setting to work with all your hearts to live like the servants of God. Assure yourselves that He is faithful, and will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will, with every temptation make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. Know that in this heavenly food He gives you strength if you will use it. What Elijah ate seemed common bread, but he walked in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights, even to the mount of God.

Our Lord has been lifted up from earth on the cross to draw all men unto Him'. Draw near then to God through Him, and strive to be ever with Him in your hearts. Think over with yourselves the words of His law, the histories of His wonderful works, and of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, the promises of His love, the praises of His Holy Name, till these things are what soonest come into your mind, what every thing brings back to your thoughts, what you rest in, and what you live by.

And let men see, not only by good words, but by your lives, by patience, by meekness, by cheerfulness, by honesty, by kindness, by forbearance, by industry, by temperance, by

p 1 Cor. x. 13.

9 1 Kings xix. 8.

r John xii. 32.

carefulness to speak no evil, by humbleness of mind, and readiness to give way to others in any thing lawful, by peacefulness, by every Christian virtue, by the likeness of Christ in you, that it is a good and a blessed thing to serve the Lord, and that He is in you of a truth.

SERMON VII.

PREACHED AT DONNINGTON, 1839.

ISAIAH XXXviii. 18, 19.

The grave cannot praise Thee, death cannot celebrate Thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy truth.

The living, the living, he shall praise Thee, as I do this day: the father to the children shall make known Thy truth.

THESE are the words of a good man under the law, the very man of whom it is written that he trusted in the Lord God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him. While yet in his full strength, he was struck with a sickness that brought him near to the grave, and we have read how God was pleased to heal him, and to shew that the cure was His own special work by giving him a sign. These words are taken from his song, in which he speaks of what a 1 Kings xviii. 5.

he felt in sickness, and of his joy and thankfulness on his recovery.

Perhaps you may have wondered why so good a man felt such sorrow and fear, and if we can learn the reason, it may throw some light on the Old Testament, so that we may read it with more understanding, and may also teach us some good lessons respecting the life of man.

Not that we can fully understand the difference between the state of pious Jews under the law and our own. The heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy. Yet it is always most instructive to consider the condition of God's people in the various states in which He has been pleased from time to time to place them.

We must observe, then, that in the Old Testament most of that which is said of the life to come is said under a figure. I mean that God speaks there as if He were speaking of this life, even very often when He means us to understand the life to come. For instance, when He speaks of Jerusalem, we know that very often it means the blessed company of Saints living together in the Church universal in Heaven and earth, now or when b Prov. xiv. 10.

perfected the everlasting City of God. But the Jews of old could only guess at that, which we have been told plainly. They would think first of the earthly Jerusalem, which they saw and lived in. So when the Holy Land is spoken of, it makes us think of Heaven, but they thought most naturally of the country of Palestine, which God had given them. And when God spoke of delivering them, and keeping them, and never forsaking them, they thought of His keeping them safe from enemies that might come and take away their goods, and distress and kill them, and of His never allowing them to be quite cut off as a nation from the earth. But we know that He means by these promises that He will be with His people to all eternity, in this world and in the next, and will give them at the resurrection an inheritance better than any thing they can now enjoy or conceive.

Now the Jews were not mistaken, they were not wrong in expecting blessings in this world, for God had promised such blessings to those who should obey Him, and He kept His word. But those things were only signs of His favour, as any little thing we give a child to please him is a sign of our love. We may not do any such thing,