have now ascertained our danger; and a moment's communion with our hearts will shew us how helpless of themselves, how ineffectual and insufficient they are, without some new vital energy to assist their weak endeavours, to work out the great spiritual change, without which heaven and its happiness cannot be comprehended, much less attained. But the Redeemer says, "Take up your cross and follow me." Here is indeed consolation and pardon for the past; hope and immortality for the future. As the ruins of that pure nature which God had endowed us with, and the express declaration and entire tenor of Scripture, prove that a great change has taken place in the human race-a moral corruption, that has broken the image which God has made for himself, and has given a shock to a part of his creation which he once pronounced to be " very good;" it appears absolutely necessary that some great change, some moral convulsion,-some shock equal to the first, should take place in order to restore the derangement that was thus produced. God himself descended to bring his own work back to its purity. By the suffering on that cross he did what we could never have done for ourselves: he made atonement for our guilty desertion of God; he became a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of our degenerate species; and, through that suffering and the merits of his blood, he procured for us an assisting Spirit, that is to keep pace with the weak exertions of our hearts, and help to overcome within us the dominion of sins, from the punishment of which we shall thus be acquitted through his mediation.

Of this great salvation the leading condition is, Faith in that Redeemer, a full reliance upon him and his merits, which only can procure us pardon and immortality and nothing can teach us to understand the nature of that faith, by which only we are saved, better than the very passage before us :-"Take up your cross and follow me." It makes Christ, and Christ alone, the object that we are to keep constantly, unremittingly

in view, as all we can depend upon for hope, and bles sing, and salvation; but it shews that in order to this, we must follow him, we must tread in his steps, we must imitate his example. In fact, faith (that word upon which so many stumble) includes in its signification what we all perfectly well understand by a word very like it, fidelity;-the fidelity of a servant to his master, of a disciple to his teacher. We look to him for every thing; for hope, for example, and for strength. For hope to his atonement, through which only we must look for every spiritual blessing which our Heavenly Father bestows; for example-to his life of purity, and holiness, and charity; for strengthto his Holy Spirit, without which our feeble struggles against the guilty nature within us would be all useless and unavailing.

Thus the text before us shews us, as it were, in a beautiful picture, the connexion between faith and its practical effects upon our lives and our feelings. It represents us following Christ humbly, yet indefatigably, under the burden of the cross; keeping him in view as the only ground of our hope and our reliance; and, in order to keep in sight, we must toil on in our journey, bearing the cross, treading the path he has gone before The moment we cease to tread in his footsteps,the moment we halt in the way in which he has preceded, he has got out of sight, and our faith and practice fail at the same instant.

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20

SERMON X.

MATTHEW, Xi. 30.

My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

It is almost always by comparison that we judge of the ease or the hardship of our situation, You will generally find, that any man who complains of the severity of his lot, compares it either with some happier state that he had himself formerly enjoyed, or with the more prosperous circumstances of those by whom he is surrounded; at least you would think him entitled to very little pity, if he continued to murmur and repine when his situation was neither worse than what it was before, nor worse than that of most of his neighbours.

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If you should attempt to reconcile him to his situation, what would be the most natural method of proceeding? By comparison: by shewing him how much worse it might have been. Now this is the best way estimating the ease of the Christian yoke, and of weighing the burden that our Redeemer lays upon our shoulders; and thus shall we soon discover how gracious are those commandments which we think it hard to fulfil; how indulgent are those laws which we often neglect and despise then, when we have compared them with other yokes and other burdens, shall we learn how easy is that yoke to which we often refuse to submit ; how light that burden which we often fling with impatience to the ground.

Let us first look abroad for matter of comparison. The greater part of the world have never yet been vis

ited by the Gospel of Christ; have never yet heard the message of love and salvation. Now it may be curious to observe what are the religious yokes and burdens which these people have imposed upon themselves; that is, in other words, what are the religious duties by which they hope to become objects of the Divine favour, and partakers of the blessings he bestows,-to turn away his anger, to purchase his favour, to escape his vengeance, and conciliate his mercy. Perhaps it would be impossible to invent a new kind of bodily torture which many among these wretched people have not willingly undergone for these objects. All those who are anxious to render themselves acceptable in the sight of God actually devote themselves to misery, and go in search of some new kind of suffering, by which they think they can become more worthy of his approbation. It would be a kind of punishment to us even to hear some of them described. Death, in its ordinary shape, appears much too easy, and would be a relief to their sufferings; but they contrive to lengthen out its agonies, so that many of them are dying for half their lives in lingering torments, in which they conceive the Supreme Being takes peculiar delight. Sometimes these miserable men offer their children, their relations, or their friends, as a sacrifice to appease his fury; and at other times they fly from the company of men, and all the comforts of society, to devote themselves to the service of the Almighty in caverns and wildernesses. Now observe, this arises from no command of God,--no revelation from heaven; it is the sentence of man upon himself the yoke and the burden that he has laid upon his own shoulders.

Suppose God had said to us-" Wear the yoke which you find your fellow-creatures have voluntarily chosen. I will allow you to attain eternal life through these sufferings. Go, be your own torturer-bring your children to my altar, and honour me with their blood; and banish yourself from the company of your fellow-creatures for ever, and you shall be an inheritor of my king

dom;"-which of us could complain? Measure these sufferings and miseries, great as they are, with life everlasting-with the glories of God's presence, and the unseen riches of a future world, and you would say, Lord, here I give thee my body, which thou requirest to be burnt-here it is, ready for the agony; and here are the children whose blood thou requirest of my hands, and here am I, prepared to fly from the fellowship of my brothers, and hide my head in the woods and the wilds from the sight of human kind,-yet still I feel it is only through the voluntary bounty of thy goodness and thy mercy that even all this can be made to avail, and it will still be the effect of thy loving kindness if even thus I become an inheritor of thy kingdom.

Such then is the yoke and the burden of our neighbours, and such is what our yoke and our burden might have been.

It is now time to look to what it is. Where are now our stripes, our agonies, the writhings of our body and the woundings of our flesh? where is the lingering death which we are to endure, and the visitation of the wrath of God upon our souls? "He was wounded for our transgressions: the chastisement of our peace was laid on him." There was a beloved Son, whose blood was shed for our sakes ;-but the lamb was not taken from our flock, nor the child from our bosom : there was one who left his home on high for this wilderness beneath, and has left us in our cheerful homes, and our peaceful habitations: his yoke was indeed severe, and. his burden was heavy, for it was our toil that he endured, and our burden that he bore. "Surely, he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows!" and he has borne and carried them away.

There is not a single pain of body or mind that we are called upon to endure because it is pain, or for the sake of the suffering itself. There is indeed self denial and mortification. But it seems to be a law that cannot be broken-that where there is sin there must be pain; as long as there is sin alive within, there will