whip the sin while he spares the sinner. It would seem, indeed, to be an unwarrantable piece of vanity in some members of a congregation to imagine that they alone, out of, it may be, many hundreds, were the only ones peculiarly deemed worthy of more immediate instruction in righteousness!-But hear what old Fuller says in his Good Parishioner : "He accuseth not his minister of spite in particularising him. It does not follow that the archer aimed because the arrow hit. Rather our Parishioner reasoneth thus. If my sin be notorious, how could the Minister miss it? if secret, how could he hit it without God's direction? But foolish hearers make even the bells of Aaron's garments to clink as they think. And a guilty conscience is like a whirlpool, drawing in all to itself which otherwise would pass by. One causelessly disaffected to his Minister, complained that he in his last sermon had personally inveighed against him, and accused him thereof to a grave religious gentleman in the Parish: Truly, said the gentleman, I had thought in his sermon he had meant me, for it touched my heart. This rebated the edge of the other's anger." And now, Reader, let me dismiss thee with the words of a Divine whose heart is always right, even when (on certain points) his theology may possibly be wrong, of whom certainly it might said in the verse of Cowley, "His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right." "He that hath given the following assistances to thee, desires to be even a door-keeper in God's house, and to be a servant of the meanest of God's servants, and thinks it a worthy employment to teach the most ignorant, and make them to know Christ, though but in the first rudiments of a holy institution. This only he affirms, that there is more solid comfort and material support to a Christian spirit in one article of Faith, in one period of the Lord's Prayer, in one holy lesson, than in all the disputes of impertinent people ".: 5 " "Unless I deceive myself, I intend the glory of God sincerely, and the service of Jesus, in this publication: and, therefore, being I do not seek myself or my own reputation, I shall not be troubled if they be lost in the voices of busy people, so that I be accepted of God, and found of Him in the day of the Lord's visitation "." 6 Only let me add, if there be one word in these Sermons contrary to sound doctrine and the teaching of the Church,-be it unsaid-it is retracted. Errare possum, hæreticus esse nolo. ́ΑΓΙΑΣΘΗΤΩ ΤΟ ΟΝΟΜΑ ΣΟΥ! CONTENTS. But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them |