she could not see, and shut up her ears that she could not hear, the things which belonged unto her peace. : In the hardness of an impenitent and unbelieving heart, she crucified her Saviour and her God, and all was fulfilled, from the greatest even unto the least of the woes which had been denounced upon her: and hence it is, that we gather the second of our moral inferences-that we may read in the ruin of Jerusalem a warning, to beware of Jerusalem's sins. The woe was indeed for her, and for her inhabitants alone; but the moral is for us and for our children for ever. For what were the Jews? A nation. So are we. A nation to whom the oracles of God were committed. Why, so are we. A nation who had every means afforded to them of improving the gift. And so have we. A nation who neglected to improve the gift unto their own salvation, and were therefore visited, in vengeance, with calamity and death. And so also may we be visited unless we cease from their sins. They despised the religion and person of Jesus. They would none of his counsel, and they obeyed none of his commandments, and they gave no heed unto his words, and no reverence unto his name. They rejected and crucified the Lord of Life, and filled up the measure of their forefathers' iniquity; and behold they are driven as wanderers over the face of the whole earth. Sins, like theirs, may be

done in every age; and sufferings like theirs, may fall upon any nation. To despise the religion and the person of the Son of God; to deny his divinity; to forget his laws; to hate his followers, and to crucify the Son of God afresh in the wickedness of our lives-are crimes, which are confined to no rank, or station, or country; and it is always in the will of a Holy, and the power of an Almighty God, to punish the evil-doers for the evil they have done. The Gentile, as well as the Jew, may sin against his Redeemer and his God; and, like the Jew, be scattered abroad in the breath of God's anger; and this city, in whose goodly buildings we glory and we dwell, may forego the things which belong unto her peace, as easily as the city of Jerusalem did; and like that devoted city, may be levelled with the ground, and her children within her. For what merit hath the Gentile more than the Jew; or what city of the earth can have more claims for mercy than the towers and the temple of Jerusalem? This record at least we must bear unto the nation, that Jerusalem was the chosen seat, and the Jews the chosen people of God; and I never think of the glory of their descent and their election, without feeling for them the reverence which is due to an elder brother in the faith. I never meet with one of these monuments of God's indignation and wrath, walking in loneliness through

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the streets and multitudes of a mighty population, without turning my mind instinctively to the words and warnings of St. Paul.* " If God spared not the natural branches, take heed, lest he also spare not thee. Behold, therefore, the goodness and severity of God; on them which fell, severity; but towards thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. For because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not therefore high-minded, but fear." Trust not in the sophisms of human reason, the weakness of human strength, or the frailty of human virtue; but fear-fear to offend the Maker, the Redeemer, the Judge of all. Fear to forfeit the gentle and enlightening influences of the Sanctifier. Fear to tread under foot the Son of God, and count the blood of the covenant an unholy thing. But above all, fear the loss of your own immortal souls; and fear to depend, for their salvation, upon any thing but the sacrifice of the Cross, and the merits, and the mediation, and the power of Jesus Christ; "for of him, and through him, and to him, are all things."† Remember also, lastly, that the vices of Jerusalem were the very cause of its ruin, the source from which its misfortunes sprung, and by which its evils were aggravated and enlarged. Her * Rom. xi. 21, 22, & 20.

† Rom. xi. 36.

perversions of Scripture; her pollution of the fountain of truth; her reliance upon man and herself; her pride, her worldliness, her wickedness; her false, her carnal, her ambitious views of the Messiah's character, were the origin of all that fatal obstinacy in error, and of all that incurable blindness to better and holier things which brought upon her a load of such merited wretchedness, as neither the warnings of her Saviour, nor the wishes and labours, even of her enemies, were able to avert. "His blood be upon us, and upon our children," was the fearful imprecation of these lost ones upon themselves; and the vengeance they called for, it came. These are memorials for every generation of man to muse upon, and speak to us in a language, which if we will but think, we cannot but understand; a caution to watch with a godly sincerity over our waywardness, to beware of the corruptions of human reasoning, to subdue the thoughts into an early obedience to the doctrines of Scripture, to hold fast to the naked simplicity of the Góspel, and to guard the genuine truth of God with uninterrupted care and diligence, lest, after having often desired to gather us under his wings, and we would not, he should at last cast us away utterly from his presence, and our house, like that of Jerusalem, should be left unto us desolate.

DISCOURSE XI.

REV. chap. xix, ver. 10.

"The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.”

II. I COME now to the second of those predictions of our Saviour to which I alluded, as bearing testimony through every succeeding generation, that he was indeed endued with the spirit of prophecy, and as affording to the sceptic an experimental solution of those doubts, which he professes to entertain with regard to the probability of real miracles.

It is not always, though it is most generally, the case, that scenes of suffering and distress are presented to the view of the prophet in his visions. The world is a state of mingled happiness and misery; its history a series of mingled disappointment and success. Whilst our Saviour, therefore, with one glance of his foreboding eye beheld the destruction of Jerusalem, and the dis