experienced Christians not merely to turn your back on your former associates in infidelity and sin, but to have your affections entirely alienated from them, and to pronounce upon them a sentence of condemnation, and to treat them as hopeless outcasts from God's favour, and even to accompany all this with something like the expression of an exulting superiority. O my dear friends, this is not becoming your Christian vocation. Do not forget that but a little while ago you yourselves were just what they are nowthat like them you were in "the horrible pit and miry clay" of sin-that you rejected the Saviour as they do, and would not open the door of your hearts though he had long knocked at it, and that desperate would have been your case had fire been permitted to come down from heaven to consume you-that you perhaps were instrumental and assisting in making them deaf to the Redeemer's entreaties that it was no merit of yours which delivered you from the curse of the law and the bondage of your lusts—that the same sovereign grace through which alone you are what you are, is able to work out the same salvation for those on whom you are looking with superciliousness and dislike as the enemies of God, and that they may yet be introduced into the same spiritual liberty which you have reached, and outstrip you in the career of faith and righteousness, and be taken in mercy to the realms of glory, while you are still left to struggle with the temptations and the sorrows of this present evil world. Forget not these things, and let the remembrance of them make your hearts tender, and forbearing, and compassionate towards every one, even the worst of them, whom you have left behind "in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity." Be zealous, be very zealous, I beseech you, for that cause which in their alliance you formerly persecuted or despised. Be careful to have "no more fellowship with their unfruitful works, but rather reprove them ;" and never think that you can be too earnest, and too active, and too persevering in that good path on which you have entered, and along which the Spirit is promised to guide you as the path which leads to heaven. But here also let charity have its perfect work, by constraining you to feel for them an affection more exalted and intense than you ever felt before, and to confer on them a boon richer and more durable by far than ever had entered into your contemplation in your "times of ignorance." Let them see that though you are changed, you are not changed in your concern for their welfare, except by its taking a higher aim, and proceeding on purer principles, and issuing in a more glorious result. Let nothing be said or done from which they may infer either your indifference, or your resentment, or your hostility. But so speak and so act as to show that you do not cease to recollect the pit out of which you have been digged, and the rock out of which you have been hewn-that you deeply sympathise with them in their sinful and miserable state-that your "heart's desire for them is that they may be saved"-that you are willing to make every allowance for their ignorance and their disadvantages-and that you would gladly please them in every thing consistent with your duty to your God, and to yourselves, and to them. And in all your intercourse with them, in all that they hear you say and in all that they see you do, demonstrate that your zeal is not the zeal of suspicion, or of hatred, or of pride, but the zeal of that charity of which an apostle has beautifully said, “that it suffereth long and is kind—that it envieth not-vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, does not behave itself unseemly-seeketh not its own-is not easily provoked-thinketh no evilrejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth-that it beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.' وو But let me not be misunderstood. I do not inculcate zeal for charity, as if charity and religion were one and the same thing; and I am the more anxious to guard against being supposed to have that object in view, because it is now too much the fashion in the religious world to care for little else than charity and peace, and even to be willing to sacrifice truth, if we can only get charity 66 practised and peace secured. The charity which is thus so greatly in vogue is a spurious charity, and not the charity of the Gospel. The charity of the Gospel, as described in its own record, though it "suffers long and is kind," though it "thinketh no evil," and "hopeth all things," is at the same time a charity which " rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth." And this may be considered as its fundamental property— its grand essential characteristic. It is charity "out of a pure heart,❞—a heart purified by the Spirit of truth, and in all its movements and in all its affections, regarding purity, whether of doctrine or of practice, as an object of constant and paramount concern. It is charity "out of a good conscience," a conscience that trembles at God's word as the word of truth, and that holds truth so sacred as to refuse all countenance to the slightest violation of it, even where compassion and kindness are most urgently needed and most warmly felt. It is charity "of faith unfeigned,”—of faith which has saving and eternal truth for the object upon which its unfaultering reliance rests, and which, from a deep conviction of the inestimable value of that object, shrinks back from whatever can disguise, or corrupt, or impair it, and in all the exercises of the love whereby it worketh, admits not of the smallest inroad upon that consecrated territory which, on R the divine warrant, it has appropriated and asserted as its own. Such is the charity of the Gospel, and under the guidance and influence of this, religious zeal assumes its fairest character and attains its best success. But far different is the charity which is continually pressed upon us by many of its modern and living advocates. Their charity is all sentiment, and all softness, and all indulgence. They give the proverbial phraseology which the Apostle uses respecting it in his address to the Corinthian church, a strict and literal construction, as if we should think no evil, even where nothing but evil presents itself as if we should believe that every thing is right, where we see that every thing is wrong as if we should endure all the mischiefs that may be done to ourselves or to religion, without feeling any keen indignation or administering any strong reproof; and accordingly they substitute a mawkish sensibility—an imperturbable mildness-an unlimited and allforgiving good-will,-they substitute these, under the sacred name of charity, in the room of all other attainments, whether they consist in holding fast our belief, or in holding fast our integrity-in resisting the efforts of infidelity, or in keeping ourselves unblamable in the sight of God. They have no other charity than that which, from the fear of saying or of doing what is harsh or disagreeable, scruples not to confound the |