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presents the means, the hope, and the aspect of improvement.

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What stupendous efforts were required, in former ages, when the spirit of man began to heave beneath the monstrous pile of superstitions and absurdities which oppressed his reason! But now, farewel for ever-we hope, for ever at least from this favoured landordeals, pilgrimages, solitary seclusions, holy massacres, crusades, inquisitorial cruelties, prohibitions of the exercise of reason, impious claims to infallibility, licenses to commit sin, together with the sale of pretended pardons, and all those worst abominations and delusions, which held the bodies and the souls even of the best and wisest, in dismal bondage. The voice of Reason has not been raised in vain. Lo! Christianity resumes her original beauty and simplicity. Religion and Virtue, Virtue and Utility, are no longer unnaturally disjoined the sacred volume is thrown open to every eye, and Jesus Christ is again the light of the world.

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He has told us that God is our Father, as

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well as his and his beloved apostle, that "God is love." Herein is comprised all knowledge, all virtue, and all felicity-God is our Father, God is infinitely kind and good, and the Universe must be ultimately happy. Who can speak the value of this exhaustless mine of hope and comfort? "God is love;” our duty is love; Heaven is perfect love; and when this divine principle shall reign with its full influence among us, earth will resemble Heaven.

Instructed by the experience of former days, let us not, in grasping at the shadows of science" "that passeth away," let go the substance of that Heaven-born charity "which endureth for ever."

Neither let us, while instructed by the same experience, despise those aids of learning, those solid improvements of the understanding, that philosophy, "not falsely," but truly so called-in whose absence Christianity itself was misinterpreted-and became a nuisance and an abomination-authorising and

multiplying the sins and miseries of our unhappy race, and, at whose return, it shone forth again, disincumbered and unveiledand began to bless mankind anew "by turning them from their iniquities."

Finally, guided, in this age of light and liberality, by all the choicest principles of wisdom, human and divine, to that temper and conduct which is essentially and everlastingly beneficial to man and acceptable to Godlet us not suffer the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, or the seductions of indolence and pleasure to blast those good fruits which superstition choked and impoverished before. Let us be doers of the will of God, and not hearers only. Let not our zeal languish, as our reason is enlightened. For as much as we cannot and ought not to hide from ourselves-that the more clearly we discern the course of pure religion, genuine virtue, and solid happiness; the more inexcusable shall we be, if we depart from it.

SERMON XVIII.

EPITOME OF CHURCH HISTORY.

III.

ISAIAH IX. 22.-A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation: I the Lord will hasten it in his time.

GREAT and glorious as are the works of creation, how much are our wonder and reverence enhanced, when we reflect on that principle of progression which pervades all nature! The plant that springs from a single seed, shoots forth branches laden with seed, capable of overspreading extensive provinces,

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in the course of time, or even of covering the globe itself with their produce.

In like manner, we may consider every pure and just idea, as a seed of knowledge and virtue, sown in the mind of man; which has no sooner sprung up in its proper form of individual beauty and usefulness, than it be. gins to scatter fresh seeds through a wide and widening region, equally productive of social happiness and improvement; till the intellectual and moral harvest be complete.

Of this, no instance is more memorable than the rise and progress of the Christian Religion, from its lowly origin, to the boundless splendor of that æra, when it was become the Religion of Constantine and of the civilized world.

Yet this auspicious dawn of heavenly truth and wisdom, was, through the pride and folly of its votaries, to suffer a dark eclipse. No sooner did the followers of the humble and

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