SERMON II.

Christmas-day.

PSALM CXviii. 24.

"This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it."

THERE

HERE was another day of which we read in Job, when "the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy;" that was the day of the creation, when the power, the glory, the goodness of God were manifested in the things that He made,-of which man was chief; then "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." That great work, brethren, by the devil's malice and man's transgression was marred, and the joy of the sons of God turned into grief and sorrow.

But now we read of another day, the day of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, of which the feast we are now keeping is the commemoration. "This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it."

That we may know best why we should rejoice, let us first consider the goodness in which we were created, then the consequences of our fall, and lastly, the mercies of God in our redemption; and conclude with shewing in what way and by

what sort of good works we may best shew our thankfulness and joy.

Our first father, Adam, was made (and we in him) in the image and likeness of God, endowed with all kinds of heavenly gifts, without any spot of uncleanness, sound and perfect in every part, both outwardly and inwardly, with reason uncorrupt, understanding pure and good, a will obedient and godly; in short, altogether after God's own image in righteousness, in holiness, in wisdom, and in truth.

When we were thus created, for the present God placed our first parents in the garden of delight; where there was plenty without labour, inviting subjects of study and improvement without difficulty, enjoyment without danger, and, above all, the fruit of the tree of life, of which it was given them to eat and live for ever in the same state of perpetual and progressive virtue and goodness, and of happiness the associate and reward of virtue and of goodness, so long as men stood in the faith of God their Maker and in obedience the witness of their faith-obedience to His command and word. Nothing could be added to the happiness of such a state, nor anything to be desired. Man was blessed and loved of God his Maker, and safe as a son in the house of an Almighty Father.

But man listened to the tempter, believed his lying words, fell from faith in God, seeking good in a way that was forbidden, and thinking to become by transgression like unto God in the knowledge of good and evil; not that likeness, surely, in which he had been created.

Now see the consequence. For abundance without toil compelled to eat bread in the sweat of his brow,-bread hardly earned, wages small and ill paid, and still exposed to poverty and want; instead of the garden of God's planting, bringing forth of its own accord every thing that is pleasant to the eye and good for food, instead of this, I say, a soil producing naturally thorns and thistles and briars, and every kind of weed unfriendly to the harvest, requiring all the care and labour of the husbandman to clear away; instead of enjoyment without danger, danger without anything real and satisfactory of the other sort; instead of an easy and perpetual course of improvement in everything honest and good, a perpetual downward tendency to become worse and worse; fear on every side; for pleasure, pain and sickness in all forms; for love, hate; for life, death, death even at the hand of a brother man, nay, of a man's own self; knowledge of evil, not of good, of evil present and to come, of good, though with an earnest longing for it, never to be attained; with the dread of sufferings unknown and pain in the spirit alienate from God, when the short period of this flitting life is over, in a state not seen now, called therefore the pains of hell. All this, I say, the consequence of our fall, without hope or possibility of escape, every attempt at which in opposition to the will and righteous sentence of Almighty God could only serve to make our condition more hopeless, and, if possible, worse than it was before.

Father, not our Maker only, but, in the person of His glorious and blessed Son, our Redeemer.

Observe, first, that nothing happens without the certain foreknowledge of God, and nothing can withstand His will. His will was that the creature should be saved: wherefore it is said, Christ was "the Lamb"-the sacrifice and propitiation for sins-" slain before the foundation of the world;" i.e. slain in the counsel and foreknowledge of God moved by His mercy and His love; a mystery, the Apostle tells us, into which, unfolded as it was step by step in time, the angels desire to look. Wherefore, as they behold the course and the completion of it, they sing,-"Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of Thy glory ;" and at another time," Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good-will towards men."

Accordingly, that man might not perish utterly through despair, God, judging the several parties in transgression, varied the sentence so as to afford some ground for hope.

First, He did not carry the sentence into immediate execution, but gave space for repentance, sending the man forth to till the ground whence he was taken, and labour for his present maintenance with the certainty of death before him, uncertain of the time. Secondly, while He multiplied sorrow to the woman who was first in the transgression, He added more of hope; for, cursing without mitigation that wicked serpent, the devil, who tempted them to sin, He said that He would put enmity between him and the woman,

and between his seed and her seed, of which the end should be that he, the devil, should bruise the other's heel, i. e. hurt no more than the lowest and least worthy part of man, in that to which the body only is liable; while, on the other hand, the seed of the woman was to "bruise the serpent's head," to crush and extinguish his power to effect further evil in despite of the goodness of God. For the devil is the father of lies, a murderer from the beginning, and the author and instigator of all sin and wickedness.

Thus, brethren, from the first, mercy was seen in judgment, which was yet further declared by the provision made by God Himself for the covering of our first parents' shame with the skins of beasts, whose flesh became their food. "The Lord. God made coats of skins to cover them." Nor from this time did the Holy Spirit ever cease to strive with men by repentance, by prayer, and by sacrifice, to win them back to God, and keep alive in them the hope of a deliverance to come.

In process of time the counsel and design of God was more and more developed and more clearly and particularly foreshewn, when God promised Abraham that in his seed all the families of the earth should be blessed, and the same promise was continually repeated to his immediate descendants Isaac and Israel. When, after this, the prophets arose, of whom the first, Moses, the deliverer and lawgiver of his people, said, -"A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren like unto me; Him