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hope and believe the contrary. Let our feelings and actions, then, my brethren, correspond with these views. Under all circumstances, the most afflictive as well as the most agreeable, let our confidence in the Divine wisdom and benevolence remain unshaken. Let us endeavour to bow, with meekness and submission, to the calamities with which he may see fit to visit us. Nor let us rest here. Let us accompany these pious feelings with a resolution that we will endeavour, so far as our ability extends, to be voluntary instruments in his hands of accomplishing the wise and benevolent purposes he may have in view in such dispensations, by faithfully fulfilling the additional duties which they may appear to lay upon us. Finally, let us indulge the delightful persuasion that, so long as we sincerely endeavour to do his will, he will never leave us nor forsake us; and that all which may appear mysterious or perplexing in the proceedings of his providence here, "we shall know hereafter."

May God enable us all to acquire, and when circumstances call for it, to display this temper of mind, for his infinite mercy's sake! Amen.

SERMON XXVIII.

THE POWER OF FAITH.

LUKE viii., 25.

And he said unto them, "where is your faith?"

OUR Lord addressed these words to his disciples immediately after having relieved them from their fears, by a wonderful display of miraculous power, in quelling the fury of the elements. They contain a gentle reproof for the want of confidence shown by his companions in a power which had already been so frequently and effectually exerted in their presence. They believed Jesus to be a messenger of God. They knew that Divine power had been largely communicated to him. They had seen him remove diseases of various kinds by a word. Yet now that danger seemed to approach them under a somewhat different form; now that the violence of the storm was such as to be filling their little vessel with water, and threatening them with instant death, their trust in the God of their Master seems to have vanished; and in the extremity of terror " they awoke him,

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saying, master, master, we perish." Jesus," we are informed, " arose immediately, and rebuked the wind, and the raging of the water; and they ceased, and there was a calm." How instantly must terror have given place, in the minds of the disciples, to astonishment and awe! Our Lord having, with his usual kindness, commenced by giving relief to the fears of his followers, suffers not, at the same time, their culpable want of confidence to pass unreproved. Retaining, no doubt, the same dignified attitude in which, by virtue of the authority of nature's God, he had been controlling the energies of nature, and pointing, perhaps, in confirmation of his implied reproof, to the subsiding waves, he proposed to his agitated and awe-struck disciples the question contained in the text, "Where is your faith ?"

It is to be observed here, my friends, that the word faith, as used by our Lord in this place, means confidence. The disciples are reproved for not relying sufficiently upon the miraculous power intrusted to their Master. The terror which they displayed at the time of making the application to him for relief, was a sufficient proof of their entertaining some doubts as to his power of granting it. Such doubts they ought not, under the circumstances, to

have admitted. That they should apply to him for assistance, in a situation so alarming, was natural enough; but the application should have been made with calmness and confidence. It was by their failure in this respect that they laid themselves open to the reproof implied in the question before us.

An attention to this incident of our Lord's life, naturally leads to the inquiry, whether the professing disciples of Christ in the present day, and we ourselves among the number, are not sometimes chargeable with a similar error. It is true, that no man is now encouraged to place dependence on the power of God to be miraculously exerted on his behalf, through a particular individual. We are acquainted with no one, in the present day, laying claim to a Divine commission, and establishing that claim not only by the purity of his life, and the excellence of his doctrines, but by a series of the most astonishing cures, performed in the midst of multitudes, and under our own immediate inspection. We may not, therefore, have it in our power to display an equally aggravated instance of distrust in the perfections and providence of the Almighty. Let us take care, however, not to plume ourselves too much upon our imagined superiority. Can we look around us

in society, and contemplate the daily occurrences of life, without being struck by frequent and glaring examples of a similar distrustfulness? Can we examine our own hearts, or review our past conduct, without being sensible that we ourselves have been too frequently chargeable with it? Have we never, in an hour of apparent danger, felt our courage fail us, and given way to a degree of uneasiness scarcely consistent with that calm self-possession which a belief in the constant presence and superintendence of such a God as we worship might have been expected to inspire? Have we not frequently felt inclined rather to sink under the difficulties by which we seemed to be surrounded, than to exert ourselves with energy and perseverance for the conquest or removal of them? When suffering from severe pain, or groaning under the weight of recent sorrow, or overtaken by sudden calamity, have we never found our faith in the Divine perfections to falter? Have we, from the bed of pain, from the very grave of our buried affections, from the deepest abyss of misery, nay, from the jaws of death itself, been able to lift our eyes to heaven, to offer to the God who made us the sweet incense of humble trust and pious resignation, and, for one brief moment at least, to rise superior to the tumult and tempest of our afflictions, in the strength

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