i muiser | Mesa sint of persetening emery a mne w TË VUAN to seek more jadi ruttuE BOT: ISSCCLs”. (fectimes perhaps, when he is acceng Awit 100D L8 28enses and thinks that this 106 that preventivar be advertall the good effect 100% sia waren S STIE De v is past his sermons. A midi dera prajan may be wapande te powder, by firing which he cal detall is sent med is errand without the prayers, de me better than a heap of cannon-balls withon powder. There must be prayer from a beart on fire. Some vermoxa ata „ke a bright antlery-piece for a model: all feined bom wed ......: everybody says What a splendid preek of orduavee" Pope stand and lock into its mouth, and measure jis breech, and lit the ball it can carry, and admire it without fear, for there is no powder in it. It is not meant to shoot any person, but to attract admiration as a finished piece of ordnance. An elaborate model-sermon, without prayer, is a gun that a man might put his ear to the muzzle of without fear. And some sermons are Like the artillery-pieces that are wheeled into line in a whom fort, and fired with blank cartridges. There must be both powder and ball, if execution is to be done. Above all things, there must be much prayer. There must be prayer on fire.—Dr. Cheever. PREACHED in the First Church, New-Haven, on the 12th of October, 1845; the Lord's Day after the decease of Mrs. Mary Dwight, widow of President Dwight. BY REV. LEONARD BACON, D. D.; PASTOR OF THE FIRST CHURCH IN NEW-HAVEN, CONN. PSALM XCII: 14. "They shall still bring forth fruit in old age." THE text is spoken of the righteous, in a poetical figure in which the righteous-that is, they who trust in God and love Him—are compared, as in the first Psalm, with a tree which strikes its roots deep into the ground, and is continually refreshed with living springs. "The righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree; He shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those that are planted in the house of the Lord They shall bring forth fruit in old age, They shall be vigorous and flourishing; To show that the Lord is upright: He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him!" The point on which the Psalmist in this passage fixes, as he contemplates the blessedness of God's own children, is the beauty and happiness of their old age. The court or open area in the center of an eastern dwelling, and especially the court of any great and stately dwelling, was often adorned with a tree, or sometimes with more than one, for beauty, for shade, and, as it might be, for fruit. There sometimes the palm-tree, planted by the cool fountain, shot up its tall trunk toward the sky, and waved its green top, far above the roof, in the sun-light and the breeze. There sometimes the olive, transplanted from the rocky hill-side, may have flourished under the protection and culture of the household, and may have rewarded their care with the rich abundance of its nutritious berries. With such images in his mind, the Psalmist, having spoken of the brief prosperity of the wicked, and having compared it with the springing and flourishing of the grass, which grows to its little height only to be immediately cut down, naturally and beautifully compares the righteous, not with the deciduous herbage, but with the hardy tree that lives on throgh de sommers and the WIDETS MORTOS, and from season to seasce stress growth. These treas of righteousness as the poes ecocecres of them, are * planted in the house of the Lord” they stand far and flowering in the courts of our God"-even od age they bring forth frit-they are full of sap and fursting —they are living memonials - to show that the Lord is faithful and that those who trust in Him shall never be confounded. The subject of thought, then to which the text invites us is the old age of piety, as distinguished from the old age of the worldling. It may be profitable to us all to fix our thoughts a few moments on this theme-the old age of the belever. What is it?. Wherein consists its beauty, its usefulness, its happiness? Wherein is it unutke the old age of those who have lived and are living without God in the world? 1. The old age of the Christian is the old age of a life of faith and of communion with God. Faith, the principle which lays hold on things unseen, and makes them realities to the soul, is from first to last one grand characteristic that distinguishes the righteous, as the Psalmist here calls them, from the ungodly. They walk by faith, looking upon things not as they appear to the eye of sense and groveling selfishness, but as they appear in the light of God's truth; and in so doing, they walk with God, and there is communion of thought and affection between their mind and the mind of God. Thus their path is as the shining light that shineth more and more to the perfect day. They are making progress in faith and in communion with God, not only during the period of youth and of maturity, while the powers of mere nature are still unfolding and strengthening, but afterward, amid the infirmities of decaying nature, even to the close of life. The good man's judgment may begin to fail-his imagination may fail—his active energy for one work and another may fail, but his faith fails, not, and the charity-the holy love-which is communion with God, "never faileth." The ungodly, on the other hand, the men of this world, look only at the things of this world, the things that are seen, the things that pertain exclusively to time. Of God and his government, of Heaven and hell, of eternity, of sin, and of salvation from the curse and power of sin, they habitually take no cognizance. Such things enter very little into their thoughts, and have no place in their plans and calculations. And as they grow old, and the powers of nature begin slowly and successively to break and fail, how melancholy is the sight to any thoughful beholder. How painful is it to see them, while the things of this life and this world are so soon to disappear for ever from their view, and while the thin bleached hair, the dimmed eye, the wrinkled countenance, the trembling and skinny hand, the stooping frame, and the tottering step, are so many tokens of the end-how revolting is it to a thoughtful mind to see them still caring for nothing and thinking of nothing but these transient and unreal interests. How painful to see an old man, upon whose path the lengthening shadows from life's sunset fall dark and heavy, while yet he has no devout conciousness, no serious habitual sense of his relations to the vast unseen; an old man whose decaying powers announce the approach of death and the nearness of eternity; but who can resist and counteract the growing apathy of age, only as he persists in vexing himself with worldly cares, still scheming and scrambling to add a little more to the accumulations which he must leave so soon. How unlike to this, how beautiful in the comparison, is the old age of the believer-an old age of faith. How tranquil and heavenly the light that, amid the shadows of departing time, beams on the believing mind. Think of such a mind, full of matured and steadfast trust in God, long conversant with God and with eternity, rich in thoughts and affections that stretch beyond the bounds of earth and time, calmly reposing on the reality of things not seen, assured that God's design of love shall be accomplished on earth and in Heaven; -how beautiful is the triumph of grace over the decay of nature! 2. The old age of the Christian, as distinguished from the old age of the ungodly, is characterized by hope. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, as well as the evidence of things not seen. The language of faith is, I know in whom I have believed, and that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him against that day. The believing mind, believing in God as He has revealed Himself in the Gospel, believing in things unseen and eternal, as those things eternal are manifested in the light of Christ's atoning cross; cannot but hope, for that mind knows and is assured that the Judge of all the earth will do right, and will cause all things to work together for good to them that love Him. In regard to the things of this life, the things that are seen and are temporal, the things which the men of this world live for, youth is the period of expectation. But as old age comes on, the illusion which young imagination threw over the future of time gradually disappears. To the aged, the glory and the bloom of this life are no more; and if this life is all to them-if they are without God in the worldif they have no hope within the veil, no inspiring consciousness of august and blessed relations to God and to eternity, what have they to hope for? Between them and that gloomy depth there lies the grave, only a dark, cold, arid remnant of existence, over which imagination itself, now languid and decaying, can spread no light nor bloom for hope to live upon. The aged unbeliever, without God in the world; the aged worldling, to whom, in his selfishness, his own plans are everything, and God's plans nothing-what is there in the world to come that he can hope for? What in this world that he can leave in God's hands with the hope that God will care for it? If he has property, he can make his will and appoint his executors, and amuse himself with turning his houses and lands into ready money, as if to take it with him, and he can build him a sepulcher, and give orders for his grave-clothes and his coffin; but what more? When all this is done, which way shall he look? But how different is it with the aged believer! To him, indeed, as to others, old age is the evening of life, its dim light still fading into darkness. But to him faith opens a vista, through which the soul looks forth in hope beyond the deepening shadows around him. Nor is earth itself dark to him as it is dark to the ungodly. That which the grace of God has long ago taught him to regard as the highest of all interests here-the great cause of God and of the world's recovery from the curse of man's apostacy-that great work, more important in his affections than any transient and selfish interest of his own, is not dependent on him. Much as he has cared for it and prayed for it, much as he has denied himself and labored in its behalf, he knows that it fails not when his powers fail, nor dies when he dies.. The decay of nature, then, brings to him no decay of hope in regard to the great object for which he has been living. His old age is an old age of hope. 3. The old age of the believer is an old age of cheerfulness. In the gradual decay of the various bodily powers, in the dim eclipse which slowly comes upon the faculties of the mind, in the conciousness of a steady and resistless approach toward the utmost boundary of the term of human life, there are influences constantly operating to produce depression of spirits. And when the old man begins to find that he is old, by feeling that he is not what he once was, and that others are more sensible of it than he is himself; when he finds himself no longer called on, as he once was, for the various services and duties of active life; when he finds himself crowded, as it were, off the stage by the men of a younger generation; there is in all this a strong tendency to an unhappy and irritable habit of mind. The old man, unless grace sustains him when nature decays, is in great danger of becoming discontented, querulous and morose, and of thinking that in proportion as he grows old, all around him grows worse. And it is not by any mere adpeal to conscience, it is not by the mere force of prohibition and censure, marking and declaring the wickedness of the thing, that these tendencies to depression, and discontent, and querulousness, are to be effectually resisted. They must be counteracted by a living force within. That counteracting force the believer experiences in the power of faith and in the grace of God that dwells within him. Faith surrounds him with the calm excitement of great and glorious realities; realities that grow nearer and brighter to his mind as the world of sense and time grows dim with age. Hope, leaning upon the love and power of God, and looking forth toward Heaven, raises him above the depressing influences of infirmity and decay. His habitual communion with God, the sympathy of his mind with the plans and movements of Almighty goodness, and the various effects which a long continued course of gracious self-discipline has wrought upon his soul, enable him to resist the tendency to discontent and moroseness which beset him in the gradual failure of the powers of nature. How beautiful is an unrepining, bright, cheerful old age! How doubly beautiful when that calm, bright cheerfulness, lighting up the evening of life, is caught from Heaven, and is none other than the cheerfulness of a mind at peace |