And having asked you to begin the good course, let me conclude with the positive requirement which our Saviour laid upon the people He called, even at the very outset of their discipleship. In coming to Christ, forsake all. You cannot too early begin the work of struggling with your iniquities. Nay, if you are not so struggling, the invitations of the Gospel have had no effect upon you. He who turneth to Christ, turneth from his iniquities. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners-give up all that your conscience tells you to be wrong-seek after all that your conscience tells you to be right-enter from this moment into a course of decided turning from all wickedness, and of decided earnestness in all the new obedience of the gospel. God will not despise the day of small things. He will not turn in indifference away from your first attempts to seek after Him, if haply you may find Him. Cherish no doubt of your forgiveness through the merits of His Son-if you betake yourselves to the leaving off of all that He bids you leave off, and to the doing of all that He bids you do; and could we only get the matter begun, with such a principle and such a purpose at the bottom of it, I would not be afraid of your stopping short: but, committing yourselves to the guidance of Him who is able to strengthen you for the doing of all things, you would abound more and more every day, and experience all those changes of soul and of spirit, as well as of body, which make you meet for the Jerusalem above.

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VOL. VI.

SERMON XXIII.

[AFTER his settlement in Glasgow, Dr. Chalmers was excessively annoyed by the accumulation of all kinds of secular business which was laid upon the city ministers. Resolved to proclaim as widely as possible the wrongs thus done to the Christian ministry, and at least to work out a way of deliverance for himself, he carried the subject to the pulpit. He had intended to preach twice upon this topic. The effect of the first sermon-the one now published-was such that he was dissuaded from pursuing it—abundant assurances being tendered to him that he would not be so interfered with in the future. So strongly, however, had he felt upon this matter, that I find among his manuscripts the introduction to a sermon intended to be a sequel to the one now published, written about the time that he was appointed to the Church of St. John's, and which he had purposed to deliver to the Tron Church congregation before parting from them. Owing, I presume, to an urgency similar to that which had been brought to bear upon him previously, his intention in this second instance also was laid aside.]

ACTS VI. 2.

"Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them, and said, It is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables."

Ir is a very possible thing to denounce a vicious system without bearing hard on so much as one of the individual agents of that system. It is a very possible thing to attack a great public corruption-ay, and that, too, with all the honest vehemence of sentiment, while all that vehemence of passion which discharges itself in the severities of pointed and personal appli

cation may be utterly kept away. Surely it is quite possible to be on the one hand zealously affected in a good thing, and on the other hand to bear in constant and effectual remembrance that the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. May we therefore never let down our zeal for the good work of a most desirable and much called for reformation, and at the same time never suffer the entrance into our bosoms for an ingredient so hateful as contempt towards any one established dignity, or the virulence of exasperated feeling towards the perversities or the wilful blindness of any one individual.

I hold it fair to say, in relation to the case now before us, that were I at all disposed to wreak anger or give vent to any one of my vindictive sensibilities on this subject, I should be at a loss to find out the human being on whom I could make to rest the burden of my indignation. I positively cannot tell who have the blame of this mischievous system. Not altogether the existing generation of official men-for they received it as a legacy from their predecessors. Not altogether the senators of our land, who are so heedlessly accumulating upon the ministers of religion such an oppressive load of signatures and certificates, and other underling secularities, as if persisted in much longer will bury the sacredness of the character altogether, and transform him who sustains it into a mere agent of police or of civil regulation-for the unseen field of our labours is too far removed from their habitual observation to make them at all aware of the mischief they are inflicting on the character of our people, and the best interests of our country. Not altogether the ministers themselves, whose task it is to watch over their assigned department, and in the duteous spirit of loyalty, to tell our state, our governors, and our patriots, how hurtfully this invasion bears on the usefulness of their order; for in truth the progress of the mischief has been most insinuating-it has come upon us in the way of gradual accumulations. At each distinct step it wore the aspect of a benevolent and kind accommodation to the humbler orders of society-and so the matter has swelled and multiplied till the upshot of this kind and benevolent system has been that in our larger towns

it has effected as to every moral and every spiritual purpose an entire separation of the minister and the people from each other; and the man whose business it was in the olden time to prepare for your Sabbath instruction, and to watch over your souls, and to hold individual conference with every earnest inquirer, and to ply his daily attendance upon your deathbeds, and by his yearly presence to shed a holy influence over your streets and your families, and to brandish all that spiritual armour which the great Master of the Church has put into his hand for reclaiming the profligate and overawing the audaciously wicked, and arresting the mad career of licentiousness, and so manifesting the truth to the consciences of men as to force their willing consent to the faith and the obedience of the gospel-the man, I say, who had this for his business then has got other business now to engross and to occupy him. The kind and the benevolent system has put other services into his hand, and he is far too busy with the performance of these modern and superinduced duties, which have been grafted on our clerical office, to have either time or strength for the drivelling exercises of a former generation—and so it is, my brethren, that now-a-days among the other boasts of this enlightened age, you will find he can boast a chamber which has upon it as much of the important aspect of business as any of you, and he is as deeply involved in the whirl of secular employments, and is as constantly beset with the urgency of most clamorous demands on his time and his attention; and that inner apartment which wont to be the scene of meditations sustained for hours together, and out of which the well-built argument, and the powerful remonstrance, and the pathetic expostulation, issued forth in a refreshing stream of Christian and moral influence upon the people, is now laid open to the din of every invading footstep, and has all its thoughtfulness and all its tranquillity chased away from it, and the whole of that machinery by which the products of the mind are accumulated through the week, and brought forth with the return of every hallowed day to nourish and to edify a congregation, is now most cruelly broken up.Ay, my brethren, and if you have any sympathy at all with

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the woes of that dark period in history when the unlettered. hordes of the North burst on the polished domains of art and of learning, and in one tide of ruthless invasion laid low all the vestiges of refinement, and bore down all the aspiring energies of genius, then let me point your attention to another invasion. just as Gothic in its character, though not so widely visible in its display an invasion by which the door of many an intellectual retreat is now no longer a security to its occupier, and the truly British maxim of every man's house being his castle is trampled upon in all the wantonness of an arbitrary and assumed discretion by the constituted authorities of the land. Yes! and be they the rulers of our kingdom or the rulers of our cities, who give their seal to these distressing inroads on the peacefulness of a studious habitation, all the power which sanctions so glaring an injustice, and all that pageantry of official grandeur by which the solemn air of legality is thrown. around it, only serve to confirm the resemblance which has now occurred to me; nor, should this shameful claim be persisted in, shall I ever cease to look upon it as the triumph of strength over principle, the mournful ascendency of vulgar power over the high prerogatives of the understanding.

In the prosecution of the following discourse, I shall first submit to your attention a short narrative of all the exactions and the services by which the ministers of the gospel in this our land are withdrawn from prayer and from the ministry of the word. I shall, in the second place, attempt to demonstrate the evils of this system; and, in the third place, to recommend some palliatives by which, till it be conclusively done away, a defence against these evils might be reared in behalf of our parish and our congregation.

I proceed, in the first place, to the narrative.

Among the people of our busy land, who are ever on the wing of activity, and whether in circumstances of peace or of war, are at all times feeling the impulse of some national movement or other, it is not to be wondered at that a series of transactions should be constantly flowing between the metropolis of the empire and its distant provinces. There are the remittances