world, free from infamous offences; yet many are hypocritical in the way of godliness, and thus perisheth a large class: others are formal professors of ordinances, and so perish. Weighed down by what he thinks little sins, is many a courteous, companionable man, so fair and upright in his dealing, that the world can see nothing gross and scandalous about him; his hands are washed with snowwater, and he is therefore thought clean every whit; but the heart is, nevertheless, full of vain thoughts, and the whole inner man buried in the concerns of an ungodly world. But, even supposing that many sins are really little, yet these are being continually committed, almost without our knowing it: hence, what such sins as these want in weight, they always more than make up in number; they are more numerous than the hairs of our head; and so at last, even on that consideration alone, weigh down and destroy the soul as effectually as the greatest crimes. Hear the Psalmist speak on this subject: "O Lord, who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults." Secret sins must of necessity be the least and the smallest, inasmuch as even he who commits them cannot discern them; but yet, as they are small, so are they found to be numerous. Who can tell how oft he offendeth? "who can understand his errors?" therefore cleanse me, O Lord, from these secret sins: though they be small as the grains of sand on the sea-shore, yet also are they, in another respect, like the sands, for they are even as the stars of heaven for multitude. As they are small, so they often escape the conscience: a man would recoil with the most sensitive feeling of alarm at the idea of theft, or blasphemy, or murder; at only a single commission of any such crime he would revolt; and yet thousands upon thousands of lesser sins (escaping the eyes and often the consciences of men, yet black in the sight of God), such as loose thoughts, vain conversation, petty oaths and exclamations, convenient falsehoods, and glosses and equivocations, and all the unnumbered artifices of a worldly mind, stream from the man, without his either striving against them, or lamenting their frequency; he would dread and expect the punishment for the single commission of the heinous and glaring crime, but he appears to overlook it altogether for the continually repeated commission of the lesser and more secret sin it would be like doing a violence to his nature to blaspheme God only once, yet he hesitates not to take his holy name in vain often and often; he would recoil from the commission of murder only once, yet he continually admits into his breast a feeling of hatred, forgetting that the Scripture classes the one with the other. An old divine forcibly writes: "It fares with us as it did with the Israelites; we tremble more at one Goliath than we do at the whole army of the Philistines; but what great difference is there whether our eternal burning is kindled by many faint sparks, or by one glowing firebrand; whether we die by many smaller wounds, or by one great one?" And truly, brethren, without further exemplification, you will fully concede, that when the Almighty at the great day approaches to make up his reckoning against us, the many thousand thoughts of vanity, and hatred, and impurity; the unnumbered words of levity, and equivocation, and anger; and the deeds of petty fraud and revenge which we have committed, will accumulate upon us as dreadful an account, and create for us as insupportable a wrath, as if murder, or adultery, or the foulest. crime that the heart of man ever contemplated, was fully charged against us. Watch, then, and pray, when you feel conscience sluggish within you, suffering many things, which God accounts flagrant, altogether to elude and escape it; and earnestly plead, through that atonement whose blood will wash all the host of impurities from a faithful heart, for strength to rise from your lethargy. The mere natural conscience appertaining to fallen man looks but at the outward actions of the life and conversation; and it sees not, or it dispenses with, the more secret sins of the heart: and thus these sins, which man chooses to call little sins, are seldom called up at the bar of conscience and rebuked; if seen, instead of sitting in judgment and condemnation upon them, he acts even as their very fosterer, by seeking out pretences to extenuate them and lessen their importance; designating them as slips, and failings, and unavoidable infirmities; saying of them, as Lot did of Zoar, "Is it not a little one? and our souls shall live." "What!" he asks, can any one think there is so much danger in a foolish thought—in a light and inconsiderate word? can it be imagined that God will reduce his creatures to everlasting condemnation for a thought, or a word, or a glance?" He forgets that, but for the fountain opened in Judah for sin and uncleanness, the very least of his levities or impurities would bring down upon him banishment from the sanctuary of the Eternal; and that, if he goes not to the waters of Siloam and be cleansed, he will hereafter hear God calling such levities and impurities by other names than the world does: it looks upon them as pardonable weaknesses; but the Almighty regards them as bitter and presumptuous affronts to his holiness, which he can 66 neither extenuate nor forgive. In that dread day, every sin, which in Christ shall be blotted out, will, out of Christ, rise up in foul deformity against us; every vain thought will then be arraigned as rebellion against infinite holiness, every idle word as an insult against infinite purity; every formal prayer, and every heartless duty, which our unmeaning lips and hands have here performed, will then stand out against us as mockery of our Judge: so that, unless every one such failing be washed in the fountain, and purified by the blood of sprinkling, the guilt will be found insupportable, and the punishment will be from everlasting to everlasting. not in a worldly sense positively bad, but there is nothing in them positively good: they are all pure as far as they go, and as high as they reach; but the misfortune is, they do not go sufficiently far; they do not reach high enough; they are all of the earth earthy; they are correct, but still only worldly, and they are not directed to, and rise not towards God. But a man will not hereafter be judged merely as a member of society, but as a creature, and subject, and servant of God; and however exalted his character may be in the estimation of the world, it will not in the least extenuate his commission of the (to him almost invisible) sin of heedlessness of God. It is well that he acts his part as a good member of society; and Christianity, by making this one of its injunctions, gives us the very best security, that wherever its influence prevails, the duties of society will be done in the most perfect manner. But the point I wish to impress is, that a man may be all that we out the authority of God as his legislator being either recognised or acted upon. The sin of ungodliness, as distinct from unrighteousness, is seldom thought of in the world; and “ungodly" is an appellation seldom imagined to apply to any but a flagrantly wicked man. There is one sin, less visible to the eye of the natural conscience, and less thought of than even levity and vanity-a sin never among the catalogue in the estimation of the world, but yet the great and condemning crime of the vast majority of our speciesand that is ungodliness, or forgetfulness of God. What can be worse than a heedless-understand by a good member of society, withness of our Maker-a neglect of the great Being with whom we have to do? And yet the continual absence of God from the thoughts of men is never imagined as a crime, with which hereafter we shall be charged, and for which we shall be called to account. This crime is again and again incurred by the highest and the purest, even by the men who think themselves above all levity and impurity, and able to stand free from the charge of most little sins, still more from the imputation of great ones. And this crime, considered so little as utterly to escape the conscience, will prove the condemnation of thousands, unless repented of and washed away by the blood of the atonement; for even under the law, this was the declaration, as given by the Psalmist, "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the people that forget God." This crime we may charge against the whole of our race; against the men of all casts and characters, without exception: and it is deeply incurred, even to the utter destruction of the soul, by individuals whom the world might call unimpeachable. Many a man, we know, standing high in the estimation of his fellows, amiable and moral, charitable and compassionate, whose every pulse beats high with honour and integrity, and whose every word carries a bond along with it; whom we see, by the salutations of the market-place, to be acknowledged and revered by all, as among the most respectable in society, many such, we know, live as without God in the world. Their thoughts may be correct, their language correct, their actions correct, their feelings, their ideas, and their motives, may all be correct, as far as they go, but they are all worldly; they are It is well that a man is a worthy member of society, but that will not make up for his not being a member of Christ's Church, or a faithful servant of God; and this is the point that I wish to impress. His error lies, not in his having, as the world would say, positively corrupt principles, but in his having principles that do not aim at holiness and I would carefully guard him against the delusion, that the principle which he has, can ever be accepted as a substitute for the principle he has not, or that the highest sense of duty which his situation as a member of society impresses upon his feelings, will ever be received as an atonement for wanting that sense of duty to God which he ought to feel in the far more exalted capacity of his servant, and candidate for his approbation. I will take my stand on the firm ground, that man is a creature of the Almighty; and shall, then, the creature be permitted to forget its Creator? shall the thing formed forget Him that formed it, and not be considered as a great and an atrocious defaulter? Surely, never. I can say to a man, let his path in society be rendered ever so illustrious by the virtues which adorn it, let every word and every performance be as honourable as a proud sense of integrity can make it; yet if the love and authority of God be not the prevailing motive of his conduct, he is utterly unworthy. What! is the friendship of the world, or a barren notion of rectitude, to be the motive for all this display of virtue? and is the Being who gives such faculties to his creatures, and provides the theatre for their exercise, to be forgotten, and neglected as of no consequence? When God is the motive of action and conduct, the very humblest aspirations after good will be accepted in Christ: but the most splendid exertions of benevolence, unconnected with God, can bring down no reward from the sanctuary of his residence. Human praise and human eloquence may acknowledge it: but the Discerner of the heart never will. The heart may be the seat of every amiable feeling, and every claim which comes to it in the shape of human misery may find in it a hearing and a welcome; but if the love of God be not there, and be not the motive for its charity, it is not right with Heaven; and if he who owns it should die in that state, he will die in his sins. He is in a state of impenitency, and must be cast out for ever. II. By what has been thus feebly but seriously said, I hope that such of you as have not yet arrived at the knowledge of sin may be made, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, in some measure aware of its extent and nature; and into what a depth of guilt, an accumulation of little sins, each one of them so small as utterly to escape the conscience, may plunge us. For ungodliness, the gross crime of the great majority of our world's population, is merely the continued succession of small failings, which would singly escape scrutiny, but which, accumulated, rise up in horrid deformity against us; and which, but for the hiding-place from the wind, and the covert from the tempest, laid up for us to flee into, would hurry us to destruction. Wrestle, then, earnestly with the Father of spirits for a clearer and clearer knowledge of the enormity of sin in his sight, and of the remedy he has provided against it; and take closely to your memory the apostle's declaration, that the smallest portion of the enormous mass is able to destroy you; for "a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump;" forgetting not the advice attached to it, to " purge out," in the strength of the Lord, "the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump." In this view of the nature of sin, and of the guilt of offences called small, and backslidings thought trifling, what a woful shipwreck is there of all the hopes of pharisees and formalists, who hope to be able to appear before the presence of God upon the strength of their performances and their good intentions! If there be any here present who come under this description, to them I would particularly address myself. (1.) Learn, from what has been now said, that a life merely spent in worldly honesty and civility, even though it be altogether free from gross crime and scandalous impiety, can never be considered as guiltless. Yet, I surmise, you have often thought it could: you have said to yourselves, your lives are harmless, your dealings upright, none can challenge you at any time for fraud; hence you have done nothing to merit eternal. punishment, and so at the great day God will accept you. But, I would ask, have you had the Being who made you always in your thoughts, so that you did all things to his service? and did there never lodge in you thoughts of vanity, and profaneness, and impurity? and did there never proceed from your lips words of levity and frivolity? and are your hands perfectly clean from all the chicanery of buying and selling, from the legalised fraudulency of trade, and all the unnumbered artifices of mercantile intercourse? If you have not stolen your neighbour's goods, have you never coveted them? Indeed, though you had been enabled to keep all the other nine, the tenth commandment will condemn you: for if you offend in one point, you know, you are guilty of all. It is in vain to plead before the bar of God that you have been considered worthy members of society; that you have been thought moral, and amiable, and upright, in worldly estimation: believe me, one of your least sins, whether of omission or commission, any one of your back-slidings or short-comings, will outweigh all your pleadings; and you, with all your fancied righteousness, must sink down into the pit. Pharisaism, my brethren, is, I fear, as much seen now as it was among the Jews of old, when it called forth our Saviour's denunciation. Many and many are the men who come up into our temples to pray, and pray thus with themselves: "God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are; I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess:" thus boasting of their righteousness in the very presence of infinite holiness, and then departing to their homes with a felt, though a false complacency. For what says the Scripture? "The poor publican who would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast saying, God be merciful to me a sinner,' went down to his house justified rather than the other." (2.) Finally, brethren, let this whole subject impress us, as it is truly in the highest degree calculated to do, with a strong sense of the necessity of a Mediator between God and his rebellious creatures, of a Redeemer to atone for man's constant iniquity. Oh! let us by it be taught to appreciate the Saviour; in the fountain of whose blood, if we will bathe therein, all our uncleanness will be washed away. Situated as we are, with hearts and bodies corrupt and sinful, wherewith, but for Christ, could we come before the most high God? "If we wash ourselves with snow-water, and make ourselves never so clean, shall not he plunge us in the ditch, and make our own clothes to abhor us?" Job saw his lost condition, unless aided by a Mediator between him and God, who might lay his hand upon them both. If, then, we be not alive to the same feeling, shall not Job rise up in the judgment and condemn us? Without the atoning blood of the Saviour, the very least sin must carry us down to destruction; and the very same sacrifice that satisfied Divine justice, and atoned for the drunkenness of Noah, for the adultery and murder of David, for the crimes of Solomon, and for the perjury of Peter, is also required to mediate with God for our every forgetfulness of him, for our every vain thought, and for our foolish and idle words: the very same "blood of sprinkling" that has cleansed the iniquity of the greatest saints now in glory must be brought to bear on our every failing, and must wash away the guilt of our covetousness and worldly inclinations, or we must for ever perish under their intolerable load. The one, indeed, is but the continuation and the result of the other. The most atrocious crimes have their origin in very small beginnings: the thief commenced his career of iniquity by coveting, the drunkard by sipping, and the perjured ruffian by equivocating; all alike take their rise from the corruption of the heart, of which it is said, “The imagination of the thoughts of man's heart are only evil continually," which is fraught with impurity, and which, but for the fountain opened in Judah, in compassion to our helplessness, could never be cleansed. Come, then, to the Saviour, and build on him the firm foundation of your hopes; in him you are safe. The Gospel of his salvation provides ample security to all who "flee for refuge to the hope set before them:" in him the faithful of all casts and all denominations feel secure; and this security arises not only from the belief that God is merciful, and will hereafter forgive them, but that Christ has perfected his work, and has actually justified them; and, clothed in the robe of his merits, they feel that they can go up to the throne of grace with the humble yet assured petition, "Look upon me, O Father, for the sake of Him who hath done away sin, and hath fulfilled all righteousness." May what has been now said be blessed to us all; and man's imperfect words be, by the great Spirit, made conducive to the soul's health, through Jesus Christ our Lord. PASSING THOUGHTS. BY CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH. THE perfection to which our modern me- Many years have passed since then, Many changes have I seen; and, from this early recollection being deeply impressed, I cannot now cast my eyes on an old-fashioned hour-glass, but it becomes identified with that of the good sempstress. I seem to view it through the long checkered vista that lies between me and the scenes of careless childhood; and as a rapid glance scans that intervening space, the hour-glass becomes a memento more touching than any classical association could render it. There is surely something more suitable to the stealthy lapse of time, in the noiseless and almost imperceptible fall of the sands, than in the ticking of chronometers, more practically useful. The deepening vacancy above, the rising heap beneath, and the falling away, from time to time, of that miniature mountain which gathers below, all have a meaning. I observe that the sand in the upper division of the glass, running from the centre, often leaves a hollow, producing deception as to the quantity actually subtracted. Clinging yet to the sides, it makes the vacancy look less; just as we love to deceive ourselves as to the proportion of our numbered days that has escaped. The pyramidical appearance of the sand below, as the last particles that fall produce an eminence, until, displaced by following grains, they sink into the common level: this vividly represents the undue importance assumed by events while yet very recent; although, while dwelling on their magnitude, we well know that, displaced by other things, they will soon be mingled with the common mass of recollections. It were easy to moralise at great length on the subject; but I would rather spiritualise, and read the lesson in its highest, holiest sense. "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." The days remaining to us we cannot number, for we know not but that our very last sand is escaping while we try to compute; but the days that are gone-O, what a testimony do they bear against us! We may have applied our time and faculties to the acquirement of wisdom, according to the general sense of the word among men; but our hearts-our most secret desires and ardent affections-how far have they been centred in the wisdom that is from above, and in "Christ, the wisdom of God?" An honest answer to this question, would send the greater number of us to the throne of grace, with the confession that we still have to be taught this application of heart to the purposes designed by our heavenly Father. Solomon trod the whole round of carnal and intellectual enjoyments, having his fill of all wisdom; yet how late in his long and prosperous life did he sit down to write " vanity of vanities" upon it all, and apply his heart to the God from whom, through the abuse of his abundant gifts, the favoured king had so deeply revolted! Let me number the days that are gone, and seeing how God has hitherto been robbed by me, let me strive to redeem the few that may still remain. Reviews and Notices. The Christian entitled to Legal Protection in the Observance of the Lord's Day: a Sermon preached in the Church of St. Mary, Hornsey. By the Rev. Richard Harvey, M.A., Rector. London, Parker. 1836. WE think this a plain and useful sermon. Mr. Harvey properly argues, "If Christianity is the law of the land, and if the observance of the Lord's day is a right to be protected in observing it. He ought not part of Christianity, the consistent Christian has a to suffer temporal injury from its violation, nor ought worldly loss to be the necessary price of his consistency." P. 7. Much good, we believe, has resulted from the prominent manner in which the subject of Sabbath-observance has been of late brought before the public. We rejoice, therefore, to see a clergyman forcibly pressing it on his parishioners, and putting his discourse into their hands, that the first impression may not pass away. We cordially hope that Mr. Harvey's admonitions may, under God's blessing, be rendered abidingly effective. We cannot, however, quite agree in his remarks on the bill introduced into Parliament: and we wish he had left out the note in page 18. The Missionary Character and Duty of the Church; a Sermon before the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, at its triennial Meeting, Aug. 24, 1835. By the Right Rev. C. P. M'Ilvaine, D.D., Bishop of Ohio. Philadelphia, 1835. WE are glad of an opportunity to call the attention of our readers to this admirable discourse. It is upon Matt. v. 14, "Ye are the light of the world;" and the bishop's object is to shew that the Church of Christ "is no other than a great association, under a divine constitution, of the professed people of God, for the propagation of the Gospel to every creature; and that, inasmuch as the preaching of the Gospel, by an ordained ministry, is God's chief ordinance for that propagation, so the Church is a great missionary association, divinely constituted, for the special work of sending into all the world the ministers and missionaries of the word."P. 9. To those who know the Bishop of Ohio, either personally or by his writings, it is needless to say that his missionary sermon will be found to have been conceived in a spirit of deep and enlightened piety, and that it is pervaded with apt and beautiful illustration. We may hereafter enrich our pages with considerable extracts; we can at present find room for only the following quotation, which will be read with peculiar interest, as the result of Bishop M'Ilvaine's own observation during his last visit to this country: "The signs of the times at present, in regard to the prospect of a great increase of spirit and effort for the propagation of the Gospel, are decidedly encouraging. There is a renovating hand at work in various sections of the Protestant Church. The revival of religion in the ministry, and among the members of that venerated parent Church, through which we love to remember and our apostolic order, and our Holy Scriptures, were that our own articles of faith, and our beloved liturgy, derived, and between which and ourselves I hope the sense of special relationship, and the desire of entire co-operation in all common labours, may continually increase, the revival of religion in the Church of our mother-country during the last 40 years, now proceeding more hopefully than ever, exhibiting its blessings in a mind of special spirituality and scriptural simplicity, and in a zeal to promote the Gospel of remark |