be evaded-but how shall he be able to extricate himself from the besetting inconveniencies of such an arrangement as gives to the whole population of a neighbourhood a constant and ever-moving tendency towards the house of the minister? The patronage with which I think it is his heavy misfortune to be encumbered, gives him a share in the disposal of innumerable vacancies, and each vacancy gives rise to innumerable candidates, and each candidate is sure to strengthen his chance for success by stirring up a whole round of acquaintances, who, in the various forms of written and of personal entreaty, discharge their wishes on the minister in the shape of innumerable applications. It is fair to observe, however, that the turmoil of all this electioneering has its times and its seasons. It does not keep by one in the form of a steady monsoon. It comes upon him more in the resemblance of a hurricane; and like the hurricanes of the atmosphere, it has its months of violence and its intervals of periodical cessation. I shall only say, that when it does come, the power of contemplation takes to herself wings and flees away. She cannot live and flourish in the whirlwind of all that noise and confusion by which her retreat is so boisterously agitated. She sickens and grows pale at every quivering of the household bell, and at every volley from the household door, by which the loud notes of impatience march along all the passages, and force an impetuous announcement into every chamber of the dwelling-place. She finds all this to be too much for her. These rude and incessant visitations fatigue and exhaust her, and at length banish her entirely; nor will she suffer either force or flattery to detain her in a mansion invaded by the din of such turbulent and uncongenial elements.

But though I talk of cessations and intervals, you are not to suppose that there are ever at any time the intervals of absolute repose. There is a daily visitation, though it is only at particular months that it comes upon you with all the vehemence and force of a tornado. There was of late an unceasing stream of people passing every day through the house, and coming under the review of the minister on their road to the supplies of ordinary pauperism. This formed part of the pre

scribed conveyance through which each of them trust to find their way to the relief that they aspired after. This always secured a levee of petitioners, and kept up a perennial flow of applications, varying in rapidity and fulness with the difficulty of the times-but never, in the whole course of my experience, subsiding into a rill so gentle that it only ministered delight and refreshment to the bosom by the peacefulness of its murmurs. Oh, no! my brethren-there is a something here about which our tearful sons and daughters of poesy are most miserably in the wrong. I know that they have got many fine things to say about the minister of a beneficent religion having a ready tear for every suffering, and an open ear for every cry, and room in his house for every complainer, and room in his heart for a distinct exercise of compassion on the needs and the distresses of every afflicted family, and an open door through which the representations of dejected humanity may ever find a welcome admittance, and a free unoccupied day throughout every hour of which it is his part to act the willing friend of his parishioners, and to yield the alacrity of his immediate attentions in behalf of all the wants and all the wretchedness that is among them. Yes! all this ought to be done, and agents should be found for the doing of it. But the minister is not the man. who can do it. The minister is not the man who should do it. And beset as we are on the one hand by a hard and a secular generation, who, without one sigh of remorse could see every minister of the city sinking the spiritualities of his office under the weight of engagements which they themselves will not touch with one of their fingers: and deafened as we are on the other hand by the outcry of puling sentimentalists, who, without thought and without calculation, would realize all the folly and all the fondness of their fancy-sketches upon us, I utterly refuse the propriety of all these services—and yet proclaiming myself the firm, the ardent, the devoted friend of the poor, do I assert these advocates of theirs to be the blind supporters of a system which has aggravated both the moral and the physical wretchedness of a most cruelly neglected population.

But I must bring my narrative to a close. There are many other miscellaneous items of employment which I have neither time nor recollection for enumerating. Many of the admittances into the charity schools of the place are granted upon the recommendation of a minister. Many statements about the circumstances of people, as if he were at all a fit hand for an office so invidious and so indelicate, will only be received on the attestation of a minister. The petitions for exemption from taxes must be signed by a minister. The petitions for exemption from road-money must be signed by a minister. The former of these two last is an imposition laid on us by Government-the latter is a county or a municipal imposition. But, indeed, it is not of much consequence to advert to this distinction. Our state and our provincial and our city rulers are all equally defaulters in this respect-that they have all a most invincible appetite for the aid and information of the minister-that from every quarter, whether of civil or of political regulation, there is a constant tendency to draw upon the time and the services of the minister that this is fast ripening into all the stability of a familiar and a customary practice-that every year is separating the clergy of our Established Church by a wider. interval from all the proper and peculiar duties of their employment-and that up from the high court of Parliament down to the humblest corporations of the land, there is a general and an alarming process now in full operation to transform and to secularize, and I add, most wofully to degrade us.

I will not speak at length just now about the mischievous effect of all this on the great mass of our population. We hold out in their eyes a totally different aspect from the ministers of a former age. We are getting every year more assimilated in look and in complexion to your surveyors, and your city clerks, and your justices, and your distributors of stamps, and all those men of place who have to do with the people in the matters of civil or of municipal agency. Every feature in the sacredness of our character is wearing down amid all the stir and hurry and hard-driving of this manifold officiality. And thus it is that our parishioners have lost sight of us altogether as their

spiritual directors, and seldom or never come to us upon any spiritual errand at all—but taking us as they are led to do by the vicious system that is now in progressive operation-taking us as they are led by that system to find us, they are ever and anon overwhelming us with consultations about their temporalities-and the whole flavour of the spiritual relation between a pastor and his flock is dissipated and done away. There is none of the unction of Christianity at all in the intercourse we hold with them; and everything that relates to the soul and to the interests of eternity, and to the religious cure of themselves and of their families, is elbowed away by the work of filling up their schedules, and advising them about their moneys, and shuffling along with them amongst the forms and the papers of a most intricate correspondence. Time, and the concerns and the managements of time, have left no room for other conversation; and our poor perishing and misled people almost never think of bending their footsteps towards us on any other object than that of mere business. But upon this object they do crowd around us at a rate that is incalculable; and after having enumerated the specific purposes, for which in compliance with our Government and city regulations they are led to transact with their minister, you are now prepared to understand how the general effect of the whole system is to make them look up to their minister as a man of great wisdom and information about all the secularities they have to do with, and that he is competent to furnish them with the best advice under every imaginable difficulty-and that surely they cannot trust so firmly to any quarter as to the ready friendship and the well-exercised discernment of their minister. And thus it is that the habit is now formed of repairing to him with the strangest variety of topics, on which he is expected to deliberate and to counsel them; and this ultimate effect of the system I have now been attempting to expose, forms a heavy addition to all those distractions which harrow up the mind, to all those annoyances which surround the person, to all those merciless intrusions which profane the every retirement, and reduce to a thing of shreds and patches the every intellectual process of your ministers.

SERMON XXIV.

[PREACHED at Glasgow in September 1816.]

MATTHEW V. 38-48.

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee; and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

THERE is something in all these precepts that is apt to startle and to perplex us. The selfishness of man, which naturally is by far the most sensitive part of his constitution, takes immediate alarm at them, and would recoil from a morality in the observance of which it conceives that all the securities of justice behoved to be broken up, and that the interest of every scrupulous Christian would be thrown open and defenceless against the inroad of a thousand possibilities. If I am fanatic enough to give to every one who chooseth to ask of me, I shall soon become as helpless and as indigent as any of them. If in this age of splendid enterprises I accede to the demand of every borrower, when-fully bent on the airy magnificence of their