drive rocks a vast distance along with them. All would soon be over, as to living existence, in the tracts within the immediate power of such tremendous eruptions and torrents. But many of the great elevations would remain many weeks, and some of them even months, high above the flood,—and so would afford ground to multitudes of the doomed and despairing people who could escape thither. But think of them! seeing, day after day, the dire enemy still rising,—still approaching,—and the while, many of them perishing with famine! And, it were not in the least an improbable imagination, that in many instances there might break out among them a deadly and infernal frenzy, in which they set upon and destroyed one another—and the survivors devoured the dead. We imperfectly remember expressing some such idea in a former instance; there is not the least extravagance in it; it is true to the nature of man, social man, when wicked and reduced to extremity. Within this month there has been published an account from Para of a horrible example. The antediluvian world had been "filled with violence," we are told; and there was nothing to extinguish that spirit on the last summits on which men continued alive. We may well believe, that depravity so extreme as to bring an universal destruction from the Righteous Governor, would continue depravity to the last; and that the final spark of life might go out in fury!

At length there was the entire surface of the solid globe without sin!-But to think that it could not be so but by being without men! When all was accomplished, the sovereign dictate repressed the flood, and gradually sent its tumultuons waters to the dark hiding place from which he had called them. The ark (in a place probably far off from where it had been built) touched the ground once more, and Noah and his family had to reflect what had been done since it had last touched the ground!—after a confinement of a

complete year, he was summoned to come forth, with all the beings of which he had been made the guardian so long. When he was delivered from the incessant, complicated cares and toils of this great charge, his thoughts would be more free to expatiate in solemn meditation.

Where was all he had been accustomed to behold, for six hundred years, and that was around him the last year at this time? The numbers of men-the towns-the camps -the arts, the works, the revels, the crimes,-the very face of nature itself?-All swept from the creation! A deserted, desolate planet that had been populous in God's creation! Nothing short of having gone to another world could be so strange.

And for SIN this mighty destruction had passed over the world! How he would deprecate the return of this dreadful cause with the renewed population, on the new face of the earth! "As man has expired, oh that sin also might be dead!"

And what an awful sentiment he would feel toward the righteous Governor,-at such a demonstration that He will be righteous, at whatever cost to any rebellious and unholy part of his creation,—that there shall be holiness, or there must be vengeance! And again, Noah might feel a grateful wonder why he, with his family, should have been the one to be divinely preserved from the wickedness of mankind, in order to be saved from their destruction, and to be made the origin of a new race. Would he assume it as a ground of pride?-He did well to begin by "building an altar to the Lord," and offering devout sacrifices. But the arkwould not that be to him, as long as it remained undecayed, a favourite and peculiarly solemn temple in which to adore the Almighty? It had been built in holy "fear;" it had been built in "faith;" it had answered to his faith; had fulfilled the promise; had been the effectual medium of his

temporal salvation. Every sight of it would renew the admonition and conviction that God is true,-both in his threatenings and his promises. And, since his was not a faith of merely temporal reference, but extended to the concern of an infinitely greater salvation, the ark would be a most striking emblem to him of that grand and sole appointed expedient for the exemption of the soul from a more awful destruction-the "manifestation of the Son of God in the flesh."

To this sovereign refuge was he also "moved by fear;" fear of a danger transcendently more dreadful than any that could fall from the tempestuous skies, or ascend from "the fountains of the great deep." And our only effectual faith is that in which, "moved by fear," we hasten to HIM that is all-sufficient to save, with all the solemn earnestness with which the patriarch applied himself to prepare the ark.

LECTURE XLV.

CHRIST, THOUGH INVISIBLE, THE OBJECT OF

DEVOUT AFFECTION

1 PETER i. 8.

Whom having not seen ye love; in whom though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."

It is familiar to all experience and observation how much the action of our spiritual nature is dependent on the senses; especially how much the power of objects to interest the affections depends on their being objects of sight. The affections often seem reluctant to admit objects to their internal communion except through the avenues of the senses. The objects must be, as it were, authenticated by the senses, must first occupy and please them,—or they are regarded by the inner faculties as something strange, foreign, out of our sympathies, or unreal.

Sometimes a philosophic spirit, proudly aspiring to a refined power of abstraction and speculation, is indignant that it should be so dependent for its objects of interest, and its emotions, on the senses. It earnestly essays to create, as it were, within itself, an order of realities of its own. A Christian mind also, from a far better principle, is often grieved and indignant that the objects of the senses so much more readily obtain favour and power within it, than the objects of its intellectual apprehension; that it is so much more easy to walk by sight than by faith. And

it is a worthy and noble strife of a Christian spirit to attain a more vital and affecting communion with things invisible.

At the same time, it is of necessity that we must yield in a measure to the effect of the constitution of our nature. By that constitution, the objects of sense, the things especially that are seen, have some evident and important advantages for engaging our affections, over the other class of objects. Let us specify a few. The objects which we can see, give a more positive and direct impression of reality; there can be no dubious surmise whether they exist or not. The sense of their presence is more absolute. When an object is seen before me, or beside me, I am instantly in all the relations of being present; I cannot feel and act as if no such object were there; I cannot by an act of my mind put it away from me. Objects seen,-may have very striking qualities simply as objects of sight; they may have visible splendour, or beauty, which strike and please independently of any thinking. Here therefore is a class of qualities of great power to interest us, which the objects or mere belief, of faith, have nothing to set against.

Again, the good or evil, pleasure or grievance, which the visible objects cause to us, are often immediate; they are now; without any anticipation I am pleased, benefited, or perhaps distressed. Whereas the objects of faith can be regarded as to have their effect upon us in futurity. They have really very much of this prospective character; but we thoughtlessly make it much more exclusively such than it is.

Visible objects, when they have been seen, can be clearly kept in mind in absence;-during long periods,—at the greatest distance. We can revert to the time when they were seen. We can have a lively image; seem to be looking at it still. But the great objects of faith having never been seen, the mind has no express type to revert to.