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or "foolishness." When that scene of humiliation is over, you will again behold the glories of heaven unveiled, and him who bowed his head for your sakes on the cross, again rising triumphant from the darkness of the grave; and you will hear his divine voice calling upon you to follow him, without terror or distrust, through "the valley of the shadow of death." Follow him then in life and in death; and when all these present things shall have passed away, and when time shall be no more, you will yet reign with him through the ages of eternity.

But it is not merely the church, my brethren, which at this time invites us to participate in its joys. The world, too, has joys of its own; and they, I fear, commonly gain the precedence in our minds. Yet, at this auspicious season, there is one very beautiful link by which the church and the world are connected. You

have it in my text. "When they were come into the house, they beheld the young child, with Mary his mother." Go, then, and enjoy the society of families and . friends, the meeting of mothers and their children. Yet go in the spirit of religion, not with the thoughtless ingratitude of man. Go as the children of God, and acknowledge amidst your enjoyments the hand from which they flow; and, when you look upon 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 commemorate, 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 roy alty 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."

WHILE 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 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

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

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 is the lord of the earth? What reason can we give but this, that while the animals follow merely the impulses of appetite, and walk in the unvarying road of blind instinct, the mind of man rushes into futurity, and forms innumerable devices for accomplishing its deliberate designs; that, long before the occasion comes, it has foreseen the plan of conduct, and has supplied, by artificial assistances, the defects of natural strength. Thus, in the lowest conditions of human society, there is always a marked pre-eminence in man over the other animals; in him there are at all times, however they may occasionally be clouded and obscured, indications

of invention and design; of a mind possessing in some degree a creative energy, and so far resembling that supreme Intelligence which devised the immense assemblage of existences that compose this prodigious universe.

The effects of this power in man are by no means small and insignificant. Even in the savage state he builds his hut; he subdues the beasts of the forest, and assembles about him many simple conveniences. While he is yet remote from what we call civilization, the native grandeur of the human mind shows itself in bold exertions of genius; and, as he proceeds in his career, man constantly discovers new resources. Into whatever situation he is brought, he brings along with him a mind equal to it; and the same creature that, on his first appearance, seemed but ill qualified to contend with the other animals for a precarious subsistence in the woods, is afterwards seen to sit in the palaces of kings; to guide his adventurous prow across the ocean; to make the earth render him the yearly return of his labour; to form enlightened plans of policy; to regulate the deliberations of senates; to count the number of the stars; and to reflect on the workings of his own mind.

Now, what is this power, the effects of which are at all times so much superior to the operations of other animated beings, and which, in the course of ages, seems to separate man from the brutes almost as far as from the trees or from the rocks? Is it a principle not differing in kind from their regular and constant instincts, although at last it produces these effects by some strange concurrence of accidents? Or is it not rather, what the