conclusion, commend the subject to your earnest meditation; assuring you that the more it is examined, the more will it be found fraught with interest and instruction. There is something exquisitely touching in an exhibition of God as providing sedulously, both in temporal and spiritual things, for the poor and illiterate. "The eyes of all wait upon thee, and thou givest them their meat in due season." God is that marvellous being to whom the only great thing is Himself. A world is to Him an atom, and an atom is to Him a world. And as, therefore, he cannot be mastered by what is vast and enormous, so he cannot overlook what is minute and insignificant. There is not, then, a smile on a poor man's cheek, and there is not a tear in a poor man's eye, either of which is independent on the providence of Him who gilds, with the lustre of his countenance, the unlimited concave, and measures, in the hollow of his hand, the waters of fathomless oceans. And that "the poor have the Gospel preached to them," is one of the strongest evidences on the side of Christianity. It was given to John the Baptist as a mark by which he might prove Christ the promised Messiah. He might hence learn that Jesus had come, not to make God known, exclusively, to the learned and great, but that, breaking loose from the trammels of a figurative dispensation, he was dealing with the mechanic at his wheel, and with the slave at his drudgery, and with the

beggar in his destitution. Had Christ sent to the imprisoned servant of the Lord, and told him that he was fascinating the philosopher with sublime disclosures of the nature of Deity, and drawing after him the learned of the earth by powerful and rhetorical delineations of the wonders of the invisible world; but that, all the while, he had no communications for the poor and common-place crowd; why, John might have been dazzled, for a time, by the splendour of his miracles, and he might have mused, wonderingly, on the displayed ascendancy over diseases and death; but, quickly, he must have thought, this is not revealing God to the ignorant and destitute, and this cannot be the religion designed for all nations and ranks. But when the announcement of wonderworkings was followed by the declaration that glad tidings of deliverance were being published to the poor, the Baptist would readily perceive that the long looked-for close to a limited dispensation was contemplated in the mission of Jesus; that Jesus, in short, was introducing precisely the system which Messiah might be expected to introduce; and thus, finding that the doctrines bore out the miracles, he would admit at once his pretensions, not merely because he gave sight to the blind, but because, preaching the Gospel to the ignorant, he shewed that God, of his goodness, had prepared for the poor.

And that the Gospel should be adapted, as well

as preached, to the poor; adapted in credentials as well as in doctrines; this is one of those arrangements which, as devised, shew infinite love, as executed, infinite wisdom. Who will deny that God hath thrown Himself into Christianity, even as into the system of the visible universe, since the meanest can trace his footsteps, and feel themselves environed with the marchings of the eternal one? Oh, we do think it cause of mighty gratulation, in days when infidelity, no longer confining itself to literary circles, has gone down to the homes and the haunts of our peasantry, and seeks to prosecute an impious crusade amongst the very lowest of our people -we do think it cause of mighty gratulation, that God should have thus garrisoned the poor against the inroads of scepticism. We have no fears for the vital and substantial Christianity of the humbler classes of society. They may seem, at first sight, unequipped for the combat. On a human calculation, it might mount almost to a certainty, that infidel publications, or infidel men, working their way into the cottages of the land, would gain an easy victory, and bear down, without difficulty, the faith and piety of the unprepared inmates. But God has had a care for the poor of the flock. He loves them too well to leave them defenceless. And now, appealing to that witness which every one who believes will find in himself, we can feel that the Christianity of the illiterate has in it as much of

stamina as the Christianity of the educated; and we can, therefore, be confident that the scepticism which shrinks from the batteries of the learned theologian, will gain no triumphs at the firesides of our God-fearing rustics.

We thank thee, O Father of heaven and earth, that thou hast thus made the Gospel of thy Son its own witness, and its own rampart. We thank thee that thou didst so breathe thyself into apostles and prophets, that their writings are thine utterance and declare to all ages thine authorship. And now, what have we to ask, but that if there be one here who has hitherto been stouthearted and unbelieving, the delivered word may prove itself divine, by "piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit;" and that, whilst we announce that "God is angry with the wicked;" that those who forget Him shall be turned into hell; but that, nevertheless, he hath "so loved the world as to give his only-begotten Son" for its redemption; oh, we ask that the careless one, hearing truths at once so terrifying, and so encouraging, may be humbled to the dust, and yet animated with hope; and that, stirred by the divinity which embodies itself in the message, he may flee, "poor in spirit," to Jesus, and, drawing out of his fulness, be enabled to testify to all around, that" thou, O God, hast of thy goodness prepared for the poor."

SERMON IX.

ST. PAUL A TENT-MAKER.

ACTS xviii. 3.

"And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them and wrought, for by their occupation they were tentmakers."

THE argument which may be drawn, in support of Christianity, from the humble condition of its earliest teachers is often, and fairly, insisted on in disputations with the sceptic. We scarcely know a finer vantage-ground, on which the champion of truth can plant himself, than that of the greater credulity which must be shewn in the rejection, than in the reception, of Christianity. We mean to assert, in spite of the tauntings of those most thorough of all bondsmen, free-thinkers, that the faith required from deniers of revelation is far larger than that demanded from its advocates. He who thinks that the setting-up of Christianity may satisfactorily be accounted for on the supposition of its falsehood, taxes credulity a vast deal more than he who believes all the prodigies, and all the miracles, recorded in Scripture. The most marvellous of all prodigies, and the most surpassing