Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

in their unbelief, as he has himself become. But while he is thus doing the work of the great enemy of mankind, he is also preparing the way for consequences, which he neither expected nor desired. He may pride himself upon the strict integrity which is stamped upon his dealings; the carefulness and consistency with which he performs the offices of his station; and the respectability and unimpeached credit with which he bears himself in the relations of social life; but while he is conveying the subtle poison of his opinions to the minds of others, he cannot predict the effects in which they may result. The young and intellectual, upon whom he had taken pains to fasten his opinions, may not be able to exercise the same mastery over their passions, and to restrain so successfully the outbreak of evil propensities, when the curb of religious principle has been withdrawn, and the outworks of morality have been beaten down. Having become infidel in opinion, they may become debauched in practice; following out in their natural result the principles to which they have been proselyted, they may become such as their companions learn to pity or scorn, and such as society desires to weed out of its pale. He who with so much assiduity converted them to his views, may be yet in the fulness of his own unchecked prosperity; but his heart will be wrung with anguish, as he marks the blight and the ruin which he caused, but which he cannot remedy. And when his own evil day comes upon him, when his leaf is sere and yellow, and the blossom of his life is gone, he will feel the full bitterness of a desolate spirit. There may be times when memory will call up early recollections, and go back to the days when he had not yet learned to call the gospel the fable of the nurse, and the

delusion of the priest; the days of unspoiled and unperverted childhood, when in the holy observances of a pious family circle, the morning and evening prayer was offered by those into whose hearts no doubt had ever entered, that the Living God was their guardian and provider, or that Jesus had clothed Himself with their nature, and had borne the burden of their sins upon the cross. There may be the remembrance of the peace which then dwelt in his bosom, and has never since been lodged there, and with this remembrance there may be a momentary stir of slumbering affections, and a gushing forth of long forgotten feelings, but the heart has been too long hardened, and the mind too much warped, to dwell on scenes and recollections like these. Yet, as he compares the present with the past, he may feel that he has made but an ill exchange. Just as we may conceive the habitual drunkard, whose pleasures have long been those of the wine-cup, and the midnight revel, looking back to the days when his limbs did not totter with premature weakness, nor his pulse throb with habitual fears, when he could stoop in the midst of the pleasures, and exercises, and labours of youth, and bathe his brow and quench his thirst in the crystal stream. He remembers the past, but the power of simple and unblamed enjoyment is gone.

But for the man who has lived in proud defiance of God, there will come a season when he will reap a fuller harvest of disappointment and sorrow. When he is shut up in his death chamber, and is preparing to pillow his head in the sepulchre, the evidence for the existence and the interposition of Deity which he laboured so long to resist and to exclude, will rush upon him with overwhelming force. He may have lived, but he cannot die an infidel. The

God whom he renounced, and the restraints of whose authority he set himself to cast away, will make his terrors to be felt. It is nothing, in his present extremity, that he has been distinguished among his contemporaries, and that his name has been emblazoned high in the records of learning and science. On all these things he will now see vanity inscribed. They cannot soothe the unquietness of bodily suffering, nor lift the burden from the self-accusing conscience. He will feel, at length, that, in his much wisdom hath been much grief, and in the increase of his knowledge hath been increase of sorrow. He has treasured up evil for the latter day, and has laid upon his own soul the bitterness of anguish, which found him out at the last.

[ocr errors]

thrown. And we cannot doubt that the old enemy of human souls, who made the tree of knowledge the instrument of his earliest temptation, is busily employed in helping forward plans which bid so fair for the advancement of his kingdom. If the flood shall not overwhelm us, and shall not sweep away whatever of holy and excellent yet remains; if the monuments of ancient piety, which have come down to us from a Godfearing ancestry, which the heart loves to cherish, and on which the eye loves to linger, are yet spared to us; it will be only through the undeserved interposition of Him, whom as a nation we are schooling ourselves to renounce.

But let us now pass on to consider, briefly, in the second place, some of the cases in which no application of the text can be made.

It cannot be applied to the know

And that which is true of individuals, is not less true of communities. If it be a dangerous thing for a man to cultivate intellectual accomplish-ledge of ourselves, and of the condiments, at the expense of personal piety; no less is it hazardous, that religion should be dissociated from knowledge, in the prevailing schemes for the instruction of a people. And among all the features of the time which cause anxiety to those who are careful for future days, and who tremble for the generation who are to follow, there is none which threatens more disaster and calamity than the growing pride, which, irrespective of the claims of the Creator, would deify the intellect of the fallen creature. The men of the new philosophy are at work, who are content that the people should be of any religion, or of no religion, provided only, that stores of perishable wisdom be accumulated. With them is leagued the cold sceptic, whose weapon is sarcasm and whose ready argument lies in a sneer; who, if knowledge be but diffused, would not complain, though the altar should be polluted and over

tion to which our nature has fallen. No acquisition is more important, for it lies at the threshold of all spiritual advancement; none more difficult, for the heart is deceitful above all things, as well as desperately wicked. The evidences of sin are around us on every side. The wreck and ruin of creation proclaim what it has done. Its disastrous effects are visible, even to the heedless eye, in the blight and wretchedness which it has cast upon a world, which, with all its furniture and all its tenants, God, at first, pronounced very good. But it is chiefly in its consequences to our own nature, that we should seek the evidences of the deadly work which sin hath wrought. It lurks, however, so deeply in the hidden and unexplored recesses of the heart, it is so contained in its concealment, that while we are borne down by its effects, the cause escapes our observation. Even when the pressure of bodily pain

[ocr errors]

Lord hath published records of Himself, on many a bright and glowing page, which it is our privilege to read. He hath not, indeed, left Himself without witness. The whole world teems with God. The meanest objects on which the eye can rest, are eloquent of Him, and bear their concurrent testimony to the lines of His eternal character. But no contemplation of God out of Christ, can give comfort to the heart, which has become conscious of transgression of his law. Every divine attribute is gathered in tremendous array. Ho

wrings the groan of anguish from the bosom; or adversity makes us poor and unprovided; or bereavement makes us desolate in spirit, we often remain ignorant of the rod of bitterness from which every human sorrow has sprung. If sin be indeed such, in its character or measures, as to excite scorn and avoidance in those with whom we are bound up, in the intercourse of common life, we may feel it to be an evil thing. But, if we have earned respect by the strict moralities of a consistent course, if our words have weight in the decision of others, and our example has influ-liness turns with loathing from the ence among men of integrity and reputation, it is hard to persuade ourselves that there may yet lie as wide an interval of separation between us and God as that which divides Him from the most reprobate and reckless of sinners. Nature resists the admission; we can learn its necessity, only by the teaching of the spirit, which unfolds our moral history and shows us to ourselves. Such knowledge is blessed in its results, when we come in the broken-bless GOD that not even the veriest ness of a self-distrusting and selfabasing heart, to seek other help and other merit than our own. Ere we can att in to it, we must become fools, in order to be wise; for, if any man thinketh that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know it.

The declaration of the text cannot be applied to the knowledge of God. No subject on which the intellectual faculties can spend themselves, is so elevating and ennobling as the character of Him who bestowed them. We shall never, indeed, master the mighty subject, nor hold it within the compass of our minds, nor grapple with the inconceivable magnitude of its details. Neither can angels accomplish this by the devotion of all their immortal energies. And yet the

guilt which Omniscience detects; justice claims its victim; and Omnipotence is ready to punish with the outpouring of irresistible vengeance. The revelation of the power of the gospel, is the only revelation of peace to the heart. It is the one blessed scheme, by which, while all the attributes have their complete, and awful vindication, the overture of free pardon is made to those whom sin has ruined, and rendered helpless. We

outcast, not even the vilest among the children of sin and shame, can come in vain to plead their cause in Mercy's presence chamber. Not a single individual, of the human family, who shall fall under the condemnation of the great day, will be able to urge in arrest of the righteous sentence, that he desired to participate in the blood bought pardon, but was left in the hopelessness of unforgiven transgression. To know GOD, as he is revealed in the Gospel record of his love to a ruined world, is to open the inlets of comfort to the soul. A martyr in our own land, who was going to bear his testimony, amidst the flames, to the truths of the Gospel, opened his Testament for the last time, and prayed that he might be pointed to some passage, whose strong conso

open the difficulties of the revealed word.

lation might carry him through the the spirit, whose office it is to conappalling terrors of the scene which vince of sin, and to subdue the hosawaited him: GoD directed him to atility of the carnal mind, as well as to text, which was the last upon which his eye rested. "This is life eternal, to know thee the only true GOD, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." And for many a saint, in his hardest conflict, and in his direst extremity, has this blessed truth sufficed. If we know God as our reconciled Father, all is well. We may be carried over dark, and troubled waters, but we shall be safe in the ark in which the Lord has shut us in; the tempest may sweep across the sky, but its violence cannot harm us, for we shall have found a haven.

There is no necessary connexion between the gifts of the spirit, and the attainments of human learning; no confinement of the blessings of spiritual knowledge, to men whose minds are furnished with other stores. Gop often hides these things from the wise, and prudent, and reveals them unto babes. Many a tenant of the mud built cottage, is able to lay hold of the hope of immortality with firmness of grasp, which the ancient philosopher, and the modern sceptic could never attain. He may be able to tell nothing of the more abstruse, and recondite evidences, of his religion, but he can produce the evidence, which never fails to satisfy

But if Scripture knowledge is to produce such effects, it must never be separated from grace. This separation is one of the dangers which specially belong to a period of so much religious profession as the pre-his own heart, which he derives from sent. It is no breach of charity to believe, that there are many persons who pore on the pages of the Bible, and have become familiar with its statements, over whose lives, and conversation, its principles have never exercised any perceptible control. It falls within the limits of an easily imagined possibility, that we might gather from the Bible, opinions of faultless accuracy, and frame a creed so scriptural, that its articles could not be impugned, and yet that while we were distinguished by an unwavering maintenance of such a creed, and were noted for sturdy partizanship of such an adopted system, we might be as far from the kingdom of GOD, as if we had never heard the sound of the Gospel, and no ray of truth had dawned upon the darkness of the soul. We can never become wise unto salvation, unless we go with the outpouring of humble hearts, to seek better guidance than our own, to ask for the gracious influences of way, he gradually discovers more of

the complete, and wonderful adaptation of the Gospel, to his wants. It found him poor, and has left him rich; it found him ignorant, it has made him wise; he was by nature a sin polluted, and a sin ruined creature, and the Gospel has shown him, how his sin has been atoned for, its guilt for ever put away, the sentence of its condemnation cancelled, and its power curbed, and restrained. And GOD may often make such an one, though untaught in schools, to be the instrument of conversion to the wise of this world. Even many a minister on whose labours abundant success has rested, might bear his testimony, that he was first guided by providence, to such a lowly disciple, from whom he might gather much precious instruction in the realities of his religion, which he never learned in colleges and halls.

Such knowledge continually increases. As the believer goes on his

the will, and the dealings of his Father. At first there might have been much of zeal, and less of knowledge; but while the former burns as brightly as when it was first kindled in his bosom, the latter is increased by continual accessions. It may be that as he draws near the close of his journey, and even when he is laid upon his dying bed, GOD may reveal to him many things which in his best, and brightest hours he had never been able to discern. Just as we may have seen how the ray of closing light, brings into view, distant objects, some village spire, or stately building upon the remote horizon, which the eye sought in vain, until the sun was sinking behind the western hills.

This knowledge shall not only form the staple of our earthly happiness, but shall outlast the span of our present existence, and reach forward into the outlying region of eternity. We doubt not that heaven will contain whatever of unimagined beauty, and grandeur, and sublimity can gladden the eye; that it will include whatever can call forth the warm affection of hearts, over which sin shall no longer have any control; but neither can we doubt that heaven

will be in the highest degree a place of intellect. The redeemed will make continual acquisitions of knowlege. It may be that the range of their observation will be indefinitely enlarged; that they may gaze with undazzled eye upon all the works of GOD, as they lie open to their view, through the wide extent of worlds, and systems; and that they may look back on the mighty designs which He has been rolling on from the beginning of time. Many a dark dispensation will be made clear; and as they trace the harmony between the administration of providence, and the dealings of grace, they will see how all things have been working together for good to the people of the Lord. And as they travel on their pathway of light, they will have for their companions the unfallen spirits, who will consecrate their lofty faculties to unrol the mysteries of divine love, which they desire to look into. And GoD shall advance his glorified saints, by continual revelations of Himself. Increasing knowledge shall be an element of that blessedness, which for aught we know, may increase in the same proportion for

ever.

A Sermon,

DELIVERED BY THE REV. DR. RUDGE, F. R. S.
IN THE CHURCH AT HAWKCHURCH, JUNE 10, 1833.

2 Samuel, xxiv. 15.-" The Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel."

THERE is no point upon which men, from some obliquity in their understandings, and some eccentricity in their views, will not dispute and wrangle. Even the doctrine of a superintending Providence, and the fact

of a divine interposition in the affairs and government of the world, have been more than questioned, and the reasons upon which both are founded not possessing nor susceptible of receiving mathematical demonstration,

« ZurückWeiter »