DISCOURSE I.

ON GOD'S PURPOSE OF GRACE.

ROMANS viii. 29.

FOR WHOM HE DID FOREKNOW, HE ALSO DID PREDESTINATE TO BE CONFORMED TO THE IMAGE OF HIS SON, THAT HE MIGHT BE THE FIRSTBORN AMONG MANY BRETHREN.

THE Soul can find no rest out of God. Itself immortal, it must have something infinite to grasp, something eternal to cling to. But it finds all created existence inscribed with the character of change. It sickens over the mutability of its earthly joys and loves. It learns that what is finite can neither fill the heart, nor quiet the conscience, that it is both unsatisfying and insecure: and thus it is often brought to confess that were it not for him, "who is of one mind, and whom none

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can turn," universal being must revert to its original chaos, and nature itself give up the ghost.

We need only appeal to your own hearts to confirm this. Have you, my brethren, ever found rest or security in what is created? Have not your fondest hopes withered in the bud? Is not every shore, along which you have been drifted by the current of life, covered with the wreck of former wishes and anticipations? And if And if your bark is still upon the waters, is it not because the pilot at the helm is himself infinite and eternal.

Many of you have drank often and deep of disappointment. You have seen one vision of happiness after another fade and die in the horizon. You have been called once and again to follow your darlings to the tomb. You have seen the desire of your eyes removed, just when your heartstrings were twined closest around it. And then, no sooner has the gourd become a shadow over your head to deliver you from your grief, and you have become exceedingly glad of the gourd, than God has prepared a worm to smite the gourd that it withered.