by Hazael or to dwell upon his character further than as an illustration of those facts in human depravity which it reveals, and which were not peculiar to him, but which are common to all men in their natural condition. Hazael grasped a crown by the foulest murder, and mounted to the throne over the slain body of his master, to wield the bloody sceptre of a vindictive and merciless tyrant. And, perhaps, you are ready to say, "What have we in common with such a man? How can his character illustrate our own?" As to his deeds you have nothing in common, and as to the prominent points of his character you have nothing. I am not preaching to blood-stained murderers, or exterminating tyrants. But there is an important point, because it is the radical point in which his character and yours unite, and do actually become one. You look upon the man and his deeds and you find in your hearts no sympathy with his crimes, but with instinctive aversion you brand him, in his own epithet, "a dog?" But I would have you look beyond his deeds to the source and spring of all his crimes, and then say, if you find no corresponding fountain of iniquity within your own breast. As yet it may have poured torth no such dark or crimson tides of guilt, perhaps it never will in this world. And, perhaps,. those swelling floods are withheld only because you are not the eventual successor to Syria's throne, and because you are not Syria's king, in those days when Damascus was the pride of Syria and Syria the mightiest empire in the East. Say not in your indignation "Is thy servant a dog that he should do these things!" lest in so saying you only help to complete the resemblance and point the moral which we seek to enforce.

Let us look at the facts:

But

1. Hazael knew, when he uttered these words, that he was a wicked man, and that his tendencies were wicked. So do you, and so does every unrenewed man know the same. You may have no meditated murder upon your conscience or any other deed of darkness to make you quail under the eye of a fellow man. you have the guilt of long continued and daring sin upon your conscience, and there is an eye before which you shrink abashed, and there is an accuser, sometimes sterner than the Hebrew prophet, whom you cannot confront. By familiarity with sin, it may have grown comparatively easy, and a stupefied conscience may give you little trouble, except an occasional twinge. But you know that you cannot stand before God in judgment and answer for one in a thousand of your sins, and the thought of that dread tribunal will, now and then, stimulate conscience to an unwonted activity and alarm your guilty fears. Your refuge, then, is in escaping reflection, or in soothing your apprehensions by extenuating your sins and magnifying your merits. You plead the infirmities of the flesh and the little harm you have

done; you are not as bad as others; you have maintained your integrity as a man, at least, you are no hypocrite and exemption from that crime you hold as a high merit, if not as an actual indemnity for all your sins. But with it all you cannot escape the conviction that you are wicked, and your tendencies are wicked; you have not rendered unto God the things which are God's ; you have trampled upon his authority; you have broken his laws and though sometimes troubled, you are not penitent for your sins, but persist in their practice. Sinner, is it not so? Well, then, the first point is made out, and as we are not inquiring for the measure and degree of actual trangression but for the source and nature of sin, you must confess that you have this much in common with Hazael, namely, a wicked and depraved heart. But this is a main point, for if your conduct flows forth from the same polluted fountain, it implies a correspondence of character, though the streams of iniquity may not in both cases have proceeded to the same extent of evil.

2. But again, Hazael was a much worse man than he supposed himself to be, and capable of committing crimes at the prospect of which he shuddered. And so are you, and so are all unregenerated men far more wicked than they suppose, and capable of an excess of sin from which, under other circumstances, they would shrink with horror. The truth upon this subject is, no man knows himself until he is tried, every man finds himself more susceptible to the power of temptation than he had supposed, and any man unrestrained by the power of divine grace, has no security that he shall not be carried away to the last extreme of vice and crime. "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?" "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." There are mournful and startling examples upon record, of grievous sins into which good men have fallen, and which stand as beacon-lights along the pathway of life, to warn away from temptation even the Christian who is unduly confident in himself. penitential strains of Israel's bard have been fitly sung by many a saint recovered from his sins, and by it taught, as David was, to know his own weakness. But in the heart, unrewed by divine. grace, there are tendencies to evil which no man can limit or confine, by any boundaries which he himself shall erect. The barriers of education or the restraints of society may suffice, under favorable circumstances, but they will be swept away when temptation, opportunity, and passion combine to open the floodgates of iniquity and pour out the gathered, but hidden wickedness of the heart. There was a time when even a Nero could exhibit some marks of sensibility, but the man who once wept at the execution of a felon, coolly plotted and executed the murder of his own mother, and revelled in fiendish delight in the destruction of his own capital, and the unprovoked slaughter of hun

The

dreds and thousands of its citizens. The point I desire to impress is simply this, there is no assignable limit to the wickedness to which any man may be carried in whose heart the devil has possession. He may yet coolly perpetrate crimes at the suggestion of which he would now be indignant, and cry out with Hazael, "Is thy servant a dog?" But let him become king of Syria, in other words, let his present circumstances be changed, and power and opportunity concur, and he has no security that the indwelling devil will not be displayed in all the diabolical excesses of an incarnate fiend.

3. And intimate connection with this is that other fact, that every heart in which God does not reign is under the dominion of the devil. He may not, as yet, have exterminated all its sensibilities. The sinner may never, in this world, become altogether a devil, but the latent evil is there, and it only waits its development to make him all that his inexorable master would have him to be.

SERMON DCLVI.

BY REV. EDMUND B. FAIRFIELD.

PRESIDENT OF HILLSDALE COLLEGE, HILLSDALE, MICHIGAN.

CHRISTIAN MEEKNESS HONOURABLE.

"The discretion of a man deferreth his anger, and it is his glory to pass over a transgression."-PROVERBS xix. 11.

VERY diverse are the ideas which different men have conceived of honor; and various, accordingly, are the standards which have been adopted for the measurement of honorable conduct. The time has been when he who was most successful in pommelling the body of his fellow, or in inflicting the speediest and deadliest revenge for real or supposed injuries, was the applauded of surrounding thousands and the honoured of a nation. The time is even yet when the conquering chieftain who has steeped the battle-field in the blood of his enemies, and who has rolled the widest and deepest wave of ruin over states and nations, returns to receive from enthusiastic millions his crown of glory,

Amid the various and, for the most part, degrading concep tions of the glory of man which have generally prevailed, the exalted morality of the text is most advantageously seen. Unregenerate men in their best estate have too often regarded revenge as

the mark of a noble spirit, and he who could brook insult and injury without attempting to call down vengeance upon the head of his enemy, has been esteemed ignoble, mean, and weakminded. But how opposite the sentiment of the text-"It is the GLORY of a man to pass over a transgression!" That which impulsive man has reckoned a decisive mark of pusillanimity is thus avowed to be his highest and truest glory. And my object shall be, in a few words, to show that it is so.

It is in obedience to the highest dictates and noblest sentiments of the human soul. Humanity presents us with a strange compound of the animal and the spiritual; of passion, and propensity, and appetite on the one hand, and reason and conscience on the other. Which of these two classes of principles was designed to be supreme, and which subordinate, is evident as well from reason as from revelation; and which, as a matter of fact, has been subordinate, and which supreme, the history of man too sadly and clearly teaches. The fall of man has reversed the order which God establishes. Passion and animality have been exalted to the throne, and reason and spirituality have been stripped of the sceptre: and trampled in the dust. The dictate of passion is self-gratification; and that dictate is the law for unregenerate man-called in the Scriptures the law of the flesh. The dictates of the intelligence or of reason are in accordance with the teachings of the Spirit of the Almighty; and hence are spoken of by the Apostle as the law of the Spirt. When man exalts to the throne the mere animal propensities, he brutifies his soul, and infinitely degrades the lofty powers with which his Maker has endowed him. When he places the reins of government in the hands of conscience, and makes the soul pre-eminent over the body, he realizes the end for which God designed him. In breathing the spirit of revenge he does the former; in exercising meekness and forgiveness he does the latter. Then it is that he appears as man, and not as a beast. Then it is that he stands up in the dignity of his moral and spiritual nature, "a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honor." It is thus that he is shown to be possessed of true nobility by Heaven's own patent. Then does he most magnify his office as lord of creation, when it is seen that he can govern himself. Every passion is humbled into submission, and bows respectfully to the authority of that inner law which the finger of God has written upon the soul. When the cries of revenge for the blood of an enemy are hushed into silence, and the raging storm of the baser passions is quelled at the voice of command, then is seen the majesty of the divine in man. The spirit of retaliation springs indigenous in the human heart. No disposition is more strongly marked, or more universally prevalent. It is seen from the first opening development of the animal being, and, unextinguished by influences from above, it burns on till

death. Constant indulgence gives it strength. And when we see the man who displays such power of self-control and such a nobleness of spirit as are demanded to quell the risings of turbulent passion, and to conquer the power of inveterate habit, we mark it as a notable instance of self-government, and a memorable triumph of the spiritual over the animal nature. And as the soul is nobler than the body, and an angel more glorious than a beast, so is meekness nobler than revenge.

We cannot but admire and honor this noblity of spirit wherever exhibited; and this is itself a proof of the doctrine of the text. A meck and forgiving spirit is consonant with the noblest sentiments that ever found a home in the bosom of man, and cannot fail to awaken the highest respect. It is said of the renowned Henderson, that the oldest of his friends never beheld him otherwise than calm and collected; it was a state of mind he retained in all circumstances. During his residence at Oxford, a student of a neighbouring college, proud of his logical acquirements, was solicitous of a private disputation with the distinguished Henderson. Some mutual friends introduced him, and having chosen his subject; they conversed for some time with equal candor and moderation; but Henderson's antagonist perceiving his confutation inevitable, forgetting the character of a gentleman, and with a resentment engendered by his former arrogance, threw a glass full of wine in his face. Henderson, without altering his features, or changing his position, gently wiped his face, and then coolly replied, "This, sir, is a digression; now for the argument!" "All that is great and good in the universe is on the side of clemency and mercy. If we look

into the history of mankind we shall find that in every age those who have been most respected as truly worthy, have been distinguished for this virtue. Revenge dwells in little minds: a noble and magnanimous spirit is superior to it. It has been beautifully said that "the greatest man on earth can no sooner commit an injury, than a good man may make himself greater by forgiving it.

Philip of Macedon was a king and a warrior. Such was the path of honor in his day. But his acts of moderation, when sometimes addressed in injurious and insulting language, were the most truly kingly of any that gave lustre to his reign. At the close of an audience which he gave to some Athenian ambassadors, who were come to complain of some act of hostility, he asked whether he could do them any service. "The greatest service thou couldst do us," said Demochares, "would be to hang thyself." Although the persons present were all of them highly offended at these words, Philip, with the utmost calmness of temper, made the following answer: Go tell your superiors that those who dare make use of such insolent language are more haughty and less peaceably inclined than those who can forgive it." And we