hope; and they were the wisest of men, and those the most popular of public journals, that could successfully respond to the pressing interrogations. The strange mania was peculiar to no one single class of the community. It seized upon men of every rank in the social scale. Men of capital, and men of no capital at all; artizans as well as tradesmen, commercial clerks as well as merchant princes, were alike found in the same eagerly-contested race, the same enchanted path of restless rivalry; all intoxicated with the brilliant illusions and images that played before their vision. To seize the glittering prize, many abandoned without reservation respectable and even lucrative commercial situations, whilst others seriously impoverished their legitimate business by the appropriation of the capital that belonged to it, to what were conceived to be more inviting and profitable channels for its employment. The very nation itself, indeed, appeared to be smitten to the heart with the splendours of the phantasm. The great bubble at length burst with a terrible explosion, leaving commerce crippled, and thousands of its victims stupified and undone. The delirium of covetous ambition has been partially cooled down, and men have had some little time to ponder, if indeed they are prepared to ponder, the madness of their mercenary career. But, though we have hardly yet recovered from the stupefaction, who will say that, should another "bubble" rise, it will not as easily attract popular pursuit; that, should another golden idol be set up, there are not thousands ready to fall down in obsequious homage at its shrine? Proof enough is there that, should human science or the changes of time call into existence another colossal scheme favourable to the gratification of their mercenary tendency and aims, a mass of willing and eager actors would simultaneously rush into the scene. The past would quickly perish from the memory, or only nerve to the pursuit of better fortune and more glorious successes. Despite blasted projects and withered hopes, speculation would be rife again-the tide of fierce competition would again sweep over the country, until another panic-crisis should consummate the struggle, leaving a few, indeed, flushed with the trophies of victory, but the multitude floundering in the vortex of mortified ambition and ruined hopes.

Is it necessary to say how obstructive must be this strong, deep current of earthliness to the progress of every holy tendency and aspiration ?-how this entire pre-occupancy of the heart, by what is secular and temporary, shuts out all sympathy with what is not secular, but reli- . gious-not temporary, but eternal? How few of our merchants and tradesmen we shall find who carry on commerce with the skies! and of our working men, how few are labouring for the glories of "the rest which remaineth for the people of God!" Questions of grand and solemn import, each pressed upon the mind by a thousand eloquent utterances from earth and heaven, are strangely superseded by questions which bear only on the interests of a mere transient and uncertain condition. The unfaltering purpose and inquiry is not "What shall I do to be saved?" but, "What shall I eat and drink, and wherewithal shall I be clothed?" The things that are invisible and future are clouded in the deep shadows of forgetfulness, giving no character to the motives-no direction to the conduct of the heart. Worldliness! oh, it blocks up every avenue to the soul, stunts all elevated thought, blinds the judg

ment to the beauty and grandeur of spiritual objects, gives an everaugmenting power to the inherent selfishness of our nature, freezes up the entire current of gracious sensibility, and, by successive degrees, widens the gulph of spiritual alienation that stretches between God and the soul.

No marvel that, under the influence of this idolatrous love of earth, the masses of the people are living in habitual neglect of every divinely instituted ordinance, that, in thoughtless neglect or in daring defiance of the commands of heaven, they never darken the door of God's sanctuary, and upon the morning of every seventh day, virtually declare "there shall be no Sabbath." Not as "the Pearl of Days," is the Lord's day regarded, but as an unmeaning, unprofitable interruption of the commercial current; compliance with the institution being yielded, not in reverential respect for the authority on which it rests, but in servile homage to a prescriptive and an arbitrary custom; whilst of the services of the sanctuary, little other impression is felt than that they are a round of dull, oppressive, and monotonous decencies, insipid as the east wind, and gloomy as the grave. Here, in this prevalent and cherished earthliness of the age, is the key to the relatively limited diffusion and influences of saving truth. Others there may be, and are, but here without controversy is the grand, the master obstructive. High above the rest it towers in overwhelming magnitude. The ministers of religion can never think upon it but with almost burning tears, with almost bleeding hearts. In all their onslaughts upon the citadel of unrighteousness, they encounter no grander device, they open the battery of truth upon no firmer stronghold of the great adversary. It resists their profoundest reasonings, blunts their most pointed appeals, crushes their fondest hopes. They can find a way to the hearts of other men by the simple story of the eross; but through what accumulated heaps of the weeds of worldliness must they penetrate, ere they touch the sympathies and impress the heart of the covetous and carnal! An element or quality of an unsusceptibleness encases that heart, so that truths which have moved to penitence the rudest embodiments of humanity, fall there like a feather on the unimpressible adamant. Men become inaccessible to the truth as it is in Jesus, more by the stolid indifference which covetousness generates than by cherished and open infidelity, more by the practical atheism which shuts God out of the heart than by the speculative atheism which impiously essays to shut him out of the universe. That infidel may be reasoned out of the false conclusions to which a perverted intellect has led him, and that libertine may be impressed with the love of virtue, and religion, and God; but pray, what arguments, what motives, what appeals shall move to penitence, shall awaken to spiritual emotion and effort that cold, eager, grasping, mercenary devotee of earth? The world is the last vanquished citadel of the great usurper, the worldling is the last rebel penitently and loyally returning to his allegiance. "How hardly shall they that have riches enter the kingdom of heaven!" How hardly shall they also who, though they may not be rich, are making it their all-absorbing study to become so!

An exclusive devotion, such as that in question, to the interests of the present state, involves the existence of every element of deep infatuation. Determined by whatever standard, or in the light of

whatever evidence, it is a direct infraction of every law of right reason, a violation of every principle of our moral economy. A course of conduct, in relation to whatever object or thing, pursued in utter ignorance or reckless defiance of all hazards, can find no sane, no successful apologist. Such, in all respects, is the conduct under consideration. If it were only heard of and not seen, it were absolutely incredible. If it were not the most common thing in the world, it might be justly deemed one of the world's greatest prodigies. The votaries of earth are moving exhibitions of the most glaring contradictions and extremes. The universe contains no such examples besides of voluntary moral debasement. That principle of their nature which allies them with the animal, holds lordly rule over that which allies them with the spiritual and Divine. Their souls, which can find their appropriate aliment alone in the favour of Him from whom they emanate, are doomed to starve upon the husks that the swine eat. Formed though they are with noble attributes for all the felicities of fellowship with God, they give a strange preference to the companionship of the carnal. Though the true home of their affections is above

the stars, the home their affections cleave to is the dust.

This conduct is pursued, moreover, whilst every thing around them dictates a directly opposite course. Turn where they will, they hear the verdict of condemnation. Within themselves, they have evidence sufficient that they were formed for some higher state of being than that which stretches no farther than the limits of their animal senses. The most impressive appeals, the most terrible and withering maledictions of the Bible, they find directed against their own idolatrous love of earth. In every temple for Christian worship they behold a standing rebuke of their impiety. Creation itself is vocal with the praise of Him that clothed it with grace and beauty, an exercise for which they, alas! rational as they are and immortal, have neither heart nor habitude, neither time nor taste. If they appeal to their experience of the world, they find the world utterly unsuited to their higher nature and aspirations. Its disciples need little argument upon this matter. Their oft exploded schemes and wishes afford them proof enough that it is a baseless fabric and a vain show, that its boasted pleasures are but painted vanities; its promises and professions, hollow mockeries and splendid lies.

Perhaps the crowning element in the folly of earthly-minded men, is to be found in the perishable properties of the world they deify and adore. Decay is the universal law. Susceptible of its influence are the brightest objects we look upon, be they wealth, or fame, or beauty, held though they be by the surest grasp, or watched with unceasing solicitude, or reared on the most massive foundations. History has taught mankind a vast amount of serviceable truth, but on no truth has history poured a broader stream of irrefragable evidence than on this, that stability and permanence are no attributes at all of any thing beneath the skies. Where now shall we find those imperial cities, those proud and princely nations of antiquity, those concentrations of all power and policy, all wealth and wisdom? Where now are those colossal structures, those towering triumphs of human strength and genius, that once appeared so proof against the blasts of all tempests and the breath of all time? And those mighty social and political

changes that have recently shaken Europe almost to its centre, what are they but so many evidences of inherent destructibleness, so many steps in the onward process of decay? And what is the world itself but a vast theatre, where in interminable succession one scene follows another, each one unfolding more clearly than its predecessor the grave verity, that there is rapidly on the wing of time a crisis in which the world itself shall pass away, when this vast material creation, this gorgeous scene of splendour and beauty, shall utterly perish and be no more. O! is such a world an adequate compensation for the irretrievable loss of all that can make eternity desirable and happy? Is such the price for which a countless multitude of our fellows appear to have made up their minds to sell their immortal birthright? O the madness of the world's worshippers! And yet, what power can break the fatal charm or dislodge the idol god? What argument and appeal can fix upon their smitten, carnal hearts the lesson of inspiration, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break not through and steal."

A course of earthliness, moreover, is the highway to certain ruin. If the Bible be no fable, if immortality be no dream, it can be the precursor only of the hopeless wreck of all that can bless its blinded votaries." He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corrup tion." It must be so, therefore, as the result of a natural law. It is a downward course of deterioration and debasement. How can it be otherwise? How otherwise than spiritually lapsed, shrivelled, and powerless can be the faculties of the mind accustomed to no exercises of spiritual elevation and discipline? A sickly and blighted heart must that ever be which is exposed only to the uncongenial influences of this beggarly world, a bleak and sterile waste, where no healthy graces germinate, where no flowers of beauty and fragrance grow.

The consequences of earthliness are also retributive. The friends of the world are not always without proof, even in this life, that a more than human curse frowns upon their selfish and sordid pursuits. God does sometimes most signally mark his abhorrence of the sin. He turns the tide of their prosperity, and dashes to pieces like a potter's vessel the fabric of their most cherished hopes; and this he does to show them that they are profoundly mistaken in assuming they have a dispensation to live as they list; that the relations subsisting between them and their Creator are neither to be set aside with indifference nor trampled upon with impunity. There are not a few cases, it is true, in which worldly men are allowed to pursue their course of carnality free from such terrible mementos of their guilt. The stream they float upon is undisturbed and placid. Little do they know by experience of those serious transitions that humble the ambition of other men. They appear to feast upon the luxuries of perpetual prosperity and sunshine. The retribution is certain, however, though it be delayed. Fearful is the reversion that awaits them in the future, and all the more fearful it may be, because preceded by a course of unrestrained indulgence and unbroken calm. Their fancied triumph and security can only last until they shall have opened their eyes upon the solemnities of another state, and then, O then, the dream is o'er, the fatal slumber is broken

up for ever, the magic spell is shivered into nothing, every vestige of the infernal delusion is swept away, and then they load with bitter curses the carnality of spirit which Heaven and its ministers had so deeply pitied and deplored. Into eternity they plunge with the guilt upon their consciences of having robbed Jehovah and deified the world, with the accumulated and unpardoned guilt of the most criminal idolatry and the most disdainful atheism. And now, in this their tremendous crisis, now that God comes forth in the majesty of judicial power to reckon with them, where, pray where is that boasted world of theirs, to which they so obsequiously bowed and so tenaciously clung? Where now its gay society, that used to cheer their spirits; its sparkling treasures and fulsome flattery, that used to feast their eyes and feed their vanity, and so bewitchingly steal their hearts away? Why does it not now stand by its scathed and terror-stricken dupes as they stood by it? Why, if it have the power as it had the pretension, why has it not redeemed its pledges of eternal fidelity, so oft repeated and also so credulously believed? Yes, why has it not snatched its wretched and ruined vassals from the withering sin-curse and the burning lake? Why! just because it is a grand subterfuge, an engine of the great deceiver, a refuge of lies, a vast system of soul-destroying seduction, a pitfall attracting and regaling its victims by the beautiful flowers that adorn its surface, and then, O horrid treachery! opening its yawning chasm to let down its unwary admirers into the burning pit beneath.

0 ye zealous competitors for the favour and the fortunes of earth! what powers of description can do full justice to the madness that has fastened upon you, and how shall be truthfully depicted the terrible retribution to which that madness shall ere long consign you? The eagerness with which you embrace and grasp the world appears almost to indicate, on your part, the infatuated idea that the world really has the power to do for you what it has so signally failed to do for others; that, when necessity requires, it shall soothe your spirit amid the death-struggles of humanity, hold up your head above the foaming billows of the black river, wrest from the grasp of Omnipotence the sceptre of justice, stand by your side in the judgment, successfully plead your miserable cause and justify your Godlessness, conduct you, in spite of the flaming sword, to the portals of heaven, and, throwing back its gates of massive gold, secure your admission to its society of angels and its thrones of light. Sons of folly! dream not thus away, I pray you, the rationality of your nature. Practise no such falsehoods on your spirits. Go, find some more enduring basis to build your hopes upon. Tarry no longer in the plain; sport no longer on the brink. Already advances the angel of death; the world is slipping from your grasp; charged with the wrath of heaven, the storm-cloud looms in the distance; the avenging sword flashes in the sky; the blast of the Archangel vibrates on the air, and soon, soon will be upon you, in all its awful grandeur, the day of retribution, the assize of the universe. Away, away to the lingering mercy, the uplifted cross, the streaming blood, the redeeming Jesus. Too true it is, indeed, you have treated that precious Redeemer with cruel indifference and neglect, and it had been but common justice had He given you over to all the consequences of your idolatrous career. As, however, he is still the sinner's Friend, go and throw the burden of your guilt upon his mediatorial offering; and, however greatly he had preferred