his greatest achievements should have been gained by those who are really in their root and principles persons that love and fear God. To place direct ungodliness before a holy child of God is too gross a bait to catch the silliest bird. Value a holy experienced friend; the value is unutterable: it will be the means in God's hands of keeping you from many a fall, when you listen to their discovery of sin and self; when you see their escapes, their safeguards, their caution, and their need of prayer, Be very cautious and careful as to the friends that you form; one unwise, injudicious, light, and flippant talker about the gospel will do you more harm than if he were a downright worldling. I repeat it-one unwise, injudicious, light, and flippant talker about the gospel, will do you more harm than if he were a downright worldling. Beware of such; never count such among your intimates: they can do you no good, but, unless prevented, must do you incalculable harm. Remember my dear young friends, the Bible is the nutriment of the new creature: "Desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby :" you never can grow in any other way. And as you read it, pray: pray before you read it, while you read it, and after you have read it; for it is only as the Holy Spirit indites those truths that you read there in your heart, that it ever profits you: those truths that you read, the Holy Ghost must engrave on your spirit, or they never can profit your souls. Read it freely-doctrine, promise, precept. Always be sure there is a snake in the grass when you wish the one to overlay the other: it is truth in its proportions. There is not a godly man on earth that will say, "Leave out the promises;" there is not one that loves Christ that will ever desire to slight the precepts; but many a child of God does not value them as he ought to value them, because he is for a time misled, and darkened in his judgment, and seeth not. Thus we see the path of liberty, of happiness, and of peace. Read the Bible fairly, read it laboriously, read it prayerfully; again I say prayerfully: read it as God's word-holy, that you may be holy.

My dear young friends, two points more, and I will detain you no longer. I have said before, keep your eye fixed upon Jesus; it is a proper maxim for all the varieties of life. Look at his blood, look at his grace, look at his tenderness, look at his willingness, look at his example. Are you in company, and do you find your souls damped? Do you find a danger? Just ask the question -"Is the Lord with me? No: then I will not be here." My dear friends, it were our mercy if that were our touch-stone through life-that "Where my Lord goes not I will not go where I have no sense of his presence, where he withdraws the brightness of his grace I will not be; and if I have done iniquity, by his mercy, I will do so no more."

Be careful in your conduct; most careful; you never can be too careful: words speak loud, but actions louder than words. Men judge of what you are, not by what you say, but by what you do. In your families, to your friends, to your acquaintances, exhibit the meekness, and tenderness, and gentleness, and faithfulness, and honesty of the disciple of Christ. Reverence age. It is one of the abominations of the present day that every man thinks himself a teacher, and the younger always instructs the elder. There can be no more decided proof of the work of Satan, and of the low state to which we are brought in the church of Christ, than that we see this perpetually. Reverence age; especially spiritual age, spiritual experience. Reverence your parents. O, my dear friends, many a child of God has in after days to mourn—“ Ah, that I had been more as I ought to have been to my dear parents in the early part of my Christian course!"

Thus, my dear friends, shall you give blessed evidence, that you have heard the joyful sound, and that you know it. I would earnestly hope and pray, by God's tender mercy and goodness, that you may be led seriously to lay these things to heart, and may the Lord the Spirit so bring in the witness of the gospel into your hearts, and so lay the precious blood of Jesus upon your consciences, that under the drawings of his love you may be able to say, "Here 1 am for this year, and all the years of my life, to be thine, and thine for ever."

DECISION FOR GOD IN YOUTH,

REV. J. FLEtcher, d.d.

STEPNEY CHAPEL, JANUARY 12, 1834.

My young friends, if your feelings on this solemn occasion are in any measure in accordance with the language of the song in which you have been uniting-if you are prepared to sympathise with that choice that led the lawgiver of Israel to despise all the honours of Pharoah's court, and to choose rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season -if you are on the Lord's side, and are disposed, under the influence of solemn impressions and believing convictions to act with decision and steadfastness in your Christian course-then you will at once be prepared to enter into the consideration of the subject that I shall this evening bring under your serious notice :

“And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him."-1 KINGS xviii. 21.

We have in this passage, and its connecting history, a spectacle, singular and unparalleled, presented to our notice. We behold two forces arrayed against each other, engaged in a contest of pre-eminent importance; a contest on the decision of which depended results of the highest moment to the people, and the national welfare of the thousands and tens of thousands assembled upon that occasion. The parties engaged were, as to their physical strength and political power, most unequal. On the one side there was Ahab, King of Israel—Jezebel, the idolatrous queen of Ahab-four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal, the god served and adored by the court of Ahab-four hundred prophets of the groves, the idolatrous worshippers of other divinities; for however idolaters could oppose the true God, they could form coalitions and unions with each other. On the same side there was the power of the court-there were the men of rank, and dignity, and office, and there was the multitude, usually disposed at all times, more or less, to follow in the train of authority, and power, and custom. Such were the forces on the one side in this unequal contest. On the other side was one man, a lone man, faithful amongst the faithless, unseduced, unterrified, a prophet of the Most High God; a man of singular courage, high daring, unexampled fidelity, and unshrinking decision; possessing in himself the true spirit of the martyr and the reformer; distinguished by his profound patriotism, but still more distinguished by his eminent devotion.

The great controversy, then, was, who was the true God-Baal or Jehovahthe God worshipped by Ahab, and Jezebel, and the court, and the prophets, and the multitude, or the Living God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. This was the question; this was the important point at issue; and the prophet of the Most High felt himself shielded by an invisible protection, strong in the Lord

and in the power of his might, possessing moral courage preparing him for the great conflict, and supported by the presence and the consolation which Jehovah imparted to his spirit, proposed an experiment, on the issue of which he leaves the great question to be determined. Baal was a name given to various idolatrous divinities; hence their worshippers are called, in various parts of the Old Testament, Baalites. The word Baal signifies ruler or lord: hence we read of Baalmcon, and Baal-zebub, and Baal-zephon: all these were the different, yet united, objects of idolatrous adoration at that period; and there is little doubt that there was a close identity and affinity between the Baal of the Ammonites, and Phœnicians, and the Moabites, and the Saturn and Jupiter of the Greeks and Romans, and the objects of idolatrous worship amongst our British ancestors in the times of the ancient Druids. Some have supposed that Baal was a personification of the sun or the solar light. Other gods under this name were doubtless embodied types of the powers of nature, or supposed spirits of departed heroes. Whatever they were, they were in character, in principle, directly opposed to the claims and prerogatives of the true God: they were models of cruelty and lust, they were patterns of impurity and revenge. It might well be said that the people sacrificed to devils, and not to God.

Now the prophet proposed an experiment that decided the question. The worshippers of the solar fire might be expected to attach the highest importance to the decision of the question by fire. Elijah adopts that very principle of their idolatrous worship: arrangements are made; bullocks are prepared; and the priests and the prophets of Baal, as you have heard in the instructive narrative read this night in your hearing, employed their arts, and their howlings, and their incantations, and their self-inflicted tortures, for the very purpose of bringing down fire, for the very purpose of consuming the sacrifice they had thus prepared. In vain their entreaties, in vain their prayers, in vain their self-inflicted cruelties; there were none that answered. The appeal was then made on another altar (for there can be no communion between God and Baal;) on another altar the bullock was offered by the prophet of the true God. And to prevent all possibility of collusion, all supposition of design by any of those private and sinister arts that the craft of men, the wicked craft of men, have employed in all ages to delude the unwary and the unenquiring—you find water surrounding the sacrifice, the trenches filled with water, even at the very time when there was a singular and unparalleled drought of water in all parts of the land. (Some infidel wits have asked, "Where did the water come from, if at this very period, for three years, there had been no water in the land of Israel?" forgetting, as they generally do when they offer sceptical objections, that Mount Carmel stood close to the sea-shore, where they found plenty of water for the purpose.) They supplied with water the trenches that surrounded the sacrifice prepared by Elijah, for the purpose of giving a more signal and decisive confirmation to the claims of the true God. You know the result: the appeal was made to Him who has all power in heaven and earth, and who never departs from the ordinary established course of nature in the general laws and arrangements he has appointed, but for the purpose of confirming his own authority, and accrediting, by miraculous agency, his own revelation, and indorsing the commission of his own inspired servants, and thus present a worthy object of confidence to the faith and love and adoration of his people. He who has all the resources of the universe, and all the laws and elements of nature, fire and storm and tempest, at his command caused that fire to descend which consumed

the sacrifice, and presented a visible and decisive confirmation in the view of the assembled thousands, that "Jehovah he was the God, Jehovah he was the God."

My friends, it was with peculiar fitness, therefore, that Elijah made the appeal to the people in the words of the text, when he reproved their pusillanimity, and their wavering, and their neutrality: "How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God follow him; if Baal, then follow him." I am anxious to apply the whole of this important argument; whatever of reason or appeal is involved in this question, to you my young friends. Let us therefore reflect first, on the alternative proposed, and secondly, on the decision required.

I beg your attention first, to THE ALTERNATIVE PROPOSED.

This implies, in the first place, opposition of claims. "If the Lord be God, follow him; if Baal, then follow him." Why, you say, and say justly, "There can be no doubt who was the true God; here we have decisive evidence, that the God of the Hebrews, the God of Elijah, the Lord God of the holy prophets, was the true God. This was the God that answered by fire; this was the God that gave visible signs of his presence, and his majesty, and his power: and therefore Baal we at once reject." Do you reject Baal? There are deities enthroned in the heart, as well as idols embodied to the eye. Every man in his natural estate is an idolater: whatever takes away the heart and the affections from God is an idol, whether carved by the cunning skill of the workman, or presented only in fantasy to the imagination; whether it be the object of desire in the heart, or the object of pursuit in the life, if it interfere with the true God, with the God of the Bible, with the claims and requirements of the true God, it is an idol and you know, my young friends, that there are rival claims here. The alternative, then, applies as much to you, and applies as much to the thousands and myriads of nominal Christians in Britain as it did to those who lived in the land of Israel. At this particular period there are Baals still. Whatever rules in the heart, whatever is lord of the affections, is an object of idolatry, if it interfere with God and his supreme claims.

There is the Baal of sensual indulgence and unhallowed gratification, before the shrine of which, thousands and millions bend the knee of senseless homage, to which genius consecrates her powers, and on which splendour, and taste, and opulence, lavish out their profuse and endless stores. And if the worship of the vilest objects of lust that Greece, or Rome, or Chaldea, or Babylon, or the ancient Moabites, ever embodied in their temples, were now again to be presented, there are amongst the rich, and the poor, and amongst all classes in nominal Christendom, and in nominal Britain, foul idolatries, idolatries of lust and sensuality, as gross as ever dishonoured the days of ancient paganism, and the impurities of ancient times.

There are the gods of Baal, of worldly acquisition, as well as of sensual indulgence; those who live for the purposes of accumulation, and worship at the shrine of Mammon, and think of nothing but the acquisition of this world's good, as the great object of their devotion.

There is the Baal of infidel speculation; men worshipping the powers of their own puny reason, and rejecting the truth of God's Holy Word; saying, "We will think for ourselves;" and maintaining the pride of their own little shallow intellect, and setting this in proud defiance against the authority of the Oracles of God.