I speak not now of the instruction conveyed, by the general good example of his holy life, or in particular actions done upon certain occasions for the express purpose of enforcing particular precepts by the authority of his example; but of particular lessons to be drawn from the peculiar manner of his conduct, upon those common occasions of action which occur in every man's daily life, when the manner of the thing done or spoken seems less to proceed from a deliberate purpose of the will than from the habitual predominance of the ruling principle. It is true, in our Saviour's life nothing was common; his actions, at least, were in some measure always extraordinary: But yet his extraordinary life was so far analogous to the common life of men, that he had frequent occasions of action arising from the incidents of life and from external circumstances. The study of his conduct upon these occasions is the most useful speculation, for practical improvement, in which a Christian can engage.

The words of my text stand in the beginning of the narrative of a very extraordinary

'transaction; which, for the useful lessons it contains, is related in detail by two of the evangelists. It is my intention to review the particulars of the story; and point out to you, as I proceed, the instruction which the mention of each circumstance seems intended to convey.

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It was in the commencement, as I think, of the last year of his ministry, that our Lord, either for security from the malice of his enemies the Pharisees, (whose resentment he had excited by a recent provocation a discovery to the people of the disguised avarice of the sect, and a public assertion of the insignificance of their religious forms,) or perhaps that he found his popularity in Galilee rising to a height inconsistent with his own views and with the public tranquillity,

thought proper

to retire for a season to a country where his person was little known, although his fame, as appears by the event, had reached it-the border of the Sidonian territory. The inhabitants of this region were a mixed people, partly Jews, partly the progeny of those Canaanites who were suffered

to remain în these extreme parts when the children of Israel took possssion of the promised land. On his journey to the destined place of his retirement, he was met by a woman, who with loud cries and earnest entreaties implored his aid in behalf of her young daughter, possessed by an evil spirit.

The first circumstance in this story which engages our attention, is the description of the woman which is given in my text. This requires a particular explication, because it is the key to much of the mystery of our Lord's conduct upon the occasion. "The woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by nation:" She was by nation therefore not a Jewess; she was not of the family of the Israelites, and had no claim to the privileges of the chosen people. But that is not all; she was by nation a Syrophoenician." The Phoenicians were a race scattered over the whole world in numerous colonies. The different settlements were distinguished by names taken from the countries upon which they bordered. The Canaanites were one of these

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Phoenician colonies; and because they bordered upon Syria, they were called by the Greeks and Romans Syro-Phoenicians. A Syrophoenician therefore is a Canaanite under another name: The woman therefore who came out to meet our Lord was not only an alien from the stock of Israel, she was a daughter of the accursed Canaan; she came of that impure and impious stock, which the Israelites, when they settled in Palestine, were commissioned and commanded to exterminate. Particular persons, it is true, at that time found means to obtain an exemption of themselves and their families from the general sentence,as Rahab the hostess, by her kind entertainment of the Jewish spies; and the whole city of the Gibeonites, by a surrender of themselves and their posterity for ever to a personal servitude. But such families, if they embraced not the Jewish religion in all its forms, at least renounced idolatry; for the Israelites were not at liberty to spare their lives, and to suffer them to remain within the limits of the Holy Land, upon any other terms. Our Lord's suppliant was not of any of these

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reformed families; for she was not only "a Syrophoenician by nation," she was besides "a Greek." She was a "Greek." This word describes not her country, but her religion: She was an idolatress, bred in the principles of that gross idolatry which consisted in the worship of the images of dead men. And because idolatry in this worst form obtained more among the Greeks than the nations of the East, such idolaters, of whatever country they might be, were by the Jews of the apostolic age called Greeks; just as, among us, any one who lives in the communion of the Roman church, though he be a Frenchman or a Spaniard, is called a Roman Catholic.

We now then understand what the woman was who sought our Lord's assistance, -by birth a Canaanite, by profession an idolatress. It appears by the sequel of the story, (for to understand the parts, we must keep the whole in view; and we must anticipate the end, to make the true use of the beginning,)—it appears, I say, from the sequel of the story, that whatever the errors