from any excellency of speech, but from the excellency of his living and suffering. Even in the human breast the deepest things, are things which it can never utter. So it was in the heart of Jesus. So it is-I speak it reverently in the nature of God, "For no ear hath ever heard, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them to us by his spirit; for the spirit, and the spirit alone, searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God."

VII.

HUMAN NATURE CONSIDERED AS A GROUND FOR THANKSGIVING

KNOW YE THAT THE LORD HE IS GOD; IT IS HE THAT HATH MADE US, AND NOT WE OURSELVES; WE ARE HIS People and THE SHEEP OF HIS PASTURE. ENTER INTO HIS GATES WITH THANKSGIVING, AND INTO HIS COURTS WITH PRAISE; BE THANKFUL UNTO HIM AND BLESS HIS NAME.-Psalm c. 3-4.

THE theme of gratitude which is here presented to us, is, our existence, our nature. "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves: we are his people and the sheep of his pasture." It is not what we possess or enjoy, but what we are; or it is what we possess and enjoy in relation to what we are, that I would make the subject of grateful commemoration in our present meditations.

In truth, every call to praise, is but an echo of this. For if it be duly considered, will it not be found, that all possible blessings,-all that can be the occasions of thanksgiving, must be referred back, when we trace them, to the blessing which is conferred upon us in a nature capable of enjoying them. The bounty and the beauty of the world, were nothing but for the seeing eye and the sensitive frame; the wisdom which all things teach were nothing, but for the perceiving mind; the blessed relations of our social existence would be all a barren waste, if we had not a heart to feel them; and all the tendencies and conditions of our life and being, all our labours and pleasures, all our joys and

sorrows, would be but one dark struggle or darker despair, if we had not a moral soul and will, to bring good out of evil, imperishable virtue out of perishable circumstance, and immortal victory out of the everpressing strife of human existence.

Every blessing, then, hath the essential condition that makes it such, in my very humanity. I am called upon to be thankful, for food and raiment, for the bounties and gratuities of nature, for green fields and whitening harvests, for peace and freedom and government; and for those blessings that are beyond and above all the immeasurable and eternal blessings of religion. I am called upon to be thankful for all these things, and I am so. But still I must say, and must so answer, that I cannot be thankful for one of these blessings, without being first, and last, and throughout, thankful that I am a man.

The advantage of being a man, therefore, is what I propose now to consider; the blessing bestowed in our very humanity; that indeed without which we had not the power of gratitude.

I am thankful, then, that I am a man. This is the central fact, around which all things range themselves in clusters of blessings.

I am thankful that I am human. I am thankful that I am not a clod; that I am not a brute. Nay, nor do I ask to be an angel. I am glad that I am human. My yery humanity, despite of all that is said against it, is a blessing and a gladness to me. Although it may sound strangely to the thoughtless man on one account, and to the theologian on another; yet will I say, that I accept this humanity thankfully—with all its imperfections, with all its weaknesses, with all its exposures to error and sin. None but a high moral nature could be so exposed. Although I stand amidst

a multitude, where the infirmities of this nature meet me on every side, in many a shaded brow and pale cheek, in many a countenance where grief and gladness are strangely mingled, where joy itself is touched with sadness; yet still I say, that with all the joy and sadness of this nature, included, interwoven, and making up one momentous, mysterious and touching experience, I accept, I embrace, I cherish it with gratitude: I rejoice that it is mine.

I do not wish, I repeat, to be something else. I do not wish that I were an angel; and I do not wish that I were like the inhabitant of some distant star. I do not know what he is. But this humanity that throbs in my bosom-I know what this is; it is near me, it is dear unto me; I rejoice that I am a man.

And upon this I insist, and am going to insist, because there is, I fear, a commonly prevailing disparagement of our humanity, which leaves no proper, no grateful sense of what it is. There is a feeling in many minds, as if it were a misery, a misfortune, almost a disgrace to be a man. I am not speaking merely of the theological disparagement—the dull fiction of oriental philosophy and of scholastic darknessthough that, doubtless, has helped to create the common impression, that it is but a poor advantage, but a doubtful good, to be a man. I am not speaking alone of that scorn and desecration, by theology, of the very humanity which it ought to have loved and helped. There are other causes that have tended to the same result human pride, misanthropy, discontent, anger with our kind, anger with our lot; and the natural sense too, of human ills and errors. It is curious to see how almost all our higher literature betrays its trust to the very humanity which it celebrates,-denies in general what it teaches in detail-heaps satire and

scorn upon mankind, and yet makes men its heroes. It is wonderful to see how, not authors only, but men generally, can berate and vilify the very being that they are. Humanity-man-these are not contrasted, but correlative things; you cannot eulogize the former, and desecrate the latter; the former is the ideal, the latter the real; the one is the picture, the other, the original. What man is, must furnish the elements from which we draw out the idea of what man should be; what you think, what you feel, is human, and that tells what humanity should be. There is doubtless a struggle between these conceptions, of the actual humanity and the ideal humanity; and for this very struggle too, I admire the human being. It could not agitate inferior natures. That man can separate the good from the evil, and set it up as a model; that he can sigh over the evil, is a praise and a glory to him. Ay, and that he can satirize, scorn and execrate the evil, and can do it with such uncompromising heartiness that he goes too far, seems to me not a disreputable tendency of his nature. There is something right then, something respectable in the leaning to darker views. In this respect, there is something right in theology, in literature, and in common opinion. But for the sake of justice and of gratitude, for man's sake, and for God's sake, if I may reverently say so, let not all this go too far; let it not spread the shadow over all, lest it hide from us, both man and God. I must therefore resist this tendency: because it is wrong, and especially at present, because it hinders a just gratitude to the Almighty Creator, for the nature he has given

us.

For this what we are-is, I repeat, the central truth around which all other truths that appeal to gratitude, do range themselves: it is the sun in the system