sions is being conducted. But in cultivating the charity which would embrace a world, we have sadly overlooked and neglected the sailor. If not entirely left out of our calculations, he has been placed at the lowest point in the scale. And yet no man has a more powerful claim on our sympathy and regard. To no one are we under a heavier debt of obligation. And this obligation we never can discharge till we put forth every possible means to improve him in the rank of social, intellectual, and moral being.

We again offer our best thanks to our numerous friends and correspondents for their former communications, and hope that they will still continue their aid and efforts.

2, JEFFREY SQUARE, ST. MARY AXE,

London, December 1843.

PREACHED NOVEMBER 27TH, IN EBENEZER CHAPEL, SHADWELL, On occasion of the recent disasters at sea.-By Rev. E. E. Adams, A. M. Isaiah xxiii. 4. "THE SEA HATH SPOKEN."

MAN has a sympathy with the external world; with its brightness and its gloom; its solitude and society; its silence and its noise. By a look or a tone, the history of years may be recalled. There is a design in this unseen affinity between the soul and nature-a moral design. If man will sever himself from the higher communications of his Creator, if he will close his ear and his heart to the voice of inspiration, he cannot always be deaf to the language of material things.

A man who had been a pirate, declared, that several times, while at certain wells on the coast of Florida, the soft and melancholy cry of the doves awoke in his breast feelings which had long slumbered, melted his heart to repentance, and caused him to linger at the spot in a state of mind which he only who contrasts the wretchedness of present guilt with the happiness of former innocence, can truly feel. He never left the place without increased fears of futurity, associated as he was with a band of the most desperate villains that ever infested the seas. deeply moved was he by the notes of any bird, and especially by those of the doves, the only soothing sounds he ever heard during his life of horrors, that through these notes he was induced to escape from his vessel, abandon his turbulent companions, and return to a family

So

deploring his absence. Paying a parting visit to these wells, and listening once more to the cooings of the Zennaida doves, he poured out his soul to God in supplications for mercy, and became a better man. He effected his escape, and is now in the midst of his friends. Thus did God speak in nature to the soul of the pirate, reminding him of truths learned and impressed in other days, and suggesting by the very tenderness of instinctive affection, his own fiend-like hardness and cruelty.

There are those whose sympathy for even the inanimate world is such as to lead them to a belief in Pantheism ;-that there is in every thing a living, conscious Divinity! or that God is the soul of the universe, and that every portion of creation is not so much an evidence of the Divine Existence, as a vehicle of the Deity. Such doctrine is not taught in the Bible. God is revealed to us rather as the Creator and Upholder of all things. Creation is His work, not His clothing. And although He speaks in the whirlwind, and shines in the sun, He is as distinct from these and all other objects, as He is from the bound volume in which His word is written; and as much above them and around them all. He speaks through them, but shall we worship the medium of His communications, or confound it with Himself? Shall we mistake the harp for the hand that awakens its strains?

Natural objects are often personified-represented as possessing life and action, and as addressing themselves to man. The Old Testament scriptures abound in personification. Indeed, through every sentence of them, and every thought, there seems to be rolling a tide of life. Whilst we read, we hear the hills breaking forth into singing,-the floods lifting up their voice,—the sea speaking;—we see the desert rejoicing, and the trees clapping their hands!

It

The neigh

fall was

an occasion Young men

The terms "waters," "floods," and "seas," often in the scriptures signify, multitudes of men in clamour and strife. In the text, however, the sea is personified,-is speaking. Tyre had fallen. had been a commercial city,-a mart for the nations. bouring cities were connected with it, and its of disappointment to them, more especially to Zidon. had been conveyed from distant shores to Tyre, to be brought up as merchants, and many ships had borne to this now fallen port, the richest cargoes. But this commerce is at an end, and the sea speaks— "I travail not, nor bring forth children." Young men will visit Tyre no more, and ships will no more enter its harbour. Zidon is also warned by the fate of Tyre. Or the meaning may be this: Tyre was a child of commerce, of the sea; was nourished and brought up