Puslapio vaizdai
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gifts and kindnesses of providence will make you joyful, if the Gospel has been so received into your heart as to teach you the value of personal goodness and the obligations of an expansive charity. In illustration of this, numerous examples may be adduced.

You were long confined, perhaps, to a bed of sickness, and debility, and pain; and though you were not without comfort, while so distressfully situated, and though you may have derived advantages from the dispensation which otherwise you could not probably have possessed, yet it has doubtless been an interruption to your course of active duty, and has withheld your hand from many a kind office which it would, in a different condition, have been forward to perform. Now that, through divine mercy, you are raised from your sick-bed, and are permitted to exchange the chamber of disease for the free atmosphere of health, and the scene of wonted industry, you indulge in the gladness of soul which such a transition is fitted to inspire. But are you glad merely that you have regained corporeal strength, and are again permitted to walk abroad, and partake of the amusements, or mingle in the business, of the world? No; your gladness, if it be that which accompanies the power of Christianity, and accords with its maxims and influences, will rather arise from this, that you can now follow out the important purposes for which your Lord has destined and qualified you,that you can

again pursue that onward career of diligence and acquirement in which you had been arrested by the severity of disease,-that you can resume those labours of love from which your exigencies had compelled you to cease,and that, to the renewal of your accustomed efforts and services, you can add the practical exhibition of those lessons of self-denial, and heavenly-mindedness, and dependence upon God, and compassion for the helpless and distressed, which were enforced upon you, when lying upon the couch of languishing or of agony.

Perhaps you had a beloved parent or a dear friend in whom you trusted under God for advice, and warning, and help, and encouragement in the path of your Christian pilgrimage; and as it had pleased God to afflict him so that he was “sick and nigh unto death," so it has pleased God to rebuke his maladies, and to give him back to your prayers, and your affections. And it cannot be but that a gleam of rapture lighted up your heart when you saw him rise and return to you, as it were, from the very grave. But you must have poorly appreciated his value, and profited little by his presence, of which you had been so nearly deprived, if you did not hail his return, not merely because there is something tender in the ties of natural kindred and in the endearments of cemented friendship, but also, and still more, because you were to be again blessed with those counsels and admonitions, with that affectionate

aid and that holy example, by which you had been guided in the way of salvation, and kept steadfast in the faith from which you had been so much tempted to swerve, and animated in all those virtuous toils and in all those diffusive charities, by which you are to be made meet for associating in heaven with the "spirits of the just made perfect."

Or perhaps you have been rescued from worldly embarrassments, which from their magnitude and extent had broken down the energy of your spirits, checked you in the cultivation of your talents, abridged and almost destroyed your power of promoting the comfort and prosperity of your fellow-men, and reduced you to decay and uselessness, in a sphere which you formerly filled with the fruits of Christian and substantial beneficence. And in the relief from these embarrassments which God has afforded you in the dealings of his providence, and in the restoration of that plenty which had formerly ministered so copiously and so variously to your gratification, you must be devoid of all sensibility if you are not conscious of more than ordinary delight. But though there are various things which must conduce to cherish that feeling in your minds, this will hold an influential and distinguished place, that you have recovered wherewithal you may again engage in those pursuits which tend to increase your knowledge and meliorate your character, by which you may give full exercise to

many a virtue that might have languished for want of suitable objects, and by which, while you make greater progress yourselves in the things that are excellent, you may be instrumental in furthering the grand interests of humanity and religion in the world, in supplying the wants or stimulating the industry of the poor, in giving instruction to the ignorant, in protecting the fatherless and helping the widow, and in causing the light of the Gospel to shine upon them that are still in darkness, and in the region of the shadow of death.

But, in short, whatever be the benefit which God has communicated to you-of whatever kind or in whatever degree—the joy which it occasions will be neither carnal nor selfish; it will be indebted for its origin, and for its ardour, and for its permanency, both to the spiritual effects produced on your own conduct and condition by the divine bounty in which you rejoice, and to the means and opportunities with which it provides you, for prosecuting your schemes of benevolence and usefulness among your brethren of mankind.

Thus it will be with all of you to whom the grace of God has not been given in vain, but who have learned to estimate aright things temporal and things spiritual, and to give to them severally their due importance, and their proper influence on one another. You will have great joy when you experience the divine mercy in bestowing

upon you the good things of this life, because you will descry in these the same loving-kindness of you heavenly Father which provides for you the better blessings of an eternal salvation; and because they constitute the means by which you are to become worthier as his children upon earth, and as the heirs of his kingdom in heaven.

Let those, whose joy proceeds chiefly or entirely from the mere worldly, sensual, or temporal gratifications which the gifts of providence are capable of affording, remember that this is an abuse and a perversion of God's goodness to them-that it is a decisive and awful proof that they are far from the possession of his favour and from the knowledge of his ways—and that making this the ultimate object of their life and of their hopes, they demonstrate that, as the pleasures of a present state must be soon, and may be suddenly, at an end, they are rejoicing in folly, in guilt, and in peril. Let me conjure such of you to escape without delay from this monstrous delusion-this state of infatuation and of danger. Seek for your joy, where alone it is to be found, in the friendship of Almighty God. Never forget that there is no real, no lasting joy which does not come from that fountain. Study to feel and to act upon the conviction, that it alone can give you "the joy which no man taketh from you" in this world; and that it alone can bring you to the joy which is full, and unmingled, and never ending, in the world that is to come.

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