your great Friend, think of your acting on inferior principles, and forgetting HIM, and His command?

As, therefore, you are to love God supremely, so your whole course of action must proceed preeminently from a principle of obedience to Him: a wish to serve and please Him to whom you are under such unspeakable obligation. You will study His will; imitate His example; and do all to Him and for Him, with a continual reference and regard to your ever present Lord: laying out yourself, your talents, and means in His service. And, acting on this principle, you will devote your time, your understanding, your wealth, your influence, and all your faculties in doing good to the utmost, with increasing energy, and to the latest period of your existence here: and what an extensive field of service there is open before you in this world of sin and misery! Much good you may do if you will exert yourself. Whilst men in general sit still, or walk carelessly through life till opportunity crosses their path, and misery, as it were, beards them, and so do little for their Lord, you should make it a part of your constant occupation to devise, and plan, and search out ways and means of pleasing Him, by serving

the community, and the members of it, with enlarged and comprehensive beneficence.

Let us pause for a moment here. We are apt to form our ideas of the talents entrusted to us on a too contracted scale. If a man be shut up in prison, or banished like the Apostle John to a desert island, in a state of destitution, and precluded from society, you then perceive that prayer, praise, a careful cultivation of all the graces of the Spirit, communion with God, an exalted love of Him, an enlarged benevolence to mankind with special reference to Him who commands and requires it; the improvement of his faculties to the utmost in order to be useful to himself where he is, and to others should opportunity ever be afforded to him ;-these constitute a real, and exalted, and, it may be, the only possible improvement of his talents while he is confined to such a sphere.

But suppose him to be afterwards set at liberty, and moving in society, still the unrelaxed pursuit of the above continue to form the essential foundation of all other improvement of his talents, and so they would have done if he never had been a prisoner or an exile; and to these he now adds

way,

active exertion in doing good to others by every practicable method, that not merely falls in his but that he can think of and contrive. His eager desire to serve and please his gracious Benefactor in the way He has pointed out, leads him "to go about doing good," and that from high religious principle, as to the LORD, and in obedience to His command: to man as his brother, for the Lord's sake.

These four points, then, stand pre-eminent in the scale of importance, and in the following order.

FIRST. An earnest endeavour,* by the use of all the means, to obtain the promised grace and aid of the Holy Spirit ; † and thus to derive "life," and a "renewed mind:" grace and more grace continually increasing," the free gift of God through faith in Christ Jesus."

SECONDLY. A diligent pursuit after the principal evidence of that renewed life; namely, an

* "Strive to enter in at the strait gate."-" The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." + See Luke, chap. xi. verse 9 to 13 inclusive.

ardent and supreme love of GoD, and desire to serve Him, and to do good from that principle of love and obedience to Him.

THIRDLY. The active exertion of our powers in doing good to our brethren on an enlarged scale, in imitation of our Lord and Saviour. And connected with this is the filling up some station in society, as a profession, business, or employment, according to our sphere in life; as this, if properly directed, may extend our opportunities, as well as increase our power of being useful.

FOURTHLY. The cultivating our intellectual faculties, and extending our knowledge, and this still with the view of serving and pleasing GoD by being useful to others as well as improving our own minds; and this leads us to the more particular consideration of the subject of this little work.

But before we enter upon this, let us for a moment survey the scale of desirable objects which is too commonly in the mind of a young person at his setting out in the world. The "Pearl of great price" is unknown through carelessness, or undervalued if known; and therefore

is not the first and great object of pursuit: and not being so, the sublime result of obtaining and advancing in this new and divine life not only fails of taking place, but is equally undervalued. GOD, who is the centre to which the soul should tend, is not his love, and delight, and object of imitation and service. No wonder, then, that what benevolent actions he may casually perform, proceed from inferior and mixed principles; such as a combination of natural pity, of self-applause, and a latent desire for the applause of others: and that the fruit he bears have no indication of an engrafted tree: they are poor, and insignificant, and thinly scattered, and of no real goodness. Nor, indeed, is he concerned about it. Success in life in obtaining wealth, or honour, or power for selfish ends, are his objects of supreme veneration, of eager desire, and of ardent pursuit. These, at his death, he leaves behind him, and the main business of life has been totally neglected. His higher interests have been sacrificed and abandoned for the gratification of comparatively low views and temporal pursuits,-pursuits indeed not to be neglected in their proper place and for proper ends; but had he formed for himself a just scale of nobler objects, and acted upon it, he would have sought above all things the