of the christian temper which produces it, "of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." The heart then being the fountain of speech as well as action, the same means must be resorted to, for the government of our lips as of our lives, the word and ordinances of God, and the exercises of devotion. Yet even these means of grace will require an auxiliary regimen to keep alive in our daily and necessary commerce with the world the pious feelings excited in the church or the closet. This end, conversation is peculiarly adapted to promote. But unhappily, religion is a topic either excluded from ordinary discourse, or introduced in such a manner as can have no tendency to excite serious impressions of it in the hearers or the speakers. Conversation is the food of the mind, which like the body, in this respect, will be injured, if it be not nourished by its constant diet. We are christians by profession; but if in our habitual discourse, there be no savour of that profession, nothing good to the use of edifying, no interchange of pious thought or serious admonition, nothing which has a tendency to make us better men and better christians, then assuredly, in the words of the Apostle, "We come

together not for the better but for the worse;" our conversation is not such as becometh the gospel of Christ. Unhappily the zeal of the age against fanatics and enthusiasts has countenanced the natural propensity of worldly men to talk with levity and irreverence of things and persons connected with religion. The frequent hearing of such discourse will naturally destroy all religious seriousness in young persons; and established christians, however shocked by it at first, will soon feel it operate on their faith and practice a change for the worse. Since then out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, let the heart be kept with all diligence: let consideration as a centinel guard the door of our lips, and question the rising emotions whence they come, and whither they go? Are they the emissaries of pride or anger, of envy or hatred, of any unsocial and malignant passion, let us arrest and crush them before they break out in words by which God may be offended, our neighbour injured, or ourselves disgraced. In proportion as we learn to exercise this inward scrutiny and control, our tongues will be accustomed to know the reins, and move under the guidance of reason and truth. This regulation of the heart is the work, the arduous

but indispensable work which religion requires of us, but which the grace of God alone can enable us to accomplish. Let us, therefore,

strengthen the guard of our hearts by imploring, in constant and fervent prayer, the aid of the Holy Spirit in the conflict with natural corruption. We observe stated periods and forms of prayer; we do well, but not enough; as a proof of this, the strictest formalists in religion are often from a reliance on the single efficacy of religious forms, notoriously liable to those disorders of the passions for which religious ordinances were appointed as the cure. Let the devotional spirit then go forth with us where most it will be wanted, into the daily occurrences and exigencies of life; then, if on the first rising of any bad passion, or the first solicitation of any criminal desire, we instantly address ourselves in silent ejaculation, and mental prayer to God, we repel at its entrance the vicious suggestion, we check the hasty or uncharitable expression, we apply the sovereign antidote before the poison has had time to reach a vital part. It is this devotional spirit which alone can keep up that habitual sense of the divine presence which is the only effectual check to sin, the only impregnable defence of innocence. Whence is it that we so often

offend in thought, word, and deed, against the Divine Majesty, but because religion has so little a share of our thoughts, that it is evident we forget, or rather we do not, we cannot believe from the heart in the divine omniscience and omnipresence. Let us endeavour to have God more in our thoughts. In thinking, as well as in speaking and acting, let us accustom ourselves to look up to the great Searcher of hearts, who detects the thought in the moment of its birth, before it is formed into a word upon the tongue. Let us control the licentiousness of appetite, and the violence of passion, with this reflection: He that shall pronounce my eternal doom has me this moment in his eye. If we thus set God alway before us, we shall take heed to our ways that we sin mot with our tongue.

In conclusion, I shall apply the doctrine of the text as a key to those declarations of our Lord, that "of every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account in the day of judgment, for by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." These are hard sayings, understood in the rigour of their literal meaning; but a just and gracious God could not expect from frail men the life of angels, could never intend to forbid all discourse

but such as savours of wisdom and piety, or to call us to an account in the day of judgment for those social hours of harmless mirth and pleasantry which maintain the cheerfulness of society, that cheerfulness of heart which "doth good like a medicine,” refreshes and invigorates the wearied spirits, makes us fit to perform the duties of our stations, enables us to taste the comforts of life, and to bear up under the weight of its troubles. The words here denominated idle, are such as the mouth speaketh out of the abundance of a heart immersed in sensual vanities, and void of every virtuous and christian sentiment. Their connexion with the preceding verse sufficiently marks these idle words as some of those evil things which the evil man bringeth forth out of the evil treasure of his heart, and for which therefore, without an intervening repentance, he shall be condemned in the righteous judgment of God. By our words then, as evidences of our real characters and of the dispositions of our hearts and the state of our souls, we shall be finally justified or condemned. In this evan

gelical sense then are the words of Solomon awfully verified, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue." Let us, my brethren, choose life; and whilst in the depraved estimate