to touch or to awaken you? Then, indeed, you affront God in the tenderest part, you dishonour His Son, you make Himself a liar by refusing His testimony respecting Him, you reject the offer of salvation that hath been brought to your door, you say-We shall persist in our sins, and we care not for the Saviour. The cry of gospel entreaty is lifted up in your hearing now, and you will not listen to it; and the cry for gospel mercy may arise from you then, when on the eve of bidding adieu to the world, you cast about for the peace and the interest of your eternity-because you can do no better, because you cannot help it. Oh! cast not away your own souls; listen to the Saviour who now standeth without, and knocketh at the door of your hearts; kiss Him while He is in the way. He is willing now to enter into friendship with you, and to manage your cause, and to take upon Himself the whole burden of your interest and reconciliation with God; but He will not always strive His wrath will at length begin to burn; and if you refuse Him now, the day may soon overtake you when you will cry unto Him and He will not hear you.

But, lastly, God calleth unto all to forsake the evil of their ways and the evil of their thoughts. He bids all to repent as well as to believe the gospel. He hath uttered this solemn denunciation—that unless we repent we perish. He makes us to understand, that in turning to Christ we turn from our iniquities. He sounds this will and order of His imperatively in your hearing-Break off your sins by righteousness.-Come out from among evil ways and evil acquaintances.-Burst asunder the entanglements and the enticements of vicious pleasure by which you are surrounded.-Be ye separate from sinners, and follow not a multitude to do evil. And to encourage you with the offers of strength and aid from above, that you may be enabled to prosecute the work of repentance and to perfect it, He says, Turn unto me, and behold I will pour out my Spirit upon you. This is the cry that He now lifts in your hearing-and will you dare after this to continue in the bonds of companionship with the ungodly? Will you choose the despisers of God and of goodness for your intimates, and that merely because they live with

you in the same street, or work with you under the same master? Will you thus expose your eternity at random to the evil influences of such acquaintances as you may happen to meet with in the world? You are young, and you may perhaps be laying your account with many days on this side of death, and may think that it is time enough to be good-that it is time enough to think of heaven, and of preparation for that awful and terrifying death which still lies at so remote a distance away from you. But I call upon you to feel the urgency of the text. Young as you are, God is lifting up a cry of expostulation and entreaty even unto you: Suffer little children to come unto me, says the Saviour―and is not this a cry of invitation to the least and youngest of you all? Children, obey your parents in the Lord, says one of His apostles-and is not this a cry of authority lifted up in your hearing? Your being young does not prevent God from crying unto you; but if you will not listen-this, when you come to be old, may prevent Him from hearing when you cry unto Him. Oh! persist not, then, in this unconcern any longer. Open your hearts to the voice of Him that speaketh from heaven, and who, while grieved because of your sins, is yet waiting to be gracious. Harden your hearts no longer against Him, or they may at length become harder than the adamant. Think with yourselves, that if this evening I stand my ground against the cry which I have heard, then will I stand more firmly against another, and another, and another cry; and thus will your case be every day becoming worse, and your chance for heaven will every day become more desperate, and your contempt and carelessness about divine things will grow upon you from one day to another; and your whole life may be one continued resistance to the proclaimed grace of that God who is now plying you with messages of love, and entreating your return to the paths of peace and of pleasantness. Oh! hold out no longer, lest in return for His cry being unheard by you all your lives long, you will at length send forth a fearful and a piercing and an exceeding bitter cry when death stares you in the face, and the terrors of the coming hell draw near to your affrighted soul, and the cry be dis

regarded, and the gate of mercy be shut, and the Spirit have left you to the fruit of your own ways, and an everlasting seal be set on that fountain which is now flowing out so freely, and to which you are now invited, that you may wash out your sins in the blood of the Lamb. Return unto God, and He will return unto you.-Seek Him while He is near.-Call upon Him while He is to be found.-He will receive you graciously.—He will love you freely, if you will only go to Him now, and put yourself under the protection of His Son Jesus Christ, and under the bidding of Him as the Master whom you have chosen, and whom alone you are determined to serve.

SERMON XXIX.

[PREACHED at St. John's, Glasgow, on the second Sabbath of Nov. 1823.]

PSALM CXXXVII. 5, 6.

"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy."

THE exquisite pathos and beauty of this sacred composition gives it a high place even in the records of poetry. It is, indeed, one of its most precious effusions; and apart altogether from that which constitutes its highest recommendation to a spiritual man, there are about it touches of imagery and feeling that call forth a responding homage from the native sensibilities of every heart. The captive despondency-the dear yet drooping recollection of that more distant home-the fond and lofty aspirings of a patriotism which the ruthless hand of tyranny must only have riveted the more, and never could extinguish these deeper agitations of the soul are so mellowed into softness, and the pensive and the picturesque are so mingled together in these accompaniments of the harp and the river, and the hanging willow upon its side, as to make this, even when regarded in the light of a Hebrew melody, the finest and most fascinating of them all.

Yet they are not the breathings either of a natural or a poetic tenderness, but those of grace and of the Spirit, wherewith at present we have immediately to do. This psalm, in fact, is

mainly and essentially the utterance of religion. It is the complaint of men now bereaved of its solemnities and its services, and hurried into a Pagan land, where the worship of Israel was derided, and the God of Israel was unknown. They had both the griefs and the fears of nature; but the chief burden of their grief is, that torn from the companionships of piety, and left to the cruel mockery of profane and unfeeling barbarians, their spirits had lost that wonted aliment by which all grace and all godliness are upholden; and the chief burden of their fear was, lest, in the withering atmosphere of that ungainly and ungenial neighbourhood where they now breathed, this grace and this godliness should go into utter dissipation. There was little danger that they should ever lose the regards and the recollections of patriotism. There was little danger that even to the hour of death the scenes of late ancestral glory, and of their own happy boyhood, should not always recur as far the dearest to their imagination. There was a powerful guarantee in the universal laws and sensations of humanity, that when they looked back on the peace and gladness of younger days, every bosom should fetch its heavy sigh, and every eye should weep at the remembrance of them. There was no fear lest any of them should become apostates from the truth and the tenderness of nature; but there was another, a more fatal apostasy, on the brink of which these holy men of God felt that they were standing; and this psalm, we repeat, is the outpouring of souls firm in their purposes of religious integrity, yet fearful of falling away from it-eyeing with dismay the hazards of their exile from a priestly and a consecrated land, and summoning to their aid the high resolve, the solemn and appalling conjuration-" If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, if I forget the city of my God, let my right hand forget her cunning; and if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy."

And we mistake it, my brethren, if we think that to be translated into a condition for feelings and purposes that are kindred to these, we must be visited with a kindred calamity