God for

you.

brought to acknowledge him, boldly and faithfully to acknowledge him, their once incarnate Saviour, their now glorified and only deliverer from the bondage and the condemnation of sin. You who do not yet acknowledge him thus, beware how you listen not to him that speaketh unto you from heaven. His signs are in the world; and whatever they precede as their grand and final issue, this they undoubtedly intend, that you also should awake, and call upon your God. He, the Saviour of mankind, calls you to acknowledge him as a Saviour Abase the pride of reason, and bow down at the foot of his cross: mortify the desires of the worldly, unrenewed heart, and follow Christ: renounce that world which you have solemnly promised to renounce, and give up your souls unto him who hath bought them with his blood. Call upon him now, while time remains, and grace may be imparted to you to call upon him at all; and join the general chorus of his redeemed, who, in blissful experience in the realms of light, or in gifted faith among the saints that are yet on earth, sing the heartfelt song of "Worthy is "the Lamb." So learn wisdom from the signs of the times;" and in the manifestation

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of the signs, and in your own spiritual profiting thereby, you shall be enabled from your inmost soul to know and believe that "this is the finger of God." Your share in the mercy of the dispensation shall then be manifested to your own rich enjoyment; and when Christ shall come to you by death or by judgment, you shall see him as he is, and be made, amid the thousand times ten thousand which surround his throne, a glorified partaker of his redeeming love.

SERMON III.

"THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES."

HEBREWS xiii. 3.

Remember them that are in bonds.

A Third Advent Sunday again calls upon us to remember Christ; Christ come in the flesh, Christ hereafter to come to the Judgment. How can we better remember him than in the application of his own words: "What I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch?" Watch for every passing incident which shall administer matter and opportunity for closer knowledge, closer imitation, of Christ; closer walking in the communion of Christ. And remembering Christ, we are called upon to remember our brethren: Christ bids us do so; and his sacred word adds the consideration of human suffering as the constraining call for

this our Christian remembrance: "Remember "them that are in bonds."

This short admonition from the holy Apostle of us gentiles, abounding in all the warm glow of an animated Christian love, will be a fit introduction to our consideration of the second among "the signs of the times"-the general abhorrence felt and openly avowed, and in a large portion of Europe acted upon, in regard to what was once the open practice, and ever will be the eternal disgrace, of Christian countries, in their public Marketing for Human Slaves.

In considering this subject, from this place, I feel that I tread upon tender ground; but that, much more from the surmises which the bare naming of such a subject may elicit from my hearers as to what I may advance hereafter, than from any conviction upon my own mind that the view I mean to take of it ought to give offence, though censure, I fear, I must be prepared to incur. The very mention of a subject of this magnitude, and near relationship to the strongest feelings of many, before it be known how and for what purposes it will be introduced, would necessarily excite suspicion as to its being named at all: and in this, our

native country, which once stood foremost with all her maritime and mercantile sanction given to the thing, and with no legislative preventive set against it, the only recent change of sentiment among us will not justify the hope that it is yet changed to all.

Why then do I bring it before you? Not, my brethren, with any other object than as linking it among those signs of our times, which call upon all of us to consider: not as a mere political question, at once nullifying private rights and long aknowledged possessions: not as a source of personal condemnation: not with the view of investigating the whole subject, in any of its bearings, one jot further than shall give it its character as a "sign of the times, in reference to its moral influence, and therefore pregnant with spiritual usefulness. But while I thus deprecate the wish needlessly and unjustly to wound the feelings of individuals upon a subject for which, in its first beginning, they are not responsible; I would not have one single voice that can be raised among us silent, upon what this detested traffic is, in itself, in the sight of God and man. That an Asiatic despot, in heathen darkness, should trample on his fellow-creatures' necks, and call them