"Go round about Sion, tell the towers thereof, mark well her bulwarks," for in Christ are their foundations laid. When as Christians we assent to her articles, we assent to them not as the constitutions of fallible man, but as the sum and substance of the Christian faith, deduced through the clearest channels from the living fountain of all truth, to reconcile the jarring opinions of self-created teachers, to correct the perversions of presumptuous ignorance, to guide the footsteps of the thousands that cannot guide themselves, into the paths of purity and peace. When as sons of our Church, we conform to her worship, obey her ordinances, and submit to her discipline, we subject ourselves not to the government of man, but to the authority of Christ, deputed by himself most solemnly to this his representative on earth. We have a standard to which we can refer her injunctions, as to a criterion of their justice and purity. There is an ordeal of truth through which all her ordinances must publicly pass, and when they shall have risen from this severe and open examination, untouched by the flame, they demand our obedience, not in the name of man, but in the name of the Lord Jesus. When we refuse to sacrifice the high and holy cause of our ancient establishment to the gratification of a momentary popularity, in flattering the prejudices, and

assisting the projects of her adversaries, we refuse it in the name of Christ: we refuse to propagate those principles of disunion, which, as we learn from the history of all nations, has interposed the most formidable obstacle to the general reception of Christianity; we are persuaded of the impracticability of their pretensions, who preach and profess the unity of the Spirit not in the bond of peace, but in the turbulence of confusion, When we consider the connection of our National Church with the Constitution of our country, when we view its spirit inspired and infused throughout every ramification of the body politic, when we see the bonds of their union so powerfully cemented as to defy the ingenuity of man to injure the one without the dismemberment and destruction of the other, we do not therefore look on our Church as a creature of the State, or an engine of civil authority, we trace their union to a higher power, and to a nobler purpose; to preserve in every branch of our various and complicated system of government, that unity of religious faith, so essential to the order, the peace, the very existence of the whole; to display the Christian faith in all its native purity, as the animating and actuating principle of every duty which we owe both to God, and to our country; not to make the Church political, but the State religious.

It is now in the bosom of this our scriptural, our primitive, our evangelical Church, and in the presence of her children, that these her ministers elect have dedicated themselves, their souls and bodies to the service of their Redeemer; and the advancement of his kingdom upon earth. Theirs is a voluntary sacrifice, not a forced oblation of an unholy and an unaccepted victim, but a free-will offering of their understanding, their reason, and their affections. "God is not mocked;" he will accept no measured nor constrained affection, no wavering nor divided love. They have chosen Christ for their Master, and his holy Church for their habitation. Happy are they who can thus offer the first-fruits of their youth and their strength to their Redeemer; who can sacrifice the aspiring views of ambitious hope, and the gay delusions of fashion and pleasure, on the altar of their God; who can raise their view above the contentions and follies of this short and perishable state, and in the ardour of unalloyed affection can exclaim, "Oh! how amiable are thy dwellings, thou Lord of hosts. My soul hath a desire and a longing to enter into the court of the Lord; my heart and flesh rejoice in the living God."

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But let them remember "that what a man soweth that also shall he reap." They may sow in tears; in the constraint of self-denial, in the

toils of laborious duty, in the coldness of neglect, in the struggles of disappointment; but they shall reap in joy; in the remembrance of a wellspent life, in the prayers of those whom they have saved from destruction, in that most perfect pleasure which heaven can give or man receive, the consciousness of blessing, and being blessed. Theirs is a heavenly Master, who "will never leave them, nor forsake them," till he shall have summoned them from the communion of saints upon earth, to his presence in heaven. Come, thou good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

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In the name of the Lord Jesus is this awful dedication made. In his holy name are they called forth to serve in their several orders in this his visible church. Theirs is a church of no modern date, theirs is no unauthorized, unattested commission: they receive their authority through a regular and unbroken chain of succession, from the apostles themselves. Could I present to their eyes those apostles from whose hands the Spirit first was given, those fathers of the primitive church, who first received the holy commission, those venerable prelates through whose hands it has passed without interruption to the present day; with what grateful devotion would they receive, by the imposition of hands this day, their patriarchal inheritance; with what

fervency would they pray that the same spirit, which animated the saints, the martyrs, the confessors of the primitive church, might descend upon their generation also, and be transmitted, through the prelates of this our ancient, national, and apostolic church, to future ages, till time itself should be no more.

To perpetuate the succession of this sacred order not in form alone, but in spirit and in truth; it has ever been the care of the Church of England, not to admit within her sanctuary, those of whose qualifications for their high office she is not most solemnly assured; much less will she tolerate the audacious and unholy persuasions of pretended illumination from above; a delusion, entertained alone by distracted ignorance and designing hypocrisy. The pride of human wisdom, and the conceits of presumptuous absurdity, are equally folly before God. Whatever then are the qualifications demanded, the duties to be performed, and the obedience required, of the Christian minister, the same predominant principle enforces every obligation, and ratifies every command.

Whether as a scholar, he has strengthened the faculties, and enlarged the scope of his intellectual powers by the subsidiary aids of human. learning; he has done it not for the advancement of his private honour, nor for the gratifica