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yourselves round it, and peace with a reconciled God shall be proclaimed to you. Come, and you shall have a full discharge of all the debt that is due to divine justice. At that very cross where sin and Satan met their overthrow, at the hand of Jesus it shall be cancelled.

Oh!

that I could hear this day the cry of penitence from some contrite heart :-"Woe is me that I have dwelt so long in Mesech, and sojourned so long in tents of Kedar!" Oh! that I, the Lord's servant, were addressed in such words as those that Saul once uttered: "I have transgressed the commandment, now therefore I pray thee return with me, that I may worship the Lord:" my answer should be, "I will return;" for the Lord is long-suffering and merciful, and will abundantly pardon. Come with a renunciation of your own righteousness! come in faith, with a firm dependence upon sovereign. grace! and thou shalt hear no more of thine iniquities, and thou shalt see the salvation of God.

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SERMON XI.

CHRIST THE RISEN SAVIOUR.

LUKE XXIV. part of the 5th verse.

Why seek ye the living among the dead?

THE heart of man is so apt to be led away by the feelings of his nature, and his ways are usually so unlike those that lead to true wisdom, that he requires to be continually reminded of what he is doing, by close, serious, and searching questions. Thus when "the sons of Eli had become, through transgression, the sons of Belial, and knew not the Lord, and the report of their evil dealings with all Israel had reached the ears of Eli," he lifted up his warning voice and said unto them, "Why do ye such things? Why make ye the Lord's people to transgress?" And thus God, in speaking to the cities of Judah, tenderly reproves their backwardness to trust in him, their want of assurance in his pro

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mises : Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, my way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God; hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God fainteth not, neither is weary?" And so Paul reasoned with the idolaters at Lystra, who, because he had wrought a miracle upon a cripple that had never walked, would have worshipped him as a god; which when the apostle heard of, he rent his clothes and ran in among the people, crying out and saying, "Sirs! why do ye these things? we also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God which made heaven and earth and the sea and all things that are therein." These questions do, indeed, so far differ from that proposed by the angel in the text, that whilst they refer altogether to the wickedness of the heart, the other must be referred to the blindness of the understanding. But every one of them was proposed with a view to the same result that the mind might be induced to examine its motives, and the heart to commune with itself. Self-examination is not less necessary for the ignorant and unwise, than for the impious and profane; for the disciple who has acknowledged Christ as his Lord, than for the high-minded who think that they can as

cend into God's holy hill without him. There was an honest sincerity, a feeling of love, about those who were seen at the break of day hastening to the sepulchre of the dead, but they were not spiritually instructed concerning him of whom they were in search. It was not the business of the angel to do this; he only reminded them that they were not in the way of finding Jesus: "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" Now, my brethren, this passage may surely be made applicable to some of the multitude of seekers that abound in the Christian world. I look upon this earth as a vast sepulchre, and very many of those who dwell in it exhausting their strength and labour among the dead. The truth may be proved by showing, in the first place, the sort of work in which mankind are occupied; and, secondly, by specifying the causes which keep up the delusion.

It is truly a most awful consideration, that an innumerable number of those rational beings that buy and sell, and plant and build, some of whom are rich enough to entertain kings, and learned enough to sit at the helm of a nation, will be thrust out from the kingdom of God:

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they seek to enter in, but shall not be able.

You would shudder with horror were you to see even a single madman cast himself down headlong from some precipitous mountain; but here

are whole congregations, villages, cities of madmen, as determinately bent upon their ruin, and hardly a voice is heard to say, What doest thou? Let the watchman cry out from the watch-tower, the sound of the trumpet dies away upon the ear; let the ministers of the temple strive to persuade them by the mercies of God, like the deaf adder, they refuse to hearken; like the uncontroulable waves, they press on in rapid succession; they pass, and the eye loses them in the mighty ocean. Oh! my friends, I am not representing a fiction, to work upon your feelings; your own eyes may behold it as an every day reality. I would have you see it, that you may not be swept away by the torrent; I would have you feel it, so that ceasing to have any confidence in the flesh, you may look unto God and be saved. Let us see what testimony can be collected out of the actions of men to verify what I have now said. And first, as to salvation, every sabbath-hearer, and almost every sabbath-breaker, is encouraged by the father of lies to believe that he is seeking it. Let us take the most favourable specimen of unprofitable seekers, the amiable moralist. His comforters, the pillars of his house, the supporters of his hope, are the works of the law; he thanks God that he can lay his head upon a pillow of down with a conscience.

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