blessing of God, gradually acquire it. If the soil is not originally good, it may be made so by labour and cultivation; but above all, by imploring our heavenly Father to shower down upon it the plentiful effusions of his grace, which he has promised to all that devoutly and fervently and constantly pray for it. This dew from heaven," shed abroad on our hearts,"* will refresh and invigorate and purify our souls; will correct the very worst disposition; will soften and subdue the hardest and most ungrateful soil, will make clean and pure and moist, fit for the reception of the good seed; and notwithstanding its original poverty and barrenness, will enrich it with strength and vigour sufficient to bring forth fruit to perfection. I have now finished these Lectures for the present year, and must, on this occasion, again entreat you to let those truths, to which you have listened with so much patience and perseverance, take entire possession of your hearts. They are not vain, they are not trivial things, they are the words of eternal life; they relate to the most important of all human concerns, to the most essential interests and comforts of the present life, and to the destiny, the eternal destiny of happiness or misery that awaits you in the next. You have just heard the parable of the sower explained, and it behoves you to consider in which of the four classes of men there described you can fairly rank yourselves. Are you in the number of those that receive the seed by the way-side, on hearts as impenetrable and inaccessible to conviction as the hard beaten high road; or of those that receive the seed on a little loose earth scattered on a rock, where it quickly springs up, and as quickly withers away; or of those in whom the seed is choked with thorns, with the occupations and pleasures of this life; or, lastly, of those who receive the seed on good ground, or an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit, some a hundred fold, some sixty, some thirty? It becomes every one of you to ask yourselves this question very seriously, and to * Rom. v. 5. answer it very honestly for on that depends the whole colour of your future condition here and hereafter. There are none I trust here present, there are few I believe in this country, who fall under the first description of professed and hardened unbelievers; and amidst many painful circumstances of these awful and anxious times it is some consolation to us to reflect, that the incredible pains which have been taken in a multitude of vile publications to induce the people of this country to apostatize from their religion, have not made that general and permanent impression on their minds which might naturally have been expected from such malignant and reiterated efforts to shake their principles and subvert their faith. But there are other instruments of perversion and corruption, much more formidable more powerful than these. There are rank and noxious weeds and thorns, which grow up with the good seed and choke it, and prevent it from coming to maturity. These are, as the parable tells us, the cares, the riches, and the pleasures of this world, which in our passage through life lay hold upon our hearts, and are more dangerous obstructions to the Gospel than all the speculative arguments aud specious sophistry of all its adversaries put together. It is but seldom, I believe, comparatively speaking, that men are fairly reasoned out of their religion. But they are very frequently seduced, both from the practice and the belief of it, by treacherous passions within, and violent temptations from without, by "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life." These are in fact the most common, the most powerful enemies of our faith. These are the weeds and the thorns that twist themselves round every fibre of our hearts, which impede the growth and destroy the fruitfulness of every good principle that has been implanted there, and form that third and most numerous class of hearers described in the parable of the sower, who, though not professed infidels, are yet practical unbelievers, and who though they retain the form, have lost all the substance, all the power, all the life and soul of religion. It is then against these most dangerous corruptors of our fidelity and allegiance to our heavenly Master, that we must principally be upon our guard; it is against these we must arm and prepare our souls, by summoning all our fortitude and resolution, and calling in to our aid all those spiritual succours which the power of prayer can draw down upon us from above. It was to assist us in this arduous conflict that the compilers of our liturgy appointed the season of Lent, and more particularly the offices of the concluding week, which from the sufferings of our Saviour at that time, we call Passion week, It was thought, and surely it was wisely thought, by our ancestors, that to fortify ourselves against the attractions of the world, and the seductions of sin, it was necessary to withdraw ourselves sometimes from the tumultuous and intoxicating scenes of business and of pleasure, which, in the daily commerce of life, press so close on every side of us; and to strengthen and confirm our minds against their fatal influence, by retirement, by recollection, by self-communion, by self-examination, by meditating on the word of God, and, above all, by frequent and fervent prayer. To give us time for these sacred occupations, a small portion of every year has been judiciously set apart for them by our church; and what time could be so proper for those holy purposes, as that in which our blessed Lord was suffering so much for our sakes? I allude more particularly to that solemn week which is now approaching, and to which I must beg to call the most serious attention of every one here present. In that week all public diversions are, as you well know, wisely prohibited by public authority; and in conformity to the spirit of such prohibition, we should, even in our own families and in our own private amusements, be temperate, modest, decorous, and discreet. Think not, however, that I am here recommending gloom and melancholy, and a seclusion from all society; far from it. This could answer no other purpose but to sour your minds and to deaden your devotions. The cheerfulness of social converse and friendly inter course is by no means inconsistent with the duties of the week; but all those tumultuous assemblies, which are too strongly marked with an air of levity, gaiety, and dissipation, and may in fact be ranked with the number of public diversions, are plainly repugnant to that seriousness and tenderness of mind, which the awful and interesting events of that week must naturally inspire. Let me only request you to read over, when you return home, that plain, simple, unaffected, yet touching narative of our Saviour's sufferings, which is selected from the Gospels, in the daily offices of the next week; and then ask your own hearts whether, at the very time when your Redeemer is supposed to have passed through all those dreadful scenes for your sakes and for your salvation, from his first agony in the garden, to his last expiring groan upon the cross, whether at this very time you can bring yourselves to pursue the pleasures, the vanities, and the follies of the world, with the same unqualified eagerness and unabated ardour as if nothing had happened which had given him the slightest pain, or in which you had the smallest interest or concern. Your hearts, I am sure, will revolt at the very idea, and your own feelings will preserve you from thus wantonly sporting with the cross of Christ. And if from a prudent abstinence from these things you were to add a careful enquiry into your past conduct, and the present state of your souls, if you were to extend your views to another world, and consider what your condition there is likely to be; what reasonable grounds you have to hope for a favourable sentence from your Almighty Judge: how far you have conformed to the commands of your Maker, and what degree of affection and gratitude you have manifested for the inexpressible kindness of your Redeemer; this surely would be an employment not inconsistent with your necessary occupations, and not unsuitable to humble candidates for pardon, acceptance, and immortal happiness. Is this too great a burden to be imposed upon us for a few days; is it too great a sacrifice of our time, our thoughts and our amusements to an invisible world and a reversionary inheritance of inestimable value? It certainly is if the gospel be all a fabricated tale. But if it contain the words of soberness and truth; if its divine authority is established by such an accumulation of evidence of various kinds as never before concurred to prove any other facts or events in the history of the world, by evidences springing from different sources, yet all centering in the same point, and converging to the same conclusion; if even the few incidental proofs that have been offered to your consideration in the course of these Lectures have produced that conviction in your minds which they seem to have done, what then is the consequence? Is it not that truths of such infinite importance well deserve all that consideration for which I am now contending; and that we ought to embrace with eagerness every appointed means and every favourable opportunity that is thrown in our way, of demonstrating our attachment and our gratitude to a crucified Saviour, who died for our sins and rose again for our justification, and will come once more in glory to judge the world in righteousness, and to distribute his rewards and punishments to all the nations of the earth assembled before him? At that awful tribunal may we all appear with a humble confidence in the merits of our Redeemer, and a trembling hope of that mercy which he has promised to every sincere believer, every truly contrite and penitent offender! LECTURE XIII. MATTHEW xiii. CONTINUED. THE Lectures of the last year concluded with an explanation of the parable of the sower; and immediately after this follows in the Gospel the parable of the |