who care little for the Gospel, and who have never opened their hearts to its gracious communications, that it would be no overwhelming calamity, if God fulfilled his threat, and removed the candlestick out of his place. They may think that the springs of national prosperity, and national happiness, would be left untouched; and that the unchurched people might still have their fleets on every sea, still gather into their lap the riches of the earth, and sit undisturbed a sovereign among the nations. I know not how far such might be actually the case. I know not how far the conquests or the commerce of a country might remain unaffected by the loss of its christianity. But this I know, that God's blessing could no longer rest on its victories, or accompany its trade; and that, therefore, if its armies triumphed, the triumph would be virtually defeat; and if its ships were richly freighted, it would be with fruits, which, like the fabled ones from the Dead Sea's shore, turn to ashes in the mouth. No, we again say, come any thing rather than this. Come barrenness into our soil; come discord into our councils; come treason into our camps; come wreck into our navies-but let us not be unchurched as a nation. We may be beloved of God, and He may have purposes of mercy towards us, whilst he takes from us our temporal advantages, but still leaves us our spiritual. He may be only disciplining us as a parent; and the discipline proves, not merely that there is need, but that there is room for repentance. But if we were once deprived of the Gospel; if the Bible ceased to circulate amongst our people; if there were no longer the preaching of Christ in our churches; if we were left to set up reason instead of revelation, to bow the knee to the God of our own imaginations, and to burn unhallowed incense before the idols which the madness of speculation would erect-then farewell, a long farewell, to all that has given dignity to our state, and happiness to our homes; the true foundations of true greatness would be all undermined, the bulwarks of real liberty shaken, the springs of peace poisoned, the sources of prosperity dried up; and a coming generation would have to add our name to those of countries

whose national decline has kept pace with their religious, and to point to our fate as exhibiting the awful comprehensiveness of the threat, "I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent."

But we rejoice in pronouncing this a doom, respecting which we do not augur a likelihood that it will fall on this kingdom. There may have been periods in the history of this land, when the upholders of true religion had cause for gloomy forebodings, and for fears that God would unchurch our nation. And some indeed may be disposed to regard the present as a period when such forebodings and fears might be justly entertained. They may think that so great is the array of hostility against the national church, that the most sanguine can scarce venture to hope that the candlestick will not be cast down. We cannot subscribe to this opinion. We are not indeed blind to the amount of opposition to the national church; neither have we the least doubt that the destruction of this church would give a fatal blow to the national christianity. We dare not indeed say that God might not preserve amongst us a pure christianity, if the national church were overthrown. But we are bold to affirm, that hitherto has the church been the grand engine in effecting such preservation; and that we should have no right to expect, if we dislocated this engine, that results would not follow disastrous to religion. I could not contend for the Established Church, merely because venerable by its antiquity, because hallowed by the solemn processions of noble thought which have issued from its recesses, or because the prayers and praises which many generations have breathed through its services, seem mysteriously to haunt its temples, that they may be echoed by the tongues of the living. But as the great safeguard and propagator of unadulterated christianity; the defender, by her articles, of what is sound in doctrine, and, by her constitution, of what is apostolic in government; the represser, by the simple majesty of her ritual, of all extravagance; the encourager, by its fervor, of an ardent piety-I can contend for the continuance amongst us

of the Establishment, as I would for the continuance of the Gospel; I can deprecate its removal as the removal of our candlestick. It is not then because we are blind to the opposition to the national church, or fail to identify this church with the national christianity, that we share not the fears of those who would now prophesy evil. But we feel that danger is only bringing out the strength of the church, and that her efficiency has increased as her existence has been menaced. The threatening of our text belongs to the lukewarm and the indolent; its very language proves that it ceases to be applicable, if it have fanned the embers, and strung the energies. We believe of an apostolic church, that it can die only by suicide; and where are our fears of suicide, when enmity has but produced greater zeal in winning souls to Christ, and hatred been met by increased efforts to disseminate the religion of love?

We might not have ventured to introduce these observations, in concluding our discourses before this assembly, had we not felt that the church stands or falls with the universities of the land, and that the present condition of this university more than warrants our belief that the candlestick is not about to be removed. It is a gratification, not to be expressed, to find, after a few years' absence, what a growing attention there has been to those noblest purposes for which colleges were founded; and how the younger part, more especially, of our body, whence are to be drafted the ministers of our parishes, and the most influential of our laity, have advanced in respect for religion, and attention to its duties. One who has been engaged in other scenes may perhaps better judge the advance than those under whose eye it has proceeded; and if testimony may derive worth from its sincerity, when

it cannot from the station of the party who gives it, there will be borne strong witness by him who addresses you, that not only is the fire of genius here cherished, and the lamp of philosophy trimmed; but that here the candle, which God hath lighted for a world sitting in darkness, burns brightly, and that, therefore, though enemies may be fierce, the candlestick is firm.

९९

But suffer me, my younger brethren, to entreat you that you would think more and more of your solemn responsibility. I cannot compute the amount of influence you may wield over the destinies of the church and the country. In a few years you will be scattered over the land, occupying different stations, and filling different parts in society. And it is because we hope you will go hence with religion in the heart, that we venture to predict good, and not evil. We entreat you to take heed that you disappoint not the hope, and thus defeat the prediction. We could almost dare to say that you have the majesty, and the christianity, of the empire in your keeping; and we beseech you, therefore, to flee youthful lusts," as you would the plots of treason, and to follow the high biddings of godliness, as you would the trumpetcall of patriotism. Your vices, they must shake the candlestick, which God in his mercy hath planted in this land, and with whose stability he has associated the greatness of the state, and the happiness of its families. But your quiet and earnest piety; your submission to the precepts of the Gospel; your faithful discharge of appointed duties; these will help to give fixedness to the candlestick-and there may come the earthquake of political convulsion, or the onset of infidel assault, but christianity shall not be overthrown; and we shall therefore still know that "the Lord of Hosts is with us, that the God of Jacob is our refuge."

22

With a heart full of the remembrance of the mercy which had been shown to her family, did Mary, the sister of Lazarus, approach and pour ointment over the head of the Redeemer. Not yet sufficiently taught that Christ was to be honored by the consecration of the best of our substance, the disciples murmured at what they thought waste, and called forth from the Savior a vindication of the act. He pronounced it possessed of a kind of prophetical power; and glancing onwards to that ignominious death, whereby the world's redemption was about to be achieved, declared that it had been done for his burial, and thus represented it as the produce of that affection which pays eagerly the last honors to one most cherished and revered.

Whether or no there had been given intimation to Mary of the near approach of the final scenes of Christ's ministration, does not appear from the scriptural record. It is evident, however, that Christ grounds his defence of her conduct mainly on the fact, that his crucifixion was at hand, making the proximity of that stupendous event a sufficient reason for the course which she had followed. Thus, in conformity with the manner of teaching which he always pursued, that of extracting from passing occurrences the material of

some spiritual admonition, he takes occasion, from the pouring out of the ointment, to deliver a truth which hath about it all the unction of divinity. We allow that, on its original delivery, our text had a decided reference to existent circumstances; but we still contend that, in the fulness of its meaning, it is as forcible to ourselves as it was to Mary and the apostles. There was, indeed, a contrast implied in the first instance, which, we thank God, can no longer be urged, a contrast between the presence of Christ as vouchsafed to his church, and that same presence for a while withdrawn. The heavens have received the Savior until the times of the restitution of all things; but though with our bodily eyes we behold him not, we know that he is never absent from the assemblies of his people, but that "where two or three are met together in his name, there is he in the midst of them."

Until the Redeemer had won to himself, by his agony and his passion, the mighty title of "Head over all things to the Church," a title which belongs to him not so much by the rights of his essential deity, as through virtue of his having entered into humanity, and presented it, in obedience and suffering, to the Creator-he could not put forth those gracious communications which

supply the place of a visible presence. Hence it must have come necessarily to pass, that any allusion to his removal from earth would bring a cloud over the minds of his disciples, since it was only from the headship to which I have adverted that they could derive those influences which teach the spiritual nature of Christ's kingdom. To the disciples, therefore, we again say, there was a contrast in the text which can scarcely be said to exist to ourselves. We are indeed looking forwards, unless we live most basely below our privileges, to a season when, after a manner infinitely more glorious than any which past ages have seen, the presence of the Redeemer shall be granted to his people. We know that the Bible hath painted, with all the power of splendid diction, a period at which the bridegroom shall return, and gathering triumphantly his elect from the four corners of the earth, unite them to himself in a visible and indestructible union. But whilst we attempt no denial that, ever since the ascension of Christ, the church hath been placed in what may fitly be called a widowed estate, we may still justly maintain, that the argument, from contrast which our text exhibits, was of local and temporary power. We have Christ with us in such real and glorious manifestations, as no apostle could have conceived of previously to the effusions of the Spirit. And in place of that carnal calculation which would detach the head from the members, and decide that no ministrations can be rendered to Christ, unless he move amongst us in the garniture of flesh, we have learned from the fuller disclosures of the Gospel, that the Savior is succored in the persons of his followers, so that having the poor always with us, we always have Christ on whom to shed the anointings of our love. If there were not, then, some general lessons couched under the limited assertion of the text, there would be but little in these words of Christ to interest the man of later generations. We could merely survey them as possessed originally of a plaintive and touching beauty, so that they must have fallen on the disciples' ears with all that melancholy softness which arrays the dying words of those we best love. We could only regard

them as exquisitely calculated to thrill through the hearts of the hearers, fixing, as they must have done, their thoughts on a separation which seemed to involve the abandonment of their dearest expectations, and to throw to the ground those hopes of magnificent empire which the miracles of Christ Jesus had aroused within them.

But the words are not thus to be confined in their application, and if we sweep out of view the incidents which give rise to their delivery, we may extract from them lessons well suited to sundry occasions, and to none more emphatically than to the present.

We are assembled to commemorate the foundation of certain noble institutions, which stand amongst the chief of those which shed honor on the land of our birth. And I see not how such commemoration can be better effected, or how that benevolence, upon which these illustrious institutions depend, can be more encouraged to go on with its labors, than by our searching into the bearings of the fact that "the poor we have always with us," remembering at the same time, that in ministering to them for the love of Christ, we as literally minister to the Redeemer himself, as if he also were always visibly with us.

The subject matter of discourse is thus opened before us. I take the assertion "ye have the poor always with you," as one which, whilst it prophetically asserts the unvarying continuance of poverty amongst men, leads us attentively to ponder on the ends which that continuance subserves; and then I turn to the fact that the head is always present amongst us in the members, and use it as a motive to the support of establishments which seek to alleviate distress.

Such are our two topics of discourse the ends which the continuance of poverty has subserved,-the motives to benevolence which the presence of Christ supplies.

Now it is much to receive an assurance from the Redeemer himself that the poor we are always to have with us; for we may hence justly conclude that poverty is not, what it hath been termed, an unnatural estate, but rather one appointed to exist by the will of the Almighty. It hath ever been a favorite