the imagination panders for appetite; and even the conscience that no faculty may be left undebased— the divine conscience strives to spread around the loathsome forms of voluptuousness, a haze of moral beauty-calling intoxication, enthusiasm; and revelling, good fellowship; and dignifying every species of indulgence with some name that is holy.

Of what, again, is the miser, and of what is every inordinately covetous man, guilty? Conversant as he may be with every species of trade and traffic, there is one kind of barter, coming yet nearer to his interest, but of which, perchance, he has never thought. He barters virtue for gain! That is the stupendous moral traffic in which he is engaged. The very attributes of the mind are made a part of the stock, in the awful trade of avarice. And if its account-book were to state truly the whole of every transaction, it would often stand thus: "Gained, my hundreds or my thousands; lost, the rectitude and peace of my conscience:" "Gained, a great bargain, driven hard; lost, in the same proportion, the generosity and kindness of my affections." "Credit "and what strife is there for that ultimate item, for that final record?-"Credit, by an immense fortune;" but on the opposing page, the last page of that moral, as truly as mercantile account, I read those words, written not in golden capitals, but in letters of fire-"a lost soul!"

Oh! my brethren, it is a pitiable desecration of such a nature as ours to give it up to the world. Some baser thing might have been given, without regret; but to bow down reason and conscience, to bind them to the clods of earth; to contract those faculties that spread themselves out beyond the world, even to infinity-to contract them to worldly trifles; it is pitiable; it is something to mourn and to weep over. He who sits

down in a dungeon which another has made, has not such cause to bewail himself, as he who sits down in the dungeon which he has thus made for himself. Poverty and destitution are sad things; but there is no such poverty, there is no such destitution, as that of a covetous and worldly heart. Poverty is a sad thing, but there is no man so poor, as he who is poor in his affections and virtues. Many a house is full, where the mind is unfurnished and the heart is empty; and no hovel of mere penury ever ought to be so sad as that house. Behold, it is left desolate; to the immortal it is left desolate, as the chambers of death. Death is there indeed; and it is the death of the soul!

But not to dwell longer upon particular forms of evil; of what, let us ask, is the man guilty? Who is it that is thus guilty? To say that he is noble in his nature, has been sometimes thought a dangerous laxity of doctrine, a proud assumption of merit, "a flattering unction" laid to the soul. But what kind of flattery is it, to say to a man, "you were made but little lower than the angels; you might have been rising to the state of angels; and you have made— what have you made yourself? What you are; a slave to the world; a slave to sense; a slave to masters baser than nature made them, to vitiated sense, and a corrupt and vain world!" Alas! the irony implied in such flattery as this, is not needed to add poignancy to conviction. Boundless capacities shrunk to worse than infantile imbecility! immortal faculties made toilers for the vanities of a moment! a glorious nature sunk to a willing fellowship with evil!-it needs no exaggeration, but only simple statement, to make this a sad and afflicting case. Ill enough had it been for us if we had been made a depraved and degraded Well might the world even then, have sat down

race.

in sackcloth and sorrow; though repentance could properly have made no part of its sorrow. But ill is it indeed, if we have made ourselves the sinful and unhappy beings that we are; if we have given ourselves the wounds, which have brought languishment and debility and distress upon us! What keen regret and remorse would any one of us feel, if in a fit of passion, he had destroyed his own right arm, or had planted in it a lingering wound! And yet this, and this last especially, is what every offender does to some faculty of his nature.

But this is not all. Ill enough had it been for us, if we had wrought out evil from nothing; if from a nature negative and indifferent to the result, we had brought forth the fruits of guilt and misery. But if we have wronged, if we have wrested from its true bias, a nature made for heavenly ends; if it was all beautiful in God's design and in our capacity, and we have made it all base, so that human nature, alas ! is but the by-word of the satirist, and a mark for the scorner; if affections that might have been sweet and pure almost as the thoughts of angels, have been soured and embittered and turned to wrath, even in the homes of human kindness; if the very senses have been brutalized and degraded, and changed from ministers of pleasure to inflictors of pain; and yet more, if all the dread authority of reason has been denied, and all the sublime sanctity of conscience has been set at naught in this downward course; and yet once more, if all these things, not chimerical, not visionary, are actually witnessed, are matters of history, in ten thousand dwellings, around us; al! if they are actually existing, my brethren, in you and in me !—and finally, if uniting together, these causes of depravation have spread a flood of misery over the world, and there

are sorrows and sighings and tears in all the habitations of men, all proceeding from this one cause; then, I say, shall penitence be thought a strange and uncalled-for emotion? Shall it be thought strange that the first great demand of the Gospel, should be for repentance? Shall it be thought strange that a man should sit down and weep bitterly for his sins; so strange that his acquaintances shall ask, "what hath he done?" or shall conclude that he is going mad with fanaticism, or is on the point of losing his reason? No, truly; the dread infatuation is on the part of those who weep not? It is the negligent world, that is fanatical and frantic in the pursuit of unholy indulgences and unsatisfying pleasures. It is such a world refusing to weep over its sins and miseries, that is fatally deranged. Repentance, my brethren, shall it be thought a virtue difficult of exercise? What can the world sorrow for, if not for the cause of all sorrow? What is to awaken grief, if not guilt and shame? Where shall the human heart pour out its tears, if not on those desolations which have been of its own creating?

How fitly is it written, and in language none too strong, that "the sacrifices of God are a broken and contrite heart." And how encouragingly is it written also, "a broken and contrite heart, thou wilt not despise." "Oh! Israel," saith again the sacred word, "Oh, Israel! thou hast destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help found."

IV.

ON THE ADAPTATION WHICH RELIGION, TO BE TRUE AND USEFUL, SHOULD HAVE TO HUMAN NATURE.

A BRUISED REED SHALL HE NOT BREAK, AND THE SMOKING FLAX SHALL HE NOT QUENCH.-Isaiah xlii. 3.

THIS was spoken by prophecy of our Saviour, and is commonly considered as one of the many passages, which either prefigure or describe, the considerate and gracious adaptation of his religion, to the wants and weaknesses of human nature. This adaptation of Christianity to the wants of the mind, is, indeed a topic that has been much, and very justly insisted on, as an evidence of its truth.

I wish however, in the present discourse, to place this subject before you in a light somewhat different, perhaps, from that in which it has usually been viewed. If Christianity is suited to the wants of our nature, it is proper to consider what our nature needs. I shall therefore in the following discourse, give considerable prominence to this inquiry. The wants of our nature are various. I shall undertake to show in several respects, what a religion that is adapted to these wants, should be. In the same connection, I shall undertake to show that Christianity is such a religion.

This course of inquiry, I believe, will elicit some just views of religious truth, and will enable us to judge whether our own views of it are just. My object in it, is to present some temperate and comprehen