THE LEAST OF SERVICE TO THE GREATEST. then, should we hesitate to pronounce we should feel the removal an indication We can imagine such a revolution in the circumstances of this country, that many of its public structures might no Thus do we unhesitatingly regard the longer be required for the purposes to which they were originally devoted. halt, the maimed, and the blind, the The spacious receptacles into which widow in her penury, and the orphan commerce brings the treasures of the in his loneliness, as virtually amongst globe might be closed; for the enter- the most useful members of our comprise and capital of our merchants might munity, keeping that community from be exhausted, or wholly overborne by hardening into a heartless mass, and foreign competition. There might no preserving in healthful play its sympaIt may be perlonger be men of science amongst us, thies and sensibilities. to throng buildings reared in honor of fectly true, that the indigent cannot do learning and for the advancement of without the benevolent; but it is equally knowledge. The proud edifices might true, that the benevolent cannot do withare gathered out the indigent. And we pray you to crumble, within which trophies of victory and implements of observe, that whensoever you give ear war; for we might have descended from to a tale of distress, and the heart melts our lofty position, and have settled into at the cry of suffering, and you contrithe sullenness of a subjugated province. bute, according to your ability, to the But we might be a virtuous and a Chris-relief of the suppliant, you receive as tian people, though our fleets no longer well as confer benefit; the afflicted swept every sea, and we were no longer conspicuous, whether by literary taste or martial prowess. It would not be the downfall of our vast warehouses, of our splendid museums, or of our towering arsenals, which could fill us with apprehensions for the spiritual well-being of our people. The structures whose removal, because they were no longer requisite, would seem to us most ominous to the vital Christianity of the nationalways excepting our churches, in regard of which the supposition is impossible-are our hospitals, infirmaries, and almshouses, structures consecrated to the reception of the indigent and afflicted, and the closing of which would indicate that there was no longer much sphere for the exercise of philanthropy. Whilst you swept away buildings which belong to us as a rich, intelligent, and powerful people, we should feel, that though there might be much in the removal that was humiliating, there might be much also that was profitable; and that the likelihood was far from inconsiderable, that the national Christianity would eventually be strengthened through changes so mortifying to the national pride. But when you came to remove structures reared for the shelter of the miserable, you." being whom you succor, and thereby This general argument might, if time permitted, be broken into detail. We might show you by various exemplificacations, how applicable is the principle of our text in regard of the several classes of society. It were easy to enlarge on the utter uselessness of orders or individuals, who may be likened to the more honorable members of the body, were there not other orders or individuals, who may, with equal fitness, be likened to the less honorable. Of what avail, for example, would be the courage and skill of a general without troops to obey his commands?-of what the ingenuity of the engineer, were there no laborers to employ his inventions of what the wisdom of the legislator, without functionaries to carry his measures into force? In these, and a thousand like instances, if it be necessary for the hand and the feet that they be directed by the eye and the head, the eye and the head would be of no use if unconnected with the hand and the feet. The clergyman, again, is a case in point. If those ordained to minister in the congregation may, from the importance of their office, be likened to the eye or the head in the body, they depend greatly on the very lowest of the people, as they prosecute their honorable and difficult employment. For if, as we endeavored to show you, the actual presence of suffering be the great antagonist to that general selfishness which would be fatal to the growth of Christianity, the poor of his flock must be a clergyman's best auxiliaries, seeing that they help to keep the rest from that moral hardness which would make them impervious to his most earnest remonstrance. Thus, we are met on every side by illustrations of the principle involved in the text, that the least is of service to the greatest. It is a principle to be carefully remembered and upheld. I cannot confine to the upper classes of society the power of being dignified, and of filling a vastly-important part in the general economy. It is no want of loyalty, neither is it forgetfulness of what a country owes to its nobles, if, after surveying the owners of a palace, and marking the diligence with which they give themselves to the lofty functions entailed by their grandeur, I pass to one of the meanest of our cottages, and, finding its inmates prosecuting daily toils with industry, and bearing daily privations with patience, feel that in all which is inherently great and essentially good, the inhabitants of the hovel are on a level with those of the magnificent ancestral abode. Poverty will never degrade a man; nothing but vice will do that. Poverty will never disable a man for usefulness, seeing that it can but change his office in the body, and there is no office unimportant to the general health. Why, then, are not our poor, our honest, hard-working, and moral poor, to lift up their heads in society, in all the consciousness of having an honorable part to perform, and in all the satisfaction of feeling that they perform it faithfully and effectually? And I dwell on this usefulness, this indispensableness, of the lower classes to the higher, because nowhere is it more practically exhibited and recognized than by that noble Corporation which I am now permitted to address. The rich and the poor, the illustrious and the mean, the scientific and the illiterate, are blended herein; but so blended, that every one is serviceable to every other. If ye have at your head the conqueror of his country's enemies, and the stay of her greatness; if men, who would have been distinguished by their birth, had not such distinction been forgotten in that of their deeds, enrol themselves in your list; if veterans in that service which has given England her supremacy, consecrate their experience to the perfecting your charts; if the astronomer be amongst you, to make the stars your ministers; the engineer, to plant ramparts against the ocean; the architect, to rear the lighthouse in defiance of the tempest; are ye not, nevertheless, dependent on the poor and ignoble? Ye have devoted yourselves to the protection of navigation, that, under your auspices, commerce may go boldly forth, and sweep into our ports the riches of the earth; but of what avail were your pains, if the sailor could not be found to climb the mast, nor the pilot to seize the helm? Surely here again "the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you." And the finest point of view under which to survey this Corporation, is to regard it as centering its care and science on the destitute and lowly. It has an eye, an eye from whose glance of fire a world has recoiled; but that eye saith not to the hand, "I have no need of thee:" it anxiously watches the meanest mariner, and is ever on the look out, that he may be warned of his danger. It has a head, a head encircled with surpassing renown; but that head saith not to the feet, they not hands which would pluck out the eye, and feet which would run the head against the rocks? But ignorant or drunken pilots, who have received their commission from the Trinity Board, whether they have imposed on that Board at first, or fallen afterwards into bad habits, are as robbers and assassins with every possible aggravation, I have no need-hands which would pluck out the eye when wakeful for their good, feet which would run the head against the rocks when occupied with kind thoughts for their safety and happiness. We have drawn our illustrations, on the present occasion, from the usefulness of every member of the human body to every other; and we ought not to conclude without observing, that, as a day approaches when the body, with all its curious adaptations and symme tries, must lie down in the dust, no one member being exempt from the general decay, so is a time at hand when the mighty and the weak, the lofty and the low, must alike depart from the scene, so that the place which has known them shall know them no more. But there is of you:" it is occupied with caring for the poor cabin-boy, as recognizing his usefulness, and his claim to be remembered in his wanderings on the deep. For not only does this Corporation labor at the protection of the seaman, by lighting up the rocks which environ our island, and furnishing our ships with skilful pilots; it devotes much of its revenue to purposes of charity, to the maintenance of such structures for the aged and infirm as I have ventured to call bulwarks against the worst evils that can fall on a land. And the most gratifying thing in this annual celebration, is not the pomp in which you descend yonder noble river, not the stateliness of ancient custom, not even the thrilling welcome with which thousands meet a venerated to come a judgment according to works, chieftain; it is rather the air of comfort, and of happiness, which distinguishes the inmates of your almshouses, the quiet thankfulness with which they come forward, testifying that those who employed them in their strength succor and defend them in their decline. And if the very structure of this Cor poration thus make it furnish not only an illustration of the fact asserted in our text, but an example of that regard for inferior members which should be shown by the higher, we are bound to add that the honor hereby done to an inferior, should urge to faithfulness and diligence in duty. The hands and the feet should be unwearied in labor, when the eye and the head are thus unwearied in care. The pilots, for example, on whom so much depends, who have often property in their keeping, the loss of which would be the bankruptcy of cities, and lives whose destruction would fill a country with wailing, ought they not to feel that sobriety and fidelity, duties in every case, are doubly so in theirs, lest they fail in a trust received from so high an authority? Ignorant or drunken pilots are virtually as much the enemies of society as robbers and assassins: for are a judgment on the body as well as on the soul. The judgment on the body may be a judgment of its several members, according as they shall have yielded themselves to the service of unrighteousness. Shall not the eye be judged, if it have been lit up with the fires of base passion? Shall not the head be judged, if it have employed itself on "science falsely so called?" Shall not the tongue, if it have given utterance to the scornfulness of the blasphemer, or the voluptuousness of the sensualist? Shall not the hand, if it have held greedily the coveted wealth? And, in like manner, the judgment on individuals shall take form and measure from their office and position upon earth. The great and illustrious shall be asked, whether they had sought to employ their high prerogatives on promoting God's glory and the kingdom of Christ. The wealthy shall be asked, whether they had regarded themselves as stewards, and used riches on the relief of the miserable and the instruction of the ignorant. The learned shall be asked, whether they had hallowed their science, by rendering it subservient to the making themselves and others "wise unto salvation." The poor shall be asked, whether they had borne poverty with contentment, and meekly struggled with those difficulties which God had been pleased to weave into their portion. Yea, and all shall be asked, what they have done with the soul, that precious deposit, which, redeemed at the inestimable cost of Christ's blood, may be, and is, flung away by thousands; by conquerors, who conquer all but them selves; scholars, who study every thing but themselves; preachers, who preach to every one but themselves; by multitudes, who care for every thing but the one thing needful, have time except for eternity, and room in the heart except for God. Oh, that all might remember the strict and solemn account thus eventually to be rendered! The shipwreck of the soul! there is no language for the expressing such catastrophe; seeing that to "lose the soul" is not to be deprived of the soul-this might comparatively be happiness; it is to retain possession of the soul, but the soul laboring under some awful denunciation: and to lose whilst we keep! there is something ter rible in the very contradiction. It is total shipwreck; and yet the stately vessel rides the waters, in place of hav ing foundered; holds fast her gallant trim, in place of being broken into shivers; lost, through being incapable of sinking; doomed to wander for ever on a shoreless sea, driven by a storm which knows no pause, through a night which has no morning. But as yet this mysterious and fearful doom is not incurred by any amongst us. The soul may still be saved, saved by the old, saved by the young. Only take heed, that, whilst you rear the beacon, and map the channel, that the mariner may be guided to "the haven where he would be," you keep the eye on Christ, "the true light," and follow the directions of that Gospel which gives the soundings of the river of life; and to die shall be but to cast anchor by a happy shore-a new world, which, unlike the old, can neither disappoint nor disappear. SERMON IV. THE BLESSING IN THE CURSE.t "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."-GENESIS III. 19. You have here a portion of the sen-, he had hearkened to his wife, and eaten tence pronounced upon Adam, because the forbidden fruit. Sentence had alPreached before the Corporation of Trinity ready been passed upon the serpent and House, on Trinity Monday, 1844. upon Eve; the serpent who had beguil ed our common mother, and that mother herself, through whose disobedience we † So comprehensive were the thoughts of our great masters in theology, that the following discourse is but the expansion of a single sentence of the admirable Barrow, who says of industry, "We were designed for it in our first happy state, and upon our lapse thence, were further doomed to it, as the sole remedy of our needs and the inconveniences to which we became exposed." became mortal and miserable. 66 Unto | lot of humankind; and that it is by some species or another of toil that every man gains his sufficiency of food. If you traverse the globe, you find every where, though not always in the same degree, the human race fighting against want, and the great majority of a population struggling with the earth for a miserable pittance. In some places there is greater luxuriance in the soil, in others greater sterility; but nowhere do you find that man eats bread except in the sweat of his face. From pole to pole, amid the snows of perpetual winter, and beneath the blazings of a tropical sun, there is but one cry and one strife,—the cry of millions for the means of subsistence, the strife with a ground on which rests God's curse, and which therefore yields nothing until extorted from its womb. And thus is the history of our race little more than one vast evidence that we are the posterity of one whose disobedience spoiled the earth of its fruitfulness, and who, receiving in himself the sentence of labor, transmitted it, unexhausted and inexhaustible, to all after generations. the serpent it was said, that upon his belly he should go, and dust should he eat all the days of his life, a doom which must have referred rather to Satan, who had assumed the serpent's shape, than to the serpent itself, and which may have been accomplished in the abject condition of that fallen, though yet mighty spirit. Unto the woman it was announced that it should be in much pain and anguish she gave birth to her children-an intimation in which, it may be, there was promise as well as threatening; for Eve had already heard of the seed of the woman that was to bruise the serpent's head; and she might now gather that, through much suffering, there would at last arise a Deliverer. And now must the man stand forward, and take his doom from the lips of his Maker. Amongst all the sentences, there is none which so marks the hateful character of sin, and its devastating power. Cursed is the ground for thy sake." So deadly a thing is evil, which thou hast been instrumental in introducing, that the very soil whereon thou treadest is thereby made barren. No Yet if" mercy rejoiced against judg longer shall the earth spontaneously ment" in the words uttered to the ser yield thee her fruits; for henceforward pent and the woman, let us not hastily thorns and thistles shall be its natural conclude that there was nothing of love produce. "In sorrow shalt thou eat of in the sentence of which the man was it all the days of thy life,"-thou must the subject. We rather incline to bewring a hard subsistence from the re- lieve that it was not wholly in anger and luctant field, in place of gathering an righteous severity that God made the abundance which solicits thine accept-cursing of the ground the punishment ance. And there will be no termination of Adam. We think that it will not be to this toil, until the earth, which has almost refused thee sustenance, shall give thee a grave. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." Thou hast been formed from that ground; its dust has been compounded into thy limbs; and the curse is upon thy body, and upon all the material of which its members have been framed. The dust therefore must mingle with the dust, difficult to show that the Almighty was consulting for the good of his creatures when He thus made labor their inevitable lot. It was indeed in just indignation that He passed a stern sentence, which still rests as a heavy burden on ourselves. But it may have happened that He so shaped that sentence as to make it beneficial as well as punitive, and thus gave cause that we exclaim with David, in reference to this as to every other instance of his chastisement, "I will sing of mercy and judgment; unto thee, O Lord, will I sing." It will be our endeavor to prove that this is the fact. We shall soon perceive that no subject could be more appropri ate to the present occasion; but without anticipating the application, let us examine into the mercy (for the judgment is sufficiently apparent) of that appoint |