious man should prescribe any limit to himself beyond which his obedience should cease. The inclination of the heart towards God, which is true, is essentially general and absolute, and must therefore resolve upon universal and never ending obedience. I say this is involved in its very nature, for it is dictated by a perception of the rights of God, which are as last

ing as his existence; by a perception of the beauty of holiness, which is unchangeable; and by a perception of the nature of happiness, which associates it forever with the service of God. There is no reason for obedience which will not be conclusive for entire obedience throughout eternity. Thus the least control of religious affections in the heart excludes all limit of time. And when the soul has tasted the sweetness of a life of piety, its own highest happiness now is a new motive in favor of pursuing such a life unto the end. What can prevent it from being thus inclined, when its highest joy and highest duty coincide; when the course which it chose, under less pressure of motives, is found to be more inviting, and no circumstances can exist to make it otherwise?

Thus we see that sincere purposes of obedience are as far as possible from being temporary expedients, or mere experiments after happiness. They have something eternal about them. Although, when first aroused by Divine grace in the mind, they have the nature of winged thoughts, yet there is an alliance between the soul which conceives them and the everlasting God. They aim at nothing less than a permanent union with God, the source of good; they soar above all condition, above all time. There shall come an end to all else that is earthly, but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

And not only does the godly man incline his heart to obedience which is without end, but such obedience is secured, under grace, by such resolutions. In themselves they have a tendency towards permanence; and they grow in strength, becoming habits of the religious life. Nor is it to be doubted that the Divine Spirit works through them to secure the endless growth of the seed which he planted in the soul.

And this inclination of heart, of which the Psalmist speaks, is not to find its termination at the end of this earthly existence. The closing words of the text, "even unto the end," only serve to strengthen the word translated always, yet they might suggest, to an English reader, that the end of life was thought of as the limit of time when the performance of the statutes would necessarily cease. And indeed, at that limit, many of the duties of life, arising out of our bodily constitution and social relations, must cease; and a revolution of being will be ushered in, of which we know thus much, that the service of God will not be suspended. But, as the Christian looks forward to this change, his heart's inclination to obedience finds here no end; but whatever else he shall leave behind him when he shall lay aside the body, this inclination of heart to the statutes of God is felt by him to be inseparable from himself. Whatever the flood of death, as it rises over his soul, shall sweep away-supposing,

even, that an utter forgetfulness of earthly scenes shall ensue, so that he shall awake again as a new-born infant in the heavenly state-yet this shall not be swept away-this undecaying principle of allegiance to his God, which is now a part of his immortal nature. He knows not what new sphere he shall move in, what new obligations shall be put upon him, what new statutes of the celestial polity shall supersede those of the earthly, which are to vanish away; yet he has confidence enough in God to know that the great Law-giver will command nothing which is not wise and right, or which is not conducive to his subjects' blessedness; and therefore, he is prepared with a free inclination of heart to welcome the constitution of God's kingdom of eternity, whatever it shall be. Here, then, we approach the full meaning of the words, "always, even unto the end." And here we see the nobleness of the principle of true godliness, which, after a willing performance of God's statutes on earth, begins with new energy its career of obedience in eternity, compared with that other principle, which even for a little time on earth showed no really good effect on the life, but, in the hour when obedience was tested, gave up the soul to the power of sin.

I cannot forbear calling the attention of my hearers, as I close my discourse, to the great wisdom of the representations, which are made in the text and elsewhere in the Scriptures, of the religious character. I refer to the union in one definition of religious feeling and religious obedience of the love of God and the actual observance of his statutes. There have been many attempts made in this world to unite the soul to God merely by religious contemplation, or religious emotion. The soul of many a mystic has been filled with lofty thoughts of God; and as he grew familiar with the beauty of the Divine countenance, and excluded the images of grosser things from within him, he became satisfied with himself, and felt a kind of superiority to those men of baser mould, involved in the works of life, whose souls had not been raised to the height of such contemplations. And yet multitudes of these men of work would do more for their friends, more for their country, more for mankind than he; his end is reached if he can enjoy elevating contemplation, but he derives from it no motive to quicken him to duty. To him God is only as a painting, or an image exquisitely wrought. He gazes and admires, but no obedience follows. His definition of religion includes only the beauty of the Divine perfections, as held before the mind.

And so the religious sentimentalist, whose taste is gratified as he beholds God's skill in nature, and whose love is awakened, as he reflects upon his goodness and mercy, who thinks that he