LIBRARY i>I I 11 K Theological Seminary, PRINCETON. N. J.'' i: ../.■ I vi SV-^jitM .t^offl ..- "^^ '-T; ,ira- ; ^*."'jj' * ^# '"W^ . .^^n -■'.*^'/.^ ■ '- '^^^^m .. -> t>3^ s-^ '*: ':• "U P^^^^: •t: CHRIST INHERITANCE OF THE SAINTS. WORKS BY THOMAS GUTHRIE, D.D. I. Tweuty-Seventli Thousand, Crown 8vo, price 7s. 6d. THE GOSPEL IN EZEKIEL. ILLUSTRATED IX A SERIES OF DISCOURSES. " The theology of this admirable volume resembles the language in which it is embodied : it is the theology of the old school — direct, simple, forcible, not sheathed in clouds of ingenious speculation, but bearing in every page the clear impress of the New Testament. While the eloquence of poetry in which it is set will scarce fail to secure the suffrages of the most fastidious, its own inherent power and simplicity will carry it with acceptance into many a humble homestead, and attract deeply-attentive circles around many a cottage hearth." — Hugh Miller. "To our friends south of the Scottish Border, who do not know Dr. Guthrie, we say. Procure this volume and read it, and you will feel that you have made the acquaintance of a man whom it were worth while to go some distance to see." — British Quarterly Keview, " Nothing has appeared since the publication of Chalmers' 'Astronomical Discourses' to be compared with this inimitable volume of ' prose-poems.' It contains the finest specimen of pulpit literature the age has produced."— ]',Krri3H Messenger. II. 12mo, price 2s. 6d. A NEW EDITION OF BERRIDGE'S CHRISTIAN WORLD UNMASKED. OR, PRAY COME AND PEEP. " Enriched by ' a life of the author ' from the pen of one who claims kiixlrcd genius and eloquence." — Witness. III. Tenth Thousand, 12mo, price 2s. THE STREET PREACHER. ItKi.Nd Tin: AUTOHIO^JKArnV OF ROBERT FLOCKUART, LATE CORPORAL >^laT REGIMENT. ^IV. S 'vcnth Tliousantl, Crown 8vo price Is, SICED TIME AND HARVEST OF RAGGED SCHOOLS, O:: A THIKI) IM.K.V, WITH NEW EDITIONS OF THE FIRST AND SECOND PLEAS. CHRIST INHEEITANCE OF THE SAINTS ILLUSTRATED IN A SERIES OF DISCOURSES FROM ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE COLOSSIANS. THOMAS GUTHRIE, r).D. AUTHOR OP "PLEAS FOB KAGGKD SCHOOLS," ETC. SEVENTEENTH THOUSAND, EDINBURGH: ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK. MDCCOLXII. PH.'MKn I.Y R, AND B. CLARK, EDINBUHOH. TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE FOX LORD PANMURE, K.T., G.C.B AS AN EXPRESSION OF RESPECT FOB SERVICES RENDERED TO THE RELIGIOUS AND PUBLIC INTERESTS OF THE COUNTRY, ^ AND OP GRATITUDE FOR SIS CONSTANT FRIENDSHIP TO THE AUTHOR. Edinburgh, Novbmbeb 1858. DISCOURSES. ♦ PAGI I. The Inheritance , . . 1 II. The Power of Darkness 23 III. The Power of Darkness — continued .... 40 IV. The Kingdom of Christ 60 V". The Kingdom op Christ — continued .... 80 VI. The Translation 98 -y- VII. Redemption 123 wv' VIII. Christ the Redeemer 141 IX. The Image of God 16.0 X. The Image of God — continued . . , . .178 XL The FiRST-BoRN 197 XII. The Creator 215 XIII. The End of Creation 2-51 XIV. Christ in Providence 2.^^0 XV. The Head . 269 Vlll CONTENTS. PACK XVI. The REAjy—contimied 289 XVII. The Beginning 309 XVIII. The Fiest-Born from the Dead 326 XIX. The Fulness . . 344 XX. The Reconciler 364 phiiicetg:! TH.^OLOG:C:iL# ''^^m:^''^^-^ THE INHERITANCE. Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. —Colossians i. 12. /^NE thing is often set against another in the expe- rience of the Christian ; and also in the every-day procedure of the providence of God. So fared it with Jacob t' «t night he slept in Bethel. A stone was his pillow, and the cold hard ground his bed ; yet, while sleep sealed his eyelids, he had God himself to guard his low-laid head, and dreams such as seldom bless a couch of down. A ladder rose before him in the vision of the night. It rested on earth, and reached to the stai's. And forming a highway for a multitude of angels, who ascended and descended in two dazzling streams of light, it stood there the bright sign of a redemption which has restored the intercourse between earth and heaven, and opened a path for our return to God. Now, the scheme of salvation, of which that ladder was a glorious emblem, may be traversed in either of these two ways. In studying it, we may descend by the steps that lead from the cause to the consumma- B THE INHERITANCE. tion, or, taking the opposite course, we may rise from the consummation to the cause. So — as a matter sometimes of taste, sometimes of judgment — men do in other departments of study. The geographer, for example, may follow a river, from the lone mountain- tops where its waters spring, down into the glen, into which, eager to leave sterility behind, it leaps with a joyous bound; and from thence, after resting a while in black, deep, swirling pool, resumes its way, here spreading itself out in glassy lake, or there winding like a silver serpent through flowery meadows ; until, forcing a passage through some rocky gorge, it sweeps out into the plain, to pursue, 'mid shady woods and by lordly tower, through corn-fields, by smiling villages and busy towns, a course that, like the life of man, grows calmer as it nears its end. Or, starting from the sea- beach, he may trace the river upwards; till, passing town and church, tower and mill, scattered hamlet and soHtary shepherd's cot, in some mossy well, where the wild deer drink, or mountain rock beneath the eagle's nest, he finds the place of its birth. The bota- nist, too, who describes a tree, may begin with its fruit ; and from this, whether huslcy shell, or rugged cone, or clustering berry, he may pass to the flower ; from that to the buds; from those to the branches; from the branches to the stem ; and from the stem into the gi'ound, where he lays bare the wide-spread roots, on which — as states depend upon the humbler classes for power, wealth, and worth — the tree depends both for nourishment and support. Or, reversing the plan, with THE INEERITANCE. equal justice to his subject, and advantage to his pupils, he may begin at the root and end with the fruit. The inspired writers, in setting forth salvation, adopt sometimes the one course, and sometimes the other. With Paul, for instance, the subject of heaven now introduces Christ, and now from Christ, the Apostle turns to expatiate on the joys of heaven. Here, as on an angel's wing that sheds light on every step, we see him ascending, and there descending, the ladder. Taking flight from the cross, he soars upward to the crown ; and now, like an eagle sweeping down from the bosom of a golden cloud, he leaves the throne of the Redeemer to alight on the heights of Calvary. As an example of the ascending method, we have that well-known passage in his epistle to the Romans — " For whom he did fore- know, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the first-born among many brethren : moreover, whom he did pre- destinate, them he also called; and whom he called, them he also justified ; and whom he justified, them he also glorified." There we pass from the root to the fi-uit, from the cause, step by step, to its efiects ; here again Paul guides us upward along the stream of blessings to their perennial fountain. He first shews the precious gift, and then reveals the gracious giver; the purchase first, and afterwards the divine Purchaser. From the crown of glory, flashing on the brow of a Magdalene, he turns our dazzled eyes to another crown, a trophy hung upon a cross ; a wreath of thorns, armed with long sharp spikes — each. THE INHERITANCE. in place of a pearly gem, tipped with a drop of blood. He first introduces us to heaven as our inalienable heri- tage, and then to the throne and person of him who won heaven for us. He conducts us up to Jesus, that we may fall at his feet with adoring gratitude, and join in spirit the saintly throng who dwell in the full fruition of his presence, and praise him throughout eternity. The words of my text, and those also of the verse which follows it, are introductory to a sublime descrip- tion of Jesus Christ — a picture to which, after consider- ing these preliminary verses, we intend to draw your attention. To the eye both of saints and sinners it presents a noble subject. If his great forerunner felt himself unworthy even to loose the latchet of his shoes, how unworthy are these hands to sustain a theme so sacred and sublime. May he who ordaineth strength " out of the mouth of babes and sucklings," without whose aid the strongest are weak, and by w^hose help the weakest are strong, fulfil among us his own great and gracious promise — *' I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me !" Turning your attention, meanwhile, to the matter of these introductory verses, I remark — I. Heaven is an Inheritance. Examples, at once, of pride and poverty — how- prone are men to attach importance to their own works, and to seek at least some shining points of goodness in them — hke grains of gold in a mass of THE INHERITANCE. rock I We are loth to believe that those things for which others esteem, and love, and praise us, and even, perhaps, crown our brows with laurel, apart from Christ, have no merit ; but appear in the sight of the holy and heart-searching God as, to use a Bible phrase, " filthy rags." It is not easy to bring human pride, no, nor human reason, to admit that; to believe that the loveliest, the purest, the most virtuous of womankind, a mother's pride and a household's honour, must be saved, as the vilest outcast is saved — as a brand plucked out of the fire, or he of whom God said, " Take away the filthy garments from him. Behold I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment." These feelings arise in part, perhaps, from a secret suspicion, that, if our works be entirely destitute of merit, they must at the same time disincline God to save us, and disqualify us for being saved. But how base, unscriptural, God-dishonouring is this fear ! One would think that the parable of the prodigal had been recorded to refute it. There, recognising him from afar, God, under the emblem of an earthly father, runs to embrace his son, all foul and ragged as he is j he holds him in his arms ; he drowns his confession in this great cry of joy, '' Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him ; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet ; and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it ; and let us eat, and be merry : for this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, and is foimd." Nature herself proves it false by every little child who THE INHERITANCE. lifts its hands and prayer to God as " Our Father which art in heaven." What idea has he formed of God who expects less of him than he would expect of any earthly mother ? Let her he a queen. She is a mother ; and under the impulse of feelings that reign alike in palaces and in cottages, how would that woman spring from her throne to embrace a lost babe ; and, weeping tears of joy, press it to her jewelled bosom, though plucked from the foulest ditch, and wrapped in tainted rags ? He knows little of human nature, fallen as it is, who fancies any mother turning from the plaintive cry and imploring arms of her offspring because, forsooth, it was restored to her in loathsome attire. And he is still more ignorant of "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Cliribt " who fancies that, unless man can make out some merit, he will receive no mercy. Blessed be his name, " God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Volumes of theology have been written, and long controversies have waxed hot, about the question — whether heaven is, or is not, in part, the reward of our own good works? Now it appears to me that there is one word in my text, whose voice authorita- tively and summarily settles that matter ; and would have always settled it, had not men's hearts been fired with angry passions, and their ears confused with the din of battle. That word is — inheritance. What is inheritance ? The pay of a soldier is not inheritance ; neither are the fees of a lawyer or of a physician ; nor the gains of trade j nor the wages of labour. Rewards of THE INHEKITANCE. toil or skill, these are earned by the hands that receive them. What is mherited, on the other hand, may be the property of a new-born babe ; and so you may see the coronet, which was won by the stout arm of valour, and first blazoned on a battered shield, standing above the cradle of a wailing infant. True, the ample estate, the noble rank, the hereditary honours were won. But they that won them are long dead ; — " their swords are rust, their bodies dust j " and underneath tattered banners, once borne before them in bloody fight, but now hung high in the house of God, the grim old barons sleep in their marble tombs. The rewards of their prowess and patriotism have descended to their succes- sors ; who, holding these, enjoy honours and estates, which we do not grudge them, but which their wealth never bought, and their courage never won. Thus the saints hold heaven. In the terras of a court of law, it is theirs, not by conquest, but by herit- age. Won by another arm than theirs, it presents the strongest imaginable contrast to the spectacle seen in England's palace that day when the king demanded to know of his assembled nobles, by what title they held their lands? "What title?" At the rash question a hundred swords leapt from their scabbards. Advan- (;ing on the alarmed monarch — "By these," they repHed, " we won, and by these we will keep them." How difierent the scene which heaven presents! All eyes are fixed on Jesus ; every look is love ; gratitude glows in every bosom, and swells in every song ; now with golden harps they sound the Saviour's praise ; and 8 THE INHERITANCE. now, descending from their thrones to do him homage, they cast their crowns in one glittering heap at the feet which were nailed on Calvary. Look there, and learn in whose name to seek salvation, and through whose merits to hope for it. For the faith of earth is just a reflection of the fervours of heaven : this the language of both — " Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory." IL Heaven is a heritage of free grace. We have no such legal claim to heavenly glory as may be esta- blished to some earthly inheritance. In consequence of a distant relationship, in those sudden turns of the wheel of fortune, which — displaying the providence of Him who abases the proud and exalts the humble — throw one family into the dust, and another into the possession of unexpected riches, the heir of noble titles and broad lands has started up from the deepest obscu- rity. And so I have seen a man come into a court of law, and, producing some old moth-eaten Bible, with its time-worn record of births, and marriages, and deaths, all long ago forgotten, or some damp, musty parch- ment, or some inscription copied from a burial-stone, which the dispute has redeemed from decay and rank churchyard weeds, lay a firm hand on estates and honours won long centuries ago. Such strange events have happened. Heirs have entered on the pro- perty of those between whom and them there existed no acquaintanceship, nor friendship, nor fellowship ; for whom, in fact, they entertained no regard while they THE INHERITANCE. lived, and whose memory they neither cherish in warm hearts, nor preserve in cold brass or marble. But it is by no su(;h obscure connecition or remote relation- ship, that " the inheritance of the saints in light " becomes ours. We are constituted its heirs by virtue of sonship ; we, who were once afar off — the seed of the serpent, the children of the devil, the children of wrath even as others — becoming sons by that act of grace, which has led many to exclaim with John, *' Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God." Thus heaven, presenting itself to us in one of its most engaging aspects, is not only an inheritance, but a home. Oh ! how sweet that word ! What beautiful and tender associations cluster thick around it ! Com- pared with it, house, mansion, palace, are cold heartless terms. But home ! that word quickens the pulse, warms the heart, stirs the soul to its depths, makes age feel young again, rouses apathy into energy, sustains the sailor on his midnight watch, inspires the soldier with courage on the field of battle, and imparts patient endurance to the worn-down sons of toil ! The thought of it has proved a sevenfold shield to virtue ; the very name of it has been a spell to call back the wanderer from the paths of vice ; and, far away, where myrtles bloom and palm trees wave, and the ocean sleeps upon coral strands, to the exile's fond fancy it clothes the naked rock, or stormy shore, or barren moor, or wild Highland mountain, with charms he weeps to think of, and longs once more to see. Grace sanctifies these lovely affections, 10 THE INHERITANCE. and imparts a sacredness to the homes of earth by making them types of heaven. As a home the believer dehghts to think of it. Thus when, lately bending over a dying saint, and expressing our sorrow to see him laid so low, with the radiant countenance rather of one who had just left heaven, than of one about to enter it, he raised and clasped his hands, and exclaimed in ecstasy, " / am going homey Happy the family of which God is the father, Jesus the elder brother, and all the '' saints in light" are brethren — brethren born of one Spirit; nursed at the full breast of the same promises; trained in the same high school of heavenly discipline ; seated at the same table ; and gathered all where the innocent loves of earth are not quenched, but purified ; not destroyed, but refined ! To that family circle every accession forms a subject of gratitude and praise ; and every new-comer receives such welcome as a mother, while she falls on his manly breast, gives her son, or as sisters, locked in his arms, with theirs entwined around him, give the brother whom they have got safe back from wreck and storm, or the bloody fields of war. So when, on returning home after weary journeys and a tedious absence, we have found that the whole household was moved, and that all, down even to the tottering babe, with outstretched hands, and beam- ing faces, and joyful welcomes, were at the door to meet us, we have thought, it shall be thus at the gates of glory. What a meeting there of parents and children, brothers and sisters, and death-divided friends ! What mutual gratulations ! What overflowing joy ! And, THE INHERITANCE. II when they have led our spirit up through the long line of loving angels to the throne, what happiness to see Jesus, and get our warmest welcome from the lips of him who redeemed us by his blood, and, in the agonies of his cross, suffered for us more than a mother's pangs — "the travail of his soul." Heir of grace ! thy estate lies there. Child of God ! thy Father, and Saviour, and brethren, and sisters, are there. Pilgrim to Sion, be ever pressing on and ever looking up ! thy true home is there ; a home above these blue skies, above sun and stars ; a sweet, saintly, glorious home — whose rest shall be all the sweeter for the pelting of the storm, thy rugged path, the sorrows and the tears of earth — and whose light shall be all the brighter for that " valley of the shadow of death," from which thou shalt pass into the blaze of everlasting day. Believer ! I congratulate thee on thy prospects. Lift up thy cast-down head ; let thy port, man, be worthy of thy coming fortunes. Bear thyself as one who shall wear a holy crown ; as one who, however humble thy present lot, is training for the highest society. Culti- vate the temper, and acquire the manners, and learn the language of heaven ; nor let the wealth or poverty, the joys or sorrows, the shame or honours of thy earthly state, ever make thee forget " the inheritance which is incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you." 12 THE INHERITANCE. III. The heirs of heaven require to be made meet for the inheritance. I knew a man who had amassed great wealth ; but had no children to inherit it. He lost the opportunity, which one would think good men would more frequently embrace, of leaving Christ his heir, and bequeathing to the cause of religion what he could not carry away. Smitten, however, with the vain and strange propensity to found a house, or make a family, as it is called, he left his riches to a distant relative. His successor found himself suddenly raised from poverty to affluence, and thrown into a position which he had not been trained to fill. He was cast into the society of those to whose tastes, and habits, and accomplishments he was an utter and an awkward stranger. Did many envy this child of fortune ? They might have spared their envy. Left in his original obscurity he had been a happy peasant, whistling his way home from the plough to a thatch-roofed cottage, or on winter nights, and around the blazing faggots, laughing loud and merry among unpolished boors. Child of misfortune ! he buried his happiness in the grave of his benefactor. Neither qualified by nature, nor fitted by education, for his position, he was separated from his old, only to be despised by his new associates. And how bitterly was he disappointed to find, that, in exchanging poverty for opulence, daily toil for luxurious indolence, humble friends for more distin- guished companions, a hard bed for one of down, this THE INHEKITANCE. 13 turn in his fortunes had flung him on a couch, not of roses, but of thorns ! In his case, the hopes of the living and the intentions of the dead were alike frus- trated. The prize had proved a blank ; a necessary result of this fatal oversight, that the heir had not been made meet for the inheritance. Is such training needful for an earthly estate ? How much more for the " inheritance of the saints in light !" " Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." No change to a condition how- ever lofty — no elevation from the lowest obscurity to the highest honour, from abject poverty to the greatest affluence, adequately represents the difference between the state of sin in which grace finds us, and the state of glory to which it raises us. The most ignorant and debased of our city outcasts, the most wretched and loathsome wanderer of these streets, is not so unfit to be received into the holy bosom of a Christian family, as you are, by nature, to be received into the kingdom of heaven. A sinner there were more out of place than a ragged beggar in a royal palace, where, all gazing at his appearance with astonishment, and shrinking back from his defiling touch, he rudely thrusts himself within the biilliant circle. Compared with the difference be- tween a man, as grace finds him, and heaven gets him, how feeble are all earthly distinctions ! They sink into nothing. So unheavenly, in truth, is our nature, that unless we were made meet for the inheritance, we were no honour to it, nor were it any happiness to us. What, for instance, were the most tempting banquet 14 THE INHERITANCE. to one without appetite, sick, loathing the very sight and smell of food ? To a man stone-deaf, what the boldest blast of trumpet, the roll of drums, stirring the soldier's soul to deeds of daring valour, or the finest music that ever fell on charmed ear, and seemed to bear the spirit on its waves of sound up to the gates of heaven? Or, what, to one stone-blind, a scene to which beauty has lent its charms, and sublimity its grandeur, — the valley clad in a many -coloured robe of flowers, the gleaming lake, the flashing cascade, the foaming torrent, the dark climbing forest, the brave trees that cling to the frowning crags, the rocky pinnacles, and, high over all, hoary winter looking down on summer from her throne on the Alps' untrodden snows ? Just what heaven would be to man with his ruined nature, his low passions, and his dark guilty conscience. Incapable of appreciating its holy beauties, of enjoying its holy happiness, he would find nothing there to delight his senses. How he would wonder in what its pleasures lay ; and, supposing him once there, were there a place of safety out of it, how he would long to be away, and keep his eye on the gate to watch its opening, and escape as from a doleful prison ! Such an inheritance were to such a man like the gift of a noble library to a plumed, painted savage. As, igno- rant of letters, he stalked from hall to hall amid the wisdom of bygone ages, and rolled his restless eyes oVer the unappreciated treasures, how he would sigh to be back to his native forests, where he might sit among his tribe at the council-fire, or raise his war- THE INHERITANCE. 15 whoop, or hunt down the deer. People talk strangely of going to heaven when they die ; but what gratifica- tion could it possibly afford a man whose enjoyments are of a sensuous or sensual nature, — whose only pleasure lies in the acquisition of worldly objects, or the gratifi- cation of brutal appetites ? You hope to go to heaven ! I hope you will. But, unless your heart is sanctified and renewed, what were heaven to you ? an abhorrent vacuum. The day that took you there would end all enjoyment, and throw you, a castaway, upon a solitude more lonely than a desert island. Neither angels nor saints would seek your company, nor would you seek theirs. Unable to join in their hallowed employments, to sympathise with, or even to understand their holy joys, you would feel more desolate in heaven than we have done in the heart of a great city, without one friend, jostled by crowds, but crowds who spoke a lan- guage we did not understand, and were aliens alike in dress and manners, in language, blood, and faith. It is the curse of vice, that, where its desires out- live the power of gratification, or are denied the oppor- tunity of indulgence, they become a punishment and a torment. Denied all opportunity of indulgence, what would a drunkard do in heaven ? Or, a glutton ? Or, a voluptuary? Or, an ambitious man ? Or, a worldling ? one whose soul lies buried in a heap of gold ? Or, she, who, neglecting quite as much the noble purposes of ier being, flits, life through, a painted butterfly, from flower to flower of pleasure, and wastes the day of grace in the idolatry and adornment of a form which death 16 THE INHERITANCE. shall change into utter loathsomeness, and the grave into a heap of dust? These would hear no sounds of ecstasy, would see no brightness, would smell no per- fumes, in paradise. But, weeping and wringing their hands, they would wander up and down the golden streets to bewail their death, crying — *' The days have come in which we have no pleasure in them." On that eternal Sabbath, — from which nor fields, nor news, nor business would afford escape, — what would they do, who hear no music in church bells, and say of holy services, *' When will they be over?" Oh, the slow, weary march of the hours of never- ending Sabbath devotions ! Oh, the painful glare of a never-setting Sabbath sun! Than go down to hell, than perish in the coming storm, they would turn their prow to heaven ; but only as the last refuge of a sinking bark, — a safe, it may be, but yet a friendless shore. Unlike the happy swallows which David envied, thy altar, God, is the very last spot where many would choose to build their nests ! Such is by nature the disposition of all of us. " The heart is desperately wicked." *' The carnal mind" has an aversion to spiritual duties, and an utter distaste for spiritual enjoyments. Nor is that all the truth. How- ever it may lie (joncealed, like a worm in the bud, " the carnal mind is enmity against God." Illustrating the familiar adage, " out of sight, out of mind," this feeling may lie dormant so long as our enemy is unseen. But, let him appear, and his presence opens every old wound afresh, and fans the smouldering enmity into flame. THE INHERITANCE. 17 Therefore, the heaven that purifies the saint would but exasperate the hatred of the sinner ; and the more God's holiness and glory were revealed, the more w^ould this enmity be developed — -just as the thicker the dews fall on decaying timber, the faster the timber rots ; and the more full the sunshine on a noxious plant, the more pestilent its juices grow. It is not in polar regions, where the day is night, and the showers are snow, and the rivers are moving ice, and slanting sunbeams fall faint and feeble, but in the climes where flowers are fairest, and fruits are sweetest, and fullest sunshine warms the air and lights a cloudless sky, that nature prepares her deadliest poisons. There the snake sounds its ominous rattle, and the venomous cobra lifts her hood. Even so sin, could it strike root in heaven, would grow more rankly, more hating and more hateful than on earth, and man would cast on God an eye of deeper and intenser enmity. Hence the need of being made, by a change of heart, new creatures in Jesus Christ. Hence, also, the need, which by reason of indwelling and remaining cor- ruption, even God's people daily feel, of getting, with a title to the heavenly inheritance, a greater meetness for it. In other words, you must be sanctified as well as saved. This work, so necessary, as we have seen, in the very nature of things, has been assigned to the Holy Spirit. It was the office of the Son to purchase heaven for the heirs. And it is the office of the Spirit to prepare the heirs for heaven. Thus renewed, purified, and at length wholly sanctified, we shall carry a holy nature to a B2 18 THE INHERITANCE. holy place, and be presented " faultless, before the pre- sence of his glory, with exceeding joy." But observe, more particularly, IV. As heaven is the gift of God, our meetness for it is the work of God. In my text, the apostle calls for thanks unto the Father. For by whatever instruments God executes his work, whether the means he uses to sanctify his people be dead books, or living ministers, be sweet or severe, common or striking providences, the work is not theirs, but his. Owing him, then, no less praise for the Spirit who makes us meet for the inhe- ritance, than for the Son who purchased it, we give thanks to God. The church weaves the three names into one doxology, singing, " Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost." Let me illustrate this point by a reference to the case of Lazarus. On the day when he was raised from the dead, Lazarus had two things to thank Christ for. His gratitude was due for what Jesus did without human instrumentality, and also for what he did by it ; both for the "Lazarus come forth!" that rent the grave, and for the " Loose him and let him go !" that rent the grave-clothes; not only for life, but for the liberty with- out which life had been a doubtful blessing. Doubtful blessing ! What enjoyment had there been in life so long as the face-cloth was left on his eyes, and his limbs were bound fast in the cerements of the tomb ? THE INHERITANCE. 19 He emerges from the grave's black moutli a living, yet a startling, hideous object, from whose appalling form the crowd reels back, and terror-stricken sisters might be excused for shrinking. Shrouded like a corpse, smelling of the noisome grave, with the yellow linen muffling eyes and mouth, every door had been shut against him, and the streets of Bethany cleared of flying crowds by such a frightful apparition. Who would have sat beside him at the feast ? Who would have worshipped with him in the synagogue ? A public terror, shunned by his dearest friends, to him life had been no boon, but a burden, — a heavy load from which he had sought rehef, where many a weary one has found it, in the deep oblivion of the tomb. Had Christ done no more than bid Lazarus live, I can fancy his unhappy friend imploring him to resume the gift, saying. Take it back ; let me return to the quiet grave; the dead will not shun me; and I shall say to corruption, " Thou art my father ; and to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister." In these circumstances, the conduct of our Lord illustrates that grace which, in whomsoever it begins a good work, will carry it on to the day of the Lord Jesus. Pointing to Lazarus— who was, perhaps, endea- vouring at that moment, like a newly-awakened sinner, to fling off his shroud, and be free — he addresses the spectators, saying, " Loose him, and let him go !" And thus God deals with renewed souls. Liberty follows life. To his Holy Spirit, and, in a subordinate sense, to providence in its dealings^ to ministers in the pulpit, 20 THE INHERITANCE. to parents, teachers, and all other human instruments, he says, Undo the bonds of sin, — loose them, and let them go ! Now, to bring the subject home, have we not merely fancied, but have we felt, have we solid scriptural ground for believing, that the same spirit-freeing words have been spoken of us ? Have we been freed from habits that were to us as grave-clothes? And, emancipated from passions which once enslaved us, are we now, at least in some measure, doing what David undertook, when he said, " I will run the way of Thy com- mandments, when Thou shalt enlarge my heart?" In growing holiness, — in heavenly desires that, flame- like, shoot upward to the skies — in godly resolutions that aim at, if they do not always attain, a lofty mark — " in the lust of the flesh," and the '' pride of life," nailed to a cross where, if not yet dead, they are dying daily, — in holy sorrows that, like a summer cloud, while they dis- charge their burden in tears, are spanned by a bow of hope, — in longings that aspire after a purer state and a better land, — in these things have you at once the pledge of heaven and the meetness for it? If so, " this is the Lord's doing ; it is marveflous in our eyes." As delightful as marvellous ! What joy, what peace should it impart to the hearts of those who, feeling themselves less than the least of God's mercies, unworthy of a crust of bread or of a cup of water, hail in these the bright tokens of a blood-bought crown — that coming event which casts its shadow before ! But if, without this meetness, you are indulging THE INHERITANCE. 21 the hope that, when you die, you will succeed to the inheritance — ah! how shall the event, the dreadful reality, undeceive you! Ponder these words, I pray you, " Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord," " Without are dogs," '' There shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie ; but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life." Let no man delude himself; or believe that cunning devil, who, — unlike the ugly toad that, seated squat by the ear of Eve, filled her troubled mind with horrid dreams, — hovers over him in the form of a benignant angel, charming away his fears with " peace, peace, when there is no peace." Believe me, that the only proof that God has chosen us is, that we have chosen him. The distinguishing mark of heirs is some degree of meetness for the heirship. In saints, the spirit is willing even when the flesh is weak; the body lags behind the soul ; the affections outrun the feet ; and the desires of those who are bound for heaven are often far on the road before themselves. By these signs thou mayest know thyself. Can you stand that touchstone ? Ere autumn has tinted the woodlands, or the corn- fields are falling to the reaper's song, or hoary hill-tops, like grey hairs on an aged head, give warning of winter's approach, I have seen the swallow's brood pruning their feathers, and putting their long wings to the proof; and, though they might return to their nests in the window-eaves, or alight again on the house-tops, they THE INHERITANCE. darted away in the direction of sunny lands. Thus they showed that they were birds bound for a foreign clime, and that the period of their migration from the scene of their birth was nigh at hand. Grace also has its prognostics. They are infallible as those of nature. So, when the soul, filled with longings to be gone, is often darting away to glory, and, soaring up- ward, rises on the wings of faith, till this great world, from her sublime elevation, looks a little thing, God's people know that they have the earnest of the Spirit. These are the pledges of heaven, — a sure sign that their " redemption draweth nigh." Such devout feelings afford the most blessed evidence that, with Christ by the helm, and " the wind," that " bloweth where it listeth," in our swelling sails, we are drawing nigh to the land that is afar off; even as the reeds, and leaves, and fruits that float upon the briny waves, as the birds of strange and gorgeous plumage that fly round his ship and alight upon its yards, as the sweet- scented odours which the wind wafts out to sea^ assure the weary mariner that, ere long, he shall drop his anchor, and end his voyage in the desired haven. THE POWEE OF DARKNESS. Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness. — Colossians i. 13. ^HE stories of subterranean caves, where brilliant diamonds, thickly studding vaulted roof and fretted walls, supply the place of lamps, are fancies — childhood's fairy-tales. Incredible as it may appear to ignorance, on whose admiring eyes it flashes rays of light, science proves that the diamond is formed of the very same matter as common, dull, black coal. It boasts no native light ; and dark in the darkness, as the mud or rock where it lies imbedded, it shines, if with a beautiful, yet with a borrowed splendour. How meet an emblem of the priceless jewels that adorn the Saviour's crown ! Besides, like many a gem of man and woman kind, the diamond is of humble origin. Its native state is mean. It lies buried in the deep bowels of the earth ; and in that condition is almost as unfit to form a graceful ornament, as the stones that pave our highways, as the rudest pebble which ocean, in her play, rolls upon the beach. Unlike many other crystals, it is foul, encrusted with dirt, and inelegant in form — flashing with none of that matchless lustre which makes it after- 24 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. wards appear more like a fragment struck from star or sun, than a product of this dull, cold world. That it may glow, and sparkle, and burn with many-coloured fires, and change into a thing of beauty, it has to undergo a rough, and, had it our sensibilities of nerve and life, a painful process. The lapidary receives it from the miner ; nor, till he has ground the stone on his flying wheel, and polished it with its own dust, does it pass into the hands of the jeweller to be set in a golden crown, or become the brightest ornament of female loveliness. Through a corresponding preparation Christ's saints have to go. Are you saved? you have to be sanctified. Are you redeemed? you have to be re- newed. You are polluted, and requke to be purified ; and, as all know who have experienced it, at a great cost of pain and self-denial, sin has to be eradicated — utterly destroyed ; in respect of its dominant power, cast down ; and in respect of its indwelling power, cast out. This fulfils the prayer, " The very God of peace sanctify you wholly;" and for this, as forming that meetness for the inheritance, which was the subject of my last address, the saints are now either offering up prayer on earth, or, better far, praise and thanks in heaven. But as the gem, ere it is polished, must be brought from the mine and its naturally base condition, so, ere those whom Christ has redeemed with his blood can be sanctified by his Spirit, they must be called and converted; they must be brought into a new condition ; or, in the words of my text, '' delivered from the power of darkness," and " translated into the kingdom of God's THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 25 dear Son." This, which is the subject before us now, calls our attention to the greatest of all changes. I say the greatest; one even greater than the marvellous transition which takes place at the instant of death — from dying struggles to the glories of the skies. Because, while heaven is the day of which grace is the dawn ; the rich, ripe, fruit of which grace is the lovely flower ; the inner shrine of that most glorious temple to which grace forms the approach and outer court, — in passing from nature to grace you did not pass from a lower to a higher stage of the same condi- tion — from daybreak to sunshine, but from darkest night to dawn of day. Unlike the worm which changes into a winged insect, or the infant who grows up into a stately man, you became, not a more per- fect, but " a new creature " in Jesus Christ. And with deepest gratitude to Him who, filled with pity, and for " his great love wherewith he loved us," left heaven to save us, let us now consider our original state — *' look unto the rock whence we are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence we are digged." I. Look at our state of nature and sin as one of dark- ness. In its essential nature, sin is as opposed to holiness as darkness is to light ; and as different, therefore, from holiness, as a starless midnight from the blaze of noon- day. Our natural state is therefore, because of its sin- fulness, represented by the emblem of darkness. How c 26 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. appropriate and how expressive the figure ! Hence, in describing the condition of the heathen, those who neither know God, nor Him whom to know is life eternal, the Bible says. The darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people. Hence, those ancient prophets who lived in the morning of the church — and in the rosy east, and clouds already touched with gold, saw a sun beneath the horizon hastening to his rise — hailed Jesus, as a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of His people Israel. Hence also, inasmuch as he reveals saving truth, redeems from sin, and shines upon the path he himself has opened to heaven, Jesus stood before the multitude, and said, as he raised his hand to the blazing sun, " I am the light of the world." Jesus ! Thy people's shield, thou art also thy people's sun ; a shield that never breaks in battle, and a sun that never sets in night ; the source of all the know- ledge that illumes, and of all the love that warms us ; with healing, as well as heating virtue in thy beams, thou art " The sun of righteousness with healing in his wings." To that emblem of our Saviour, so splendid and yet so simple, science imparts additional appropriateness, if the theory be true that accounts for those vast stores of light and heat which we extract from dead dark coal. The coal, which we raise from the bowels of the earth, once grew upon its surface. Some ten or twenty thousand years ago, it formed the giant forests where mighty monsters ranged at will over an unpeopled world. After this rank vegetation had incorporated THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 27 into its substance those elements of light and heat which the sun poured down from heaven, God, provident of the wants of a race not yet created, buried it in the earth ; and thus furnished our world with ample stores of fuel for the future use of man. So, when the sun has set, and the birds have gone to roost, and the stars have come out in the sky, and the door is shut, and the curtains are drawn, and peace and happiness smile on the bright family circle, it is sun-light that shines from the lustres, and sun-heat that glow^s on the hearth. But w^hether that speculation of science be true or false, to Jesus we can trace all the light, direct or derived, which illuminates the world. Heavenly fountain of the love that warms and the truth that enlightens mankind, he rose like a sun on this cold benighted earth ; and will be the centre around which heaven itself shall roll when tides have ceased to flow below, and suns to shine above. " The city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof." But, turning from the Saviour to contemplate the sinner, I pray you to observe, that our state by nature is one not merely of darkness, but of double darkness. It is always dark, pitch dark, even at noonday, to the blind; nor blazing sun, nor shining stars to them. With God " the night shineth as the day," but to the unhappy blind, ** He maketh the day dark -with night." Yet strong as this figure is, it does not adequately re- present the full misery of our condition. We had neither light nor sight. That we may be saved, do 28 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. you not perceive that two things, therefore, must be done for us ? We require a medium to see by, as well as eyes to see with; to the revelation of the Gospel must be added the regeneration of the Holy Spirit ; in other words, we must have in Christ an object for faith to see, and in faith we must have eyes to see Christ. Inhabitants of a Christian land, we possess one of these, — like the Hebrews in Goshen we have light in our dwellings ; and so far we differ from the heathen, for they have neither light nor sight. They live in dark- ness so gross, that they do not distinguish purity from pollution. They have no more idea of the way of sal- vation, than the blind have of colours. They do not know God. Some worship a cow; some a serpent ; some a stone ; some the very Devil. In them, reason crouches to adore a beast ; and man, made in the image of God, bows his erect form and noble head before a lifeless block. When, from the study of that instinctive and unerring wisdom with which the lower animals — the stork in the period of her migrations, the bee in the construction of its cell — act in their allotted spheres, we turn to this amazing, and all but incredible sense- lessness, and stupidity of man, what an illnstration have we of the saying, " If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" But we, who dwell in this land, as I have already said, live in light. Like the angel whom John saw, we staud in the sun. Comparing it with most other lands, we may, at least, (;all our island-home a Goshen. Let those boast their balmy air, and richer fruits, and sunnier THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 29 skies ! In our religious as well as civil advantages, we enjoy blessings that more than compensate for the gloomy fogs that veil these skies, and the storms that rage on our iron-bound shores. Our lines have fallen in pleasant pla(;es, and happy the land, nor to be rashly left, where the light of divine truth streams from a thousand printing-presses, and the candle of the Lord shines bright in its humblest cottages. May I not say that, with their multitude of churches, our cities are illuminated every Sabbath, to celebrate the triumphs of the cross, the great battle that was won on the heights of Calvary, and the peace his heralds proclaim between God and man ? Men do perish, yet none need perish. There is no lack of knowledge. The road to heaven is plain. " The wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein." It is better lighted than any street of this city, or the rugged coasts along which our seamen steer, or the harbours which, over surf-beaten bars, they boldly take in winter's blackest night. Notwithstanding the fuhiess of our light, what mul- titudes are wrecked and perish ! They never reach the harbour, — nor, arriving in heaven, get home ! And I am bound to tell you that, unless He, who gave sight to the blind, apply his finger, and touch your eyes with " eye-salve," their fate shall be yours. What though light streams on our eye-balls? We are in darkness till we are converted ; because we are blind, — and that not by accident, but by nature, — born blind. There are animals, both wild and domestic, which, by a strange and mysterious law of providence, are boi*n in that 30 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. state. " Having eyes, they see not." Apparently unripe for the birth, they leave their mother's womb to pass the first period of their being utterly sightless. But, when some ten days have come and gone, time unseals their eyelids, and they are delivered from the power of darkness. But not ten days, nor years, nor any length of time, will do us such friendly office. Not that we shall be always blind. Oh, how men shall see, and regret in another world, the folly they were guilty of in this ! Eternity opens the darkest eyes, but opens them, alas, too late ; "He lift up his eyes, being in torment." He is a madman who braves that fate ; yet it awaits you, unless you bestir yourselves, and, shaking sloth away, seize the golden opportunity to pursue the Saviour with the blind man's cry, " Thou Son of David, have mercy on me!" I can fancy few sadder sights than an entire family, parents and children, all blind — a home, where the flowers have no beauty, the night has no stars, the morning no blushing dawn, and the azure sky no glorious sun — a home, where they have never looked on each other's faces ; but a blind father sits by the dull fire with a blind boy on his knee, and the sightless mother nurses at her bosom a sightless babe, that never gladdened her with its happy smile. How would such a spectacle touch the most callous feelings, and move to pity even a heart of stone ! But a greater calamity is ours. The eyes of our understanding are darkened. Sin quenched man's sight in Eden ; and, strange result ! the event that revealed their nakedness THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 31 to our first parents, shut, closed, sealed their eyes, and those also of their children, to the greater shame of spiritual nakedness. Thus blind to their blindness, and insensible of their need of Jesus, alas ! how many allow him to pass by ! The precious opportunity of salvation is lost — lost perhaps for ever. Oh, for one hour of the sense and energy of the beggars that sat by the gate of Jericho ! Stumbling, often falling, but always to rise, they hung on the skirts of the crowd, plunged headlong into the thick of it, and, elbowing men aside, pursued Jesus with the most plaintive, pitiful, and earnest prayer, " Have mercy on us, Lord, thou Son of David ! Have mercy on us, Lord, thou Son of David!" Be yours that cry. Follow your Saviour on their feet ; hang on him with the vehemence of one who said, " My soul followeth hard after thee." Be turned by nothing from your purpose ; but keep follow- ing, and, as you follow, crying ; and I promise you that that cry will stop him as sure as Joshua's pierced the heavens, and stopped the glowing axles of the sun. That we may have a deep, and by God's blessing a saving, impression of our need of salvation, let us look at some aspects of our state by nature in the light, if I may say so, of its darkness. 1. Darkness is a state of indolence. Night is the proper period for rest. When — em- blem of a Christian at his evening prayers — the lark sings in the close of day, and leaves the skies to drop 32 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. into her dewy nest ; when from distant uplands, the rooks, a noisy crowd, come sailing, wheeling home ; when the flowers shut their beautiful eyes ; when the sun, retiring within the cloudy curtains of the evening, sinks into his ocean-bed — nature, however some may neglect her lessons, teaches man to seek repose. So, with some exceptions, all honest men and women go to sleep in the dark. " They that sleep, sleep in the night;" and this busy world lies hushed in the arms of slumber, till morning, looking in at the window, calls up toil to resume her labours. And thus, when we have been summoned at midnight to a bed of death, how loud the foot-fall sounded in the empty thoroughfare ! With thousands around who gave no sign of life, with none abroad but prowling dog or houseless outcast or some guilty wretch, with the tall grim tenements wrapped in gloom, save where student's lamp, or the faint light of a sick chamber glimmered dim and drear, we have felt such awe as he might do who walks through a city of the dead. Yet, in its hours of deepest darkness and quietest repose, this city presents no true pictm-e of our state by nature. We see it yonder where a city sleeps, while eager angels point Lot's eyes to the break of day, and urge his tardy steps through the doomed streets of Sodom. A fiery firmament hangs over all the unconverted ; and there is need that God send his grace to do them an angel's office, saving them from impending judgments. Are you still exposed to the wrath of God ? House thee, then, from sleep, shake off thy indolence, and leap from THE POWER OF DABKNESS. 33 thy bed — it is all one whether thou burn on a couch of down or straw. " Escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed," betake you to the Saviour, lest — since the blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin, and he died for the chief of sinners, and salvation is without money and without price, and God is not willing that any should perish — thou perish, more in a sense the victim of thy sloth than of thy guiltiest sins. Ancient Egypt, however, supplies perhaps the best illustration of the connection which subsists between a state of darkness and a state of indolence. God said to Moses, " Stretch out thine hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt. And Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven ; and there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days." And how passed these days of darkness ? They neither bought nor sold ; they neither married nor buried ; they neither rocked a cradle nor embalmed a corpse. No hammer rang ; no merry wheel went round ; no fire burned at the brick kiln ; no woman sang " behind the mill;" no busy tread sounded on the pavement, nor cheerful dash of oar upon the water. An awful silence reigned throughout the land. As if every house had been in a moment changed into a tomb, and each living man into a mummied corpse, they sat motion- less — the king on his weary throne, the peasant in the field, the weaver at his loom, the prisoner in his dun- geon. As in the story of some old romance, where a bold knight, gouag in quest of adventures, sounds his 34 THE POWEll OF DARKNESS. horn at the castle gate, and, getting no response, enters to find king, courtiers, servants, horses, all turned into stone — they sat, spell-bound, where the darkness seized them. " They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days." Still greater wonder ! many a man in this world has not risen from his place, I say not for three days, nor for three years, but ten times three years and more. He is no nearer heaven than he was a long time ago. Borne on, indeed, by the ever-flowing stream of time, and ever-downward course of sin, alas ! he is nearer the brink of hell. Perilous indolence ! God says, " labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which en- dure th unto everlasting life," " give diligence to make your calling and election sure," " seek ye the Lord while he may be found," and therefore, I say, be up, and doing ; time is short ; the stake is great ; death is at the door, and, if he find you out of Christ, damnation is at his heels. " And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." Of your many calls, and opportunities, is this all the result ? Half awakened, yet unwilling to tear yourself from the arms of pleasure, do you avert your eyes from the light ? angry perhaps, at being dis- turbed, perhaps half sorrowful, do you bid us come back at "a more convenient season?" drowsily turning on your deceitful couch, do you say, " Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep?" Then, in God's name, I ask what shall be the end of these things ? The end of these things is death. THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 35 2. Darkness is a state of ignorance. Conducted under the veil of night to the nuptial couch, Jacob finds in the possession of Rachel, as he supposes, an ample reward for the seven long years of weary work and waiting. She, whom his heart wooed and his hands won, is now his wedded wife. He wakes a happy man. Neither suspecting how God had punished him for the deceit he practised on his old blind father, nor how Laban, a greater master of craft than himself, had substituted the elder for the younger daughter, fancy his confusion, when he turns, by the rosy light of morn, to gaze on his beautiful bride, to find the blear-eyed Leah at his side. Yet a day approaches when, from dreams of wealth and pleasure, many shall awake, in rage and unavailing sorrow, to the discovery of a greater mistake. AVhat Jacob's mistake to his, who, embracing pleasure, wakens to find himself in the arms of a hideous demon, dragging him down — struggling, shrieking, into the lowest hell ? But if we would see spiritual darkness represented on a scale in any degree commensurate with the multi- tude of its victims, and with its destructive power, let us turn to the host of Midian. The memorable night has come when, animated by a divine courage, Gideon leads his three hundred to the bold assault. Silently he plants them around the enemy's lines, waiting till song and revel have died away, and that mighty host lies buried in stillest slumbers. Then, one trumpet blows loud and clear, starthng the wary sentinel on 36 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. his round. He stops, he hstens ; and, ere its last echoes have ceased, the whole air is torn with battle-notes. Out of the darkness, trumpet replies to trumpet, and the blast of three hundred, blown loud and long, wakens the deepest sleeper — filling the ear of night with a dreadful din, and the hearts of the bravest with strange and sudden fear. Ere they can ask what mean, whence come these sounds, a sight as strange blazes up through the murky night. Three hundred torch-fires pierce the gloom, and advance in flaming circle on the panic- stricken camp. Suddenly extinguished, once more all is dark. Then — as if the dust of the whirlwind, or the sands of the desert, or the leaves of the forest, had turned into armed men, ready to burst on that uncir- cumcised host — in front, on their rear, on either flank, rings the Hebrews' battle-cry, '' The sword of the Lord and of Gideon !" For dear life the Midianites draw. Mistaking friend for foe, they bury their swords in each other's bosoms. Wild with terror, stricken mad with pain, each man seizes his fellow by the beard, giving and receiving mortal wounds. And so, not by the arms of Gideon, so much as by the hand of the darkness, was skill outwitted, and bravery defeated, and that mighty army routed and slain. Such is the power of darkness ! Yet what is that dying host to one lost soul ! Ugliness and beauty, friend and foe, are all one in the dark. And so are all roads when the belated tra- veller cannot see his finger before him, and the watery pool throws ofif no gleam, and earth and sky appear a THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 37 solid mass of darkness. Unconscious of danger, and dreaming of a home he shall never more see, he draws near the precipice ; his foot is on its grassy edge ; another step, one loud shriek, and there he lies — a bleeding mass, beneath the crag. Nor, when night comes down upon the deep in fog, or rain, or blinding drift, can the ill-starred mariner distinguish the rock from the sea, or a wrecker's fire from the harbour lights. Thus — showing us how many sinners perish — the darkness is the cause of their death. They are lost — victims to the " power of darkness." The greatest of all mistakes is to miss the path to heaven. Yet see how many, turning from Christ, who says, " I am the way, and the truth, and the life," in the darkness of their understandings, and the depravity of their hearts, have missed, and are missing it ? Some think that their charities, and public usefulness, and household duties, will save them. Some think, by going the round and lifeless routine of prayers, and preachings, and sacraments, and outward services, that they will cer- tainly secure the favom* of God. Some think they may go on in sin, and for a while longer dare the danger, and then put up the helm — veering round when they like on the other tack ; while many fancy that they are on the road to heaven, when every step they take, and every day they live, is carrying them farther and farther away. Others regard religion as a thing of gloom ; they reckon the friends of their souls to be the enemies of their happiness. Infatuated men ! they fly from the voice of the Shepherd to throw themselves into the 38 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. jaws of the wolf. Nay, there are some plunged in yet deeper moral darkness, who remind me of a convict whom I saw in the Hulks — that frightful concentration of villany and crime. He had seated himself ostenta- tiously on a bench. With no blush burning on his beardless cheek, but with an expression rather of satis- faction in his face, the boy was polishing the fetter on his ankle. Poor wretch, he was vain of its silvery sheen, and raised sad thoughts in us of pity and wonder at the darkness of his neglected soul. And yet more dark and dreadful is the state of many who would once have said of the life they now lead, " Is thy servant a dog that he should do this great thing?" Gone in iniquity, they boast, with unblushing face, of the victims whom they have seduced ; of the abominable debauch- eries which they practise ; of virtue ensnared by their villanous arts ; of simple, unsuspecting honesty they have overreached ; of their scorn for religion, of their contempt of its professors, and their loose, licentious freedom from its holiest bonds. They blazon their sins upon their foreheads, and, parading them before the world, glory in their shame. No man wishes, no man intends, to go to Hell. And who, that was not plunged in the ignorance of deepest darkness, would choose death rather than life, would embrace sin rather than the Saviour, would wave away the cup of salvation to seize a poisoned chalice, and drink down damning draughts of forbidden pleasure ? May God enlighten your eyes lest you sleep the sleep of death ! Be not deceived. The tale of the goblet, which THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 39 the genius of a heathen fashioned, was true ; and taught a moral of which many a death-bed furnishes the melan- choly illustration. Having made the model of a serpent, he fixed it in the bottom of the cup. Coiled for the spring, a pair of gleaming eyes in its head, and in its open mouth fangs raised to strike, it lay beneath the ruby wine. Nor did he who raised that golden cup to quench his thirst, and quaff the delicious draught, suspect what lay below, till, as he reached the dregs, that dreadful head rose up and glistened before his eyes. So, when life's cup is nearly emptied, and sin's last pleasure quaffed, and unwilling lips are draining the bitter dregs, shall rise the ghastly terrors of remorse, and death, and judgment, upon the despairing soul. Be assured, a serpent lurks at the bottom of guilt's sweetest pleasure. To this awful truth may God, by his word and Holy Spirit, open your eyes ! Seeing the serpent, seized with holy horror at the sight, may you fling the temptation from you ; and turn to Him, who, with love in his heart, and kindness in his looks, and forgiveness on his lips, and the cup of salva- tion held out in his hand, cries, " If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink." Here, believe me, is peace that passeth understanding ; here are joys that will bear the morning's reflection, pleasures that are for evermore. THE POWER OF DARKNESS. (Contimied.) Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness. — Colossians i. 13. Q AILING once along a coast where a friend liad suffered shipwreck, the scene which recalled his danger filled us with no fear. Because, while his ship, on the night she ran ashore, was cutting her way through the densest fog, we were ploughing the waters of a silver sea, where noble headlands, and pillared cliffs, and scattered islands, and surf-beaten reefs, stood bathed in the brightest moonshine. There was no danger, just because there was no darkness. The thick and heavy haze is, of all hazards, that which the wary seaman holds in greatest dread. It exposes him to accidents which neither care nor skill can avert. In a moment his bark may go crashing on the treacherous rock, or, run down by another ship, fill and founder in the deep. Rather than a glassy sea, wrapped in gloom, give him the roaring storm and its mountain billows, with an open sky above his head, and wide sea-room around. And, in a sense, is it not so with a Christian man ? Give him the light of heaven — let him enjoy both a clear sense of his interest in Christ, and a clear sight of his duty to Christ, and, in the midst THE PmVER OF DARKNESS. 41 of trials and temptations, how nobly he rides over them ! He rises on the waves which seemed about to over- whelm him, and holds on his course to heaven — safer in the storm than others are in the calm. Enjoying the sunshine of God's countenance within his soul, and the light of God's word on his path of duty, the man is cheerful where others are cast down ; he sings when others weep ; when others tremble, he is calm, perhaps even jubilant; and, the Lord his Saviour, because his sun, he adopts the brave words of David, saying, " The Lord is my light and my salvation ; whom shall I fear ? The Lord is the strength of my life ; of whom shall I be afraid ?" In resuming the subject of the previous discourse, this leads me to remark — 3. That darkness is a state of danger. As locks and bars prove, neither life nor property is safe by night as they are by day. Honesty, having nothing to blush for or to conceal, pursues her business in open day ; but crime seeks the cover of the night. And what is that thief, prowling abroad like a fox, and with stealthy foot creeping along under shadow of the wall ; what that assassin, searching the gloom, and listening for the step of his victim's approach ; what she, who, issuing from a den of sin, and throwing the veil of night over painted cheek and faded finery, lurks in the streets for her prey — what are these, but types of him who is the enemy of man, and takes advantage of spiritual darkness to ensnare or assault God's children, and to ruin poor thoughtless sinners. c 2 42 THE POWER OF DARKNESS, Such danger is there in darkness, that people have perished within reach of home, almost at their own door. So it befell one who was found in a winter morning stretched cold and dead on a bed of snow — her glazed eyes and rigid form contrasting strangely with her gay attire. She began the night with dances, and ended it with death. She leaves the merry revels of a marriage-scene for her home across the mountain. The stars go out, and the storm comes on. Bewildered by the howling tempest, and the blinding drift, and the black night, she loses her way. Long the struggle lasts. At length, worn out and benumbed, she stretches her fragile form on that fatal bed, and, amid dreams, perhaps, of dances, and song, and merriment, she sinks into the sleep that knows no waking. Nor was it when snows were melted, and months or years had gone, that her withering form was found by a wandering shepherd on some drear upland, in a lone mountain corrie, half buried in a dark and deep morass. No. She met her fate near by a friendly door, and perished in the darkness within a step of safety. Yet not nearer, nor so near it, as many are to salvation, who yet are lost. They die by the very door of heaven. The Apostle tells us how, " The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which beheve not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." The darkness is their death. And while no night ever came down so black and starless as that which has settled on the human soul. THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 43 in respect of its power over men, what can be compared to mental, moral, spiritual darkness ? Its chains are more difficult to rend than chains of brass or iron. Look at Popery! She immures her votaries in a gloomier dungeon than ever held her victims. And throwing her fetters, not over the limbs, but over the free mind of man, what an illustration does she give of '' the power of darkness?" How formidable is that power which compels a man to sacrifice his reason at the feet of priestcraft ; and woman, shrinking, modest, delicate woman, to allow some foul hand to se^ch her bosom, and to drag its secrets from their close concealment. Best gift of heaven ! God sends them his blessed word, and they dare not open it. Those senses of smell, and touch, and taste, which are the voice of God, declare that the cup is filled with wine, and the wafer made of wheat; but, as if their senses as well as their souls were darkened, they believe that to be a living man's blood, and this to be a living man's flesh ! " Having eyes, they see not." And, greatest triumph of darkness ! they hug their chains ; refuse instruction ; stop their ears, like the deaf adder which will not hear the voice of the charmer, charm he ever so wisely; and turn away their eyes from the truth, as the owls that haunt some old monastic ruin from the glare of a torch, or the blaze of day. How appropriate to the devotees of a faith so detestable, the words of Scripture — " If the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness!" Censure, as well as charity, however, should begin 44 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. at home ; and therefore, to be faithful to ourselves as well as just to others, we ought not to forget that melancholy illustrations of the power of darkness are found nearer at hand than Rome. In the face of all past and much bitter experience, how many among ourselves live under the delusion that, though the happi- ness they seek and expect to find in the world has, in all bygone time, eluded their grasp, in the object they now pursue, they shall certainly embrace the mocking phantom ! How many among ourselves, also, are putting away the claims of Christ and of their souls to what they flatter themselves shall be a more, but what must be a less, convenient season ! Contrary to the testimony of all who have ever tried it, do not many of us persist in believing God's service to be a weariness, and piety a life of cheerless gloom ? Many regard the slavery of sin as liberty, and shun the liberty of Christ as intolerable bondage. Many fancy them- selves to be safe, who, hanging over perdition by life's most slender thread, are '' ready to perish." Talk of the delusions of Popery and the credulity of Papists ! Many among us believe the barest and most naked lies of the devil, rather than the plain word of God. Alas ! the feet of thousands here are on the dark mountains; and, unless God shall enlighten them by his Spirit, the dark- ness, which is now their danger, shall prove their death. Were you, under the tyranny of mortal man, im- mured in his strongest dungeon, I would not despair of your escape. Within an old castle that sits pictu- resquely perched upon a noble sea rock, and to whose THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 45 crumbling walls the memory of other days clings, fresh and green as the ivy that mantles them, there is a sight to strike men with horror. Passing under a low- browed portal, where you bid farewell to the light and air of heaven, a flight of broken steps conducts you down into a chill, gloomy vault. In the centre of its rocky floor yawn the jaws of a horrid pit. The candle, lighted and swung into that dread abyss, goes down, and yet deeper down, till, in an excavated dungeon in the rock, it dimly reveals the horrors of a living grave. There the cry for help could reach no ear but God's ; and no sound responded to the captive's moan but the dull steady stroke of the billows, as they burst on the face of the crag. Into that sepulchre — where they buried God's persecuted saints — you look to shudder, and to say, *' for them hope was none." Yet immure a man in that — in the darkest, strongest dungeon despot has ever built, and give him hope for a companion, liberty for his bosom-wish, a brave heart, a stout hand, and, some morning, his goaler enters to find the cage empty, and the bird flown. But, for you that are under the power of darkness — for you, who are at once the servants and slaves and captives of the Prince of Darkness — for you, whom he first blinds, and then binds, there is no help in man. There is help in God. Sin never wove, in hottest hell-fires the devil never forged, a chain, which the Spirit of God, wielding the hammer of the word, cannot strike from fettered limbs. Put that to the test. Try the power of prayer. Let continued, constant, 46 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. earnest, wrestling prayer be made for those that are chained to their sins, and, so to speak, thrust " into the inner prison," and see whether, as on that night when Peter was led forth by the angel's hand, your prayers are not turned into most grateful praises. From the belly of the whale, from the depths of ocean, from the darkness of a perpetual night, God brought up Jonah to sunny shores and lightsome liberty. And let that same God hear from vilest lips the cry of danger — Lord save me, I perish — the cry of earnest desire, of lowly penitence, of an awakened conscience, of humble faith, and he shall save them by a great deliverance. He will bow his heavens, and come down. True to his word, he, who never said to any of the sons of men, " Seek ye me in vain," will deliver from the power of darkness, and translate into the *' kingdom of his dear Son." Having from these words considered our state of nature under the emblem of darkness, I would now remark — II. That even God's people remain in more or less darkness, so long as they are here. 1. They may be in darkness through ignorance. Their eyes have been divinely opened, and they can say with the man of old, " This I know, that I once was blind, but now I see." Having received " the truth as it is in Jesus," and abandoned the works of darkness, they are therefore called " the children of light, and THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 47 the children of the day." Yet all of them do not enjoy the same measure of light, nor are they all possessed of equal powers of sight. Skies differ, and eyes differ ; and hence those conflicting views which have separated brother from brother, and rent Christ's church into so many most unfortunate and lamentable divisions. It is easy to understand how this happens. Let objects be looked at through an imperfect light, and how different the appearance from the reality ! What mistakes we fall into ! In the grey morning, I have seen the fog-bank that filled the valley wear the aspect of a lake, where every wood-crowned knoll lay as a beautiful island, asleep on its placid bosom. How often has superstition fled, pale, shrieking from the churchyard, to report to gaping rustics that the dead were walking ; when it was but the pale moonlight struggling through the waving branches of the old elms, that had transformed some grave-stone into a sheeted spectre ! And, seen through a mist, the very sun itself is shorn of its glorious splendour, turned into a dull, red, copper ball; while mean objects, regarded through the same false medium, acquire a false dignity — bushes are magni- fied into trees, and the humble cottage rises into a stately mansion. And do not God's people fall into as great mistakes, when they look at divine truth through their defective vision, and through the mist of those passions and prejudices that are common to our poor humanity ? There should be much more latitude allowed for those differences of opinion which are inseparable from our present state ; but, forgetting to temper the ardent zeal 48 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. with the loving and liberal spirit of the great Apostle, Christian men have allowed differences to grow up into quarrels, and quarrels to ripen into divisions, till they, who once took sweet counsel together, and walked to the house of God in company, part, saying, " Can two walk together, except they be agreed ? " A time approaches, blessed be God, when this unseemly state of matters shall cease. According to old legends, the ghosts all vanished at cock-crowing. And, as the day dispersed the spectres, and the rolling away of the mist from the landscape rolls away also the mistakes it led to, even so, when the day of the Lord comes, it will settle all controversies — great and small. In *'the seven-fold" light of Zion, God's children shall see " eye to eye." They shall not only behold " Him as he is," and " the truth" as it is, but, with loving surprise, their brethren as they are. There shall be no differences, because there shall be no darkness. " Now we see through a glass darkly ; but then face to face ; now I know in part ; but then shall I know, even as also I am known." Meanwhile, He, who is sovereign in his dealings, and gives no account of his ways, has not equally dis- tributed the light of saving truth ; nor is there anything in the kingdom of grace corresponding to a remarkable fact in nature. Under the equator, each day consists of twelve hours of light, and as many of darkness, the whole year round. But pass by one long stride to the polar regions, and, according as the season is sum- mer or winter, you stand beneath a sky which either THE POWER OF DxVKKNESS. 49 enjoys perpetual day, or is wrapped in perpetual night. There, Dr. Kane and his ship's crew, for instance, never saw the sun for one hundred and forty long and weary days ; but were left, as in those Pagan lands on which the gospel has never shone, to unbroken night. During all that long period the sun never rose above the horizon to cheer their icy prison with one beam of light. Yet, taking the whole year round, the inhabitants of these dreary climes have the same period of light as we and others ; for theirs are nightless summers, on which the stars never rise, and the sun never sets, but wheels his burning chariot round and round the pole. Now, in regard to saving light and knowledge, we find nothing corresponding to this phenomenon. Strange, mysterious providence ! there is no such equal diffusion of gospel truth. We dare not doubt that God's ways are equal, and that eternity will shed a wondrous and glorious light on this gloomy mystery ; but over a vast surfa^ce of our unhappy world we see only dark- ness — " gross darkness" — unbroken night — nations that never hailed the rising of a better sun. But, leaving the Heathen in the hands of God, we find some Christian nations in such darkness, as to make it almost a marvel to us how they find their way to heaven. I cannot, and would not doubt, that the Church of Rome, for instance, has true saints within her — chosen ones, who shall be plucked as brands from the fire, cast out, like praying Jonah, safe upon the land. Still, within that church, the people enjoy at best '' a dim religious light." The gospel, permitted 50 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. to reacli them only through blind or selfish prie.sts, suffers like change with the sunbeam that streams through the coloured windows of their gorgeous but gloomy cathedrals ; and, with a cloud of saints inter- posed between him and the eye of the sinner, the Saviour, like the sun behind misty vapours, stands shorn of his resplendent glory. Again, in those few countries where, in full free- dom to use the Bible, and in the general use of it, the gospel may be said to shine with unclouded splendour, God's people do not all walk in the same degree of light. Be it owing to peculiar circumstances, or to some defect of vision, they are not all equally enlightened. Some are offensively narrow-minded. Some are so ghort-sighted, that they can hardly recognise Christ's own, and therefore their own, brother, unless he belong to the same church, and remember the Saviour at the same table with themselves. They are great upon little things. More given to hate the error than love the truth which they see in others, their temper is sour and ungenial. I do not assert that they have not the eagle- wings which rise to near communion with God, but tliey want that long-sighted eagle-eye which discerns distant objects, and embraces in its range of vision a broad and wide expanse. Be ours the charity which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endure th all things ! Again, while some saints enjoy a clear assurance of their salvation, and, stretching toward heaven, be- hold the land that is very far off, as seamen from THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 51 their outlook descry the mountain tops, when their bark is ploughing a waste of waters, and yet a long way from land, there are other Christians who pass their days in a state of despondency. The sun seldom breaks out to cheer them. Their faith has a hard fight with their fears. It is little they know of rejoic- ing in the Lord, and joying in the God of their salva- tion. By help of God's word, their compass, they succeed, no doubt, in steering their way to heaven, but it is over a troubled sea, and under a cloudy sky ; nor are they ever happy enough to be altogether delivered from doubt and fear, till fears as well as faith are lost in light, and they find themselves safe in glory. Again, while some, who draw all the doctrines they believe directly and freshly from the fountain of God's word, are enlightened, catholic in spirit, and sound in the faith, it is otherwise with others. Calling this or that man Kabbi, they yield too much submission to human authority. They draw the water of life, so to speak, not at the spring but at the well ; and tasting of the pipe it flows through, their creed, and faith, and doctrines are adulterated by a mixture of earthly, though not fatal, errors. If we allow to these views their due influence, how ought they to expand our hearts, and teach us a tender regard toward those from whom we difier ! Blindness of mind, surely, if not wilful, claims our gentle pity, more even than blindness of body. We all "see through a glass darkly." Perhaps we are mistaken. Perhaps our brethren are right. The possibility of this 52 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. should teach us to differ meekly, and to avoid, even when denying the infallibility of the Pope, the arrogance of one who thinks himself infaUible. Of this, at any rate, I am sure, that, as objects are not only obscured but also magnified by mist, many points of difference between Christian men appear much larger now than they shall do when regarded by the serene light of a deathbed, and yet more certainly in the transparent atmosphere of heaven. And were it not well if good men would never forget that piety, though not consistent with indifference, is consistent with a measure of error. Admit that, by heaping " gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble" on the true foundation, others have done wrong ; yet they shall be saved, though as by fire. The errors of many are delusions ; and it is both literally and figuratively true that delusions of the brain are less dangerous than diseases of the heart. A man, through the darkness, may wander to a greater or less extent from the plain, patent, du-ect road, and yet get home. And happiest though they be who pursue their journey in unclouded sunshine, yet to the upright *' there ariseth light in the darkness " — shed by the Spirit within their souls, streaming down direct from heaven. And I have often thought it shall be with those whose hearts beat true to God and Jesus Christ, as with one who loves his father and his mother, and longs once more to see their faces, and to hear their voices, and, after weary years of exile, to dwell again among brothers and sisters beneath the old roof-tree. Little light serves to show him the road. Bent on getting home, he will THE POWER OF DARKNESS. 53 cross the mountains, and ford the river, and travel waste and pathless moors through the mists of the thickest day. What although errors, like exhalations from the swampy ground, have risen up in many churches to obscure the heavenly light? Where there is genuine love to Jesus Christ, and God, and man, may we not cherish the hope that there is truth enough to conduct to heaven the steps of every pilgrim who is honestly and earnestly inquiring the way to Zion ? " There shall be a highway out of Egypt." " They shall come from the east and from the west, and from the north, and from the south," — from various climes, and from diverse churches, — " and shall sit down in the kingdom of God." Nor do I despair of any getting to that heavenly king- dom, who, though belonging to churches that are dimly lighted, can discern upon the altar the one sacrifice for sin. 2. God's people may be in darkness through sin. — So long as you walk in the path of his holy command- ments you walk in light, walk at liberty; you have Jesus' arm to lean on ; heaven lies straight on the road before you ; and, on your path, however rough or steep, there streams perpetual sunshine. In the light of God's word, and in the beams of his countenance, the believer has that which imparts a genial waiTQth to his heart ; every object, as in a sunny day, looks bright and beautiful; and the clouds, which occasionally sweep over him and discharge their burden on his head, are spanned, as they pass away, by a bow of hope. " Light 54 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart." " Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation ! " the cry of one who has wandered from the paths of purity and peace, leads us to speak, in such cases, of God withdrawing the light of his countenance. But is it not more strictly true, that, in turning aside from the paths of holiness, we have withdrawn from that ? It is he that descends into a pit who leaves the light, not the light that leaves him. So it is with the saint — the deeper he «inks into sin, the darker it grows. God will not smile on his child sinning ; and that which would happen to our world, were its sun withdrawn, hefalls his unhappy soul ; a chilling cold follows on the darkness, and, but for restoring grace, death itself would follow in their train. The heart, that once sang like a bird, is now mute ; the beauties of religion are lost to sight ; sacraments, prayers, pious services, cease to afford their wonted pleasure ; the joys of salvation — that once flowed through his heart, like silver streams among flowery pastures — are congealed into stillness, silence, and death ; the soul itself grows benumbed, and is seized with a lethargy that would end in death, did not God send some Nathan to break the spell, and to rouse the sleeper. Then, conscience awakened and alarmed, in what darkness does he find himself? The sun is down ; nor does a single star cheer that deepest night. His mind is tortured with dreadful doubts. He recalls the days of old, but only to fear that he was a hypocrite or a self-deceiver. Where the scriptures speak of TUE POWER OF DARKNESS. 65 castaways, of the unpardonable sin, of the impossibiHty of a renewal again unto repentance, he seems to read his doom, written by God's own finger in letters of fire. Nor is the poor penitent backslider saved from utter despair, but by clinging to the hope of mercy through the all-cleansing blood of Jesus. Led by this blessed angel to " the throne of grace," encouraged by this blessed pro- mise, " I will heal their backslidings and love them freely," he throws himself in the dust to cry, " Hath God forgotten to be gracious?" "Is his mercy clean gone for ever?" " Restore unto me the joy of thy sal- vation ; and uphold me with thy free spirit." Be merciful unto me, God ; be merciful unto me." These are the words of David, when under re- morse for most terrible crimes. But never fancy that you are in no danger of losing the light of God's favour, unless you fall into a pit as deep, into sins as gross and grievous, as that good man committed. Beware of so great an error. No object, in its own place the most innocent, nor man, nor woman, nor husband, nor wife, nor child, nor bosom friend — nothing beneath the sun, not the heaven above it, with its holy pleasures, and high society, and welcome rest, may be allowed to come in between our affections and Jesus Christ. Let any object whatever interpose between me and the sun, and a shadow, more or less cold and dark, is the immediate consequence ; as happens when the moon, forgetting that her business is to reflect the sunbeams, not to arrest them, rolls in between our world and him, to turn day into night, and to shroud us in the gloom 56 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. of an eclipse. Even so the deep shadow of a spiritual darkness may be flung over a congregation, who, allowing the pulpit to come in between them and the cross, think too much of the servant and too little of the Master. May not that account for the scanty fruit of a ministry from which much might have been ex- pected ? God will not give his glory to another ; and they who in their regards set the servant before the Master, place the preacher in a position to intercept that blessing, without which Paul may plant and Apollos water, but there is no increase. When Alexander offered to do Diogenes any favour he might ask, the philosopher, contemplating in the sun a far nobler object than the conqueror of the world, and setting a higher value on his beams than on the brightest rays of royalty, only begged the monarch to step aside, nor stand between him and the sun. However rude such answer on the part of the cynic, it were a right noble speech from you to any and every object that would steal your heart from Christ. Let him, who is all your salvation, be all your desire. Is he not " the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of His person ? '* Fairer than the children of men, more lovely than the loveliest, he is " the chiefest among ten thousand " — he is " altogether lovely." 3. God's people may he in more or less darkness as to their spiritual state. It is easy to account for such a case as David's. There, spiritual darkness was both the consequence and the chastisement of a sad spiritual declension. It is not always so. There are cases of THE POWER OF DAKKNESS. 57 religious desertion and despondency that do not admit of being thus explained. Without any sensible falling away, the shadow of Calvary has spread itself over the believer's soul ; and, filling him with awful horror, has wrung from his lips that most bitter cry, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " The mercy- seat and the cross are lost in darkness. The Sun of Righteousness undergoes an eclipse. Nothing is seen but the lightnings, and nothing heard but the thunders of Sinai — flash follows flash, and peal thunders upon peal, while his sins rise up in terrible memory before him. Were such your case, God has provided for it. '* Who," says he, " is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light ; let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God." In these cases God has not left his people comfortless. If, perhaps, like Peter, sinking in the waves of Galilee, the lightning flashing on their foaming crests, and the thunder crashing above his head, you have lost all sensible hold of Christ, it does not follow that Christ has lost saving hold of you. You may retain your hold when you lose your sight of him. God's people are to hang on him in their seasons of deepest distress. His promises are a Father's arm ; and, clinging to these, trusting to him when you can- not see him, you may hope against hope, and even rise to the faith of one who said, " Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." But the spiritual state of some unquestionably pious people is not occasionally, but always more or less dark. I have known such. They could not find, at least they 58 THE POWER OF DARKNESS. could not feel, any very satisfactory evidence of their conversion. We saw it ; they did not. It happened to them as to Moses. He left the mount of God with the glory of his face visible to every one but himself. This is not a desirable state, certainly, if for no other reason than this, that he fights best, either with men or devils, who fights the battle with hope at his back. What so likely to make you diligent in preparation for glory, as a clear prospect of heaven, and sense of your holy calling ? Who that, footsore, worn, and weary, has toiled up some mountain-height, from whose breezy summit he saw his distant home, has not found the sight make another man of him, and — all lassitude gone — send him off on his journey, with bounding heart and elastic limbs ? Therefore we say with Paul, " Give diligence, to make your calling and election sure." Notwithstanding all your pains and all your prayers, have you never yet attained to the joy of faith, to a full assurance of salvation ? Be not " swallowed up with overmuch sorrow." Blessed are they whose sky is clouded with no doubts or fears ! With music in their hearts, and their happiness blowing like those flowers that fully expand their leaves, and breathe out their fragrance only on sunny days, they will go up to Ziou with songs; yet, although not so pleasantly, they may reach home as safely who enjoy the light of the sun, but never see his face. Your last hours may be like hers whom John Bunyan calls Miss Fearing. She was all her lifetime " subject to bondage," and dreaded the hour of death. The summons comes. And when she goes down into the waters, how does this shrinking, THE POWER OF DARKNESS. trembling, timid one bear herself? Hand to hand, Christian met his enemy in the valle}^, and so smote Apollyon with the sword of the Spirit, that he spread forth hi3 dragon wings, and sped him away ; yet where that bold believer was in deep waters, and all but perished, this daughter of many fears found the river shallow. She beheld the opposite shore all lined with shining angels, and passed with a song from earth to heaven. The sun, who has struggled through clouds all day long, often breaks forth into golden splendour at his setting ; and not seldom, also, have the hopes that never brightened life broken forth to gild the departing hour. The fears that hung over the journey have vanished at its close. The voice, that never spoke with confi- dence before, has raised the shout of victory in " the valley of the shadow of death." To the wonder of men and the glory of God, the tongue of the dumb has been unloosed — what gracious things they have said ! and the blind have got their sight — what views of heaven they have had ! and he, who seemed all his life but a babe in Christ, has started up, like a giant and a strong man armed, to grapple w^ith the last enemy. Standing in the light of life's declining day — with. Satan, and the world, and the flesh, and Death himself beneath his feet, he spends his last breath in the triumphant shout, " death, where is thy sting? grave, where is thy victory ?" " Thanks be to God, which giveth rae the victory through my Lord Jesus Christ." And thus God fulfils the promise, " It shall come to pass, that at evening time it shall be light." THE KINGDOM OF CHEIST. Translated into the kingdom of his dear Son. — Colossians i. 13. TNSIDE those iron gratings that protect the ancient regalia of our kingdom, vulgar curiosity sees nothing but a display of jewels. Its stupid eyes are dazzled by the gems that stud the crown, and sword, and sceptre. The unreflecting multitude fix their thoughts and waste their admiration on these. They go away to talk of their beauty, perhaps to covet their possession ; nor do they estimate the value of the crown but by the price which its pearls, and rubies, and diamonds, might fetch in the market. The eye of a patriot, gazing thoughtfully in on these relics of former days, is all but blind to what attracts the gaping crowd. His admiration is reserved for other and nobler objects. He looks with deep and meditative interest on that rim of gold, not for its intrinsic value, but because it once encircled the brow of Scotland's greatest king, — the hero of her indepen- dence, Robert the Bruce. His fancy may for a moment turn to the festive scenes in yonder deserted palace, when that crown flashed amid a gay throng of princes, and nobles, and knights, and statesmen, and lords, and THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 61 ladies, all now mouldered into dust ; but she soon wings her flight to the worthier and more stirring spectacles which history has associated with these symbols of power. She sees a nation up in arms for its indepen- dence, and watches with kindling eye the varying fortunes of the fight. It rages around these insignia. Now, she hears the shout of Bannockburn ; and now, the long wail of Flodden. The events of centuries, passed in w^eary war, roll by before her. The red flames burst from lonely fortalice and busy town ; the smiling vale, with its happy homesteads, lies desolate ; scaffolds reek with the blood of patriots ; courage grapples with despair ; beaten men on freedom's bloody field renew the fight; and, as the long hard struggle closes, the kingdom stands up like one of its own rugged mountains, — the storms that expended their violence on its head, have left it ravaged, and seamed, and shattered, but not moved from its place. It is the interests that were at stake, the fight for liberty, the good blood shed, the hard struggles endured for its possession ; it is these, not the jewels, which in a patriot's eye make that a costly crown — a relic of the olden time, worthy of a nation's pride and jealous preservation. Regarded in some such light, estimated by the sufferings endured for it, how great the value of that crown which Jesus wears ! What a kingdom that which cost God his Son, and cost that Son his life ! It is to that kingdom that we have now to direct your attention ; and for this purpose, let us consider — 62 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. I. The importance which Christ himself attaches to his kingly claims. There are crowns worn by living monarchs, of which it would be difficult to estimate the value. The price paid for their jewels is the least part of it. They cost thousands of lives, and rivers of human blood ; yet in his esteem, and surely in ours also, Christ's crown outweighs them all. He gave his Hfe for it; and alone, of all monarchs, he was crowned at his coronation by the hands of Death. Others cease to be kings when they die. By dying he became a king. He laid his head in the dust that he might become "head over all;" he entered his kingdom through the gates of the grave, and ascended the throne of the imiverse by the steps of a cross. The connection between our Lord's sufferings and kingly claims marks some of the most touching scenes of his history. In what character did his people reject him ? It was as a king ; they cried " We will not have this man to reign over us." In what guise did the soldiers ridicule and revile him ? It was as a king ; " they clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns, and put it about his head." For what crime was he crucified? It was because he claimed to be a king. The noble character of the sufferer shone through the meanest circumstances of his death, and was read in the inscription that stood above his dying head, " Jesus of Nazareth the King of the THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. C3 Jews." His royal claims have been lightly thought of, and often trampled beneath the heavy foot of power. Men have dared to treat them with scorn. Yet he, who is surely the best judge of their importance and value, has himself taught us a very dififerent lesson ; and in proof of that, let us now turn to two separate occasions on which our Lord refused to abate one iota of these claims — maintaining them under circumstances of the strongest temptation to do otherwise. Turn your eye on that desert, where, Heaven and Hell watching the issue at a distance, alone and without attendants, the two mightiest potentates that ever met on earth, meet — not for conference, but for conflict. Knowing that he has another now to deal with than a guileless woman — the beautiful but fragile vessel his cursed hand shattered in Eden — Satan enters the lists, armed with his deepest craft. He knows that Jesus stands before him, a poor man ; who, though aspiring to universal empire, has neither friend nor follower, neither fame nor rank. Never was deeper poverty ! He presents himself before us in its most touching aspect — he has neither a morsel of bread to eat, nor a bed to lie on. Ever suiting the temptation to the tempted, and, like a skilful general, assaulting the citadel on what he judges to be its weakest side, Satan comes to Jesus with no bribe for passions so low as avarice, or lust, or ease, or self-indulgence. He addresses that love of power, which was his own perdition, and is the infirmity of loftiest minds. Tacitly acknowledging, by the magnificence of the temptation, how great is the 64 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. virtue of him whom he tempts, he offers him the prize of universal empire. By some phantasm of diabolical power, he presents a panoramic view of " all the king- doms of the world, and the glory of them ;" and when he thinks the spell has wrought, and that he has roused the dormant passion to its highest pitch, he turns round to Jesus, saying, " All these things will 1 give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me," He shall, and shall for ever, be king, if he will for once yield up his claims, and receive the kingdom at Satan's hand. No ; neither from such hands, nor on such conditions, will our Lord receive the sceptre. He stands firm upon his own right to it ; and, rather than yield that up, is ready to endure the cross and despise the shame. He turns with holy scorn from the temptation, and foils the Enemy with the words, " Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Turn now to another scene. Jesus stands before Pilate. Alone ? Not now alone ; worse than alone. Deserted by the few humble friends he had, without one to know him, he is confronting malignant and powerful accusers. A savage crowd surrounds him. Blind to his divine excellence, deaf to the calm voice of reason, dead to gentle pity, they glare on him with their eyes ; they gnash their teeth at him ; nor are restrained but by the steady port and resolute demeanour of these Roman guards from rushing in like a pack of blood- hounds, and tearing him to pieces. Blessed Lord! now, now mayest thou say, "My soul is among lions; and I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 65 of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword." There, in that hour, see how his life hangs on a thread, on a single word. Every charge they have brought against him has broken down — bursting into spray and foam, as I have seen the sea-wave that has launched itself upon a rock. Leaving their v^itnesses to convict themselves of perjury, he pre- serves, on his part, unbroken silence. Serene and unmoved he stands the cruel pelting of the storm. Shame to his chosen disciples, shame to his followers, shame even to the thousands he had blessed and cured, not one is there to espouse his cause ; and, boldly step- ping out, to say, in the face of that infuriate crowd, " I know the man ; I know him to be the purest, kindest, greatest, best of men. Assembly of murderers ! crucify him not; or, if you will perpetrate so foul a crime, crucify me with him." Such are the circumstances in which Pilate puts his question, " Art thou the King of the Jews ?" On this question, and our Lord's answer, everything is now to turn. The crisis has come. His fate is in the balance. Let him say. No, and resign his claim — he lives ; and, the baffled crowd dividing before him like the sea of old before the host of Israel, he leaves the bar for life and liberty. Let him maintain his silence — continue dumb, he is safe. Unless he compromise himself, this coward judge condemns not " innocent blood." Have you ever been present in a court of justice when the bell rang, and the jury returned, and the foreman rose to pronounce a verdict of death or life on the pale, anxious, D 2 66 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. trembling wretch who stood before you ? Then you can fancy the deep, hushed, breathless silence, with which judge, and accusers, and the whole multitude, bend forward to catch our Lord's reply. If he claims to be a king, he seals his fate. If he renounces and disavows his right, the Roman sets him at liberty. Our Lord foresees this. He has a full foreknowledge of all the consequences of the word he is now to speak. Yet he claims the crown. Refusing to abandon, or even to conceal his kingly character, he returns to Pilate this bold reply, " Thou sayest ;" in other words, " I am a king" — King of the Jews. How do these facts illustrate the pre-eminent im- portance which Jesus attached to his ofiSce and character as a king ! They do more than illustrate, they demon- strate it. To explain this, let me recall a recent cir- cumstance to your recollection. When our Indian empire was shaken to its foundations, and, as many feared, tottering to its fall, the enemy in one instance offered terms of compromise. They were rejected. Unmoved by the most adverse fortunes, undismayed by the pestilence, starvation, and murder, which stared them in the face, with the hope of relief burning lower and lower as the weary days wore on, our gallant countrymen, in the darkest hour and crisis of their fortunes, would listen to no compromise. They could die, but not yield ; and so sent back this stern answer, " We refuse to treat with mutineers." And, if we would yield up no right in the hour of our greatest weakness and terrible extremity, far less shall THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 67 we do SO with the tide of battle turned in our favour, and that enemy crushed, or crouching in abject terror at our feet. Now, our Lord had the strongest tempta- tions to abandon his kingly claims ; and if he refused to give them up in the desert, w^here he had not a morsel to eat, and at the bar, when to have parted with them would have saved his life, he is not likely now certainly to yield one jot or tittle of what belongs to him as a King. He has no inducement to do so. A friendless prisoner no more, he stands at the right hand of God ; the head which was bound round with a thorn wreath, now wears the crown of earth and heaven ; and the hand they mocked with a reed sways, over angels, men, and devils, the sceptre of universal empire. Think you that Christ will allow Satan, or the world, or the flesh, to pluck from his power what they could not wring from his weakness ? Never. He wdll never consent to share his throne with rivals from whom he won it. He claims to reign supreme in your hearts, in every heart which his grace has renewed, over all whom he has conquered by love and redeemed with blood. Would God that we could live up to that truth ! How often, and to w^hat a sad extent, is it forgotten ! each of us doing w^hat is right in his own eyes, as if there was no king in Israel. Oh, that we were as anxious to be delivered from the power, as all of us are to escape the punishment, of sin ! 1 do not say that we should look less to Christ as a Saviour, but we should certainly look more to him as a sovereign ; nor fix our 'attention on his cross, so much to the exclusion of his 68 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. crown. We are not to yield him less faith, but more obedience. We should not less often kiss his wounds, but more frequently his feet. We can never too highly esteem his love, but we may, and often do, think too lightly of his law. His Spirit helping us, let his claims on our obedience be as cheerfully conceded as his claim to our faith ; so that to our love of his glorious person, and his saving work, we may be able to add with David, " how love I thy law ! " II. Consider from whom Christ received the kingdom. 1. He did not receive it from the Jews. " He came unto his own, and his own received him not." Once, indeed — like stony-ground hearers, like some who make a flaming profession of religion to abandon it almost as soon as they embrace it — the Jews seemed eager to receive Jesus. They even attempted to thrust royal honours on him ; " Jesus perceived that they would come and take him by force to make him a king." Afterwards, and by one of those popular move- ments, which, in the form of a panic or an enthusiasm, rises rapidly, like a flooded river, to sweep in its headlong course stones as well as straws before it, they bore him in royal state on to the capital. Not with sacred oil, or golden crown, or imperial purple, but such royal insignia as the circumstances admitted of, they invested their new-made king. They denuded themselves of their garments to carpet the dusty road. Mothers held up their babes to see him ; women and children filled the THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 69 joyous air with loud hosannas ; grey old men, as the procession swept by, shed tears of joy that the long- looked for hour had come ; and, marching with the tramp of freemen — as if every foot beneath its tread crushed a Roman eagle — strong men, with ten thousand stout arms ready to fight for his crown, waved green palms in anticipation of triumph and victory. Thus the living wave, swelling higher as it advanced, rolled on to Jerusalem, bearing Jesus forward to the throne of David. For his mother, for the Marys, for his disciples, for all ardent patriots, it was a glorious hour. Alas ! how soon all was changed ! It passed like a beautiful pageant — passed like the watery gleam of a stormy day— passed like a brilliant meteor that shoots athwart the dusky sky. A few days afterwards, and Jerusalem, with a crowd as great, presents another spectacle. The stage, the actors, the voices, are the same ; but the drama, if I may so speak, how dififerent ! This brief act of honour and duty, homage and triumph, is closely followed by an awful tragedy. We have seen tales of horror and shocking butchery shake the heart of a whole nation ; but this event struck the insensate earth with trembling, spread a pall of mourning over the whole firmament, filling creation wdth such signs of bereavement as fill a house when its head is smote down by the hand of death. The tide, which bore Jesus to the crown, turns ; and when next we see him, he hangs basely murdered upon a cross. An inconstant people have taken the object of their brief idolatry, and, like an angry child with its toy, dashed it on the ground. 70 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. The only crown our Lord gets from man is woven of thorns. His Father had said, " He shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high;" and man found no way of fulfilling that old prophecy, but to raise him, amid shouts and laughter, naked and bleeding, on the accursed tree. " He came unto his own, and his own received him not." I know that a nation is not always to be held accountable for the acts of its rulers. A righteous pubHc may have the conscience to disapprove what they have not the power to prevent. But our Lord's death was no act of the government, or simply the act of Pilate, or of the priests and statesmen of the time. It was a great national deed. In that vast assembly which pronounced the verdict, there was certainly not a city, nor village, nor hamlet, nor perhaps even a shepherd's solitary hut among the uplands of Judea, but had its representative. So, when Pilate put the question, it was the voice of the entire country that made itself heard in the unanimous and fatal verdict, " We will not have this man to reign over us" — yesterday we would; to-day we won't ; let him die ; away with him to the cross. Horrible crime ! yet one, alas ! in a sense still repeated, often repeated ; and for no other reasons than at the first. If Christ would have consented to rule on their terms, the Jews would have made him king. Had he agreed to establish an earthly monarchy, to gratify the nation's thirst for vengeance on their Roman masters, to make Jerusalem the proud capital, and the Jews sole sovereign rulers of a conquered world, they THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 71 would have revolted to a man. Religion lent its intensity to the burning hatred which they bore against the empire of the Caesars; and, on such conditions, those who crucified him would have fought for him v/ith the resolution which held Jerusalem, till delicate women devoured their children, and men, famished into ghastly skeletons, met the Romans in battle under a canopy of flames, and in the throat of the deadly breach. Now, to this day, how many would accept of Jesus' as king, would he but consent to their terms — allow them to indulge their lusts, and retain their sins ! If, like some eastern princes, who leave the reins of govern- ment in other hands, he would rest contented with the shadow of royalty, with the mere name and empty title of a king, many would consent to be his subjects. But be assured that he accepts not the crown, if sin is to retain the sceptre. He requires of all who name his name, that they " depart from iniquity ;" and, with "holiness unto the Lord" written on their foreheads, that they take up their cross, and deny themselves daily, and follow him. On this account he is still practi- cally rejected by thousands — whose profession of religion is a name and shadow. How is that old cruel tragedy repeated day by day within the theatre of many a heart ! God says, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased ;" the preacher brings Jesus forth for acceptance, clothed in purple, and crowned with thorns, and all the tokens of his love upon him, saying, " Behold the man ;" conscience is aroused to a sense of 72 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. his claims ; but these all are clamoured down. Stirred up by the devil— the love of the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, the pride of life, and all the corrupt passions of our evil nature, rise like that Jewish mob to cry, " We will not have this man to reign over us." Let the fate of these Jews warn you against their sin ; for if God did such things in the green tree, what shall he do in the dry? Be assured that, unless you are obeying Christ as a sovereign, you have never yet known him as a Saviour. Your faith is vain. His cross and his crown are inseparable. 2. He does not receive the kingdom from his own people. Some have fought their way onward to a palace, leaving the print of a bloody foot on every step that led them to the throne. And what violence or villany, or both, have won, despotism holds. I could point to lands where the ambitious adventurer who has seized the throne is a tyrant, and his subjects are crouching slaves — as, indeed, men ever will be, who want the backbone of religion to keep them erect. It is God- fearing piety which makes a man the best subject of a good government, and the most formidable enemy to a bad one. Animated by its lofty hopes, sustained by its enduring spirit, a true Christian is not the man to sell his liberties for a dishonourable peace, nor his birth- right for " a mess of pottage." Our happy land, in contrast with most other countries, presents an illustrious example of a family THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 73 crowned, I may say, by the hands of the people — called to the throne by the free voice of a nation. The sceptre, which a female hand sways so well and grace- fully over the greatest, freest, empire in the world, was, nigh two hundred years ago, wrenched from the grasp of a poor popish bigot ; and his successor was borne to the vacant throne on the arms of a people, who, to their everlasting honour, considered crowned heads less sacred than their liberties and religion. Is it by any such act of his people that Christ has been crowned ? Is he in this sense a popular monarch, one raised to the throne by the suffrages of the people ? No. Here the king elects his subjects — not the subjects their king ; and in that, as in many other senses, he who is both our Saviour and our sovereign says, '' My kingdom is not of this world." There have been many disputes about the doctrine of election, and these have given birth to many most learned and profound treatises ; the combatants on one side maintaining that in election God had respect to the good works which he foresaw men were to do, while their opponents have, as we think more wisely, held, that in all cases his choice is as free and sovereign as when, descending on the plains of Damascus, he called, in Saul of Tarsus, the greatest persecutor of his church, to be its greatest preacher. It was on this subject that an aged Christian uttered a remarkable saying, which I may apply to the matter in hand. She had listened with patience to a fine-spun and very subtle argument against the doctrine of a free election. She did not attempt to unravel it. 74 THE KINGDOJii OF CHRIST. She had no skill for that ; but broke her way out as through the meshes of a cobweb with this brief reply, " I believe in the doctrine of a free election ; because I know, that if God had not first chosen me, I had never chosen him." That reply, which was quite satisfactory to her simple piety, and will weigh more with many than a handred ponderous volumes of theological learning, rests on the depravity of our nature, and applies to our present subject. Aliens by nature to the common- wealth of Israel, and the enemies of God by wicked works, it is absolutely necessary that Christ should first choose you as his subjects, before you can choose him as your king. Hence our catechism says, " Christ executeth the oflSce of a king in suhduing us to himself, ruling and defending us, and restraining and conquering all his and our enemies." Thus, Prince of Peace though he be, in the Psalms and elsewhere he is pictured forth as a warrior armed for the battle ; a sword girded on his thigh, a bow in his hand, zeal glowing in his eyes, he drives the chariot of the gospel into the thick of his enemies. And as our own nation lately, with prayers for their success, sent ojff her armies to reduce to obedience a revolted province, God, when sending his Son to our world, addressed him as one about to engage in a similar enterprise ; " Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, most mighty, with thy glory and thy majesty. And in thy majesty ride prosperously, because of truth, and meekness, and righteousness ; and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things. Thine arrows are THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. . 75 8harp in the heart of the king's enemies; whereby the people fall under thee.'* Christ does indeed reign by conquest ; but his reign is not therefore one of terror. The very opposite. He reigns, as he conquered, by love. For, although in the first instance his people neither choose him, nor call him to the throne, afterwards, what king so well beloved? Enthroned in the heart, he rules them through their affections ; nor employs any but that which is at once the softest and strongest, the gentlest and mightiest of all forces, the power of love. He subdues, but it is to save you. He wounds, but it is to heal you. He kills, but it is to make you alive. It was to crown you with glory that he bowed his head to that crown of thorns. Other sovereigns may have rendered good service to the state, and deserved its gratitude ; but Christ's is the only throne, filled by a living king, who has this at once most singular and sublime claim on the devoted attachment of his sub- jects, that he died to save them. " I am he that liveth, and was dead." We are not such subjects as we should be. Yet the world is not to be allowed to forget, that, imperfect as our obedience is, his people are not insensible, nor have they shown themselves insensible, to the paramount claims w4iich Jesus has upon their loyalty. In our eyes, the grace and glory of other sovereigns pales before his — as stars when the sun has risen ; nor is there any one we ever saw, or our affections ever clung to, whom we feel we should love as we ought to love Jesus Christ. 76 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. True piety is not hypocrisy; and it is due alike to Christ and the interests of religion, that the world should know that the love his people bear for him is a deeper affection than what the mother cherishes for the babe that hangs helpless on her bosom ; a stronger passion than the miser feels for the yellow gold he clutches. With the hand of the robber compressing his throat, to have his grey hairs spared, he would give it all for dear life ; but loving Jesus, whom they never saw, better than father, or mother, or sister, or brother, or lover, or life itself, thousands have given up all for him. Not regretting, but rejoicing in their sacrifices, they have gone bravely for his cause to the scaffold and the stake. It is easy to die in a battle-field — to confront death there. There, earthly prizes are won — stars, bright honours, are glittering amid that sulphureous smoke ; there, earthly passions are to be gratified — my sister was wronged, my mother butchered, my little brother's brains dashed out against the wall. I am a man, and could believe the story told of our countrymen ; how each, having got a bloody lock of a murdered woman's hair, sat down in awful, ominous silence ; and, after counting the number that fell to each man's lot, rose to swear by the great God of heaven, that for every hair they would have a life. Amid such scenes, with passions boiling, vengeance calls for blood, hurling me, like a madman, on the hedge of steel ; and, where the shout of charging comrades cheers him on, the soldier is swept forward on blazing guns and bristling bayonets, THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 77 in a whirlwind of wild excitement. But, to lie pining in a dungeon, and never hear the sweet voice of human sympathy ; to groan and shriek upon the rack, where cowled and shaven murderers are as devoid of pity as the cold stone walls around ; to suffer as our fathers did, when, calm and intrepid, they marched down that street to be hung up like dogs for Christ's crown and kingdom, implies a higher courage, is a far nobler, manlier, holier thing. Yet thousands have so died for Jesus. Theirs has been the gentle, holy, heroic spirit of that soldier boy, whose story is one of the bright incidents that have relieved the darkness of recent horrors, and shed a halo of glory around the dreadful front of war. Dragged from the jungle, pale with loss of blood, wasted to a shadow with famine and hard- ship, far away from father, or mother, or any earthly friend, and surrounded by a cloud of black incarnate fiends, he saw a Mahometan convert appalled at the preparations for his torture — about to renounce the faith. Fast dying, almost beyond the vengeance of his enemies, this good brave boy had a moment more to live, a breath more to spend. Love to Jesus, the ruling passion, was strong in death ; and so, as the gates of heaven were rolling open to receive his ran- somed spirit, he raised himself up, and, casting an imploring look on the wavering convert, cried — " Oh, do not deny your Lord 1" A noble death, and a right noble testimony ! Would to God that we always heard that voice and cry, when, in the ordinary circumstances of life, we are 78 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. tempted to commit sin. I say the ordinary circum- stances of life ; for it would almost seem as if when we are least tried, we are most in danger. On grand occasions faith rises to the trial ; and such is the vitality of Christian love, that, like the influence of the wind on fire, the storm seems rather to blow up than to blow out the flame. How often have Christ's people fouDd it easier to withstand on great occasions than on small ones ! Those will yield to some soft seduction, and fall into sin, who, put to it, might stand up for the cause of truth and righteousness as bravely as he who, in yonder palace, stands like a rock before the king. Commanded to do what lays Christ's crown at Csesar's feet, he refuses. It is a thing which, though ready to dare death, he dare not, and he will not do. He ofiers his neck, but refuses that — addressing himself in some such words as these to the imperious monarch, " There are two kingdoms and two kings in Scotland ; there is King Jesus and King James ; and when thou wast a babe in swaddling clothes, Jesus reigned in this land, and his authority is supreme." Would to God that we had, whenever we are tempted to commit sin, as true a regard for Christ's paramount authority ! With special reference to our own hearts be the prayer ever ofiered, thy kingdom come — take to thee thy great power and reign. Ours be thy prayer, David — " Cleanse me from secret faults, and keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins ; let them not have dominion over me." Alas, how often do we unwittingly, thoughtlessly, rashly, under the THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 79 lingering influence of old bad habits, swept away by- some sudden temptation, some outburst of corruption, practically deny the Lord that bought us, and yield our members to be the servants of sin ! Let us confess it. Often are we constrained to say, with Ezra, when he rent his mantle, and fell on his knees, and spread out his hands unto the Lord, "Oh my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God ; for our iniquities are increased over our heads, and our trespass is grown up unto the heavens." Yet let not the worldling go away to triumph over such confessions, and allege that there is no such thing as genuine religion or true love to Christ. This much I will venture to say for his people, and for the grace of God, in which their great strength lies — Put us to the test, give us time for prayer and reflection, and there are thousands who, rather than renounce Jesus Christ, would renounce their life, and, with unfaltering footstep, tread the well-beaten path that the martyrs have made to glory. Faith, eyeing the opening heavens, would stand on the scaffold, and say, as she changed a Jewish into a Christian hymn — If I forget thee, Jesus, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth ; if I prefer not Jesus above my chief joy ! THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. {Continued.) Translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son. — Colossians i. 13. npHERE was an ancient and universal custom set aside, on his coronation day, by that great emperor who bestrode the world Hke a Colossus, till we locked him up in a sea-girt prison — chained him, like an eagle, to its barren rock. Promptly as his great military genius was wont to seize some happy moment to turn the tide of battle, he seized the imperial crown. Regard- less alike of all precedents, and of the presence of the Roman Pontiff whose sacred office he assumed, he placed the crown on his own head ; and, casting an eagle eye over the applauding throng, stood up, in the pride of his power, every inch of him a king. The act was like the man — bold, decisive ; nor was it in a sense untrue, its language this, The crown I owe to no man ; I myself have won it ; my own right arm hath gotten me the victory. Yet, with some such rare exceptions, the universal custom, on such occasions, is to perform this great act as in the presence of God ; and, adding the solemnities of religion to the scene, by the hand of her THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 81 highest minister to crown the sovereign. It is a grace- ful and a pious act, if, when religion is called to play so conspicuous a part, on such a stage, and in the presence of such a magnificent assembly, all parties intend thereby to acknowledge that crowns are the gift of God, that sovereigns as well as subjects are answer- able for their stewardship, and that by Him whose minister performs the crowning act, kings reign, and princes decree justice. According to that scripture, God sets up one and puts down another, plucks the sceptre from the hand of this man, and gives it to that, and, as our days have seen, makes fugitives of kings, to raise a beggar from the dust and the needy from the dunghill, and set him with princes. And what he does in an ordinary and providential sense to all kings, he did in a high, and pre-eminent, and special sense to his own Son. The " divine right of kings," with which courtiers have flattered tyrants, and tyrants have sought to hedge round their royalty, is a fiction. In other cases a mere fiction, it is in Christ's case a great fact. The crown that rests on his head was placed there by the hands of Divinity. It was from his eternal Father that he re- ceived the reward of his cross, in that kingdom, which, as we have already shewed, he received neither from the Jews, nor from his own people. " Yet," says God, " have I set my king upon my holy hill of Sion." And so I remark — 3. Jesus received the kingdom from God. When we look at the two occasions — both of them 82 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. great occasions— ou which our Lord was crowned, what a striking contrast do they present ? The scene of the first is laid on earth. Its circum- stances are described by the evangehsts — men who were the sad eye-witnesses of the events that they relate. And when we have found ourselves unable, without trembling voice, and swimming eyes, and kindling pas- sions, to read some of those touching letters which tell how brothers, and tender sisters, and little children, and sweet babes, and beloved friends, were pitilessly massacred — when one remembers how, even at this distance from India's bloody scenes, we were ready to take fire, and swell the cry that called for vengeance on such revolting cruelties, nothing in the Bible seems more divine than the calm, even, unimpassioned tone with which our Lord's disciples describe the events, and write the moving story of their Master's wrongs. Where one would fancy an angel might have been stirred to anger, or would have covered his eyes and wept outright for sorrow, their voice seems never to falter, nor their pen to shake, nor their page to be blotted by a falling tear. Where, we are ready to ask, is John's fond love, Peter's ardent temper, the strong impetuous passions of these unsophis- ticated men ? Nor is there any way of accounting for the placid flow of their narratives, other than the fact that holy men of old spake and wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, and were the organs of Him whose complacency no event ruffles, and who, dwelling in the serene altitudes of his divine nature, is raised high above all passion. THE KINGDOM OF CUKIST. 83 Let US look then at the scene of our Lord's first coronation as they present it. Jesus is handed over to men of blood. Behold him stripped of his raiments I His wasted form — for it is he who speaks in the prophetic words, " I may tell all my bones ; they look and stare upon me," — moves no pity; no more, his meek and patient looks. They tie him to a post. They plough long furrows on his back. And now, cruel work is to be followed by more cruel sport. Laughing at the happy thought, his guards summon all the band, and hurry ofi" their faint and bleeding prisoner to some spacious hall. The expression may seem coarse, but it is true — they make game of the Lord of Glory. And when the shocking play is at its height, what a sight there to any disciple who should venture to look in ! Mute and meek, Jesus sits in that hall — a spectacle of woe ; an old purple robe on his bleeding back ; in his hand a reed ; and on his head a wreath — not of laurel, but of thorns, while the blood, trickling down from many wounds over his face, falls on a breast that is heaving with a sea of sorrows. Angels look on, fixed with astonishment ; devils stand back, amazed to see themselves outdone ; while all around his sacred person the brutal crowd swells and surges. They gibe ; they jeer ; they laugh ; some in bitter mockery bend the knee, as to imperial Csesar ; while others, to give variety to the hellish sport, pluck the reed from his unresisting hand, and beat the thorns deep into his brows ; and ever and anon they join in wild chorus, making the hall ring to the cry, " Hail, King of the Jews." 84 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. The people of Bethlehem, one day as they looked out at their doors, saw a poor widow, bent and grey with grief and age, walking up their street, who was accompanied by a Moabitess — poorly clad and widowed like herself. She is at length recognised. It is Naomi ! The news flies through the town. But when her old acquaintances who hastened to greet her, beheld in such poor guise one who had left them in circumstances of envied affluence, happy with a loving husband at her side, and at her back two gallant sons, they were seized with blank amazement. They held up their hands to cry, " Is this Naomi?" And how might the angels, who had adored the Son as he lay in the bosom of the Father, or, singing in the skies of that same Bethlehem, had bent down to gaze with wonder and admiration on the babe of Mary's breast, regard the spectacle in that hall with greater bewilderment — ex- claiming, " Is this the Son of God?" These twisted thorns formed the crown wherewith " his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals." Nor should we leave that to turn our eyes on another scene, till we have thought with godly sorrow of the sins, and with deep affection of the love, which brought Jesus from heaven to meet such sufferings. In these wounds and blows he took our sins upon him ; in these indignities he was wounded for our transgressions ; he was bruised for our iniquities ; the chastisement of our peace was upon him ; and with his stripes we are healed. Turn now from this cruel mockery to the other THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 86 scene where he received a dijBfcrent crown, in a different assembly, and from very different hands. The cross is standing vacant and lonely on Calvary — the crowd all dispersed ; the tomb is standing empty and open in the garden — the Roman sentinels all withdrawn ; and from the vine-covered sides of Olivet a band of men are hastily descending — joy, mingled with amazement, in their looks. With the bearing of those that have a high enterprise before them, they are rushing down the mountain upon the world — a stream of life which is destined to roll on till salvation reaches the ends of the earth. While the disciples come down to the world, Jesus, whom a cloud received from their sight, goes up to heaven ; and, corresponding to the custom of those olden days, when the successful champion was carried home in triumph from the field, borne high through applauding throngs on the shields of his companions, our Lord enters into glory, escorted by a host of angels. His battle over, and the great victory won, the conqueror is now to be crowned, throned, installed into the king- dom. Behold the scene as revealed by anticipation to the rapt eyes of Daniel : — " I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve him : his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed." 80 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. Thus our Lord received the crown from his own Father's hand ; and then, it might be said, was the Scripture fulfilled, " He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied." Yet observe, I pray you, that, in a sense, he is not satisfied. Is there no satisfy- ing of the greedy grave ? None. Death has been feed- ing its voracious maw these many thousand years ; and yet, how does it open that wide black mouth to cry, ''Give, give, give?" Nor, in one sense, is there any satisfying of the love of Christ. It is deeper than the grave ; and its desires grow with their gratification. Incessantly pleading for more saved ones, Jesus entreats his Father — his cry also, " Give, give." Yes ; he would rather hear one poor sinner pray, than all these angels sing ; see one true penitent lying at his feet, than all these brilliant crowns. In glory, where every eye is turned upon himself, his eyes are bent down on earth. I fancy that amid the pomp of state, and splendid enjoyments of the palace, it is little that the sovereign thinks of the poor felon who pines in lonely prison, crushed and terror-stricken, with haggard face and heavy heart, waiting the death to which the law has doomed him ; seldom, perhaps, in fancy, does that pallid wretch intrude himself where all wear smiles, or send a hollow groan from his cell to move one thought of pity, or disturb the sparkling flow of royal pleasures. But Jesus does not forget the wretchedness of the lost amid the happiness of the saved. Their miseries are before him ; and amid the high hallelujahs of tho upper sanctuary, he hearkens to THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. the groans of the prisoner and the cry of the perishing. And — like a mother, whose loving heart is not so much with the children housed at home, as with the fallen, beguiled, and lost one, who is the most in her thoughts, and oftenest mentioned in her prayers — Jesus is think- ing now of every poor careless sinner with his lost soul, and the sentence of death hanging over his guilty head. He pities you from his heart. He would save you, would you consent to be saved. And you, who were never honoured with an invitation to a palace on earth, you who are never Hkely to be so honoured, you, by whom this world's pettiest monarch would haughtily sweep, nor deem you worthy of the smallest notice, Jesus, bending from his throne, invites to share his glory, and become with him kings and priests unto God. in. Let us enquire in what character Jesus holds this kingdom. It is not as God, nor as man, he holds it ; but as both God and man. Mediator of the New Covenant, the monarch of a new kingdom. What he was on earth he is still in heaven — God and man for ever. Our Lord appeared in both these characters by the grave of Lazarus. " Jesus wept." Brief but blessed record ! These were precious tears. The passing air kissed them from his cheek, or they were drunk up of the earth, or they glistened but for a little, like dew-drops on some lowly flower ; yet assuring us of his sympathy in our hours of sorrow, their memory has been bealmg 88 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. balm to many a bleeding heart. Weeping, his bosom rent with groans, he stands revealed — bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh — a brother born for adversity, for the bitter hour of household deaths, to impart strength to the arms that lay the dead in the coffin, or slowly lower them into the tomb. Yet mark how, by the same grave, he stands revealed in another character, with his divine majesty plainly unveiled. To weep for the dead may be weakness, but to raise the dead is power. Like the clear shining after rain, when every tree seems hung with quivering leaves of light, and the heath of the moor sparkles, and gleams, and burns with the changing hues of countless diamonds, see how, after that shower of tears, the sun of Christ's Godhead bursts forth on the scene, and he appears the brightness of his Father's glory. Men have wept with him ; but there, where he stands face to face with grim death, let both men and angels worship him. Death cowers before his eye. He puts off the man, and stands out the God; and the wonder of the dead brought to life is lost in the higher wonder of one who could weep as a man, and yet work as a God. On the Sea of Galilee also, our Lord appears in both characters. The son of Mary sleeps. His nights have been spent in prayer, and his days in preaching, heal- ing, incessant works of benevolence — he has been teach- ing us how we also should go about doing good — he has been practically rebuking those whose days are wasted in ease and idleness, or whose evenings, not calm like nature's, but passed amid the whirl of excitement, or in THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. guilty pleasures, sweet slumbers refuse to bless. Now wearied out with labour, the sou of Mary sleeps. There is no sleeping draught, no potion of the apothecary that can impart such deep refreshing slumbers as a good conscience and a busy day's good work. Proof of that, stretched on his bare, hard couch, Jesus sleeps — amid the howling of the wind, the dash and roar of stormy billows, sleeps as soundly as he ever slept a babe in his mother's arms. He lay down a weary man ; but see how he rises at the call of his disciples to do the work of a God. On awaking, he found the elements in the wildest uproar, the waves were chasing each other over the deep, the heavens were sounding their loudest thunders, the light- nings were playing among the clouds, and the winds, let loose, were holding free revelry in the racked tormented air. As I have seen a master, speaking with low and gentle voice, hush the riotous school into instant silence, so Jesus spake. Raising his hand, and addressing the rude storm, he said " Peace, be still." The wind ceased, and there was a great calm. No sooner, amid the loudest din, does nature catch the well-known sound of her master's voice, than the tumult subsides; in an instant all is quiet ; and, with a heave as gentle as an infant's bosom, and all heaven's starry glory mirrored in its crystal depths, the sea of Galilee lies around that boat— a beautiful picture of the happy bosom into which heaven and its peace have descended. " Justified by faith," purchased by the blood of Christ, and blessed with his presence, *' we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." £2 90 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. Now those two natures which our Lord thus revealed on earth, he retains in heaven. And as both God and man, he occupies the throne of grace, and the throne of providence — holding under his dominion all worlds, and principalities, and powers ; for, in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and he has been made Head over all things to the church. This must be so. He got the kingdom ; and, simply as God, there could be no addition made to his possessions. Simply as God, he could get nothing, because all things were already his. You cannot add to the length of eternity ; nor extend the measure of infinity ; nor make absolute perfection more perfect; nor add one drop to a cup, nor even to an ocean, already full. And as, on the one hand, our Lord did not get this kingdom simply as God, neither, on the other hand, did he receive it simply as man. To suppose so, were to entertain an idea more absurd, more improbable, more impossible, than the fable of Atlas, who, according to wild heathen legends, bore the world on his giant shoulders. How could an arm that once hung around a mother's neck sustain even this world? But he, who lay in the feebleness of infancy on Mary's bosom, and rested a wayworn and weary man on Jacob's well, and, faint with loss of blood, sank in the streets of Jerusalem beneath the burden of a cross, now sustains the weight of this and of a thousand worlds besides. It is told as an extraordinary thing of the first and greatest of all the Caesars, that such were his capacious mind, his mighty fiiculties, and his marvellous command of THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 91 them, that he could at once keep six pens running to his dictation on as many different subjects. That may, or may not be true ; but were Jesus Christ a mere man, in the name even of reason, how could he guard the interests, and manage the affairs of a people, scattered far and wide over the face of the habitable globe? What heart were large enough to embrace them all ; what eyes could see them all ; what ears could hear them all ? Think of the ten thousand prayers pro- nounced in a hundred different tongues that go up at once, and altogether, to his ear ! Yet there is no con- fusion ; none are lost ; none missed in the crowd. Nor are they heard by him as, standing on yonder lofty crag, we hear the din of the city that lies stretched out far beneath us, with all its separate sounds of cries, and rumbling wheels, and human voices, mixed up into one deep, confused, hollow roar— like the boom of the sea's distant breakers. No ; every believer may feel as if he were alone with God— enjoying a private audience of the king in his presence-chamber. Be of good cheer. Every groan of thy wounded heart, thy every sigh, and cry, and prayer, falls as distinctly on Jesus' ear as if you stood beside the throne, or, nearer still, lay with John in his bosom, and felt the beating of his heart against your own. Jesus Christ, God and man for ever, what a grand and glorious truth ! How full of encouragement and comfort to those, like us, who have sins to confess, sorrows to tell him, and many a heavy care to cast upon his sympathy and kindness. Since Mary kissed 92 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. his blessed feet, since Lazarus' tomb moved his ready tears, since Peter's cry brought him quick to the rescue, since John's head lay pillowed on his gentle bosom, since a mother's sorrows were felt and cared for amid the bitter agonies of his dying hour, he has changed his place, but not his heart. True man and Almighty God — God and man for ever — believer, let him sustain thy cares. Thy case cannot be too difficult, nor thy burden too heavy for one who guides the rolling planets on their course, and bears on his unwearied arm the weight of a universe. IV. Let me urge you to seek an interest in this kingdom. Your eternal welfare turns on that. You must be saved or damned ; crowned in heaven or cursed in hell. Jesus said. My kingdom is not of this world ; and blessed be God that it is not. For those very features by which it is distinguished from the world's kingdoms are among its most encouraging aspects to us. They are bright with hope to the chief of sinners. The poor say there is little chance or hope for them in this hard world. Well, are you poor ? I had almost said, so much the better. " To the poor the Gospel is preached." You can get on well enough to heaven without gold. The wealth on which the kingdoms of this world set so high a value, and which, for all their talk of blood and breeding, has bought the coarse ple- beian a marriage into proud patrician famiHes, is here THE KINGDOM OF CURIST. rather a hinderance than a help. Has not the Lord of this kingdom said, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God ? In the freest and best governed states, birth, and wealth, and rank, and blood, give to their envied posses- sors great — often too great advantages. It is the high- born chiefly that approach the person of the sovereign, enjoy the honours of the palace, and fill the chief oflSces of the state. Royal favours seldom descend so low as humble life. The grace of our King, however, is like those blessed dews that, while the mountain tops remain dry, lie thick in the valleys ; and, leaving the proud and stately trees to stand without a gem, hang the lowly bush with diamonds, and sow the sward broadcast with orient pearl. This is the kingdom for the mean, and the meek, and the poor, and the humble ! Its King has said. Not many mighty, not many noble, are called. Blessed are the poor in spirit ; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. There is no degradation in honest poverty. But are you degraded, debased, an outcast from decent, good society — characterless ? Nor does that exclude you from the mercy and grace of God — " Go ye," he said, " into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature." Go to the gallows ; and preach it to the man with a rope on his neck, and his feet on the drop. Go to the jail ; and preach it to the scum of the city. Go to her dens of iniquity ; and preach it as freely and fully as in her highest and holiest congregation. Saving, gentle, pity- 94 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. ing mercy, turns no more aside from the foulest wretch, than the wind that kisses her faded cheek, or the sun- beam that visits as brightly a murderer's cell as a minister's study. !N"ay — though the holiest of all king- doms — while we see a Pharisee stand astonished to be shut out, mark how, when she approaches, who, weeping, trembUng all over, hardly dares lift her hand to knock, the door flies wide open ; and the poor harlot enters to be washed, and robed, and forgiven, and kindly welcomed in. Have you done nothing to merit this kingdom ? Who has? DidManasseh? Did Simon Peter? Did Saul of Tarsus ? Was it his hands, reeking with the blood of Stephen, that earned for him the saving grace, and the honours of the chief apostleship ? Was it for one look of pity, one word of kind sympathy from their lips, that, as his murderers nailed him to the tree, our dying Lord raised his eyes to heaven and prayed. Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do ? No. They say, and why may not we. Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost ? Yet, though not saved by obedience, remember that submission to Christ's commandments is required of all those who belong to his kingdom ; and that the very foundations of spiritual as of common liberty are laid in law — are right government and righteous laws. There is no true liberty without law. Nor can you fancy a more unhappy condition for a country than that of THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 95 Israel when, without king or government, " every raan did that which was right in his own eyes." Ours is a free country, for instance; yet where is law so paramount? The baton of the humblest constable carries more autho- rity here than sceptres have done elsewhere. Liberty is not only the birthright of its sons, but should a slave once touch these shores, he drops his chain, and is free as the waves that beat them. Still, it is freedom under, not without, law. He is not at liberty to do what he chooses — he cannot seize my property. He is not at liberty to go where he chooses — he cannot enter the humblest cottage without its owner's consent. He is not at liberty to act as he chooses — commit a private wrong, ov disturb the public peace. Yet he is free ; only, in escaping from a slave-cursed soil to a land of freedom, he has not placed himself beyond authority ; but has exchanged lawless oppression for lawful govern- ment. So is it with you whom the truth has made free. To you the gospel is *' a law of liberty," because, bursting the bonds of sin and Satan, it sets you free to obey the law of God. The believer gladly accepts of Christ's yoke, and delights in the law of God after the inward man, saying. Oh how love I thy law, it is my meditation all the day. In a general sense, we are all the subjects of Christ's kingdom. It embraces the boundless universe. And, he who once had not a place wherein to lay his head, now reigns over a kingdom, the extent of which reduces our proud boast to contempt. Tell me that the sun never sets on Britain's empire, and that before he 96 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. has sunk on one province, he has arisen on another; that sun, which wheels his mighty course in heaven, shines but on an outlying corner of the kingdom over which Jesus reigns. To many of its provinces he appears but as a twinkling star ; and in others, lying far beyond the range of his beams, immeasurable distance hides him from view. But no distance removes any part of creation beyond our Saviour's authority. He stands on the circle of the heavens, and his kingdom ruleth over all. In a saving sense, however, Christ's kingdom is not without, but within us. Its seat is in the heart ; and unless that be right with God, all is wrong. It does not lie in outward things. It is not meat and drink — not baptism or the communion — not sobriety, purity, honesty, and the other decencies of a life of common respectability. " Except a man be born again, he can- not see the kingdom of God." Its grace and power have their emblem in the leaven this woman lays, not on the meal, but in the meal — in the heart of the lump, where, working from within outwards, from the centre to the circumference, it sets the whole mass fermenting — changing it into its own nature. Even so the work of conversion has its origin in the heart. When grace subdues a rebel man, if I may so speak, the citadel first is taken ; afterwards, the city. It is not as in those great sieges which we have lately watched with such anxious interest. There, approaching with his brigades, and cavalry, and artillery, man sits down outside the city. He begins the attack from a distance ; THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 97 creeping, like a lion to the spring — with trench, and parallel, and battery — nearer and nearer to the walls. These at length are breached; the gates are blown open ; through the deadly gap the red living tide rolls in. Fighting from bastion to bastion, from street to street, they press onward to the citadel ; and there, giving no quarter and seeking none, beneath a defiant flag, the rebels, perhaps, stand by their guns, prolonging a desperate resistance. But when the appointed hour of conversion comes, Christ descends by his Spirit into the heart — at once into the heart. The battle of grace begins there. Do you know that by experience ? The heart won, she fights her way outward from a new heart on to new habits ; a change without succeeds the change within, even until the kingdom — which, in the house of God, by the body of the solemn dead, over the pages of the Bible, amid the wreck of health or ruins of fortune, came not with observation — comes to be observed. A visible change appears in the whole man. May it appear in you ! then, though the world may get up the old half-incredulous, half-scornful cry. Is Saul also among the prophets? good men shall rejoice on earth, and angels celebrate the event in heaven THE TRANSLATION. And hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son. — Col. i. 13. A LL pain, that is passing, and not perpetual, is, in that circumstance, attended with great consola- tion. This is true of pain, whether its seat be the body or mind; whether it be a dead, or, worse still, a living grief; the pangs of disease, the lingering suf- ferings of a common, or the terrible shock of a violent death. It will soon be over, says a man ; and, with that, he bares his quivering limb for the surgeon's knife ; or, eyeing the tall black gallows, walks with firm step and erect mien to stand beneath the dangling noose. Say- ing to himself, It will soon be over, he closes his eyes, casts away the handkerchief, and takes the leap into eternity. This feeling enters as an element into Christian as well as common heroism. I knew a precious saint of God who was often cast into the furnace, but always, like real gold, to shine the brighter for the fire ; and who, having now left her sorrows all behind her, has joined the company of whom the angel said, " These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have THE TRANSLATION. 99 washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb; therefore," in the front rank as the highest peers of heaven, " are they before the throne of God." The courage with which she met adversity — one trial after another, shock succeeding shock, billow bursting on the back of billow — was as remarkable as the strength with which, though a bruised reed, she seemed to bear it. Where did her great strength lie 9 The grand secret of that serene demeanour and uncom- plaining patience was, no doubt, a sense of the divine favour. The peace of God kept her heart and mind through Jesus Christ. Yet her sorrows found a solace, life's bitterest hour a sweetness, also, in the simple couplet that was often on her hps — " Come what, come may ; Time and the hour runs through the roughest day." This prospect of relief, this not distant end of suf- fering, has often divested even the grave of its horrors. " There'll be no sorrow there." Ah ! that sometimes ■turns our eyes with a longing look on its deep dream- less sleep. Supporting and restraining them by his grace, God with one hand keeps his people up under their sorrows, and with the other keeps them back from anticipating their appointed time. They do not rush on death, nor go unsummoned to the bar of judg- ment. Unless reason give way, and responsibility cease, they wait his time, and bide it as their own ; holding their post like a sentinel who, however cold the night, or fierce the storm, or thick the battle. 100 THE TKANSLATION, refuses to desert it till he is duly relieved. They say with Job, All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. Yet, with whatever bravery trials are met, and with whatever patience they are borne, there are times when the prospect of relief, which even the grave affords, is most welcome. An object of aversion to light-hearted childhood^ and to him who is bounding away over a sunny path thickly flowered with the hopes of spring, the grave is not so to many who have lived to see these fair flowers wither away, beneath whose slow and lonely steps the joys of other days lie strewed — like dead leaves in autumn. Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord. There is no sorrow for them in the tomb, or beyond it. Thus, from the grassy sod, which no troubled bosom heaves, sorrow plucks blossoms of refreshing odours ; thus, weary life grows strong by feeding on the thought of death ; thus, to that grave which remorse- lessly devours the happiness of the ungodly, Christian faith can apply the language of the strong man's riddle, saj^ing with Samson, when he found the lion that he had rent with a hive of honey within its skeleton ribs. Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. Hope may flatter in this common solace of worldly men, that the longest road has a turning. But, turn or not turn, God's people know that it has a termi- nation ; and that the weary journey, with its heaviest trials, shall end in rest. But for this, thousands had sunk beneath their griefs. And, when calamity came with THE TRANSLATION. 101 the shock of an earthquake, and reason sat stunned and stupified on her tottering throne, how often has that blessed prospect restrained man from turning the wish that he were dead into a daring act ; and casting life away from him as a burden — one greater than he could bear. There have been such cases. I remember in one a scene never to be forgotten. It surpassed anything it had been my fortune ever to witness in the most terrible shapes of mortal agony, and anything also which I had ever seen of the power of Christian endurance. To be hanged, or burned, or broken on the wheel, as the martyrs were — some brief hours of torture, followed by an eternity of rest — how the sufferer would have welcomed that ! His was no such enviable, happy fortune. Death struck him — like a tree, which first withers at the top — in the head ; and, in excruciating sufferings protracted over weary years, he suffered the pain of a hundred deaths. His endurance was heroic, and never failed but once. Once, for pity's sake, for the love she bore him, he implored his wife to tear out his eyes — an expression of impatience, recalled as soon as uttered ; regretted on earth, and forgiven in heaven. Now, never as by that bed, where I have seen him turn, and twist, and writhe, like a trodden worm, have I felt so much the power of the consola- tion of which I speak. Happy was it that religion was not then to seek ; and that, beside a wife struck dumb with grief, and little children who stood still and saddened by the sight of a father's agony, I could bend 102 THE TRANSLATION. over a pillow, wet with the sweat of suffering, and implore him to remember that these pains were not eternal, and that the Saviour who loved him, and whom he loved, would, ere long, come to take him to himself. In such a scene what comfort in the words — " Time and the hour runs through the roughest day." Nor is this unscriptural comfort. The transient nature of all earthly trials is one important ingre- dient of that cordial with which Paul comforts sorrow- ing believers — Our light affliction, which is but for a moment^ worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. Nay, may not that have been poured by the angel's hand into the very cup of. redeeming sorrows ? When our Lord was alone in the garden, and death's cold shadow had begun to fall, and the gloom of the approaching storm was settling down upon his soul, an angel sped from heaven to strengthen him. He finds him prostrate before God. His face is on the ground. In an agony of supplication he has thrown himself at his Father's feet ; and, shrink- ing from the pains of the cross, he cries. Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. At that event- ful moment, with the salvation of the world hung on its issues, may not the angel, reverently approaching this awful and affecting scene, have strengthened our Saviour, and revived his fainting spirit with this comfort, Lord of Glory, drink ; the cup is bitter, but not bottom- less? It is no presumption to fancy that, pointing to the moon as she rode in heaven, he had reminded our THE TRANSLATION. 103 Redeemer that ere she had set and risen again, his pangs should all be over; and that when next she rose, it should be to shine upon an empty cup, and an empty cross, and Roman sentinels keeping watch beside his sleeping form and peaceful tomb. Something of this, indeed, our Lord seems to intimate in the words he addressed to the traitor's band — " This is your hour, and the power of darkness." They may bind these hands ; but they shall soon be free to rend the strongest barriers of the tomb, leaving him to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. With the foul shame of thorns, with spitting, and with scornful rejection, they may hide his glory; but it shall burst forth, like the sun above his dying head, from the shadow of a strange eclipse. Let them put forth their utmost power; its triumph shall be brief — shut up within the limits of a passing hour. Does not the same idea also appear in the w^ords which our Lord addressed to the traitor at the supper table ? As one who, though shrinking from the sufferings of a severe operation, feels confident of relief, and braces up his spirit to endurance by setting permanent ease over against a passing pain, Jesus bent his eye on Judas, and said, " That thou doest, do quickly," — do it, and have done with it ; I know it shall not last; I am not to be buried but bap- tized in sufferings; from the cross where it shall bow in death — exposed on a bloody tree; from the grave where it shall lie in dust — pillowed on a lonesome bed, 104 THE TRANSLATION. shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me ; so that thou doest, do quickly ; I foresee an end of sorrows, and long to enter upon my rest. Now, the relief which death brought to Christ, blessed be God, it brings to all that are Christ's. The passing bell rings out sin with all its sorrows, and rings in eternity with all its joys. And the very same event which plunges the unbeliever into everlasting perdition, ushers the believer into the inheritance of the saints in light. With gladness and rejoicing they shall be brought; they shall enter into the palace of the king. Before taking up the subject of the translation, this leads mo to remark — I. That in delivering his people from the power of darkness, Christ saves them from eternal perdition. The punishment which sin deserves, and which the impenitent and unbelieving suffer, is a very awful sub- ject — one on which I could have no pleasure in dwell- ing. It is a deeply solemn theme ; a terrible mystery ; one in presence of which we stand in trembling awe, and can only say with David — Clouds and darkness are round about him. It is a painful thing to see the dying of a poor dog, or any dumb creature suffer ; but the fate of the impeni- tent, the sorrows that admit of no consolation, the misery that has no end — these form a subject brimful of horrors ; the deepest, darkest, unfathomed mystery in the whole plan of the divine government. Yet what affords no THE TRANSLATION. . 105 pleasure may, notwithstanding, yield profit; and that even by reason of the pain it inflicts. And so, in the hope of such a blessed result, let me warn, and beseech, and im- plore careless sinners to be wise, and consider this solemn matter in the day of their merciful visitation. Better fear that punishment than feel it ; better look into the pit than fall into it ; better than fill your ears with syren songs of pleasure, listen to this warning voice, " Behold, now is the accepted time ; behold, now is the day of salvation." " To-day, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts." The chains which bind you are yet but locked, and the gospel has a key to open them. Reject that gospel, and what is now but locked by the hand of sin, shall be ri vetted by the hand of death — like the fetters on the limbs of him who leaves the bar to suffer that most awful sentence, the doom of perpetual imprisonment. " As the tree falls, so it lies." " He that is filthy, let him be filthy still." People talk about the mercy of God in a way for which they have no warrant in his word ; and, ignoring his holiness, and justice, and truth, they lay this and the other vain hope as a flattering unction to their souls. Thinking light of sin, seeing no great harm in it, they judge God by themselves. " Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself," accounts for the manner in which many explain away the awful revela- tions of Scripture about future punishment, and in the face of such terrible words as these, " Depart from me. ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels," give such a ready ear to the devil's 106 THE TRANSLATION. old falsehood, Thou shalt not surely die. The fire, they allege, and are sure, is a mere symbol. Well, just look by the light of that symbol at the condition of the lost. Fire ! What does that mean ? Take it as a symbol, grant that it is but a figure of speech, still it has a terrible meaning, as will be manifest, if we con- sider the nature and characteristic features of that ele- ment. Let us see. According to the imperfect science of the world's early ages, there were four elements, of which ancient philosophers held that all things else were compounded. These were fire, air, earth, and water ; and from the other three, the first is strikingly distinguished by this peculiar and well-marked feature, that it is destructive of all life. Let us examine this matter somewhat in detail. 1. The element of earth is associated with life. Prolific mother, from whose womb we come, and to whose bosom we return, she is pregnant with life, an exhaustless storehouse of its germs. Raise the soil, for example, from the bottom of deepest well or darkest mine. And as divine truths, lodged in the heart by a mother in early childhood, though they have lain long dormant, spring up into conversion so soon as God's time comes and the Spirit descends, so seeds, that have lain in the soil for a thousand years, whenever they are exposed to the quickening influences of heat, and light, and air, and moisture, awake from their long sleep, and rise up into forms of grace and beauty. Nowhere but THE. TRANSLATION. 107 within the narrow walls of the churchyard — with its earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust — are death and the dust associated. Even there how does life, contending for the mastery of this world, intrude upon death's silent domains, and both in the grass that waves above, and the foul worms that feed below, claim the earth as her owja ! This earth is far less the tomb than a great prolific womb of life. Of its matter life builds her shrines ; beneath its surface myriads of creep- ing things have their highways and homes ; while its soil yields bountiful support to the forests, and flowers, and grasses, that clothe its naked form in gayest robes of Hfe and beauty. 2. Air, too, is an element associated with life. Invisible substance, it is as much our food as corn or flesh. Symbol of the Holy Spirit, it feeds the vital flame, and is essential to the existence of all plants and animals, whether their home be the land or water, the ocean or its shores. They live by breathing it, whether it be extracted from the waters by their 'inhabitants, or directly from the atmosphere by the plants and animals that dwell on the dry land. Ceasing to breathe it, they die. With that groan, or gasp, or long-drawn sigh, man expires. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth ; in that very day his thoughts perish. And as life exists on air, it exists in it ; nor ever presents itself in a fuller, happier aspect, than at the serene close, for instance, of a summer day. The air is filled with the music of a thousand choristers ; creation's evening 108 THE TRANSLATION. hj^mn, sung by many voices, and in many notes, goes up to the ear of God ; and, while the lark supplies music from the ringing heavens, nature holds innocent revels below ; and happy insects, by sparkling stream, or the sedgy borders of the placid lake, keep up their mazy merry dances, till God puts out the lights, and, satiated with enjoyment, they retire to rest, wrapped round in the curtains of the night. Figure of the truth that in God we live, and move, and have our being, our world itself, with all that lives on it, is a sphere that floats, buoyant and balanced, in an ocean of air. 3. Water, too, is an element associated with life. Fit emblem of saving mercies, so indispensable is water to the continued existence of life, that unless it be fur- nished by some source or other, all plants and animals must speedily die. Then how does this element, which covers more than two-thirds of the surface of our globe, teem with life ! He has not seen one of the wonders of creation, who has not seen a drop of water changed, by the microscope, into a little world full of living, active, perfect, creatures, over whom a passing bird throws the shadow of an eclipse, and whose brief life of an hour or day seems to them as long as to us a century of years. Imagination attempts in vain to form some conception of the myriads that, all creatures of God's care, inhabit the living waters — the rushing stream, the mountain lake, the shallow shore, the profound depths of ocean — from the minutest insect which finds a home in some tiny pool, or its world on the leaf of the THE TRANSLATION. 109 swaying sea-weed, to leviathan, around whose mighty- bulk, whether in play or rage, the deep grows hoary, and foams like a boiling pot. How soon we abandon the attempt, and, dropping the wings of fancy, fall on our knees before the throne to say, Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all. Mark, now, the broad and outstanding difference between these elements and fire. Earth and life, air and life, water and life, are not, as we have seen, neces- sarily antagonistic ; but fire and life are. Unless under such miraculous circumstances as those in which the three Hebrew children walked unhurt in the furnace, or the mountain bush, as if bathed in dew, flowered amid the flames, life cannot exist in fire under any shape or form. No creature feeds, or breeds, or breathes in flames. What the winds fan, and the soil nourishes, and the dews re- fresh, fire kills. It scorches whatever it touches, and what- ever breathes it, dies. Turning the stateliest tree, and sweetest flowers, and loveliest form of the daughters of Eve, into a heap of ashes, or a coal-black cinder, fire is the tomb of beauty, and the sepulchre of all life ; the only region and realm within which death reigns, with none to dispute his sway. And thus the characteristic feature of this element — beside the pain it inflicts — is the destruction and death it works. Suppose, then, that the fire that is never quenched is but a painted flame — grant that it is nothing but a symbol or figure of the punishment which awaits the impenitent and unbelieving, in what respects have they, who have 110 THE TRANSLATION. persuaded themselves of that, improved their prospects ? It is, " as if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him ; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him." Although the language of Scripture were figurative, yet expressing, as it does, the utter consumption and death of all hope and happi- ness, it is not less madness for any one to reject the Saviour, and for the enjoyment of a passing pleasure to brave so terrible a doom. Endless misery — the worm that never dieth, and the fire that is never quenched — in whatever shape it comes, is an awful thought. We can- not think of it without shuddering. Oh, why should any hear of it without fleeing instantly to Jesus ; for who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burning ? I do not undertake to defend God's procedure in this matter. He will defend it himself, and one day justify his ways, in the judgment even of those whom he condemns. They shall not have the miserable consolation of com- plaining that they have been hardly and unjustly dealt with. The sentence that condemns them shall find an awful echo in their own consciences. How they shall blame themselves, and regret their life, and curse their folly — turning their stings against their own bosoms, as the scorpion, maddened with pain, is said to do, when surrounded by a circle of fire ! Before we leave this subject, let us all join in thanksgiving, both saints and sinners. Let the people praise thee, God; let all the people praise thee. Fascinated, bewitched by pleasure, do you THE TRANSLATION. Ill still linger beside the pit, notwithstanding, perhaps, that its flames are rising fearfully lurid against the darkening skies of a fast-descending night ? Be thank- ful that you are not in the pit ; and falling on your knees by its horrible brink, let its miserable captives, who envy you your time of prayer, hear your cry for mercy, and that that gracious long-suffering God, who has preserved you to this day as a monument of his sparing, would now make you a monument of his saving mercy. And how should saints praise him ! How should they praise him, who have exchanged the hor- rible fear of hell for a holy happy fear of God, and — in a good hope through grace, that they have been delivered from the power of darkness, and translated into the kingdom of his dear Son— enjoy a peace that passeth understanding. " Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered." Blessed, more blessed than if he had the wealth of Croesus, the poorest, hum- blest, weakest child of God, who can say with David — He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and esta- blished my goings. It is beautiful to see a bird spring from its grassy bed, mounting up on strong wing into a morning sky of amber, and ruby, and gold, and sapphire, and to hear her, as she climbs the heavens, sing out the joy which God has poured into her little heart in a thriUing gush of music ; but, oh, if God's people through more purity enjoyed more peace of heart, were they as holy, and therefore as happy as they might be, how would angels stay their flight, and pause upon 112 THE TRANSLATION. the wing to watch the rise, and Usten to the song of him who, as he rises, sings — My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler : the snare is broken, and w^e are escaped. " Happy is that people, that is in such a case : yea, happy is that people, whose God is the Lord." II. Consider how we are brought into this kingdom. Translation is the expression used to describe the method. There is a difference between being trans- formed and being translated ; in so far as the first describes a change of character, while the second describes a change of state. These changes are coin- cident — they take place at the same time ; but the transformation is not completed, nor are saints made perfect in holiness, until the period arrive for a second translation. Then those who were translated at con- version into a state of grace, are translated at death into a state of glory. The transformation of the soul into the image of God, and of God's dear Son, begins at the first translation, and is finished at the second. And it is with man as with a rude block of marble. Raised from its dark low quarry-bed, it is, in the first instance, removed to the sculptor's studio. There the shapeless masH gradually assumes, under his chisel, the features and form of humanity — blow after blow, touch after touch is given, till the marble grows into a triumph of his genius, and seems instinct with life. And, now a perfect image, it is once more removed, and leaves his THE TRANSLATION. 113 hand to become on its pedestal the attractive ornament of some hall or palace. Now, it is the change of state corresponding to the removal of the block from the quarry, that we have here to do with. And let us take care that the word em- ployed to describe the change from nature to grace leads to no mistake. It were a great mistake to sup- pose that God only is active while man remains passive in this work. You may, indeed, translate a man from one earthly kingdom to another, you may carry him, for instance, across the channel which parts Great Britain from France, while his senses and faculties are steeped in slumber. The traveller falls asleep in one country to awake in another ; and, conveyed smoothly along the level road or over an arm of the sea, — rocked, it may be, into deeper slumber by the gentle motion — he opens his eyes, amid a Babel of tongues, on the strange costumes, and faces, and scenery of a foreign land. Not only so ; but, greater and most solemn change, a man may be translated from this world into the next in a state of entire unconsciousness. As I have seen a mother approach the cradle and gently lift up the sleeping babe to take it to her own bed and bosom, so, muffled in the cloud of night, death has stolen on the sleeper, and, moving with noiseless step across the floor, has borne him off so gently, that, on awaking, he was in heaven, and opened his eyes on the glories of the upper sanctuary; and when his children, wondering what detains their father from the morning F 2 114 THE TRANSLATION. meal, enter his chamber, they find the spirit fled, and, as one who had done his work, his lifeless form resting on the couch in a posture of calm repose. Such sudden transition from time into eternity brings an awful arrestment to a life of sin ! The sinner is like some wretched criminal, who has been tracked to his hiding- place. Lying asleep in the arms of guilt, he is roused by rough hands, loud voices, and the flash of lanterns ; starting up, he stares wildly round ; and how pale he turns to see his bed beset, and door and window guarded by the stern oflBcers of justice — they are come to drag him to prison. But to die and not know it, not even to taste death, to be spared the bitter cup, to be exempt from the mortal struggle, to be borne across the deep cold waters asleep in Jesus' arms, to be wakened from nature's unconscious slumbers by strains of heavenly music, and the bright blaze of glory, what a happy close of a holy life ! It is not in this quiet, gentle, placid way, that sin- ners are translated out of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear Son; far otherwise. And in illustration of that, I now remark — 1. That this translation is attended by sufiering and self-denial. Killed by a bullet, prostrated by a blow, deprived at once of consciousness and of existence by means of an opiate or some other narcotic poison, man may die to natural Ufe quite unconsciously. But thus he never dies to sin. Best of all deaths ! yet it is attended by a painful, and often a protracted struggle ; during THE TRANSLATION. 115 which he is as sensible of pain as the victim of a cross, who, when the nails have crashed through nerve, and flesh, and bone, hangs convulsed and quivering on its extended arms. Hence these striking metaphors : " They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts ;" " But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world." I would not deter you from the cross, or from resolving now, by the grace of God, and aids of the Holy Spirit, to take it up, and deny yourselves daily, and follow Jesus. On the contrary, I say, the crown is worthy of the cross. I have no doubt that there is far more pain suffered in going to hell than to heaven. And, although there were not, how will one hour of glory recompense you for all the suffer- ings and sacrifices of earth? I only wish to dissi- pate the delusion under which some apparently live, and, living, certainly perish, that indolence, and ease, and self-indulgence may inherit the kingdom of God. They think, therefore, that they have no occasion to be anxious about their souls ; and rest satisfied that it may be, and is all right with them, though they are not conscious of having ever felt any serious alarm, having made any great exertion, or suffered, indeed, any self- denying pains whatever. Be assured that, as it is among pangs and birth- struggles that a man is born the first time, it is in Borrow and pain that he is born again. " Verily, verily, I say unto you, that ye shall weep and lament, but 116 THE TRANSLATION. the world shall rejoice ; and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow, because her hour is come ; but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remem- bereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world." May it not be in part with refe- rence to this, that John, speaking of Jesus, said, He that cometh after me is mightier than I — he shall bap- tize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire ? To be baptized with fire is another thing from being baptized with water. How often has the water fallen from our hand on the calm brow of a sleeping infant, which, held up in a father's arms, was returned to a mother's bosom perfectly unconscious of its baptism — translated into the visible church of Christ in a state of profound repose. But a fiery baptism ! that which symbolises the descent of the Spirit in conversion, impHes pain — such convictions of sin and dread of hell, such self-reproach, and deep remorse, as have often risen to agony, and sometimes driven man to the verge of madness. Fire burns the flesh, penetrates to the bone, and dries up the very marrow. Can a man take fire into his bosom, and his clothes not be burned? If not, how could a soul receive the fiery, baptism of the Holy Spirit, and be unconscious of it ? Ah, fancy not that it is to sinners only that our God is a consuming fire. He is a consuming fire, not indeed to his people's souls, but to his people's sins. The unholy pleasures and habits that bind those whom he has chosen for him- self out of a world that lieth in wickedness, he will burn. THE TRANSLATION. 117 Nor are these bonds burned off them in a way as painless as happened to the three Hebrews. They, whom Nebuchadnezzar cast bound into the fiery furnace, were suffering for God, not for sin. And preserved by Christ's presence, like his people in corresponding trials, they walked right pleasantly on burning coals, and found the flames as fresh as the breath of a balmy morning. If you have never felt pain, be assured that you have never parted with sin. Nothing short of burning out will remove it. Yet, painful as it may be, throw open your bosom for this baptism of fire ! What- ever wounds it inflicts, they shall be healed. There is balm in Gilead, and a physician there. 2. In this translation both God and man are active. When the hour of our Lord's ascension had come, he rose from Olivet neither on angel's wings, nor in the prophet's fiery chariot. He put forth no effort. His body, as if belonging to another sphere, floated buoyant, upward through the air, until, as he bent over his dis- ciples in the attitude* of blessing, a cloud received him out of their sight. But no man rises in this glorious manner from a state of nature into one of grace ; or leaves the horrible pit, for the light, and love, and liberty of a son of God. There is help afforded on God's part ; but there is also an effort required on ours. We must climb the ladder which divine love lets down. The soul is not, as some seem to think, a piece of softened wax, receiving the image of God as that does the impress of a seal. We receive salvation ; still, we must put forth our hand for it, as the starving for a loaf 118 THE TKANSLATION. of bread ; as he who dies of thirst for a cup of water ; as a drowning man, who eagerly eyes and rapidly seizes the falling rope — clinging to it with a grasp that neither his weight nor the waves can loose. '* Between us and you," said Abraham to the rich man, " there is a great gulf jBxed ; so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot ; neither can they pass to us that would come from thence." I know that a gulf as impassable and profound divides the state of sin from the state of grace ; and that no quantity nor quality of good works that we may attempt to throw in, can form a passage for our guilty feet. Rubbish at the best ! how are they lost in its unfathomed depths ! lost like the stones which travellers in Iceland fling into those black, yawning, volcanic chasms, which descend so deep into the fiery bowels of that burning land, that no line can measure, and time never fills them. Yet, blessed be Christ's name! the great gulf has been bridged. Redemption, through his blood and merits, spans the yawning chasm. An open way invites your feet. And would to God we saw men seizing that opening and opportunity of escape, as a retreatiug army makes for the bridge when bayonets are bristling on the heights, and the shot is plunging amid its dis- ordered ranks, and clouds of cavalry are cutting down the stragglers I Oh, what diligence, what activity, what energy, what shouts and cries for help in such a crisis, such a terrific scene I They cast away their baggage ; everything is sacrificed for life. Husbands dragging on their wives, fathers carrying helpless children, brother THE TRANSLATION. 119 raising up wounded brother, the cry of all is for the bridge, the bridge ! And as the iron hail rattles among their flying squadrons, save where the rear-guard faces round to the enemy and gallantly covers the retreat, every man forces on his way ; until, the living wave surging on it, the bridge is choked with eager fugitives. Who thinks of sitting down there, and waiting a more convenient season, waiting till the press and crowd is over ? ■ They may envy the bird that, frightened from her brood, darts through the sulphureous cloud, and wings her rapid way high over the swollen flood, but who sits down there in the idle hope that God will send some eagle from her rocky nest, some angel from the skies, to bear the loiterer across, and save him all effort of his own ? No man. Every man is on his feet. He throws himself into the crowd ; seizes every opening in the dense, desperate, maddened throng, to get forward; nor relaxes the strain of his utmost efforts, till he stand in safety on the other side — blessing the man that bridged the stream. Is not God, it may be said, sovereign and omnipo- tent? As such, does he not sometimes save those who are no.t seeking to be saved ? and even send them back from church to pray who came to scoff ? True. He may set aside the ordinary laws of grace, as he set aside the ordinary laws of nature, when at his bidding iron swam, and flames were cool, and the flinty rock yielded drink, and the blue skies gave not dews but corn, and unstable water stood up in solid walls like adamant. But be it ever remembered, that in the ordinary course 120 THE TRANSLATION. of his providence, God works in grace as in nature. To use a common but expressive adage, God helps the man who helps himself. Even the young bird chips its own shell, and I have heard its voice in a feeble cry for liberty before it had burst its prison walls; and what violent exertions have I seen an insect — about to enter on a new existence — make to shuffle off its worm case, and come forth in resplen- dent beauty to spend happy days in sunbeams, and sleep away the short summer nights in the soft bosom of a flower. Instinct teaches the lowest of God's creatures to exert themselves ; and providence teaches man, in the common affairs of life, to exert himself. The blessing is on the busy. He reaps a harvest who tills his field ; and sickles flash, and sheaves stand thick where the ploughs have gone. The history even of Christ's miracles is pregnant with the same lesson. Who were the lame he healed, but those who painfully crawled to him on their knees, or crept to him on crutches, or got kind friends to bear them on beds and break through house- roofs, that they might get near the Saviour? Who were the blind whose eyes he opened, but those whose hearts leaped within them, and who leaped to their feet when, by the hum and rush of the crowd, they knew that the Saviour was passing ? Be these your pattern. Allow no difficulties about this or that doctrine to hinder you from giving immediate attention and earnest obe- dience to these plain commandments, Pray without ceasing, Labour for the bread that never perisheth, Give all diligence to make your calling and election THE TRANSLATION. 121 sure, Take diligent heed to do the commandment and the law, to love the Lord your God, and to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments, and to cleave unto him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul. Why is it that many, that perhaps you, are not saved ? Will the Lord cast off for ever ; and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone for ever ? doth his promise fail for evermore ? Hath God forgotten to be gracious ? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? Is heaven full? Is there no room for more ? Or, has the blood of Christ lost its efficacy, or God his pity? No. It is miserable to see how carefully gold and jewels are preserved, while souls are thrown away, as of no value. Men are not saved; but why ? They will give themselves no trouble — take no pains to be saved. This change is indeed a birth ; but remember that it is not like the birth of the body — the pangs there are all the mother's. This change is a translation, but forget not that it is not such as Elijah's, when that deathless man had only to step into the chariot, and angels shook the reins, and horses of fire whirled him at his ease through the skies to heaven. I am persuaded that there would be many more saved, if fewer of us abused the doctrines of man's depravity, and God's free, sovereign, saving grace. It is the gospel, that Without shedding of blood there is no remission ; it is the gospel, that Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God ; it is the gospel, that Not by works of righteousness which 122 THE TRANSLATION. we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost ; but remember, I pray you, that, accord- ing to the same gospel, those who receive are they who ask, and those who find are they who seek. It is to the knocking hand that the door is opened. REDEMPTION. lu whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveneaa of sins. — C0L0331ANS i. 14. /^NE who had been a great traveller, who had visited all the capitals of Europe, who had studied the most famous wonders of ancient art, and, no stranger to nature's grandest scenery in the Old World, had filled his ear with the roar, and his eye with the foaming cataract of Niagara, once declared, in my hearing, that near by the latter and most glorious spectacle he had seen the finest sight he ever saw. He was crossing from the American to the Canadian shore ; and the same boat was carrying over a fugitive slave. The slave had burst his chain, and fled. Guided northwards by the pole-star, he had threaded his way through tangled forests and the poisonous swamp — outstripping the blood- hounds that bayed behind him, and followed long upon his track. Now about to realise his long-cherished and fondest hopes, to gratify his burning thirst for liberty, the swarthy negro stood in the bow of the boat, his large black eyes intently fixed upon the shore. She nears it. But ere her keel has grated on the strand, impatient to be free, he gathers up all his strength, 124 KEDEMPTION. bends for the spring, and, vaulting into the air, by one mighty bound, one glorious leap for liberty, he reaches the shore, and stands erect upon its bank — a free man. The liberty for which that slave longed, and laboured, and braved so much, is perhaps the sweetest earthly cup man drinks. It has, indeed, been often said, that health is the greatest earthly blessing. It is a precious boon. How did the woman of the Gospels spend all she had in search of it ; and how would thousands, now languishing on beds of sickness, and sinking into the grave under an incurable malady, buy this possession at as great a price ? Without health, what is money ? what, luxury ? what, rank and sounding titles ? what a crown, if it sit heavy on throbbing brows and an aching head? Yonder poor and humble cottager, browned by the sun, with ruddy health glowing on his unshaven cheek, who, seated at his simple board, uncovers his head to wipe the sweat of labour from his brow, or to bless the God who feeds him and his little ones, might be an object of envy to many. In vain they court coy sleep on beds of down, and try to whet a failing appe- tite by costly luxuries — sighing, they say, what is money without health ? That speech may come very well from those who never knew what it is to be a slave ; but what is health without liberty — health in chains ? We sympathize even with the strong instinctive love of freedom which appears in the lower animals— the bounding noisy joy of the household dog when he gets ofif his chain ; the sudden change on the weary horse, when, shaking off his fatigue with his harness, he REDEMPTION. 125 tosses his head, and, with buoyant spirits and flowing mane, careers amid his fellows over the pasture field. It has moved our pity to see a noble eagle chained to the perch, and, as she expanded her broad sails, turn up a longing eye to the golden clouds her wing shall never more cleave, to the bright blue skies where she shall never more soar. I have felt a deeper sympathy with the free-born denizen of the air, that, pining for his native haunts, declines his food, refuses to be tamed, and, dashing against the bars, dies — strangled in struggles to escape, than with the tamed and gentle captive which takes its food from some fair jailer's hand, and sings the song of golden moors and green woodlands within an iron cage. Much more, of course, do we sympathise with our fellow-creatures, — with the Hebrew exiles, for instance, who hung their harps on the willows by Babylon's sluggish streams, nor could sing the songs of Sion in a strange land ; with all those, whether slaves or citizens, who have made the altars of Liberty red with their blood, preferring death to bondage. If I can judge from the interest with which I watched the progress, and, I confess it, all but wished for the escape of a man, who, with the officers of justice at his heels, was running a race for freedom, I believe that unless the offence is one which nature taught us to avenge, it would cost a struggle between one's sense of duty as a subject, and one's sympathy with man's love of Hberty, to arrest a runaway prisoner. But who would arrest a runaway slave? Who, that ever tasted the sweets of liberty, 126 KEDEMPTION. would not help him ? What is the colour of his skin to me ? He is a brother wronged ; a man oppressed ; nor were he a man who would not in such circumstances espouse the side of innocent weakness against tyrannous strength ; and hide him, and feed him, and lodge him, and help him, from chains and stripes and slavery, on to freedom. If so, who would be himself a slave ? What value should we set on health if we had to rise to our work in the rice swamp, in the cane or cotton-field, at the sound of the horn ; and were driven to it, like oxen, with the crack of the whip ? Health ! what value would a man set on life itself, were his children to be torn from his arms, set up to auction, and, knocked down to the highest bidder — sold before his eyes to slavery ; if he must stand by and hear their mother's piercing shrieks, as with bended knees and outstretched hands she implores — in vain implores for pity ; stand by, and hear his own mother cry for mercy, as the breast that nursed him bleeds under the cutting lash ; who would value life a straw, if he must stand by, nor speak a word, nor shed a tear, nor from his bursting bosom heave a groan, nor lift a hand in their defence ? How sad it is to think that there are lands, governed by Christian men, and in the prostituted name of liberty, where such scenes are witnessed, and crimes so foul are done! It almost tempts one to pray that an avenging Heaven would blight and wither and blast the fields that are watered with human tears : — " Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain REDEMPTION. 127 upon you, nor fields of offerings." May God give a noble country grace and power to wipe from its shield so black a stain ! In these sentiments, I have no doubt you all sym- pathise. But 1 have to tell you of a worse and more de- grading — a more cruel and dreadful slavery. There are among us many greater and more to be pitied slaves. I refer to those who, as the servants of Satan, are sold unto sin. Would to God that we set the same high price on spiritual as we do on earthly liberty ! Ah, then what efforts would be put forth, what struggles would be made, what long, earnest, unwearying prayers be offered for salvation ! And, when saved ourselves, how anxious ^ould we be for the salvation of others ? In the touching narrative of a fugitive slave I have read how, when he himself had escaped, the thought of his mother — a mother dear — and sisters still in bondage, haunted him night and day, embittering the sweetness of his own cup. He found no rest. Liberty to him was little more than a name, until they also were free. And surely one may wonder how Christians can give God any rest, or take it themselves, while those near and dear to them are in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity? And why is it, moreover, that when his servants appear, proclaiming through Christ liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound, so few hearts leap for joy, and so many hear it — as if they needed it not, heard it not, heeded it not — with calm, cold, frigid indif- ference ? Go, proclaim emancipation in a land of 128 REDEMPTION. slaves, and the news shall fly like wildfire — sweep on like flames over the summer prairie. At such glad tidings how the bed-rid would leap from his couch ; the lame throw away his crutches; the old grow young; the people go mad with joy. Mothers with new feelings would kiss their babes, and press them to their bosoms ; brothers, sisters, friends, would rush into each other's arms, to con- gratulate each the other that they were free ; and, weeping the first tears of joy their eyes had ever shed, would they not make hut and hall, forest and mountain, ring with the glorious name of him who had fought their long hard battle, nor ceased, nor relaxed, his efforts till he had achieved their freedom ? Jesus! with what jubilant songs, then, should we celebrate thy name, and enshrine thy memory in our best affections ! What great glad tidings these, redemptioQ through thy blood ! Oh that God would inspire us with such a love of it, and give us so great enjoyment in it, that with some foretaste of the joys, we might sing this song of heaven. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen. In directing your attention to this subject, 1 remark — I. That we all need redemption. To a man nigh unto death, who is labouring under some deadly malady, and knows it, ofier a medicine REDEMPTION. 129 which has virtue to cure him, and he will buy it at any price. In his eyes that precious drug is worth all the gold on earth. But offer that, which' he grasps at, to one who believes himself to be in robust and perfect health, and he holds it cheap. Just so, and for a similar reason, the Saviour and his redemption are slighted, despised, and rejected of men. Some of you have no adequate conception of your lost state as sinners ; nor do you feel, therefore, your great need of salvation. The first work, accordingly, of God's Holy Spirit in conversion is to rouse a man from the torpor which the poison of sin — like the venom of a snake infused into the veins, produces, to make him feel his illness, to convince him of his guilt, to make him sensible of his misery. And blessed the book, blessed the preacher, blessed the providence that sends that conviction into our hearts, and lodges it, like a barbed arrow, there. For, to an alarmed conscience, to a soul convinced of sin and misery, who so welcome as the Saviour ? Let a man, who fancied that he was in no danger, see- himself to be in great danger, know that he is a poor, polluted, perishing sinner, lost by nature, lying under sentence of death, deserving the wrath of God, and, like one standing over a volcano, separated from hell only by a thin crust of earth, which, becoming thinner and thinner as the fire eats it away, is already bending, cracking beneath his feet, ah ! he understands the import of the words, Unto you therefore which believe, he is precious. Now that Christ may be so to you, and that the grace of God which bringeth salvation 130 REDEMPTION. may not come to you in vain, let me show how all of us require to be redeemed from the slavery of sin and Satan. And I remark — 1. That this slavery is the natural state of man. We pity, how greatly do we pity, the mother, as one robbed of a mother's best joys, who knows that the little creature which hangs on her bosom is a slave ; and only smiles because unconscious of its sad estate. But this calamity is ours. The progeny of slaves are slaves themselves. And we, having sprung from parents who, in the expressive language of Scripture, had sold them- selves for nought, leave our mother's womb in bondage to sin. Accordingly, David says, "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity ; and in sin did my mother conceive me." Let me recall to your recollection the testimony on this subject of one who, so far as civil liberty and Roman citizenship were concerned, was free born. You know how Paul stood on his rights as a Roman. He dared them to scourge him as they would a slave. Yet, speaking of himself, as before God, and in the eye of a holy law, he says, I am carnal, sold under sin. And — not to multiply examples — in what terms does he address his converts? " Ye were," he says, " the servants of sin," or, as we would express it, ye were the slaves of sin. The slaves ! for observe, I pray you, that the word which is there translated servant, means not a servant simply, but a servant who is a slave ; not one hired for a period, whom the next term sets free to leave or stay, but one bound, branded with the mark of a perpetual bondage ; and so the apostle says, " God be REDEMPTION. 131 thanked that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you," " Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness." David uses stronger terms. In one of his psalms, he uses this very strong expression, " I was as a beast before thee." And, though few of us have the deep sense of sin which that holy man had, there is no child of God who recalls the past to memory — what he was, and how he felt antecedent to his conversion, who looks back beyond that blessed day when the truth made him free, but will be ready to acknowledge that he was a man in bonds. Not master of himself, and free to follow the dictates of conscience and God's word, he slaved in the service of the devil, the world, and the flesh — three hard taskmasters. On that ever memorable day fetters stronger than iron were struck from his limbs. I do not affirm that the most advanced saint is alto- gether free from the bondage of sin. No. The holiest believer carries that about with him which painfully reminds him of his old condition. I have seen a noble dog which had broken loose and restored itself to liberty, dragging the chain, or some links of it, along with him. I have read of brave stout captives who had escaped from prison, but who brought away with them, in swollen joints or festering wounds, the marks and injuries of the cruel fetters. And do not old sins thus continue to hang about a man even after grace has delivered him from their domi- nant power? Have you not felt that these called for constant watchfulness and earnest prayer ? Who does 132 REDEMPTION. not need every day and hour to resort to the fountain of cleansing, and wash his heart in the blood of Christ oftener than he washes his hands in water? We need to be renewed day by day ; converted, as it were, not once, or twice, but — every day. Surely the happiness of a child of God lies mainly in this, that sin, though it remains within his heart, has ceased to reign there, and that, made perfect at length in holiness, he shall enter by the dismal gate of death into the full and glorious liberty of the children of God. 2. This slavery is the universal state of man. Both sacred and profane history show that slavery, as it is one of the worst, is one of the oldest human, not humane, institutions. At an early period of man's history, in Cain, he who should have been his brother's keeper became his murderer. And when afterwards man did become his brother's keeper, alas ! it was too often as an owner — selling, buying, oppressing him. It is long, very long since men and women, with broken hearts, turned a wishful eye on the grave as a welcome refuge — -where the wicked cease from troubUng, and the weary be at rest. But while there might be lands that slavery never cursed, and while there were in every slave land a number who in a sense were free, the slavery of sin spared no land. There are no " free-soilers," so far as sin is concerned. It has exempted no class. The king on his throne, as much as the beggar on his dunghill, is a slave. The loveliest woman as much as the vilest outcast, the proudest peer and poorest peasant, the man of letters and the man so ignorant as not to know the REDEMPTION. 133 letters, Jew and Greek, bond and free, are all branded and bound ; and, like the gang of miserable captives which the slave-dealer is driving to the sea-bord, they are moving on to eternity — bound in one long chain with every minor distinction sunk in the one misery, that all are sold under sin. In this, every difference of race, and rank, and colour, is merged. Every man's heart is black — whatever his face may be. It matters little, indeed, nothing before God, whether a man has a dark face or a pale one ; but it is all important whether he has a black heart or no — whether our sin- stained souls have or have not been washed white in the blood of Jesus Christ. What avails it that you are not bound in fetters of man's forging, if you are bound in the devil's chain? The difference, yonder, between the white master with his lash, and the poor, trembling, crouching black, over whom he cracks it, is lost in this, that both are under bondage to sin. And I dare to say that of the two, the bigger, blacker, baser slave is he, who, boastful of his vaunted freedom, and proud of his blood and colour, holds a brother in chains. The driver is more a slave than the driven ; the oppressor than the oppressed. What chain, I ask, has been forged for human limbs so strong, degrading, intensely hateful in the sight of God, as the base cupidity which breeds human beings, like cattle, for the market ; and grasps at wealth, although its price be groans and tears and blood and broken hearts ? 3. This slavery is the actual state of all uncon- verted men. 134 REDEMPTION. Some are slaves of one sin ; some of another ; and the forms of slavery are as many and varied as the sins which people are addicted to. Let me give a few examples. (1.) Some are slaves of gold. How they drudge for it ! . Their tyrant, the love of money, rules them with a rod of iron. Naturally kind, they feel dis- posed to assist the poor ; but, No, says their master ; and with an iron heel he crushes the tenderest feeHngs of their heart. Visited occasionally with solemn thoughts, and not altogether dead to the claims of Christ, they would part with something worthy of their wealth and of his cause ; but what is Christ to Mammon ? Again, their master says, No ; you must make more money ; toil on, ye slaves ; you may not trust man, and you cannot trust God ; toil on ; you must be as rich as that man, and leave a fortune for your heirs to quarrel about over your grave, or squander in folly and dissipa- tion. And thus, blushing at his mean excuse, the poor wretch — for I call him poor who has money which he cannot use — sends Christ's cause away to beg with more success at a much poorer door. Talk of slaves and slave-masters ! What bondage like that which con- demns a man to do what he condemns himself for doing, to harden his heart against the claims of pity, to deny his own flesh and blood, to lie, cheat, and defraud, or, if not that, every day of his life to run counter to the divine saying, What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? From such bondage, good Lord, deliver us ! *< Thou, man REDEMPTION. 135 of God, flee these things, and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness;" "fight the good fight of faith;" and, like gold which a drowning man will drop to clutch the rope flung to him from ship or shore, let go the world. With thy hands set free, lay hold on eternal life. (2.) Some are the slaves of lust. To what base society does it condemn them? To what acts of meanest treachery and blackest villany do their tyrant passions drive them ? Think of a man drowning his conscience, and by that deed effacing from his soul the most distinct remaining traces of the image of God ! Of all sinners, these are most like their master, the Devil, when he changed himself into a serpent, with its lying tongue and smooth glittering skin, to win a woman's trust. They creep into the bosom which they intend to sting, and put forth their powers to fascinate some happy singing bird, who goes fluttering, but, spell-bound, cannot help going, into their open devouring jaws. Better be a slave and die heart-broken, than be a heart-breaker. The thief — the mean, sneaking, pilfering thief — that steals my money, is a man of honour compared with him who steals a woman's virtue, and robs a household of its peace. (3.) Some are slaves of drunkenness. Of all sla- very this is the most helpless, and the most hopeless. Other sins drown conscience, but this reason and con- science too. More, perhaps, than any other vice, this blots out the vestiges of that divine image in which we were originally formed, and reduces man to the lowest degradation — lower than a beast. Smiting him with 136 REDEMPTION. the greatest impotency, in sucii slavery as that of iron to a magnet is the poor besotted drunkard to his cups. He who is a slave to man, may retain his self-respect, cherish his wife, and love his children ; and, raising his fettered hands in prayer to heaven, may preserve and present in his very chains the image of God ; but yonder wretch, with beggary hung on his back, and dissipation stamped on his bloated face — dead to shame, or, hanging his head, and passing old acquaintances with averted eye — degraded before the world, and expelled from the communion of the church — lying in the gutter — or beating his wife, or cursing his flying children, and in his sober moments cursing himself — ah, he is a slave indeed. What hope for a man who reels up to the bar of judgment, and staggers drunk into his Maker's presence? Let his fate excite your fears as well as pity. I say with the apostle, " Let him that thinketh he staudeth, take heed lest he fall." Have I not seen many, whose spring budded with the fairest promises, live to be a shame, and sorrow, and deep disgrace? And, though it were revealed from heaven that you yourself should never fall, is there nothing due to others? Does not that bloody cross, with its blessed victim, call upon every Christian to live not to himself, but to think of other's things, as well as of his own ? Every man must judge for himself ; to his own master he standeth or he falleth. But when 1 think of all the beggary, and misery, and shame, and crime, and sorrow, of which drunkenness is the prolific mother, of the many hearts it breaks, of the happy homes it curses, of the precious REDEMPTION. 137 souls it ruins, I do not hesitate to say that the question of abstinence deserves the prayerful consideration of every man ; and that, moreover, he appears to me to consult most the glory of God, the honour of Jesus, and the best interests of his fellow-men, who applies to all intoxicating stimulants the Apostolic rule, Touch not, taste not, handle not. In regard to no sin can it be so truly said that our adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour. (4.) Some are slaves to the opinions of the world. It was the boast of the Macedonian that he had conquered the world ; the world can boast that it has conquered them. Subservient to its opinions, theirs is the miser- able condition of an unhappy servant, who has to bear in some ill-governed household the caprices, not of one mistress, but of many. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but the fear of man bringeth a snare. How many of the young are ruifled, just because they have not the courage to say. Nay, to do what they know to be right — allowing themselves to be laughed out of their virtuous habits, and early holy train- ing. Then, into what misery do we see parents plunge themselves and their families by a course of extrava- gance, into which they are drawn by the whirlpool of fashion. To sacrifice the well-being of your children to a wretched vanity, to do mean or dishonest things that you may appear genteel, to prefer the approbation of the world to that of your own conscience, to incur the wrath of God that you may win a man's or woman's G 2 138 REDEMPTION. smiles, to stand more in fear of the hiss of dying men than of the deadly serpent — this slavery, common in the world, is one to which Christ's freemen should not yield — no, not for an hour. Hear how God asks, as in sur- prise, " Who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass ; and forgettest the Lord, thy maker, that hath stretched forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth?" Yet see, how men of the noblest genius and proudest intellect have crouched, slave like, before the world, laying their heads in the very dust at her feet. When Byron, for instance, stood aloft on the pinnacle of his fame, he confessed that the disapprobation of the meanest critic gave him more pain than the applause of all the others gave him pleasure. Miserable confession, and miserable man ! not less a slave that laurels wreathed his brow, and that a star glittered on his breast. What a contrast do we see in Paul ? He was a freeman ! Like some tall rock, he stands erect; unmoved from his place, or purpose, or judgment, or resolution, by the storm of a world's disapprobation raging fiercely around him. " With me," he says, " it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judg- ment ; .... he that judgeth me is the Lord." What moral grandeur is here ! What a testimony to the elevating power of piety ! What a glorious illustration of the poet's words, " He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, And all are slaves besides." REDEMPTION. 139 lu old times, men and women were said to have sold their souls to Satan, consenting that he should have them at death, on condition of receiving a power to com- mand, in their lifetime, any wealth, any honours, any pleasure their hearts might desire. As the story goes, the devil held them to the bargain ; and, when they died, the old castle shook, and the screech-owls hooted, and the dogs howled, and the lights burned blue, and the tempest roared, and people crossed themselves aa they heard the shrieking spirit borne away through the black night to hell. An old superstition ! True ; yet fables are often less wonderful than facts ; and there are things more incredible in real life than you or I have read in the wildest romance. Did Satan, according to these old legends, drive a hard bargain ? With sinners, now, he drives a harder. Deluded, defrauded, cheated, the poor sinner has no lifetime, no season of profit and pleasure. He sells himself for nought. I could fill this house with living proofs of it. They swarm in our streets in their rags and wretchedness. And what though many, who are living a life of sin, are apparently happy and prosperous ? If their hearts had a window whereby we could look within, and see the fears that agitate them, the gnawing of remorse, the stings of conscience, the apprehensions of discovery and impend- ing evil that haunt the steps and cloud the path of guilt, we should conclude that, though there were neither hell nor hereafter, the way of transgressors is hard. From their way I pray all here to turn. Why will ye die? Why? when Christ is willing, wish- 140 REDEMPTION. ful, waiting to save. Sin's is a miserable thraldom. If its wretched slaves, you are the objects of deepest compassion. Nor ever more so than when, intoxicated with the pleasant but poisoned cup, you sing and laugh and dance in chains. To men in your circumstances, and with your appalling prospects, how may we apply the words, I said of laughter, It is mad ; and of mirth, What doeth it ? God help you ! God bring you to a better mind; that, raising your fettered arms and weeping eyes to heaven for help to burst these fatal, accursed bonds, you may be free — blessed with holy liberty, and true peace, and pure pleasure, and lasting joys — redeemed and ransomed by the blood of Christ. CHRIST THE REDEEMER. In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins. — CoLOSsiANS i. 14. lyrO place touches us with a more melancholy sense of the fleeting nature of earthly glory, than an old deserted castle. All is gone but the main keep. Stoutly battling with time, as one not easily subdued, it stands erect in its ruin amid the grass-green mounds, that, like graves of the past, show where other buildings once have stood. Grey with moss, or mantled with ivy, the strong thick walls are slowly mouldering ; and there is deep desolation in these silent courts. No step but our own treads the floor that in other days shook to the dancers' feet ; nor sound is heard in halls which once rung with music, and sweet voices, and merry laughter, but the moaning v/ind, which seems to wail for the wreck around it ; or the sudden rush and flapping of some startled bird that flies at our intrusion from her lonely nest. If happily an empty chain hangs rusting in the dungeon where captives once had pined, how cold the hearth around whose roaring fires in long winter nights many a tale was told, and many a bright group had gathered, and the mother nursed her babe, and the father told his 142 CHRIST THE REDEEMER. rapt and listening boys of stirring scenes in flood and field ! In the grass-grown court below, where once they had mustered gay for the bridal, or grim for battle, the sheep are quietly feeding. And here on the battlement some pine, or birch, or mountain- ash, rooted in a crevice and fed by decay, lifts its stunted form, where the banner of an ancient house floated proudly in days of old, or spread itself out, defiant, as the fight raged around the beleaguered walls, and the war-cry of assailants without was answered by the cheers of gallant men within. Now all is changed — the stage a ruin, spectators and actors gone. They sleep in the grave ; their loves, and wars, their fears, and joys, and sorrows — where ours, too, soon shall be — buried in its cold oblivion. *' Their memory and their name is gone, Alike unknowing and unknown." And, greatest change of all, the heirs of those who reared that massy pile, and rode helmed to battle with a thousand vassals at their back, have sunk amid the wrecks of fortune. Fallen into meanness and obscurity, as humble rustics^ they now, perhaps, plough the lands which once their fathers held^ Such changes have happened in our country. But changes corresponding to these never happened in ancient Israel. It was there, as in the heavens above us, whose luminaries, after a certain period of time has elapsed, always return to the same place in the firmament, and the same relative position to each other. The sun, CHRIST THE REDEEMER. 143 for instance — although changing his place daily — shall rise and set, twelve months from this date, at the same hour, and appear at his meridian in the same spot as to-day. Corresponding to that, or like the revolution of a wheel, which restores every spoke to its former place, society — whatever change meanwhile took place in personal liberty or hereditary property — returned among the old Hebrews to the very same state in which it was at the commencement of those fifty years, whose close brought in the jubilee. " Then," said Moses, " shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family." In consequence either of his crimes or his misfortunes, the Hebrew was occasionally obliged to part with his paternal estate. His was sometimes a still greater cala- mity ; for not only was his property sold, but his liberty. He became the bond-servant of some more fortunate brother. So matters stood till the fiftieth year arrived, and the jubilee was blown. At that trumpet sound — how fondly anticipated ! how gladly heard ! — the fetters fall from his limbs, and the slave of yesterday is to-day a freeman. At that trumpet-sound the beggar dofis his rags, the weary labourer throws down his tools. Mar- riage-bells never rang so merry as that blessed peal ; it 144 CHRIST THE REDEEMER. has changed the serf into a freeholder, a man of substance and position. And as, blown with the breath of liberty, trumpet replied to trumpet, and the sound of the jubi- lee, rising from valley to mountain, echoed among the rocky hills, and spread itself over the land from beyond Jordan's bank to the shores of the sea, from the roots of snowy Lebanon to the burning desert — every man bade adieu to beggary and wandering and exile ; like parted streams, divided families were reunited ; long alienated possessions were restored to their original owners ; and, amid universal rejoicings, feastings, mirth, music, and dances, every man returned to spend the rest of his days in his father's house, and when he died, to mingle his own with ancestral dust. What a singular institu- tion ! As a civil arrangement, acting as a check both on excessive wealth and on excessive poverty, it was without a parallel in any ancient or modern nation. But it was more ; it was a symbolical institution. More than in many respects a great social blessing, it had a deep, holy, spiritual meaning. Celebrated on the great day of atonement — that day when the goat, typical of Jesus, bore away the sins of the people — it was the symbol of a better restitution and a better redemption ; and was, in fact, a striking, very beautiful, most benig- nant figure of the redemption which we have through the blood of Christ, even the forgiveness of sins. Before turning your attention to the redemption, of which that jubilee was such a remarkable figure, let me by way of warning remark — CHRIST THE REDEEMER. 146 I. Our redemption is not, like that of the Hebrews, a simple matter of time. Every fifty years, and in certain cases every seven years, redeemed the Hebrew, and restored him to the enjoyment of his property. " If thy brother," said God, " an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years ; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And w^hen thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty." Thus, time set free the Hebrew slave, and, as its finger moved over the face of the sun-dial, pointed him onwards to freedom. E very w^ here, and in its most ordinary course, time works many changes — the young grow old, and raven locks grow grey ; the poor rise into wealth, while the rich sink into poverty ; old families disappear, and new ones start up — like mushrooms. And, constantly changing the condition of society, as he turns the wheel of fortune. Time is altering the form even of this great globe itself. The proudest mountains are bending before his sceptre, and yielding to his silent but resistless sway. Nor is there a tiny stream that trickles over the rock, and, often hid under the broad fern, and nodding grasses, and wild flowers that grow- on its narrow banks, betrays itself only by the gentle murmur with which it descends to join the river that receives its tribute, and rolls it onward to the ocean, but — teaching us in the highest matters not to despise the day of small things — is wearing down the 146 CHRIST THE REDEEMER, mountain, and filling up the sea. Through the agencies of heat and cold, dews and rains, summer showers and winter snows, time is remodelling the features of our world, and — perhaps in that symbolizing the onward progress and future condition of society — reducing its various inequalities to one great common level. But amid these changes shall years change, as a matter of course, the condition of a sinner ? Shall they redeem him, for instance, from his slavery, or even relax the chains of sin ? In the course of time you will grow older, but not of necessity better. On the contrary, while the Hebrew slave was, by every year and day he lived, brought nearer to redemption, and could say, on such a day and at such an hour I shall be free, it is a solemn and awful fact, that the longer you live in sin, the more distant, more difficult, more hopeless, does your salvation become. " The last state of that man is worse than the first." Let us not flatter ourselves with the very common hope, I shall grow better as I grow older. That is very unlikely to happen. The uncon- verted are less likely to be saved at the jubilee age of fifty than at five-and-twenty — in their seventieth than in their seventh year. " Oh that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end ! " Do you say, in reply, But what then am I to do ? Can I redeem myself? Assuredly not. But are we, because we can be redeemed only through the blood of Christ, to sit still ; as if that redemption would come like a jubilee in the common course of providence, or time, or nature ? No. We are to be up and doing ; ciir:st the redeemer. 147 since, in a sense, it is as true of a soul's as of a nation's liberty — " Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." I do not say that we are to rise like an oppressed nation which wrings its liberties from a tyrant's hand; nor that we can purchase redemption, as we bought with our millions the freedom of West Indian slaves ; nor that through works of righteousness that we do or have done, we can establish any claim whatever to its bless- ings. By care and industry you may acquire goods, not goodness ; money, but never merit — merit in the sight of God. And yet I say, in. God's name, " labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life;" " work out your own salvation with fear and trembling ;" " give diligence to make your calling and election sure ;" " take diligent heed to do the commandment and the law, to love the Lord your God, and to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments, and to cleave unto him, and to serve him with all your heart, and with all your soul." There are various ways of being diligent. One man, seated at the loom, is busy with the shuttle ; another, at the desk, with his pen ; another, in the field, at his plough ; another bends to the oar, and, ploughing the deep, reaps his harvest on the stormy waters; another, seen through the smoke of battle, is straining all his energies on the bloody field, winning honours with the bayonet's rush and at the cannon's mouth. And, though men may call him idle, yonder 148 CHRIST THE REDEEMEK. poor beggar, who, in orphan child or infirm old man, claims our pit}^ and reproves om- indolence, is busy also — diligent as the others. His hand is not idle, it is busy knocking ; nor are his feet, they bear him weary from house to house, from door to door ; nor is his tongue, it pleads his poverty, and tells his tale of sorrow ; while, pressed by necessity and earnest of purpose, out of his hollow eyes he throws such looks of misery, as move compassion and melt the heart. And such as that suppliant's, along with the use of other means, are the labours, the diligence, to which <^lod's gracious mercy and your own necessities call you. Unable to save yourselves, be it yours to besiege with prayers the throne of grace. Learn from Simon Peter what to do, and where to turn ; not Peter sleeping in the garden, but Peter sinking in the sea. One who in his boyhood had learned to breast the billow, and feel at home upon the deep, he makes no attempt to swim ; the shore lies beyond his reach, nor can boldest swimmer live amid these swelling waters. His companions cannot save him ; their boat, unmanageable, drifts before the gale, and they cannot save themselves. He turns his back on them. He directs nor look nor cry to them ; but, fixing his eyes on that divine form which, calm, unmoved, master of the tempest, steps majestically on from billow to billow, the drowning man throws out his arms to Jesus, and cries " Lord, save me." Did he cry in vain? No more shall you. Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost ; nor did he ever say unto any of the sons of men. Seek ye me in vain. CHRIST THE llEDEEMER. 14