punishments for a soul created for the joys of the one or the flames of the other.

But this truth, to have its effect, must be believed. The very presentment of it is a part of its truth; for everything proclaims the existence of God: this mighty fabric of creation, this lofty arch over our heads, that golden sun, the great and wide sea, the rolling clouds and revolving seasons show the greatness of the design; and yet how inadequate are the pursuits of life to the longings of the soul! Immortality explains the mystery, and the very presenting of the doctrine shows a purpose worthy of the efforts of man, worthy of the wisdom of God.

Two objects are presented to us which explain each other by their contrast: the poor rewards of this life, and an unfading crown in heaven. This balance facilitates our choice, if we are wise; for what is a man profited if he gain, etc.?

It shows our perversity if we do not choose right; for the blindness which can thus dispose of eternal glory for the shadows of life, must be a voluntary blindness; it must indicate intense hatred to piety, arising from intense love of the world. So that you gain religion, or become a monument of its truth, by your perversity and loss.

This text sends us to our best instructor, our own experience. We are continually feeling the consolations of religion, or the vanity of the world. It is an increasing experience. If we refuse, we are sinning against God and our own happiness at the same time.

What an alternative is before us! what a responsible condition is our place in life!

WORLDLINESS.

The grand sin that seduces all and ruins thousands, is We love the world, we live for the world, we hope to gain the world. But what is the world worth, if we lose our Saviour, and are left to die in our sins?

The first motive by which religion influences us, is here presented and sanctioned. In both parts of this text, in the value of the soul and in the little value of gaining the world, our prudence is addressed. No doubt the professed Christian proceeds to higher motives: he has disinterested love;

his last lesson is to crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts; but he begins by a sense of his own personal danger. He contemplates the fearful possibility, that his own soul may be lost. It alarms him into reflection. He fears, he trembles, he compares; and this first step in religion is an excellent point of view to distinguish the second. "I must rise," he says, "higher than this; my danger shows me the common danger of a dying world."

The inconsistency of two pursuits is presented: the care of the soul, the gain of the world. The pursuit of the one implies the renunciation of the other.

In the day of judgment, it will be a sad aggravation of our sin and folly to see for what poor rewards we have lost the eternal glory. The baits of Satan will then be surveyed in their true light. The bribe will be weighed; the remorse will be complete. Judas will see the value of thirty pieces. of silver for which he betrayed Christ. Nabal will see his churlishness; Saul will see how needlessly he afflicted himself in his jealousy of David; yes, in the light of a burning world, when the heavens are passing away with a great noise, the righteous Judge will hold up the toys, the chaff, the momentary pleasures, the transient honors which seduced you, and in this amazing brightness you will see the folly of your choice and the justice of your doom. Verily the wicked have their reward.

How dreadful the condition of him whose joys are seen only in an increasing retrospect, and whose agonies are the whole of his eternal experience!

ARTICLE V.

GOD'S OWNERSHIP OF THE SEA.1

BY REV. LEONARD SWAIN, D. D., PROVIDENCE, R. I.

PSALM 95: 5. "The Sea is his, and he made it."

THE traveller who would speak of his experience in foreign lands, must begin with the sea. Especially is this the case if he would speak of his journey in its religious aspects and connections. For it is through the religion of the sea that he approaches those lands, and through it that he returns from them. God has spread this vast pavement of his temple between the hemispheres, so that he who sails to foreign shores must pay a double tribute to the Most High; for through this temple he has to carry his anticipations as he goes, and his memories when he returns. Nor can the mind of the traveller be so frivolous, or the objects of his journey so trivial, but that the shadows of this temple will make themselves felt upon him during the long days that he is passing beneath them on his outward, and then again on his homeward, way. The sea speaks for God; and however eager the tourist may be to reach the strand that lies before him and enter upon the career of business or pleasure that awaits him, he must check his impatience during this long interval of approach, and listen to the voice with which Jehovah speaks to him as, horizon after horizon, he moves to his purpose along the aisles of God's mighty tabernacle of the deep.

God's way is in the sea as it is in the sanctuary; and

1 This Article is a Sermon, which was preached by the author to his own people soon after his return from Europe. Many who heard it felt desirous of its publication; and many who heard of it, requested that it be printed in the Bibliotheca Sacra. It has been yielded to the press by its author reluctantly, and in compliance with the earnest wishes of his friends. - EDS.

having so recently come from beholding it, that the roll of the ship and the roar of the waves are scarcely yet vanished from my brain, let me speak to you of it in his house to-day; that so his works may combine with his word to teach us the lessons of his greatness, and that some strains of that vast anthem of the deep that praises God round the whole world this morning may mingle with the worship which rises to him from this sanctuary.

In speaking of God's ownership of the sea, I wish to consider, first, some of the more important material uses which he has made it to subserve in the economy of nature and for the welfare of the world, and then to refer to some of those more distinctively religious elements of impression by which it becomes the symbol of his presence and the earthly temple of his glory.

It is very natural, in looking at the ocean, and in travelling over its enormous breadth, to wonder why such an immense mass of water should have been created. When we think that three-fourths of the entire surface of the globe are covered by its waves, it seems to us like a vast disproportion. It is a common thing, in speaking of the sea, to call it "a waste of waters." It seems as if it were a mere desert, incapable of being turned to any profitable use, and as if it would have been much better were its vast hollows filled up with solid land, and its immeasurable area covered with fields and forests, waving with harvests and resounding with the noise of cities and the busy life of men.

But this is a mistake. Instead of being an incumbrance or a superfluity, the sea is as essential to the life of the world as the blood is to the life of the human body. Instead of being a waste and desert, it is the thing which keeps the earth itself from becoming a waste and desert. It is the world's fountain of life and health and beauty; and if it were taken away, the grass would perish from the mountains, the forests would crumble on the hills, the harvests would become powder on the plains, the continents would be one vast Sahara of frost and fire, and the solid globe itself, scarred and blasted on every side, would swing in VOL. XVIII. No. 71

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the heavens as silent and dead as on the first morning of creation.

do not

We say

1. Water is as indispensable to all life, whether vegetable or animal, as is the air itself. From the cedar on the mountains to the lichen that clings to the wall; from the mastodon that pastures on the forests to the animalcule that floats. in the sunbeam; from the leviathan that heaves the sea into billows to the microscopic creatures that swarm a million in a single foam-drop; all alike depend for their existence on this single element, and must perish if it be withdrawn. But this element of water is supplied entirely by the sea. All the waters that are in the rivers, the lakes, the fountains, the vapors, the dew, the rain, the snow, come alike out of the ocean. It is a common impression that it is the flow of the rivers that fills the sea. It is a mistake. It is the flow of the sea that fills the rivers. The streams make the ocean, but the ocean makes the streams. that the rivers rise in the mountains and run to the sea; but the truer statement is, that the rivers rise in the sea and run to the mountains; and that their passage thence is only their homeward journey to the place from which they started. All the water of the rivers has once been in the clouds; and the clouds are but the condensation of the invisible vapor that floats in the air; and all this vapor has been lifted into the air by the heat of the sun playing upon the ocean. Most persons have no impression of the amount of water which the ocean is continually pouring into the sky, and which the sky itself is sending down in showers to refresh the earth. If they were told that there is a river above the clouds equal in size to the Mississippi or the Amazon; that this river is drawn up out of the sea, more than a mile high; that it is always full of water, and that it is more than twenty-five thousand miles in length, reaching clear round the globe, they would call it a very extravagant assertion. And yet not only is this assertion substantially true, but very much more than this is true. If all the waters in the sky were brought into one channel, they would make a stream more than fifty times as large as the Mississippi or