up. In this solitude may come that tempter that came to our Lord in the desert. In truth, unhappily there is no situation or employment in which temptation is not to be apprehended.

We only add, what vigilance and prayer are necessary against the sudden violent surprises of temptation! These may come with as little warning almost as the dreadful accidents that befall men's persons. A sudden flash of infernal fire kindles the passions, and prostrates the judgment and conscience. Divine aid can come as suddenly as these assaults. But who may confidently rely that it

shall?

Now, think of all this; and then of a heedless, self-trusting, and prayerless habit of mind! What must be the consequence? Serious persons amidst their self-reproachful reflections may be amazed at the preventing goodness of God that still worse has not befallen them. To think how many days and weeks they have begun, how many scenes and occupations passed through, with little of real earnest. prayer, little of solicitous conscientious vigilance. How grateful should they be to think how many temptations they have been mercifully kept out of the way of, which they probably would not have resisted! But let them consider whether the proper testimony of that gratitude will be, that henceforward they little care or apply to his heavenly protection. They would have cause to dread that, even if they should not be at length fully and finally given up to evil, they will be suffered to fall into some great iniquity, in order to rouse them by the horrors of guilt. Think solemnly of the frightful extent of the possibilities of falling into sin. And that it is an insult to God to calculate on escaping without the means he has enjoined. "Watch and pray." These must be combined; for watching without prayer were but an impious homage to ourselves.

Prayer without watching were but an impious and also absurd homage to God.

And let it be observed, finally, what emphatic importance there is in the point of being saved from entering into temptation; since when a man is fully in it, and under the strength of its influence, there is an end of watching, and an indisposition to pray!

March 14th, 1822.

LECTURE VI.

SPIRITUAL FREEDOM PRODUCED BY KNOWLEDGE

OF THE TRUTH.

JOHN viii. 22.

"The truth shall make you free."

You all recollect the reception given to this declaration of our Lord, and the reply, "We were never in bondage to any man." The Jews did not take his words in the sense he meant;-but let the sentence be taken in their own sense, and a more absurd reaction of pride is not easy to be imagined-" Were never in bondage to any man!” What! had they not the Roman governor, with a division of the imperial guards, in their metropolis? They retained, indeed, a little of the show of a monarchy,—a king by sufferance, over a people tributary to a foreign power; but of so little account was this government of their own, that in the arraignment of our Lord, his claim to be "King of the Jews," was alleged not as in contravention to the rights of Herod but of Cæsar.

But our Lord was speaking of a far different kind of bondage and emancipation; a matter affecting all mankind, after all the Cæsars are dead, and the Roman empire is fallen. And in this far more important view of men's condition, it is striking to observe how much pride of freedom there may be amidst the profoundest slavery. This is exemplified in multitudes of the citizens of any state politically free; they shall be seen exhibiting a proud consciousness of this privilege (each one is lord of himself),

with the utmost contempt and scorn of the people of those nations where all are subject to the will of one or a few. Now very far be it from us to undervalue political libertya right of human nature, a thing without which no people can ever rise high in wisdom, virtue, and happiness. But at the same time, contemplate in another light, any such free nation existing, or that ever did exist,-how many of the people elated with this proud distinction, stand exposed to your view as slaves, in a sense they little think of! Many in subjection to their appetites; many to the most foolish, many to the most vicious passions. Now to them what an inconsiderable good is their political liberty, as compared with the evil of this slavery! and yet, amidst it all, there is the self-complacency, the pride, the boasting of freedom!

Take another exemplification. A high-spirited man in very independent circumstances, with confidence and selfsufficiency conspicuous on his front; in numberless cases he can and will do as he pleases; he has the means of commanding deference and obsequiousness, defies and spurns interference and opposition; and says "I am free!" For all this, perhaps, he is but the stronger slave. All the while, his whole mind and moral being may be utterly servile to some evil passion, some corrupt purpose, some vain interest, some tyrannic habit.

We might specify one more exemplification, namely, the pride of free-thinking, carried to the extent of rejecting revealed religion. Here, indeed, the man will perhaps say that he verifies the text; the truth has made him free; he has quite impartially and in the soundest exercise of reason, satisfied himself that there is no divine revelation, and that there wanted none; that that which claims to be acknowledged such, and the whole history concerning it, are a most wicked imposition on mankind; that the recorded

miracles are a fabrication of lies; that the little good there is mixed up in the imposture was well known or attainable without it; that the judgment to come, and heaven and hell, are idle fictions; that immortality, and indeed a future state at all, are matters of such mere conjecture, and so like poetical fancies, as not to be worth seriously taking into calculation in the scheme of this short life; and a hundred other things his reason has achieved. And upon this, he has a proud sense of freedom from vulgar delusion! Now a Christian judges all this to be a most signal prostration and slavery of the man's reason; but let that pass; allow him to say, "I am free;" yet we might turn upon him and say, "Nay, but are you really free, in your own. sense? have you never any dread of being left alone to your own reflections? have you never any dark and terrifying intimations speaking to your soul? if you happened to be reminded of the solemn dying expressions of a parent or friend, are you 'free?' If you hear of, or witness, the last scene of one of the same class of freemen dying with inexpressible horror, are you 'free ?' If any illness should attack yourself, and suggest the alarming idea of death, are you 'free?' No; you are in reality not 'made free,' even in your own sense. But even supposing that you were, it would in another sense be but slavery. You would be surrendered, as if bound hand and foot, to all that is most pernicious to man. You would be just so much the more at the command of every temptation to sin; just so much the more completely a slave to any favourite vice;—a vice, perhaps, most destructive of present welfare. You would be just so much more at the mercy and the sport of the frivolous and the profligate. And this is your proud freedom!" Thus the most wretched of slaves are beguiled by a self-assurance of being free!

A grand primary thing that truth has to do in this world