the chaff from the wheat, and they who are weighed in the balance, and found wanting, must take their fearful portion with the unbelievers.

The effect of such considerations should not be anxious apprehension, and corroding care, but, on the contrary, a firm reliance on our Lord, a disentanglement from the interests of this life, and an earnest desire to prove ourselves faithful in the day of trial. "If, on your voyage,' says an eloquent primitive preacher', "a dark and stormy tempest, the waves rising with the violence of the winds, were to announce shipwreck at hand, would you not hasten to seek the harbour? The world itself trembles and shakes, and declares that its end approaches, not by natural decay, but by the judgment of God. ..... it is for us to reflect that we have renounced the world, and professed to live in it as strangers

1 Cyprian, Sermo de Mortalitate.

and pilgrims

66

but what

stranger and pilgrim doth not long for his native country? Who doth not desire a fair breeze that his vessel may glide rapidly towards the friends of his youth? And thus we must reckon paradise to be our native land, and the patriarchs there the dear friends whom we are hastening to embrace." There," he adds, "stands the expecting crowd of our own parents, brethren, children, and friends; that beloved multitude long for our coming; and having no longer any solicitude respecting their own salvation, their anxiety is now all for our safety. What a common joy will it be to both, when we reach their presence and their embraces! What must be the happiness of that heavenly kingdom, where there is no fear of death, but the assurance of immortality!"

To us, degenerate successors of these holy men, their sentiments may appear romantic, their devotion enthusiasm ; but

a day is at hand, when all our favourite objects of ambition and desire, of covetousness and contention, will shrink into insignificance, and vanish like a dream when one awaketh; and those noble visions, which filled their pious souls, will be found the only true and substantial realities!

The present scene of things is rapidly passing away, and all the pleasures and hopes of life are fading before their bloom is full expanded; but those unseen glories which the world slights, and the pride of man despises, will flourish in amaranthine immortality, when all that we now behold is dust and darkness! "The things that are seen are temporal; but the things that are not seen are eternal.”

SERMON VII.

THE CHRISTIAN CONFLICT.

1 JOHN iii. 8.

For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.

SOME of the ancient heretics held very strange opinions1, and propagated blasphemous doctrines respecting that perplexing question, the origin of evil; and they cut the knot which they could not resolve, by supposing the empire of the universe to be divided between two great

1 Manichees; Gnostics.

opposing powers of good and evil, maintaining an interminable contest. This

notion was ably refuted by the primitive fathers, who showed that "the dominion of Satan was a forced and usurped power, acquired through our sin and apostacy, by which we became the house and vessels of that strong man; but the Lord Jesus hath bound this strong man, and delivered us from his usurpation and tyranny'.'

But although Satan could have no more power in the world, than GOD, for the punishment of sin, saw fit to permit to him, yet, since sin was "exceeding sinful," the power given to the evil one, to be a rod for man's correction, was doubtless very great; so great that, from the time of the fall until the advent of the Saviour, he exercised a sovereign authority among the nations, established a

' Irenæus, Lib. iii. c. 6. Lib. v. c. 18. King's History of the Creed.

2 Rom. vii. 13.