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too favourably received. It would surely be needless to discuss them here at large; the only questions we are tempted to ask in regard to this religious revolution are the following: Where is there any promise that the power of the flesh shall cease? Where is there any prospect of an access to the Father of Light except through the conquest obtained by the immortal soul over this poor and trembling frame,-this form of clay, which shall not enter into Heaven except it be changed, which must be turned into corruption a natural body, and rise again a spiritual body? Lastly, is there any reason, from the progress of society, to believe that, as the world becomes older, the power of the flesh, which misleads the soul it imprisons, shall wane away, and man be no more subject to pride, to envy, to ambition, to wrath, and to lust? and where, until this change be wrought, shall the hope of man rest, or his spirit fly for succour, but to the footstool of the throne of Him, who having overcome the world, encourages his disciples to believe that through his Spirit they may overcome it also?

LECTURE VIII'.

PSALM CXIX. 71.

It is good for me that I have been afflicted.

AMONG the many benefits which Revelation has conferred on man, it is not the least that it has encouraged him to look upon affliction and calamity with far different feelings than those which he can derive from any other source -with feelings of humble resignation and even cheerfulness for the present, and of hope for the future. In the Christian scheme neither fate nor chance find place the very hairs of the head of man are numbered, and nothing can happen which it is not the will of a tender Father of the human race to permit. This is one source of consolation unknown to all but those who

1 This Lecture has no connexion with those which

precede it. It is the Sermon preached on Sunday the 14th of April, 1833, being the day on which a general Thanksgiving was ordered to be made in all the Churches for the goodness and mercy of Almighty God in removing the grievous disease with which several places in the kingdom had been visited. The duty of preaching this Sermon. on this occasion, in the Church of Great St Mary's, having devolved on the Hulsean Lecturer, it is thought that the manner in which the subject was treated fairly brings it within the legitimate range allowed by Mr Hulse to these Lectures.

drink of living water from the wells of life; and its value is proportioned to the greatness of the Being from whom it proceeds. It is true, indeed, that the gospel teaches man to expect physical evil and corporal suffering for such is the condition of a fallen nature, while worldly principles remove as far as possible out of sight a truth so distressing to our nature. The man of this world endeavours to chase away every thought of pain, and to enjoy the present without anticipation of the future, while he would fain delude himself into the belief, that because the velvet foot with which sorrow is advancing on him is unheard, its iron hand will never seize his frame. It is true that for a season his passions may cheat his understanding, and lull to rest all his anxiety, but it is as clear also, that, by the very condition of his being, the storehouse of his consolation decreases as he advances in life, that his habits of mind leave him at the mercy of the first breath which deprives him of his accustomed enjoyments, and that when the arrows of misfortune are aimed against him, his breast is open and defenceless to their point. The gospel, on the contrary, offers no tumultuous joy, no thoughtless pleasures for the moment; and it gives no promise that God will so shape the course of this world, that outward evil and calamity shall not sometimes fall upon the most holy of its

followers, in the same, or in a greater proportion, than on the unholy and the sinner. But it does promise to give man an inward principle, if he will hearken to its voice, and accept its offers and conditions, which will entirely change all his views with regard to this world, by placing all that happens to him here, all the things that are seen, in subordination to another system-the world that is unseen.

The occasion to which the service of this day directs our thoughts, as a ground of thanksgiving to the Almighty Giver of all good things, is the suspension of the chastening hand of God from our country, in the removal of the grievous disease by which our land has been visited within the last few months. Before we turn our attention to some points in the Christian view of national judgments, it may not be entirely out of place to cast one glance, and that but very briefly, on the view of suffering and of death which some among the noblest spirits of the heathen world entertained, and to observe how little consolation their philosophy was calculated to afford them. One of the great families of philosophy' undertook to grapple with these enemies of man and to subdue them. Its object was to render man callous, and accordingly it ridiculed the folly of struggling against that which is unavoidable,

1 The Stoics.

and of deploring that which is incurable. Man was to sustain himself under all circumstances by the feeling of conscious rectitude, and the dignity of his nature was not to be compromised by unmanly softness nor slavish fear. This was to be the sustaining principle, but this was not all: man was to believe, was to attempt to persuade himself, that pain is no real evil! and therefore all its efforts to unman the frame were to be despised by the wise and virtuous man!

Far be it from the Christian to exult or to triumph over this display of human weakness, where it thought itself strong! but surely in these abstract notions there was no support against a single hour of torturing pain, or the prostrating power of a lingering sickness. They may be among the sayings of the wise,

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But with the afflicted in his pangs

Their sound little prevails, or rather seems a note
Harsh, and of dissonant tone from his complaint?.'

Whatever comfort they could bring, and that was indeed but little, could be brought only to the highest and noblest spirits that embraced these doctrines! and even they must have felt the nothingness of a system, to which their own feelings gave the lie as soon as its consolation was needed-the worthlessness of an armour that falls off in the day

2 Milton, Samson Agonistes.

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