There must be a busy Sunday press, worked by the great Enemy himself, in the guise of an angel of light; and despatching its winged messengers in all directions, on errands of evil.

There must be infidel demagogues "mouthing the heavens ;" and gaping crowds admiring the skill that blindfolds them for destruction. There must be gorgeous palaces, in which death and disease shall appear holding their court; in which busy hands shall be seen distributing liquid fire to crowds of wan and squalid forms :-and each of those palaces must be shown standing in the midst of a jail, a poor-house, a lunatic asylum, and a cemetery, all crowded-and leaning over the bottomless pit. And over the whole must be cast a spell--an all-encompassing net-work of satanic influences, prepared, and held down, and guarded by satanic agency. And, to complete the picture, three hundred thousand Christians passing by, without scarcely lifting a hand to remove it!

And is it true that scenes answering to this dark picture of guilt exist under the meridian -the very solar path-of Christian light and influence? Is it possible that this moral ulcer has collected and formed around the very heart of Christianity? Yes-and the

painful thought will arise, that the worst part of it might have been prevented-that it has come to pass through neglect. For, is it not true that, until lately, Christians, as a body, had not even glanced a look in the direction of the evil? that they were not aware even of its existence? Is it not true, that the Christian, when speaking of the religious state of things, thought only and selfishly of his own rich privileges? pointed exultingly to the temples of piety and the palaces of charity, and expressed an assurance that, in the event of a national visitation, these hallowed edifices, pointing, like lightning conductors, towards heaven, would turn aside the bolt of judgment from the favored city, and leave it unscathed? And yet, at that very moment, large tracts of heathenisin were stretching away from the spot where he stood; and he was thus proclaiming, to his own condemnation, that he had never explored them.

Brethren, there is a weighty responsibility somewhere. Who has been, who is to be, accountable for the moral state of the country? Were its history to close to-night; were its inhabitants to be arraigned in the presence of God, to be there divided into the two classes of religious and irreligious; and were

those enormities of the irreligious which we have depicted to be there drawn out in detail, would you not feel, as the examination proceeded, that there was a momentous responsibility somewhere? And, as the mighty sum of those enormities went on swelling and swelling under the rigorous investigation of Omniscience, would you not feel, think you, that for ages past the nation had failed to answer any leading moral purpose in the divine government commensurate with its vast resources; and had been owing its continuance from day to day to the same longsuffering which spared the guilty Nineveh? And as the examination still proceeded, and extended to the religious advantages afforded to the guilty population, to the efforts made, and the Christian means employed, for their reformation,-O, would you not be ready to accuse yourselves to advance, and fall down, and acknowledge that there was a weighty responsibility resting upon you? that you had not acted the citizen as it became the gospel of Christ?

IV. But wide and appalling as are the wastes of depravity around you, and great as is the cause which Christians may have for humiliation before God on account of past inactivity, there is no ground whatever for

despair. For if you act the citizen, as it becometh the gospel of Christ, you will bring that gospel to bear on the depraved portions of the community, and you will do so with perfect confidence of success.

Thus saith the Lord: "At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to pull down, and to destroy it; if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them."

With penitence for the past, then, and hope for the future, mark the present as an era in your history, by bringing the gospel to bear on its moral condition, and by doing this in the full confidence of ultimate success. You will not neglect or depreciate the various subsidiary means of human improvement -the arrangements of police, the improvements of art, the diffusion of knowledge, the elevating influence of education, the importance of good government, the encouragement of industry, and whatever tends to raise a community in the scale of civilization and comfort. But you will not expect much from them all. As far as the moral, the highest, welfare of man is concerned, you will remember that the best forms of social gov

ernment, and the most civilizing education and philosophy, apart from the gospel, are perfectly impotent. You will remember that the gospel was sent on account of that impotence that it was not until man had tried and proved the worthlessness of all his remedies, that God sent the gospel as his remedy -that he waited four thousand years, till man had tried, on the largest possible scale, all forms of society which were then possible, and all degrees of civilization--till He had actually shown that the highest point of man's civilization may be the lowest point of his depravity-and that not till then, when the fulness of that time was come, did God send forth his Son to save the world from itself to save earth from becoming hell.

In all your endeavors, then, to regenerate the community, you will rely supremely on the gospel of Christ. And in doing this, besides effecting that regeneration, you will be answering a most important end-you will be entering a protest for God against that infidel spirit of the age which proudly proposes to renovate society by human science alone.

The present is emphatically the dispensation of the Spirit; not merely the economy