safe, while the world is perishing. Though all be one unbounded sea, a sea without shore, yet, as it is here said, the greatest inundation, the floods of deep waters shall not come nigh unto him. This the psalmist exhorts those that have experienced it to teach, and determines himself so to retain it with deep attention and firm faith in his own mind, as in the following verse.

Ver. 7. Thou art my hiding place; thou hast been, and wilt ever be so. Thou hast compassed, and thou wilt compass me, with songs of deliverance; even me who was so surrounded with clamours of sin. Where he further intimates, that songs of praise are perpetually to be offered to God our deliverer. And that these faithful admonitions and counsels may meet with greater attention and regard, he offers himself to us as a most benevolent teacher and leader.

Ver. 8, 9, 10, 11. I will instruct thee, and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go, &c. See to it only, that thou be tractable, and dost not with a brutal obstinacy and fierceness repel this friendly and wise counsel, as capable of being governed only by violence, like a mule or unbroken horse, which must be held in by bit and bridle. Such indeed are the greatest part of men, whom the philosophers with great severity, but with too much justice, called "wild bulls with human faces."

But it is added, as the sum of all admonition, and the great axiom most worthy of regard, that many_sorrows shall be to the wicked, but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about. And the psalm concludes with this as the burden of it, Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous; and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.

Truly, my friends, I have nothing further to wish for myself or you, than that we may heartily believe these things; for then it would be impossible that we should not with open arms embrace true religion, and clasp it to our hearts, since nature teaches every one to desire happiness, and to flee from misery. So that Epicurus himself would teach us to lay hold on joy and pleasure, as the first and proper good. This therefore let us lay down as a certain principle, and ever adhere to it, that we may not, like brute beasts, remain in subjection to the flesh;

that safety, and joy, and all happiness are the property of him who is possessed of virtue, and that all virtue is comprehended in true piety. And let us remember what the prophet adds, according to the Greek translators, as the necessary consequence of this principle, that to the wicked there can be no joy.

PSALM CXXX.

Ver. 1. Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. It is undoubtedly both a useful and a pleasant employment, to observe the emotions of great and heroic minds in great and arduous affairs; but that mind only is truly great and superior to the whole world, which does in the most placid manner subject itself to God, securely casting all its burdens and cares upon him in all the uncertain alterations of human affairs, looking at his hand, and fixing its regard upon that alone. Such the royal prophet David declares himself every where to have been, and no where more evidently than in this psalm, which seems to have been composed by him. He lifts up his head amidst surrounding waves, and directing his face and his voice to heaven, he says, Out of the depths, O Lord, do I cry unto thee: for so I would render it, as he does not seem to express a past fact, but as the Hebrew idiom imports, a prayer which he was now actually presenting.

Out of the depths; being as it were immersed and overwhelmed in an abyss of misery and calamities. It is indeed the native lot of man, to be born to trouble, as it is for the sparks, the children of the coal, as the original expression signifies, to fly upward. Life and grief are congenial; but men who are born again seem as in a redoubled proportion to be twice born to trouble; with so many and so great evils are they as it were laden, beyond all other men, and that to such a degree, that they may seem sometimes to be oppressed with them. And if any think this is strange, surely, as the apostle expresses it, he cannot see afar off; at best, he only looks at the surfaces of things, and cannot penetrate far into those depths. For even the philosophers themselves, untaught by divine revelation, investigated admirable reasons for

such dispensations of Providence, and undertook in this respect boldly to plead the cause of God. "God," says the Roman sage, "loves his own people truly, but he loves them severely!

As the manner in which fathers express their love to their children is generally very dif ferent from that of mothers; they order them to be called up early to their studies, and suffer them not to be idle in those days when their usual business is interrupted, but sometimes put them on labouring till the sweat flows down, and sometimes by their discipline excite their tears; while the mother fondles them in her bosom, keeps them in the shade, and knows not how to consent that they should weep, or grieve, or labour. God bears the heart of a father to good men, and there is strength rather than tenderness in his love; they are therefore exercised with labours, sorrows, and losses, that they may grow robust: whereas, were they to be fattened by luxurious fare and indulged in indolence, they would not only sink under fatigues, but be burdened with their own unwieldly bulk." Presently after he quotes a remarkable saying of Demetrius, the cynic, to this purpose: "He seems to be the unhappiest of mankind, who has never been exercised with adversity, as he cannot have had an opportunity of trying the strength of his own mind." To wish to pass life without it is to be ignorant of one part of nature, so that I may pronounce thee to be miserable, if thou hast never been miserable. If thou hast passed through life without ever struggling with an enemy, no one, not even thou thyself, can know whether thou art able to make any resistance: whereas in afflictions we experience, not so much what our own strength is, as what is the strength of God in us, and what the aid of divine grace is, which often bears us up under them to a surprising degree, and makes us joyful by a happy exit; so that we shall be able to say, My God, my strength and my deliverer. Thus the Church becomes conspicuous in the midst of the flames, like the burning bush, through the good will of him that dwelt in it. And when it seems to be overwhelmed with waters, God brings it out of them, cleansed and beautified. He plunges it in the deep, and it rises fairer than before.

We will not here maintain that paradox of the stoics,

that "evils which happen to good men are not to be called evils at all," which however is capable of a very good sense, since religion teaches us, that the greatest evils are changed, and work together for good, which comes almost to the same thing, and perhaps was the true meaning of the stoics. Banishment and poverty are indeed evils in one sense-they have something hard and grievous in them; but when they fall on a good and brave man, they seem to lay aside the malignity of their nature, and become tame and gentle. The very sharpness of them excites and exercises virtue: by exciting they increase it, so that the root of faith shoots the stronger, and fixes the deeper, and thereby adds new strength to fortitude and patience. And as we see in this example before us, affliction does by a happy kind of necessity, drive the soul to confess its sin, to flee as it were to seek its refuge under the wing of the divine goodness, and to fix its hope upon God. And this is certainly one great advantage which the pious soul gains by adversity, that it calls away the affections from earth and earthly things, or rather tears them away, when obstinately adhering to them. "It is necessary that they suffer such hardships as these,” as one expresses it, "lest they should love this inconvenient stable in which they are now obliged to lodge, as if it were their own house." It is necessary that they should perceive that they are strangers and foreigners upon earth, that they may more frequently, and with more ardent desire, groan after that better country, and often repeat "Dear home! Most desirable home!" The children and heirs of the kingdom must be weaned by wormwood, lest they should be so enchanted by the allurements of the flesh and the poisonous sweetness of secular enjoyments, as to barter away the true and pure joy of their blessed hope, for this false, polluted, and deadly joy; and lest, dissolved in pleasure, the heaven-born soul should be broken under the yoke of this pernicious flesh, the root of so many passions. Lastly, we see how much vigour and vehemence affliction adds to prayer; for the divine psalmist, the deeper he sinks, cries to God in so much the louder accents; Out of the depths have I cried.

This prayer contains those precious virtues which, in a grateful temperature, render every prayer acceptable

to God-faith, fervour, and humility-faith, in that he prays out of the deeps; fervour, in that he cries, and both again expressed in the next word; faith, as in the midst of surrounding calamities he does not despair of redress; fervour, as he urges it with repeated importunity, and the same word uttered again and again. And to complete all, humility expresses itself in what follows, where he speaks as one that felt himself sinking, as one who was plunged in a sea of iniquities, as well as calamities; and acknowledges he was so overwhelmed with them, as to be unable to stand, unless supported by pure mercy and grace. If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, who shall stand? Thus bere again faith manifests itself more clearly, together with its kindred affections of hope and charity, which, like three graces, join their hands, and by an inseparable union support each other. You have faith in the 4th verse, There is forgiveness with thee; hope in the 5th, I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope; charity in the 7th and 8th, where he does in a most benevolent manner invite all Israel to a communion of the same faith and hope, and, in order to confirm them more abundantly, does in a most animated manner proclaim the riches of the divine benignity. Such is the composition of this excellent prayer, which thus compounded, like a pillar of aromatic smoke from myrrh, frankincense, and every other most fragrant perfume, ascends grateful to the throne of God. And this you may take instead of the analysis of the remaining verses, which to handle by a more minute dissection of words, and to clothe in the trite phrases of the schools, to speak freely, would be as barren and useless as it is easy and puerile. And indeed I cannot but form the same judgment of the common way of catching at a multitude of observations from any scripture, and of pressing it with violence, as if remarks were to be estimated by number rather than weight, propriety, and use. But here let every one follow his own genius and taste; for we are willing to give the liberty we take.

Out of the depths. O the immortal power of divine faith, which lives and breathes in the midst of the waves, in which it may be plunged, but cannot be sunk under any of the hugest billows; but raises itself, and the soul in which it resides, and emerges and swims above all,