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SERMON LXII.

MATTH. VI. 24.

·Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

O said the Saviour of the world: yet man,

presumptuous man, confiding upon his own strength, in opposition to heavenly wisdom, will still go on to make the dangerous experiment. He still hopes to unite his pleasures and his duties, his interests in this world and his hopes in the next, his love of God with the service of mammon. But repress these vain and fallacious hopes, thou child of folly, and learn wisdom from him that redeemed thee. The love of the world and the love of God are things as incompatible, as the blaze of meridian splendor and the darkness of midnight. To be a half Christian is to be no Christian, or, what is much the same, is to be a Christian to no purpose. Either, therefore, entirely reject the terms of the Gos

pel, or entirely embrace them: either be entirely a Christian, or entirely a lover of the world: for, be assured, thou canst not, at the same time, serve God and mammon.

And who is there, that rightly considers, who can doubt, even for a single moment, that God, and God alone, is to be served and adored? We are commanded to love him with all our heart and with all our soul: now the word "all" excepts nothing; therefore our heart neither ought to be, nor can be, divided between God and the world. Since, therefore, we are convinced of the being of a God and his perfections, and profess to believe the Gospel, we must necessarily acknowledge, that this good and gracious God ought to be the only proper object of our love as well as our adoration: that is, as he alone ought to be worshipped, by humbling our selves in his presence and submitting our desires to his will; so, for the same reason, he ought to be loved with an affection incommunicable to the creatures, both by reason of his own infinite perfections and the blessings he has bestowed upon us so that we cannot justly refuse our homage to that Sovereign of the universe, to whom we are indebted for so many obliga tions.

Again: We have received from God a mind and a heart a mind, to know the value and excellence of every being; and a heart, to proportion our esteem and love to their merit and excellence. And when we have considered the most excellent of created beings, if we afterwards extend our thoughts to the Creator, we shall find an infinite distance between them, which obliges us to regard the Creator as the first principle of all things. We are obliged to acknowledge, that our existence depends upon this first principle, and that we live and move by its influ ence alone. God is the great fountain of life and light we are beams derived from, and subsisting only by his pleasure. Are we not, therefore, bound to love and serve him alone, who is alone perfect and unchangeable, and by whom alone we ourselves exist at all?.

Again: If we consider the infirmities of life; the infinite multitude of diseases to which it is subject, and the fears and anxieties which hourly surround us in this vale of tears; we shall easily perceive, that the only means to preserve us against these melancholy changes and chances, is to secure an interest in Providence: And how shall we do this but by loving and serving God, who is the disposer of all events, and to whom

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whom all things in heaven above and earth below do bow and obey?

And farther; if we take a view of ourselves and our actions, we must confess, that we have often behaved ourselves in a manner so unworthy of reasonable creatures and children of God, as to give us abundant cause to dread the consequences of his displeasure. And yet he has been so far from inflicting those punishments we have deserved, that he has not only spared us from time to time, but even found out the means of reconciling us to himself by the sacrifice of Christ. And who would not then love this Father of mercies, who so first loved us, that he gave up his only Son to die for repenting sinners?

And if, from the sins and miseries of life, we turn our eyes to that melancholy event by which they are closed; if we reflect that the arm of death is always lifted up over our heads, ready perhaps to strike the fatal blow in an hour when we least think of it; what method is there so proper to assuage the fears with which this unfelenting king of terrors fills us, as to arm our souls with the hope of never-dying glory? And what method is there so proper to secure to

ourselves