SERMON XV. ON THE DUTY OF DOING GOOD TO ALL MEN, AND GALATIANS vi. 10. As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men. especially unto them who are of the household of faith. THIS injunction of the apostle finds a responsive answer in the dictates of our judgments and the feelings of our hearts. The mutual dependence of the individuals composing the great family of mankind, is an indication that if one member suffer, all the members should suffer with him. No one, in this sense, lives for himself; but is bound to do good, as far as he has opportunity, to all men. To this course of universal benevolence he is prompted by those powerful feelings within him which attach him to his fellow-men, as partakers of the same nature, the same wants, and the same sorrows. But there is a portion of the great family of mankind to which Christians are bound by stronger ties than those which unite them to the mass of the human race-the household of faith, that spiritual family who, in the faith of the same Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, are gathered into the same fold, under the protection and guidance of the same Holy Spirit, and in the enjoyment of the same blessed hope of eternal life. These are those ON THE DUTY OF DOING GOOD TO ALL MEN. 203 brethren in Christ Jesus to whom we are bound especially to do good; and the highest good that we can do for them, is to provide for them as we have opportunity, and they have need, all the means of religious instruction and consolation provided in the word, the ministry, the ordinances, and the worship of the Gospel, as professed in apostolic and primitive purity by that branch of the Christian church of which we are members. Let me then, my brethren, at this time, illustrate this duty—the duty of extending our church among those who, destitute of its ministrations and worship, are desirous of enjoying them. 1. In extending our church, we extend a rational system of religion. Rational, not in the sense of excluding from our belief every religious doctrine which transcends the comprehension of our feeble faculties, and defies the grasp of our finite intellect. A revelation from heaven, in its very character as a revelation, must include what the highest efforts of reason could not discover, and from the subjects of which it treats-the uncreated mind, the invisible and eternal realities of a future world-must demand belief in much that no finite understanding can comprehend. It is in the highest degree irrational to expect, in the sense in which the term is in these last days used, as denoting the exclusion of every thing from our belief which we cannot comprehend, a rational system of religion. But though reason, exercising her legitimate powers, will implicitly receive divine truths well attested, however they may transcend her comprehension, she ought not to be called on to receive any which, on the very face of them, contradict her strong and honest dictates. And we hold it as a distinguishing excellence of our church, that she does not make this arbitrary demand of us. She avows indeed, as the cardinal truth of the Christian revelation, as the lamentable characteristic of our nature which rendered that revelation necessary, the subjection of all men, through the disobedience of their progenitor, to error and to sin; but she does not go to the irrational extreme of subjecting all men, merely on account of that transgression of the first of the race, in which they had no participation, to the awful curse of eternal damnation. In accordance with Scripture, and with the eternal and immutable rules of justice, she pronounces this tremendous sentence only on actual personal transgression-only on those who, when light has come into the world, choose darkness rather than light; and when the means of recovery from error and sin are offered to them in the mercy and grace of the Gospel, perversely neglect and reject the proffer. She adores with reverence the inscrutable determination of Him who worketh all things according to the counsel of his own will, to call successively certain portions of mankind to the knowledge of his revelation in Jesus Christ; thus predestinating them to all the means and all the blessings of salvation; but she does not, contradicting every view which revelation exhibits and reason confirms of the just and merciful character of the Ruler of the universe, make him the partial dispenser of the blessings of eternity, the irrespective awarder of its tremendous woes; believing that, signalized as are God's elect, the great body of professing Christians, in this life, with eminent and superior means of spiritual improvement, and exalted therefore as they may be hereafter to brighter states of glory; still all those, in every nation, who seek to know and to do the will of the invisible. Being who made them, will not seek him in vain, but, through the merits of him who died to purchase redemption for all men, will be accepted according to what they have, and not according to what they have not. She hails, too, as an inestimable gift of God to man, that supernatural light which incomprehensibly, but effectually, guides our benighted faculties in the discovery and reception of divine truth; and that powerful grace of the Spirit of the Most High, which transforms and renews in righteousness our depraved affections, turning them from sin to holiness, from the world to heaven: but she does not countenance all the wild and unseemly sallies of fanaticism, nor sanction its presumptuous claims to sensible impressions of this supernatural light, and sudden and violent impulses of this all-powerful grace; these she teaches her members to seek in the diligent use of the appointed means of their conveyance-pious reading, and meditation, and prayer, and the ordinances of the church; and she impresses on them the necessity of improving this light and grace to their spiritual illumination and sanctification, by the humble, and diligent, and persevering exercise of all the powers of their minds in the search of truth and duty, and in the works of righteousness. In extending then our church, you extend a system of doctrine which is in all respects accommodated to the spiritual wants of mankind, and accordant with the enlightened dictates of reason. 2. You extend also, in their purity and power, the distinguishing truths of the Gospel-evangelical doctrine. None can go further than our church does in maintaining the demerit of man, the inadequacy of his brightest virtues to stand before the blaze of that glory which confounds the cherubim-of his best performances to encounter that justice, the weight of whose awful sentence could be borne but by the Son of God: none can cherish with more reverential ardour those incomprehensible but glorious truths concerning the Divine Nature, which proclaim the Persons of the Godhead as the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier of fallen and sinful man: none confounds more entirely all the vain boasting of human pride, in ascribing all our hopes of pardon here, and acceptance hereafter, solely to the merits and intercession of that divine Personage whom it has pleased God to constitute, in our nature, as the Redeemer of the world: and none lays deeper the great foundation of all genuine acceptable righteousness in the operations of that Holy Spirit, by which we abolish the whole body of sin, and rising as new men in Christ Jesus, with renewed affections daily proceed in all virtue and godliness of living. These truths of the Christian system, fraught with peace, and holiness, and celestial hope, are not only exhibited in the didactic and technical terms of articles of faith-they glow in the devotional language of a liturgy. Thus, then 3. In extending our church, you extend an unrivalled form of religious instruction and devotion. For the liturgy is as perspicuous a manual of |