SERMON III.

2 THESS. ii. 15.

Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

In addressing you on a former occasion, I ventured to protest against that system of compromise, which, from the days of Ammonius Saccas to the present hour, has always been popular among those religionists who prefer peace to truth, instead of truth to peace; but which, perhaps, never prevailed among men really serious in their views, and honest in their intentions, to the extent it does now. To sacrifice any portion of any known truth, or, which comes to nearly the same thing, to forbear from the expression of it, from any sordid care or debasing fear, in order to promote peace among ourselves, or to offer a more imposing front to

the enemy, to increase our political strength, or to ward off impending persecution; to silence an adversary, or to save the advantages and honours of an establishment;-in a word, for any cause, pretext, or purpose whatever, is to act on a principle just the reverse of that which won for the primitive martyrs their crown of glory, and enabled our own forefathers to hand down to us the church in which it is our privilege to eat the bread of life. Suppose that our forefathers, those to whom God in his providential mercy committed the custody of his church, influenced by a different principle, had acted on a different system, and, instead of maintaining resolutely and firmly, as (peace be to their ashes) they did, the whole counsel of God, had from time to time sacrificed, for the sake of peace, here a little and there a little of what some of their contemporaries, relying on their own private judgment, were pleased to consider nonessential points;-suppose this to have been the case, and what would our position be at the present moment? Of the torn and tattered vesture of our Saviour what should we have left? With our clergy, if clergy they might still be called, stripped of all those decent adornments of office which at one time excited the spleen of the captious and the fury of the superstitious;

with our sanctuaries bare of ornament as the desecrated barn of the lay-improprietor; what would have become, by this time, of our venerable ritual, our primitive liturgy, and all those other divine offices by which our souls are attuned for heaven, and brought into communion with the saints of the church triumphant, through the self-same services by which those saints themselves, through a long succession of ages, sought for and obtained sanctification, solace, and strength, while they were militant on earth? Long since they would have all been sacrificed to conciliate those who preferred the muddy waters of Geneva to the pure fountains of catholic antiquity. Where would have been that ministry which we now trace up to the Apostles, and through the Apostles to Christ? Long since, it would have been levelled to the dust, to make way for the Presbyterian platform. To conciliate the Zuinglians the canon of the communion would have been altered, and to please anabaptists our children would have remained unbaptized. And our Articles,-what would have become of them ?They would have yielded to other Articles breathing all the horrors of an unmitigated Calvinism, unless these, too, had in their turn given way, in the last century, to an Arian creed, to gratify those who

contended, that, in maintaining the catholic doctrine of the Trinity, we were narrowing the pale unnecessarily, and contending for a mere iota. Such at least would have been the case with the majority of those who are now members of the church of this land. Some few there might have been, there would have been, a chosen few, who, refusing to bow the knee to Baal, or to worship the golden image of worldly expedience, though a burning fiery furnace blazed before it, would have kept up in dens and caverns and upper rooms, amid contempt and scorn and persecution, the apostolical succession of the ministry, while they would have soothed their sufferings and sorrows by the calm but sublime and elevating devotions of the Liturgy;—and of these, preserved "as a cluster of the vintage, as a candle in a dark place, as a haven or ship from the tempest,"-of these the successors perhaps would be now beginning to creep out of their obscurity, and to win to their side, like the episcopalians of Scotland, the more soberminded and better educated of their countrymen. But if it were so, it would not be in the churches once their own; it would be amid the difficulties of a bare toleration, not with the aids and appliances by which an establishment influences public opinion,-it would not be in these ancient