of which it has to bear the disgrace, if science confutes them.

To-day, then, as on last Sunday, I plead for the Scripture itself, against our crude interpretations of it, both in its history of the Fall and of the Deluge. I ask you not to believe that a man was able to frustrate the purposes of God; not to think that the world was created in Adam, or stood in his obedience; for the Scriptures of the New Testament, illustrating those of the Old, teach us that it stood and stands in the obedience of God's well-beloved Son; the real image of the Father, the real bond of human society and of the whole universe, who was to be manifested in the fulness of time, as that which He had always been; who was to exhibit in the sorrow, tears, death of a man, the full grace and truth of which all men, so far as they had trusted in God, had exhibited some tokens and reflections. I ask you not to think,-because Adam could only transmit to his descendants the nature which he had, and because all who lived according to that nature, were evil continually in the imagination of their hearts,—that therefore God forgot the work of His own hands, or ever ceased, or ever has ceased, to seek after them and strive with them. I ask you, lastly, not to doubt that there is a true and holy repentance in God, since otherwise there can be no true and holy repentance in us. For though our repentance be for sin, yet it cannot spring from sin. The holy Being must be the author of it. And if He is the author of it, it must issue from something which there is in Himself. Oh! be sure that the repentance which He would awaken in us, is in the strictest sense the counterpart of His own. He would have us wish,-not that His order should be changed, not that His war against evil should be less

THE DELUGE: ITS USE TO US.

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exterminating than it is;—but that our wills should be brought into conformity with His Will; that His punishments should do the work they are sent to do,-for us, and for mankind, and for the earth. He would have us say, 'Grant that it may repent us and grieve us at our hearts, 'that we and our brethren have made ourselves the slaves ' of nature instead of Thy servants; that we have walked ' after the flesh instead of the Spirit; that we have lived 'each as separate individuals warring against each other, 'not as members of a kind redeemed and united in Christ, '-after the downward tendencies of the old Adam, and 'not according to the quickening Spirit of the new. 'Grant us and all Thy children this repentance; that so we 'may pass safely through whatever judgments and chas'tisements Thou hast ordained for the corrupted earth in 'which we dwell; that we may be fit to behold it and 'offer thanksgiving sacrifices for it, when it comes forth 'from Thy hands purified and renewed !*

SERMON III,

NOAH AND ABRAHAM.

(Lincoln's Inn, Quinquagesima Sunday.-March 2, 1851.)

Lessons for the day, Genesis IX, and XII.

GENESIS XII. 1-3.

Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

THE following words opened the lesson for this morning:

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have 1 given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for

N: one. Ink, has ever doubted that this is a divine Tuessing unor the human sacs. The Wals at altrosed * the representatives of who had just escaped from the waters of the food. Now the two characteristics, which were said in belong or man in his original, creadon, ace said belang him here. The beasts, the birds, the fishes, are to fear him; he is made in the image of God. Neither of these titles car by possibility be limited to a time that was past. The dominion is especially assured to Nash and his sons; the law concerning the shedding of man's blooda law, stray assuming that era had existed and was Ekely to exist—rests on the other and more glorious distinction. There was a third part of the original charter which is renewed and strengthened. De team Ma mutigny, and replenish the earth, is a command given to those who had seen and experienced the wickedness of the cud earth, with as much emphasis, with as large a benediction, as it was given on the day when the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

I apprehend that, even if we had not been told of that signal witness for God's order and against man's transgression, which is contained in the story of the Delage, we should still have found nothing to surprise us in the blessing of Noah. The worst sinner who perished when the ark floated, had the right of dominion over the birds and the beasts and the fishes; though in consenting to obey his own inclination he had become their slave. He had a right to feel that the blessing, ‘increase and mutiny, was his; only through his uncleanness, and indifference to

the duties of a father, he had made it into a curse. He had a right to believe that he had the likeness of God; only he had acquired the likeness of the serpent, which was sentenced to go on his belly, and eat dust. In every case the cause was the same, and the effect was the same. Each man would live in himself and to himself. He could not therefore be, in the real sense of the word, a man. He was wrapped up in his Adam nature. He could claim no fellowship with his kind.

Still, there is something especially appropriate in this language to the inhabitants of a restored earth. One cannot help feeling that, though it is in strictest accordance with all that has gone before, it has yet a wider scope,a higher promise. Compare it with the simple records of the garden life of Adam, and you perceive that you are entering upon a more advanced stage in human history. I use the words because they are true, and because I think it is honouring God and his word to use them. I know very well that we shall hear of more, and more complicated, sins than we have heard of yet. But as I find a perfectly holy Being blessing the work of His hands; as I find the sacred historian regarding the world as His world, and man as under His government;—I suppose it is not wrong, but right for us to do the same:— and to try, if we can,-to understand what step it is that we have gained since the oppressors of the earth were destroyed, and it began its life anew.

One change has been often noticed, and has recently been turned into an argument against the old doctrine respecting capital punishment. Noah and his sons are that, 'Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall

he shed.' But, by a still older decree, Cain was