than by him who first labours with the whole bent and strenuousness of his soul after the money which purchases the objects of this world's gratification, and then gives himself up to the harvest of indulgence. But what mars and confirms the distinction in this instance is, that when a man devotes himself to the acquisition of that money which purchases all things, it is not always with the view of purchasing. Wealth is often pursued without this view. An independent charm is annexed to the bare possession of it. Apart altogether from the power of its command over the enjoyments of life, it has become with many an object in itself of the most passionate and intense ambition. All

the pleasure of the chase is keenly felt in the pursuit of it, and all the triumph of a victory as keenly felt in the attainment of it; and this, without any regard to the harvest of subsequent enjoyments into which it has the power of ushering its successful votaries; it it thus, that although the mere shadow and representative of enjoyment, it has at length infatuated its worshippers into a higher relish for itself than for all the enjoyments of which it is the minister; so that instead of being the handmaiden to the gratification of other appetites to many, it has itself become the object of an appetite more domineering than all others; and wealth, apart from all its uses and subserviences, now stands to their imaginations in the place of a mighty and dispensing Sovereign, to whom they render the devotion and the drudgery of all their services.

In those cases, however, where wealth is the terminating object, there is still the process of sowing, even the process of diligence and busy device by which the scheme of this earthly ambition is carried on, only the harvest instead of consisting of any ulterior thing which the wealth of the world can purchase, consists in the mere possession of the wealth itself. In the walks of merchandise, were we to look to the minds and motives of its most aspiring candidates, should we often see that it is not what comes after the wealth, but the mere wealth itself, which both set them agoing and kept them agoing. They may be sowing, not unto the lust of the flesh, not unto the lust of the eye, not unto the pride of life-all of which are opposite to the love of the Father, but still they are sowing, and to that too the

love of which is equally opposite to the love of the Father. They who are seeking treasures for themselves instead of seeking to be rich towards God, are in fact sowing unto the flesh, for they are sowing unto that which terminates with the body, they are sowing unto that which is altogether corrupt, understanding this term in its textual meaningaltogether transitory; they are sowing unto that on which death in a few little years will put its impressive mockery. They are rearing their chief good on a foundation that is perishable, or labouring for one only portion which will speedily be wrested from them by the gripe of a destroyer, who will leave them without a portion and without an inheritance for ever. They are labouring for a part of this world's substance, and in the possession of it "verily they have their reward;" but in regard to the substance which "endureth for ever" they have never sought it, and, as they have never laboured for it, so of it they will never reap. They have sought to be arrayed in perishable clothing, and perhaps to find a little hour of magnificence on earth ere they bid their everlasting adieu to all its infatuations; but that hour will soon come to its termination, and death may leave all the possessions untouched, but he will lay his rude and resistless hand on the possessor. The house may stand upon foundations broad and in castellated pride for many generations, and the domain may smile for ages in undiminished beauty, but in less, perhaps, than half a generation, death will force his unbidden way into the inner apartment, and without spoiling the lord of his property he will spoil the property of its lord; he will enter and leave uninjured the hall, but he will level and destroy the lord of the mansion. It is not his way to tear the parchments and the rights of investiture from the hand of the proprietor, but it is the hand that possessed that he paralizes; he unlocks not the coffers, but he leaves their contents and their owner like, useless and forgotten things of the world. It is thus that death smiles in ghastly contempt on all human aggrandisement. He meddles not with the things that are occupied, but he lays hold on the occupier; and this to him is as entire deprivation as if he had trampled on all that belonged to him in the world. He does not seize upon the wealth, but he lays his arrest upon

the owner; he forces away his body to the grave, where it moulders into dust, and in turning the soul out of its warm and well sheltered tenement, he turns it adrift and unprotected into the cheerless waste of a desolate and neglected eternity.

We are not taught here that it is wrong to sow unto the flesh. This may be, this is, a doctrine of Scripture, but it is not the doctrine of this particular verse. It does not pronounce on the criminality of the pursuit, but just on the evanescence of its objects. It simply tells us that the good obtained by sowing unto the flesh is temporal; and to this the whole experience of man bears testimony. He cannot look on the pages of general history without perceiving the rapid movement of one generation after another. He cannot live long in the world without perceiving the fall of acquaintances on every side of him. He cannot have a circle of relatives around him without the lesson of death being brought home to his feelings by the touching incidents of his own domestic bereavements. Should he himself still persist in the pursuits of ambition, and in associating either durability or magnitude with his earthly interests, this may prove a moral or intellectual derangement in himself; but it proves nothing against the affirmation, that in sowing to the flesh he shall of the flesh reap only corruption. As he grows older in years, he may grow more inveterate in delusion. As he draws towards the termination of his earthly existence, he may cling with more intense affection to its various vanities. As the hour of his eternal separation from the world approaches, it may grow in his estimation, and he may adhere more tenaciously than ever to all its objects and interests. This proves him to be the child of infatuation, but against the truth of the text it proves nothing. It may bespeak the virulence of some great spiritual disease that overspreads our species, it may demonstrate that in reference to a great and awfully momentous truth the man may labour under all the obstinacy of an habitual blindness; but the truth remains unbroken, and in every instance and on every indivídual that is born into the world it will be most surely and speedily realized.

So much, then, for the first lesson, the VANITY OF THIS WORLD'S AMBITION; and the second lesson, founded on these

explanations that our text affords, which I would propose, is THE UNPRovidedness oF ALL THOSE MEN FOR ETERNITY whose affections are settled on the wealth of this world, and who possess not one wish nor have one practical interest beyond the limits of its sensible horizon. That, indeed, is a meagre theology which would look upon the outcasts of human society as the only outcasts from heaven, and which would represent the path that leadeth unto life-that leadeth unto spiritual and everlasting life-to be so gentle and so accessible as that few can miss it; instead of representing it as that arduous and narrow path, of which our Saviour has said, that "there be few who find it." It is a woeful delusion, and we fear the undoing of many an immortal spirit, that God will shut out of paradise only those who have been guilty of such flagrant offences against the law of rectitude, as would degrade them beneath the average character of those decent and respectable and neighbour-like families by whom we are surrounded; and that, if we but acquit ourselves with tolerable fairness on earth, we may expect when we die, to become the companions of those who constitute the celestial choirs, and of the myriads of happy souls that will surround the throne of heaven. Now, it may be true that we may stand exempted from all gross and outrageous delinquency; we may fulfil all the proprieties of social intercourse; we may have more than an average share of its humanities; cordialities of domestic affection may by the mechanism of our sentient nature, flow through our bosoms in a stream as warmly and as kindly as doth the blood that circulates through our veins; and to many of the graces of private life there may be added the activities of public life and of patriotism, the pulse of high and honourable feeling, the blush of unviolated delicacy, the ingenuousness of nature's truth, the sensibilities of nature's tenderness, and, with all, there may be a taste most keenly and feelingly alive, if not to the spiritual duties which irradiate the character of the Godhead, at least to all those sensible beauties, wherewith the face of our goodly creation has been decked so profusely by his hand; and there may be science and imagination, and towering intellect, and sublime thoughts of truth and of the universe; there may be all those virtues which

the happiest institution can engender, and all that philosophy which the loftiest genius can achieve. But now I will put it to your own sense, and your own experience of our common nature, if you think it impossible that a man who shall be so gifted, shall breathe the element of irreligion; that from morning to night that God, amid the glories of whose vast workmanship he all the day rejoices, shall be to him like an unknown or a forgotten thing; that satisfied in his full occupation with the business of the peopled region in which he dwells, he should still cast not one look beyond the worldly task to which he is fixed, the goal to which his footsteps daily carry him; that he should heave not one aspiration through the irradiated conclave which is above his head, and that thus the Being, who has so graced humanity, with all that so proudly and so pleasingly adorns it, should be habitually and wholly disregarded by him whom the hand of this Almighty Sovereign has called forth, and exalted into one of the noblest of its specimens. And if, indeed, a creature so accomplished and so gifted should, nevertheless, live and die in utter indifference towards his God and in ungodliness, then let not us be deceived into a mistaken and fatal security, by the average virtues of an every-day life in this world. They, one and all of them, may consist with a habit of utter carnality, or to make use of the language of the textwith a habit of sowing only unto the flesh, and an utter negation of the habit of sowing unto the spirit. They may, one and all, exist consistent with an utter alienation from God, consistent with the character of an utter estrangement to the things of the Spirit. The possessors of all these may, throughout all their rounds of business, or companionship, or pleasure, be sowing only unto the flesh, and making this earth-this perishable earth-the scene of all their joys, and of all their expectations. We charge them not with crime, yet if they are so immersed in earthliness, as to have lost all practical sensibility towards God, we must refuse their Christianity. The whole drift and tendency of their affections are to the things which are beneath. The energy, the anxiety, the perpetual rovings of their hearts are all towards the accommodations and interests of time, and towards the consummation of their