spirits and foul demons around him, has so keen a sense of approaching blame as the finished sensualist. Arrows, flaming and ministering flame, pierce through and through his soul, while yet it lurks in time, and clings to earth. These are terrible admonitions of the future. O, it is Virtue's ways that are ways of peace. Take them, follow them, if you would not die. Ten thousand times, I tell you to take them, keep them, follow them, if you would escape the lake that burneth. Think not that there is a loss in this. No! the gain is a thousand-fold here! But, even if there were loss in self-restraint and self-conquest, who would not be willing to plant his joys here, in order to harvest them forever.

With one or two words, I close. Beware of beginnings! The time to stop in crime is before commencement. Young friends, your safety lies in never taking the first step. Give it no allowance in your meditations or imaginations! Scorn to let your immortal minds be stained by such pernicious employment. Be sensitive and watchful against the first and least temptation! Put from you all books and pictures that have a licentious bearing. Fly from everything that endangers virtue or defiles the heart. Avoid bad associates! Distrust them who prefer the night to the day; the lower to the higher pleasures; the dance and the frolic, to the higher duties and aspirations of life. Avoid every incentive to vice, in dress, in fashion, in airs and exposures, and in bewitching, beguiling charms! Do not form hasty acquaintances, nor fall a prey to flighty or flashy affections. Keep your heart: keep your judgment; hold your self-possession; set high by your hand; higher by your virtues; but highest by your hearts. Attend to the words of wisdom! How much are such words worth! Oh, how many have said, too late. How have I hated instruction and despised reproof. Worlds would I give for the innocence I have lost, and the chance I once had to be saved. There is but one course of safety; it is to give your hearts to Christ. Enter wisdom's ways. Come under the attractions of the cross. Then temptation will lose its charm, and your tastes and attachments will be pure. And when the hand of icy death feels for your heart-strings, and closes forever life's warm currents, you will be safe-you are blest!

RECTOR OF THE CHURCH OF THE ASCENSION, NEW YORK.

GOD'S WONDROUS DEALINGS.*

"Be glad ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain and the latter rain: and the floor shall be full of wheat, and the fats shall overflow with wine and oil. And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you."-JOEL ii. 23, 24, 26.

WONDROUSLY; as the harvest testifies. Wondrously; as peace, prosperity, and plenty testify. Wondrously; as our individual comforts, the lengthening of our days and the continuance of our hopes of heaven bear witness. The floors are full of wheat, and the fats overflow with wine and oil. We eat in plenty and are satisfied. We praise the name of the Lord who hath dealt so wondrously with us.

The ingathering from our harvest fields demands thanksgiving. Our civil authorities offer a tribute of gratitude to Him from whose Divine Providence their rights proceed, and by whom their enjoyment of them has been peacefully continued and confirmed. Our church unites her voice in the general offering of praise, remembering that the powers that be are ordained of God, and, in obedience to them, providing, by solemn hymns, and common prayers, for the irrepressible thanksgiving of her children. The general conscience of our people speaks a similar language,

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*Preached, New York, November 29th, 1855.

Let us

and the general heart throbs with a common generous impulse of gratitude to God. In harmony with such a spirit, we meet to place our common sacrifice on the altar which we love. come with such humble and fervent hearts as will call down, from the Lord our God, a reviving influence of his Spirit, to kindle our gratitude to praise; and mingle the incense from our temple with that mighty cloud which is gathering strength, and rolling upward from many thousand sanctuaries of our land, acceptably, toward the throne of our Father reconciled.

What theme should we indulge, but the wondrous dealings of God. His promise has not failed. Each season seems to re-erect Noah's altar in our midst, and to repeat to every generation the story of God's unfailing and unalterable word. Summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, still run their joyful round of obedience to the Creator's will, scattering generous delights with a full hand. God's Mercy went out with the sower as he laid down the precious seed. God's Mercy went out with the hoar frost, as he scattered his protecting snow-flakes over the tender plant. God's Mercy went out with the summer sun, as he came back from the south and looked upon our smiling fields on the sides of the north. God's Mercy drew clouds between, when the sun grew hot, and the growing grain languished. God's Mercy burst the clouds and sent down gracious rain from heaven, when the ripening grain had exhausted the nourishment from the thirsty soil. And so, God's Mercy having watched, protected and matured the seed, went out with the husbandmen and the reapers as they gathered in the sheaves. "The floors are full of wheat, and the fats overflow with wine and oil." It is sufficient to say that the harvest has equalled the hopes of the sower. We have not only sufficient for our own necessities, but abundance to pour out for the wants of sufferers in less favored portions of our world. And now while the reaper puts aside the sickle, and he that bindeth up the sheaves rests from his toil, there is a call upon us from the field and the barn floor, from the fireside which wellrewarded labor has made cheerful, and from the households which a plenteous harvest has placed above want, that we should unite in their song of gratitude to God's mercy. We would not refuse to rejoice with them that rejoice, even if we were not partakers of their good things. But since we share with them; and whilst every season, every month, every moment of the circling year pours God's mercies into our own cup, fills our own bosoms with the golden sheaves of God's benefits, we must have a Thansgiving for ourselves.

God's mercy has gone forth with our industry and enterprise under all its forms. Manufacturers have met a generous demand, and been able to return a liberel supply. Commercial exchange has favored many a people with our superabundance, and received a full return of comfort and luxury, both to profit itself,

and give joy to all who depend upon its energies. In a time of great commercial pressure, the forecast and frugality of our merchants, through God's blessing, has saved them from any general disaster. During a year of unexampled danger to the course of trade, our exchanges have been made with little disorder; amidst rumors of financial difficulty we have experienced little distress: property maintains its value, labor brings its remuneration, and wealth scatters its favors with a liberal hand. The professions and liberal arts, the efforts of science, talents, and mental industry, have all been accompanied in their sphere by God's mercy. They have received their reward, whether it were applause of men, pecuniary gain, the increase of human happiness, or the praise of God.

During the course of the year we have welcomed with great satisfaction the return of our Arctic voyagers. We may well say that their absence has been a source of national anxiety. Interrested as was every heart in the search which called them forth to brave the rigors of the pole, following them as representatives of our national solicitude for the lost wanderers amidst those ice wildernesses, we could not but fear that an indomitable enterprise would carry them also beyond all reach of succor, and that every expedition sent to their relief would but add to the monuments which eternal winter heaps over our Anglo-Saxon dead in the graveyard of the north. It was a God's Mercy that brought those brave companions home again in safety. It was a God's Mercy which brought day again to their long winter's night; which delivered them from a cold captivity, where many valiant hearts sleep with no hope of rescue until the ice lands of the pole give up their dead. We number it among the mercies for which we return thanks to God to day.

Nor can we omit from our general enumeration that good gift of largeness of heart, with which God has again blessed our favored community. We shall not soon forget the sorrows of our brethren in the south who were shut up to disease and distress, whilst health and plenty walked with free step in our midst. In those cities shrunken Pestilence, cursing the morsels of food and the drops of water, and the very air it breathed in common with an afflicted people, tottered from house to house distributing the plague, and left no house until it had commissioned the dead (whom there was no man to bury) to carry on its ministry of woe. As the sick died by hundreds, as the nurses and the physicians and the clergy perished at their posts-as the cries of the orphans filled our ears, what a mercy to ourselves it was, that our hearts did not shut themselves up in selfish rejoicing for our own safety. What a mercy to ourselves that no lines of quarantine -kept out the tidings of distress, or kept in the efforts of benevolence; that no arguments of indifferentism and economy prevented our going forth with sympathy, and effectual relief to the

suffering members of the one household. "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to thy name be the praise," for a soul to feel a brother's woe, a hand to minister to his relief, and an abundance which we could bestow upon his necessities. There is a view of this act of benevolence in which it becomes a national blessing, and deserves to be recorded and remembered. For it happened at a time when unhappy political questions were arising, which, if they were to be discussed with any other feelings than those which guide and guard the good tempered differences among brethren, threatened to rend our union. At such a moment, our sympathies being called into active exercise, the fact of our brotherhood, and the influences of fraternal kindness were felt on both sides. It has chastened, and we trust will continue to soften the asperity of the conflict of opinion. It is only needed that the charities of the gospel shall control our expressions, and our maintenance of conscientious differences. Then the national family shall know neither north nor south in their mutual concessions for the peace and welfare of the whole. And then shall we transmit to our children, unimpaired, that God's mercy of union and liberty which we have inherited from our forefathers. God's mercies! how they multiply as we study them. Good gifts, wondrous dealings of his kind providence with us unworthy sinners, bestowing social and domestic comfort and peace; the privileges of family communion and reciprocal deeds of love; contentment and competency, if not abundance and wealth; remnants of prosperity out of adversity; recovered prosperity after adversity; perhaps, prosperity without adversity; health out of sickness, it may be health without sickness; life prolonged, it is possible while we may have been daily walking amidst the tombs; life preserved, though dangers and accidents have many a time threatened; life permitted, perhaps, without an accident, perhaps unshaded even by a fear-as strong and ardent and buoyant and joyous and promising, as when we started on the race, ten, thirty, fifty-shall I say, seventy years ago? Nor is this the sum of God's wondrous dealings of mercy. There is something more than the blessings of the land whose bread is without scarceness, where honest industry never wants, whose stones are iron, whose hills are brass, whose streams are ever living, whose heavens drop down dew, and whose soil is generous as it is rich. There is something more than the blessing of civil liberty, and security of person and substance. There is something more than individual blessings of comfort, and peace, and prosperity, and health, and happiness. Neither the earth, the sun, the heavens, nor time itself can tell this story, or measure this blessedness. God's heart sends it forth. God's eternity is its sphere. God's only Son its subject. God's well beloved creatures its only object-creatures of whom it is said "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever be