totally unable to appreciate arts and sciences, poetry, music, literature, or any facts or theories not connected with your worldly calling, not necessary to procure your daily bread? Would not life be irksome and intolerable, if held only on such terms? Would you not be ashamed of attempting to hold it on these terms? Would you not consider that you were robbing yourselves of all that was worth having? Would you not admit that you had missed and ignored your high calling, your power to be enlightened and wise beings, and had sunk shamelessly and guiltily to the level, below the level—for he answers the end of his creation—of the irrational brute? And shall you who feel such shame for worldly ignorance, shall you who make such efforts to gain secular knowledge, who are ever widening your minds, and storing up in them as much as they will hold, who delight in growing wiser and more learned, who will study unwearily, and exercise all your intellect, and consume I know not what time, in unravelling the worthless mystery of some enigmatical line in a poem of fiction—shall you contentedly pass over the difficulties, and remain ignorant of the mysteries which meet you in nearly every verse of the Word of GOD? Shall you be otherwise than glad and attentive when the preacher draws your attention to them? Shall you even unfairly and ungratefully charge him with _speaking_ parables, when he is really _explaining_ parables? Dear brethren, it is rarely that the public preacher, who has to take thought for the simpler ones of the flock, can enlarge upon profound truths. When he does, take care that you make the most of the rare occurrence, and compensate for the forbidden frequency, by diligent private study, by ready use of that individual aid which the clergyman is as rejoiced, as he is bound, to afford you. Acquaint yourselves now, as far as may be, with GOD, and the things of GOD. Furnish yourselves with the answer, the want of which was such a reproach to Nicodemus, to the question—“How can these things be?” Show, at least, as much interest in salvation, in sanctification, in heaven, in eternal bliss, as will lead you to inquire what they are, and require, and promise. Get now the germ of that knowledge, which is to expand hereafter albut to an infinite grasp, and is to revel in spiritual science. Cast away the reproach of knowing not; provide against the doom which awaits him that improves not the talents entrusted him: “From him that hath not, shall be taken away even that he seemeth to have.”