the sensualist?

Shall not the hand, if it have held

greedily the coveted wealth?

And, in like manner, the judgment on individuals shall take form and measure from their office and position upon earth. The great and illustrious shall be asked, whether they had sought to employ their high prerogatives on promoting God's glory and the kingdom of Christ. The wealthy shall be asked, whether they had regarded themselves as stewards, and used riches on the relief of the miserable and the instruction of the ignorant. The learned shall be asked, whether they had hallowed their science, by rendering it subservient to the making themselves and others" wise unto salvation." The poor shall be asked, whether they had borne poverty with contentment, and meekly struggled with those difficulties which God had been pleased to weave into their portion. Yea, and all shall be asked, what they have done with the soul, that precious deposit, which, redeemed at the inestimable cost of Christ's blood, may be, and is, flung away by thousands; by conquerors, who conquer all but themselves; scholars, who study every thing but themselves; preachers, who preach to every one but themselves; by multitudes, who care for every thing but the one thing needful, have time except for eternity, and room in the heart except for God.

Oh, that all might remember the strict and solemn account thus eventually to be rendered! The shipwreck of the soul! there is no language for

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THE LEAST OF SERVICE TO THE GREATEST.

the expressing such catastrophe; seeing that to "lose the soul" is not to be deprived of the soul-this might comparatively be happiness; it is to retain possession of the soul, but the soul labouring under some awful denunciation: and to lose whilst we keep! there is something terrible in the very contradiction. It is total shipwreck; and yet the stately vessel rides the waters, in place of having foundered; holds fast her gallant trim, in place of being broken into shivers; lost, through being incapable of sinking; doomed to wander for ever on a shoreless sea, driven by a storm which knows no pause, through a night which has no morning.

But as yet this mysterious and fearful doom is not incurred by any amongst us. The soul may still be saved, saved by the old, saved by the young. Only take heed, that, whilst you rear the beacon, and map the channel, that the mariner may be guided to “the haven where he would be," you keep the eye on Christ," the true light," and follow the directions of that Gospel which gives the soundings of the river of life; and to die shall be but to cast anchor by a happy shore-a new world, which, unlike the old, can neither disappoint nor disappear.

SERMON IV.

THE BLESSING IN THE CURSE 2.

GENESIS iii. 19.

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

You have here a portion of the sentence pronounced upon Adam, because he had hearkened to his wife, and eaten the forbidden fruit. Sentence had already been passed upon the serpent and upon Eve; the serpent who had beguiled our common mother, and that mother herself, through whose disobedience we

1 So comprehensive were the thoughts of our great masters in theology, that the following discourse is but the expansion of a single sentence of the admirable Barrow, who says of industry, "We were designed for it in our first happy state, and upon our lapse thence, were further doomed to it, as the sole remedy of our needs and the inconveniences to which we became exposed."

2 Preached before the Corporation of Trinity House, on Trinity Monday, 1844.

became mortal and miserable. Unto the serpent it was said, that upon his belly he should go, and dust should he eat all the days of his life, a doom which must have referred rather to Satan, who had assumed the serpent's shape, than to the serpent itself, and which may have been accomplished in the abject condition of that fallen, though yet mighty spirit. Unto the woman it was announced that it should be in much pain and anguish she gave birth to her children, an intimation in which, it may be, there was promise as well as threatening; for Eve had already heard of the seed of the woman that was to bruise the serpent's head; and she might now gather that, through much suffering, there would at last arise a Deliverer. And now must the man stand forward, and take his doom from the lips of his Maker. Amongst all the sentences, there is none which so marks the hateful character of sin, and its devastating power. "Cursed is the ground for thy sake." So deadly a thing is evil, which thou hast been instrumental in introducing, that the very soil whereon thou treadest is thereby made barren. No longer shall the earth spontaneously yield thee her fruits; for henceforward thorns and thistles shall be its natural produce. "In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life,"-thou must wring a hard subsistence from the reluctant field, in place of gathering an abundance which solicits thine acceptance. And there will be no termination to this toil, until the earth, which has almost refused thee

sustenance, shall give thee a grave.

"In the sweat

of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." Thou hast been formed from that ground; its dust has been compounded into thy limbs; and the curse is upon thy body, and upon all the material of which its members have been framed. The dust therefore must mingle with the dust," dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return."

Such was the sentence on our offending father, and on ourselves as having offended and fallen in him. And we need not tell you how faithfully the sentence has been executed. You know that, with few exceptions, and those, perhaps, more apparent than real, labour-painful and oppressive labour-is the lot of humankind; and that it is by some species or another of toil that every man gains his sufficiency of food. If you traverse the globe, you find every where, though not always in the same degree, the human race fighting against want, and the great majority of a population struggling with the earth for a miserable pittance. In some places there is greater luxuriance in the soil, in others greater sterility; but nowhere do you find that man eats bread except in the sweat of his face. From pole to pole, amid the snows of perpetual winter, and beneath the blazings of a tropical sun, there is but one cry and one strife, the cry of millions for the means of subsistence, the strife with a ground on which rests God's curse, and which therefore yields nothing