stantly making to the conscience and the heart of man: which leave a vacancy of inspired instruction, and silence the full and glorious gospel, beside the path of life where God appointed it to be heard. The great object of this work is to make religion more earthly — more intimate with the necessities and blessings of earth; to show to man that the best lessons are given him at the best occasions of piety; that piety, springing up and growing on the soil of earth, is the piety of heaven, - a plant that will never die.

On this point we need to be corrected. How many of our religious applications are on the contrary ground; that the common path of life is quite unsuited to the walk of faith—that business, and care, and uncertainty, and plans, and efforts, and disappointments, and success, must needs hinder the rise and growth of faith in the heart. How current the claim, that piety must begin and grow by seclusion from the business and cares of life—by indifference to all earthly things.

Perhaps, (and we speak it with diffidence,) the error in question can scarcely be said to be avoided in any other religious book but the Bible, so remarkably liable has Christendom been to adopt the ancient and modern error of the Gentiles; - so tenacious have Protestants been of that inherited error of the Catholic church. The Bible, with all its purity and perfection of principles and motives is among us mects us on our daily path; at every juncture of our life; and there, is profitable ever for our reproof and correction, and instruction in righteousness. But many of our best religious treatises, and biographies of excellent meu, are far from following the wisdom of that divine Book; calling us away from the very opportunities which God has appointed and requiring an indifference to earthly good and evil, which renders nugatory the providential occasions of faith. We could name books with reverence and gratitude for benefits received by their repeated perusal, which, nevertheless, we should adjudge guilty of the error in question. The more we have read

that standard of religious writing, the Bible; the more we have

been taught by it amidst and not aside from the discipline of life— the more we have found it a light to our steps, amidst the meanest duties of our earthly path and the more we have passed "the furnace of affliction;" the more have we been convinced that much of our religious application fails of imitating that divine Book, in its wonderful adaptedness to our present life; in its high and holy claims amidst the things of earth.

We know no better illustration of the error in question, than may be found in some of our popular hymns. Even Watts, the great master of our public praise, is by no means always in keeping with that blessed book from which he has derived his songs. We the more readily select from him, because he abundantly corrects his own error and because the contrast of Watts with Watts will make our own views more plain.

There is much that is true and beautiful in the 53d Hymn, Book Second, and the truth glows in the first verse amidst the darkness which the poet must have inherited from preceding ages :

Yet the dear path to thine abode

Lies through this horrid land;

Lord, we would keep thy heavenly road,

And run at thy command.

But must we not condemn wholly the first and second stanzas ?

Lord, what a wreched land is this,

That yields us no supply;

No cheering fruits, no wholesome trees,

Nor streams of living joy!

But prickling thorns through all the ground,

And mortal poisons grow ;

And all the rivers that are found,

With dangerous waters flow.

But we must permit the poet to correct himself: and no mortal pen can do it more happily than he does in Psalm 73.

God, my Supporter, and my Hope,

My Help forever near;

Thine arm of mercy held me up,

When sinking in despair.

Thy counsels, Lord, shall guide my feet,
Through this dark wilderness;

Thine hand conduct me near thy seat,

To dwell before thy face.

Or in Psalm 71.

My God, my everlasting hope.

I live upon thy truth;

Thy hands have held my childhood up,
And strengthened all my youth.

Still has my life new wonders seen,

Repeated every year;

Behold my days that yet remain,

I trust them to thy care.

Cast me not off when strength declines,

When hoary hairs arise;

And round me let thy glory shine,

Whene'er thy servant dies.

Then in the history of my age,

When men review my days,

They'll read thy love in every page,

In every line thy praise.

The lesson beside the common path of life, thus devoutly acknowledged, has peculiar importance in an age of propagation. Our Catholic predecessors in the work of spreading the gospel, failed, not

for the want of zeal, or money, or men, but for lack of an earth-made piety. Such holy men as Xavier, could but conduct the issues from the corrupted fountain. The college de propaganda fide, have but left their sluggish streams, and stagnant pools, noisome and pestiferous, where should now be flowing the pure waters of life. Romish missions have accomplished little more than to introduce Christian asceticism, indulgence and idolatry, side by side, with a like triple paganism.

It is a most encouraging feature of modern missions, that more than any other since the days of the Apostles, they are woven in with the common web of life are carried on, on principles, and with the spirit which Christianity claims of all her disciples, are exposed to the ills and eligible to the blessings of life, in common with all lawful employments and conditions of men. They have been instituted with families, are burdened with domestic cares, cheered with domestic blessings, and urged to forethought as to domestic contingencies; not to the hindrance but to the furtherance of the gospel. Nothing would have been more fatal to modern missions than to have valued useless self-denials and austerities as tokens of Apostolic devotedness. The consequence must have been a less pure and simple piety at the fountain head in Christian lands; and abroad, a religion of asceticism and indulgence, little better than the grossest paganism. Let religion have place, its entrance and discipline amidst our common affairs; and the fountain will be pure and full, and the streams abnndant for the life of the world!

SERMON I.

THE FOWLS OF THE AIR.

MATTHEW, 6: 25-33.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you? O ye of little faith! Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek ;) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

THE command of our Lord is given in view of a double danger, to which the condition of the present life renders us liable. The uncertainty of a provision for our wants exposes us to fear, anxiety, despair; while the connection of their supply with our own skill and strength, exposes us on the other hand to an absorbing and self-confident diligence. Thus are we liable to incessant fluctuations-to a divided, changing