we throw ourselves with unbounded and glorious confidence on such as we think well of, an error.soon corrected; for we soon find out too soon that men and women are not what they seem. Then comes disappointment; and the danger is a reäction of desolating and universal mistrust. For, if we look on the doings of man with a merely worldly eye, and pierce below the surface of character, we are apt to feel bitter scorn and disgust for our fellow-creatures. We have lived to see human hollowness; the ashes of the Dead Sea shore; the falseness of what seemed so fair; the mouldering beneath the whited sepulchre and no won der if we are tempted to think "friendship all a cheat

:

smiles hypocrisy - words deceit;" and they who are what is called knowing in life contract, by degrees, as the result of their experience, a hollow distrust of men, and learn to sneer at apparently good motives. That demoniacal sneer which we have seen ·ay, per haps felt curling the lip, at times, "Doth Job serve God for naught?”

The only preservative from this withering of thẻ heart is Love. Love is its own perennial fount of strength. The strength of affection is a proof not of the worthiness of the cbject, but of the largeness of the soul which loves. Love descends, not ascends. The might of a river depends not on the quality of the soil through which it passes, but on the inexhaustibleness and depth of the spring from which it pro eeeds. The greater mind cleaves to the smaller with more force than the other to it. A parent loves the child more than the child the parent; and partly be cause the parent's heart is larger, not because the child is worthier. The Saviour loved His disciples infinitely

more than His disciples Him, because His het was infinitely larger. Love trusts on,-ever hope and expects better things; and this, a trust springing from itself, and out of its own deeps alone.

And more than this. It is this trusting love that makes men what they are trusted to be, so realizin Trus

Would you make men trustworthy?

itself the Would you make them true? Believe them This as the real force of that sublime battle-cry which no Englishman hears without emotion. When the crews of the fleet of Britain knew that they were expected to do their duty, they did their duty. They felt in that spirit-stirring sentence that they were trusted: and the simultaneous cheer that rose from every ship was a forerunner of victory,--the battle was half-won already. They went to serve a country which expected from them great things; and they did great things. Those pregnant words raised an enthusiasm for the chieftain, who had thrown himself upon his men in trust, which a double line of hostile ships could not appall, nor decks drenched in blood extinguish.

And it is on this principle that Christ wins the hearts of His redeemed. He trusted the doubting Thomas; and Thomas arose with a faith worthy " of his Lord and his God." He would not suffer even the lie of Peter to shake his conviction that Peter might love Him yet; and Peter answered to that sublime forgiveness. His last prayer was extenuation and hope for the race who had rejected Him, —and the kingdoms of the world are become His own. He has loved us, God knows why-I do not; and we, all unworthy though we be, respond faintly to that love, and try to be what He would have us.

Therefore, come what may, hold fast to love. Though men should rend your heart, let them not embitter or harden it. We win by tenderness; we conquer by for giveness. O, strive to enter into something of that large celestial Charity which is meek, enduring, unretaliating, and which even the overbearing world cannot withstand forever. Learn the new commandment of the Son of God. Not to love, but to love as He loved. Go forth in this spirit to your life-duties; go forth, children of the Cross, to carry everything before you, and win victories for God by the conquering power of a love like His.

XVII.

[Preached June 15, 1851.]

THE MESSAGE OF THE CHURCH TO MEN OF WEALTH.*

SAM. XXV. 10, 11.- -"And Nabal answered David's servants, and said, Who is David? and who is the son of Jesse? There be many servants now-a-days that break away every man from his master. Shall I then take my bread, and my water, and my flesh that I have killed for my shearers, and give it unto men whom I know not whence they be??"

I HAVE selected this passage for our subject this vening, because it is one of the earliest cases reorded in the Bible in which the interests of the employer and the employed- the man of wealth and the man of work-stood, or seemed to stand, in antag onism to each other.

It was a period in which an old system of things was breaking up, and the new one was not yet established. The patriarchal relationship of tutelage and dependence was gone, and monarchy was not yet in firm existence. Saul was on the throne; but his rule was

*This subject was continued on the following Sunday. By accident, the continuation was omitted from the first edition of Vol. I., and inserted at the beginning of Vol. II. It has been thought better to continue that arrangement, merely drawing attention to the fact, that the conclusion of the subject is to be sought in Vol. II.

irregular and disputed. Many things were slo ly growing up into custom which had not yet the furce of law; and the first steps by which custom passes into law, from precedent to precedent, are often steps at every one of which struggle and resistance must take place.

The history of the chapter is briefly this. Nabal the wealthy sheep-master, fed his flocks in the pastures of Carmel. David was leader of a band of men who got their living by the sword on the same hills, — outlaws, , whose excesses he in some degree restrained and over whom he retained a leader's influence. A rude, irregular honor was not unknown among those fierce men. They honorably abstained from injuring Nabal's flocks. They did more: they protected them from all harm against the marauders of the neighborhood. By the confession of Nabal's own herdsmen, "they were a wall unto them both by night and day, all the time they were with them keeping their flocks."

And thus a kind of Right grew up,- irregular enough, but sufficient to establish a claim on Nabal for remuneration of these services; a new claim, not admitted by him; reckoned by him an exaction, which could be enforced by no law, only by that law which is above all statute-law, deciding according to emergencies an indefinable, instinctive sense of Fairness and Justice. But as there was no law, and each man was to himself a law, and the sole arbiter of his own rights, what help was there but that disputes should rise between the wealthy proprietors and their self-constituted champions, with exaction and tyranny on the one side, churlishness and parsimony on the