"That will be a fair excuse." "That must be attended to immediately." "To delay that will be a serious evil." "That is a matter of practical duty, for which God will excuse the mental." When in the exercise, a person may detect himself readily recollecting and allowing a call away. What a test of the habitude of the heart is there in all this! "Thou restrainest prayer before God." We may specify again. In the interval appropriate to this exercise, a man may defer it till very near what he knows must be the end of the allowed time. He may be under obligatory regulations requiring him to meet certain business or engagements at nearly a precise time. Now, having this known measured time before him, does he allow himself to pass away the moments that belong to devotion till very near the appointed moment, so that there is time for only a few hurried sentences ?

Again, an inconvenient situation for devotional exercise, will often be one of the real evils of life. But here let the question be, Is this circumstance readily seized as a plea to conscience for but little practising the solemn exercise? The man is almost pleased that there is such a ground of excuse, and yet laying the whole blame of the omission or slightness on this cause.

This lamentably defective state of mind may be verified again in a mode like this, namely; "I did not very long since employ some moments in prayer; it will not be necessary so very soon again. For awhile I am free from the pressure of duty." As if the chief use of the preceding prayer were its clearing the time forward.

The having engaged in a social act of religion may be assumed as a partial excuse for omitting the private exercise, a kind of acquittance; the share of a social exercise is reckoned enough for the whole tribute from the individual. As if a social tribute were for the purpose of gaining an exemption for each individual.

Sometimes the exercise is made very brief from real unqualified want of interest. Or prayer is delayed from the sense of recent guilt. No wonder there should be an indisposition then. But will mere time wear the guilt away? And what will be the best security against renewed sin? Do not defer praying till more guilt come between! Do not, lest death come between!

The charge in the text falls upon the state of feeling which forgets to recognize the value of prayer as an important instrument, shall we call it, in the transactions of life. There may be an acknowledgment, in a general way, of its value, but in practice things are left to ordinary resources.

The charge falls, too, on the indulgence of cares, anxieties, and griefs, with little recourse to this great expedient. We may put the evil charged under the final general description, praying but so that there is a consciousness, "This will not do alw ys."

This is more than enough for enumeration and description. The few admonitory considerations which we might have added, to enforce a reform, can be little necessary, when the evil is so plainly evident.—It is a privation of whatever state and happiness it is, that is imported by "communion with God."-How much it foregoes the benefits of the intercession of Christ!-It precludes the disposition to refer to the Divine Being in social communications.—It saps a man's moral and Christian courage.-It raises a formidable difficulty in the way of recourse to God on urgent occasions and emergencies.

On the review of such an exposure, we do not adopt any formal language of exhortation. Mere exhortation is never of any use. Such representations and appeals to painful experience are of the essence of exhortation, and here therefore we leave the subject.

May 2, 1822.

LECTURE X.

THE SPRING AND ITS MORAL ANALOGIES.

PSALM civ. 30.

"Thou renewest the face of the earth."

SOME time since we were endeavouring to describe certain states or moods of feeling, which might be called seasons of the mind; and to show in what manner these might by a judicious and determined exercise of thought, be turned to an advantageous account.

The seasons of external nature, in the course of the year, are a part, and a considerably interesting part, of what makes up our condition during our sojourn on this earth; and good men, from the psalmist downward, have not been content that the effect of these seasons upon them should be confined to the mere external material condition, but have been desirous that the vicissitudes of nature should minister to the welfare of the mind.

The spring season especially has been regarded as fertile of what might afford salutary instruction in a pleasing vehicle. We are now in the very midst of this genial season; and before its flowers and bloom are past, we might do well to endeavour to draw from it something not quite so transient.

The vast importance to us, that this season should regularly and infallibly return in its time, is obvious the instant it is mentioned. But it is not so instantly recollected how entirely we are at the mercy of the God of nature for its return. We are in our places here on the surface of the

earth, to wait in total dependence for Him to cause the seasons to visit our abode, as helpless and impotent as particles of dust. If the Power that brings them on, were to hold them back, we could only submit, or repine-and perish! His will could strike with an instant paralysis the whole moving system of nature. Let there be a suspension of his agency and all would stop; or a change of it, and things would take a new and fearful course! Yet, we are apt to think of the certainty of the return of the desired season, in some other light than that of the certainty that God will cause it to come. With a sort of passive irreligion we allow a something, conceived as an established order of nature, to take the place of the Author and Ruler of nature, forgetful that all this is nothing but the continually acting power and will of God; and that nothing can be more absurd than the notion of God's having constituted a system to be, one moment, independent of himself.

Consider next, this beautiful vernal season:- -what a gloomy and unpromising scene and season it arises out of! It is almost like creation from chaos; like life from a state of death. If we might be allowed in a supposition so wide from probability, as that a person should not know what season is to follow, while contemplating the scene, and feeling the rigours of winter, how difficult it would be for him to comprehend or believe that the darkness, dreariness, bleakness, and cold-the bare, desolate, and dead aspect of nature, could be so changed. If he could then, in some kind of vision, behold such a scene as that now spread over the earth-he would be disposed to say, "It cannot be;" "this is absolutely a new creation, or another world!"

Might we not take an instruction from this, to correct the judgments we are prone to form of the divine government? We are placed within one limited scene and period of the great succession of the divine dispensations-a dark

and gloomy one-a prevalence of evil. We do not see how it can be, that so much that is offensive and grievous, should be introductory to something delightful and glorious. 'Look, how fixed! how inveterate! how absolute! how unchanging is not this a character of perpetuity ?" If a better, nobler scene to follow is intimated by the spirit of prophecy, in figures analogous to the beauties of spring, it is regarded with a kind of despondency, as if prophecy were but a kind of sacred poetry; and is beheld as something to aggravate the gloom of the present, rather than to draw the mind forward in delightful hope. And so we allow our judgments of the divine government,-(of the mighty field of it, and of its progressive periods,)—to be formed very much upon an exclusive view of the limited, dark portion of his dispensations which is immediately present to us! But such judgments should be corrected by the spring blooming around us, so soon after the gloomy desolation of winter. The man that we were supposing so ignorant and incredulous, what would he now think of what he had thought then?

Again, how welcome are the early signs, and precursory appearances of the spring; the earlier dawn of day;—a certain cheerful cast in the light, even though still shining over an expanse of desolation,—it has the appearance of a smile; a softer breathing of the air, at intervals ;-the bursting of the buds; the vivacity of the animal tribes; the first flowers of the season;-and by degrees, a delicate dubious tint of green. It needs not that a man should be a poet, or a sentimental worshipper of nature, to be delighted with all this.

May we suggest one analogy to this? The operation of the Divine Spirit in renovating the human soul, effecting its conversion from the natural state, is sometimes displayed in this gentle and gradual manner, especially in youth. In