PRAYER BEFORE THE SERMON.

We humble ourselves before thee, our Father. We draw near to thee in the spirit of children: and yet of children that have gone wrong. We are conscious of our sins. We are conscious that we have sinned against our own light and knowledge. Thou hast had occasion to be offended with us. Thou mightest long ago have been discouraged and cast us off. It is the nature of thy love to endure. Thou art long-suffering, patient, slow to anger, quick to relent. Thy nature is healing to sin, and none shall open their hearts to let in thine influence and go uncleansed. The fire of thy Spirit shall burn up the dross. The purity of thy soul shall cleanse the impurity of ours. The truth of thy thought shall straighten out the crookedness, the lies, the falsity, in us. Thou wilt pour through the soul those tides of the divine spirit that shall cleanse it; and by thy power we shall be regenerated, ennobled, lifted up into the likeness of God. And into our souls breathe the filial spirit, so that we shall call out in every hour, in every spontaneous moment, "Our Father which art in heaven."

We thank thee for all thy bounty which there is in the fatherhood of God. Oh! what comfort we have plucked from it already! It has reached above our heads as a vine that grew by diminution; for all we have taken of thine over-arching care has but caused it to put forth new clusters. Thou art giving without diminishing the supply. Oh! what consolation have we had when we fled from the terror of thy law; when we fled from the relentless aspects of nature, and found the warmth and sympathy of thy paternal heart! Thou art good. Thou art not only good but thou art merciful., How gentle are thy ways towards us! Grant that thy goodness and thy gentleness may win us more than terror and more than necessity. Grant that our hearts, moved by honor and by duty and by love, may turn unto thee and to thy ways. May we desire thy favor more than all other things. Thou knowest the battle of every one. Thou knowest the temptation that to every one is most potent. Thou knowest where are our weaknesses and what are our infirmitics. Thou dost behold the doubtful conflict. Thou hast watched over us with more than tender watching and care than ever a mother watched over a child. We need not tell thee who we are. We need not tell thee what we are.

In

Lord Jesus! but for thy grace, we should have perished; and by thy grace we are what we are in good. Yet continue thy good to us. spire us and strengthen us and lift us up as things that are mighty to the destruction of pride and selfishness and appetite and every evil way. Turn us to thyself. Be school-master to us in love. Discipline us. Instruct us. Guide us to the knowledge of all that is good; and may our inclination follow our knowledge. May we have the way of righteousness. And, we beseech of thee, be near to those who are yet too weak to walk, and to all that are cast down and cannot rise up, and to all that are taken captive by sin and cannot release themselves, and to all that are snared, and to all that are slumbering, being stupefied by sin. O thou Healer! draw near. Thou Deliverer! appear for the rescue of souls that are in peril. There are many who make feeble cry to thee, not because they deserve aught but because it is thy heart's delight to do good, that they have faith in thee. And we beseech of thee that thou wilt help those who seek to help others. Give them wisdom. Inspire them with prudence. Give them might and power upon the hearts of their fellows. May all that seek to lead men in Godly ways be themselves lead by God. May those who seek to injure men, to carry them down, and to make mischief of happiness, be met with rebuke and overthrown by the breath of thy mouth and the brightness of thy coming.

Oh! hasten that day when all men shall learn the lore of love. Hasten that day when thy Spirit shall be breathed into all thy churches, and through thy churches into all the community; when laws and government shall be

founded and administered in righteousness; when all the institutions of society shall be filled with the spirit of heaven. Grant that that blessed day of prediction may come when sorrow and sighing shall flee away, when cruelty shall cease, when superstition and ignorance shall depart, and when the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters fill the sea. Oh! hasten that long-delaying day. Grant that those who labor for it and die without the sight, giving place to other generations that labor and die again without the sight, and all of us may behold it, if not upon these shores, yet in our Father's kingdom. For this world is thine own. Oh Jesus! thou hast redeemed it by thy precious blood. Thou shalt win it through the dark ages. Thou art the Traveler unknown, seeking it. Thou shalt find it. Thou shalt cleanse it. Thou shalt ordain purity and justice and truth and love. And all the world shall see thy salvation. Make haste then, consummate thy promises. Fulfill the blessedness of thine intent. Bring in on this earth all thy mighty power.

And to the Father, the Son and the Spirit shall be praise everlasting. Amen.

PRAYER AFTER THE SERMON.

Our Father, we beseech of thee that thou wilt bless the word of instruction which we have endeavored to give. May all those who are in the morning of life take heed to their courses. May all those upon whom thou hast placed the burden and heat of the day watch warily, knowing whose adversaries abound on every side. May those who have passed the years of their lives, and are standing in their autumn days, more than ever see that they are prepared to meet their God. May there be no more delay. May there be no more excuses. May men no more deny their duty, or turn away from their Saviour. Lift up thy cross, and make it glow before the eyes of every one. And may there be many who shall be won to it, and subdued by it, to the honor of thy name, through Jesus Christ our Redeemer. Amen.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE A NEW LIFE.

I have selected for the theme of discourse, this evening, the passage of Scripture which I read in the opening service, and which is contained in the forepart of the third chapter of John's Gospel. It is the account of the interview of Nicodemus with our Saviour. I select it because, while it has been ten thousand times discoursed upon, and in ways most edifying, there are certain tendencies existing in our time, and developing themselves in the most interesting manner, which can be made in no way so beneficially affected, I apprehend, as by holding up the truth which was made known by our Saviour to Nicodemus in this passage.

The whole interview and the whole thought of the Saviour become very interesting when they are looked at in connection with the character of this man.

The Pharisees were not very good; but they were the best men to be found at that time. They were the most patriotic of the Jews. They were the most learned and intellectual class. They were the most religious. And it does not alter the fact of their endeavoring to do well, that they had fallen upon a wrong method, and that it was a method which exhausted itself in benefit, and then led them into positive mischief.

After the Jews had been carried to Babylon and scattered, their services were discontinued, and their law was forgotten, and intermarriages were gradually being formed; and the bad example working, little by little, little by little, it became evident to the heads of the nation that unless something were done they would perish, and the Jews that were remaining from Judea would be, as the ten tribes had been, mixed and lost among the nations of the earth. Therefore it was that a class of men sprang up among them who undertook to keep the Jews to their national faith, to keep the children in memory of their history, to stir up, by every means in their power, the remembrance of the land from which they had been exported, and to keep alive all those historic circumstances which should make them proud of their history, and proud of themselves, and, more than that, prevent their forgetting the peculiar economy under which they had been reared.

SUNDAY EVENING, July 10, 1870. LESSON: JNO. III, 1-15. HYMNS (Plymouth Collection.) Nos. 15, 666, 1270.

These men undertook to bring out, and to expound, the whole Mosaic ritual. And, as times had changed, and their condition was very different from what it had been in their own land, there sprang up innumerable questions which were not provided for in the text-questions of casuistry; questions relating to adjustments of duty; a thousand nice questions. These questions were answered according to the best light of these men. And the Pharisee was the man who undertook to maintain, among the Jews, in their dispersion and captivity, the spirit of Judaism, and the spirit of the Jewish religion. And when the Jews came back again to Jerusalem, that which had been so useful abroad was still continued at home. The Pharisees, although never separated as a sect, and organized as our sects are in the Christian religion (the term Pharisee being rather the name of a school of thought, or of a certain class of men with peculiar tendencies), went on with this same work. They were men who undertook to live a righteous life according to the best light they could obtain from their own scriptures, to gether with the coördinate reasoning of all the learned men of their nation. They were extremely scrupulous, therefore, in all those points of morality which were pointed out in their Scripture. But as pride, and vanity, and self-seeking, and various other moral evils, had no special prominence in the Mosaic institutes, so they had very little notice at the hand of the Pharisee. While he was rigorously pure, according to the Mosaic law of purity; while he neglected no known duty; while he followed the way of righteousness according to the best interpretation that he had; he was yet spiritually blind; and he became proud and vain, and hard, and unsympathetic, and unloving, rigorous for duty, and without mercy. And it was against these elements that our Master inveighed most severely. But it cannot be denied that among the Pharisees were specimens of the best natures and the best characters that were found in the Saviour's time.

So, then, if you can select from them one of the best of the Pharisees, who represents the highest estate to which the moral nature had risen among the Jews (and the Jews were preeminently higher than any other nation on the globe, morally,) and then listen to the instruction which Christ gives him, you will be able to come nearer to the ideal of your Master than in any other way. This we have in the case of Nicodemus.

He was a Pharisee; and the whole history shows that he was one of the noblest of the Pharisees; that he had a hunger of soul; that he was not satisfied with the external righteousness which he had attained. The teachings of Christ had touched a secret feeling in him, and opened a desire for something more.

He came to Christ by night-it has been supposed from cowardice.

I think not. I regard Nicodemus as one of those men who are timid from excessive conscientiousness; who are not demonstrative; who are very thoughtful and quiet; who are very desirous to know what is right, and to do what is right, but who are distrustful of themselves, and therefore are mild, moderate, secluded, even. He came by night, not because he was afraid, but because it comported with that kind of inquisitive, conscientious, mild nature of his. Afterwards, circumstances showed that he was far from cowardly. When he sat in the council, and they were to condemn Christ, he spoke out before the others, and said, "Doth our law condemn any man before he be heard?" And afterwards, when, to everybody else, the whole mission of Christ seemed to have been exploded, and Christ had been crucified, and there was no friend to stand near him; when John was not there, and bold Peter had fled, and every one of the disciples that were nourished in Christ's bosom had gone-then this man it was, whom men are pleased to call "timid," and to accuse of sneaking to Christ by night to avoid responsibility—he it was, that, with [Joseph of Arimathea, dared to go before the Government, and risk everything, for a cause that had failed, and gone out of sight, and demand the body of the Saviour, and give it an honorable burial. It is a shame to asperse the name of Nicodemus with the charge of moral cowardice. No, he went to Christ by night because he was a ruler, and he did not wish all the men in the body to which he belonged to be picking at him. He was not yet prepared to take a stand. He wanted a conference with Christ; he wanted instruction; he wanted to go to him when he was not thronged-when he was at leisure; he wanted few or no spectators; and he did just what you or I would have done. He went by night to the Saviour, in order to have a long communion with him.

Now John, and perhaps one or two disciples besides, were present whilst this conversation between Christ and Nicodemus was going on; and we should have expected that our Saviour would say to him, "You are on the right path; and you are among the few that I have met of the Jews who have a spiritual insight. You have moral earnestness. Go on. Develop. Bring forth to the higher form that which is already in you." But no; singling out this best one of all the men of that time, Christ, in this conference, without any preface, without any qualification, said:

"Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

And when Nicodemus could not understand it, Christ went further, and told him that it was not the birth of the flesh, or physical birth, that he was speaking of. Said he:

"That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit."