may see your good works, and glorify your "Father which is in heaven." (St. Matt. v. 16.)

To you, my brethren, who hitherto regard no sign from without, nor act upon any painful warning from within, ever urging you with tenderest remonstrance to believe, repent, and obey; to you I offer that which I have ventured to speak of as a sign of the times, as an awakening call from your sleep of sin unto a life of righteousness. Christ's message hath already been frequently, in outward providence, and in the means of grace sounded in your ears; but you

you,

have not hearkened to it. Christ's invitation "Come unto me," hath been ever before and still you go not to him. In external profession, as a member of the true church of Christ, you are right as against the enslaved to the errors of the papacy; in surrounding light, as living amid its rays, you are shone upon though not enlightened, when you avow your belief of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and would reject with contempt, the follies and the falsehoods of Mahommedanism. But living in acknowledged sin, with conscience resisted or unawakened; or living with careless or with a feigned indifference to the solemn matter of gospel truth; how are you safer in knowledge

than the misled papist; how are you purer in heart and life than the benighted follower of the Koran? Would you but consider not only the religion but the reason of the thing, your case would present itself to your mind in far more dangerous character than theirs. Did not the Saviour himself pronounce his heavy woe against Jerusalem offered to be enlightened with his truth, in contrast with the lighter judgment upon cities and countries where his gospel had not been? Can your natural reason resist the wisdom and the equity with which he spake, when he declared, that, "unto whomsoever "much is given, of him shall be much required?" (St. Luke xii. 48.) Exercise your mere reason herein aright, and it may haply be blest to your looking at last to the doctrines of grace. It is an omnipotent Saviour who bids you do so; and though you have heretofore rejected him, he still repeats, but possibly may not much longer repeat, for your hearing, "Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise "cast out." Go, my brethren, unto him; and prove, in a happy experience, that Jesus Christ

is true.

SERMON V.

"THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES."

JEREMIAH iii. 14, 15.

Turn, Obacksliding children, saith the Lord; for I am married unto you; and I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion; and I will give you pastors according to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.

WHEN I first ventured to draw your attention to the eventful period in which we live, it was with the most express caution, on my part, that your minds should be directed to the plain matter of personal holiness, and not to any useless and unwarranted surmises as to what the manifest "signs of the times" might import of any thing yet future. The warning which God gives in his visible and providential interferences in the guidance of circumstance affecting the destiny of empires, or in the

;

minute superintendence of cause and effect in which individuals alone are concerned, the warning for immediate and spiritual thought and improvement is plain and practical. It is not, indeed, a sinful and rash presumption for the humble-minded inquirer, through the written revelation of God, to look into the ways and counsels of God, when manifest events show that his voice, in mercy or in judgment, is speaking to the inhabitants of the earth but still the Christian will proceed herein with all the caution, which holy Scripture itself gives, against any hasty conclusions as to what the end may be : " Thy way is in the sea, and 'thy path in the great waters, and thy foot"steps are not known," (Psalm lxxvii. 19.) will be his rule in every consideration of the works and dealings of the Most High God. His sole object will be spiritual good, and not the needless and the sinful gratification of an idle and a forbidden curiosity.

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Again, recurring to this sole principle, in regard to the eventful circumstances of our day, I proceed to the fourth among those which pious and considerate Christians every where are more and more deeming to be" signs "of the times,"-A manifestly awakened inte

rest in the Christian world to the great and peculiar doctrines of the Gospel; and a visible and an acknowledged dying away of that listlessness and that indifference to their spiritual post, which for so long a period marked and disgraced the Christian Ministry.

The text which I have read to you from the prophet Jeremiah is a portion of one of the prophecies relating to the gospel times. It contains an affectionate remonstrance from God to his people Israel, under the image of the nearest and tenderest of all human ties: "Turn, O backsliding children, saith "the Lord, for I am married unto you."

It speaks of their gradual restoration to

their long-lost privileges: "I I will take you

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"one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion." It tells them of better teachers of the better way: " and I will give

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you pastors according to mine heart, which "shall feed you with knowledge and understanding." All this will apply, in allowed adaptation, to any period in the history of the church of Christ, wherein a knowledge of the truth revives, and those whose office it is to teach the truth are themselves becoming