scenes await you. We trust your country will not need the interposition of your swords; but, free from foreign commotion and internal disquiet, will continue to hold a distinguished rank among the nations of the earth.

Gentlemen, our best wishes follow you into the tranquil and useful walks of life. May you long enjoy, with gratitude, the bounties of Heaven and the blessings of Christianity in the happiest land beneath the sun, and when your great Commander, the captain of our salvation, shall give you your discharge, may you hang up your arms in the mansions above, and be numbered among those happy spirits, who have fought their way to glory, and washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb.

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SERMON VII.

THE GOSPEL PREACHED TO THE POOR.

LUKE Vii. 22.

To the poor the Gospel is preached.

Of the numerous evidences in favor of the truth of Christianity, that derived from miracles has always been considered of primary importance. Although it has been assailed by the most ingenious sophistry of modern deists, it has triumphed over all opposition, and will ever remain one of the great bulwarks of the Christian faith. This kind of evidence, indeed, is essential to a revelation, purporting to come from God, for in no other way are we able to conceive how a revelation can be made. Should we be thought to attach too great importance to this

kind of evidence, we have only to plead the authority of our divine Master. In the early part of his ministry, the fame of his benevolent labors, as it spread throughout Judea, reached the damp and gloomy walls where the bold and intrepid Baptist lay a prisoner for his fidelity to an incestuous tyrant. When he heard of the wonderful works which Jesus performed, he called two of his disciples and sent them to him saying,-Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?

We cannot suppose that John himself had any doubts of the claims of Jesus to be the Messiah, as he had some time before pointed him out to the multitude on the banks of Jordan as the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world ;—and had beheld the descent of the Holy Ghost like a dove on his sacred head, when he condescended to submit to receive baptism at his hands. His embassy to Jesus was more probably intended to satisfy the minds of his disciples, than his own; and to introduce them to the notice and regards of the Saviour, before he should be removed from them by the bloody act of his relentless persecutor.

When the messengers of John delivered their errand, they found the Saviour engaged in his

usual acts of benevolence and mercy,-for in that same hour he cured many of their infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits, and unto many that were blind he gave sight. These benevolent miracles furnished a ready and satisfactory answer to the question of the disciples. Our Lord might indeed have returned them a categorical reply, but he well knew the power of evidence on the human mind; and it was doubtless his object, in performing these and other miraculous cures, not only to relieve the miseries of suffering humanity, but to furnish a mass of evidence sufficient to satisfy minds more inquisitive than were probably those of the disciples of John-evidence so full and so minute as to render perfectly inexcusable every rational being to whom it is addressed in vain.-Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised; to the poor the gospel is preached.

In this enumeration of miracles, which our Lord adduces as evidence to support his claim to be the Messiah of the scriptures, you will observe that all but one relate to the kingdom of nature. The last, and deservedly the climax of the whole,

relates to the kingdom of grace. That the interesting and important fact, announced in the words of our text, may be considered A MIRACLE in the moral world, may be inferred, not only from the connection which our Lord gives it with the miracles wrought on the bodies of men, but from the consideration that it was as great a deviation from the ordinary course of proceeding at that period in the moral world, as the restoration of sight to the blind and life to the dead was from the ordinary course of nature.

There is another point of light in which our text may be viewed. It may be considered as referring to another source of evidence of the truth of Christianity, viz., that arising from the fulfilment of prophecy. This branch of evidence is not less important than that arising from the miracles of Christ. To some minds it is even more conclusive; and it is a truly astonishing fact, which can only be accounted for by the consideration that blindness has happened to Israel, that this evidence could have been resisted by that remarkable people, who were the depositaries of ancient prophecies, and who with their own eyes witnessed their exact fulfilment in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

The fact to which the Saviour referred the