it inspires, employing the means and only those which it dictates and sanctions-the great principles of the gospel, professed and lived, and loved, and preached, and the promised Spirit sought in earnest prayer; whoever in this tone and frame, will thus labor, and hold on against all signs and all weathers, will accomplish much in the end for human welfare-much for the regeneration of society, and the saving of the souls of men. All other plans and schemes, and theories abroad, are only experiments; mere mushroom-growths, the offspring of human pride and restlessness, But this other process, I have sketched, a chain at once of adamantine strength, and of shining links of love-constructed, from the golden treasures of the gospel, reaching back and making fast to the throne of God himself, and extending forward till it shall compass at length a world within the pale of a willing and joyous allegiance-this has stood the test and strife of ages, and has come out brighter and stronger from all the fires it has gone through. Many will scorn this way. Still they are blessed by it, if ever blessed at all. The true reformations are where God's word and signal working are. The decency, the morality, the piety are here-the foundation-stones, and the supporting pillars of the great edifice of society are here. All else but hay and wood and stubble. Our strength and valid expectation come only in a fixed trusting here-will be realized fully, gloriously, in a child-like leaning upon our God.

Let me in closing just indicate three or four remarks suggested by this subject.

1. This doctrine or sentiment of dependence shuts the door against most of the excuses made for withholding Christian endeavor. The greatest excuse of all, the one most frequently bubbling out, is this :-"I am such a poor weak creature, it is of no use to attempt any thing." This sentiment broods in many a heart, like a smothering ash bed, upon all the coals of Christian zeal; and is ever coming from the lips to chill and throw back other timid and adventuring hearts. "O, we are such little feeble ones; moats in God's immensity; 'tis of no use." I say, it is all wrong. You can do it perhaps certainly you can try. And it matters little whether you try, or Gabriel tries; for neither you nor Gabriel can do it without God. And God can do it, and will as soon do it, through you, as through Gabriel. Before our blessed doctrine of an ever present and ever working God, always ready to do through our humble endeavor, human littleness and feebleness has nothing to say, but only to go forward, believe and be strong in the Lord.

2. Our subject authorizes any measure of Christian expectation. I only name this. You see, at once. what a scale and scene of wonder it opens to the vision of your faith.

3. This feeling of dependence, is an admirable beauty in the character. The creature in his place giving God the throne;

God shining from his throne, and the creature dwelling beneath, in the flooding radiance of his beneficence; it is fitting-it is beautiful.

4. It is always a blessed feeling in the soul-something that makes the soul quiet and happy; to refer all might and efficacy to God; all our achievements and prosperity to him; to feel that gushing thankfulness; to render praise for his bounties; to thank and praise him still, there is nothing this side of heaven more like the essence and fulness of heaven's joy.

Finally. It is a feeling which will bring every person, truly and deeply cherishing it, within the circle and pale of God's eternal blessedness-the humility, the lowliness, the breaking down and the sinking of self, beneath the burden of your sins, these will bring you where Christ hung and bled: and standing there, and beholding that wondrous sight, with such a heart, taught its sins-your burden will fall. And the moment you bow in faith, your soul shall come and dwell in the favored circle of the redeemed and rejoicing in the kingdom of our God.

SERMON DCLIX.

BY REV. AARON L. LINDSLEY,

SOUTH SALEM, N.Y.

THE DAYS OF OLD.*

"Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy fathers, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee.”DEUT. XXxxii. 7.

MOSES, the Leader and Prophet of Israel, was one of the most remarkable personages whose names have come down to us in history. He occupied a station of the highest responsibility ever entrusted to man; and he discharged all obligations with the utmost fidelity. He elevated a race of bondmen into the dignity of a nation. He restored to them liberty, religion and law. His success as a Leader, was not more remarkable than his wisdom as a Legislator and Teacher. And we admire his true greatness of soul, when he ascribes all his successes to the direct interposition or the overruling Providence of God. His plans were accomplished because the Almighty was his guide. In every word he uttered, in every movement he made, he acknowledged himself

* A Discourse occasioned by the death of JEREMIAH KEELER, a soldier of the Revolution, delivered in the Presbyterian Church of South Salem, Westchester County. N. Y., Feb. 27, 1853.

to be the agent of the Most High, whose will respecting the descendants of Abraham he was commissioned to execute.

Having brought the numerous band of emigrants to the close of their long pilgrimage, he cites them to a grand review. The chief is about to resign his commission; for he and they must part before they cross the boundary of the promised land. His warfare is ended; he has fought his last battle; he will soon be at rest forever. At this point he addressed a farewell message to his countrymen, in the celebrated song, composed by divine command, of which the text forms a portion. He rehearsed the dealings, promises and threatenings of God respecting the Hebrews. He exhorts them to obedience by a review of God's mercies; and in this connection occur the words of the text: "Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will show thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee."

He sends them for instruction to the past, while their gaze is intently fixed on the immediate future. The brilliant prospects opening before them might cause them to forget the lessons which their long abode in the desert should convey. The words of admonition were therefore timely and important. In all their career, they had never more needed the counsels of wisdom, and the guidance of God, than when they were about to enter upon their long expected possessions. The occasion demanded a careful review of the principles which they had. adopted, and a reve rent compliance with the will of that beneficent Being, who had chosen them for His peculiar people from among all the nations of the earth. By such a retrospect, they would discover the hand of God in the disposal of every event; and be able to trace, amidst the agitated and conflicting affairs of time, the steady current of an all-wise Providence in "the days of old," and throughout the years of many generations." Their fathers could show them this unvarying course in the government of God their elders could tell them of His revealed plans, His promises, and His faithfulness.

Occasions frequently arise, not only in the progress of nations but also in the life of individuals, which justify the wisdom of retrospection. And we are naturally led to "remember the days of old." by the particular occasion which we have this morning assembled to honour with our mournful respect for the dead. It invites us to examine what our fathers have shown us, and listen to what our elders can tell us We look with filial respect upon the man whose head is silvered by the ninety-third winter of his life. He is the remnant of an age gone by. The span of his existence sweeps the circle of a century. He stands by the wayside of passing generations an oracle to be consulted, a monument to be revered. His is a voice from the heroic age of our country, relating from memory the narrative of events which

have long been the themes of history. No descendant of the revolutionary fathers can remain unmoved in the presence of one of their compatriots in arms, whose protracted life, embracing the manhood of three generations, brings vividly to view his compeers, long since departed. The heart glows with gratitude to God when we read the record of those times of battle and of victory for the unalienable rights of man: but the sight of a relic of the old Continental Line that pressed onward through reverses, destitution and self-sacrifice, up to final triumph and independence, stirs the heart with unwonted emotion, for it is the glorious past speaking eloquently to the present, not in the page of history, but with the living voice. It leads us to "remember the days of old," when the American colonists resisted the invasion of their natural and chartered rights: when the question was, whether they should remain subjects of the British constitution, or become vassals of the British throne.

It would ill become this day or this place to consider principally the secular issues which were involved in the momentous struggle that followed. We shall find an appropriate theme in the RELIGIOUS INTERESTS which were at stake. The claims set up and the pretensions made by many who have since come in for a share of freedom's blessings, require that our countrymen should be reminded that the war for independence was not exclusively a contest for civil liberty. The dear-bought rights of conscience were remotely jeopardized, and more directly the principle of religious liberty. The belief is well-founded, that if the Colonies had been subdued, the Church Establishment of England would have been declared by law the established church of all the Colonies, as it had been already in many of them. The confiscation of church property belonging to those who were called Dissenters, to the use of the established church, had already been perpetrated in some instances by the king's officials; and the power of a proud conqueror, supported by a mercenary Parliament, would not have scrupled at any pretext to accomplish an object, cherished by the temporal and spiritual aristocracy of the mother country. "No bishop, no king," a maxim first expressed by a sovereign of England, was a favourite saying of the nobility. And if the principle of "taxation without representation" had triumphed in the defeat of the colonists, this country would no doubt have been covered with lords spiritual as well as lords temporal, church lands as well as crown lands, church and crown united, and that monstrous system of ecclesiastical robbery called tithes, by which a man is compelled to pay for the support of a sect which he disapproves. A rich and worldly State church lording it over God's heritage, would have driven the colonists back into the wilderness again, to be enslaved as soon as their advancing prosperity should tempt the rapacious cupidity of kingly power.

This result was justly feared by many of the colonists whose fathers had escaped, or who had themselves fled from religious oppression in the old world; and they were like the elders of the children of Issachar, "men having understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do." Among them were descendants of the Huguenots of France, who "remembred the days of old," when their ancestors were tormented with savage barbarity, or tortured to death, because they would not give up their Bible and their God; and who did not forget that night of old-that night of unequalled horrors-which followed the eve of St. Bartholomew's. Among them were representatives of the brave Hollanders, who asserted their independence and maintained their Protestant Christianity, against the most formidable popish powers of Europe. Among them were children of the Scottish covenanters, who met to worship God in desolate retreats-who hid in dens and caves of the earth to escape outrages and death at the hands of a brutal soldiery, obeying a more brutal king. Among them were descendants of Cromwell's warriors, to whom Englishmen are at this day indebted for some of their most valued privileges, and who had victoriously fought in defence of the Reformation on the plains of Europe, and had thus learned to oppose tyranny by force. With one threatening word, their master stopt the bloody persecution of the Waldenses; and thenceforth, during the life of Cromwell, persecution was at an end. Among them pre-eminently were the honoured Puritans of England, who feared God rather than king or prelate, and were therefore exiled from their country, and compelled to carve a home out of the wild forests of America.

All these classes had been sufferers for conscience sake under the power of despotic kings, although in some of these cases, the royal authority was obedient to an ecclesiastical power that claimed to be superior to all the monarchs of the earth. Hence these classes of colonists were suspicious of every encroachment of the crown on their chartered rights, as jeopardizing or invading their religious privileges. To the effect of this conviction, the success of the American Revolution is directly traceable. While many engaged in the contest mainly for the defence of civil rights, many were moved to the same measure to maintain the supremacy of a free Gospel in connection with civil liberty. And hence, on the main issue, a general harmony of counsels and of effort prevailed throughout the Colonies.

But it was the Puritan spirit which reigned over all that mighty contest. It has been well said that God sifted the kingdoms for wheat wherewith to sow the virgin soil of America. And the same God suffered not the old monarchies to reap the precious harvest. The Puritan spirit was transplanted into the new world, and here found an ample field, a fertile soul, and a vigorous growth. The Spirit of the Lord was in it, and "where the Spirit