lieve that he who is zealously affected on every other subject, may be always lukewarm on this. If it were enough to keep the commandments according to the bare letter of the moral code, surely the first of these commandments would have been altogether superfluous. But it is not sufficient that the affections be merely admitted into religion; if they are allowed to enter it at all, they must enter it powerfully; if God is to be loved, he must be loved supremely. By a fervency of spirit in serving the Lord, must be understood an ardent and active desire of honouring the Lord, and of obeying his commands "with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength." If the soul be worth any thing, it is inestimably precious. If we have never felt the pleasures of devotion, our piety is spurious and questionable. If our affections are never set upon things above, if our hearts have never glowed with gratitude for the blessings of redemption, and with the love of him who died to obtain them for us, we know religion only as a law, not as an enjoyment; it is our schoolmaster, not the friend of our bosom. This fervency of spirit is one of the brightest ornaments of the christian character. It enters into

the heart, and engages the whole man in the work of devotion, giving a double measure of force and alacrity to that religion which was before sincere. In a word, it is to the spiritual life what health is to the natural; it makes that spirited and cheerful, which otherwise would only breathe; and more conscious that religion is his grand concern, the fervent Christian will set about the duties of it with suitable ardour, and alacrity of mind. The passions and affections which God hath given man as the springs of action, will in him be exerted to their noblest purpose, to inspire him with cheerfulness and delight in serving the Lord. He will feel in his heart, though in an inferior degree, those affections and desires so passionately described by the holy Psalmist, "How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts! my soul longeth for the courts of the Lord. For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. The desire of my soul is to thee, O God! and to the remembrance of thy name. With my soul have I desired thee in the night, yea with my spirit within me, will I seek thee early."

It may be objected that a being so far removed above the limits of human conception as God, can hardly be the object of human affection and

desire. We can fear infinite power, we can be astonished at unsearchable wisdom, we can be awed at spotless purity, joined with inconceivable majesty; but to love a Being who has nothing in common with mortality, nothing visible, tangible or audible, is not within the ordinary exercise of human affections. Yet this single circumstance, that God is not the object of any one of our senses is abundantly compensated by the consideration that he is never absent from us, that he compasseth continually our path, and our lying down, and that we cannot remove a step from the sphere of his presence and observation: that not a single sigh escapes us which reaches not his ear, nor an affectionate emotion springs upon our hearts to which he is not a witness. why should the affection of love towards infinite goodness be more unintelligible than that of fear towards infinite power? a power unseen, is commonly more dreadful from its obscurity. Why also should not the other perfections of God, as well as his power, be the objects of affections refined into more purity and wrought into greater energy under the chastising influence of reverential awe? But wherefore in religion alone should things spiritual and invisible have no command over the affections? The philosopher

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becomes intensely interested in his abstract and lofty speculations. The imagination of the artist glows with the forms of ideal beauty. And has religion nothing to elevate the soul, nothing to absorb the thoughts, and to command the passions. Is the grandest object on which our minds can dwell, because he cannot be seen, to be excluded from our affections; is he who is essential purity and goodness, because he is unmingled with the grossness of human nature, to be contemplated in cold and listless speculation?

A more plausible objection to the admission of the affections into religion arises from the enthusiasm to which they are said naturally to lead. Many persons it must be confessed are constitutionally prone to mistake their animal sensations for sentiments of the heart, and to measure their attainments in religion by the high or low temperature of those sensations. Indeed it is difficult to define the sphere, or ascertain the extent of the devout affections. Good men who have witnessed the mischiefs of fanaticism have fled perhaps too precipitately to the opposite extreme in their religion. But let us not infer from the abuse of what is good, its utter inutility. Is not every thing in this world exposed to grosser perversion, in proportion to its intrinsic excellence?

Has not the reasoning faculty itself been often debased into the most wretched sophistry? Has it not been exerted in every possible form of fallacious deduction, and turned against the dearest expectations and interests of men? But fervency of spirit in serving the Lord, has no affinity, no resemblance to enthusiastic zeal. It proceedeth from above. It is a beam from the Father of Light, pure, benign, and steady; warming, and enlightening, and tranquillizing the mind. It is a temper wrought in the heart by the Holy Spirit, compounded of love to God and of zeal for his honour, inseparably attended with love and goodwill to man. Fervency of spirit in serving the Lord, consists not in a few starts and fits of natural devotion when we are in danger or difficulty, without the help of man; neither is it a wild blaze of religious passion that flashes and vanishes. Much less shall it be profaned by confounding it with those furies, fanaticism and superstition, which have drenched whole countries with blood, under pretence of serving the Lord: "Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath, for it was cruel. O my soul, enter not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united." It is true that the passions are an uncertain criterion of religion; and the external

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