"As unknown and yet well known." Be well known in the world for your integrity, for your honour, for your humanity, for your active and disinterested benevolence, for all that the world, dark and undiscerning as it is, knows how to applaud and how to sympathize with. But in respect to the life that is hid with Christ in God-in respect to the manifestations of my text-in respect to fellowship with the Father and Sonin respect to their taking up an abode with you by the Spirit, and those bodies of yours becoming the temples of the Holy Ghost-why, in respect of all these, you must lay your account with being utterly unknown. This they do not understand, for they do not experience it, and the Saviour manifests Himself to you in such a way as He does not unto the world.

Oh that what I have said could be converted into a lesson of patience or of comfort with any melancholy Christian who may now hear me! To divert his melancholy, I give him something to do, and refer him for his daily task to those duties of the New Testament which are of daily and hourly recurrence. This is the way revealed in my text for conducting you to the manifestations you long after. Weeks and months and years may elapse before they arrive; but believe and persevere, for this is the faith and patience of the saints. There may at this moment be a dark screen between you and the cheering light of our Saviour's manifestations; but surely there is no such screen over the lessons of your daily walk-the duties of mutual love and mutual forbearance-the prayer for grace and light in our Saviour's name-and the faith, however faint its impressions on your comforts may be, that God is waiting to be gracious, and the time of your deliverance is coming. Hold fast by what you do see, and God in His good time will reveal what you do not see. Hold fast by known duties, and you will come to experience what are yet unknown and unfelt privileges. God will do for you exceeding abundantly beyond what you have now the power either of thinking or of asking for. He will throw a radiance over your heavenly contemplations; and the Spirit of God will witness with your own spirit that you are indeed His children.

SERMON XIV.

[PREACHED at Kilmany, 3d April 1814. At Cupar, 19th February 1815. At Glasgow, 13th August 1815.]

ACTS XXVI. 25.

"But he said, I am not mad, most noble Festus; but speak forth the words of truth and soberness."

Ir might be difficult to give a definition of madness; but it is not so difficult to understand the circumstances which often dispose a neighbourhood to fasten the imputation of madness on any individual. It strikes me that the leading circumstance which gives rise to such an imputation is a great devotion of mind on the part of the individual to some one theme or subject which his acquaintances around him do not understand and do not sympathize with. They cannot enter into his tastes. or feelings or pursuits, and therefore they call him unreasonable; and, if he give his whole mind to the subject, they call him mad. He has suffered some unaccountable topic to run away with him; and because it is a topic which has no attraction for them, they pronounce the man who is so run away with to be under the influence of derangement. We doubt not that a solitary star-gazer in some remote or Highland valley, where astronomy was never heard of, would fall under this imputation, and all his apparatus of books and telescopes would only serve to confirm it. It is true that now-a-days such a valley is scarcely to be met with; astronomers are admitted to all the credit of rationality; but this would not have happened had there been only one astronomer in the world. They have

appeared in sufficient number to establish themselves, and the certainty of those practical results which all may appreciate, gives a credit to those abstract and difficult speculations, of which a few only are capable. Still, however, there are some obscure and illiterate districts where the honours of astronomy are unknown, or where only a few are enlightened enough to acknowledge them; and should one of these few give himself devotedly to the science, he would share the fate of the minstrel-" Some might call him wondrous wise, but some pronounce him mad.”

Now, my brethren, I appeal to you from this judgment, and ask if, in point of truth, you think it a fair one? Is not the charge of madness fastened upon the individual in question just because he is wiser, and abler, and higher in the scale of intellectual dignity than the people around him? Do not you see that if the estimate were to be formed on the mere strength of votes and of numbers, it might be a delusive one? Should not the question of his madness be tried upon its own principles? and were it so tried, would it not be clear as day that, while he was standing on a respectable elevation, the little world of his acquaintances were grovelling in all the bigotry of ignorance? And would not this have been equally true, though in the great world there had only been one astronomer? All the world might have thought him mad, but all the world would have been wrong; and his memory would have been handed down with ridicule only because in the high attributes of genius and contemplation he stood the greatest and most distinguished of the species.

A man may carry in his mind an entire devotedness to astronomy, and a man may carry in his mind an entire devotedness to religion, and in both cases there may be a circle of observers who refuse to sympathize and go along with him. It is true that religion is not purely an intellectual subject-its peculiarities are not confined to matters of speculation-they extend to the conduct, and may be exemplified by men of the humblest talents and lowest walks in society. Still, however, where there is a want of sympathy there will be a disposition

to ridicule a disposition to give names and to throw out imputations, and to fasten the charges of madness and melancholy and Methodism on the man who is altogether a Christian. It is not to be wondered at that such an imputation should be preferred against him who is a Christian in the full extent and significancy of the term, for the very principle which lies at the bottom of the imputation, and serves to explain it, is expressly asserted in the New Testament. This principle is neither more nor less than a want of sympathy and common understanding between the men of vital Christianity and the men of the world. "Ye are not of the world," says our Saviour, "therefore the world hateth you." The children of this world are spoken of as a totally different order of beings from the children of light. Christians are called upon not to be conformed to the world, but to be conformed to something else, which we may be sure was very different from the world. The wisdom of this world is said to be foolishness with God, and with those therefore to whom the Saviour hath given power to become the children of God. And, finally, such is the want of understanding betwixt Christians and the men of the world, that John says of himself and his fellow-disciples, "The world knoweth us not;' "marvel not if the world hate you."

Here, then, we behold Christians placed in those very circumstances where they are exposed to the full operation of the principle which I have been illustrating. If Christians indeed, they will with their whole mind serve the Lord Jesus, and give their whole heart to a business in which the world cannot sympathize with them. This direction of all their faculties to what to the world at large is an unknown and unaccountable object, is the very thing which will bring down the full cry of ridicule upon them. It throws them at a distance from the tastes and enjoyments of ordinary men. It makes the Christians of the present day what Christians were in the times of the apostles -a peculiar people. It is this peculiarity which holds them up to the mockeries of the world. They are outnumbered, and the loudest laugh must rise from the multitude on the broad way. In the game of ridicule, indeed, they will have it all to

themselves, for Christians are not disposed to laugh but to pity. Their only weapons are the still small voice of persuasion, and the mildness of an affectionate behaviour. But all this will not save them from being laughed at; and if we hear of the oddities of the solitary and abstruse and devoted astronomer, we are sure to hear also of the oddities of the entire and devoted Christian.

It is true, that if all or even the majority were decided Christians, they would present such a countenance to the world as to silence the voice of ridicule. Christianity would cease to be that peculiar thing which provokes men to laugh at it. Go to a Moravian village, and you meet not with a few Christian individuals but with a Christian society, where the virtues of the gospel are exemplified in all their primitive simplicity and fulness-where every day of the week wears a Sabbath complexion, and every sentence that falls from them is tinctured with the phraseology of the New Testament-where such a faith as theologians only describe animates every heart, and such a charity as poets only dream of is realized in the practice of every individual-where all live not to themselves, but to the Redeemer who died for them-where every other business is made subservient to the business of piety-where this appears to be the main concern, whether at work among their families, or in those assemblies of love, where music falls in the gracious strains of sacredness and peace upon the ear of the wandering traveller. Holy men! you have indeed chosen the better part, and have withdrawn to the quietness of your own villages from a world that is not worthy of you! Had you mingled with us, your good would have been called evil-nor would all the mildness of your virtues have saved you from the persecution of our contempt. The imputations of madness and Methodism would have been lifted up against you, and the world's dread laugh would have been sure to have followed the men who give up all for eternity.

Now, I have to put the same question to you as before-Is this judgment a fair one? Should not the question be tried upon its own merits? or are we to suffer the mere strength of