SERMON XI.

MENTAL HOSPITALITY.

HEBREWS xiii. 2.

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

There are precepts, and this is one, of which the incidental importance is more than the direct importance; the applicability of which, a difference of manners, customs, and circumstances has very much diminished, if not totally destroyed; which there is perhaps little occasion to dwell upon in any sense, and which in their original sense cannot or need not now be enforced; but which yet, by the analogies they suggest, or the lessons they contain, or the principles they imply, have acquired a new interest to recommend them to our consideration. I know of no particular reason for admonishing the members of this congregation to practise hospitality to strangers. So far as my observation of their actual conduct goes, they are liable to no charge of deficiency or forgetful · ness on that score; and so far as my knowledge extends of the disposition within, and the circumstances without, under whose influences they act, there is adequate motive for their doing whatever is right and

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useful in this particular, without invoking the aid of the more powerful sanctions of religion and morality to impel a better observance. So far as modern times need this virtue, it is a virtue of native growth in our country. England has long been the generous hostess of all earth's fugitives. Thither they came, in turn, to escape from revolutionary fury and regal vengeance. This island has long been one great temple of hospitality, the sanctuary and asylum of the oppressed. If for a time there were any exceptions to this generosity, they have all been owing to the policy of our statesmen, and not to the feelings of our countryThe national heart was always right, and a right noble heart it is. The madness of continental despotism has ever elicited and illustrated the glory of British hospitality. Why then, it may be thought, put forward a precept, which is doubly rendered obsolete?-obsolete, by the indigenous vigor of the disposition which it was meant to cherish, but which needs not cherishing; and obsolete, by the difference of our manners and condition, which otherwise provide for that convenience for which, in those times, private hospitality was the chief provision. And I reply that it is put forward not on account of its direct, but of its indirect importance. It is put forward because it has acquired, in one way, at least as much interest as it has lost in another. And if there be little use in my preaching to you on the duty of hospitality to strangers, there may be no little use in the thoughts and feelings arising out of the fact that such a precept was so earnestly enforced on the first Hebrew believers in Christianity.

The precept is a valuable relic of antiquity; of a different state of society; of a lower degree of civilization: it carries us far back to a ruder period; it carries us far away to eastern regions. In the progress of society there is a stage in which hospitality to strangers is reckoned among the first of virtues, for this plain reason, that its practice is among the highest utilities or the greatest necessities. Among many eastern tribes, with their unchanging manners, and in thinly peopled countries, we find men remaining long in this stage. But for the custom of such to give food and shelter to the wayfaring man, the charities of life, and the security of life, would soon be at an end. With the multiplication of inhabitants; with the improvement of the arts; with the diffusion of the conveniences of life; with the increased facilities for travelling, and security for property, and all the multifarious arrangements of the more perfect forms of political society, we come into a much better condition, though it may be less adapted to strike the imagination. The precept which reminds us of the contrast is a lesson of gratitude. The sceptic on this point would perhaps be satisfied by the actual comparison of a journey of any given distance in such a country as this, and among any of the semi-civilized tribes that yet occupy any of the not semi-civilized regions on the face of the earth. In proportion as the precept ceases to be obligatory in promoting hospitality to the man whom we know not, it becomes obligatory in promoting gratitude to the God of whom we do know that he has caused our lines to fall in pleasant places, and given us a goodly heritage. The allusion of the

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writer in the text, I take to be to some occurrences in patriarchal history. He refers to the period when oftentimes in fancy, and sometimes perhaps in fact, beings of superhuman nature wandered visibly about the earth, in the outward form of men, and sojourned in the tents of those whose virtues they were commissioned to put to the test, and to whom they became the unexpected agents of reward or punishment. So three men, as they seemed, stood by the tent of Abrahamn in the plains of Mamre, in the heat of the day; and accepted the simple viands which he courteously offered, and his services, as he stood by them under the tree, when they did eat; and ere they left. him that gracious promise, in which Israel gloried through all succeeding generations. And so the two angels came, as common travellers, to Lot at eventide, as he sat in the gate of Sodom; and he rose up to meet them; and bowed his face to the ground; and prayed them to come in to their servant's house, and tarry all night, that he might send them on their ways in the morning; and he pressed them greatly; and he spread his feast; and he protected them from insult; and they told him of the coming doom of the devoted cities, and counselled his flight, and promised him security in the destruction. And other histories are there, of a similar description, showing God's superabundant blessings on man in the discharge of his duty and the exercise of generosity; and illustrating the assertion in the text, that while they only thought of kindly entertaining strangers,some had entertained angels unawares.

There is a narrow and short-sighted criticism, which

in its mistaken strivings after verbal accuracy, is apt to overlook too much the opinions and modes of thought which prevailed in Judea, and which, because the meaning of the word angel is simply messenger, would always so interpret it, to the exclusion of those notions of a superior race of beings, so denominated from their office, in which the Jews manifestly believed, firmly and generally. According to critics of this class, we must in such a passage as the text, interpret the term of human messengers, the angels, i.e. the messengers or ministers of the churches, or of the Gospel; a sense in which the word certainly is found, especially in the commencement of the book of Revelation. The text will then mean, that in their indiscriminate hospitality to strangers, they might sometimes unawares receive, and be edified by, some of the authorized messengers of the Gospel; some who would well repay their kindness by the communication of useful instruction, or interesting fact; who would bring new light to their minds, and fresh gladness to their hearts; who were bearing over the world's wilderness the water of the spring of life eternal; heralds charged with the proclamation of the spiritual jubilee for mankind; and whose benediction of 'peace to this 'house' came upon it in the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel of peace.' And though the coming of such guests might be like angel visits, few and far between;' yet the hope of it would animate, and the recurrence richly reward all the efforts and duties of the hospitality of the intervening period.

Well would it have been for the Jewish nation, when Christ came to them, not in that form and with those