This, dear brethren, is a happy day with you. I trust it will be memorable. Thirty-four years ago to-day your Senior Pastor was ordained to the office of the Christian ministry. You have enjoyed much peace and prosperity. Your pastor has been loved and honoured by his brethren. And now, while I trust it may be said of him that "his eye is not dim nor his natural force abated," it is his privilege to receive the aid and co-operation of a younger brother in whom he can confide, and whose natural disposition and Christian character and ministerial attainments will increasingly commend him to him and you. You have been spared the trial of an interval between the presidency of one pastor and the settlement of another. The dreary desolateness and bewilderment which are the lot of orphan Churches have not been yours, and to-day, in the enjoyment of a peaceful and unbroken fellowship, your eyes behold your teachers.

The echo of a more distant past than that to which your own memories extend, is heard among you on this occasion. In the honoured succession of pastors who have laboured in this part of Christ's vineyard, stand, as we have heard in the statement of one of your deacons, the names of such men as Dr. Bates and Matthew Henry. Your descent from an ancestry so holy and universally honoured, involves both privilege and responsibility. The voices of the present and the past combine with the voice of the Unchangeable in saying to you,—

"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect."

These words are recorded in Matthew v. 48. They are the words of Christ. Let us meditate on them. And may the Holy Spirit open our hearts to receive them!

There are perhaps who do not in express terms deny the legitimacy of our Lord's command, who notwithstanding

say secretly in their hearts, "The standard is too high, we cannot attain to it," and then quietly set it aside. But this shelving of Divine words, this practical evasion of them, is in every case undutiful and perilous, and in the present instance the effect would be to legalize sin. If it be right to enjoin every duty separately and by itself, it cannot be wrong to make all duties meet together and enjoin them in one word-"Be ye perfect." If every excellence and grace and virtue and attainment be the fit subject of separate inculcation, all their rays of light may be concentrated in a focus-"Be ye perfect." Find the duty which it is lawful to omit, or the sin in which it is lawful to indulge, or the shortcoming with which it is lawful to be contented,-and to the extent of that duty or sin or shortcoming we shall allow you to subtract from the obligation of this command. But you will not make the attempt. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," is a law with which no one quarrels, or whose justice and obligation at least all are prepared to confess. And the command of our Lord is only another form of the same law. It erects the same standard. And so long as there are depths in perfection which we have not explored, and heights which we have not attained, so long as there is grace in Christ to bring us nearer and nearer to God and to himself, our eye must be fixed on no goal, and our heart content with no state, short of our Lord's requirement.

Not to insist on views so obvious, allow me to direct your attention to two forms into which the services of this evening suggest the propriety of throwing the injunction of our text.

1. As a Church, you are called on to-night to aim at breadth or completeness of character. Your Father in heaven causes His sun to shine on the evil and on the good. "So," said Christ to His disciples, "do ye." Not only love your friends,

enemies. Do the one as well as the other.

"Be

perfect." Be complete, not one-sided in your goodness.

Brethren, this breadth or completeness of character is a rare attainment. Men excel intellectually rather in individual gifts than in general and well-proportioned strength. And Christians excel spiritually rather in individual graces than in well-proportioned holiness. One man is distinguished by unbending integrity and stern adherence to principle, another by the softer grace of tender love and sanctified amiableness. How few combine the severer and the gentler!-between which, let us be assured, there is no natural alienation, and which, when combined, give to the character at once strength and beauty. One man is liberal, and another is active. But the giver of money seems to imagine sometimes that he purchases exemption from labour, and the doer of work that he may save his money. Sometimes a man is both liberal and active, but his tone of mind is far from being spiritual. He is engrossed with the machinery of Christian operation, and his heart possesses but a very scanty measure of the holy oil of Christian sentiment and feeling. And what is stranger far, you sometimes meet with a man whose tone is deeply spiritual, but who is neither liberal nor active. Talk of Christian experience, and he is quite at home. His lips overflow from the fulness of a heart which seems to be richly imbued with grace, and bathed in the very joy and light of heaven. Hear him address God in prayer. His language is the language of a child whose heart is full of love to his father. It is the language of a soul which has known much of spiritual conflict and spiritual victory, which has passed through much experience both of the cloud and sunshine, and which, while deeply sensible of want, adores confidingly the fulness which is treasured up in Christ. You conclude that the suppliant who can thus pray lives near to God, and is

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ripening for glory. But follow him from the throne of grace, and you find him without heart to give or heart to work. This is a great mystery. I do not understand it, and I shall not attempt to solve it. The truth of such a man's character is surrounded by a cloud which I cannot penetrate. "To his own Master he standeth or falleth." The relations of life often betray incompleteness of character very strikingly. Follow a man into business, and you find every virtue to adorn and sustain him; but as a Church member the same man is perhaps a cypher. He occupies a pew, and does not absent himself from the Lord's table; but as to every thing besides, his membership is not felt or realised. There is, however, a more anomalous case still. You find a Church member, zealous and useful, interesting himself in all that concerns the honour and prosperity of the Church, a brother amidst brethren-and the same man holds a very ambiguous position in the world. There is a want of transparency in his transactions, and men stand in doubt of him; or there is a want of system and energy, and the condition of his affairs is often unsatisfactory. Could we examine one hundred professors of religion separately in these three positions—at home-in the Church-in the world-what varieties! what anomalies! How many should we find like a portrait which can be viewed only in one light, or a statue made to be looked at only from one position! Find the proper point from which to view the statue, and you admire it. Move from that point, and its beauty and symmetry are gone-you can scarcely imagine it to be the same thing. How few of the hundred would bear to be gazed on and examined from two of the three positions we have named! And how many fewer still from the three! Blessed be God, there are on whom you may gaze from every position you can take in relation to them; and every aspect will elicit new beauties, and render the proportions more striking and undoubted,

These living models of well proportioned completeness illustrate the command of our Lord, "Be ye perfect."

Churches often exhibit collectively all the varieties and characteristics of individuals. They take their mould sometimes from pastors, sometimes from a few leading members, sometimes from unseen causes which cannot be discovered, sometimes from circumstances hidden in the dim past, but whose force is not yet spent, and propagates itself through one generation to another. Could you gather from all the churches in a district the excellences which distinguish each, and concentrate these excellences into one body, you might have such a Church as every Church ought to be. In one you would find brotherly love and concord. In another, zeal and public spirit. In a third, scriptural enlightenment and knowledge. In a fourth, fervour and spirituality. In a fifth, faithful discipline and purity. A sixth would furnish you with an example of obedience to the apostolic command-" Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free;" and a seventh, with an example of obedience to the equally apostolic command-" We beseech you, brethren, to know them who labour among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love for their work's sake."

It is not to be expected, I shall be told, that every Church should combine in itself all these excellences. Why not? Which of them is incompatible with the rest? Which of them is unattainable? Which of them will the law of Christ dispense with? Which of them is of little value? Why then not expect to combine them all in the character of one Church? Is not their combination the very thing commanded by the Head of the Church—“ Be ye perfect?" Is their combination beyond the power of His grace? Or does it not enter into His design? Why not expect it? Not expect all the seven colours in the