SERMON XX. JEREMIAH IV. VERSE XXXI. I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, and the anguish as of her that bringeth forth her child. To listen to that voice which the prophet in imagination heard, to diminish a real anguish, which he only witnessed with the eye of fancy; to minister to the weariness of heart, to the wailing, and spreading of hands, and to lift from the ground many a living being that crieth out, woe is me, my soul is weary, to do what Jesus Christ did, to act as he commanded, and to labor in the work of salvation, and love, for these objects we are met here this night;* for a moment the business of the world is forgotten; the aged are thoughtless of their infirmities; the gay of their pleasures; the busy of their toils; the church has told you, that there is great affliction in the land, and ye have entered into this holy place to minister unto it: May God bless this purpose, may he breathe into you the soul of sanctity, and for the mercies of the present hour, forget the sins that are past, and lessen the sorrows that are to come. The sun is now fallen in the Heavens, and the habitations of men are shaded in gross darkness: That sun is hastening onwards to other climates, to carry to all tongues, and people, and nations, the splendor of day: What scenes of mad ambition, and of bleeding war will it witness in its course. What cruel stripes; what iron bondage of the human race; what de * This Sermon was preached in the night, as is the custom with Charity Sermons in Scotland. basing superstition; what foul passions; what thick, and dismal ignorance! It will beam upon the savage, and sensual Moor; it will lighten the robber of Arabia to his prey; it will glitter on the chains of the poor negro. It will waken the Indian of the ocean to eat the heart of his captive. The bigot Turk will hail it from the summit of his mosque; it will guide the Brahmin to his wooden Gods; but in all its course it will witness perhaps no other spectacle of a free, rational people, gathered together under the influence of revelation, to lighten the load of human misery, and to give of their possessions to the afflicted, and the poor. There is so much evil mixed with all human attempts at improvement, and we are driven so frequently to sacrifice one good to obtain a greater, that hardly any scheme has been proposed for promoting human comfort, which has not experienced, in its infancy, a strenuous opposition; as often as such opposition proceeding from a mistaken calculation of good, and evil, is conducted with temper, and mo |