and where thieves do not break through, nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

This is the sum of the whole matter. If we are able to fast, we should do so. We are exhorted to it by God, and the Church; but we must fast to God, not to the world; to our own hearts, not to other men's eyes; to conscience, not to form.

And think not, that if you so fast, you will lose your reward.-No, you will have a witness in your own approving conscience, and a witness in Him, Whose eye never slumbers, and who records the feeblest effort made for His Son's sake in the path of holiness.

Deny yourselves, then, to follow Christ; let each day have its daily cross, and you will learn, ere long, that what now seems hardest and bitterest to you, has in it a sweetness more exquisite than can be found in self-indulgence, and worldly joy. Life will become, what it was intended to be, a continal preparation for death; and temporal self-denial, a foretaste of eternal enjoyment.

And when the toil and travail of this miserable world are ended, you will look back on the mortifications, and prayers, and tears of your earthly pilgrimage, as the means which, under grace, and for your Saviour's merits, have borne you safe and undismayed to the mansions of the Saints in light, and to the joyous Alleluias of your heavenly home!

SERMON XVI.

OF SOWING BESIDE ALL WATERS.

ISAIAH Xxxii. 20.

Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters.

THERE seems little doubt that the prophecy contained in the chapter from whence this text is taken, had a primary, and secondary fulfilment; the latter being the greater event, since the Messiah Himself was connected with it; while the former related only to the temporal fortunes of the house of Judah at a period but few years subsequently to that in which it was delivered. Thus type and antitype meet in the same prediction.

The sovereign alluded to, as "the King" that should "reign in righteousness," was Hezekiah. If the prophecy was uttered in the days of Ahab, we may read its accomplishment in the early part of Hezekiah's reign but if that monarch was actually on the throne, when Isaiah published his tidings of future good, then we must look for its accomplishment in the period immediately succeeding the invasion of the Assyrians, and the slaughter of Sennacherib; when, after "many days" of trouble, God's people were permitted (as it had been foretold they should) to "dwell in peaceable habitations, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places;" when "the work of righteousness was peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance for ever:" when the effect (that is, as Bishop Lowth explains the passage) of God's goodness, and man's reformation, should give peace and unanimity at home, and freedom and security from the invasion of enemies from without.

There is, as I have said, no question

1 See Lowth and Pole, (iii. 329) in loc., and also Townsend's Chron. Arr.