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unchanging covenant and promise. Political sagacity can look but a little distance, and that only by uncertain conjecture, into future scenes. A thousand things which the keen eye of

the Burkes and Cannings of the world cannot discover in the future, may modify anticipated changes, and render void the plans of the profoundest political sagacity. But no such unseen modifying causes can affect the predictions of Him who has foretold the conversion of the world. He saw the end from the beginning. He saw all the revolutions of states and empires. He saw all the plans of statesmen, and all the results of wars and revolutions; and he has made it a matter of public record, that the period is to come when "the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad, and the desert blossom as the rose;" when "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." In the divine purposes it is settled; in the promises of the everlasting God it is fixed; and the time shall arrive when

shall

"The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks"

"Shout to each other, and the mountain tops
From distant mountains catch the flying joy;
Till, nation after nation taught the strain,
Earth rolls the rapturous hosannah round.”

The world is to be recovered to God. No matter how degraded it is no matter how polluted-no matter how sunken; all its lands of pollution and defilement are to be made as lovely as the "sweetest village that smiles on a Scottish or New England landscape." No matter what it may cost; the purposes of God are to be fulfilled. No matter how many of our young men are to go forth, consecrated to this work, the nation must be willing that they should go and lay their boncs

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on the banks of the Senegal or the Ganges-in burning sands or amid the snows of the North. No matter how many fall as martyrs, their places are to be supplied. If other Lymans and Munsuns are to fall by the hand of violence, Amherst and other colleges are to send forth those who will hail it as a privilege to tread in their steps, and to die, if God so will it, as they died. Let the heathen world become full of martyrs, and every vale be filled with the rough stones that mark the graves of murdered missionaries, or with graves which not even the humblest monument shall point out to the passing traveller, still the world is to be converted to God; and the work is to be pursued until the time shall come when even in those lands the same honour shall be rendered to the names of the murdered men which the world now cheerfully pays to the names of Ignatius and Polycarp, of Latimer, and of Cranmer.

It is to be an elementary principle in the choice of a profession, that this world is to be converted to Jesus Christ. It is to form the basis on which that choice is to be made. It is to be one of the points which are assumed as true; and to promote that object is yet to be one of the main purposes which is to influence young men in making that choice. Whatever is needful for that is to be done; whatever would retard that -whatever would not in some way promote it, is to be deemed a course of life that is a departure from the divine purposes, and an object which lies out of the appropriate sphere of human effort. And the time will come at no distant period,—and should be now regarded as already come by every young man, -that no one has entirely correct views in the choice of his profession, who has not admitted it as an elementary and a leading principle in his choice, that all the miseries of men should be alleviated and will be alleviated by the prevalence of the gospel of Christ, and that his talents are to be consecrated in their appropriate sphere in augmenting human hap

piness; in removing the evils of cruel laws, and degrading rites, and bloody institutions-of ignorance, and superstition, and pollution, throughout the entire world. Be it a fixed principle, that the light of truth, like that of a clear summer's morning, is yet to be diffused over all the darkened hills and vales of this world; that the banner of salvation is to float in broad and ample folds, "all covered o'er with living light," everywhere on earth; and that, under the influence of welldirected effort, every pagan temple is yet to be left without a priest, and every pagan altar without a sacrifice.

XV.

Practical Preaching.*

THE subject to which your attention will be invited, at this time, is practical preaching. The design is so to discuss it as to present as far as possible a view of the preacher's power and province. In other words, we desire to consider the question, how may a preacher make the most of his office and influence in regard to the salvation of the world. In order to understand what is meant, it is necessary to distinguish this from two other kinds of discourse, which have often been deemed the appropriate province of the preacher.

The first may be characterized as that which is contemplative, pious, and consoling. It rather assumes that there is a church to be edified, than that the mighty task is to be undertaken of recovering a church from a ruined world; rather that an edifice is reared which needs only that its proportions should be preserved; its beauty kept from defacings; than that a man is to enter amid ruins, to engage in rearing an edifice from the foundation. He who goes to this work, goes to speak words of consolation; to recount the privileges of those whom he addresses; to dwell with pious contemplations on their hopes, and their elevations over a less favoured portion of mankind. The aim of the preacher is not so much to convert, as to sanctify the soul; not so much to press the empire of God into regions of surrounding desolation and night, as to keep and cultivate the territory

*An address delivered before the Porter Rhetorical Society, in the Theological Seminary, Andover, September 10, 1833.

already gained. It assumes that in a time and manner over which the preacher has no control, the benignant purposes of God toward man will be manifested; and that the main end of the ministry is to retain the jurisdiction which God has already gained by his power. It cannot be denied that many men have felt themselves called to this special undertaking; and it would not be easy to deny that entire systems of divinity have received their form from some such views of the design of the preacher. That such preaching is not useful will not be affirmed; and that a talent for it may be eminently fitted to do good, will not here be called in question. It is pious, contemplative, edifying;and it is a very important department of the great design of redemption, to train the recovered faculties of man for glory. The work of cultivating a field regained from the desolations of the wilderness, of making the landscape smile where before all was barren, may be as important, in some respects, as that more hardy and daring enterprise which plunges into the forest, and encounters cold, and tempests, and streams, for the purpose of recovering sites for towns and empires from the far-extended wastes. The design of noticing this is merely to distinguish it from that kind of preaching which is to be the subject of this address.

The second kind of preaching from which we wish to distinguish the subject before us, may be termed speculative. It may be of high intellectual character, and may call into exercise the highest endowments of the imagination, and the profoundest talents of thinking. It may draw from the stores of ancient learning; or it may revel much in splendid visions of what shall yet occur on our own globe. The single point on which we are remarking is, that it does not contemplate any direct and mighty movement on the spirits of men in converting them to Jesus Christ. It does not design an overpowering aggression on the works of darkness, and on the mighty mass of evil which has reared its strongholds in every land, and in every human bosom. It delights in abstractions; in unusual thoughts; in acute dis

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