We are enjoined to act as children of the light; and not only to redeem the time, as regards our personal holiness, but also to reprove the hidden things of darkness. My brethren, there are two objects for which I solicit your contributions, whose design is to dissipate, in some measure, the darkness of our own days, the one by implanting right principles in the youthful heart; the other, by cultivating and rewarding, in those of riper years, the important habit of providence. These charities are a school and a penny-clothing-club. Their importance is too self-evident to need an explanation. It will, however, I doubt not, stimulate the forwardness of your zeal, and conciliate your sympathies in behalf of these charities, to mention to you the fearful condition of many of our poorer brethren.

The computation is, that there are in London at least 150,000 children without the means of education; and that from 2,000 to 4,000 of their number are hired out to beggars, and employed in thieving. If ignorance and vice are to prove less prevalent in our own parish, it must be, in the order of the Lord's appointment, through the instrumentality of schools such as those to whose support you are invited. The children are here rescued from a life of idleness and profligacy, and taught the knowledge of a Saviour; and there is

imparted to them also such instruction as may qualify them for active life.

Then, again, there are in the neighbouring metropolis 10,000 wretched beings, who rise each morning in entire ignorance where at night they shall lay their head. Now a club such as that in behalf of which your aid is at this time solicited, while it materially assists the necessities of our poorer brethren, is well calculated to promote in them habits of foresight and economy, and thus to avert from our fellow-parishioners that abject destitution which inevitably awaits the improvident.

Some public charities there are which, however excellent in their design, are ruinous in their consequences. They encourage hopes which they are inadequate to satisfy; they foster a spirit of indolence or vice in appearing to promise a refuge from want in the hour of extreme destitution. Such, however, is not the tendency of these institutions they strike at the root of the evil; they essay to dry up the fountain-head whence a torrent of pauperism threatens to inundate our land. The evil lies at your doors, brethren; your neighbour, wounded and needy, craves your compassion and assistance. You will not pass by on the other side: as children of light, you will do what in you lies to bring succour to the distressed; and

this with the more earnest zeal, as being stimulated by a conviction which the occurrences of each day tend to confirm, that the night is fast approaching in which no work can be done.

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SERMON XIV.

THE LAST JUDGMENT.

2 COR. v. 10.

"We must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad."

THE traveller who, in obscure twilight, pursues his arduous course through some mountainous district of our globe, obtains but an inaccurate perception of the surrounding country. At one time, buried in the deep valley, his prospect is narrowed by the huge hills which rise around him. At another, planting his foot upon some lofty mountain, he commands a survey of a host of prominences, whose interjacent valleys, however, lie hidden from his view; each appears to

stand in independence of the other; each seems to uprear its head, proud in its own solitude.

Equally embarrassed is the traveller in the region of unfulfilled prophecy. The prospect which lies revealed before him is but a minute particle of a vast system. At one point in his progress his mind feels overwhelmed by a few, but those momentous, truths. At another point of the revelation, sundry fragments of divine truth lie scattered before his eyes; but the mode of their adjustment in their several relations comes not within the compass of his vision: the precise links which hold them in connexion, the gradual declivity with which each sinks into the bosom of the other, lie buried in obscurity.

In the present instance it is, confessedly, a task of some difficulty to reconcile the statements relative to the day of judgment with the circumstances elsewhere revealed as attendant on the second advent of Messiah. Each portion of the revelation must, however, be viewed in its own distinctness. The event will unfold their several connexions.

It is with one of these isolated truths, that of the coming judgment, that I desire now to occupy your attention; and of this we may be assured, that the proceedings of an earthly tribunal would not have been ordained to delineate that last