to believe according to his notions. We are ready to yield our assent to any prevailing opinion which has respectable names to countenance it, we take it on trust because they maintain it, and then we are said to believe in it, and our authority perhaps may weigh with others and lead them to take it on trust in their turn. So that in this way opinions may be echoed by the mouths of thousands, but yet be really believed by very few, and that may claim assent because it is universally received, which in fact is believed by an infinitely small number, the mass who echo it having received it on trust, and entertaining no reasonable and personal conviction respecting it. So our nobler life shrinks up within us to nothing; our sense of truth perishes from want of exercise; truth is nothing, falsehood is nothing; our own minds have no clinging to the one, no instinctive shrinking from the other; they know either only by proxy, and that is not at all. For take a blind man and persuade him that he sees because we see, can he see therefore really, or can he have any notion whatever of that wonderful gift of sight which they who have eyes enjoy? Even so, truth cannot be known by those who have no appreciation of it within themselves; it cannot be known and it cannot be valued; and therefore all sorts of trickery and dishonesty, from which a mind knowing and loving truth shrinks with loathing inexpressible,

are to minds which know truth by proxy a congenial element; they are to them nothing base, nothing disgusting, but an amusing exercise of ingenuity.

It is one great part of a Christian's armour that he should be able to distinguish between truth and falsehood; that he should know what it is truly to believe. And observe once again, that here too, combining a keen sense of our own soul's life with the sense of God and of Christ, there is no room for pride or presumption, but the very contrary. For what are our minds which perceive truth so livelily and believe it so firmly? What are they but minds gone astray from God by nature, blinded by a thousand weaknesses, and surrounded by darkness on every side? All this is true, and therefore we hold our knowledge and our faith but as God's gift, and are sure of them only so far as His power, and wisdom, and goodness are our warrant. If we are confident, it is because we humbly trust, that-using the faculties which He has given us according to His will, when they speak decidedly, their assurance is His and not their own; we trust to them because it is His will that we should trust them. Our knowledge in fact is but faith, bold as such, but as knowledge simply at the mercy of every sceptic who may perplex us by affirming that we have no grounds for knowing any thing; no grounds for knowing as of ourselves,

but great grounds for believing that God's appointed evidence is true, and that in believing it we are trusting Him.

The subject grows as we advance in it. Only thus far have we come already, and with this I will now conclude; that for our guidance in life we should ever feel a lively sense of the three parties in every one of our thoughts and actions, God and our own souls, and Christ the Mediator between God and our souls: and that one point of feeling a lively sense of our own souls, is to believe for ourselves, and not by proxy; to distinguish in our own minds between truth and falsehood; to discern truth and enjoy faith.

April 17, 1842.

SERMON XXX.

OUR OWN SOULS WITHOUT GOD AND

CHRIST.

DEUTERONOMY, ix. 1.

Hear, O Israel: thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fenced up to heaven.

IN

In my last sermon the point at which we arrived was this:-Looking at you as going to be scattered so soon, many of you to the remotest parts of the earth, as going to be called to a great variety of duties, we know not in many instances how new they may be to you, nor how important; we said it did become a matter of very great interest that you should go from hence, furnished, so far as we can furnish you, with the preparation for a Christian's course and I said that, as a short form containing much in few words, it was desirable that we should bear three things ever in our minds,

ever livelily present, ever indissolubly united, God and Christ, and our souls; and that one thing meant, when I spoke of bearing our own souls ever consciously in our minds, was this, that we should have our own belief founded on our own convictions, and not taken on trust from any other man or men, whether of this present time or of the times that have gone before us.

sermon.

Thus far we were come at the end of my last But it is manifest that the greatest part of our subject was left as yet untouched; for I had spoken only of one point in the consciousness of our own soul's existence: of our consciousness of God and of Christ I had not spoken at all. Yet it cannot be supposed that the great or the only thing needed in our Christian course is to hold fast our own convictions. It is a great thing, a very great thing, quite essential to all excellence, but not the great thing, nor the only thing. We must not put any one point so forward as to obscure others; resolute individual conviction is a great matter; but is that resolute conviction to be the belief of evil or of good?

Let us see then what it is to hold fast with all our hearts and with all our souls our sense of God and of Christ; what a great difference, the great difference in fact for time and for eternity, exists between us, either entering on the world, or as we go through the world, according as we do