your life is, how quickly it passeth away, how soon you will enter upon eternity. You who are "lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God," it is an awakening thought that you must so shortly resign those pleasures in which you live, and so soon give an account of yourselves to that God, whom you despise and neglect. If you were sure of having ten thousand years of earthly enjoyment, what would they be compared with the incalculable ages of eternity? But when, at the most, you have perhaps but some ten or twenty years remaining, when God only knows whether you have a single one, when it is utterly uncertain what to morrow, or even to day may bring forth, will you still prefer time to eternity, and value earth more than Heaven? Will you think it hard that you are called upon to prove your love of God, by denying yourselves for that short space of time? And denying yourselves in what? Only in those things which are hateful to God, which are disgraceful to man, which are ruinous to the soul, which are more properly the enjoyments of brutes, which form no part of the happiness of Heaven! Only denying yourselves in every evil passion, and appetite, and practice. May you be enabled by God's grace to practice this self-denial, while yet you have the opportunity of making a voluntary choice of

it; for the time is coming, when it shall otherwise be forced upon you against your will; when you shall burn with desire for ever, void of all hope and possibility of gratifying it; when your unruly lusts and passions shall be among your greatest torments, raging with furious violence, and all means of indulgence for ever taken away. May you repent while the "accepted time" and the "day of salvation" last, lest your repentance (which must come at some time, in Hell, if not upon earth) be ineffectual and eternal. "Seek ye the Lord, while He may be found, call ye upon Him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.”

And you who are living through God's grace in a Christian state of self-denial, who have taken up your cross, and are following Christ, through the trials and tribulations of this evil world, consider that your time also is short, and take comfort from the thought; you shall not be long exposed to the temptations which now beset and harass you; the flesh shall not much longer "lust against the spirit;" you shall not much longer find it a work of trouble, and of difficulty, to serve the God whom you love; the opposition

of your enemies shall shortly cease; a little while, and your affection for spiritual things shall no more be distracted by the intrusion of worldly and carnal desires; there shall be no "law in your members warring against the law of your mind, and endeavouring to bring you into captivity to the law of sin. You shall soon be enabled to say, "O happy men that we are, we are now for ever delivered from the body of this death! Thanks be to God who hath given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ !"

66

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord."

SERMON XVIII.

"GODLINESS" AND "FORM."

PSALM LXIII. 7.

Have I not remembered thee in my bed, and thought upon thee when I was waking?

THESE words are very expressive of the state of mind, in which a truly pious man habitually lives; he feels himself always in the presence of God, and maintains, under all circumstances, a constant communion with Him; however occupied, he has always leisure for reflection on religious subjects; however distracted in regard to other matters, in this one respect he is uniform, and consistent, and undeviating; however confined and weighed down in the body by the fetters which bind him to the earth, his free and

buoyant spirit is ever mounting up towards heaven.

We cannot see into each other's hearts; but such an one, as I now speak of, is many a time deeply engaged in the contemplation of things above, when you would think him most busily employed about the affairs of this life; often he is most anxiously endeavouring to promote his eternal interests, when his attention appears to be fixed only on temporal concerns; and frequently are his earnest prayers ascending to the Throne of Grace, when there is no outward sign, or gesture, by which men can perceive that he is occupied in devotion. To him there is no place, and no time inappropriate to religious meditations and exercises; for the worship of God he can convert every place into a temple, and every day into a Sabbath.

Now this constitutes the essential difference between the truly religious man, and the mere formalist; the latter has no conception of such an habitual state of mind; he knows not what it is to be under the constant influence of pious feelings; he has always been used to connect the idea of religion, with particular times and places, to the exclusion of all others; he supposes the Sabbath to be the only proper day for such a subject, and a church the only proper place;