There is only one part of the alternative which the Christian minister can press upon you-Come out from among them, and in the language of Peter to the Jewish multitude, "Save yourselves from this untoward generation." Then they had to sustain the persecution of violence, and now you will have to sustain the equally effective persecution of ridicule and contempt. Christ endured the contradiction of sinners, but it was for the joy that was set before Him. The same troubles await you here, but if you endure unto the end, you will share in the same triumphs hereafter. Take not up with a measured Christianity; bid adieu to all partitioning betwixt Christ and the world. He who followeth Him must forsake all; and the work of providing for eternity is surely ample enough in its exercises and rich enough in its rewards to engross and to occupy the whole man. Suffer not any one thing to come into competition with it. It is only against one competitor that I have attempted to arm you—the opinion of your acquaintances—many of whom may wonder at the change; and when they see in your life and conversation the fruits meet for repentance, may denounce them in every company as the oddities of an altered man. This you may look for, and this you must brave. It is the trial of your faith; and when I take a survey of that unchristian complexion which appears so broadly and so visibly on the face of the world, I cannot but think that the Christians of the day have the very same exercise of principle to go through with the Christians of a more stormy and unsettled period. There is a greater similarity than is generally conceived-the only difference is in the species of persecution; and when I think of the many thousands who in the high flush of gallantry and honour would rather die than be affronted, I will not say that the persecution of contempt is not more tremendous than the persecution of personal violence. It will cost you nothing to be just such a Christian as the average of those around you; but to pass from the nominal indifference of the age to the entire and devoted Christianity of the New Testament, is almost as mighty a stride as to pass to it from the abominations of heathenism. Be assured that

in such a cause singularity is wisdom, and a prudent accommodation to the world is madness. It is only a little while that they will have to laugh at you, or to say of any one of you, that he is beside himself. God, and eternity, and the Bible are with you, and what though the men of the world be against you? A few years will bring round your vindication; and amid the awful realities of the judgment, it will appear that the way of the derided Christian is indeed a way of truth and soberness!

SERMON XV.

[ON the closing Sabbath of his ministry at Kilmany, July 9, 1815, Dr. Chalmers preached three short sermons-the first intended to awaken the secure-the second to direct the awakened-the third to counsel the believer. The second of these sermons, on the text Isaiah lvi. 1, 2, is omitted here as occupied with the same topic which was insisted on in the "Address to the Inhabitants of the Parish of Kilmany." (See Works, vol. xii. p. 71.) The introductory paragraph of the first sermon, in which there was an allusion to the special circumstances of the day, I have not been able to recover, so that it opens abruptly.]

HEBREWS III. 7, 8.

"Wherefore as the Holy Ghost saith, To-day, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts."

-BUT this is a subject on which I can expatiate no more, and you will forgive me if I should even studiously keep aloof from it in the future course of this day's services. It is a subject the introduction of which may unfit the mind for purer and better exercises. It may distress without edifying. It may hurt the speaker; and those who are around him, while deeply affected with one of the many fluctuations of time, may in fact not be hearing for eternity. This is the higher ground to which I want to confine myself.

A man in common language is called hard-hearted who would refuse his tear and his sensibilities on an occasion like the present. But he may give way to all the excesses of tenderness, and yet be hard-hearted in the sense of my text. An

object of sight may engage his every affection; and when that object is shifted away from him, he might abandon himself to the violence of grief. Yet wonderful to tell, in the matters of faith, the heart of this very man might remain hard as a nethermillstone. Eternity with all its mighty claims upon the attention of every imperishable being might have no power to move him. The unseen God who gives him every breath might knock at his bosom by the warnings of His providence and His ministers, and it remain shut and shielded against them all. That guilt which the angels see him to be covered with he might not see nor be sensible of; and because there is nothing which the world can point its finger at-nothing which the people around him who are as spiritually blinded as himself can fasten upon him as a deformity in their eyes-he may remain unappalled when we tell him that there is a lurking sinfulness within about which it were well if we could soften his heart, and fill it with the suspicions and alarms it has yet been a stranger to—that with all his decencies and his accomplishments he is a forgetter of God-he is alive to the world, but he is dead to the Maker of it he is an habitual stranger to the influence of God's authority over him, and if he remain so, God will turn him into hell.

Let me, therefore, make one attempt more to pull down the strongholds of carnal security within you. I address myself to the careless and unawakened-to those who have not yet become seriously alive to the danger of their souls-to those who have never yet pressed home upon their consciences the high questions of sin and of salvation-to those who have hitherto been in the habit of spending their days as if their all were in the world, as if eternity lay far, and very far in the background of their contemplations-as if it were seen to stand at such a vast and immeasurable distance from them that it offered no immediate call upon their attention whatever; or, to speak more correctly perhaps, as if it were not seen and were not looked to at all. Yes! my brethren, there is a thick covering upon the face of these people; and it does not lie within the strength or compass of a human arm to draw aside the vail which hides from them the realities of the spiritual world. This, my brethren,

I can vouch to be the result of all my little experience as a Christian minister. I feel that there is a power of resistance in human nature above the power of argument and beyond it -that something else must be brought to bear upon you than the demonstrations of human reasoning or the eloquence of a human voice-that these have all the feebleness of carnal weapons when brought into the contest with the dark and sullen and obstinate enmity of the natural mind against the things of God-that another power, mighty to the pulling down of strongholds, must be called in to aid the high service of the Christian ministry—that the man who rests his hope of success on his own might or his own wisdom puts this power away from him, and that the only right attitude for grappling it with our people is that of the apostle, who rested all his sufficiency on God, and never thought of himself but with weakness, and with fear, and with much trembling.

I desire, therefore, in what remains to throw myself upon the aids of the Spirit of God, and I shall endeavour, in the further prosecution of the subject, to soften your hearts, first, by a sense of guilt; secondly, by a sense of danger; and thirdly, by the touching argument of my text-giving you to know that the call of to-day may never be repeated-that the season of grace may not be prolonged to the uncertain morrow-and that while at this interesting now all who hear the word of salvation and will to accept of it shall be welcome, they who put it away from them are just hardening their hearts against the solemnity of all future warnings, and that the call of another day may never be brought to bear with energy upon their consciences.

I. Harden not your hearts against a sense of your guilt—look fairly at the matter. I am sure that many, if not all of you, must be sensible that against the God who brought you into being, and keeps you in it just as long as it pleases Him, and tells you what is His will, and what is your duty-that against Him you have times and ways without number been guilty of positive and specific sins. But some, my brethren, have fewer visible transgressions than others, and they compare themselves