necessities, is to be esteemed a blessing in proportion as it is distributed to relieve the temporal and spiritual wants of others. Again I ask--How do we evade the application of all these precepts and arguments and exhortations and warnings and examples to our own times? Is there in the Holy Scriptures any limitation as to the time when the love which distinguished the primitive church was to be in exercise? Is not humiliation and suffering, the very character of this dispensation, as of the life of Him who introduced it? Are there no farther ends to be obtained by the crucifixion of self and selfish interests, and manifesting the mind that was in Christ Jesus? Let the disputes and divisions in the Church of God, and the 600,000,000 who have never heard the name of salvation by the blood of Jesus declare. Let the Agents of our Societies declare, who travel from one end of the land to the other, to gather a scanty pittance from half-reluctant Christians--nay, who are often led to sharpen their goads at the Philistines' grind-stones, to the dishonour of the cause of God. What then is the ground of evasion? Why, that those were apostolic times and apostolic men. Could there be a stronger reason urged for following their steps? Their having supernatural aids, in addition to moral, makes the obligation to use moral more imperative on our part, if possible, than on theirs; for we have now only the silent and unobserved influences of the Spirit of God operating by them. Those, who may be inclined to ask--Were not the miraculous powers, entrusted to the Apostles for the advancement of Christianity, also subservient to their personal comfort, amidst their want and pain and distress? We would refer those who enquire to the words of the Apostle Paul. "Even unto this present hour," says he (1 Cor. 4. 11 and 2 Cor. 11. 27), "we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling place. I have been in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." It was, indeed, the very ground of the Apostles' glorying and rejoicing--that they were counted worthy to suffer for the sake of Him who had died for them; and it was these very sufferings which they endured, and sacrifices which they made, that proved most effectual in converting others to the faith, by drawing their attention to Him whom they loved, and for whom they suffered gladly the loss of all things. They felt the beneficial effects of suffering on their own souls, and they saw it blessed to the conversion of the souls of others: and, looking beyond things which are seen and temporal, they beheld that "exceeding and eternal weight of glory" which their sufferings were working out (2 Cor. 4. 17);--they knew that, if they suffered with their master, they should also reign with him. Considering the preceding remarks to establish the sense, in which the Apostles