certainly cannot be counted among the irreligious-he too fails, most grievously, in not linking together these pleasing views of God with actual obedience. The two are divorced from one another in his soul, so that many a poor ignorant Christian, without refinement or native sensibility, will stand up at the judgment day, and shame him by works of love and of mercy for which he felt no promptings.

On the other hand, the formalist occupies exclusively the practical department of religion. He has no belief that unsubstantial sentiment or meditations on Divine beauty can procure heaven. Something must be done to obtain the Divine favor. He must deny himself, must mortify himself, must surpass others in doing works of beneficence, in punctuality of devotion-in the drill of religion. As for inclination of heart, and a glad consent of his inner man to the service of God, alas! he knows nothing of it. There must be some feeling of the burdensomeness of obedience in order to suggest to him that it is meritorious.

How partial and one-sided do these false kinds of religiousness appear when placed by the side of the comprehensive, soul and lifeembracing religion of Christ. Let that be but once implanted within the man, and now there is no longer a want of concord between his emotions and his actions; but his whole life in the feelings and the deeds plays a harmonious tune, the strain of which ends in God. And the reason of this is, that while the mystic thinks perfection attainable by contemplation; and the sentimental religionist, by warming natural reverence and admiration of God into love; and the formalist thinks, either that the external action is the all-important part, or else that it will awaken and improve the somewhat imperfect inward principle; the truly godly man begins his religious life with acknowledging the corruption of his heart, and bewailing his past alienation, and returning to allegiance in the way prescribed by the gospel. Then, when an inclination of heart is actually commenced, it is as natural to perform the statutes as it is to live. But the prescriptions of natural religion and of unhumbled human nature for curing the disease of the soul, are made on the principle that a slight change is necessary, that it is a thing not needing an inward cure to be right in the sight of God. The Scriptures, by uniting in one definition the religion of the heart with that of the life, not only make each a test of the genuineness of the other, and show that true religion controls the whole nature; but also, by representing it to be a deep and governing principle, lead to the conviction that only a renewed nature can possess it, that it must be produced and maintained by a life-giving Spirit.

SERMON DXLIX.

BY REV. ENOCH POND, D.D.,

PROF. IN BANGOR THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY.

THE LITTLE LEAVEN.

"A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump."-GALATIANS 2: 9.

THIS seems to have been one of Paul's common sayings, or proverbs; as we find him using it on different occasions, in the same words. The word leaven is used by the apostle in every instance, I think, in a bad sense; or it is used figuratively to denote a bad thing. In the text it has reference to a particular error in point of doctrine. In other cases it denotes errors in practice. Thus the apostle speaks, in one place, of "the leaven of malice and wickedness."

It is proposed to consider the maxim under consideration in both these points of view. I shall endeavor to show, in respect both to doctrine and practice, that apparently slight deviations are eminently hazardous; that "a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump."

First, let us consider the truth of this maxim in respect to doctrine. The particular case which the apostle had in view, when he penned the declaration in the text, is highly instructive. It was that of the Judaizing teachers. Their error consisted not so much in practising circumcision and the Jewish law, as in insisting upon these things as essential to salvation. "Ye must be circumcised, and keep the law of Moses, or ye cannot be saved." This was substituting circumcision and the Jewish law, in place of the blood of Christ, as the foundation of the sinner's hope, and the ground of his justification. This, therefore, was an error; but it was a single error, and in the estimation of many at that day, a trivial one, if one at all. But Paul thought differently. He saw clearly the nature of the error in question, and to what it must lead. He predicted that the little leaven, if suffered to remain, would leaven the entire lump; and so it proved. In their zeal for circumcision and the Jewish law, these Judaizers set aside at once the atonement of Christ, and the kindred doctrine of justification by faith. They were led also to deny the divinity of Christ, and held him to be no greater than Moses. And because Paul opposed them in their

errors, they proceeded to deny the apostleship of Paul, and to reject his Epistles, as constituting any part of the sacred Word. In short, they went on, from one thing to another, till in the course of a few years they were separated from the Church, and fell into a state of irretrievable apostasy.

Another case, going to illustrate the same principle, occurred almost in the apostolic age. It was that of the Gnostic teachers. The prime error of the Gnostics was a philosophical one. It grew out of their too eager inquiries respecting the origin of evil. Knowing no other cause of evil, they were led to ascribe it to the influence of matter. Matter, they said, is the source and the centre of all evil and of all vice. Now, admitting this philosophical speculation to be an error, most people, perhaps, would say, there can be no harm in it. What danger in believing matter to be essentially evil and corrupting, and in tracing our moral corruptions to such a source? But listen for a moment to some of the inferences which these ancient Gnostics drew from this fundamental maxim of their philosophy. If matter is essentially evil and corrupting, then God can have had no hand in creating this material world. Such a supposition would be infinitely degrading to him. This world must have been the work of some inferior and malig nant demon. Again, as matter is the source of all evil, God cannot be the author of our material bodies. The body is the cruel prison and corrupter of the soul, with which some hateful spirit has invested it, and from which it becomes us to rid our souls as far and as fast as possible. Hence that "neglecting of the body," of which Paul speaks, and those dreadful austerities which many in ancient times were led to practise, for the subduing of the flesh. Again, the Gnostics said, if matter is evil, and the source of all evil, then, when Christians and other devout men have once laid aside their material bodies, they will never have them more. There will be no resurrection of the body. There will be no other than a moral, spiritual resurrection, and with good men that is past already. Those who denied the resurrection in the days of Paul, and against whom he argued in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, (chap 15,) were undoubtedly of the Gnostic class.

But the Gnostics, or a portion of them, pursued their reasonings still farther. If matter is so essentially evil and corrupting, then our blessed Saviour cannot have had a material body. He seemed to have one. He appeared to eat and drink, and walk about here on the earth, and suffer and die like other men; but it was all an illusion. He was a mere spectre-an apparition-a spirit, but not a body. It was the inculcation of this error which led the apostle John to insist that he had not only seen but "handled the Word of Life;" that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh; and that those were very Antichrist who denied it. (1 John 4: 2, 3.)

I have noticed but a few of the perverse inferences which the early Gnostics and more especially those who had some respect for Christianity-were accustomed to draw from their prime error as to the evil and corrupting nature and tendencies of matter. Enough has been said, however, to show how this one error worked in their minds, and led them along to a perversion and corruption of the entire Gospel. It proved with them, as with the Judaizers, that a little leaven leavened the whole lump.

Instances illustrative of the same point are constantly occurring in our own times. Take the case of an individual who is first led to doubt, and then to deny, the proper divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. He may think this, at the time, a small departure from the common faith, and one attended with little or no danger. "Of what importance is it," he says, "so long as I hold to the divine mission of Christ, and receive his instructions, whether I believe or not in the proper divinity of his person?" But the results of a few years almost invariably show that the question is one of very great importance. For, having rejected the divinity of Christ, the individual supposed will, if consistent, reject the atonement; since none but a divine person can have made an atonement sufficient for a guilty world. And having discarded the idea of a divine Saviour, and of atonement by his death, our inquirer will proceed on to a denial of the connected doctrines of depravity, of regeneration, of justification by faith, and of all that is essential in evangelical religion.

The late Dr. Priestley was a student in theology under good Dr. Doddridge, and commenced his ministry as he tells us, a moderate Calvinist. He entered upon his downward career, by denying the proper divinity of Christ. He was first an Arian, then a Socinian, and then a Materialist and Universalist. He then denied the inspiration of the Scriptures, and closed his life in a state of almost infidelity.

Nor is his a peculiar case. Hundreds and thousands have passed through substantially the same experience. Nor would the case be different, supposing a person to commence his wanderings from some other point besides that of the divinity of Christ. Suppose him to commence, if you will, with a rejection of the doctrine of the entire sinfulness of the natural, unrenewed man. The race, he thinks, is not fallen so low. We should not take such humbling, degrading views of human nature.

Starting from this point, our inquirer is next led to doubt, perhaps, respecting the character and work of the Saviour, and the peculiar work of the Holy Spirit. "I do not feel that I am fallen low enough to need an almighty Saviour, and an almighty Sanctifier, and I cannot believe that any such provision has ever been made for me."

Having rejected the doctrine of depravity, the individual supposed denies, of course, the kindred doctrine of regeneration. The most that men need is reformation, not regeneration; to have their characters improved and amended, but not to be born again. And without the doctrines of depravity and regeneration, he cannot hold to any radical distinction between the righteous and the wicked in the present life. "There are differences, indeed, in the characters of men; some are much better than others. But all have some good in them, and there is no radical difference or distinction between the righteous and the wicked." And if there are no radical distinctions among men in this life, the next inference is, that there will be none hereafter. "All may not be equally happy in the future life, but certainly none will be for ever miserable. The eternal burnings of which we hear are a mere bugbear." Having descended to this point, the individual supposed has but another step to take, and if he is a consistent man, he will certainly take it. He will reject the divine authority of the Scriptures, and settle down in cold and cheerless infidelity. For when he looks into his Bible, he finds all those doctrines which one after another he has discarded, clearly there. They are in the Bible, and by no dint of honest interpretation can they be got out of it. And it only remains to reject the whole together, to put out the light of revealed truth, and commence sailing across the troubled sea of life, and the dark waters of death, and into the dread ocean of the future, with naught to direct him but the glimmering rays of misguided and perverted reason.

Instances like those here supposed might be multiplied to any extent, and these taken, not from fancy, but from real life. The history of the Church. from the beginning downwards, is filled up with such cases; strewed all the way with the wrecks of individuals who having wandered from the path of truth, have found afterwards no resting-place. They have continued to wander more and more, till the whole mind has become corrupted, and the little leaven has leavened the whole lump.

And it is easy to account for these disastrous results, from the natural workings of error, and from the principles and operations of the human mind. Let a person get away from the Bible, and fall into error on almost any point of religious doctrine, and (if he has an active, inquisitive mind) the imbibed error will diffuse itself. It will not lie in the mind alone. It is inconsistent with whatever of truth there is in that mind, and to make room for it, this truth will gradually displaced. The one error will ere long become two, and the two three, and the three four, and so on till the whole mind is disordered, and faith and a good conscience are shipwrecked together.

I have thus far illustrated the apostle's maxim in the text, in its