people unto himself. This collection of the human race he has styled, throughout the Scriptures, his sons and daughters, his children, the household of faith, the household of God, the family which, both in heaven and earth, is named after Christ. Of this family he is pleased customarily to style himself the Father throughout the Scriptures, a title, in this application of it, infinitely venerable and endearing, and casting around even the Deity himself a peculiar and glorious lustre.

It cannot be an unprofitable employment, unless we choose to make it so, to examine the manner in which the great Being who made this universe is pleased to perform those offices of benevolence which he has taught us naturally to expect from his assumption of this affectionate character. The observations which I shall make concerning this subject, although in most instances equally interesting to every person present, I shall, in form, address to the youths for whom this discourse is especially written. To you, my young friends, let me ob

serve

I. That God has given you your being.

sense.

In this respect God is your Father in the highest possible He created both your bodies and your minds. From this wonderful act, possible only to the mind which is itself uncreated and infinite, you are to date your existence, your enjoyments, and your hopes, throughout the endless progress of duration. The germ then was formed, which, it is to be hoped, will grow, and blossom, and bear fruit in every period of eternity.

II. He sustains you with a parental hand.

All the means of your sustenance he created by the same power, wisdom, and goodness which originated your existence. He gave existence both to the plants and the animals which have supplied you with food and raiment from your birth to the present hour. The former he raised to perfection by the mysterious nurture of the rain and sunshine; the latter he taught with instinctive wisdom to find the food and the safety which his own hand had provided, and fitted them, in ways not

less mysterious, to become the means of support, comfort, and even luxury, to you. The food by which you have been sus tained, the raiment which has covered you, the very houses which have sheltered you, the beds in which you have slept, the fuel by which you have been warmed, as well as the glo rious lights of heaven, by which you have been guided, equally to your business and your enjoyments, and the earth on which you dwell, the scene of all that business and those enjoyments, are, in the same manner, the works of his hands and the gifts of his bounty to you.

All these blessings he has rendered doubly precious, by causing them to flow to you through the hands of your parents. He gave you these parents, and furnished them with that singular and mysterious affection, which, commencing with your birth, has followed you through life hitherto by night and by day, in sickness and in health, with every act of tenderness and bounty, which your helpless years, your daily returning wants, your comfort, or your future usefulness could demand. Your enjoyments have all been sweetened by the hand which immediately bestowed them. Thus he has not only given you the best things, but given them in the best manner.

III. He has preserved you with parental care.

Your own recollection will probably remind most of you of dangers to which you have been exposed, diseases by which you have been distressed, and near approaches to death from which you have escaped. You cannot fail also to perceive, that in infancy and childhood your life was a continual scene of exposure, in which no eye could effectually watch over you, and no hand effectually preserve you but his. Heedless, giddy, thoughtless of yourselves, why did you not then perish? Why did not your parents weep over your premature death? Why are they not now, at times, wandering themselves, and conducting their friends to your untimely grave? Why are you not now agonized with the cholic, or wasting with the consumption? Who, to double all your blessings, has given and preserved to you, severally, that circle of friends who sympathise with you in every sorrow, as well as in every joy, and love to

multiply both pleasures and hopes around you, without whom the world would be a solitude, and your life a melancholy pilgrimage.

IV. He also has educated you with parental kindness.

God has caused the lines to fall to you in pleasant places, and has given you a goodly heritage. You are born in a land of health and plenty, where, compared with most other countries, life is eminently secure, and the means of subsistence are singularly rich and abundant. Why were you not left to a life of mere sickness and languishing in the poisonous forests of Terra Firma, or to famish amid the deserts of Greenland?

It is a land of peace. Not one of you has heard the con

fused noise of the battle of the warrior, or seen with an eye of anguish garments rolled in blood. You sleep and wake, you walk and study, you pursue business and amusement, you worship and live, in regions of quiet and safety, where there is none to molest or make you afraid. While the world beside trembles at the sound of the trumpet, and sighs and groans beneath the ravages of war, while the nations of Europe are visited by the Lord of Hosts with thunder and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire, we behold our Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down. Not one of the stakes thereof has been, nor, as we hope, shall be removed, nor any of the cords thereof broken. The Lord has hitherto been our judge, our lawgiver, our king, and our Saviour. To his overflowing goodness is it owing that you and your companions are not chained together as conscripts, and driven in a herd to the field of battle, to butcher your fellow-men, rob them of their property, consume their habitations with fire, hurry their wives and children to an untimely grave, and in the end leave your bones to whiten on the same waste of death. To the same goodness is it owing that your parents are not now lamenting your fall by the sword of an enemy, as one mourneth for an only son, and as one is in bitterness for a first-born.

It is a land of knowledge. Here all persons are taught to read, from the cradle, and thus have immediate access to the

word of God. They are qualified, also for the various useful business of life, and are furnished with information to such an extent, as to make thinking a source of continual pleasure, and to render them useful instructors of their children in the morning of life. You, with advantages greatly superior, have been trained up in the hall of learning and science, and have had your minds enlarged with the knowledge accumulating for ages by men, and the wisdom sent down from heaven. Why were you not born on the burning lands of Caffraria, your bodies parched by a blazing climate, and your minds sunk to the standard of animal perception ?

It is a land of freedom. Here you and all others may do every thing which is right, with safety from molestation. Within this single limit, a limit which every man of worth prescribes of course to himself, your own pleasure is the only human law of your conduct. You might as easily have been born under the iron sceptre of despotism, and whenever you acted, spoke, or thought, might have trembled habitually through life, like a Chinese, at the apprehension of being observed and disapproved by some minion of power. All that endears life, and life itself, you might now have holden on the doubtful and terrible tenure of a tyrant's will. Why are you free, safe, and happy, and ninety-nine hundredths of your fellow-men bowing their necks under the yoke, and sighing and groaning under the miseries of political bondage?

It is a land of religion. Here the Gospel shines with meridian lustre. The glad tidings of salvation are published in the streets, and the influence of the Spirit of truth distils as the rain, and drops as the dew. Once a wilderness, it has become an Eden; a desert for forty centuries, it is now a garden of God. Instead of walking in this light of heaven, you might at the present moment have been groping in heathen or Mohammedan midnight. Instead of listening to the sound of forgiving love, you might have been deafened by the shrieks of a bacchanal, or the howlings of a Powaw. Instead of being summoned to the mercy-seat, invited to the possession of immortal life, and welcomed to the gates of heaven, you might have been bound and filleted, butchered and smoking on the altar of

a demon. This house of God might have been commuted for a pagoda, the Bible for responses of a sybil, and the cup of the Lord for the cup of devils. Why are you here, gathered by the command, and admitted to the presence of Jehovah, for the divine purpose of obtaining a glorious immortality; and why are others, as good by nature as you, perishing for lack of vision?

All the blessings alluded to under this head are essentially made yours by that great providential act which directed the place of your birth. From the moment in which

you were born, they have gathered around you, unsolicited, and have forced themselves upon your acceptance. How wonderful, how affectionate, how divinely endeared is that care of your heavenly Father by which they have been bestowed?

V. He has governed you also with the kindness of a parent. This indispensable office he has, to a great extent, executed by the agency of your earthly parents and others, to whose superintendence you have been committed. It is impossible for you sufficiently to prize the value of this dispensation, or the kindness with which it has been administered by them. Had you been left ungoverned, your dispositions would have assumed all the wildness, ferocity, gross indulgence, and sordid baseness of the savage. Your habits would have been fixed irretrievably in the foulest sin, and your conduct would have been only a series of black and bloody crimes. Powerfully to restrain you from these perpetrations, and efficaciously to withdraw you from this hopeless character, God has placed you in the hands of the most affectionate parents, and by the instrumentality of these parents in the hands of others also, who have checked your dangerous propensities, and prevented you from the commission of sin with as much tenderness, and as little severity, as you yourselves could rationally wish. The proof of this is complete. Your propensities to evil are not even now sufficiently overcome. Still, much, very much, has been done for you to this end. All this also has been kindly done. God, who has placed this incalculably important interest of yours in