their conduct offensive to God, but every imagination of the thought of the heart, is evil, only evil continually. We must inculcate principles that violate every inbred sentiment of their hearts, and press maxims, and doctrines and duties, that give their whole conduct the lie, and cover their whole character with guilt and pollution. We must assure them that, as God is true it will be ill with the wicked in every stage of their being, and in whatever world God may place them. We must uncover the pit before them, must prophesy evil concerning them, must say loudly and fearlessly, that the wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God, where their worm shall not die, nor their fire be quenched.

But it needs no prescience to feel assured that all this will not please. Men are not disposed to have their characters laid bare, and their hopes destroyed. The refuge of lies where they have taken sanctuary, they will not allow us with impunity to demolish. The god of this world persuades them that he is their enemy who thus beforehand brands them with the marks of perdition.

And while we are thus liable to offend, we depend on them for support. While every doctrine we preach, and every duty we urge, and every woe we announce, are at issue with the strongest biases of their hearts, we expect them to clothe our children, and fill our board with bread. While they are in the very act of doing us a kindness, we may see them violate the law of God, and may be under the odious necessity of returning the favor with reproof. Hence trials come as certainly as death. If we watch the interest we are set to watch, and cannot be bribed to perfidy, there will grow thorns in our path, and we shall wet our couch with tears. Hence the fact that the Lord's servants have been stoned, have been sawn asunder, have been tempted, have been slain with the sword, have wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, been destitute, afflicted, tormented. Hence the scenes of persecution that fill the pages of ecclesiastical history, the agonies of the cross, the fires of the stake, the inquisitorial dungeons, and the whole catalogue of plagues, that have borne off the stage the armies of the martyrs.

III. This same ministry furnishes an antidote to the wo it generates. It is, of all the appointments of the court of heaven, the first. The leader of Israel had a commission less dignified. He was the minister of a transient service, promulgated a temporary economy, was conversant with types and symbols. He released men from

the chains of a human and temporary bondage, led them to an earthly Canaan, and built them a perishable sanctuary. But all these were the mere shadows of good things to come. Ours is the office, not of typifying, but of substantiating; not of predicting, but of narrating; not of breaking the bands of a temporary bondage, but the league with death, and the agreement with hell; not of leading men to a paradise of hills and brooks of water, but to a city not made with hands, eternal in the heavens; not to a crumbling material sanctuary, but to the very throne itself of God. Under the ministration we occupy, Sinai blazes not with wrath, but with glory, God is seen not through a veil but with open face; "Mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other."

Such the office; every trial is light. He who may fill the first embassy in a kingdom, will suffer any privations, will risk any dangers, will endure any trials, will submit to any hardships. He will traverse, with such a commission, the dreariest heaths, and the stormiest seas, will inhale in any clime the most polluted atmosphere, will live in the wildest solitude, with beings the most rapacious and bloody. And shall men endure, supported by the honors of a human embassy, trials, dangers, and death, without complaint, which the minister of the Lord Jesus, with the high hopes that attach to his office, cannot endure? If insulted we think of our commission, and feel the inspiration of its honors, and instantly rise superior to shame. He whom heaven has commissioned, needs no human applause to animate him. "He that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me.' ." And what if men do condemn, while God approves? There lies an appeal from every human tribunal. To none of these lower courts are we amenable, in a sense that can excite alarm. Said an apostle, "It is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment." To our own Master we stand or fall. If our message does not please men, we have only to see to it, that it has not been altered in our hands, and, if not, take courage. When we can see affixed to every doctrine we preach the broad seal of heaven, we have no farther concern, except to inquire if we have chosen out acceptable words, and felt a right spirit. If to the book of instruction we add or diminish, the deed blots our names from the book of life, and brings upon our heads the plagues recorded. If men will not hear us, we have only to weep in secret places for their pride.

If to men it should seem that we urge them too assiduously, we

have only to assure them that they must believe or die. The direction is, "Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins." Our stand is between men and the pit, and our business to stop them. If they now think us too urgent, they will curse our supineness when they have perished. done with them, they will know the truth of all we have said, and more yet, and will wonder that we could believe it at all, and proclaim it so coldly.

Before we have

If men are angry, still there is hope. This may be the first step to conviction and faith, and they may still be our crown of rejoicing in the day of the Lord Jesus. The gospel may produce wrath, and still be a savor of life. The tenant of the tombs raved, and then believed. Our assurance is that Christ is able to bind the strong man.

But then we fear the worst, and have no hope that the miserable beings will live, whom we would warn and waken, still we may be to Christ a sweet savor, though it be of death unto death. Christ has not suspended our reward on our success. He will provide for his ministers who have dared to be faithful, though the whole population of the apostacy should go in a mass to perdition. Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord." For the faithfulness of our ministry, not for the effects; for the good we intended to do, not for the good we have done, shall we be tried in the last day. If the Lord has made us rulers over his house, to give them their meat in due season, blessed are those servants whom their Lord when he cometh shall find so doing. And he will soon return. In a few days we shall have his decision upon our conduct, and till then it is of small importance what is human opinion respecting us.

Thus the godly minister takes courage. If our toil be hard, we serve a good master, and the period of rest is nigh. If we should even faint and die under the fatigues of the service, still we can die in no other circumstances so honorably. If our present privations are many, and our joys few, there is just before us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. If the corner of the vineyard where we labor is unpromising, still we know that Christ shall see of the travail of his soul and be satified. We have only to fill the place appointed us, as God shall give us ability, and for what remains he will provide. Do we but cast our seed corn upon the moist field, we shall see it after many days. Should the seed lie buried in the dust till we are in heaven, we may still see the

fruit of our toil. Thus our commission so presents its consolations in the time of trial, that we may well say with the apostle, "Having this ministry as we have received mercy, we faint not."

İV. The text prescribes that open and ingenuous conduct, which it is the duty of Christ's ministers on all occasions to exhibit. Let us notice them,

1. In their daily walk. The apostle says of himself and his fellows, probably in allusion to the intrigue and duplicity of the false teachers, "That they renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, and did not walk in craftiness." He does not mean to imply that this had ever been their course. They had, from the period of their vocation to the apostleship, refused to reach any point of enterprise, by deception and fraud. Even when Paul says of himself, that, on a certain occasion, being crafty, he caught them with guile, he is thought merely to have alluded to the language of his enemies.

The ministers of Christ have nothing to hide, have no budget of secrets, and may say and do nothing that is inconsistent with simplicity and godly sincerity, either in their social and commercial transactions, or in connection with the functions of their office. The world will doubt, if we show duplicity in one case, whether we are sincere in any case. If we can smile complacently upon the man we would betray and ruin; if with one hand we can embrace, while the dagger is fast held in the other; can soothe, and flatter, and hate; men will have no confidence in us, when we thunder the anathemas of the law, or breathe out the counsels and the accents of mercy. If it cannot be said of the minister of Christ, that he is a sincere and honest man, nothing can be said of him that does not put the whole brotherhood to shame. The man may be able in theology, and in oratory, may be a profound general scholar, may have made the multitude bow to him; but if he be, to adopt a very homely, though a very significant figure, a two-sided man; if his assent and his smile are not tokens of approbation, and we may fear he will betray us, when pledged to serve us, then has he not renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, and will be as readily suspected of insincerity in the pulpit as by the fireside. Heaven's ambassador must exhibit in his countenance, and on the face of his whole deportment, the simplicity of the man of God. The veriest wretch with whom he has intercourse, ought not to doubt for a moment his honesty.

Toward his ministerial brethren, duplicity is doubly odious.

We are but distinct agents, attached to the same grand embassy, and sent to make overtures to the same disloyal multitude. When we have no trust in each other, the foe is strengthened, and our defeat and shame sure-the least approximation to duplicity destroys confidence. We may differ in shades of doctrine and points of duty, and still, if honest men, may co-operate, and there may be in the general embassy an efficiency and a unity, that shall pour honor upon Christ, and shame upon the adversary. We must have confidence in each other's prompt and cordial co-operation, or the world we have come to sanctify, will be strengthened in every deadly and desperate principle of revolt, and will sleep on till they are waked by the terrors of the last trumpet.

The motives to such a confidence are obvious. Our trials and our enemies are numerous, and are the same, and the same our joys and our friends. We serve the same Master, and hope for the same heaven. Without an asylum in each other's bosom, in this outcast world, where we find so rarely an honest friend, we should be the loneliest of all flesh. No union can be more sacred. There is not only Christian sympathy, but the fellowship of office. There belong to the sacred ministry special hopes and promises. In what relationship do the hidden things of dishonesty wear an aspect so monstrous, or wage a war so cruel, as when they disturb the intercourse, and break the compact that binds together the ambassadors of the Lord Jesus? One would sooner lose confidence in his mother's children, and betray his offspring, than see marred the fellowship of the Divine legation. That Jesuitical fraud, nicknamed pious, so long current in the church of Rome, is the worm that now devours that polluted community. May it go, with its foster mother, to perdition, and never find a lodgment in the bosom of Christ's ministers. Let us notice the minister of Christ,

2. In his official capacity. While the apostles renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, and would not walk in craftiness, so neither would they handle the word of God deceitfully. They would not, nor may we, hide, misrepresent, or leave out of view, any truth, meant to be conveyed to us in our Book of instructions. The ambassador of Christ resolves, that the Bible, in all its plainness and simplicity, shall be permitted to pour forth its precepts, its doctrines, its denunciations, unadulterated, upon the congregated multitude of the ungodly. To inquire, what is pleasing, and what is popular, and what is safe, belongs only to the traitor, who would make a kiss the signal of arrest.