less paupers. It is not your commendable industry and enterprise, it is not your free and unrestricted commerce with all the world that are at fault. British merchants and manufacturers are the glory of the commercial world, and have nothing to fear from the rivalry of any other nation. Her source of weakness is within herself. The atmosphere of her counting-rooms is contaminated. The manufacturer, in calculating the cost of his labour, forgets, that his calculation involves the highest moral principles of the Divine government. In determining the cost of brick and mortar, and the wear and tear of machinery, his conclusions, right or wrong, are untrammelled by any principle of morality. Too many place human labour on the same platform with their machinery, and count its cost as they would the cost of an inanimate piece of matter. They account of their hundreds and their thousands of immortal beings, toiling in their mills and serving in their warerooms, as if man, the image of his God, even the Eternal Jehovah, had been created for no other purpose, than to serve the temporary ends of a few enterprising speculators, and their boasted commerce. Know it and consider it well, ye who, perhaps ignorantly, grind and oppress the poor the helpless. Commerce, manufactures, arts, science, and every earthly invention, are intended to promote the happiness, and increase the comforts of the whole human family. If then, in your race for cheapness in production, you take not into account the comforts and happiness of the many, who incessantly toil and labour to enrich the few; if to send cheap prints to China, and cheap shirts to colonies, you diminish the comforts, and destroy the happiness of innumerable families in your native land; plead what you may in extenuation of your

and

conduct, it can only be viewed in one aspect by every impartial observer, and the judgment of such cannot fail to be, that to your own cupidity and love of gain, you are sacrificing the highest interests of the community to which you belong; that for the same godless end, you are prepared to reckon as less than nought, the moral and social welfare of a large portion of a great nation. You would do well to keep ever before your minds the apostolic warning-" Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasures together for the last days. Behold the hire of the labourers which have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped, have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth." (James v. 1-4.) Those frequently recurring commercial panics and crises have their origin in the violation of sound moral principles; and it may be said, without fear of contradiction, that the merchants and manufacturers of Great Britain would have been more prosperous in their commerce, and more happy and contented in their minds at the present day, if they had honoured God more, and served mammon less, in times past. And were they now surrounded and served by a godly and pious generation of workers, their wealth would not have been less, and their joy would have been unspeakable.

Hear it, ye sons and daughters of toil, who, forgetful of your high dignity as immortal beings, content yourselves with the unrestrained indulgence of sensual

appetites and brutish desires; who, ceasing to recognise the claims of your God, have acted towards your employers and in your families, as if you owed Him no allegiance, and were indifferent alike as to his promised blessings to those who honour Him, and His denunciations against all workers of iniquity. If left to you, Great Britain would never have emerged from its original obscurity and degradation. Your misery and your suffering, no one can dispute. There are many, very many of your fellow-countrymen, who deeply and truly sympathize with you. Blame not your employers. True, they neglect their duty, but it must not be concealed from you, that if even their reproach were wiped away, and your pecuniary circumstances improved, your responsibility only would be increased in God's sight; your condition would be little, if at all improved. Your personal iniquities are the cause of all your sorrow. Search your hearts and your motives, your pursuits and your misnamed pleasures, and in them you will find for what it is God is contending with you individually and as a class; and because of which He employs others as His instruments in correcting and chastising your grievous sins. Return to God, and He will return to you. Serve him in all things, and He will honour you. Be virtuous and godly, and "who is he that can harm you,

if

ye be followers of that which is good." Your elevation and improvement must begin with yourselves. In vain will you hope for betterness in your condition, so long as you content yourselves with declaiming against others. I repeat, for it needs to be repeated, ye are the authors of your own misery. Your sins afflict you, and except ye repent and be converted and healed, by Divine influence, ye cannot be extricated by human

means from your perilous position. Oh! that my voice, accompanied by the mighty power of God's Holy Spirit, in his quickening, enlightening, and sanctifying influences, could reach every heart sunk in degradation and sorrow through sin, in all the land; and that, through its sound, God would impart light, life, love, liberty, and holiness to the sinful, and therefore, suffering sons and daughters of toil in my native country. Abandon, give up for ever, your so-called political associations, through which you have been pursuing a phantom, which has still eluded your grasp, and the only effect of which as yet, has been, the unsettling occasionally of the minds of the community, because of your threatened insubordination. Combine! Yes! Combine in all parts of our land. Organize in every city, and in every street of every city. Assail every house, and every member of every family. Butlet it be a combination among yourselves, for the social, the moral, and the religious improvement of the labouring population. Let it be an organization in the true spirit of independent men, supported by yourselves, for the accomplishment of one of the greatest achievements, that shall ever be recorded in the page of history-the moral renovation of the families of the labouring classes, through schools and churches, provided and supported by themselves. Let your weapons of assault be the cross of Jesus and the word of God. By these means, and the blessing of God, this generation would not pass away, until ye would become the strength and the glory of the greatest nation that ever was in the earth. Your moral worth, and your religious principles, would at once secure to you every political and civil privilege, a free nation can confer upon any of its members. Your employers would not then venture to disregard your just demands,

and if they did, it would be permitted, only to give your God an opportunity of publicly testifying the care He takes of those who trust in Him. Your homes and your families would be Bethels, in which God would delight to dwell; and His blessing would make you prosperous in all your ways, and you should want for no good thing.

Britain is nevertheless great, and hers is a true and enduring greatness. Unlike the evanescent glory of ancient kingdoms, Britain's glory is ever increasing, and shall never come to an end. Britain owes all she is, or ever shall be, to the cross of Christ, and the leaven of the principles of the christian religion; not as established and maintained by the force of her civil power-that is a blot in the page of her history-but, thanks be to God, the time draweth very near indeed, when in His abundant mercy, by the outpouring of His Holy Spirit upon our senators and the great body of the people, He will teach them true wisdom, and make them of one heart and one mind, in putting away from among them, without violence or civil commotion, the unclean thing. She owes all her greatness to God's sovereign grace and mercy, in maintaining through many generations, among individuals in the palaces of her sovereigns, the mansions of her nobles, the ranks of her senators, the marts of her commerce, and the dwellings of her artizans, the vital principles of the christian religion; fanned and kept alive in vigorous action, by the faithful preaching of divinely honoured ministers of the gospel, who, of whatever denomination, acknowledged Jesus as their only king and master, and made His glory and the salvation of sinners, the only, the exclusive, the continual aim of all their ministrations; that great day, when all secrets shall be revealed, can alone disclose the inseparable connection,