y enforced. In these time, when the
press is daily exercising so great a power over the minds of the people,
for wrong or for right as may happen, _that_ preacher ranks among the
first of benefactors who, without stooping to the direct treatment of
current politics and passing events, can furnish infallible guidance
through the delusions that surround them; and who, appealing to the
sanctions of Scripture, may place the grounds of its injunctions in so
clear a light, that disaffection shall cease to be cultivated as a
laudable propensity, and loyalty cleansed from the dishonour of a blind
and prostrate obedience.

It is not, however, in regard to civic duties alone, that this knowledge
in a minister of the Gospel is important; it is still more so for
softening and subduing private and personal discontents. In all places,
and at all times, men have gratuitously troubled themselves, because
their survey of the dispensations of Providence has been partial and
narrow; but now that readers are so greatly multiplied, men judge as
they are _taught_, and repinings are engendered everywhere, by
imputations being cast upon the government; and are prolonged or
aggravated by being ascribed to misconduct or injustice in rulers, when
the individual himself only is in fault. If a Christian pastor be
competent to deal with these humours, as they may be dealt with, and by
no members of society so successfully, both from more frequent and more
favourable opportunities of intercourse, and by aid of the authority
with which he speaks; he will be a teacher of moderation, a dispenser of
the wisdom that blunts approaching distress by submission to God's will,
and lightens, by patience, grievances which cannot be removed.

We live in times when nothing, of public good at least, is generally
acceptable, but what we believe can be traced to preconceived intention,
and specific acts and formal contrivances of human understanding. A
Christian instructor thoroughly accomplished would be a standing
restraint upon such presumptuousness of judgment, by impressing the
truth that--

In the unreasoning progress of the world
A wiser spirit is at work for us,
A better eye than ours.--MS.

Revelation points to the purity and peace of a future world; but our
sphere of duty is upon earth; and the relations of impure and
conflicting things to each other must be understood, or we shall be
perpetually going wrong, in all but goodness of inten