and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for you."-" Now the just shall live by faith, but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. But we," says the apostle,-O that we might all 66 the same! say we are not of them who draw back unto perdition, but of them who believe to the saving of the soul."

DISCOURSE XI.

Job, xlii. 5, 6.—“ I have heard of thee with the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes."

I HAD once an opportunity, my brethren, of explaining to you, in some detail, that law of human nature, according to which our emotions arise from our perceptions, and the force of the former is uniformly proportioned to the vividness of the latter; and I then stated also a fact which your own observation and experience must have confirmed,— the superiority of those perceptions in respect of clearness, and liveliness, and force, which we derive from the direct contemplation of the objects, to those which we receive when the ideas of those objects are brought before our minds through the medium of vocal signs,-by the instrumentality of spoken language. The saying of an ancient poet has become proverbial among those acquainted with the language he employs, that what is suggested through the ear does, of necessity, affect the heart more lan

guidly than what is presented to the faithful eye. In these well-known facts of human nature, then, you have the explanation, so to speak, of the passage now before us, in which the Idumean Patriarch explains the comparative erroneousness and faintness of his former apprehensions concerning his own moral character in its reference to God, by the circumstance, that then he had only "heard of him by the hearing of the ear," and accounts for the mighty change which had since taken place upon his views of this subject, by the fact, "But now mine eye seeth thee." Let us consider, therefore, a little more minutely, what was the change in Job's impressions of his own moral character and condition produced by his being placed in the immediate presence of the Almighty, and how the alteration in his circumstances was fitted to produce the alteration in his feelings.

On looking back, then, upon the arguments maintained by Job in the controversy with his three friends, who, proceeding on the fallacious principle, that, in the administration of Providence, peculiar sufferings endured by a human being are the infallible indication of peculiar crimes committed by him, had charged him foolishly as having reached some dread pre-eminence in guilt, corresponding to the sad pre-eminence he then held in sorrow, we find, that if they had pushed their opinions to a false and ungenerous extreme on one side, he had

rushed-such is the condition of our poor nature -to an equally fallacious and unjustifiable extreme upon the other. He had not only repelled with scorn and indignation the charges so cruelly heaped upon his afflicted head, of a certain excelling wickedness,‚—a certain terrible supremacy among the haters of God and workers of iniquity, which had provoked the Almighty Governor to set him up as a conspicuous monument of his intolerable vengeance,—a mark for the arrows of his fiery indignation,-a prodigy of wrathful suffering, to proclaim to all beholders how "fearful a thing it is to fall into the hands of the living God,"-but he had asserted his innocence in such a way,—with such strength and violence of expression, as by one who was disposed to reprove words," and "the speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind," might easily be interpreted as ascribing perfection to himself, and attributing injustice to God. For "Job," as Elihu remarks in summing up the controversy, and pointing out the faults and excesses of the argument on either side, "Job hath said, I am righteous, and God hath taken away my judgment." He had, indeed, admitted occasionally, here and there, his own participation in the universal depravity of human nature. For "who," he asks, "can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?-Thou writest bitter things against me: Thou makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth." Yet, even in the utterance

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of these confessions, it is plain from the context in which they occur, that there was implied a tacit reflection on the Almighty's justice, or at least a tacit remonstrance against his severity, in visiting so rigidly upon him as an individual that which he shared with all his race,-that which was the taint of his nature, rather than the guilt of his person, and in calling up for judgment and for vengeance now the sins and errors of his unriper years,while, in regard to his now formed and developed character, he had not scrupled to declare of God, “He breaketh me with his tempest, and multiplieth my wounds without cause: He knoweth that I am not wicked: I will maintain mine own ways before him: Let him weigh me in the balances of justice, that God may know mine integrity." Such was the tone and spirit, then, in which the controversy had been hitherto conducted on the part of Job,-a spirit which prompted him to palliate and diminish the sins which he confessed, to exalt and magnify the virtues which he claimed,-and which carried him so far as once and again to implore, to demand of the Sovereign Judge, that he would vouchsafe to him the opportunity of arguing the whole cause before him, and to undertake, that, if the opportunity were but permitted him, he should triumphantly assert and vindicate his innocence, even before that omniscient tribunal, "and lift up his face without spot to God."-"Oh that one would hear me !" he had