look upon you

the

countenances of those whom you love upon earth, breathe the secret prayer that you may yet meet and love them

in heaven.

One farther observation and I have done. The season which brings joy and gladness to us, brings suffering to many of our brethren. The poor, alas! will too certainly be subjected to inclemency and hardship, while we are giving way to mirth and gaiety, Yet you know, that he whose birth you now comemorate, although born a king, came not with the distinctions of rank and fortune: they who went to seek for him found him not surrounded with the splendours of royalty: they entered into a cottage, and found only a solitary woman and her child. Go, then, my brethren, but go not to the house of feasting alone;

enter likewise the dwellings of the poor, and seek there for "the young child, and Mary his mother.” Bring forth there your gifts, and remember to your comfort, that inasmuch" as ye do good to one of the least of these his brethren, ye have done it unto him.”

SERMON VIII.

ON MAN AS A RATIONAL AND MORAL BEING.

JOB, XXXii. 8.

"But there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding."

WI

HILE it is the object of some philosophical systems to degrade man nearly to a level with the brutes, the sacred writings always represent him as " little lower than the angels." They affirm, indeed, that he has lost the original purity of his nature; that he is corrupt and fallen; but

H

this melancholy truth they never enforce with malignant triumph, nor make it the subject of indecent raillery. On the contrary, while they inform him plainly of the misfortune attending his condition, and of the incalculable evils of which it may be the cause, they console him with the account of those great exertions. which divine mercy has made in his behalf, and endeavour to make him keep pace with those exertions, by elevating his mind to a sense of what he was, and by bringing before him all those traces of grandeur and excellence in his nature which still, however faintly, shadow out the image of God. "When I consider (says David) the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crown

ed him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his fect."

In discoursing from the text, I propose, first, to assert the inherent worthiness of our nature; and, secondly, to draw practical inferences from the doctrine.

Under the first head I shall consider man in three views, as a Rational, a Moral, and a Religious being.

"There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding." How are we otherwise to account for that superiority which man has acquired over all the other inhabitants of this world? Inferior in strength to many, passing a long period of weakness and infancy, how has this being been enabled to protect himself from the ferocity of the lion and the tiger; and why are these animals fugitives in the woods, while he