well be regarded, in reliance upon the gracious influences which will ever gather about an act of religious consecration, as a fair initiation into the Christian life. It is the precise step urged upon us by Him who "worketh in us to will and to do," and its real value and importance can only be determined by its permanent influence upon the character and the life. Do what is so inculcated. Follow the lead

ing of the Spirit. Obey the impulse given by high heaven. God, in all his operations, seeks this one thing—to induce you "to will and to do." Your whole duty in the premises consists simply in obedience in willing and doing. In obtaining your consent to become a Christian, all this apparatus of means these convictions, visitations of the Spirit which have covered your moral history hitherto, find their satisfaction. It is the full import of their preparatory dispensation. This full surrender, this high resolve removes the one obstacle to piety-sweeps away the massive barrier that alone has so long bid defiance to the approaches of Heaven's saving grace.

3. WILL AND DO. These are the significant words which describe the duty of the unconverted man. Seem they mysterious, cabalistic terms, hard to be understood and obeyed? None in the Bible are really plainer or more simply practical. What is implied in this willing-this pregnant resolve, on which so vast results are suspended? It may be you have been an undutiful son, and are about to reform. You begin, of course, by a volition, and resolve hereafter to be dutiful. What is contained in such a purpose? That you will perform all your neglected duties, will honor and cherish your parents, consult their will and their taste, and do all you can to promote their welfare and honor. And all this you set about doing cordially and frankly, and continue to do so. solve has not bound you to do or omit any particular thing so much as with true, upright intention to carry out in action, and on all occasions, the new principle which you have ad

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mitted to control you. The religious process is as simple and as practicable. The hearty adoption of the new principle of action toward God, and the honest, earnest application of it to the life--this is precisely the willing and the doing which, with such infinite, sedulous painstaking, God “worketh in us" to accomplish.

In conclusion, I remark,

1. It is of the utmost importance practically to observe the order of the proposed method. The will must precede the work. Nothing is more common, especially in a time of general seriousness, than to transpose these terms. Awakened persons, without having made the full, irrevocable resolve to live for God, often enter, with apparent earnestness, upon the work of what they deem seeking religion. And so they pass on through anxious days and months, as sad, as earnest, as prayerful as any, all the while having their hearts closed against the divine renovation they so urgently invoke. They have omitted and refused to do the first work. They pray, and weep, and strive, as a tentative process-a sort of experiment in religion-hopeful, it would seem, that somehow, amid these efforts and this bodily and mental exercise, some good may befall, and some by-door into the kingdom spring open before them. Such a career of blind, vain, objectless seeking, as it is called, ends in a return to levity and the world, or in a stubborn melancholy-the heart hardened, seared, poisoned with a self-righteous consciousness of having tried the experiment and failed-throwing the blame boldly upon God. These builders forgot to lay the foundation. They omitted the first and the main step in the process. It may be they were glad to evade the main issue, which involves the main sacrifice. They were willing to do, but not to will, to resolve, to submit absolutely and irrevocably. Their working and seeking have, so far, been but an expedient to pacify the startled conscience, which must fulfill one of the conditions proposed, and finds it easier to work than to

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submit and resolve.

Such persons, if they ever discover their mistake, will have to retrace their steps back to their point of departure, and begin with the heart rather than the hands. They must recognize the great obstacle to piety where God has pointed it out. So, beginning at the source and fountain of all right moral movements, by the homage of the free will, they will find that, instead of having to go far to seek religion, religion will eagerly seek them, and bear them away to the great feast.

2. Let us remark, again, that a successful commencement in religion does not depend wholly, or in part, upon deep, pungent convictions, nor profound sorrow, nor plenteous tears. All the agitations that precede conversion are without effect upon the result sought, except in so far as they may incline the inquirer to accept the proffered method of relief, or rouse him to the importance of religion and the vastness of the interests at stake. If we could induce him, in his calmer moods, to contemplate the subject, and deliberately choose the better, resolve determinately and at once to give his life to God's service, I doubt not the work of conversion would be quite as effectually done. In either case, and in all cases, the one issue pressed upon the sinner is absolute submission both in purpose and life.

3. These conditions complied with, the man is, for the first time, in a position to exercise the faith about which he has been so long puzzled. It is not the business of this crisis to study and embrace great doctrines and compare creeds. The mind has long since probably been well furnished in this respect, or it may well postpone such studies to fitter opportunities. The faith it needs and seeks is a full trust in Christ as its Savior. And now, having voluntarily accepted Christ to be lawgiver and ruler, and so being placed in a position to be saved, not only is it easy to believe in him, but it is hardly possible to withhold unreserved confidence in him as our Savior. We did not, and we could not, trust him before, just be

cause we were conscious of holding a rebel's position. Now we have submitted, and can claim the promises; or, rather, grace flows in spontaneously now the obstacle is out of the way.

4. We may now hopefully point the willing soul to the love of God. He now desires Christ upon his own terms. He called on him perhaps before, but not like an honest penitent. It was, in reality, an indignity to call upon the Crucified, spurning meantime the terms on which he offers himself to the world. Now we may press up to the mercyseat, and claim all things in the name of our Savior and our Priest.

I have little to say of the fear and the trembling of our text. I suppose this language refers to the very serious conditions and liabilities under which we work out our salvation. We may die at any time, and so go into eternity without religion. We are guilty of fearful sin every hour that we resist God's method of recovering grace, and thus heap up wrath against the day of wrath. We grieve the Spirit by delay, and so may finally expel him. We grow older, and with increasing years come diminished religious susceptibilities. There is every day less probability that a man will become a Christian. Every day increases the fearful probability that he will not be converted-that he will lose his soul. The impenitent, under all the urgencies of strong conviction, under the intolerable pressure and burden of overwhelming motive, obstinately maintains his position, and will not resolve. He does not become a Christian, and can not, just because he will not take the first step, and so he stands a monument of folly and guilt, a spectacle to men and angels.

III.

LIFE INEXPLICABLE EXCEPT AS A PROBATION.

A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, RHINEBECK, N. Y., JULY 15, 1849, AT THE FUNERAL OF MRS. CATHARINE GARRETTSON.

AN enlightened Christian can hardly avoid feeling some measure of wonder as well as of disapprobation at the view of human life which finds expression in the remarkable reply of the patriarch Jacob to the question of Pharaoh, "How old art thou?" "The days of the years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty years. Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been," was the answer of an old man and prophet, whose earthly pilgrimage had already been protracted more than a full half century beyond the usual limits of the good old age conceded to his successors. Not only had his life been long, but eminently prosperous. He had, indeed, been no stranger to labors, perils, adversity; but these vicissitudes were the good discipline which had molded his great character, and made him a great man. It would be difficult to mention a single element of good fortune which Divine Providence had withholden from this its favored child. He had derived a vigorous physical constitution and a glorious intellect from ancestors who made treaties with sovereign states and gained victories over kings, and who could trace back their pedigree, honored from age to age by special tokens of divine favor, to the common parents of our human race in the Garden of Eden. He had gained an ample fortune by the manly exercise of his own talents-a species of success which is usually thought to contribute beyond any other method of acquisition to human happiness—and he had inherit