“ for such a time as this,” for the particular exigencies, with especial reference to the Church, of your own probationary period; and casting yourselves, as she did, by humiliation and prayer, upon the divine succour and support, brace up your minds to the heroic standard of her determination, so impressively summed up in her decisive words, “ if I perish, I perisha." If it please God that my life be sacrificed in this perilous service, His will be done. I cannot devote it to a better cause, nor can I hazard its forfeiture more profitably to myself, then when it will be gain to lose it. Let this then, finally, be your established purpose; and though, in the self-confident calculations of conspiring unbelievers, our Church's days are numbered, as were those of Israel at the crisis before us by her inveterate foe, and sport is made of it in their impious carousals ", as already prostrate at their feet, after the same ensample, yet emulate Esther's fortitude with unwavering resolution. For this is one of the Church's divinelyspecified prerogatives, that that kingdom shall perish which deserts its cause, and the same issue in account a Esther iv. 16. See The World, June 19, 1828, for an account of the Commemoration Dinner on the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, a document which well deserves to be placed in a less fugitive repository. © Isai. lx. 12. that Esther's narrative has recorded shall ultimately defeat, in every instance, all the evil which the craft and subtilty of the devil or man works against it-their wicked devices shall “ return upon their own heads a " and its " sorrow shall be turned into joy b;" and " light and gladness and rest” for ever shall be its portion . TO a Esther ix. 25. Ibid. 22. Ibid. viii. 16. THE END. |