Without bread and water, life cannot endure for many days; without clothing, misery invades us at every pore, every modest, delicate sentiment is murdered, and the noble nature of man brought level with the brutes; without health, the countenance of man is transformed and his nature is disguised-pain possesses the place of enjoyment, and the selfishness of pain doth in the long run eat out the kindlier sympathies of the heart. And what were man without friends or the fellowship of his kind? a miserable outcast, a helpless wanderer and vagabond upon the earth, for whom it is better to die than to live. And the loss of liberty, imprisonment in loathsome dungeons, and restriction from the natural freedom of our estate, for which every creature under heaven was made, is perhaps of all the others the most desperate calamity. For if Providence deny us bread and water and necessary clothing, then we can die in calm resignation to his will, and our misery is at an end; or if his visitations bow us down with sickness, then still it is the Lord which giveth, and the Lord which taketh away, and let his name be blessed. If our friends forsake us, we have still a resource in the friendship of God, and of him whom God hath sent to comfort the afflicted and the fallen. But that our fellow-men, worms like ourselves, should have power yielded them to shut us out from friendship and the face of day, and the sight of Nature's charms, to deal out to us our pittance of bread and water and wretched accommodation, protracting at pleasure the vile durance, and at will increasing the measure of our deprivations-this is a condition for humanity to be affected with, worse, it seems to me, than the other five, and, next to a disgraceful and violent death, the worst that can be laid upon enduring man.

Let these six states of existence, a hungered, athirst, naked, sick, a stranger, a prisoner, be regarded then not as six individual afflictions amongst the ten thousand which afflict this weary world, but as being the six aspects of miserythe six evil stars under which the miserable pass their life. Go round the habitations of men, and examine into the several sources of their anxiety, and the several causes of their urgent labours, you shall find that it is to keep at the staff's end these three necessities-hunger, thirst, and nakedness. Also, study the luxuries which are assembled into the shops and market-places of the city; you shall find the most part for the accommodation or entertainment of the three desires, of food and drink and raiment, for which the earth is cultivated and the juices of her fruits expressed,

and her animals stripped of their fleecy and hairy coverings; Again, go round the habitations of men, and mark the sources of their grief and bitter lamentations, you shall find them to arise from loss of friends or balmy health; they are sick, or they are strangers to the beloved of their heart, whom God hath removed from the place where they were wont to dwell. Finally, go to the places appointed for the miserable, and what do you find? prisons where liberty is curtailed; hospitals into which the sick are received; asylums for the friendless and the orphans; tables for the hungry mendicants, and clothing for the naked and the destitute; -which induction doth prove the position stated above, that these six conditions, mentioned in the judgment, are, as it were, the six great perils of man.

For this same reason that these six conditions are as it were the six zones in the world of misery, they become six regions into which the power of man consigns those whom it would afflict. They are the points on which human nature is vulnerable, and are fixed upon for that end by those who, from cruelty or for punishment, would trouble her condition-and further they cannot go in their measures against her well-being. For it is not in the power of man to disturb the seat of reason, which God hath kept secret from his reach; neither can he raze out the legends of memory, or deface the visions of hope, or stem the current of thought; he can only remove us from the dwellings of our kindred to a land wherein we shall be a stranger; and he can immure us in disgraceful bondage, and abstract from Nature her wonted supplies; he can dismember our bodies, and bring on sickness and disease by noxious confinements and unwholesome foods. If he were to go a greater length he would defeat his own end, for by death we should flee away and be at rest. Accordingly, if you study the annals of wantonly inflicted suffering, or enter into the criminal code of nations, you will find these six heads, mentioned in the judgment, to be a good classification of all the individual instances of infliction:-deprivation of customary diet, from the plenty and luxury of our ordinary life down to the limit of starvation: abstraction of personal comfort and domestic accommodation, down to the limit of nakedness: infliction of torture, to cause pain and sickness: exile from our native land to a distant inhospitable region; deprivation of our liberty, to the extent of immuring our persons and fettering our limbs. The Lord, therefore, in these six brief instances, has not only grouped the calamities of human na

ture, but also the limitations of man's power over his fellow

man.

Now, into each of these six conditions he supposes himself to have passed under the eye of every man who is before him in judgment, and inquires into the treatment which he received at their hands: whether they did supply him when it was in their power, and comfort him when it was not: or whether they did utterly neglect him and basely suffer him to pine without help or consolation. Upon this, when the one class modestly decline having done for him any such charitable offices as he enumerates, and the other stoutly deny that they turned a deaf ear to the cry of his calamities, he explains that it was not of himself he spoke, but of the meanest of those who were his brethren:-" Inasmuch as ye did it, inasmuch as ye did it not, to the least of these my brethren, ye did it, or ye did it not, to me." The judge identifies himself with every one who is joined to him in a brotherly union, and identifies their evil or good treatment with his own, justifying to the last that love of his people for which he suffered and died and sent his comforter; verifying all the figures contained in Scripture, of their intimate union with himself their living head, of their being his members upon the earth, in whose sufferings he suffered, and in whose enjoyments he rejoiced.

The meaning of the whole transaction is therefore this, -that Christ hath set on foot upon the earth a cause to which certain others have associated themselves, and which they are striving with one accord to establish. In the prosecution of their object they are to encounter all the six forms of human misery, and to draw down upon their heads all the six forms of human trial-hunger, thirst, nakedness, sickness, exile, and imprisonment. In which encounter of stormy trial, they are to find in the world some who pity and assist them, others who neglect and despise them. By this mark the world is to be separated asunder, and acquitted or condemned in the great day of her responsibility. So that, in truth, this test, which at first seemed merely moral, turns out to be specially christian, and contains, as we now proceed to show, the most discriminative mark between the friends and enemies of God, between the servants and the rebels to his Son's government.

For, as every man knows, deeds show the sincerity of words, and adversity proveth the true character of deeds; any cause will find coadjutors while it goes with the stream, but when it hath to struggle against it, none but true men

lie to their oar. Therefore Christ propoundeth the true test of adherence to him and his cause. Six jeopardies he puts it in, and a seventh can hardly be found; he enumerates the orb of its perils, and then asks who hath stood by it throughout the entire round. These are the men, says he, for whom my Father hath prepared a kingdom from the foundation of the world, for the rest, let them plead as their fears and self love may dictate, they must betake them to the devil and his angels, whose service they preferred to mine. He examines who are standing at the end of the battle, or have fallen with wounds in their breast, scorning flight or base submission. These he numbers and unites in his triumph; but the rest, who joined not his standard, or having joined it, turned not out to his help against the mighty, or having come into the field, preferred flight or base desertion to noble death and triumph, he rejects and abandons to the power of that enemy whom they loved or feared.

There is no evading or counterfeiting of this test. Had he placed it in forms of belief, then every sound-headed student of his word, who could logically extract the bearing of its various propositions, would have come off glorious, whatever had been the state of his affections or his morals. And no one but he could have come gloriously off: so that the busy multitude, who have not time accurately to try conclusions of doctrine; and the unlettered, who have not learning to consult the faculties and bodies of theological lore; and the unintellectual, who have not sufficient depth of mind to fathom their mysteries; and the wise, who have more sense than to meddle with their vain and profitless janglings, would all have been excluded for the sake of some few head-strong persecuting dogmatists. I, for one, feel truly most happy and contented in my mind, that upon whatever future destiny is made to turn, it is not upon a refined and finical creed. Had it been made to turn upon what are called frames of the inner man, or evanescent feelings of the mind, then I know not what a rabble of devotees and self-deluded enthusiasts would have rushed forward in the greatness of their self confidence. You would have had them, from the cell of the crazed with religious dreams, and from the gloomy chambers of the fanatic; you would have had persecuting prelates and infuriated inquisitors all pleading the holy convictions of their minds. Every dreamer, every visionary, every self-deluded prophet would have come, and every towering confident of God and pharisaical judge of his fellow. The whole catalogue of severe monas

tics, who lived on remote and retired communion, and built presumption upon the intoxications of self-consequence, which their solitude and seclusion wrought within them—all would have come, claiming upon their deranged conceptions and fancied communions with God.

But as it is, the test reduces itself to that which alone can evince the reality of belief, measure the worth of service, and interpret the truth of feelings; namely, the trouble and the trial which we did undergo for him whom we profess to believe in, and to sacrifice to, and to feel for. It comes and makes inquiry whether for his sake we did encounter, when need was, the extremest rigours of life, neither felt ashamed of those who were called on to encounter them. If the fear of public reproach, or the loss of liberty, or exile, or straitened conditions, if any of these extremes, or any of the degrees which lead on to them, were willingly met when the cause was for Christ and his followers. "Those who deny me on earth, them will I deny before my Father in heaven; those who confess me on earth, will I confess before my Father which is in heaven."

There is therefore no doubt that when these tests occur in the providence of God, they are touchstones for ascertaining true-hearted and faithful followers of the Cross of Christ. But it may be thought that there is a quaintness, if not a source of error and mistake, thus to reveal unto all ages and nations of men, a test of eternal judgment, which, it may be thought, is applicable only to those few times and places in which Christ or his members are suffering reproach and tribulation. But let us look a little deeper still, and we shall find that the age or country hath not been, in which these six perils of human life have not deterred, and their six opposite advantages bribed, the world from the cause of Christ.

For those six conditions, be they sad calamities of Providence, or inhuman inflictions of man upon his fellow man, are of all things the most terrible to be endured; and are avoided like the mouths of tigers and wolves, and other ravenous creatures. To escape from them is the delight, to fall under them the horror, of human nature. In every condition wherein we stand, be it high or be it low, there are constant temptations, beseeching us to rise a little higher and escape from some of the hardships with which we feel ourselves to be threatened or encumbered. Whenever we have a want or pain or any unquiet feeling, there is also a desire to escape from under its oppression; and when we