"of joy and gladness" is to be heard, there are other scenes surrounding you, where no other voice will be heard than that of "mourning and sorrow." In the beginning of such a season, it becomes us to accommodate the temper of our minds to the real condition of human life; to restrain the hand of profusion, that it may be come the hand of charity; to begin that heroic economy which may be profuse at last in beneficence; and to be ready to surrender even the most innocent of our pleasures, whenever they interfere with the wants or with the claims of the wretched. It becomes us still more, my brethren, who are preparing ourselves to celebrate the nativity of Him who descended from heaven to save us,-to fashion the dispositions of our minds " that they may "be like unto him,"-to prepare ourselves, in our humbler spheres, to be also "saviours one to another,"-and to re

member, that, in the decisive hour of nature, they only can plead for mercy, who, in the hours of trial, have shewn mercy to their brethren.

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thy youth; while the evil days come not, "nor the years draw nigh, when thou "shalt say, I have no pleasure in them."

THE

year opened upon us with scenes of disorder and of guilt very different from

This Sermon was preached on the Sunday after the melancholy and unexampled occurrence of the execution of three young men, (all of them under the age of twenty,) for robbery and murder, on the night of the 1st of January

the usual character of this country.-A few weeks only have passed, my brethren, and " we have seen the awful end of "these things." Of the unhappy actors in these scenes of guilt, some have left the land which they had dishonoured, to seek, amid fields of danger, the reputation they had lost; some have been exiled to distant shores, to know no more the affections of kindred and of home, and to weep, amid ignominy and bondage, the loss of that liberty which they had abused. Three,—(three, alas! while yet in the spring of their age, and while their years had not even ripened into manhood,) have perished, to satisfy the justice of their country. The awful deed of death has been performed in the sight of thousands; and that life which God had given, has been seen, in dread silence, taken away by the just and commissioned hand of man. It is thus, my brethren, that

God teaches us his providence. In such awful events, his voice says to our hearts, as strongly as it said to the ears of his people, "Thou shalt do no murder;" and the stroke of human justice repeats now whenever it falls, the words of the eternal decree:-" whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."

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There are few of us, of whatever age or condition, which this sad event has not affected. Amid all the anxieties of public or of private life, the predominant interest of this week has arisen from its melancholy occurrence. The aged man lifts up his feeble hands in wonder and in prayer; and even the infant, incapable of learning what it means, has felt, in the grief and consternation of every eye around it, that some general calamity has taken place. The bitterest tears which nature can shed have fallen, and they are made not to fall unnoticed, but to sink