colder constitution they produce fearfulness and despair. They divert the attention of all who hold them from following the plain and undeniable duties of their station, to seek after new, and, by degrees, unnatural excitements. For their feelings are necessarily growing less intense with every repetition of them. Often (and it is a most likely consequence of them) they cause the language of earthly attachment to be addressed to the great God of heaven, and tend to degrade the tone of that very devotion which they purposed to raise and inflame. Such, generally speaking, we may state to be the consequences of such opinions; and, if I may venture to generalize on so small a basis, such as these are, for the most part, the consequences whenever men make motives the direct objects of their efforts;when, because it is unquestionably true, that such and such a feeling, or frame of mind, is the only one which can render actions acceptable with God, men address themselves directly to stimulate that feeling, or to produce that frame of mind, instead of following the direct line of practical duty, accompanying their acts with prayer and watchfulness of heart, and trusting that the Spirit of God, aiding the natural course of diligent and watchful habit, will by degrees refine their motives, and thereby dignify and render acceptable their deeds.

On the other hand, there are some persons, who, jealous of the undue intrusion of feeling into religion, would fain exclude it altogether: in whose

eyes all warmth is enthusiasm; who hold that there are certain doctrines to be believed, and certain deeds to be done, and think that any thing like excitement of feeling towards the high God that inhabiteth eternity, is fantastic at least, if not indecorous and improper. And assuredly, of these two kinds of error this one tends to produce the more mischievous consequences. Coldness and formality, the form of godliness without the power of it, follow closely on such doctrines. Feeling, duly regulated, is indeed the vital heat of religion. Without it, doctrines are mere words, and deeds mere shadows; prayers mere lip-service, and morality mere worldliness. Nothing can be more clear than that the religion of the Apostles,-of St. Peter, who was grieved that Christ should thrice ask him if he loved him, of the energetic and warmhearted St. Paul, of St. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, and whose writings exhibit the most fervent return of reverential love,-was utterly unlike to this.

The first point that seems to occur in speaking of the love of God as the first great commandment, is, that our Lord in so terming it plainly intends to sum up in that phrase the first four commandments of the Decalogue. The lawyer who tempted Him hoped to hear some one of God's laws preferred to the others, and our Lord disappoints him, by giving an answer which comprises all. Therefore, to love God, when explained as a duty, means to worship Him alone; to worship Him in spirit

and in truth; to speak of Him with all reverence and awful respect; to hallow His sabbaths. These duties, enlarged to comprehend all kindred acts and dispositions, according to the model given by our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, make up, as parts, the first of the two great commandments, on which hang all the law and the prophets. And so says St. John, in his first Epistle : "This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments." Moreover this love of God not only applies with more express propriety to the duties of the first table, but it also embraces those of the second, for so St. John says again, "This commandment have we from God, that he who loveth God, love his brother also."

But further, there would be no propriety in terming certain deeds, the love of God, if it were not that the feeling of love towards God, is the inward motive that excites men to perform them. If therefore the whole round of Christian duties be comprised in the single phrase, the love of God, it can only be because the great motive of all Christian duty is the feeling of this love. And this is the subject which, with God's assistance, I now propose to consider.

In order to analyze the feeling of the love of God in the heart of man with any completeness, it would be necessary to examine first the loveliness which there is in God, whereby He may become the object of such a feeling; secondly, the state of mind which is requisite to enable man to perceive and

appreciate this loveliness in Him, and thirdly, the inward and outward acts which testify the growth and perfection of this love.

The first sort of loveliness to be observed in the character of God, as discovered to us by reason and revelation, is His goodness.

Goodness is in itself the natural object of love. We naturally approve that which our understanding declares to be good, or perhaps it would be more correct to reverse the order, and to say, that that which our approbation naturally fixes upon is found by our understanding to be good. The more perfect goodness appears to us, that is, the more it surpasses our own individual standard, the more the feeling of approbation is blended with that of admiration. We fix our thoughts with delight on an object so congenial and gratifying to the best part of our nature. When goodness is presented to us in an absolutely perfect shape, the subordinate feelings of approbation and admiration are lost in an overwhelming awe-an awe mingled with the profoundest reverence and delight; while we perceive that though we have, in some degree, eyes to see goodness, and feelings to love it, yet we gaze on it from an immeasurable distance, and with a painful sense of our imperfection, and consequent unlikeness to it. Now these feelings proceed from what may be called, without impropriety, the disinterested love of goodness. As the eye naturally takes delight in some combinations of figure or colour,

and is pleased with the mere contemplation of them, without desiring any further result to ensue out of them; or as the ear dwells with satisfaction on some combinations of sounds, and avoids or disapproves of others, so the natural moral feeling, which we have within us, finds its natural scope and gratification in contemplating moral goodness. Nothing

can be more clear than this is from the commonest observation of life. Gentleness of mind, self-restraint, governed temper, conscientious conduct, these things are plainly lovely in themselves. Not only do they tend by God's merciful arrangement to produce beneficial effects upon society, but we acknowledge them to be the natural objects of love. On the other hand, falsehood and fraud, violence and self-indulgence, are unpleasant things to contemplate. Men unite in loving and reverencing the one character, even when they receive, and expect to receive, no direct benefit from it; their natural feelings loathe and disapprove of the other, even where the sense of present interest checks the expression of all sentiments but those of esteem.

In God such goodness has its absolute and complete perfection. Nor is the distant and unapproachable nature of this perfection any impediment to our regarding it with these natural feelings of love. For however different in kind Divine goodness may be from human, or however mere perfection may constitute a different kind from that which