quaintance with their several successes. The parent, who is pouring his attention on the education of a child, or laboring to procure for him advancement and independence, would be unable to go forward with his efforts, if certified that he must follow that child to the grave so soon as he had fitted him for society and occupation. And even if the map were a bright one, so that we looked on sunny things as fixed for our portion, familiarity with the prospect would deteriorate it to our imagination; and blessings would seem to us of less and less worth, as they came on us more and more as matters of course. In real truth, it is our ignorance of what shall happen which stimulates exertion: we are so constituted that to deprive us of hope would be to make us inactive and wretched. And, therefore, do we hold that one great proof of God's loving-kindness towards us, may be fetched from that impenetrable concealment in which he wraps up to-morrow. We long indeed to bring to-morrow into to-day, and strain the eye in the fruitless endeavor to scan its occurrences. But it is, in a great degree, my ignorance of to-morrow which makes me vigilant, and energetic, and pains-taking, to-day. And if I could see to-day that a great calamity or a great success would undoubtedly befall me to-morrow, the likelihood is that I should be so overcome, either by sorrow or by delight, as to be unfitted for those duties with which the present hour is charged.

Now it were easy to employ our selves in examining, more in detail, the bearings on our temporal well-being of that hiding of the future to which we have adverted. Neither would such examination be out of place in a discourse on the words of our text. The prophet refers chiefly to temporal deliverance, when mentioning the salvation of the Lord." Judah had gone into captivity: and Jerusalem, heretofore a queen amongst the cities, sat widowed and desolate. Yet Jeremiah was persuaded that the Lord would "not cast off for ever;" Lam. 3: 31; and he, therefore, encouraged the remnant of his countrymen to expect a better and brighter season. He does not, indeed, predict immediate restoration. But then he asserts that delayed mer

cy would be more advantageous than instant, and that profit might be derived from expectation as well as from possession. If we paraphrase his words, we may consider him saying to the stricken and disconsolate Jews, you wish an immediate interference of God on behalf of your city and nation. You desire, that, without a moment's delay, the captive tribes should march back from Babylon, and Jerusalem rise again in her beauty and her strength. But if this wish were complied with, it would be at the expense of much of the benefit derivable from affliction for "it is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord."

Thus the original design of the passage would warrant our taking a large sweep in its explanation, and leading you over that range of inquiry which is opened by our introductory remarks. We might dilate on the advantageousness of the existing arrangement, and its wondrous adaptation to our moral constitution. We might show you, by references to the engagements and intercourses of life, that it is for our profit that we be uncertain as to issues, and, therefore, required both to hope and to wait. We doubt whether you could imagine a finer discipline for the human mind, than results from the fixed impossibility of our grasping two moments at once. The chief opponent to that feeling of independence which man naturally cherishes, but always to his own. hurt, is his utter ignorance of the events of the next minute. For who can boast, or who can feel himself, independent, whilst unable to insure another beat of the pulse, or to decide whether, before he can count two, he shall be spoiled of life or reduced to beggary? It is only in proportion as men close their eyes to their absolute want of mastership over the future, that they encourage themselves in the delusion of independence. If they owned, and felt themselves, the possessors of a single moment, with no more power to secure the following than if the proposed period were a thousand centuries, we might set it down as an unavoidable consequence, that they would shun the presumption of so acting for themselves as though God were exclu

ded from superintending their affairs. And if there were introduced an opposite arrangement; if men were no longer placed under a system compelling them to hope and to wait; you may all see that the acquired power over the future would produce, in many quarters, an infidel contempt, or deuial, of Providence: so that, by admitting men to a closer inspection of his workings, God would throw them further off from acquaintance with himself and reverence of his majesties. Thus the goodness of the existing arrangement is matter of easy demonstration, when that arrangement is considered as including the affairs of everyday life. If you look at the consummation as ordinarily far removed from the formation of a purpose, there is, we again say, a fine moral discipline in the intervening suspense. That men may withstand, or overlook, the discipline, and so miss its advantages, tells nothing against either its existence, or its excellence. And the necessity which is laid on the husbandman, that, after sowing the seed, he wait long for the harvest-time, in hope, but not certainty; and upon the merchantman, that, after dispatching his ships, he wait long for the products of commerce, hoping, but far enough from sure, that the voyage and the traffic will be prosperous; this necessity, we say, for hoping and waiting reads the best of all lessons as to actual dependence on an invisible being; and thus verifies our position, that, whatever the desired advantage, it is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for" its possession. Ay, and we are well convinced that there cannot be found a nobler argument for the existence of a stanch moral government over the creatures of our race, than results from this imposed necessity that there elapse a period, and that too a period full of uncertainties, between the forming and completing a design. Amid all the mutiny and uproar of our present torn and disorganized condition, there is a voice, in our utter powerlessness to make sure of the future, which continually recalls man from his rebellion and scepticism; and which, proclaiming, in accents not to be overborne by the fiercest tempest of passion, that he holds every thing at the will of another,

shall demand irresistibly his condemnation at any oncoming trial, if he carry it with a high and independent hand against the being thus proved the uncontrolled lord of his destinies.

But we feel it necessary to bring our inquiry within narrower limits, and to take the expression, "the salvation of the Lord," in that more restrained sense which it bears ordinarily in Scripture. We shall employ, therefore, the remainder of our time in endeavoring to prove to you, by the simplest reasoning, that it is for our advantage as christians that salvation, in place of being a thing of certainty and present possession, must be hoped and quietly waited for by believers.

Now whilst it is the business of a christian minister to guard you against presumption, and an uncalculating confidence that you are safe for eternity, it is also his duty to rouse you to a sense of your privileges, and to press on you the importance of ascertaining your title to immortality. We think it not necessarily a proof of christian humility, that you should be always in doubt of your spiritual state, and so live uncertain whether, in the event of death, you would pass into glory. We are bound to declare that Scripture makes the marks of true religion clear and decisive; and that, if we will but apply, faithfully and fearlessly, the several criteria furnished by its statements, it cannot remain a problem, which the last judgment only can solve, whether it be the broad way, or the narrow, in which we now walk. But, nevertheless, the best assurance to which a christian can attain must leave salvation a thing chiefly of hope. We find it expressly declared by St. Paul to the Romans, we are saved by hope." Rom. 8:24. And they who are most persuaded, and that too by scriptural warrant, that they are in a state of salvation, can never declare themselves, except in the most limited sense, in its fruition or enjoyment; but must always live mainly upon hope, though with occasional foretastes of coming delights. They can reach the conclu sion-and a comforting and noble con clusion it is-that they are justified beings, as having been enabled to act faith on a Mediator. But whilst justification insures them salvation, it puts

It is thus again that St. Paul distinguishes between justification and salvation, saying of Christ, "being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him." Rom. 5: 9. So that the knowing ourselves justified is the highest thing attainable on earth; salvation itself, though certain to be reached, remaining an object for which we must hope, and for which we must wait.

Now it is the goodness of this arrangement which is asserted in our text. We can readily suppose an opposite arrangement. We can imagine that, as soon as a man were justified, he might be translated to blessedness, and that thus the gaining the title, and the entering on possession, might be always contemporary. Since the being justified is the being accepted in God's sight, and counted perfectly righteous, there would seem no insurmountable reason why the justified man should be left, a single moment, a wanderer in the desert; or why the instant of the exertion of saving faith, inasmuch as that exertion makes sure the salvation, should not also be the instant of entrance into glory. To question the possibility of such an arrangement, would be to question the possibility of an outputting of faith at the last moment of life; for, unless what is called deathbed repentance be distinctly an impossible thing, the case is clearly supposable of the justifying act being immediately followed by admission into heaven.

But the possibility of the arrangement, and its goodness, are quite different questions; and whilst we see that it might have been ordered, that the justified man should at once be translated, we can still believe it good that he "both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord." Our text speaks chiefly of the goodness to the individual himself; but it will be lawful first to consider the arrangement as fraught with advantage to human society.

We must all perceive, that, if true believers were withdrawn from earth at the instant of their becoming such, the influences of piety, which now make themselves felt through the mass of a population, would be altogether

of that salt which alone preserves it from total decomposition. We believe that when Christ declared of his followers, "ye are the salt of the earth," Matthew, 5: 13, he delivered a saying which described, with singular fidelity, the power of righteousness to stay and correct the disorganizations of mankind. As applied to the apostles the definition was especially accurate. There lay before them a world distinguished by nothing so much as by corruption of doctrine and manners. Though philosophy was at its height; though reason had achieved her proudest triumphs; though arts were in their maturity; though eloquence was then most finished, and poetry most harmonious; there reigned over the whole face of the globe a tremendous ignorance of God: and if humanity were not actually an unsound and putrid mass, it had in it every element of decay, so that, if longer abandoned to itself, it must have fallen into incurable disease, and become covered with the livid spots of total dissolution. And when, by divine commission, the disciples penetrated the recesses of this mass, carrying with them principles, and truths, exactly calculated to stay the moral ruin which was spreading with fearful rapidity—when they went forth, the bearers of celestial communications which taught the soul to feel herself immortal, and, therefore, indestructible; which lifted even the body out of the grasp of decay, teaching that bone, and sinew, and flesh should be made at last gloriously incorruptible

when, we say, the disciples thus applied to the world a remedy, perfect in every respect, against those tendencies to corruption which threatened to turn our globe into the lazar-house of creation; were they not to be regarded as the purifiers and preservers of men, and could any title be more just than one which defined them, in their strivings to overspread a diseased world with healthfulness, as literally "the

salt of the earth ?"

But it holds good in every age that true believers are "the salt of the earth." Whilst the contempt and hatred of the wicked follow incessantly the professors of godliness, and the enemies of Christ, if ability were com