we live, but is likewise the cause of more than half the moral mischiefs prevailing among human communities. It especially prevents that reciprocation of intimate personal knowledge, which ought to exist between man and man, in order to inspire the confidence necessary to maintain the just balance of society, and give its due importance to social communion. It begets distrust, and, as a melancholy consequence, all the evils resulting from that baneful feeling.

Let us then endeavour to avoid falsehood as a moral bane, never resorting to it as a matter of expediency, or seeking to justify it upon the hollow claims of moral necessity. Let us universally shun it as an evil of the greatest magnitude, implicitly following the advice of St. Paul to the Ephesian church-" Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour, for we are members one of another."

SERMON XX.

THE NECESSITY OF EXPELLING BESETTING

SINS,

MATTHEW, CHAP. XII. VER. 43, 44, 45.

"When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out, and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept and garnished. Then goeth he and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there and the last state of that man is worse than the first."

THIS parable, which has singular force of signification, refers to a person possessed with a devil. The person so possessed, having had the evil spirit expelled from him, is represented as receiving it back again after a while, and retaining it. He thus becomes in a worse condition than ever, the possession being more confirmed, and the difficulty of future expulsion consequently encreased. The lesson inculcated in this comprehensive fable is extremely important. The awful consequences of a return to sin, after it has been once abandoned, are represented with a vivid force of illustration, unequalled out of the Sacred

Volume, under the image of a demoniac, being again taken possession of by the evil associate of which he had been previously dispossessed.

"When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man," says our Lord, “he walketh through dry places seeking rest and findeth none." It was the general opinion of the Jews, in our Saviour's time, that evil spirits inhabited solitary or desert places, when they were not immediately employed in working mischief to mankind. Their vile machinations being always accompanied with personal suffering for there is no exemption from suffering to the wicked, because such exemption, being the result of goodness, cannot subsist in union with wickedness-they are ever seeking rest, though ever in vain; and, not finding it, they return to their work of seduction among the fallen race of Adam, with renewed malice and encreased energy. They cover the baits of temptation with honey, to disguise the gall that lurks beneath.

The released spirit in the parable is represented as going to some desert, in search after such repose as he can never enjoy, but where he might vent, unseen and unheard, his disappointed malice and baffled hopes, in being ejected from the home which he had occupied in the body of his victim. Here is a picture, no less vivid than awful, of the effects of that never-dying worm, which is unceasingly at work within the bosom of the impenitent wicked. Smile as they may, it is, nevertheless, there. Their smiles do not disturb

this busy worker; it gnaws on in spite of them. Like the evil spirit of the text, a sinner, of the class described, retires, under disappointment or trouble, to solitary places, "seeking rest but findeth none." The fire of guilt is in his heart, where it burns with augmenting fury, because not subdued by religious restraint, and is only to be quenched by those waters drawn from "the wells of salvation"—those wells which are perpetually "springing up into everlasting life." He, however, repairs not whither those waters are supplied, to all such as earnestly desire to slake their thirst at these refreshing fountains, but goes, with a fierce and untractable perverseness of nature, to broken "cisterns which can hold no water."

But let us now return to our Lord's parable. The evil spirit which had been dismissed from the body of the miserable demoniac, finding no relief in those "dry places" whither he had retired "seeking rest," determines to return to the habitation he had so reluctantly quitted, under compulsion which he was unable to resist. Having reached his late abode, upon examination, he finds it better fitted for his reception than when he had first occupied it, being "empty," or void of all pure thoughts and holy desires; all motives to righteousness being removed from it, for it had, during his absence, been swept "with the besom of destruction," and "garnished" with a variety of base passions and vile affections, which would render his former

home more congenial than ever. Overjoyed at this discovery, and finding its capacity of evil thus enlarged, this wicked spirit determines that it shall contain as much as it will bear; and, thus resolved, he taketh "seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there, and the last state of that man is worse than the first." They have now confirmed possession. They are too securely established to render ejectment probable. The Saviour does not again interfere with their re-establishment in an abode so exactly calculated to suit them. The man who had so wickedly prepared for their reception falls under their dominion, bears on his prostrate neck the galling yoke of their tyranny, and to him thenceforth there is nothing but a "fearful looking for of judgment." As he did not value his freedom, he is subjected to a still more intolerable slavery than he was compelled to suffer under one minister of evil, for his sufferings are augmented seven-fold.

Among the Jews seven always denoted excess; that is, the extreme, or perfection, of good, and the excess, or extreme, of evil. We find in the Revelations, "the seven spirits of God" employed to represent the Third Person of the sacred Trinity, namely, the Holy Ghost. And in numerous other parts of Scripture, we shall observe this number employed to express mere unity, but unity in some shape of vastness, whether in good or in evil. This number is consecrated, as it were, in the Holy Books, and in the religion of