united the whole society in one rejoicing sympathy with each other, and with the beneficent Father of them all ;-could he further see, that pain and mortality were there unknown; and, above all, that sig there unknown; and, above all, that signals of welcome were hung out, and an avenue of communication was made for him;-perceive you not, that what was before the wilderness would become the land of invitation; and that now the world would be the wilderness? What unpeopled space could not do, can be done by space teeming with beatific scenes, and beatific society. And let the existing tendencies of the heart be what they may to the scene that is near and visibly around us, still if another stood revealed to the prospect of man, either through the channel of faith or through the channel of his senses, then, without violence done to the constitution of his moral nature, may he die unto the present world, and live

to the lovelier world that stands in the distance away from it." pp. 87-89.

The third sermon exhibits "the sure Warrant of a Believer's Hope," deduced from the passage, "If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more being reconciled we shall be saved by his life."

Dr. Chalmers commences by an observation, which, although most assuredly just, will probably not meet with universal approbation. From the circumstance of St. Paul being the most argumentative, and at the same time the most successful, of all the Apostles, he incidentally remarks, that argument is both a legitimate and powerful weapon in the work of making Christians; and his own discourses may be considered as generally framed in conformity with this supposition. It is no good sign, that many, who hold a fair place in what is called the Christian world, appear to make light of sound and Scriptural argumentation. In their view, unless we greatly mistake the matter, it has too much of the air of "carnal reasoning," and gives an impression that appeals to the understanding are expected to do that which can be effected only by the Spirit of God. Between sound argument, however, founded upon a Scriptural basis, and pressed in a

Scriptural manner, and that reasoning which leaves out of sight the influence of Divine grace, and the operations of the Holy Spirit, there is a wide and essential difference; and meagre indeed will be the exhibition of Divine truth, and unimpressive the addresses from the pulpit, when the sickly taste which would renounce the argumentative method of St. Paul shall have seized the ministers of the Gospel, as it has taken possession of some among their hearers. It is not by the repetition of certain favourite expressions, nor by the mere reiteration of certain doctrines of the Scriptures, however important in themselves, that those who look to the example of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, will expect their labours to be rendered successful; but by the legitimate use of every weapon which God has put into their hands; so that they may reach the understandings and consciences of men of every class, and, so far as in them lies, may give to the truths which they deliver their full effect.

Among modern divines, Dr. Chalmers is honourably distinguished for his adherence to this principle; and it is happily followed out in this discourse. The argument a fortiori, "an argument which affirms a thing to be true in adverse and unpromising circumstances, and therefore far more worthy of being held true in likelier circumstances," is urged with much felicity of illustration and great impressiveness; and there are many persons, we think, who will rise from the perusal of this sermon with clearer views than they had before of the force of the Apostle's argument in the text, and with an enlargement and confirmation of their Christian hope.

It will not, we trust, be ascribed to the love of objections, for their own sake, that we express a strong doubt about the propriety of the following sentiment: "Nor do we estimate aright what we owe of love and obligation to the Saviour, till we believe that the whole of

that fury which, if poured out upon the world, would have served its guilty generations through eternitythat all of it was poured into the cup of expiation." (p. 106.) We see not the necessity for statements of this kind, and the justice of them is at least problematial. That our blessed Saviour, "by his oblation of himself once offered, made a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world," is a doctrine which no man who admits the truth of the Scriptures will venture to deny; but we are not acquainted with any passage in the word of God which is equivalent in precision to that just cited from Dr. Chalmers: we know of none which will fairly and obviously bear out such an assertion. It is not in this way that the doctrine of the atonement is brought forward by the inspired writers: neither is it, we will venture to say, by this sort of calculation that men are usually led to those deep practical views which the devout Christian will seek ever to cherish, of "the exceeding great love of our Master and only Saviour, Jesus Christ, thus dying for us, and the innumerable benefits which by his precious bloodshedding he hath obtained to us." The idea, to which we object, is not original: we have heard it repeatedly, but not generally from persons of the same class of mind with Dr. Chalmers; and the striking paragraph which we subjoin would have lost none of its impressiveness by a different termination.

"This argument obtains great additional force, when we look to the state of matters in heaven at the time that we upon earth were enemies, and compare it with the state of matters in heaven now that we are actually reconciled, or are beginning to entertain the offers of reconciliation. Before the work of our redemption, Jesus Christ was in primeval glory; and, though a place of mystery to us, it was a place of secure and ineffable enjoyment-insomuch, that the fondest prayer he could utter in the depths of his humiliation, was to be taken back again to

the Ancient of Days, and there to be restored to the glory which he had with him before the world was. It was from the heights of celestial security and blessedness that he looked with an eye of pity on our sinful habitation; it was from a scene where beings of a holy nature surrounded him, and the full homage of the Divinity was rendered to him, and in the ecstacies of his fellowship with God the Father, all was peace, and purity, and excellence ; it was from this that he took his voluntary departure, and went out on his errand to seek and to save us.

And it was not the

parade of an unreal suffering that he had endurance: it was not a triumphant proto encounter, but a deep and a dreadful menade through this lower world, made easy over all its obstacles by the energies of his Godhead, but a conflict of toil and of strenuousness: it was not an egress from heaven on a journey brightened through all its stages by the hope of a smooth and gentle return; but it was such an exile

from heaven as made his ascent and his re-admittance there the fruit of a hard

won victory. We have nothing but the facts of revelation to guide or to inform us; and yet from these we most assuredly gather, that the Saviour, in stepping down from the elevation of his past eternity, incurred a substantial degradation--that when he wrapped himself in the humanity of our nature, he put on the whole of its joy which he renounced, he became acquainted with grief, and a grief too commensurate to the whole burden of our world's atonement-that the hidings of his Father's countenance were terrifying to his soul-and when the offended justice of the Godhead was laid upon his person, it required the whole strength of the Godhead to sustain it. What mean the agonies of the garden? What mean the bitter cries and complainings of abandonment upon the cross? What meaneth the prayer that the cup might pass away from him, and the struggle of a lofty resolution with the agonies of a mighty and unknown distress, and the evident symptoms of a great and toilsome achievement throughout the whole progress of this undertaking, and angels looking down from their eminencies, as on a field of contest, where a great Captain had to put forth the travailling of his strength, and to spoil principalities and powers, and to make a shew of them openly? Was there nothing in all this, do you think, but the mockery of a humiliation that was never felt-the mockery of a pain that was never suffered-the mockery of

infirmities and its sorrows-that for the

a battle that was never fought? No, my brethren, be assured that there was, on that day, a real vindication of God's insulted majesty. On that day there was the real transference of an avenging hand, from the heads of the guilty to the head of the innocent. On that day one man died for the people, and there was an actual laying on of the iniquities of us all. It was a war of strength and of suffering in highest possible aggravation, because the war of elements which were infinite. The wrath which millions should have borne was all of it discharged. Nor do we estimate aright what we owe of love and obligation to the Saviour, till we believe that the whole of that fury, which, if poured out upon the world, would have served its guilty generations through eternity-that all of it was poured into the cup of expiation." pp. 103-106.

"The Restlessness of Human Ambition" is the subject of the fourth sermon: in which the preacher, from Psalm xi. 1, and lv. 6, expatiates upon the perpetual tendency of man "not to enjoy his actual position, but to get away from it;" and hence deduces the excellency of religion, and its suitableness to his condition and his wants.

"What a curious object of contemplation to a superior being, who casts an eye over this lower world, and surveys the busy, restless, and unceasing operations of the people who swarm upon its surface! Let him select any one individual amongst us, and confine his attention to him as a specimen of the whole. Let him pursue him through the intricate variety of his movements, for he is never stationary; see him with his eye fixed upon some distant object, and struggling to arrive at it; see him pressing forward to some eminence which perpetually recedes away from him; see the inexplicable being, as he runs in full pursuit of some glittering bauble, and on the moment he reaches it, throws it behind him, and it is forgotten; see him unmindful of his past experience, and hurrying his footsteps to some new object with the same eagerness and rapidity as ever; compare the ecstacy of hope with the lifelessness of possession, and observe the whole history of his day to be made up of one fatiguing race of vanity, and restlessness, and disappointment;

And, like the glittering of an idiot's toy, Doth Fancy mock his vows.'

"To complete the unaccountable hisCHRIST. OBSERV. No. 271.

It

tory, let us look to its termination. Man is irregular in his movements; but this does not hinder the regularity of nature. Time will not stand still to look at us. moves at its own invariable pace. The winged moments fly in swift succession over us. The great luminaries which are suspended on high, perform their cycle's in the heaven. The sun describes his circuit in the firmament; and the space of a few revolutions will bring every man among us to his destiny. The decree passes abroad against the poor child of infatuation. It meets him in the full career of hope and of enterprise. He sees the dark curtain of mortality falling upon the world, and upon all its interests. That busy, restless heart, so crowded with its plans, and feelings, and anticipations, forgets to play, and all its fluttering anxieties are hushed for ever." pp. 129, 130.

"What meaneth this restlessness of

our nature? What meaneth this unceasing activity which longs for exercise and employment, even after every object is gained, which first roused it to enterprise? What mean those unmeasurable longings, which no gratification can extinguish, and which still continue to agitate the heart of man, even in the fulness of plenty and of enjoyment. If they mean any thing at all, they mean, that all which this world can offer is not enough to fill up his capacity for happiness-that time is too small for him, and he is born for something beyonti it-that the scene of his earthly existence is too limited, and he is formed to expatiate in a wider and a grander theatrethat a nobler destiny is reserved for him-and that to accomplish the purpose of his being, he must soar above the littleness of the world, and aim at a loftier prize.

"It forms the peculiar honour and excellence of religion, that it accommodates to this property of our nature-that it holds out a prize suited to our high calling-that there is a grandeur in its objects, which can fill and surpass the imagination-that it dignifies the present scene by connecting it with eternity-that it reveals to the eye of faith the glories of an unperishable world-and how, from the high eminencies of heaven, a cloud of witnesses are looking down upon earth, not as a scene for the petty anxieties of time, but as à splendid theatre for the ambition of immortal spirits." pp. 136, 137.

The first remark which occurs to us, on finishing the fifth sermon, entitled "The transitory Nature of visible Things," is, that one half of 3 M

the text seems to be omitted. We have here only the clause, The things which are seen are temporal: the remaining clause, but the things which are not seen are eternal, forms one of the subjects considered in the discourse, and must originally, we imagine, have held a prominent place at the head of it.

We select the following paragraph on account of its useful practical tendency.

"All the descriptions we have of heaven in the Scriptures are general, very general. We read of the beauty of the heavenly crown, of the unfading nature of the heavenly inheritance, of the splendour of the heavenly city; and these have been seized upon by men of imagination, who, in the construction of their fancied paradise, have embellished it with every image of peace, and bliss, and loveliness; and, at all events, have thrown over it that most kindling of all conceptions, the magnificence of eternity. Now, such a picture as this has the certain effect of ministering delight to every glowing and susceptible imagination. And here lies the deep-laid delusion, which we have occasionally hinted at. A man listens, in the first instance, to a pathetic and highwrought narrative on the vanities of time; and it touches him even to the tenderness of tears. He looks, in the second instance, to the fascinating prospect of another scene, rising in all the glories of immortality from the dark ruins of the tomb; and he feels within him all those ravishments of fancy which any vision of united grandeur and loveliness would inspire. Take these two together, and you have a man weeping over the transient vanities of an ever-shifting world, and mixing, with all this softness, an elevation of thought and of prospect, as he looks through the vista of a futurity losing itself in the mighty range of thousands and thousands of centuries. And at this point the delusion comes in, that here is a man who is all that religion would have him to be-a man weaned from the littleness of the paltry scene that is around him-soaring high above all the evanescence of things present, and things sensible and transferring every affection of his soul to the durabilities of a pure and immortal region. It were better if this high state of occasional impressment on the matters of time and of eternity, had only the effect of imposing the falsehood on others, that the

man who was so touched and so trans

ported, had on that single account the temper of a candidate for heaven. But the falsehood takes possession of his own heart. The man is pleased with his emotions and his tears; and the interpretation he puts upon them is, that they come out

of the fulness of a heart all alive to reli

gion, and sensibly affected with its charms, and its seriousness, and its principle. Now, my brethren, I will venture to say, that there may be a world of all this kind of enthusiasm, with the very man who is not moving a single step towards that blessed eternity over which his fancy delights to expatiate." pp. 151-156

"O, my brethren! we fear it, we greatly fear it, that while busied with topics such as these, many a hearer may weep, or be elevated, or take pleasure in the touching imagery that is made to play around him, while the dust of this perishable earth is all that his soul cleaves toand its cheating vanities are all that his heart cares for, or his footsteps follow after." p. 157.

The Universality of spiritual Blindness is the subject of the sixth sermon, founded upon Isaiah xxix. 9-12; in which the preacher, conformably with the sacred writings, asserts the necessity of a higher influence upon the mind, for the attainment of right spiritual knowledge, than what lies in human art, or human explanation; and that it is just as competent for the unlearned to become wise unto salvation, as for those in the higher and more cultivated walks of society.

Mr. Irving, in the eighth part of his Argument for a Judgment to come, has some remarks on the intelligible character of the Scriptures, which, as he conceives, ill accord with the views of his " evangelical brethren:" and he appears to represent these brethren as preaching persons away from the word of God, by casting clouds and darkness and mystery around its approach. We think that there is an error in this judgment: many of the individuals thus designated would probably be somewhat scrupulous about expressing themselves precisely in the words adopted by Mr. Irving; but if his views on the subject correspond, as

nearly of a mind with himself on these matters than he had been led to imagine. We are inclined to believe that the sentiments of this sermon are such throughout as they would cordially admit; that they regard the blindness of man's heart, and the remedy for it, in the same light with that respected individual to whom his own Orations are dedicated; and assert nothing concern. ing the Scriptures as a sealed book, for which they cannot find an apology, if apology be wanted, in the judicious and scriptural discourse now before us.

"The learned," says Dr. Chalmers, "just labour as helplessly under a want of an impression of the reality of this whole matter, as the unlearned; and if this be true of those among them, who, with learning and nothing more, have actually tried to decipher the meaning of God's communication-if this be true of many a priest and many a theologian, with whom Christianity is a science, and the study of the Bible is the labour and the business of their profession-what can we expect of those among the learned, who, in the pursuits of a secular philosophy, never enter into contact with the Bible, either in its doctrine or in its language, except when it is obtruded on them? Little do they know of our men of general literature, who have not observed the utter listlessness, if not the strong and active contempt, wherewith many of them hear the doctrine of the book of God's counsel uttered in the phraseology of that book how, in truth, their secret impression of the whole matter is, that it is a piece of impenetrable mysticism-how, in their eyes, there is a cast of obscurity over all the peculiarities of the Gospel-and, if asked to give their attention thereto, they promptly repel the imposition under the feeling of a hopeless and insuperable darkness, which sits in obsolete characters over the entire face of the evangelical record. There may be bright and cheering examples to the contrary-of men in the highest of our literary walks, who, under a peculiar teaching, have learned what they never learned from all the lessons of the academy. But, apart from this peculiar influence, be assured that learning is of little avail. The

sacred page may wear as hieroglyphical an aspect to the lettered as to the unlettered. It lies not with any of the powers or processes of ordinary education to dissipate world hath blinded the mind of him who that blindness, wherewith the god of this believes not. To make the wisdom of the New Testament his wisdom, and its spirit his spirit, and its language his best-loved and best-understood language, there must be a higher influence upon the mind than what lies in human art, or in human ex

planation. And till this is brought to pass, the doctrine of the atonement, and the doctrine of regeneration, and the doctrine of fellowship with the Father and the Son, and the doctrine of a believer's progressive holiness, under the moral and spiritual power of the truth as it is in Jesus, will, as to his own personal experience of its meaning, remain so many empty sounds, or so many deep and hidden mysteries; and just as effectually, as if the book were held together by an iron clasp, which he has not strength to unclose, may he say of the same book lying open and legible before him, that he cannot read it, because it is sealed." pp. 166-168.

"The feelings and the suggestions of all our old senses put together, will not make out for us a practical impression of the matters of faith; and there must be a transition as great as that by which man awakens out of the sleep of nature, and so comes to see the realities of nature which are around him-there must be a something equivalent to the communication of a new sense, cre a reality comes to be seen in those eternal things, where no reality was felt or seen, however much it may have been acknowledged before." p. 184.

"This awakening calls for a peculiar and a preternatural application. We say preternatural; for such is the obstinacy of this sleep of nature, that no power within the compass of nature can put an end to it." p. 186.

The seventh sermon, on the new Heavens and the new Earth," has, for one of its principal objects, the establishment of a point which will by many be deemed very queɛtionable; namely, that " in the new economy, which is to be reared for the accommodation of the blessed, there will be materialism— not merely new heavens, but also a new (material) earth."