nothing which we can do can, of itself, deserve favour, he will yet study to approve himself not altogether an unprofitable servant to the Lord. He will there also learn that maxim of universal experience which the Apostle has not hesitated to borrow from the heathen poet, and to adopt as a portion of those truths which are intended to be the guide of mankind through all ages: "Evil communications corrupt good manners.” Whatever might be the disposition with which you leave this place, - however pure, self-controlling, diligent, and pious, the contagion of evil example, if wilfully and constantly encountered, must necessarily pervert and corrupt it. Your mind will become familiarised to images of indelicacy and impurity, from which perhaps now it instinctively recoils: you will soon begin to take delight in frivolous occupations and amusements, and will discard those honourable employments from which you had previously derived your highest pleasure and enjoyment; and gradually, too, religious feeling will lose its hold upon your mind, and the fear and love of God will be dismissed from your hearts, and that which I am now especially enforcing upon you the advantage of, will be wholly lost to you, namely, a scriptural rule of action; and the worst of all curses will fall upon you, you will learn to live with

out God in the world. From such then and similar evils you will be most effectually shielded by that knowledge which he alone can gain who earnestly endeavours to take heed to his way according to God's word. But it is not alone for details of practical duty that you must consult the Scriptures you must endeavour from them to acquire just views, both of the great principles of natural religion and of the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel; and so to establish your principles upon sober and rational inquiry as not to suffer them hereafter to be shaken by the scoffs of the licentious or the cavils of the sceptical. Above all, my young brethren, you will find, in the serious study of God's Word, and of those subsidiary means of building up a pure and sober faith, which his Holy Spirit has supplied us with from the writings of good and wise men in many successive ages, an indirect influence, purifying and hallowing all your actions, words, and thoughts, not so much arising from actual precept as from that exalted tone, that elevated state of feeling, which the earnest student cannot but be conscious of, when, through the inspired writings of good and holy men, he approaches, as it were, the throne of God, and holds communion with the Almighty. After such meditations as these, hallowed, as they should be, by the continually re

curring aspirations of mental prayer, you will find that you cannot in a moment stoop to wickedness; you will feel that there is something holy still watching over you; you will have the sense of God's presence about and around you; you cannot descend at once to degrading folly and the pollutions of sin. You will here possess a safeguard that men in general wot not of: you will find yourselves elevated above temptation ; you will feel it a painful degradation, an act unworthy of your high calling in Christ Jesus, to prostrate and debase yourselves to impurity and licentiousness; and you will thus gradually, but surely, acquire that greatest of all blessings in this life, that frame of mind which is impressed with the habitual thought of God's presence, so as to sustain you under every temptation, and to bear you through unspotted from the world.

Such indeed would be the substance of our affectionate prayer for you all. But we may not in this world indulge too confidently in hope. If some have gone from among us who have either completely fulfilled every high expectation which they had excited in their early youth, and are now adorning and improving their several narrower or wider spheres of society, or prematurely, as we fondly deem it, snatched away by God's mysterious providence, have left behind them a name

endeared in the recollections of us all *; yet there must have been others, and we cannot but fear there will always be others, on whose course misery and sorrow and painful regret alone attend. Oh! let not this be your lot! Let not thus the spring-time of your life be lost, for its loss is irreparable. Lose not for any base and sensual pleasures now the glorious promise of all your after life. Sell not thus, like Esau, your birthright for a morsel of meat, lest, like him, ye too afterward, when you would inherit the blessing, be rejected, and find no place of repentance, even though you seek it carefully with tears.

*This alludes to the lamented death of J. R. Currer, a private pupil of the author, who was accidentally drowned at Oxford, in his first year's residence, before he could fulfil at the University the affectionate hopes which had been excited by his excellent qualities of mind, and his distinguished career at school.

35

SERMON III.

ON THE POSSESSION OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRIST.

ROMANS viii. 9.

But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.

THE spirit of Christ and the spirit of God are clearly used here as synonymous and convertible terms, both of them implying the Third Person in the blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which, according to the belief of our church, proceeds both from the Father and the Son. There seems to be only this difference in the use of the terms, namely, that the Spirit of Christ is mentioned when a more distinct reference is intended to the graces and influences bestowed upon us under the Christian dispensation.

With this preface, I shall now assume, in what I am about to say, that the Apostle, in this latter portion of the verse of our text, has no intention of delivering merely a speculative matter of faith, but is propounding a thoroughly practical doc