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smile with the richest joy and to reflect the greatest happiness? its barren sands, nor its deserts, but its most fertile, and prolific spots. And what are the words that denote the intensest happiness? Words that mean living out of self, and going from self. What is meant by the word ecstacy? the intensest joy that human nature feels-standing out of one's self; making self no more the center and the basis of our action, but sacrificing self in order to do good to others.. And what is the meaning of the word transport, ecstatic joy? Being carried beyond one's self, and subdued, absorbed, floated into a current of irrepressible beneficence and love. And hence our blessed Lord has uttered what is deep thought, worthy of being deeply pondered: "It is more blessed," not, as it is sometimes read at the Royal Exchange, to receive than to give, but as they read it in heaven, and as it is felt by Christian hearts upon earth, "It is more blessed to give than it is to receive." Our Lord has thus so constituted them that are the recipients of his grace, that they shall be the greatest distributors of it. It is his own great plan for spreading upon earth the grand truths that are inspired from heaven; and he that fails to spread the truth, is just in that fact as criminal as he that refuses to accept the truth; for both are ordinances and appointments of Heaven. I must add what is equally true, that the man who refuses to give, will very soon discover that he has very little worth giving. A limb that is rarely used, loses its muscular power, and grows feeble; coins that are not in currency, soon become corroded; the keys that open not the stores of beneficence, will soon rust; and a Christianity, that lives in itself and for itself only, is a Christianity that gives very equivocal evidence of its birth-place, heaven, and contains. very little that will enable it to last and outlive the strifes, the trials, and the temptations, of this present world. It is a law lasting as the economy of grace, "to him that hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, shall be taken, even that which he hath." The well of living water which is planted in every individual heart the moment it is inspired and taken possession of by the Holy Spirit of God, does not increase its water and augment its volume by remaining still; on the contrary, the more it wells up and pours forth in multitudinous rivulets upon this world's deserts, the more it draws from its parent depths of everlasting life. He that is made a saint by grace, will instantly become a servant by obligation; and the evidence, the greatest, brightest, evidence of his saintship, are the toils and sacrifices of his service to men for Christ's sake.

The great truth that Christ died a sacrifice for our sins, is the greatest motive that can possibly be urged for the great sacrifices that Christians can make. Jesus came from a height so high, that our soaring thoughts can not climb to it; and he came down to a depth of woe, and agony, and misery, so unfathomable, that no plumb-line of ours can sound it; and he endured a distress within and a torture without so far beyond

precedent, and above parallel, that he cried, ir ts noontide agony, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" He lived for us, he died for us, he suffered for us, he sacrificed for us. What are we doing for him? It was these lips of ours that shouted, "Away with him, away with him!" It is surely right, it is surely proper they should be con secrated to say now, "Come, behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world." It was these hands of ours that crucified him ; what more natural than that these hands of ours should now distribute the bread of everlasting life? He came to save us; we had no claim upon him; and he had no inducement out of himself to come to us, but in his great love, and for no other reason, he died for us: the least that we can do is to carry out as far as we can those unsearchable riches, and that blessed gospel which will bring others to the brightness of his rising, and make the rest of the world as happy as it has made us.

From Jesus we have received the words of eternal life. Let us reflect them on the wide world. Let us bring all we can within the hearing of this sweet music, these saving strains, these words of eternal life.

His words are going round the earth, and awakening echoes in its remotest districts. They are translated into every tongue. They are preached and heard by increasing thousands, from the pine forests of the North, to the palm groves of the East. They mingle with the hum of busy cities, and are reflected in the sheen of great rivers. They are carried in the soldier's knapsack, and give him happy thoughts amid the privations of the Crimea. They lie under the sailor's pillow, and make Sunday all sunshine on the Euxine and the Baltic. They are pronounced at our weddings; they hallow our graves; they give names and blessings to our children. Can these words be of earth, or of time, or of man, that so widely spread, so sweetly sound, so gloriously cheer? Is it reasonable to come to any other conclusion than that they are words of eternal life; that they come from heaven, and lead to heaven? Other words of poet, and novelist, and orator, come and go, and often leave no impression beyond the transient interest or amusement of the day. But these words are living; they strike deeply and last long. They have almost creative force. Applied by the Spirit of God, they prove incorruptible and living seeds in the heart in which they are sown. Very soon all that man fears or loves, in this world, will pass away. But the word of the Lord abideth forever, striking its roots deeper in the convictions of the thoughtful, and occupying a larger space in the affections of the good. Blessed thought! stones may fall and temples decay, and basilicas and cathedrals crumble into the dust, and the great pyramids descend into the sands that day by day acc imulate about them. But thy word, O God, like thy throne, is from everlasting to everlasting; and thy truth, like thy kingdom, has no end.

DISCOURSE XLIX.

JAMES BUCHANAN, D.D., LL.D.

THE distinguished successor of Dr. Chalmers in the chair of Systematic Theology in New College, Edinburg, was born at Paisley in the year 1804. His father, James Buchanan, Esq., was an elder of the Church, and a magistrate of the borough. Until the time of the disruption in 1843, Dr. Buchanan was attached to the Established Church of Scotland, when he joined the Free Church, of which he may, perhaps, be called the intellectual leader. He was educated in the grammar-school at Paisley, and in the University of Glasgow; and, in 1828, ordained to the charge of the Chapel of Ease, at Roslin. A year later he came to his charge in the parish of North Leith, where he continued till the year 1840, when he was transferred to the High Church of Edinburg. Three years later he became pastor of the Free Church of St. Stephen's, and in 1845 was appointed Professor of Apologetic Theology, in New College, on the translation of Dr. Cunningham to the chair of Church History. At the death of Dr. Chalmers, in 1847, he was appointed to the vacant professorship, a position which he has filled with honor ever since.

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Dr. Buchanan is the author of several works; as, "Comfort in Affliction” (which has reached its twenty-first edition); "Office and Work of the Holy Spirit;" ." "Faith in God and Modern Atheism Compared ;" and several smaller works, such as dress to the People of Scotland" (of which 200,000 copies were circulated), “On Tracts for the Times," and "On Church Establishments."

His “Modern Atheism," in part, has recently been printed in this country, and is received with very great favor. It is one of the ablest works of recent British authorship; and, as a specimen of profound, luminous, discriminating, and conclusive reasoning upon an abstract subject, is not often excelled. A leading journal remarks, that " we have nowhere met with a more clear and complete outline of the several systems he exposes. Comte's Positive Philosophy, Oken's Theories of Development, Kant's Transcendentalism, Fichte's, Hegel's, and Schelling's Pantheism, with other similar forms of disguised Atheism, which have originated on the Continent, and thence been disseminated throughout England and America, are explained in their essential features so plainly and fully as to make them comprehensible by the most unlettered reader. He is, besides, eminently fair and just in his outline, allowing the strong points of each system to appear. His argument, in considering them, is conclusive and convincing, affording a most satisfactory refutation of these fallacious theories."

Dr. Buchanan has published few sermons, as such; but we have his own authority for presenting the following as a specimen of his discourses.

THE DYING MALEFACTOR.

"And one of the malefactors railed at him; but the other said," etc.-LUKE Xxiii. 39–43.

THE crucifixion of the Lord Jesus was so ordered as to furnish a striking illustration, at once of the depth of his abasement, and the certainty of his reward. To enhance the agony and the shame of his death, he was crucified between two thieves, being numbered with transgressors, placed on the same level, in the public view, with men whose lives had been justly forfeited by their crimes, and subjected, in his last moments, to the painful spectacle of their sufferings; but, to evince the certainty of his reward-to make it manifest that the joy which was set before him, and for which he endured the cross, despising the shame, would be realized-and to give him, as it were, a pledge in hand that "he should see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied”—one of the thieves who suffered along with him was suddenly converted; and, in the lowest depths of the Redeemer's humiliation-in the darkest hour of the power of darkness, when Satan's policy seemed to be crowned with complete success—this immortal soul was snatched as a brand from the burning, and given to Christ as a pledge of his triumph, and the first-fruits of a glorious harvest. While others mocked and reviled him, and when his chosen disciples stood aloof, the dying malefactor relented-his conscience awoke-his heart was touched; and, amid the ridicule, and the execrations, and the blasphemies of that awful hour, one solitary voice was heard, issuing from the cross beside him, which called him "LORD," and which spake of his "KINGDOM" in accents of faith, and penitence, and prayer. And how must that voice have gladdened the Saviour's heart, and imparted to him, in the midst of bitterest agony, a foretaste, as it were, of the joy "that was set before him ;" exhibiting, as it did, a proof of the efficacy of his death, the faithfulness of God's covenant promise, and the certainty of his reward; for if, even now on the cross, and before his work was finished, the stricken spirit fled to him for ref uge, and was quickened into spiritual life in the very hour of death— was it not a sure pledge and earnest that he should yet bring many sons and daughters to glory, when, being by God's right hand exalted to the throne, he should receive the promise of the Father, and shed forth the Spirit on high?

I. In reference to the state of the man's mind before the time of his conviction, nothing is recorded that would lead us to suppose that he had ever thought seriously of religion, or acquired any knowledge of the gospel until he was brought to Calvary. He is described as a malefactor, and more specifically as a thief or robber-a desperate character-fearing neither God nor man; whose crimes exposed him to the highest penalties of the law; and his own confession admits the justice of the sentence under which he suffered-" We receive the due reward of our

deeds." On a comparison of the parallel passages in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, it would seem that at first he had joined with the other malefactor in reviling the Saviour; for, in the one, it is said, “The thieves also which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth;" and in the other, "They that were crucified with him reviled him ;" expressions which may indeed be interpreted generally as descriptive of Christ's extreme humiliation in being subjected to reproach from such a quarter-this class of men being spoken of as partaking in the crime of embittering his last moments, just as the soldiers are said to have filled a sponge with vinegar, because one or more of them did so so; but if they be understood as applying specifically to each of the two, they are sufficient to show that, at first, the one who was converted was as ungodly and as guilty as the other.

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But immediately before his conversion, and preparatory to it, a change seems to have been wrought in the state of his mind-a change which consisted in a deep conviction of sin, and a just sense of his own demerit on account of it. For when one of the malefactors railed on Jesus, the other answering "rebuked him, saying, Dost thou not fear God, seeing that thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds." The whole process was so suddenly accomplished in this case, that it is difficult to say whether, in the order of time, the convictions which are expressed in this remark able confession preceded, by any perceptible interval, his cordial recep tion of the truth; but as, in the order of nature, conviction precedes conversion, we may consider it part of his experience, while as yet he was in a state of transition from darkness to light. The words of his confession imply that his conscience, which, by the commission of crime, might have been seared as with a hot iron, was now deeply impressed with a sense of sin; and it was a true sense of sin-not the mere row of the world which worketh death," but godly sorrow, working toward genuine repentance; for, although the condemnation of which. he speaks might be the temporal sentence of death, pronounced and executed by his fellow-men, his language shows that he viewed his guilt with reference not to men merely, but to God also-to God, as the supreme Lawgiver and the final Judge. As a resident at Jerusalem, or at least in Judea, the seat of true religion, he had probably enjoyed some of the advantages of early religious instruction, and had been taught some of the elementary truths of Scripture; for he speaks of God, the only living and true God, whose name he knew and feared, although he had lived in the violation of his law. The thought of God as a Lawgiver and Judge was now vividly present to his mind; and the conception of God's character, combined with the inherent power, of conscience, which, even in the breasts of the most depraved, is never altogether extinguished, produced that conviction of sin which is invariably ac companied with the fear of God, and of a judgment to come. So

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