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SERMON,

&c.

ACTS xvii. 5, 6.

But the Jews which believed not, moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and set all the city on an uproar, and assaulted the house of Jason, and sought to bring them out to the people. And when they found them not, they drew Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of the city, crying, "These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also."

IN the narrative from which the above words are taken we find one of the innumerable proofs of that bitter animosity which is ever exciting the unregenerate and carnal mind against the teachers of righteousness. The infusion of Christianity into the soul of man has been designated by Scripture as a new creation, a second birth, by which our old propensities are obliterated, and others of a directly contrary character generated. And the expression can scarcely be said to be figurative. No contrast can, in fact, be stronger than that which is presented by a well-disciplined Christian

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mind, when compared with the wayward, gross, and reckless votary of this world. The spiritual man exists for God, and the unseen things of eternity the natural man for self, and the debasing sensualities of carnal objects. Externally alike in many of their social habits, they are internally, in all their ideas and the ends for which they live, as different from each other as any two orders of creatures can possibly be. The consequence of this total dissimilarity of habit and feeling is a hatred by anticipation, a kind of instinctive moral revulsion on the part of the natural and unregenerate man against the regenerate and spiritual. "What have we to do with Thee, Jesus thou Son of God?" was the alarmed exclamation of the evil spirits, who saw that, by the coming of the Redeemer, their unhallowed reign was drawing rapidly to a close. And such is still the anxious cry of the children of this world, when disturbed by the preachers of righteousness in the enjoyment of their darling sins, "What have we to do with Thee, Jesus thou Son of God, art thou come hither to torment us?" They find themselves checked in their career of grovelling vice: they begin to feel, in spite of all their efforts to the contrary, the stings of an alarmed conscience, and the terrors of the world to come, and they rise up in a spirit of angry retaliation against their importunate and unwelcome monitors. Anxious only to pursue their own degrading course without interruption, they

consider themselves not as the injuring, but as the injured party they deem the warning voice, which admonishes them of their danger, as a personal insult, and the pity and sorrow which points from earth to heaven as an act of unprovoked aggression; and they reply to it, accordingly, with undissembled hostility. Such has ever been the reception which He, who so entirely knew what was in man, foresaw, from the first, that the blessed doctrines of meekness, and righteousness, and peace, would have to encounter from a depraved world. "Think not," was His prophetic warning, "think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I am not come to send peace, but a sword." And never was prophecy more completely fulfilled to the very letter. Strange indeed, and paradoxical, it ought to appear to those who know what the merciful principles of Christianity are, that a message, so gracious as that of the Gospel, should, from the first moment of its promulgation, have excited in its hearers feelings of the most deadly hatred. But such, at all events, has been the fact. Account for it as we may, no dislike is assuredly more intense, no deadliness of antipathy more portentous than that which actuates the carnal mind against the doctrines of the Gospel. Even in the comparatively dark period of natural religion and of heathenism, it rarely happened that any more highly-gifted individual set an example of goodness beyond the age in which he lived, without paying, with his life a penalty for his virtues.

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since the promulgation of Christianity, as the contrast of character has been more marked, the concurrent feeling of repugnance, on the part of the children of this world, has become proportionably more uncompromising. From the date of that remarkable epoch in man's history, we seem, in fact, to recognize a kind of desperate struggle for the supremacy of the moral world, in which the spirit of evil is, on the one hand, striving, by every possible stratagem, to retain its original possession of the human heart, whilst that of righteousness, on the other, is proceeding to eject it from its place. There is, accordingly, no form or modification of resistance under which the merely natural man will not take shelter, if, by so doing, he can cling, unmolested, to those beloved sins which have become almost identified with himself. At one time his language is the plaintive and peevish remonstrance of the sluggard, "Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep;" at another he is striving to render those truths powerless by his ridicule, which he knows that he cannot refute by his arguments; at another he is vilifying them by the most gross misrepresentations and calumnies; at another he is steeping his hands in innocent blood, and joining an infuriate mob in the fiendish yell of "crucify him, crucify him."

My brethren, if we have learned to know the human heart, not from the flattering descriptions of human philosophy, but from the accurate estimate of it supplied by Scripture, these results ought not, for

a moment, to excite our surprise. From first to last. it has been the lot of the kingdom of heaven to suffer violence. Satan is indeed trembling, and justly, for the possession of his strong holds, from which one, stronger and mightier than he, threatens to eject him. No wonder that, by an instinctive sympathy, the world, which he has deluded by his enchantments, unites with him to repel the invasion of its most dearly-cherished treasures; that it, with one voice, deprecates the interference of its sober monitors, who would dash away the cup of sensuality from its lips, and protests against the aggression of those who would, as it were, "turn it upside down." To men thus confederated together by a common imaginary interest of carnal indulgence, wickedness is a no less powerful band of union and sympathy than goodness itself. It is recorded as having been a common remark of those who lived in the early ages of the Church, "See how these Christians love one another:" but not less closely drawn, though it would be a profanation of the word "love" to apply it to such an occasion, is that community of purpose which leagues together the children of this world against those who would warn them to flee from the wrath to come. If a bad man can, on any one occasion, forget his own natural selfishness, and cordially make common cause with his neighbour, it is when goodness is to be hunted from the face of the earth. Thus it was at that most portentous consummation of iniquity, the crucifixion of our blessed Saviour.

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