states may have come in collision; and property to an amount which no one can estimate may be at stake.

Our whole land is dependent every day on confidence in the government; on confidence in the judges; on confidence in the general virtue of the people; on confidence in the excellence of our institutions. There is not a wheel of the government that could move for a moment if it were not for this. No one of us would entrust a letter to the mail, no one of us would carry a cause before any constituted tribunal, or even submit it to an arbitration.

(5.) We are prepared now to apply the remark to the main thing pertaining to the subject before us—the government of God. The demand in the Bible is, that man shall repose confidence in his Maker, for "without faith it is impossible to please him.” The inquiry which we have had in view has been, What is the reason why faith under his government has such a primacy, and is of so much value?

Now it is obvious that the value of confidence is as great in God's government as in any other, and may be as great in the universal family, embracing all worlds, over which he presides, as in the much smaller families with which we are conversant. But it should also be added, that to an extent elsewhere proportionably unknown the government of God is one of confidence, not of force. With all power in his arm, and with all resources to bind, and fetter, and restrain, and punish, at his command, still that which he most relies on in his administration is not force, but love and confidence. It is in every way probable that that is the only thing on which reliance is now placed in heaven in controlling the pure and happy minds there, and that vast as they know the power of God to be, they are not restrained by that, but by the all-controlling influence of affection. They have confidence in God-in his wisdom and his goodness—in the equity of his laws and in the principles of his administration; and this is all that is needed to preserve order, and harmony, and peaceful

obedience in heaven. For

Love is the golden chain that binds

The happy souls above.

The thing, too, on which reliance was placed in Paradise to secure obedience was confidence. There was no force employed there. There were no walls built around it which man could not overleap. There were no cherubim with flaming swords to prevent the egress of man, as there were, after his apostacy, to forbid his return. As long as confidence in God remained, man was happy.

When that failed, he was ruined; and the want of confidence in God was there, as it ever has been since, the source of all the woes that man has experienced. With strict philosophical accuracy, all the woes which have come upon the race have arisen from a want of confidence in God as the just moral Governor of the world. Man has no confidence in his law, in his goodness, in his truth, in his promises, in his threatenings, in his qualifications for empire. He has no such confidence in him as to submit to his teachings; to bow reverently to his will where his dealings are mysterious; to resign himself to him in his trials; to embrace his promises, when he offers heaven to him; to feel alarm, and to turn from his sins, when he threatens the punishment of hell. Even now, with all our external sources of trouble and woe, with all the sorrows and ills of poverty, want, sickness, bereavement, and dreaded death, this would be a happy world if man had confidence in God; for the moment you can infuse into the bosom of a sufferer, no matter whether in bereavement, on a sick bed, or in any other form of woe, confidence in God, that moment you have soothed the anguish of the soul, and diffused through the bosom peace and joy.

I will ask your attention, in view of the reasoning pursued in this discourse, only to one thought of a practical nature suggested by the subject. It is, that infidelity, or unbelief, as a speculative or practical matter, is not a harmless thing. It is often supposed to be so. It is regarded as a mere matter of speculation; a thing in reference to which the utmost freedom of the mind may be innocently indulged; a thing in which you do others no wrong, for you deprive them of no property by it, and suppose that you do nothing to sap the foundation of their happiness.

But if the views suggested in this discourse are correct, nothing can be more unfounded than this opinion. Is that a harmless system which, if it came into your family, would unsettle all the confidence which you have in your wife, and all the confidence which your children have in you as a father? Is he an innocent man who would unsettle all confidence in a commercial house, in a bank, in a lawyer, in a physician, in a bench of judges? Would that be an innocent system which would breathe suspicion in the community on the character of every minister of the gospel, and every professor in a college, and every teacher in a school? And if you may suppose that a man of capital should establish a system of agencies all over the land, and have them wholly under his control, and that the design should be by a well-arranged scheme of operations to destroy all confidence, say in every merchant, and every monied institution, would you say that that was a harmless

system of operations? And suppose that a man should come into your family and unsettle all the confidence of your children in God, and in the principles of virtue and sound morals, and in that holy volume which you regard as the foundation of all just views of morals,-shall we regard him as a harmless man, and his opinions as a matter of no consequence? Or suppose, by an extended system of agencies, by the facilities of the press, by his power of scattering pamphlets and books all over the land, he should pursue an extended scheme of operations to destroy all the confidence of man in God as a moral Governor, and in his law, and in the principles of virtue, and in the foundations of morality; that should tend to destroy the confidence which the poor, the afflicted, the oppressed, and the dying repose in God their Saviour; which should leave them to suffer without support, and to feel that they are "in a forsaken and fatherless world," and to die without hope,-will you say that such a system is harmless? Why more so than when a malignant agent establishes a system with a view of unsettling the confidence in every merchant and monied institution throughout the land? Is confidence in the foundations of morals, and confidence in God as the righteous moral Governor of the world, of less importance than in a man or in a bank? The perpetrator of the deepest mischief in this world is the man who lives to unsettle confidence. Let my enemy come, if he wishes, and take the little property which my hands have earned; let him come and strike me on one cheek and on the other; let him take my coat and my cloak also; let him turn me out from my happy and peaceful home, a penniless wanderer on the face of the earth;but let him not come and destroy the confidence which my wife reposes in me, and I in her; let him not come and unsettle the foundations of moral principle in which I have endeavoured to ground my children; let him not seek to alienate our confidence in each other and in our God. Poor, and penniless, and cold, and naked, and with no certain dwelling-place, I should wander with my family with one source of pure happiness, undisturbed, if they trusted in me, and I in them, and all in God; but in the most splendid palace that imperial wealth could build and adorn, I could never be happy if confidence in them, and in my Maker and my Saviour, were blasted and destroyed,

Nor is unbelief, as a practical personal matter, more harmless. Sinner, it is not an innocent thing that you have no confidence, no faith in the God that made you. You wrong him; you wrong your own soul. There is no being that is so worthy of your confidence as he; none that has so high a claim. And how can you

"please him" if you have no confidence in him? Can a childa son—a daughter-though learned, and accomplished, or graced with polished manners, though admired for beauty, or praised for talent, or distinguished for eloquence, can such a child "please" his father, can he be worthy of his love, if he has no just confidence in him-if he treats him with cold neglect-if he never relies on his promises, or respects his principles ? Sinner! the source, the root, the germ of all the evil in your soul, is the want of confidence in God. The evil will be arrested, the ruin which is coming on you will be stayed, the moment you are brought back, through the great Mediator, to exercise faith in him who made you-and not till then. Without that, dissociated from him, you are destined to a degree of wretchedness and woe, compared with which all the evils produced by want of confidence in a family, a commercial community, between nations, or under a human government, are trifles not to be named !

SERMON XXVIII.

FAITH AS AN ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLE OF ACTION.

2 COR. v. 7.-"We walk by faith, not by sight."

IN the first discourse on the subject of faith, I illustrated the inquiry why faith is made an indispensable condition of salvation; in the second, I considered the value and importance of faith.

Faith enters so much into the Christian system, is regarded as so essential an element in our conduct as religious beings, and is designed to accomplish so important effects on our character, that, in every point of view in which it can be regarded, it demands our careful and prayerful consideration. It seems to be supposed that there is some foundation for the importance attached to it in our very nature, or that man is so made that it is designed that faith shall be an important element of his conduct, and shall exert an important influence over him. If there were not something in man that laid the foundation for this, the prominence given to faith in the Bible would seem to be unauthorized, and the purpose of making so much out of it would seem to be an attempt to institute an arbitrary arrangement, and to separate religion from all other principles of action. I propose, then, in order to explain the prominence and the value assigned to faith in the Bible, to consider it as an elementary principle of conduct; or to inquire into the influence which it is adapted to exert on man. I shall refer to it, not exclusively as a Christian virtue-for the object is to inquire why it should be incorporated among the Christian virtues at all; but as a state of mind-a principle of conduct—a law of our being. Our aim is to ascertain what place it is designed to occupy in the mind of such a being as man, and placed in the circumstances in which he is; and the bearing of all my remarks will be to illustrate the power of that principle stated in the text, "We walk by faith, not by sight."

In order to illustrate the subject properly, it will be necessary to consider two points:-I. What the principle is; and, II. Its influence as an element of conduct.