wrings hard earnings out of the hands of the poor." Here is the man, soliciting to plead the cause of the cheated and wronged, who "under cover of the law's delay," cunningly delays his client's cause till his client's purse is empty. "Here is the villain at heart who, with unhallowed passion" wins, ruins, then forsakes. "Here is the slanderer, who makes relished meals out of good men's names, and makes his pillow out of the peace of families," "Here is the man of envy, another word for gall and bitterness." "Here is the highwayman, the suicide the duellist, the murderer of fathers and brothers." What is there not here! There is not one kingdom or province, not one palace or private dwelling, not one Indian hut or inhabited cave, not one dwellingplace of man on the face of the earth, where the laws of Heaven are not broken. There is not a tribe or nation in the present or past time that has not been engaged in murderous warfare. The sun has never yet risen on the world without seeing man slaughtering his brother man. Not a night has drawn its curtain over the world without being lighted by the camp-fires of opposing armies. No city, and no man ever went to rest without leaving somebody awake, not far away, for purposes of crime. It seems as if the fountains of iniquity in the heart were overflowing on every side, like an ocean with the shores all taken away. It seems as if the bad propensities had taken possession of the world, had ascended to the bench of the judge, to the hall of the legislature, to the office of the executive, to the ballot-boxes of the land, were mixing themselves with all the counsels of friendship, ruling in all the operations of business. "O! the deeds too that the sun never shone upon the sins that durst never seek repentance!"

And this is a world which punishment has failed to reform. Fire came upon several of its cities, and they were burned to ashes for their crimes; but Sodoms and Gomorrahs are still here, and send up to Heaven the cry of their great wickedness. A flood once drowned the world for its dreadful corruption; but upon every generation since, another has been needed to ease creation of the shocking scenes enacted on the earth. Nothing has taught the world righteousness-still it is a great Aceldama-a very Golgotha! still do the "times rain blood!"

MAN RECOVERED.

We have looked at man as ruined. Let us now contemplate him as recovered,

No sooner was man fallen and involved in moral ruin, than a plan of recovery was brought into operation. This plan is that of the gospel, which is worthy of all acceptation. The arrangements for man's deliverance are exactly adjusted to the object to be accomplished, the antidote is as powerful as the disease; the reparation as ample as the injury. Sin has done nothing which the gospel has not provided to undo; sin has brought no degradation from which the gospel cannot raise us; led us into no danger, or sorrow, or fear, or suffering, from which the gospel cannot set us wholly and for ever free.

The remedial arrangements have not full operation and effect, in the case of any individual in this present life. We shall have, therefore, no communities in a state of complete redemption from the ruins of the fall-no perfect paradise on earth; neither shall we have any individuals to point to, from whom the last stain of sin, the last vestige of man's fall, is removed. But we shall see the mitigations of moral disease-the incipient stages of recovery. We shall see the commencing freshness, vivacity, and vigor of moral health. We shall see springing up everywhere upon the soil so overgrown with noxious things, the blessed fruits of righteousness. Wherever there was darkness in the soul or the path of man, we shall see light arising. Wherever there had been evil affections, there we shall witness heavenly tempers supplanting them, overgrowing them, extinguishing them: wherever pernicious deeds, there excellent acts of charity and great usefulness.

1. In our view of man, in his ruin, we considered the injuries which have been done to his intellectual powers. I begin at the same point in a survey of the condition which he is in the process of attaining in his recovery.

In the first place, as a part of that recovery, is a progressing emancipation of the faculties of the mind from the clogs, palsies, and obstructions of sin. This is an important deliverance. Escaped from all these, as it will be when redemption is perfect, the human mind, it seems to me, will appear in action and progress what it is, a glorious thing, struck off from the great Infinite Mind -a creation with many of the aims and attributes of its superior Original. It will open to truth and make achievements with a joyousness and power which none but a freed intellect itself can understand and measure. We have but a faint conception now of mind undarkened, disenthralled. We have never had any specimens. Fettered, unwinged, benighted, we have always seen it. Once uncaged, loosened, fairly out on its own pinions, it would

spread itself, and soar, and show us how much like its great Author it is in character and power. Approximations it makes to this energy and elevation in proportion as the gospel exerts over the heart its redeeming effects.

Beside the removal of impediments, this same gospel exerts direct and positive influences on the human mind. The greatness of the objects which it presents and renders delightful to the intellect gives it growth and energy. These objects, among which the mind of man finds itself as it emerges out of its ruin into the sphere of salvation, have attributes of all conceivable perfection and of all possible vastness and grandeur. The divine plan by which our redemption is effected, including its history, aspects, accomplishments; the capacities and destinies of man; the attributes and mighty acts of the great Eternal; the holy majesty of the divine law; the full glories of heaven-such are the themes of the redeemed mind. In conversing with them it feels itself a part of them. It receives a token and tone of them all; it is carried by them, and along with them, into a higher, wider sphere, and made strong to services of good. How much larger and grander the intellect opened to the eternal Throne, with all the greatness and glory seated upon it, than when narrowed and shrivelled up to dollars, evanescent pleasures, mortal honors.

The influence of the religious affections on the intellect is more marked still, and more powerful. I know not according to whose philosophy the mind of man acts, nor would I discuss the question now whether it have distinct faculties, or exist only as an indivisible whole in the form of individual states. One fact is evident, its condition, at a given time, essentially influences its condition at the time immediately succeeding, and I have no doubt that an antecedent strong feeling does more than an antecedent powerful intellection to arouse the mind to great exertions. Increased fires are not more sure to awake and accelerate the connected machinery, than is a high enthusiasm of the emotions to kindle and push the understanding into powerful action and accomplishment. The affections of religion are the most living, stirring, energetic, permanent, which belong to our nature. Infinite and eternal things feed them! If therefore the excitement of the intellect is correspondent to the ardor that glows in the heart, it will be an unusual stir, and vivacity, and power, which will be induced upon the understanding by the warming presence of religion. Live fire in the heart will never fail to put the intellectual powers all in a glow. The entrance of thy word giveth light, saith the Bible. Emphatically is the transition from sin to holiness, a passage from darkness to light.

The most important influence of redemption on the intellectual powers is the direction of them to useful exertions. In communities where many have been redeemed to the blessings and hopes of religion, there is a great deal of intellectual effort for the good

of man, on the part of those who are neglecters of personal piety. The gospel, however, though it do not give birth to it directly, is to have the credit of so much of this service as has existed in consequence of its own presence and power. To perceive, therefore, what the gospel is doing in turning the intellects of men into useful channels, we must mark the character and tendency of the productions of Pagan mind, in contrast with all the elevated works of science, art, and religion, produced and circulated in Christian nations. But, in the case of all the trophies of grace, there is a direct appropriation of the intellectual powers to human good. The very day on which a man becomes a Christian, he commences intellectual ministrations in behalf of those who surround and who journey with him to the grave and the judgment. He is at the bedside of the dying, offering consolation, pointing the departing spirit home, lending wings! He is giving lessons of instruction to the ignorant, and admonitions to the wayward. All the good books with which our Sabbath-schools are furnished, and with which our centre-tables might be adorned; all the rich works on morals, on the divinity of the Scriptures; all the illustrations of the Bible; all the inculcations of truth by the wise and good of previous ages and of the present time, are the labors of mind imbued, sanctified, directed by the gospel. Eighty thousand pulpits are now uttering the deep thunders of God's law into the ears of the guilty, to keep the world in awe! Eighty thousand, in tones of compassion, learnt in heaven, are offering pardon and peace, glory and immortality. They are minds redeemed, which in these pulpits wake these thunders, and sound out these proclamations of mercy. In all the nurseries of religion with which our land is blessed, from the family fireside to the theological seminary, the young intellect and the young heart of the country is budding into character, and influence, and eternal life, under the bland and holy power of evangelized mind. Under the same power, hundreds of thousands have risen and are now rising in heathen lands from their degradation and idolatry to light, life, and Christian hope. Springing up under intellect, pervaded, prompted, directed by the gospel, are asylums, hospitals, infirmaries, houses of refuge, charity-schools, to relieve disease, to smooth down care, to light up the heart of despair, to instruct the poor, to reclaim the wicked. Intellects, inspirited and turned by the gospel to such accomplishments, set up as orbs of light, to shine upon intellects that shall shine again, enriched to be fountains of blessings to them, who in turn shall themselves be blessings:-these present a deeply interesting and magnificent spectacle. I would rather bear a part, as a servant of the gospel, in sanctifying and planting in his orbit one such intellect thus to shine and thus to bless, than to put the stars and sun in their places. I should have assisted an accomplishment infinitely more enduring. Sanctified intellects will remain to pour abroad their illuminations, when these heavens are no more!

2. The next thing that appears prominently in the new condi tion of man, as redeemed under the gospel, is conscientiousness. It is a moral exercise in man with which I am here concerned. What I would describe is a soul's warm, joyous love and welcome to the true, the good, the right; as also, what is invariably conjoined, its shrinking and recoiling, loathingly, from the false, the bad, the wrong. Such an exquisite sensitiveness of the moral nature, at the same time that it is one of the noblest of human qualities, is the leading elementary principle in man redeemed, in distinction from man ruined.

Christian conscientiousness may be illustrated by the nervous arrangements of the body. So pervaded is the physical frame by the sensitive tissues, that the finest needle cannot find a point that will not feel. So we can conceive of the entire moral spirit, as possessed of an exquisite sensibility, such that it shall revolt with pain and fear on the approach of evil, and move delightfully, responsively, out at the presence of good. How blessed! O how blessed to see existing and moving about in a scene of general corruption, conscientious, pure-hearted men; to see others near them, under the influence of their example, in greater or less degree, showing real friendship to goodness, righteousness, truth; to see the circle enlarging, and the observers of all justice, the lovers of all pureness, multiplied; to witness the confidence and blessedness existing where the transactions of business and social interchanges are regulated and sanctified by a frank, immaculate conscientiousness. There are families so under the influence of this conscientious principle, this affectionate sympathy for right, and this spontaneous disrelish of wrong, that clashing and jarring, through mutual injuries, are seldom known, and their peace flows like a river. If wrong ever be done in thought, word, or deed, it is so sensitively regretted by the transgressor, that the injury is repaired almost before it is felt. These families are not perfect; but the holy gospel, in redeeming the members, has made them such conscientious observers of right, such hearty repudiators of wrong, that few things earthly so much resemble heaven as the order and happiness which reign habitually among them. Their sensitiveness to right and wrong is better to keep out all evil than a two-edged sword at every entrance. This is a fair specimen of the action and delightful result of that crystal conscientiousness with which the gospel enriches the heart when it redeems it.

There are communities in which this same conscientious feeling, through the redeeming influence of religion, is so far diffused and possessed, that the houses and property need no locks or bolts; that loans take place every day without any other security for the payment but the simple word of the borrower; that lawyers seldom have any clients, the courts any docket, or the jails any prisoners. As in families, so in communities this sensitive regard to equity and truth will diffuse abroad confidence, and harmony, and quietness.