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these benefits believers in all ages are equal sharers with the first converts, our Lord's own contemporaries, provided they be equally good Christians. The particular benefits which the first Christians received from the miraculous powers, in the cure of their diseases and the occasional relief of their worldly afflictions, and even in the power of performing those cures and of giving that relief, these things in themselves, without respect to their use in promoting the salvation of men by the propagation of the gospel, were, as we are taught by our Syrophoenician sister, but the fragments and the refuse of the bridegrom's supper.

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We have now traced the motives of our Lord's unusual but merciful austerity in the first reception of his suppliant. What wonder that so bright an example of an active faith was put to a trial which might render it conspicuous? It had been injustice to the merit of the character to suffer it to lie concealed. What wonder, when this faith was tried to the uttermost, that our merciful Lord should condescend

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to pronounce its encomium, and crown it with a peculiar blessing? "O woman! great is thy faith! Be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And when she was come to her house, she found the devil gone out, and her daughter laid upon the bed." The mercy shown to this deserving woman, by the edification which is conveyed in the manner in which the favour was conferred, was rendered a blessing to the whole church; inasmuch as it was the seal of the merit of the righteousness of faith, not of "faith separable from good works," consisting in a mere assent to facts; but of that faith which is the root of every good work of that faith which consists in a trust in God, and a reliance on his mercy, founded on a just sense of his perfections. It was a seal of the acceptance of the penitent, and of the efficacy of their prayers; and a seal of this important truth, that the afflictions of the righteous are certain signs of God's favour, the more certain in proportion as they are more severe. Whenever, therefore, the memory of this, fact occurs, let every heart and every tongue join in praise and thanksgiving to the

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merciful Lord, for the cure of the young dæmoniac on the Tyrian border; and never be the circumstance forgotten, which gives life and spirit to the great moral of the story, that the mother, whose prayers and faith obtained the blessing," was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by nation."

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SERMON XXXIX.

ECCLESIASTES, xii. 7.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

*

NOTHING hath been more detrimental to the dearest interests of man-to his present and his future interests, -to his present interests, by obstructing the progress of scientific discovery, and retarding that gradual improvement of his present condition which Providence hath left it to his own industry to make; to his future interests, by lessening the credit of revelation in the esteem of those who will ever lead the opinions of mankind,—nothing hath

* Preached for the Humane Society, March 22. 1789.

been more contrary to man's interests both in this world and in the next, than what hath too often happened, that a spirit of piety and devotion, more animated with zeal than enlightened by knowledge in subjects of physical inquiry, hath blindly taken the side of popular error and vulgar prejudice: The consequence of which must ever be an unnatural war between Faith and Reason, between human science and divine. Religion and Philosophy, through the indiscretion of their votaries, in appearance set at variance, form as it were their opposite parties": Persons of a religious cast are themselves deterred, and would dissuade others, from what they weakly deem an impious wisdom; while those who are smitten with the study of nature revile and ridicule a revelation which, as it is in some parts interpreted by its weak professors, would oblige them to renounce their reason and their senses, in those very subjects in which reason is the competent judge, and sense the proper organ of investigation.

It is most certain, that a Divine reve

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