The days referred to here by the prophet are undoubtedly the more advanced and brighter days of the gospel dispensation. The days foretold by the prophets, promised by the Eternal, struggled after and prayed for by all the sainted dead. The days when the "wilderness shall blossom as the rose"; when "all shall know the Lord"; when "the beams of the sun of righteousness shall fall on every human soul"; when, in one word, "the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdoms of our God, and of his Christ." Such illustrious days, I believe, are in the future history of this planet; days that, perhaps, shall extend over centuries more numerous far than those that are gone. In "those days" of universal knowledge, virtue, and blessedness, not a solitary man will be found to complain of this hereditary principle in the divine government. Every man shall have such an insight into the nature of God's administration that he shall see the wisdom and feel the beneficence of this principle. In "those days" the successive generations of holy and happy men will clearly see that the good, that will then have come out of this principle to humanity, will far outmeasure all the evil that has ever grown out of its operation, through all the past history of man. In "those days," parents, through many a circling age, down to the solemn day of doom, will transmit nothing to their offspring, but haleness of constitution, elasticity of intellect, purity of feeling, nobleness of soul, and honor of name. One generation will lay a deep rich stratum of experimental knowledge, and blessed example, on which it shall leave its successor to lay another, and thus on for centuries; until humanity shall find itself on that rich and lofty soil, where the choicest productions of Paradise will bloom for ever.

This subject serves several practical purposes :

First: It serves to show the right which every Reformer has to protest against the sins of individuals. If evil is thus contagious, if from sire to son, if from family to family, from generation to generation, it is thus handed down, then the sin of each individual man concerns the race. The sinner who is charged with his sin by another who

earnestly seeks his reformation, has no right to say, as he sometimes does, What does my sin concern you? If I choose to live a life of sinful pleasure, that is my concern not yours. This is false, my friend. Since you are a member of the race, a link in the chain of humanity, your conduct influences others, and your individual sin concerns every member of your species. You have no right to do that which injures your brethren; and in the name of humanity, every man has a right to protest against your sins, and to endeavor to restrain you by all moral means from their commission. Every man has a right to arrest you by earnest expostulations, and in the name of humanity and God, demand that you cease to do evil, and learn to do well;" "that you do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God."

Secondly: It serves to show the solemn responsibility of the parental character. How impressively solemn does the parental relationship appear in the light of this subject! Our children's children, and ages downwards, will feel our influence. Our dispositions will be reproduced, our deeds retransacted, our actions will vibrate on the hearts of unborn men and women. Morally, as parents, we shall live, and think, and act, here in our posterity, either for good or evil, long after our frames are dust and our names forgotten. Ungodly parents are acting every day in direct violation of their parental instincts and wishes. Though they desire the well-being of their children, their ungodly conduct is working their ruin. The breath of the parent is often moral poison to the child.

"Parents! bequeath not to your children's lot

The shame that from them no device can take,
The blemish that will never be forgot."

SHAKSPERE.

Thirdly: It serves to show that the best way to elevate the race is to train the young. Do not cease in your efforts to convert adults, but remember that their conversion bears no comparison to the right training of the young. As one genera- ·

tion so forms another, the best way to serve the whole race is to make a generation physically, intellectually, and morally, what it ought to be. But there is no chance of thus forming a generation, except in the first stages of its life. Concentrate your efforts on the young. Secure for them,

by putting them in possession of all the conditions of health, a hale constitution, and a well developed frame, that when they become parents they may not transmit a deformed frame, a small brain, a diseased constitution. Give them a good intellectual training, seek to inspire them with a love of truth for its own sake, teach them the habit of vigorous thinking and enquiry; that when they become parents, they may not transmit to their offspring the warping and fettering dogmas of past ages. Attend well to their moral training, teach them to be reverential, generous, selfsacrificing, and religious, and to feel that godliness is life; that when they become parents they may not transmit to the next generation, the profanity of scepticism, the selfishness of the world, or the mere cant of religion.

Fourthly: It seems to throw some light upon what is called original sin." If sin is what John says it is a "Transgression of the law," original sin is original nonsense. But if by original sin is meant a deterioration of our nature, and a disturbance of our moral relations, then it is a fact palpable to every eye, incontrovertible to every intellect, conscious to every soul. By the hereditary principle on which the Almighty has been pleased to conduct His government of man, and for which we have seen there is no just reason for complaint, there must be what is infelicitously and technically called original sin. Under such a constitution of things, the children must bear the iniquities of their fathers. Judgment, as the Apostle has it, must come upon all men, through Adam, the first Father's offence. The doctrine is not peculiar to revelation, it is written in every chapter of the history of the world.

Fifthly It seems to indicate the philosophy of Christ's incarnation. "To destroy sin in the flesh." To do this not

merely in theories, books, or speech, but in actual human life, is the grand condition of the world's salvation. But inasmuch as sin, by this hereditary principle, is transmitted through physical relationship and social influences, it seems necessary that He who would destroy it, should become a link in the great chain of humanity, identify Himself with the race, and originate the counteracting influences of truth and righteousness. Hence the world's Great Deliverer became the SON OF MAN. He was born of a woman; He grew up with His generation ; He mingled with the multitude ; He impregnated the social atmosphere of His age with new ideas of a new spirit; He became a second Adam, the head of a new, vast, numerous, and influential family. By His regenerating ideas and creative spirit He was to raise up a class of holy men, that would work and multiply from age to age, until the influences of the first Adam should be felt "As in Adam all die even so in Christ shall all be made alive." Christ, like the leaven, which the woman put into the meal, enters the race, sends his nature through every particle, and will one day assimilate the whole to himself.

no more.

Since 'tis decreed, that all the good or ill,
That ever on our own race shall fall,
Shall flow from sire to son,

And work by human powers;

Since man by man, must rise or fall,

Sink Hell-ward, or towards Heaven ascend-
Man's devil only by man's nature can be fought,
Redemption only by his struggles can be won.

The Genius of the Gospel.

ABLE expositions of the Gospel, describing the manners, customs, and localities alluded to by the inspired writers; also interpreting their words, and harmonizing their formal discrepancies, are, happily, not wanting amongst us. But the eduction of its WIDEST truths and highest suggestions is still a felt desideratum. To some attempt at the work we devote these pages. We gratefully avail ourselves of all exegetical helps within our reach; but to occupy our limited space with any lengthened archæological, geographic, or philological, remarks, would be to miss our aim ;which is not to make bare the mechanical process of scriptural study, but to reveal its spiritual results.

SECTION SIXTY-FIRST :-Matt. xviii. 10-14.

"Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven. For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost. How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray. Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.”—Matt. xviii. 10—14.

SUBJECT:-Guardian Angels.

THERE are two things which at once strike us in this passage. First: That there is a tendency in the world to despise the humble Christian. The caution which Christ here enforces against it, implies its prevalence. The first Christians, being poor, in a worldly sense, destitute for the most part of the graces of intellectual culture and social refinement, and known as the pledged followers of One who was despised and rejected by the age, were regarded with no small measure of contempt by their thoughtless contemporaries. They were everywhere spoken against. Nor is the tendency on the part of worldly men to despise the humble Christian, peculiar to the Jew in the first ages of Christianity; it has always been prevalent, and still is. Even in nominally Christian England, a poor Christian is despised. It is true, that you may see the world bow

Vol. IX.

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