his own accepted sacrifice, a certain character of dimness, and difficulty, and indistinctness should be attached to the intercourse between himself and his adorers, and that even his believing worshipper should feel his position in reference to God one of awful and unfamiliar remoteness, compared with that near and cordial communion which Christians under the Gospel are authorized and encouraged to hold with the Father of their Lord Jesus Christ. Let me exhort you, therefore, brethren, to avail yourselves of your peculiar privilege as Christians, by coming "with boldness to the throne of grace,”—approaching, as it were, into "the secret of his presence,”—realizing with child-like trust and joy the thought of a present Deity, -and unbosoming to him, in confidence of prayer, all your sorrows and all your wants. It is in this blessed exercise of believing prayer that you especially "come," according to the Apostle's exhortation, "to the throne of grace, that ye may find mercy and obtain grace to help you in the time of need." This is that precious and honoured ordinance to which, in the Bible, the Holy Spirit, in all its sevenfold energy, is expressly promised, and in the use of which particularly the saints of former times have known what it was, amidst all their own deeply-felt infirmities, for "the power of Christ to rest upon❞ them, to be "strong in the Lord and in the power of his might."-" In the day when I cried," says the holy Psalmist," thou answeredst me, and strength

enedst me with strength in my soul." It was after beseeching the Lord in thrice-repeated and urgentlyenforced entreaty, that St Paul received the promise, "My grace is sufficient for thee, my strength is made perfect in weakness." Employ, I beseech you, with humility and fervency and faith like theirs, the means which the Psalmist and Apostle used, and be assured that they shall be followed with the same result. "Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you. For every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. For if ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him!" And if ye would have your mouths opened and your hearts enlarged in your approaches to the sacred seat of heavenly majesty and mercy, O never forget the blessed truths to which the exhortation of the text is subjoined! Remember that ye have not such an "High Priest as cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one that was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." Remember that, having collected thus, from an unbounded experience of trial and temptation, an unbounded store of sympathy for those whom "he is not ashamed to call his brethren," amidst all the trials and perils, the faintings and sorrows of their pilgrimage, he

hath sat down for

appears in the presence of God for them, bearing his own blood,-pleading for them with all the power of his prevailing intercession, all the merit of his perfected atonement. Remember that such is the fulness of that intense complacency with which that mighty sacrifice, and he who offered it, are viewed by the Eternal Father, that, in virtue of it, our anointed High Priest has not only been admitted, like the Jewish intercessor in the ancient sanctuary, to plead its merit before the throne, but has actually been invited to sit down upon the throne itself, at the right hand of the Majesty on high. "This man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, ever at the right hand of God." You may conjecture, therefore, with what irresistible and all-prevailing intercession an Advocate thus glorious, and thus dear to God, will plead the cause of all in whose eternal welfare he deigns to take an interest. O let this glorious and consoling thought henceforward animate your prayers with a fuller spirit of adoption ; let it infuse into them the tone of a more assured, but not less humble faith,-of a more filial, but not less reverent confidence in God, and teach you to approach the mercy-seat, as still indeed a throne, but yet "a throne of throne of grace." There is no exigency that can occur in the course of your Christian warfare,-no kind of temptation, no form of trial, in which, by the devout and grateful use of the unutterably precious privilege of access to the sprin

ye

kled mercy-seat of God, you may not receive appropriate and abundant help and consolation. Nor, so long as ye thus take refuge with your paternal God, and support your weakness upon his omnipotence, have ye any reason to despair or to despond, in looking forward to the toils, and trials, and vicissitudes of that lofty and arduous course to which are so solemnly devoted. "He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. For even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fail;— but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."

PROVERBS, Xxvii. 1.

DISCOURSE XVI.

Boast not thyself of to-morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth."

I SHOULD not reckon it surprising, brethren, that these words of the wisest among men came vividly to your minds when, during the bypast week, we heard once and again of our fellow-mortals smitten down upon our streets by the stroke of sudden aceidents, and passing, in the course of one or two hurrying hours, from the fulness of youthful health and strength, into the coldness and the silence of untimely dissolution. Nor will you esteem it wonderful, that they flashed with peculiar force upon my mind when called, but a day or two ago, to visit in one hour two several dwellings thus suddenly changed into houses of mourning,-passing straight from the couch of the dead to that of the dying; or that I should be now induced, under the solemn recollection,-albeit it is an argument I have often treated, and often urged on you,-once more to en