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ever has been, with false men, holding to some false support to the last. The time comes when they feel deeply their need of real support, and they grasp, with an awful avidity, the last relic of those things on which they once depended. See that man, who has fallen from his bark into the surging deep yonder, how he struggles with the waves; how eagerly he looks for something on which to fix his hold. A rope is thrown to his rescue. How eagerly he seizes it; but, alas! unfortunately it is not connected with the ship; consequently, it affords him no support. It is a delusion and a snare. It sinks with him. An emblem this of what will assuredly happen to the false man in the great tempests of the future! He will be struggling in the billows. The last thing he clutches will not be connected with the great bark of truth; and although he seizes it with the energy of a dying man, he and it will sink together, and be seen no more. I know not of a more awful picture of misery than this :-a frail, finite soul, bereft of all its support, standing alone in the universe, without anything on which to rely!-neither a friend nor a God! but a black, starless, hopeless futurity as its doom!

Learn from this, my friend, the all-important fact, that thy highest interest is to be a true man-true to thy nature, true to thy felt obligations, true to thy circumstances, and, consequently, true to thy God! Unless thou hast supreme love to him, thou hast no true life. With all thy education, thy conventional morality, thy artificial adornments, thy good name, thy seeming before men, thou art nought, morally, but a rush. Thy supports are but as the spider's web, which, although thou mightest maintain until the last moment, must give way, and leave thee to fall into the dark abyss, to float along a friendless, hopeless, godless soul, throughout an interminable future. "For, behold, (although,) God will not cast away a perfect man, neither will he help the evil-doers."

Analysis of Homily the Thirty-sixth.

"Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory ?”— Rom. ix. 21-23.

SUBJECT:-Honor and Dishonor; or, the Work of the Sinner, and the Work of God.

WELL might Peter affirm of Paul's writings that they contain " some things hard to be understood." His thoughts, at times, seem to be inconsistent with each other, with other portions of revealed truth, and also with some of our most fundamental notions of moral propriety. The inconsistency, however, we believe, is formal, not real; arising from a defectiveness in the interpretations and generalizations of the reader, and not from any confusion or incoherency in the mind of the writer. Perhaps no portion of the apostle's writings has, on the one hand, suggested more theological difficulties, and instigated more controversies, than the chapter containing our text; or does, on the other hand, disclose a larger amount of broad disciplining and self-evidential truth. Although a critical exposition comes not within our present purpose or power, we would, nevertheless, suggest that an accurate settlement of three questions is necessary in order to reach the exact meaning of the apostle :-First. What does he mean by the word ELECTION? Secondly. Does he refer to national and temporal blessings, or to personal and spiritual? Thirdly. What is his grand object in the whole? We will not at present commit ourselves to any opinion upon the first two questions, involving, as they do, a large variety of opinion amongst good men. The last, however, is easy of solution: it is evidently to meet certain objections which the Jews would feel to the calling of the

Gentiles to the blessings of Christianity, the new religion. The words read bring to our minds a few thoughts which may minister to our spiritual life and culture.

I. THAT ALL MEN ARE MADE OF ONE COMMON NATURE. "We are," as the old prophet has it, "the clay, and thou our Potter; and we are all the work of thy hand." We are all of one nature and origin. Our exploring expeditions, our scientific researches, and the labors of our missionaries, have brought abundant evidence to prove that, notwithstanding the vast variety in color, conformation, habit, internal tendencies, and external circumstances, there is such a correspondence, both in the physical and spiritual structure of the fair Caucasian, the black Ethiopian, and the copper-coloured races of Asia, Australia, and America, as to corroborate the biblical declaration, that God "hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth."

Let us not be satisfied in admitting the truth of this doctrine. Let us learn, and work out in life, the practical inferences. Let us reverence the rights of all-regard each man, of whatever hue, form, or location, as having certain rights as sacred and dear as our own. No mercantile enterprise, no patriotism or nationality, no religious zeal or proselytism, could ever justify us in offering the slightest indignity to that right which belongs to man as man to the free use of his limbs and soul, to the product of his labor, to the formation, utterance, and development, of his opinion. Let us sympathize with the woes of all. If we love not our brother "whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen?" Like the good Samaritan, let us lift our prostrate nature from the dust wherever we find it, staunch its bleeding wounds, and help to bear it on its way. Let us diffuse that gospel, which is the great want of all. The soul of all peoples is haunted with the visions of an innocence that is sacrificed, and an Eden that is lost; and everywhere is it scared with the sense of a guilt that is contracted, and the idea of a judgment that is coming on. Man, the world over, is a brother in moral

instincts, remorseful memories, and spiritual needs. From the nether deeps of his heart there rises an inarticulate, but a loud and lasting, cry for the help the gospel offers. Ought we not to lift up the CRUCIFIED ONE to the eye of our common humanity, and say, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world."

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II. THAT OF MEN MADE OF THE SAME NATURE, PART IS BEING FITTED FOR DESTRUCTION," AND PART FOR GLORY. The word destruction does not refer either to existence, consciousness, or obligations,-these, we believe, will never be destroyed, but to HAPPINESS. It is here put in antithesis to glory, and glory means all that is blissful in being. Now, it is here implied that there are certain men being fitted or framed for the destruction of all happiness, and others being "prepared" for all that is glorious. This is, unquestionably, a solemn thought. Is it true? There are three things which show its truth:-First. The inevitable tendency of the two great principles that rule mankind. There are two, and but two, chief and all-important principles in the spiritual world -selfishness and love, or sin and holiness. In heaven, love alone reigns; in hell, selfishness alone reigns; on earth, the two principles reign: and hence, on earth, we have two moral kingdoms, the one of darkness, and the other of light. Every man is under the government of one of these two principles. Now, the one tends to the decrease of happiness, and the other to its increase; the one fits for destruction, and the other prepares for glory; the one tends to quench hopes, the other to kindle them; the one to dissolve friendships, the other to perfect and perpetuate them; the one to break all peace of mind, the other to fill the soul with joy unspeakable; the one to enervate and fetter all the spiritual powers, the other to invigorate and enfranchise them. Show me a man under the influence of selfishness, and you will show a man whose nature is undergoing a rapid process of deterioration; there is a cloud on his horizon that shall blacken and spread until it obscures every light; and though it launch

everlasting thunders, and flash eternal lightnings, it shall never break and clear the sky. There is a blight in his atmosphere that shall wither every living plant, and leave his spiritual territory barren and bleak. There is a disease in his system that shall undermine his constitution, and bring on death. Secondly. The actual experience of mankind. Take two men as types of these two portions of our common humanity. One shall be SAUL. "He was a choice young man and a goodly, and there was not among the children of Israel a goodlier person than he." He had, undoubtedly, a good mental, as well as a "goodly" corporeal, constitution; and on his great native intellect, and broad-hearted sympathies, the "Spirit of the Lord" once moved in his stirring and energizing influence. But the man was selfish; and under this selfishness -the soul of every sin―he gradually lost his power and his peace. His selfishness continued to fit and frame him for "destruction," until, in the black cave at Endor, with a soul palsied and trembling through every fibre, he exclaims, "I am sore distressed. God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets, nor by dreams. The other shall be DAVID, the son of Jesse. "Now he was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to." He was but a shepherd boy; having, it would seem, nothing peculiarly great either in bodily or mental make; but his soul developed itself under the reign of a Divine and all-comprehensive love, which led him to "serve his generation." And you see this youth, in almost every step of his life, getting new power, and rising into new glory. By glory I mean not the high rank and political dominion which he attained in the world, but the glory of that spirit of his which continued to free itself from trammels, increase in force, emerge into higher realms of thought and feeling, and approach nearer, and nearer still, to the ETERNAL ALL, until it could sing, in rapturous notes, the "Lord is my portion."

Now, all this is abundantly confirmed by scripture, which represents all men as pursuing two paths, the one to destruc

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