sponsible to God for our faithful adherence to him. In the sacrament of the Lord's Supper we renew our covenant with him, we present ourselves at his altar in public acknowledgment of our allegiance to him as our Lord. We partake the body and the blood of Christ in token of our grateful remembrance of his dying love, we implore forgiveness for past offences, and fresh supplies of his enabling grace to resist future temptations. After such solemn and repeated engagements, let them who still continue in sin reflect, that they inflame the guilt of their disobedience by the addition of unfaithfulness and perjury, and that the time assuredly will come, (may it not come too late) when they shall be witnesses against themselves, and need no other; when their own wickedness shall correct them, and their backsliding shall reprove them, and they shall know and feel that it is an evil thing and bitter to forsake the Lord.

Let us next consider the obligation to "cleave to the Lord our God," from a sense of his infinite goodness. We are taught to address him as our Father which is in heaven, and our individual experience justifies the endearing appellation. He is the father of all our mercies. By him have we been holden up from the womb. From him,

the fountain of love, proceeded that parental affection which fondly nursed our helpless infancy, and watched over our safety with unceasing solicitude. From our entrance into life to the present hour has his providential guard been placed about our path and about our bed, protecting us from the arrow that flieth by day, and from the pestilence that walketh in darkness, from diseases, assaults, and accidents, which no human prudence could foresee or escape. Nor let us forget the mercy of our deliverance from sudden death; how often God has spared our lives when he might have cut us off in the midst of actual sin, and in a state of utter unfitness for another world, for no other cause conceivable by us than to prolong our space for repentance. The proofs are not more strong and convincing that in God we live, and move, and have our being, than that to his provident beneficence we owe, through human instruments and second causes, our health, and ease, and worldly comforts, our social enjoyments and domestic happiness. Through his creative wisdom and goodness, the senses which might have been so many inlets of pain and misery, are inexhaustible sources of exquisite gratifications and delights, so that we see, and hear, and taste, and feel, how gracious the Lord is. Still more illus

triously is the goodness of our Creator displayed in those noble endowments of the mind by which we exercise lordship over the creation, explore the heavens and the earth, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge. But the privileges we enjoy as the rational creatures of God, together with all the bounties and blessings of his creation, disappear as the glory of the stars in the beams of the sun, when we contemplate the love of God to us in Christ Jesus. In this stupendous act of grace the Lord descends upon Zion, and causeth all his goodness to pass before us, proclaiming himself, as of old he did to his prophet, "the Lord God merciful and gracious, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin." The voluntary surrender of the Son of his bosom to be a man of sorrows, and an atoning sacrifice, that by his sufferings we might be pardoned, and by his merits and intercession received into heaven with him; this is so transcendent a display of the divine goodness and mercy as should draw our hearts by the indissoluble cords of grateful affection to the Lord who bought us, and determine us to devote to his service those bodies and those spirits which are his. Lastly, under a sense of the manifold wants and infirmities of mortality, let us cleave to the Lord

T

our God. "The beginning of pride," says the Son of Sirach, “is when one departeth from his God, and his heart is turned away from his Maker." The source of this pride is ignorance of our frail nature and dependent condition; and the natural fruits of this ignorance are forgetfulness of God, and entire reliance for our happiness and security on second causes and human instruments. This is our epidemical sin. Like the Israelites, we have committed two evils, we have forsaken the fountain of living waters and hewn us out cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no waters. We seek our comforts and fix our dependencies every where but where alone they never would fail us, in the favour of the Almighty, In the full enjoyment of worldly felicity we can with difficulty conceive the evil days which await us, and all the sons of men. But those days of darkness will come, and come with aggravated horror to those who have lived without God in the world. The sun of prosperity in which you have hitherto basked may soon be wrapt in dark clouds, or set to rise no more: your health may be turned into sickness, your ease into pain, your wealth into want, your credit into disgrace, your prosperity into calamity; and then what alleviations has this world to afford

power will

you

have in yourselves to

you, what strengthen and support yourselves? You will totter like infants without the nurse's aid, if you attempt to bear up in your own strength, when distress and anguish come upon you, and all the waves of affliction are breaking over you; prepare then now, to meet the evil days, in time betake yourselves to the ark of safety, and secure a retreat from the impending storms under the protection of the Most High. Cleave to the Lord your God, and shall be safe; stay yourselves on his everlasting arms, and he will sup-. port and guide you with the tender solicitude of a parent, he will strengthen your weakness, console your misery, and be a present help in every time of trouble.

you

And now, my brethren, having endeavoured to explain and to enforce the duty of cleaving to the Lord, if I were to address you in the words of Joshua, "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve," your hearts would be ready to answer with the Israelites, "God forbid that we should forsake the Lord." We should abhor the thoughts of apostatizing from the God of our fathers. But are we not chargeable with partiality in his service? Do we not indulge the hope that with a little management, we can contrive to please