to courtesy that it appealed to the great and the gay, and sought its proselytes in the mansions of the rich and the homes of the refined; and that it stood up against revivals of religion, and all the forms of expanded Christian beneficence. This scheme was met by argument, and learning, and critical power equal to its own. But not by that alone. It has been met by revivals of religion, and its progress checked by the work of the Holy Ghost on the hearts of men.

Another feature of our times. We were fast becoming a nation of drunkards. We could ascertain that there were three hundred thousand drunkards in our land, and that from ten to twenty thousand were annually consigned to drunkards' graves. And this mighty evil has also been met by revivals of religion. Hundreds of churches have been visited by the Spirit of God as the result of their efforts in the temperance reformation; and hundreds of thousands of our young men have been saved from the evils and disgraces of intemperance because God has visited the churches with the influences of his Spirit.

There was another dark feature in our religious prospects. The love of gain had become, and is. still our besetting sin. This passion goads on our countrymen, and they forget all other things.

They forsake the homes of their fathers; they wander away from the place of schools and churches to the wilderness of the west; they go from the sound of the Sabbath bell, and they forget the Sabbath and the Bible, and the place of prayer; they leave the places where their fathers sleep in their graves, and they forget the religion which sustained and comforted them. They go for gold, and they wander over the prairie, they fell the forest, they ascend the stream in pursuit of it, and they trample down the law of the Sabbath, and soon, too, forget the laws of honesty and fair dealing in the insatiable love of gain. Meantime every man, such is our freedom, may advance any sentiments he pleases. He may defend them by all the power of argument, and enforce them by all the eloquence of persuasion. He may clothe his corrupt sentiments in the charms of verse, and he may make a thousand cottages beyond the mountains re-echo with the corrupt and the corrupting strain. He may call to his aid the power of the press, and may secure a lodgment for his infidel sentiments in the most distant habitation in the republic. What can meet this state of things, and arrest the evils that spread with the fleetness of the courser or the wind? What can pursue and overtake these

wanderers but revivals of religion-but that Spirit which, like the wind, acts where it pleases? Yet they must be pursued. If our sons go thus, they are to be followed and reminded of the commands of God. None of them are to be suffered to go to any fertile vale or prairie in the west without the institutions of the Gospel; nor are they to be suffered to construct a hamlet, or to establish a village, or to build a city that shall be devoted to any other god than the God of their fathers. By all the self-denials of benevolence; by all the power of argument; by all the implored influences of the Holy Ghost, they are to be persuaded to plant there the rose of Sharon, and to make the wilderness and the solitary place to be glad, and the desert to bud and blossom as the rose. In such circumstances God HAS interposed; and He has thus blessed our own land and times with signal revivals of religion.

The remarks thus far made conduct us to this conclusion, that we owe most of our religion in this land to revivals; that the great and appalling evils which have threatened us as a people have been met and turned back by revivals; that every part of our country has thus, either directly or indirectly, felt the influence of revivals. Scarce a village or a city smiles on all our vast landscape

that has not been hallowed in some parts of its history by the deep-felt presence of Israel's God. And he who loves his country, who looks back with gratitude to those periods when the God of salvation has conducted us through appalling dangers; or who looks abroad upon our vast land and contemplates the mighty movements in the pursuit of gold, and pleasure, and ambition; who sees here how inefficacious are all ordinary means to arrest the evils which threaten us, will feel the necessity of crying unto God unceasingly for the continuance and extension of REVIVALS OF PURE

RELIGION.

66

SERMON III.

THE IMPORTANCE OF REVIVALS.

AND THAT REPENTANCE AND REMISSION OF SINS BE PREACHED IN HIS NAME AMONG ALL NATIONS, BEGINNING AT JERUSALEM." Luke xxiv. 47.

SHOULD

In two previous discourses I have endeavoured to explain the nature of revivals of religion: to show that they are in accordance with the laws of the human mind and the mode in which society is organized; that they are described in the Scriptures as inestimable blessings; and that their value has been shown in a special manner in the history of religion in our own country. My particular object in this course of lectures, however, was not so much to vindicate revivals in general, as to consider their relation to cities and large towns; and I propose now to enter on this, the main part of our subject. The point which will be before us at this time will be, THE IMPORT

ANCE OF REVIVALS

AND LARGE TOWNS.

OF

RELIGION IN CITIES

On a subject so copious,