troubled, neither let it be afraid." Fear need have no place with you; yours is joy and peace in believing. Trials you say come round you. Have you found your peace broken by them yet? The snares of the world lie under your feet day by day? have they yet made your peace vain? No surely; nor will they : you will go from strength to strength, and will hereafter appear before your Master to receive the crown of glory laid up for you and all that have loved and served HIM. May we all be thought fit to wear it!

SERMON XIV.

CHRISTIAN MORALITY..

S. MATT. V. 2.

And He opened His mouth and taught them. WOULD that men would believe that the Religion of CHRIST JESUS is simple, and the factious systems which men have attempted to pile upon it are inventions, and have none of the simplicity which belongs to the things of Heaven. Would that those who make His Name a watchword of strife among us, would take this famous sermon of His, as it is called, and see how plain, how practical, how much without set phrase and quibbles of doctrine His teaching was that it delivers advice, comfort, and practical rules, not points of high doctrinal speculation; that it leads more to what men are to do, than what they are to think, and plainly seeks

to build up their lives in a sober and subdued spirit of watchful obedience.

I. We will take a few of the topics separately. The Sermon begins with the nine beatitudes of which so much has been said and written. Our SAVIOUR, that is, pronounces his authoritative benediction on men who are of certain characters. Of these the first are "the poor in spirit." "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Now let us see what the world has to say on this subject. We find a certain class of persons who are quick to resent injury, are impatient of restraint, and think highly of themselves. They are known in the world by the readiness with which they defend their reputation and their possessions in it; and they sometimes do so in a directly sinful way, as by ill language, by revengeful measures, by cruelty; and they do not even make it their study to avoid these sins, but only avoid them, when they do, because there is some other way of gaining their

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wishes. Now these the world calls " rited persons, persons who have a fit sense of injustice and of the means by which they are to show their sense of it. The world, I mean people who live in the world without Religion, caress them, praise them, and point to them as fine characters, which they would imitate themselves, and have their children to imitate.

But what are they? Are they happy men here while they are receiving all the credit which their proud tempers bring them? or rather are they not passed into a proverb for being persons uneasy, unloving and unloved, because those very qualities which glitter in the world, make the distemper and unhappiness of the closest ties of our nature? It is not easy to wear two characters, to be haughty and overbearing one hour, and courteous and gentle in the next; and thus the feelings which they have indulged, and been praised for abroad, are made seeds of bitterness where no bitterness should be.

Yet more.

What does the world do for

them? Does it bless them? and are those things which it says and which they love to hear, said with any real meaning? Does it even wish them well or care about their interests? Does it remember them when out of sight, and treasure their memories? Of the thousands of "high-spirited" men, as they are called, how many names do we know? Some few hundreds perhaps, who have been handed down to us because they have done things which either have secured some profit to mankind, or are just such as men hope to be applauded for themselves. But we know the hollowness of the world's blessings, if such they may be called, and that out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing within a very short space of time.

But suppose the world to bless ever so sincerely, what is its blessing worth? The men blessed by the breath of the world, are surely none the better for it; they gain no enlargement of soul, seldom any good to their bodies or temporal estate; they are left just where they were,