mansions the hosannas of joy, over every one individual of its repentant population?

And here I cannot omit to take advantage of that opening with which our Saviour has furnished us, by the parables of this chapter, and by which he admits us into a familiar view of that principle on which the inhabitants of the heavens are so awake to the deliverance and the restoration of our species. To illustrate the difference in the reach of knowledge and of affection, between a man and an angel, let us think of the difference of reach between one man and another. You may often witness a man, who feels neither tenderness nor care beyond the precincts of his own family; but who, on the strength of those instinctive fondnesses which nature has implanted in his bosom, may earn the character of an amiable father, or a kind husband, or a bright example of all that is soft and endearing in the relations of domestic society. Now, conceive him, in addition to all this, to carry his affections abroad, without, at the same time, any abatement of their intensity towards the objects which are at home

-that stepping across the limits of the house he occupies, he takes an interest in the families which are near him that he lends his services to the town or the district wherein he is placed, and gives up a portion of his time to the thoughtful labours of a humane and publicspirited citizen. By this enlargement in the sphere of his attention, he has extended his reach; and, provided he has not done so at the expense of that regard which is due to his family, a thing which, cramped and confined as we are, we are very apt, in the exercise of our humble faculties to do-I put it to you, whether by extending the reach of his views and his affections, he has not extended his worth and his moral respectability along with it ?

But I can conceive a still further enlargement. I can figure to myself a man, whose wakeful sympathy overflows the field of his own immediate neighbourhood-to whom the name - of country comes with all the omnipotence of a charm upon his heart, and with all the urgency of a most righteous and resistless claim upon

his services-who never hears the name of Britain sounded in his ears, but it stirs up all his enthusiasm in behalf of the worth and the welfare of its people-who gives himself up, with all the devotedness of a passion, to the best and the purest objects of patriotism-and who, spurning away from him the vulgarities of party ambition, separates his life and his labours to the fine pursuit of augmenting the science, or the virtue, or the substantial prosperity of his nation. Oh! could such a man retain all the tenderness, and fulfil all the duties which home and which neighbourhood require of him, and at the same time, expatiate in the might of his untired faculties, on so wide a field of benevolent contemplation-would not this extension of reach place him still higher than before, on the scale both of moral and intellectual gradation, and give him a still brighter and more enduring name in the records of human excellence?

And, lastly, I can conceive a still loftier. flight of humanity-a man, the aspiring of whose heart for the good of man, knows no

limitations whose longings, and whose conceptions on this subject, overleap all the barriers of geography-who, looking on himself as a brother of the species, links every spare energy which belongs to him, with the cause of its melioration who can embrace within the grasp of his ample desires, the whole family of mankind-and who, in obedience to a heaven-born movement of principle within him, separates himself to some big and busy enterprise, which is to tell on the moral destinies of the world. Oh! could such a man mix up the softenings of private virtue, with the habit of so sublime a comprehension-if, amid those magnificent darings of thought and of performance, the mildness of his benignant eye could still continue to cheer the retreat of his family, and to spread the charm and the sacredness of piety among all its members-could he even mingle himself in all the gentleness of a soothed and a smiling heart, with the playfulness of his children—and also find strength to shed the blessings of his presence and his counsel over the vicinity around him ;-oh! would not the combination of so much grace with so much lofti

ness, only serve the more to aggrandize him? Would not the one ingredient of a character so rare, go to illustrate and to magnify the other? And would not you pronounce him to be the fairest specimen of our nature, who could so call out all your tenderness, while he challenged and compelled all your veneration?

Nor can I proceed, at this point of my argument, without adverting to the way in which this last and this largest style of benevolence is exemplified in our own country-where the spirit of the Gospel has given to many of its enlightened disciples, the impulse of such a philanthropy, as carries abroad their wishes and their endeavours to the very outskirts of human population—a philanthropy, of which, if you asked the extent or the boundary of its field, we should answer, in the language of inspiration, that the field is the world—a philanthropy, which overlooks all the distinctions of cast and of colour, and spreads its ample regards over the whole brotherhood of the species-a philanthropy, which attaches itself to man in the general; to man throughout all his varie