and the world of fiction, you must come back to sober truth and reality. Your reveries and vain imaginings must be given up, or you will not come under that government of principles, that spiritual subjection of the thinking power of the mind to Christ, which in the text is so emphatically called a "captivity to the obedience of Christ."

Is your mind prone to wander? When you would have it look steadily at heaven, does it turn away to earth, in spite of all your efforts? Here it becomes important to inquire, whether you are careful to avoid all disturbing, distracting influences. We should especially do so on the return of the Sabbath. It may be that your worldly business is continued to a late hour on the evening preceding the Sabbath, and after all is left unfinished. It may be that your reading on the morning of the Sabbath is miscellaneous, or unsuitable, and that your morning conversation is not strictly relevant to the objects of the day. With such defects in the preparation, ought you to expect any thing else than wandering thoughts, and an unsatisfactory day? Did we end our worldly cares at a seasonable hour previous to the Sabbathdid we devote some portion of the previous evening to special meditation and prayer to get our minds in a spiritual frame and did we guard as we ought against every disturbing influence on the morning of the Sabbath, we should rarely have to complain of wandering, unprofitable thoughts in the services of the sanctuary.

VI. The last direction I would give for acquiring a religious control over our thoughts is, to erect mementoes of spiritual things along the path of our daily business. An ancient heathen monarch is said to have had a servant cry out at his door every morning, "Remember that thou art mortal." This was a memento of an important truth he was prone, in the multitude and pressure of his affairs, to forget. What if the same admonition had been repeated at noon and at night? These would have been so many additional mementoes;-by which I mean certain appropriate expedients to remind us of heavenly things in the intervals of our daily business. Such expedients we frequently employ to remind ourselves of secular engagements and duties, and the more forgetful we are, the more do we employ them. Let us employ them to remind ourselves of the objects of faith. And to this end let us study out the analogies, the resemblances between earthly and heavenly things, and thus associate the two in our minds. In this manner we may fill the whole earth with mementoes of the invisible world, and make every object and place vocal of heaven and of God.

It only remains for each one to inquire, how far his own thoughts have been brought into this blessed captivity. Are we able to read even the shortest chapter in the Bible, without wandering thoughts? Can we pray without them? Can we meditate, even for a short time, without them, upon any one religious subject? Have our thoughts an upward tendency during the day? Let us not lose sight of the importance of this subject to ourselves individually. It is not less im

portant to us, than the possession of eminent spirituality and holiness. Let us look for divine aid, and not lose sight of the appropriate means, nor of the necessity for immediate and persevering effort. Verily we are recommending a high and invaluable attainment. Whoever of us has his thoughts in spiritual subjection, has gained the entire mastery of them. Not only so, he has fought the grand battle, has performed the most difficult task in life. His is the blessed liberty of the gospel the liberty of thought. His mind is no longer the slave of circumstances; it is dependent on nothing without. At the command of the will, it moves in any direction and to any object. Above all, it can soar upward with angel-flight towards the glorious Sun of Righteousness, and gaze without distraction upon his ineffable effulgence. This is the man to be "filled with the knowledge of God's will, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding." This is the man. to be "fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God." This is the man to be "strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and long suffering with joyfulness."

Let us seriously reflect on the importance of the subject we have been contemplating. Think not that the heart can be kept, while the thoughts are uncontrollable. It cannot be. Our hearts will never be brought into full captivity to the obedience of Christ, unless our thoughts are. Both must be subdued, or neither will be.

May God, in infinite mercy, bring all our thoughts into this captivity, and draw our souls continually, effectually, and forever towards Himself. Amen.

SERMON CCCXL.

BY REV. GEORGE B. CHEEVER,

PASTOR OF THE ALLEN STREET PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEW YORK.

A NEW YEAR'S SERMON.

"And all the days of Methusaleh were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and be died." Genesis v: 26.

NINE HUNDRED YEARS! It almost covers the duration of the antediluvian world. We speak of the age of Bacon, the age of Plato, the age of Burke, characterizing ages by the great men that have marked them. Of Methusaleh there is nothing of greatness recorded, besides the begetting of sons and daughters, some of whom were pious, but the roll of nine whole centuries for his mortal life. You may perhaps call him a great man as being the son of Enoch; and inasmuch as he fills up the whole space between the first and the last inhabitant of the antediluvian world, we may fitly speak of that world's duration as the age of Methusaleh. When Noah began to build the ark Methusaleh was living and was 849 years old; Lamech also was living and was 662 years old. Doubtless they were both pious, and probably some of their descendants also. Some of Methusaleh's brethren and sisters likewise, whom Enoch bore after him, and educated as such a man must have educated his children, were in all probability the subjects of divine grace. Noah was not, therefore, entirely alone, not entirely destitute of christian sympathy and succor. His own father Lamech was alive until five years before the deluge, and his grandfather, Methusaleh, was living up to the very year that the deluge came. Nay, if he died a natural death, it could not have been more than a month, if so much, before the deluge. We do not know, indeed, that he did not perish in the deluge, but if not, then the funeral of Methusaleh must have been the very last thing that Noah attended. We go upon the supposition that Lamech and Methusaleh were both pious; and we do it principally because they had such pious sons. The thought is too dreadful for a moment to suppose that Methusaleh, that old, old man, remained among the ungodly scoffers of his grandson. We cling to the belief that he was a child of God, that he supported Noah by his counsels and his example; perhaps he assisted with his own hands in building

the ark; perhaps he lived to the very day when Noah entered into the ark, and blessed him, and took a solemn farewell of him, and then awaited, in holy resignation, his own end, giving himself up to God, even amidst the descending torrents, and seeking, to the last moment, to persuade others to repentance. I conceive that this is not at all improbable; that he, and what few others of God's people may have been living to the last, would solemnly gather together in prayer and supplication, on the day when the foundations of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, awaiting in that posture, the consummation of the will of Jehovah. And if so, they doubtless prayed for Noah and his family, and thus the breath of prayer from the antediluvian world, even on the eve of its destruction, may have mingled with Noah's own supplications to bear the ark in safety over the waste of waters.

It was a solemn night for Noah and the world. It was a solemn night for the aged Methusaleh and other believing relatives; but how much more so for the unbelieving and ungodly; their last night before the storm of vengeance.

In dwelling upon this interesting text, I shall first take a simple survey of the age and manners of the antediluvian world; and second, I shall draw some important lessons from such a survey.

I. As to the age and manners of the antediluvian world. The youth of the world was the season of man's greatest age; perhaps also it was the season of man's greatest wickedness. Three things we know with certainty, amidst all the darkness that hangs over the life of the antediluvians; they lived to a great age, they rose to a great height of depravity, and except Enoch, they all died. The assurance of a very long life would be to any man either a great temptation to sin, or a great means of holiness; most likely the former. Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. The character written for our instruction of the race of man in the world before the flood, that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, corresponds unerringly with the inspired declaration by the mouth of Solomon. The sentence of death deferred for so many ages, was almost unknown, and came at length to be utterly discredited; they thought not of it; nay, so hardy and secure had long centuries of vigorous existence made them, that, as long as Adam lived, they might have dreamed of indefinite centuries yet to come, the limit of man's life, in all probability, not having been made the subject of precise revelation. For more than seven antideluvian generations no death is recorded in the scriptures. There may have been mortal diseases, and even the crime of Cain may have been not unfrequently repeated, for the earth was filled with violence.

But, for aught we know, the funeral of Adam was the first which his posterity attended for nearly a thousand years. There was, indeed, another funeral; the murdered Abel was buried; but the parents were the only mourners. With his own hands Adam dug the grave of his

youngest, best beloved son; with his own hands he buried him; and Eve planted the sacred inclosure with flowers, and watered it with her The simplest things were then matters of revelation; death and its consequences were so little known, that the angels would have to show Adam what he must do with the bleeding corpse of Abel; the language of Abraham, bury my dead out of my sight, could only spring from experience; for if death left the bodies of those we love as uncorrupted and as beautiful as life, we should wish to keep them by us, though inanimate and lifeless. The ancient Egyptians had a strange custom of doing this, as it was. They sometimes kept the dead bodies of their friends standing upright in their houses, embalmed so carefully, that every feature remained as it was in life; they kept them, Diodorus tells us," in costly habitations, for the pleasure of beholding them for ever."

When Methusaleh was born, Adam was six hundred and eighty seven years of age. When Adam died Methusaleh was two hundred and eighty two. The oldest man lived in the society of the first man 282 years. Methusaleh was the grandfather of Noah; and when Noah was born, Methusaleh was 369 years old. Methusaleh and Noah were therefore contemporaries during the long space of 600 years. Noah had never seen Adam; the father of the second race of mortals had never seen the father of the first. But Lamech, Noah's father, and the first born of Methusaleh, had lived while Adam was yet alive, 95 years; and he, as well as Methusaleh, could describe to Noah, from personal knowledge and recollection, the teachings and the venerable grandeur of the Father of them all.

We cannot tell how many of the posterity of Seth were men of piety; we may hope that at least this was the case with the first born, whose names are recorded in the scriptures. The generations so recorded are the first born of the first born: in that line came Enoch and Noah, the first translated without seeing death, and the second preserved amidst the universal deluge to be the second father of the world. Enoch was the father of Methusaleh, and was translated when his first born son was 300 years of age. Before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God; and the period for Methusaleh's education was sufficiently long for both himself and his own son Lamech to be moulded by the piety of their translated progenitor. The character of Enoch is sufficient pledge that the education of Methusaleh would be that of a child of God. Perhaps it was to make up for the taking away of Enoch from the world so early that the son of Enoch was permitted to live in the world so long. As the father was translated that he should not see death, the son was left to a longer life than that of any other mortal; and the example of the father's piety was probably transmitted and continued in the piety of the son. As to that numerous progeny of the antediluvians undistinguished by name in the scriptures, but embraced in the general appellation of sons and daughters (as it is stated of each successive patriarch that he lived after he had begotten his first born, some hundreds of years, and