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DEVOTEDNESS TO CHRIST.*.

BY REV. BISHOP PIERCE.

"For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord's."-Romans xiv, 7, 8.

The spirit of Christianity is essentially a public spirit. It ignores all selfishness. It is benevolence embodied and alive, full of plans for the benefit of the world, and actively at work to make them effective. Catholic, generous, expansive, it repudiates all the boundaries prescribed by names, and sects, and parties, and stretches its line into the regions beyond," even to the uttermost parts of the earth. The world is its parish. Its wishes are commensurate with the moral wants of mankind; and the will of God, who gave His Son to die for us sinners and our salvation, is the authority for its labors and the pledge of its triumphs.

It is the policy of every form of infidelity and speculative unbelief, and of every false religion, to depreciate and undervalue the nature of man. They despoil him of his true glory by their chilling, preposterous theories, even while they affect to magnify him by fulsome eulogy of his intellect and its capacious powers. By false notions of personal independence, they isolate him from his kind, and the sensibilities which Heaven intended should flow out free as the gushing spring, they contract and stagnate, till the heart grows rank and putrid with its own corruptions. But while our holy religion exalts man as made in the image of God, the head and chief of the system to which he belongs, and thus invests the individual with dignity and value vast and incalculable, far, far beyond "worlds on worlds arrayed," it yet links him in closest fellowship with the kindred of his race. For him the ground yields its increase, the sun shines, the stars beam in beauty, the winds blow, the waters run. Earth, air, and ocean are all astir with agencies commissioned to do him good;

A Sermon preached in McKendree Church, Nashville, Tennessee, April 15, 1855, in memory of the late William Capers, D. D., one of the Bishops of the M. E. Church, South.

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