maketh intercession for us.

Who shall sepa

rate us from the love of Christ? We are His if we do His will, and by that only, not by any outward profession of any formal creed, can we know ourselves to be His. Our souls must own Him as their element of life, even as our bodies own the air we breathe. If evil befal us not, if no plague come nigh our dwelling, or if the shadows of the valley of death lie damp on our souls, and our God appear as though he would slay us, we must love Him still, and bless His love, though

behind a frowning Providence.

If these prayers be deemed wanting in attempts to express this love, let each individual provide for himself the language calculated for the utterance of his own feelings. Our Common Prayer supplies an admirable proof how the strongest words may be used without departing from respect and sobriety of thought.

There is a strong evidence of the corrupted state of our hearts in the multitude of meanings imposed upon one word, and the vague

their Maker, and the indulgence of their own wills. A hollow convention subsists, until a fitting season occur to them for hearing more of the matter.

Nor is it the passions alone that set up this idol for our worship. Our understandings, however seemingly dispassionate, are subject to a corresponding idolatry; but the abomination of it is less apparent, and rarer, and less offensive outwardly. Some writers in almost every age have tried to defend a palsy of the mind, which they have termed a suspension of their assent; and have thrown over the wild dreams of disease a character borrowed from the careful considerations of a sound investigator; intending thereby to designate a state. between belief and unbelief. But, "whether he will hear, or whether he will forbear," if the Gospel be true, every man who does not try to shape his life by its pages, when known to him, is liable to judgment. Every sceptic in fact deceives his own soul; for he, who is not a believer, must be an unbeliever: an intermediate state of doubt, a twilight of faith, is

inadmissible among those whom the Dayspring from on high might have brightly visited. And it is also useless; for Atheism itself cannot exempt a sound reasoner from the fear of death and a world to come; it can only deprive him of the hope his Maker would have cheered him with while on earth.

If the word natural be taken in its usual acceptation, as meaning what we possess by nature, in the same manner as we possess our sight or hearing, it is not easy to understand what is meant by natural religion. If it be natural, it cannot be religion; for then, our reason were our God, and ourselves as high as our Maker; then, there would not, in terms, be any necessity for a second revelation, such as were the Gospel. If it be religion, it cannot be natural, because the avowed purpose of religion is to make for man a new nature, and overrule the corruptions of his old and natural birth. The proper use of the epithet natural, as justly applicable to religion in a restricted sense, has been too often adduced in support of its improper use.

heaven will be accepted, if at the hour of death we be found in the service of Satan. "When a righteous man turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and dieth in them, for his iniquity that he hath done shall he die." Again," When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive. Because he considereth, and turneth away from all his transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die."

Yet many persuade themselves a third class exists and although the distinction in the Gospel is so plain and decided, attempts have been made to prove an ambiguous state possible. Some have considered themselves bound by an earthborn allegiance, which is not altogether on principles of this world, in their sense of the phrase, because there are current in the world worse principles than those, on which it is rested, according to their erroneous standard of right and wrong: and we may allow their untenable notion of admeasurement

to pass current now, for the purpose of trying

for ourselves, by their own test, the component parts of their allegiance. From the imperfect reception of Christianity in the world at large, too much success has attended their attempts to support, upon what is called Honour, and upon an assumption of self-love, in a shape, which, if possible, it never yet assumed, such parts of this scheme as were too plainly at variance with the word of God. Indeed a little support seems enough in these cases, if it appear outwardly proportionate to the stress it should bear. If the enquirer but see any thing like a beam, he does not often enough go on to enquire whether its strength may not have been eat away. And the nature of human laws, and reasonings just enough when applied to the civil government of a people, have been forced, by a mistaken analogy, to justify the wrong actions of individuals, in the eyes of those, who were predetermined to hold them justifiable. Too many practically adopt, whilst they vaguely dispute, this tempting plan for a seeming reconciliation between their duty to