nature, poisoning domestic peace, inflaming national animosity, and setting the passions of man in array against his own happiness.

66

of its ravages wherever the foot of man has been known
to stray.
We thus read the destructive consequences

of sin, not only in the Word of God, but in the dur
able or decaying monuments raised by the hand of man
as trophies of his glory; and now preserved by divine
wisdom, in their shattered remains, as permanent me
morials of the profligacy of those nations whose power
and resources have been dissipated by sin.
On this
state of things it would be idle to speculate; it bas
been permitted by the wisdom of God, and therefore
we may be sure that it is not inconsistent with the
perfections of his nature: and as in the natural world,
we discern the contrivances of divine wisdom, chiefly
in those remedial resources which the Author of na
ture has devised, to counteract evident tendencies to
defeat an intended end; such provisions, for instance,
as we see in the antagonist forces which regulate the
motions of the heavenly bodies, and in the opposing
muscles necessary to animal motion, and particularly
manifested in the human frame; so, in the moral con-
stitution of the world, which appears to be in a state of
complete derangement, we might naturally be led to
wish for, and perhaps to expect, a remedy; yet that
remedy must be of an extraordinary kind, and as far
beyond the powers of man to conceive as it would have
been for him to contrive the laws of nature.

Here, then, is a monstrous deformity without a single Countervailing advantage. Poets and philosophers have fancied a remedy in the dogged resolution of the mind which may triumph over pain and misery. Virgil makes one of his heroes say, Desperation is the only safety of the vanquished;" Milton makes one of his devils say, "Our only hope is flat despair;" Archbishop King asserts the omnipotence of the human will, and tells us that "things are not chosen because they are good, but become good because they are chosen," a maxim which goes as far as the most extravagant pretensions of the stoics. But man, when untutored by religious knowledge, and unimbued with any maxims of philosophy, cuts the knot at once, by explaining away the enormity of sin, and looking with complacency on the havoc it has wrought; considering war as a pastime, the world as a hunting field, and man as the destined prey of the most subtle, or the most daring. Poetry and heathen philosophy scarcely afford us any other lesson. Homer at once "cries havoc, and lets slip the dogs of war." He commences his great poem by invoking the muse to assist him in celebrating the indomitable rage, and implacable resentment of as untameable a savage as ever wore the shape of humanity; and he sticks to his text to the last, chang-perfections of the divine nature are more illustriously ing occasionally the actors on the scene, but ever gloating over unmitigated slaughter, celebrating no virtue but courage, and the wisdom which guides to conquest, and stigmatizing no sin but cowardice, and the weakness which shrinks from blood.

We learn a different lesson from a work of much higher antiquity, and much higher authority, than that of the father and prince of poets, where we are informed that the first who shed the blood of man was branded with insupportable ignominy, and where glorious war, as our great poet calls it, is uniformly announced as the most terrible scourge that can afflict a nation. How can it be otherwise, when war is a temporary suspension of the charities of life, and of the laws of justice and humanity, by which God has ordained that the world should be governed, the violation of which, for any length of time, would lead to the utter extermination of human society? But the question is, where is an antidote to be found for that sin, which sets on fire the course of nature, which arms the hand of man against his brother, and prompts him to act in perpetual opposition to the known law and will of God? As we find a provision made to rectify every other apparent irregularity or defect, we might be led to conclude, that a remedy might also be found for this; and it is evident that all mankind have entertained this idea, and have not been backward in devising means to accomplish the desired end. The heinousness of sin has always pressed upon their consciences; and the history of superstition, the only form in which religion can appear where there is no revelation, presents endless varieties of schemes and expedients to escape from the consequences of sin. I need not stop to demonstrate the futility and inefficacy of all these attempts to find a substitute for that obedience which the law of God requires, or to devise a satisfaction for acknowledged guilt: reason, though unsanctified by grace, and unenlightened by revelation, perceives the absurdity of all such attempts; and nothing would appear more revolting to its convictions than to be told, that the blood of an innocent animal would make atonement for the guilt of a conscious sinner.

Let us consider, then, how the matter stands. We have seen sin reigning throughout all generations, from the first human pair down to the present day; transmitted from father to son in a line of unbroken succession, polluting the stream of time, and leaving vestiges

If, therefore, we shall find reason to conclude, that the

displayed by the redemption through Christ than they could have been, if man had never sinned; and if man is raised to the hopes of higher dignity and honour through his union with the second Adam, than if he had never suffered by his connection with the first,then, whatever reason we may have to lament the consequences of human depravity, we shall see still greater reason to magnify the riches of the grace of God.

If any one, then, should be disposed to say, "Why was not the guilty race cut off; why were men permitted to multiply crimes and propagate misery, till the earth groaned with the burden of sin, insomuch that 'it repented God that he had made man, and grieved him at his heart?"" In answer to this we can only say, that to have acted on the principle which such queries suggest, would have been to show the impotence of anger, the irritation of disappointment, and the total absence of mercy; it would be like the policy of the unfeeling and bungling physician, who would rather kill the patient whom he cannot cure, than allow him to live as a monument of his want of skill. But God permitted the utmost possible derangement to take place in the moral constitution of man, that his hand and his power, his wisdom and his grace, might be made apparent in defeating the efforts of the adver sary, and in making the discordant elements, which he had introduced into human nature, the means of proclaiming the sovereignty of divine mercy. The Most High has left no room for triumph to the author of evil; his empire is limited, and it will be short-lived; for the time is approaching, when the knowledge of the Lord shall fill the earth, when every one who is born shall be an heir of glory, and multitudes which no man can number shall come from all quarters of the earth to sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.

Let the impenitent sinner, and the self-sufficient unbeliever, then, mourn over the miseries of human nature; let them arraign the wisdom and the justice of the great Creator, for having permitted sin and misery to enter into this world; let them brood, in gloomy discontent, over the calamities that flesh is heir to; they deserve no better portion, for their misery is of their own creating; but let the humble Christian exclaim, Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through Jesus Christ!" He too sees, that there is much sin and misery in the world; but he does not on

festation of justice and power; that might have annihilated the guilty race, it could not have effected a religious reformation; no, love only can beget love,-benefits alone can remove aversion,-goodness alone can produce esteem, and by these principles God assailed the obduracy of the human heart, and subdued it by the demonstrations of his tender mercy, whilst He, by whom the world was made, demonstrated his power to rectify the evil which had been introduced, and to redeem mankind, through whom he had resolved that his name should be glorified, from the thraldom and condemnation of sin.

that account murmur, or repine, or charge God fool- This, we may safely say, was the greatest work shly: he sees, that the miseries of life are not only the which God himself. has accomplished. There was no punishments, but the preventives of sin, and he recog- resistance to his will when he called the material uniises them as chastisements in a Father's hand, to verse into existence by the word of his power; but he eclaim his erring children: he sees, that there is no- gave to man the power of resisting his will; this was thing wrong in this world but sin; and whilst he a privilege and an honour, inasmuch as it was the Jaments its devastations, he perceives, at the same time, pledge and proof of freedom; this privilege he abused, that this greatest of all evils has been the chief means of and incurred the sentence of death announced as the magnifying the divine glory in rescuing the victims of sin. wages of sin. He was now in the position of a rebel, Whilst, therefore, the heavens declare the glory and, suffering the punishment of a rebel, he had the of God, and the firmament sheweth forth his handy- dislike and the distrust of one. How were these feelwork," yet this paltry spot of earth has been the theatre ings to be removed, and love and confidence reinstat on which the glory of his perfections has been particu-ed in the human heart? It could not be by the manilarly manifested, and that with a degree of splendour and power which commands the reverential admiration of men and of angels; and which, in the minds of the apostles, and first converts to Christianity, seemed to absorb all their feelings. The Old Testament saints, who lived under very lively impressions of the divine presence, celebrate, in the loftiest strains of poetic imagery, the wisdom and the power of God, as displayed in the works of creation and providence: and they show what a rich and varied banquet the pious mind may receive from the contemplation of the visible works of God. But it is worthy of remark, that these subjects of contemplation are never once touched on by the writers of the New Testament. So completely were their minds engrossed by the marvellous revelation of goodness and grace made known in the Gospel, that they found no room in their hearts for any other subject of meditation, and no time to spend on any other manifestations of divine goodness: all and each of them seemed to adopt the language of the apostle when he said, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ!" Instead of expatiating, like David, on the beauty and order of the visible world, as proclaiming the wisdom and goodness of God; or of illustrating, like Solomon, the facts of natural history; for that wise king was also a very learned man, "and he spake of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall; he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.' 1 Kings iv. 33. Instead of thus employing his faculties, the apostle declared, that he was determined "to know nothing but Christ crucified;" and he assigns a good and sufficient reason for this preference, viz., because "in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." And who that views the matter aright, can come to any other conclusion? We are not required to be insensible to the wisdom and power of God as manifested in the visible creation: we may see him in all his works, and may recognise him as the kind and bountiful Parent of the universe; but when we see him in Christ, we see him accomplishing the great purpose for which the world was made, subduing the power of the devil, and raising man from the depths of despair, perhaps, to higher dignity and honour than he ever could have aspired to, though he had retained unsullied his original innocence.

And what but the wisdom of God, and the power of God," concentrated in Christ, could have achieved such a victory? Sin is the great disorganizing principle in human nature, and nothing is so difficult to be Overcome. When the body is disordered, there is a rectifying power of nature which often sets it to rights without the aid of a physician: but there is no remedy in nature for the spiritual maladies of the soul; they have always a tendency to advance from bad to worse, till they become incurable by any power of man; a depraved will is a thousand times more hopeless and unmanageable than a diseased body, for evil has become the object of its choice, and it obstinately rejects all assistance, and nothing but the power and grace of the Saviour could effect its emancipation,

It is not men and this world alone that are effected by this dispensation. "The angels desire to look into these things," and they received important information respecting the ways of God, from witnessing the marvellous love of Christ. Before that manifestation, they had only witnessed the inflexible justice of God in the punishment of their fallen brethren, but they had not seen an instance of free pardon extended to ungrateful rebels; they had seen the fallen angels punished, and they had seen the best of fallen men enduring the punishment of death as the penalty of sin. But in the Gospel dispensation they saw how sin and death were to be abolished; they saw "life and immortality brought to light," and offered to penitent sinners, who received an earnest and pledge of their resurrection and immortality, in the death and resurrection of Christ, their spiritual head.

I say, then, that the Christian dispensation was intended for the redemption of men, and the instruction of angels, and the manifestation of the combined attributes of justice and mercy, a union which would otherwise have been incomprehensible both to men and angels. Eph. iii. 8-10. We may go farther still, and may assert that not only this, but all worlds were made by Christ, and for Christ. Col. i. 16. We do not know the state of other systems, and other worlds, nor the kind of administration that prevails under the government of the Son of Man, but we see how intimately he is connected with our world. He is "God with us," the proper object of our religious homage and adoration; nay, he is God with all created beings who can acknowledge God, and it is only through him that we can worship the Father. The human mind can form no right conception of the Eternal Spirit; the subject is so vast that we cannot bring it home to the mind with any realizing effect. When we think of God as "infinite, eternal, and invisible," without human passions, and human affections, everywhere present but nowhere seen, we are overwhelmed with the conception, and unable to discern the relation in which we stand to such a Being, as there are no steps or degrees by which it can be measured. But we can "worship him in spirit and in truth," when we see the light of his glory in the face of Christ Jesus, for, in him we see "God manifest in the flesh," possessing all our sympathies and all our feelings, but without sin, and displaying all the holy and endearing attributes which adorn the Godhead, in a shape, so to speak, which we can admire, and which we can attempt to imitate.

Here, then, is the antidote provided by the wisdom

generation passes away; the surface of the country is altered-lands are reclaimed from the forest-streets are laid out and trampled on for years-houses are built, and pavements hide the soil.

dron, it swells, imperceptibly changes its character, | The recollection of their existence begins to fade; a and becomes fuller and sharper-thousands seem to join in, and by an hour after mid-day, the whole country far and wide rings with the unwonted sound. The insects are now seen lodged in or flying about the foliage above; a few hours having been thus sufficient to give them full strength and activity, and bring them into full voice.

Well may the schoolboy and the young curly-headed negro rejoice at the sound, for their hands will never want a plaything for many days to come. Well may the birds of the forest rejoice, for this is the season of plenty for them; the pigs and poultry, too, they fatten on the innumerable swarms which before many days will cover the ground in the decline of their strength. The pretty insect, for it is truly such, with its dark body, red eyes, and its glassy wings interlaced by bright yellow fibres, enjoys but a little week; and that merry harping which pervades creation from sunrise to sundown, for the time of its continuance is but of some six days' duration. Its character would be almost impossible to describe, though it rings in my ears every time I think of the insect. Like all those of its tribe, the sound produced is not a voice, but a strong vibration of musical chords produced by the action of internal muscles upon a species of lyre, or elastic membrane, covered with network, and situated under the wings, the action of which I have often witnessed. The female insect may utter a faint sound, but how I do not know-it is the male who is endowed with the powerful means of instrumentation which I have described. Though the sound is generally even and continuous as long as the insect is uninterrupted, yet there is a droll variety observable at times; but what it expresses, whether peculiar satisfaction or jealousy, or what other passion, I cannot divine. It has been well described by the word Pharo the first syllable being long and sustained, and connected with the second, which is pitched nearly an octave lower, by a drawling smorzando descent.

During the whole period of their existence, the closest attention does not detect their eating anything; and with the exception of the trifling injury received by the trees consequent upon the process observed by the female in laying her eggs-which I will describe immediately-they are perfectly innoxious. The end to which they seem to be sent to the upper day is purely confined to the propagation of their species. A few days after their first appearance, the female begins to lay her eggs. She is furnished with an ovapositor,

situated in a sheath on the abdomen, composed of two serrated hard parallel spines, which she has the power of working with an alternate perpendicular motion. When her time comes, she selects of the outermost twigs of the forest trees or shrubs, and sets to work, and makes a series of longitudinal jagged incisions in the tender bark and wood. In each of these she lays a row of tiny eggs, and then goes to work again. Having deposited to her heart's content, she crawls up the twig a few inches yet further from the termination, and placing herself in a fitting position, makes two or three perpendicular cuts into the very pith. Her duty is now terminated. Both male and female become weak; the former ceases to be tuneful; the charm of their existence is at an end; they pine away, become blind, fall to the ground by myriads, and in ten or fifteen days after their first appearance, they all perish. Not so, however, their seed. The perforated twigs die, the first wind breaks them from the tree, and scatters them upon the ground. The eggs give birth to a number of small grubs, which are thus enabled to attain the mould without injury; and in it they disappear, digging their way down into the bosom of the earth. Year goes after year-summer after summer, the sun shines in vain to them-they "bide their time!"

Still though man may almost forget their existence, God does not. What their life is in the long interval none can divine. Traces of them have been found in digging wells and foundations, eight and ten feet under the surface. When seventeen years have gone by, the memory of them returns, and they are expected. A cold wet spring may retard their appearance, but never since the attention of man has been directed to them, have they failed-but at the appointed time, by one common impulse, they rise from the earth, piercing their way through the matted sod, through the hard trampled clay of the pathways, through the gravel, between the joints of the stones and pavements, and into the very cellars of the houses-like their predecessors, to be a marvel in the land, to sing their blithe song of love and enjoyment under the bright sun, and amidst the verdant landscape; like them, to fulfil the brief duties of their species, and close their mysterious existence by death. We are still children in the small measure of our knowledge and comprehension with regard to the phenomena of the natural world.

CHRISTIAN TREASURY.

What are your motives to Liberality?—You have given, you say, to the cause of Christian philanthropy. But, it may be inquired, when have you given? Has it been only when your sensibility has taken you by surprise? or when a powerful appeal has urged you to the duty? or when the example, or the presence, of others, has left you no alternative? or when the prospect of being published as a donor, tempted your ostentation? or when importunity annoyed you? or when under the passing influence of a fit of generosity? We would not too curiously analyse the composition of any apparent virtue; nor would we have you to suspend the practice of charity till you can be perfectly certain that your motives are unmixed. But we would affectionately remind you that if you have given to God at such times only, it proves to a demonstration that you are covetous at all other times. Your covetousness is a

habit-your benevolence only an act; or, rather, it is only the momentary suspension of your prevailing habit; and, as the circumstance that a man enjoys lucid intervals does not exempt him from being classed among the insane, so your accidental and occasional charities still leave you in the ranks of the covetous.— Rev. J. HARRIS. (Mammon.)

Christ looked on Peter.-My brethren, how expressive was that look! How eloquent were these eyes! Never was discourse so energetic. Never did orator Jesus looked on express himself with so much force. Peter! It was the man of griefs complaining of a new burden added to that under the pressure of which pitying a soul about to destroy itself. he already groaned. It was the compassionate Saviour It was the apostle of our salvation preaching in bonds. It was the subduer of the heart, the omnipotent God, repressing the efforts of the devil and depriving him of his prey.-SAURIN. (Sermons.)

Price paid for the Salvation of Man.-We have been bought with agony and bloody sweat; with tears and groans; with writhings of the body, and woundings of the spirit; with the torture of the cross, and the life of God; amidst darkness and fearful signs, and the rending of the rocks, and the bursting of the tombs. All that the frame and the spirit of man could endure, was suf fered for us; and all that the love and mercy of God could give was lavished upon our salvation.— Wolfe's Remains,