them to its limits. But where the law ends, there the gospel begins. It is only Jesus, the New Testament Joshua, the Mediator of the new covenant, that can bring us into the inheritance; to him it belongs to divide Jordan—to level the walls of proud Jericho— to subdue our enemies under us. He has already taken possession of the inheritance for us, and he can carry us out of this wilderness into his glorious rest. And there all the din and confusion of this nether world shall be drowned in the sweet music of another, even in the joyful acclamations of those who sing the song of Moses, the servant of the Lord, and the song of the Lamb, saying "Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are all thy ways, thou King of Saints. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord! and glorify thy name, for thou only art holy." Amen.

SERMON X.

"For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe."-1 CORINTHIANS, i. 21.

ONE of the favourite forms of this world's wisdom, is what is called the Philosophy of Induction, i.e., the establishment of general principles upon the evidence of particular facts-facts that have been ascertained either by careful observation, or by actual experiment. Now in the memorable words before us, the Almighty is pleased to reason with men just after their own inductive method. He here invites the world to examine the various experiments which for ages it had been trying in its own folly and weakness, for its own benefit, and to see and confess that every one of these experiments had signally and utterly failed. Yes, brethren, it was after God had left man to the efforts of his own unaided reason for a period of four thousand years, that the fulness of the time came for him to interpose. It was after the world, in the exercise of all its wisdom, had succeeded in nothing but in obscuring the beauty of truth and tarnishing its lustre, and denying its author and questioning its very existence, "after that, in the wisdom of God, the

world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe."

We have here brought under our review the world's great disease, man's fruitless remedies, and God's effectual cure.

I. Look first of all at the world's great disease. It is sin-briefly but comprehensively here described by one of its most fatal results, viz., the not knowing God; which is, however, simply a Bible phrase for all practical ungodliness. Examine then the case of the world-consider your own state and character personally, and say are you-say is any one on the earth, by nature in a perfectly sound and healthy moral condition? More particularly I ask (1.) is not the whole world guilty before God? Have not all of us broken God's holy law times and ways without number, in deed and word, in thought and desire? Lived there yet a man here or elsewhere (save only He who was more than man) who could say with truth, "I have no sin—I have never done wrong?" Did the God of heaven ever enjoin a command which some of his creatures on earth did not violate-yea, often persist in violating in the face of all his warnings? To the best mere man that ever yet existed, might not the reproach have been justly addressed,-"The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, thou hast not glorified?" And though the thunders of divine wrath roll over the head, and an accusing conscience whispers guilt to the heart, and men feel their imminent danger, and are standing in dread and expectation of their final doom, yet their state is such as entirely to preclude the hope that they can ever atone for the sin or escape from the punishment,

by any expedient of their own devising. Now, in these circumstances, every boasting self-justifying mouth is stopped, and every sinner lies guilty and condemned before his judge.

(2.) Another feature in the world's disease is impurity and defilement. If guilt were the only element in the case, we might hope that the God of mercy, by some scheme of his own devising, would simply blot out the transgression and remove it for ever. But man is grovelling as well as guilty-he is unclean and polluted-his very mind and conscience are defiled. The moral aspect of his nature is in direct contrast to that of the God of purity with whom he has to do; and hence, as he is obnoxious to divine justice through guilt, so he is odious to divine holiness through pollution. Who of the sons of Adam can say," I have made my heart clean; I am pure from my sin?" "Behold the heavens are not clean in God's sight, and he might charge his angels with folly; how much more filthy and abominable is man, who drinketh up iniquity like water?"

The principal seat of the spiritual malady is not the tongue, nor the hands, but the heart; and it is to the heart or spirit of man that the Father of Spirits chiefly looks. And as he is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity with complacency—as he cannot look upon sin but with detestation and abhorrence-so no experiments and no expedients of the sinner's own, can ever purify him in the sight of his Maker. “Yea,” said a holy man of old, “though I wash myself in snow water and make my hands ever so clean, yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, so that my own clothes shall abhor me."

(3.) Another symptom in man's disorder is utter helplessness entire impotence as regards his own deliverance and recovery; for he is not more prone to transgress than he is helpless to redeem. Were there indeed any means of his own. contrivance by which he might rescue himself from guilt and raise himself above corruption, we know not how far he might have gone in the way of effecting his own redemption of acting as his own saviour. But help in himself, he has not: hope, from any created being, he has not. There is an oppressive atmosphere weighing him down, which he cannot remove. There is a felt sense of inability for any thing spiritually good, which plainly tells him, that though human hand joined in hand to work out something for his recovery, it would be without the slightest hope of success. He who best knows him, declares of him, that he is without strength-that the imagination of his heart is evil, only evil from his youth-evil continually; and that how to perform that which is good in God's sight, of himself, he finds not. This is a dreadful disease of which he is the subject—the palsy of the soul -by which all its spiritual and moral powers have been paralysed. And every experiment which he has ever tried, and every expedient which he has ever adopted, have only shown that he has no refuge of his own from the storms which hover over his head, and that he has no power of his own to avert the coming vengeance.

(4.) Another and a still more revolting feature in the case is, that man's heart is alienated from his Maker. If you had only to contemplate the sentence by God, which is the award of his guilt; and the sepa