future world, we are to take into view the fact, that the actual spiritual condition of the soul is not to be taken as the measure of personal merit. Spiritual condition is absolute, merit is relative, and is measured not by results alone, but by endowments and opportunities. Endowments and opportunities diminish the merit of the very excellence they enable a man to attain. In a heathen, a much lower degree of excellence may be more meritorious than a much higher one under Christian light and influences. Socrates may have been more meritorious in the sight of God than a majority of Christians, because he reached a sublime height of virtue under the mere light of nature.

So, on the same principle, God is our example, and we are commanded to be "followers of God, as dear children," and to "be perfect, as our Father who is in heaven is perfect"; but he cannot justly be made our measure, for he is infinite and we are finite. He is omniscient and self-sufficient. He is incapable of temptation. He cannot err and cannot

sin.

We commence our career at nothing, in utter weakness and ignorance, and let our progress be never so direct and never so rapid, we cannot have advanced far toward perfection before we are overtaken by death. In the mean time, we are constantly liable to error and sin.

So Christ is our pattern, and we are commanded to walk in his footsteps, but he is not our measure. If he were, as some suppose, an incarnate, pre-existent spirit, and brought to this world the experience and the wisdom of other worlds and countless ages, he was not in the category of humanity, and the

temptations to which humanity is exposed were no temptations to him. They were not proportioned to his strength. If he were simply human at his birth, the endowments he received at his baptism, to fit him for his great office, lifted him out of the category of mere humanity, in respect to temptation, just as much as a pre-existence. If the words of the New Testament are reliable as history, after this period he had a degree of knowledge which is incompatible with the strength of temptation by which ordinary men are beset. What to us, in regard to God, is faith, to him was certainty. We believe in God; he knew God. To us God's presence is insensible; to him it was sensible. To us the existence of a spiritual world is a matter of rational probability; to him it was a present reality. We cannot see into futurity. A dark veil conceals from us all coming events, and all beyond the grave is wrapt in impenetrable obscurity. He saw into futurity and was aware of ap proaching events, and that tomb which is to our eye an everlasting prison, when he was about to enter it, was to surrender him on the third day to an immortal life.

Possessing such knowledge, sustained by such aids, and operated on by such motives, he lived a life on earth more divine than human. But the absolute merit of that life is a totally different thing from its perfection. That none of his followers have attained to it, does not exclude them from his kingdom and a share in his glory, because they too may have lived according to the measure of their light. No more ought the deficiencies of the heathen world to shut them out of the future happiness bestowed

on Christians, if those deficiencies have been occasioned, not by their unfaithfulness to their light, but the imperfection of the light itself.

Beware, then, how ye despise one of these little ones, even the heathen, whom ye imagine to be the orphans of God. "It is not the will of your Heavenly Father that one of these little ones should perish." He who watches the sparrow's fall, and clothes the lilies of the field, does not neglect the spiritual interests of those whom he has made immortal. There is a light, emanating from the very centre of the Divinity, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world. God has made every human being in his own image; that image makes every human being a child of God, gives him spiritual wants and interests, which he who created them is bound by paternal obligations to supply.

To every human being God reveals himself in his works, in the deductions of reason, in the admonitions of conscience. Every human being feels himself to be in a state of probation. He who does what he knows to be right, is as confident as he is of his own existence that he secures the approbation of God. And he who does wrong is equally impressed with the conviction, that he did not escape the notice of the All-seeing Eye, and somewhere, in time or eternity, that wrong shall return to him, and no power can deliver him from the dreadful expiation. To lead him to good, and to restrain him from evil, his first years are passed under the plastic discipline of parental affection. A watchfulness grows out of it, rendered more careful by the motives of interest, because, if the child goes wrong, the parent is the

first to suffer. Then comes the influence of public opinion, or the universal conscience of the whole community; then comes the moral education of universal language, which is the natural Scripture of the human race, written by that universal inspiration which has given all men understanding. These are the indisputable evidences of God's parental care of the obscurest individual of the human race.

DISCOURSE XI.

THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER.

ASK, AND IT SHALL BE GIVEN YOU; SEEK, AND YE SHALL FIND; KNOCK, AND IT SHALL BE OPENED UNTO YOU: FOR EVERY ONE THAT ASKETH RECEIVETH; AND HE THAT SEEKETH FINDETH; AND TO HIM THAT KNOCKETH, IT SHALL BE OPENED. OR WHAT MAN IS THERE OF YOU, WHOM IF HIS SON ASK BREAD, WILL HE GIVE HIM A STONE? OR IF HE ASK A FISH, WILL HE GIVE HIM A SERPENT? IF YE THEN, BEING EVIL, KNOW HOW TO GIVE GOOD GIFTS UNTO YOUR CHILDREN, HOW MUCH MORE SHALL YOUR FATHER WHICH IS IN HEAVEN GIVE GOOD THINGS TO THEM THAT ASK HIM? Matthew vii. 7-11.

IN immediate connection with the paternity of God, Jesus taught the doctrine of the duty and the efficacy of prayer. One is the natural consequence of the other. If we are the children of God, and God has a Father's heart, he must hear and answer our prayers. Christ did not stop here. He encourages us to use importunity in our prayers. "And he spake a parable unto them, to this end, that men ought always to pray and not to faint; saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man. And there was a widow in that city; and she came to him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And he would not for a while;