lesson, a copy of straight strokes, in writing. Oh! how there are pictured on the mind, the various appliances-with the desire for their perpetuation in families which those moments have hallowed!

Consider this not as frivolous. It weighs with me, as important, in encouraging you, and exhorting you, henceforth, so to appropriate your Sunday evenings, that you and your children may rise from them, to the performance, with an increased diligence, of the toilsome duties of the week. Oh! those sweet occasions for reading together, for superintending and educing our families' improvement; the blending of our voices in a hymn; the timely converse, when our minds are unbent from worldly engrossing cares, and, with our. children, we are children!

But I will pursue my remarks no further, hoping that I have succeeded in inducing a hope of encouragement in you, as to what you can do, and will do, on the Sunday evening. And ye youth, who are before me, let me enjoin you, that ye anxiously, sedulously, become assistant to your parents, in creating circumstances around you for your improvement, in that your manner of appropriating the Sabbath shall be, the sublime, the plain compendium, to the deep philosophy, the love, the truth, by Jesus enunciated, that, The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.

THE TEACHING OF JESUS,

APPLIED BY THE PEOPLE.

MATTHEW, 7th chapter, 28th and 29th verses.

"And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine; for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes."

How truthful are the slightest incidences of the portrayal of the life of Jesus! I say of his life,—for his life was his teaching, and his teaching was his life. Yes, therein is the elucidation of the words read for my text; it was the earnestness flowing from his heart that swayed with the people. His sincere touches responded to their souls: they were mutually the vibrations of nature, which were attuned between them, the teacher and the people-the pupils, and he who taught, not as they whom they had been wont to hear; but who entered into them; whom they felt to be the sympathy uniting with their own bosoms.

Oh! it is not the asperity of austeriousness-the coldly condemning of vice which teaches of error; but the eliciting of the generous tendency of humanity, or of love, in every breast; which perhaps, before, has not been touched, but which has been passed over, or equally unknown, by the censors of crime, as by them whom they condemned,

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Such is our fault, I believe, throughout society, in all our connections with others; and which is the consequence of our ignorance of ourselves; for, without doubt, the more thoroughly one's own failings are imprinted on our hearts, and we see them with the understanding of our minds, the more humble we are, and the more considerate in regard to the failings of others.

Man, constituted as he is, requires, that by man the full of human nature should be revealed. The light, shewing the constituents of which he is composed, cannot shine but from himself to himself. It must be breast to breast, heart to heart, head to head, which is the teacher. Then see we thoroughly; and by our own frailties we know what those of others are. So do we also know their virtues, and the seats of those quickening qualities which run through all, and which are alike the consistence, which, under all circumstances, proves the human family to be one.

Wherever a brighter virtue appears, or wherever in an individual, or in whomsoever, the truthfulness of love glows dispensingly of its blessings unto others, the multitude, the vast family of man, is touched, and the vibrations run through the soul, as of the drop lighting in the ocean of waters, of its own element, the rain drop, its circular vibration extends to its utmost boundary, and it is ever after indivisibly one with the vast deep.

In this sense I believe it was that the remark was made concerning Jesus, by the people, that he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes: not as their hitherto accredited teachers, they who

taught as having taken teaching up as a professionwho had been inured in the schools, they who had been taught what they were to teach; being like to a lithographed impression, every later one becoming more faint in the repetition from the original.

So is truth even, when we merely depend on it as it is delivered to us. It must be newly budding, to be fresh, vigorous, healthy. A recital only will not do. Its germinating life must be nourished. In the sunshine of loving hearts, infusing warmth, its generating, vital speck of creation must put forth. Yes, indeed, must it, and it shall, increase in the earth, in perpetuity, thirty-fold, sixty-fold, and a hundred.

Cease we being the copyists, the repeaters only, of things gone by, drawing for ever from the past; but venture we into the future; look we forward, igniting the qualities which God has implanted within usthe germs, budding in every breast, of purity, good sense; an understanding of our position, of the human family; and inspiring other bosoms, the minds of all upon whom they shall act; being a common sympathy and action to the increasing of truth; a combinedness in a separateness of being, or an indissolubility of a holy object in the world.

Human nature! the more I consider it, the greater, the sublimer, it appears, in its rudiments of a disinterestedness; a love, an understanding, emanating and settling mutually in blessings-so far as its capacities are exercised; are called forth; are known; are felt; are lived: its deathless and ever-rising new emotions establishing in earth an immortality of. vir

tue.

Such are the impulses that rise within me whenever I dwell on, and contemplate, I believe with much advantage, the character of Christ. The evidences appear so confirmatory, that he only was a development of human being, that I dive into myself, and others, and all of my fellow beings, for the discovery · of the similitude of the likeness in us; and it appears, verily as it asseverated in the multitude, who beheld him, and heard him, personally before them, that he taught as one having authority: he touched responsive feelings within them; their emotions of a kindred. nature were kindled; they heard him, they understood him, poor and unlettered as they were-ignorant, in the world's cold phraseology; but rich, in that mine of unexplored human treasure, which shone, and is indestructible as the diamond, and which is bedded in the ore of every human bosom.

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To bring forth the faculties, the treasures of the mind, or spirit of man, is the work of man. liarly is it man's vocation to bring to perfection himself. Man acts upon man. We are not as other creatures, subjected to a superior creature who is over us; but we are as a god to ourselves, breathing in the spirit of the uncreated Spirit, who created us. God has made us to experience the relation in which to himself he has placed us. Divine is the strength in which he has given us power! By the chord of love he attaches us to him. We are moved, and we feel that we are drawn to him, in sympathy. But, then, this drawing of us to him is through ourselves: by, and to, and for, one another, as a brotherhood, our true experience is, that as one child, without any dis