Secondly, CHRISTIAN LIBERALITY ranks higher than the mere emotions of humanity; it is a spiritual grace stamping the very image of the Deity upon the benignities of our nature; while it softens whatever is harsh, enlarges whatever is contracted, extinguishes whatever is unkind, refines, sublimates, and perfects whatever is amiable—and this is the subject upon which your attention is engaged. How beautifully and with what pathos is this principle described, in itself, and in its active operation, by the Apostle, in the context! It springs from _a right source_. It is all referable to a Divine Agent. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law”—no sentence of condemnation. This is Christian liberty—a deliverance from the curse; but it is not licentiousness—it releases from no moral obligation, and it requires the active exercise of Christian liberality. “For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.” If “every good gift, and every perfect gift, is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning,” how distinctly may we trace all our kind affections, under the regulation of religious principle, to that greatest and best of Beings, of whom it is emphatically said, “God is love.” The liberality which springs from a right source will be always governed by _a right motive_. We seldom err so entirely as on this great point. Hypocrisy is a wilful deceiving of others; an unblushing pretension to qualities which the individual is conscious he does not possess; and regarding which he is careless—excepting that the assumption of them subserves some supposed interest. But it is very possible for a man to deceive himself, who intends to practise no deceit upon others; and to give himself credit for qualities which he does not really possess. Christian exertion may meet with opposition and hostility; but it will also, in the present day, be encircled with distinction and applauses. Ah! who can be certain of his motives, when so much intermixture of interest, influence, and approbation, is found in connexion with the consecration of our time, our talents, and our property, to God? It is a solemn inquiry, which we ought closely to put to our own consciences—Should we be the same persons, if attachment to the cause of religion (for the subject is _Christian_ liberality,) subjected us to privations and persecutions, fines and imprisonments, disgrace and death, as we now are, when a superiority of exertion in the cause of God and humanity, commands the esteem of a large proportion of society, and thus confers a present reward of the most flattering description? What man can trust his heart on such a point without incurring the censure of the wisest of men—“He that trusts his own heart is a fool?” On what point