SERMON II.

"THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES."

ISAIAH Xxvi. 9.

For when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.

THE Prophet warns us of the Christian duty of watchfulness, as especially pressed upon us when God speaks audibly in the display of his superintending power; and the memorial of a second Advent Sunday points to the great end of all our watchfulness,-the Redeemer's advent in the flesh, and the Redeemer's advent to the general judgment. Whatever, then, brings our minds to this great end of our being-Christian watchfulness in the cause of the kingdom of our God and his Christwill be well adapted to the purposes of this

hallowed season: whatever leads us to the consideration of Christ's advent, the mercies of his first advent past, and the glories and the terrors of his second advent yet to come, whether that be nigh or far off, may well serve as invitation to think more of Christ as our redeeming Saviour, our omniscient Judge.

In my last morning's discourse from this place upon those eventful movements of our day which have led many Christians to believe them "signs of the times," I introduced the subject as one which appeared to call for our serious consideration also. I declared, at the same time, that it was not the idle and unprofitable motive of curiously prying into the secret counsels of the great God who rules over heaven and earth, which should be the motive for such consideration; and that it would be more profitable to note the signs, in reference to their intended practical and spiritual effect upon our own souls individually, than to think or say much as to the thing signified, and still future. To this end I ventured to draw your attention, in unison with that of our fellow Christians who are thinking and speaking much of these things in other

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places, to six great and eventful circumstances, as peculiarly marking the history of our own times, and which might, without presuming too nicely to apply them to any specific thing future, be profitably considered by us as "signs of the times," and therefore, according to our blessed Lord's words, calling for our peculiar observation, "Ye can discern the face "of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs "of the times?"

Of these six, the first of those which I ventured to enumerate is now to be considered; and this was-The great, sudden, and unusual change in the kingdoms and nations of a large portion of the habitable world at and since the period of that tremendous concussion in civilized Europe, which ended in the overthrow of the monarchy of France.

When I named this as the first sign, I also showed, from the prophet Isaiah, that Scripture appends great importance, as a moral engine, to the downfal of empires, in the strong imagery used in the prediction thereof: "The "stars of heaven, and the constellations thereof, “shall not give their light: the sun shall be

darkened in his going forth, and the moon

"shall not cause her light to shine." (Isaiah xiii. 10.)

With such figurative description in the Word of God, and with such moral consequence as is attached to the rise and fall of empires in various other passages of Holy Writ, we are impressively called upon to regard these great events; to regard them as in themselves important, and in their consequences as intended by Almighty God to read an awful lesson to mankind.

It is now somewhat more than five and thirty years since the great epoch in the history of Europe occurred in the revolution which overturned the kingdom of France. Were this epoch to be considered without its peculiar accompaniments and eventful consequences, it would be no more than other issues, which the page of history records, to the successful resistance to a human dynasty, and terminating in scenes of massacre and blood. Every such period is big with awful warning. Nineveh, Babylon, Jerusalem in her twofold ruin, Carthage the totally destroyed, Rome pagan, and modern France, each held out in their mere fall a warning voice to the world. But not one of them was attended or followed by cir

cumstances such as characterized the eventful overthrow of the French monarchy; and none, therefore, are considered, as affecting these times, or the times which immediately succeeded their own, under any thing like a comparison with the results of this later revolution.

Its causes, too, were not a sudden bursting forth of popular fury, or the circumscribed plot of an ambitious few, thirsting for power or discontented with submission. Whatever the proximate cause may have been for kindling the blaze, the principle had been engendering for a long time past.

It seems to have been the ebullition of sentiment and principle, which the abettors thereof had long been brooding over in secret, and which, under an acknowledged avowal of them, were levelled not merely at an existing government, but against all government, and against every principle, human or divine, which holds society together. In no former revolution among mankind had so many circumstances combined as in this, to make it quite plain, as a sign of those times, to be felt and profited by in after times.

It was peculiarly marked. In the downfal