ligion. They are to plant their feet on the ground of a free, pure, spiritual church, a "kingdom not of this world," regardless of the anathemas of corrupt hierarchies, or the snares of formalism, or the rage of a sin-mad world. If they do this, they will elevate their light far above the light of science, and reason, and worldly wisdom, and the world shall be constrained to see it, and confess it to be the "light of the knowledge of the glory of God, as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ." The moral sentiment and practice of the church, should always be in advance of the world as well as above it. She must take the lead in every work of real enlightenment and progress. She is God's own chosen instrument for regenerating and saving the world. All other instruments are human and impotent, and can never, of themselves, succeed. She must let her light shine, or men will not see; put forth her strength, or they will not be made. alive; go forth in the name of the Lord and battle with error, corruption, and evil, in its various forms, or no victory will be won; not a fetter will be broken; not a soul will be regenerated; society will make no progress. Woe to this dark and sinful world, when the church of God sinks to a level with it in sentiment and character. Woe to it, when the light of the sanctuary is in no wise superior to the teachings of men-when the truth as held and practised by evangelical Christians, fails to reprove the world of sin, and gives no offence and furnishes no condemnation to unregenerated sinners. The light of the church ought to be kept ever burning and shining. Her's is the only light that beams upon the darkness of this world. Men are taught to expect instruction and warning from her. If they are sailing in dangerous seas, or hard by the dreadful reefs, or approach the fatal breakers, they expect to see some signal of warning, and are deceived and ruined if they do not. And our criminality is without excuse or extenuation, if we let our light go out and thereby leave those who expect warning and guidance from us, exposed to all the perils of spiritual shipwreck. Oh, what hope is there for sinners; how morally inevitable is their endless ruin, when Christians fail to warn them from God! And how often do they fail in this. In times of declension, like the present, how dimly burns the light on the watch-towers of Zion! darkness broods on the face of the deep; sinners dash carelessly and recklessly on; no warning meets their eye or ear that danger and destruction are nigh, and they founder on some friendless shore, or are dashed to pieces against some fatal rock. The light of Christians ought to shine with a clear, steady, and powerful lustre. It should shine with a radiance sufficient to illumine the whole scene of man's duty and danger; pour forth a tide of effulgence so as no darkness shall remain unvisited and no mind be able to gainsay or resist it. A church may have the true light, and yet it may shine so faintly as to be of no avail. She may hold to the truth, and yet so imperfect may be her advocacy and transmission of it, that her light will be a pale and uncertain one at best, failing to reach, with the power of conviction, the benighted hearts of perishing men. Or the truth she holds may be so covered up with human devices, so walled round with rites and forms, and ceremonies, as that the light is smothered and cannot burn and go forth to bless men. The church must possess the truth in its purity, and leave it free to act in its own native simplicity and divine spirituality, if she would convict the world of sin and bring it to Christ. If the teaching of her ministry be equivocal, wavering, or time-serving; if her standards do not give a clear, honest, and manly annunciation of the truth; and more than all, if her members do not maintain personal purity, and stand forth before the world in the effulgence and attractiveness of a sanctified nature, her light will only lure men to ruin. Oh, it is a fearful thing for a church, set for the light of the world, to corrupt the pure oil of God's truth by any human admixture, or to weaken and confine its light and power by the forms and observances of a burdensome ritual, or to vary its teachings to suit the times or gain the favor of the world. Never was there a time when the light of Christianity, shining in its own matchless clearness and splendor, was more needed by the world. Never were Christians more loudly called upon by the passing signs of the times, by the actual state of the world, and by the light of the future, to put on boldness and speak out the honest truth without fear or favor; to speak as with one mouth for God and true religion; to mingle their lights into one, and hang that light out in the face of the world, and let it burn and blaze till it shall spread from "pole to pole," and be lost in the gathering brightness of the millennial day. Christians! remember that ye are "the light of the world." Men's hearts are full of darkness--the world is full of darknessbut you have the light of Heaven, which guides to the cross, and makes wise unto salvation. O let it shine! By the mercy of Jesus-by the guilt of sin-by the misery of mankind-by the hastening doom of the sinner-by the joys of forgiveness, and the glories of heaven, be entreated to let the heavenly light go forth, and speed it on its blessed mission. Do not put it under a bushel; do not let it go out; do not dim its lustre or confine its rays. Elevate it; keep it burning; trim and replenish it often; make it steady and uniform and brilliant as the light of day, "that men may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven."-EDITOR. SERMON CCCCLXXVI. THE MORAL DANGERS AND USES OF ILL HEALTH. BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER, PASTOR OF THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CHRYSTIE-STREET, NEW YORK. 66 Why criest thou for thine affliction? For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord."-JEREMIAH, XXX., 15, 17. THERE are persons in every community, and the number of such is not small, whose lives are embittered by bodily weaknesses and disabilities, of which no one can tell the trial but he that has had personal experience of it. I mean the subjects of chronic maladies, ailments, and physical sufferings, that, while they weaken the strength by the way, and greatly impede one's usefulness and activity, still do not quite shut a man up and lay him aside, like some sudden attack of acute disease; but allow him to perform life's duties, though in a suffering and toilsome way, through bodily pains and heart-aches and depression of spirits and harassing impediments, quite unknown to the world. They may be said to go mourning all their days with trials which few can appreciate; that often make life a heavy burden, grievous to be borne, and death to be desired as a relief, and that do in fact slowly but surely bring an end to one's earthly career long before his time. Such persons, if they are Christians, have need of great grace and patience, that after they have done and suffered the will of God, and struggled manfully through the billows of life, they may receive the promises; and if not Christians, there is the louder call for our sympathy; for if in this life only they have hope, of all men are they the most miserable. Precluded by ill health from most of the enjoyments of this life, if they have no preparation or hope of a better, then are they wretched indeed. The trial of protracted ill-health, as it is a much greater calamity, so is it far more difficult to be borne, than the bereavement of VOL. XXII. friends, or the loss of property, that leaves the health unimpaired. The shock is indeed great at first when dearest relatives are laid low, when sons and daughters, parents, brothers and sisters, and partners, dear as life, are suddenly seized from us by death; when riches take to themselves wings and fly away; when the stream of earthly resources suddenly dries up. But the buoyant heart of man soon recovers, and rises from the blow that at first stunned or even plunged our head under the billows. Time, the universal healer, assuages the violence of our anguish; life's duties call for exertion; grief can not be nursed; property lost must be made again; and if the physical energies only remain, the mind soon regains its balance and tone after the severest bereavement. But let the health be undermined; let slow maladies prey upon our bodies; let chronic pains and discomforts, make their home in our enfeebled frames; let the system of nerves get unstrung and disordered; let the animal spirits cease to flow, and the muscular vigor of health be impaired, without altogether laying us aside and breaking us off from the active duties of life, yet "Let languor and disease invade then is it that our trial is the greatest, this discipline the most severe to which flesh and blood are here subjected. The very energy that is needed to sustain the wear and tear of life and to support its duties, has now to be spent in baffling disease, and that at the greatest disadvantage; for while perhaps the same amount of care and active service are pressing on us, there is not one-half the strength of health to supply it. This state has its peculiar dangers as well as antidote, and there are peculiar moral uses which may be derived from it. And, forasmuch as in every community there are not a few who are so afflicted as to be now in this estate, and the healthiest persons are liable also at some future time to be of the number, I propose to develop for our instruction, some of the moral dangers incident to this condition, and the antidotes adapted to it. It is a subject that will be sure to apply to some, and it need not fail of profit to any; for, frail as health is in the strongest, we are all liable to the incursions of disease, and to have the tide of our prosperity arrested. The healthiest this year may be the feeblest next; the sun of prosperity that shines on us now with genial rays, will not shine always. It may be a calm with us now, but we must look out for the storm; for a storm is certainly brewing up among the moun'tains or off on the sea, that will one day burst upon our unprepared bark. Calamities of some sort are close at hand to us all, if they are not already upon us; for few or none in this life can be long exempt from suffering. Of all it is true, there is a wave now over our heads, or there is one coming; and it is the part of wis dom, now in health and prosperity, to consider the days of darkness, for they shall be many, and to parry the strokes of affliction as they come, or make the best of them by having the heart fortified by grace. In pursuing, therefore, this subject, I remark, I. There is danger that protracted ill-health will sour the disposition, an effect to be greatly deprecated and guarded against. It was a very true remark dropped by Cecil and preserved by his friend, that "affliction has a tendency, especially if long continued, to generate a kind of despondency and ill temper. The spirit of prayer does not necessarily come with affliction; and if this be not poured out upon a man, he will, like a wounded beast, skulk to his den and growl there." There is a pertinency in this, which those who have had much to do with chronic invalids, or long afflicted persons in any way, cannot fail sometimes to have observed. When the animal spirits are repressed, as in a long course of ill health they must be, and the spontaneous flow and vivacity of nature is almost necessarily precluded, it is nothing strange, unless a strong effort be made to the contrary, that the temper should get sour, or that it should seem so to others even when it is not. Want of cheerfulness, a quality that cannot be forced, or its semblance long assumed by any one, may be easily construed into moroseness; and, in fact, want of cheerfulness and elasticity, made habitual through the constant pressure of ill health, does not merely seem, but is moroseness. It puts its expression upon the countenance; it looks out gloomily and distressed at the eyes, those windows of the soul; it sets its seal upon the features. It makes one look as if his own blood was curdled, and as if living with him might curdle that of others; when it is all owing to ill health, to bodily maladies that must necessarily involve the mind, and find expression in that seldom deceptive mirror of mind, the countenance. Now and then there is a person so innately cheerful, of a disposition so irrepressibly buoyant and social, and of so happy and strong a conformation of brain and nerves, that no weight of either maladies or misfortunes can keep him under; but he will die before he will become gloomy, that is, before disease has gone so far as to prey much upon his nerves. Still he carries his head above the waves, and keeps his eye cheerfully aloft, and will do so till he dies. If now and then his cheerfulness suffer a temporary eclipse, it is only like the sun drifting through vapors that are scattering as fast as they are gathering, and it will be but a minute before you will see through some open cloud-rift the clear beams of his sunny face. Ah, how true was this of a beloved brother now in glory! But it is not many that are so happily constituted, and even grace can not here fully make up the lack of nature. The native temper will appear, and misfortunes and sicknesses will be apt to |