surely descend on those who cause it to be unreal, on those who do not make it real. Ministers we are, coming from GOD to you, going to GOD from you. Oh, you cannot suppose that if you leave two or three clergymen to deal with thousands of people, to inform them, to persuade them, to become acquainted with their wants, to relieve them out of their own poor means, you cannot suppose I say that in so doing, you are working the works of GOD, that when you have said your prayers, and listened to the sermon, and paid your pew rents, and dropped a superfluous coin into the plate of an occasional collection, you have obeyed and imitated CHRIST. No, brethren, you are under no such delusion of Satan. An awful responsibility is indeed upon the clergy. We have sworn to give ourselves wholly to a work in which your part is to support, and succour, and enable us. We are pledged to forego opportunities of acquiring fame, and gaining wealth and power, and taking pleasure. Wo to us, if we disregard the oath, if we cling to the things which we profess to have renounced! But if we fail, that will not excuse you; and if we are faithful without your adherence, the reward will be ours, the blood guiltily shed, or guiltily unstaunched, will be upon your heads. It is a solemn theme which I am discussing this morning, and I dare not but speak plainly upon it. Our fidelity will not profit you if you are not helpers of us. Our unfaithfulness, though we perish in it, will be visited on you, if you do not enable us, if you do not constrain us, by the power with which you should endow us, by the jealous concern which you should have for our work, by the diligent co-operation which you should exercise with us. It is easy to say, that you are not qualified for this, that your time is all engaged in your worldly calling, that you cannot spare from the means of your support, from the capital of your business, the money which the Church calls for. But, brethren, consider, that though GOD requires you to maintain yourselves and your families, though your worldly callings are appointed for you by GOD, though He allows you to give much time to them, to advance and enrich yourselves by them, yet all this is on the condition that you do not withhold from Him the direct service and offerings which constitute the one thing needful, the reward of which is all that shall survive this life, and this world! It was the fashion once among religionists to despise, to pronounce unclean (unfitting for the Christian), the use of the world, its callings, its profits, its pleasures. There is much danger of an opposite fashion prevailing in our days. The confining of religious service and worship to the honest, respectable, intellectual, liberal pursuit of some worldly vocation, “the religion of common life” as it is called, being regarded, not as the companion,—rather the handmaid—but the substitute (and a very good one, too) for pure spiritual religion. Both are wrong.