ties. This is, indeed, what will always happen. It happened most signally among the monks of later times. Where unnatural restraints are imposed, they will be eluded or broken through, and cause men to err in the opposite extreme. The commandments of God, on the other hand, are known by this, that they enjoin nothing but what is practicable by all.

Such are the "fruits" which appear to have been produced in the earlier ages by a departure from the church; thus were men led into wild and idle, nay, and impious speculations. And I may now ask, whether such tenets are not wholly and irreconcileably at war with the true faith? Whether there could, for a moment, have existed any fellowship, any community of worship between the real disciples of Christ and such dreamers? I will ask further, whether these instances do not strikingly corroborate all that I have said of the danger as well as sinfulness, as also of the natural progress of schism; whether, reasoning from what we have hitherto seen, we are not warranted in the conclusion, that, generally speaking, every such departure, whether it be pure schism or mixed with heresy, originates in those causes to which it is attributed by the apostles; in pride, in ambition, and that love of distinction which is not unmixed with covetousness.

The means too, by which these schisms ..nd these heresies were maintained and justified were uniformly the same; no less than the corrupting, the mutilating, or the perverting of the holy Scriptures: "the wresting of them" by men, "to their own destruction*." And I wish you the more to observe this, because it will be a main test by which you may judge of the separatists in later ages.

This is, indeed, only what we might expect For it is only to those who approach him in the spirit of humility, of purity, and of meekness, that God will make himself known. The proud, the covetous, the ambitious, and the vain he "beholdeth afar offt." They who take up the Scriptures merely with a view of making them speak a language favourable to any pre-conceived notion of their own, or who, as I fear, but too many have done in our days, consider them as a field in which they may expatiate at will, and upon which they are at liberty to make a display of their ingenuity; all such, I say, will, in the end, only deceive themselves and others: they will be the dupes of their own imaginations. If we would really profit by the inspired writings, we must prepare ourselves in a very different manner. We must,

*

2 Peter iii. 16.

↑ Psalm cxxxviii. 6. O. Y.

according to the exhortation of St. Paul," as "new born babes desire the sincere milk of the "word;" then, and then only shall we partake of it in such a manner as that we "may grow

SERMON IV.

LUKE. xi. 35.

Take heed that the Light which is in thee be not Darkness.

In the schisms and heresies of the early ages, to which in the close of my last discourse I adverted, we had occasion to see the spirit of am. bition and of covetousness which is the presumed, and by the apostles declared original of all divisions in the church, operating indeed widely and among different sorts of people, but not assuming any great consistency of form, or acquiring any share of solid establishment. In succeeding times it pleased the Almighty, that to the temptations with which the church

was thus assailed from without, to the erroneous systems and the gaudy and complicated theories which were displayed to her view by those who had wilfully separated from her, another and a more severe trial should be superadded from within: that the false and corrupt doctrine by which the truth was to be obscured should proceed from those very persons to whom the oracles of God were in a special manner confided; that the flock of Christ should be led astray by those very rulers who were set over it for the express purpose of keeping it in the right path. This is what took place with the first appearance, and grew with the growth of the papal usurpations; till, at last, by the abominable and even impious tenets which came to be maintained by the church of Rome, almost the whole Christian world was reduced to the lamentable condition which is so forcibly marked out in my text. Thus it happened that "the light which was within them became dark"C ness."

I need not, I should conceive, employ many words in shewing to you the propriety of this application; and that it is to such a state of things as I am describing that the words of Christ most particularly and distinctly refer. The parable or metaphor which is here used is sufficiently familiar in the New Testament to leave us no room to doubt its meaning. By