:i-^»-i!i luTlBR^TlY i Theological3eminary PRINCETON, N. J. C'isr C^^^' ^..- Division _ Shdf. ^UL '/..Secti, Book i: hx SERMONS DOOTPtlNAL AND PRACTICAL. BY THE REV. WILLIAM ARCHER BUTLER, M.A. LATB PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITV OF DUBLIN. SECOND SERIES. EDITED, WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR'S LIFE, BY THE VERY REV. THOMAS WOODWARD, M.A. DEAN OP DOWN. NINTH EDinON. |?onbon : MA CM ILL AN AND CO. 1S73. ['f/ie Rifjhl of Rfprodtiition and Tramhition is rcsirred.] LONDON: CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, BREAD STR£ET HILL. ADVERTISEMENT. The Editor of the Sermons contained in tins Volume has confined himself to the simple task of presenting a faithful transcript of the original manuscript. He is aware that upon many of the points, which are directly treated or incidentally noticed, much difference of opinion must exist; and he is in no wise pledged to defend all the arguments and interpretations of Scripture adopted by the lamented Author. A pos- thumous work is necessarily imperfect, and discourses intended for oral delivery would doubtless have gained much in terseness of style and diction by a careful preparation for the press. But, even in their present form, these Sermons will be found to be of no ordinary merit. They are marked by the same originahty and vigour of expression, the same richness of imagery and illustration, the same large views and catholic spirit, and the same depth and fervour of devotional feeling, which so remarkably distinguished the preceding Series, and which rendered it a most valuable accession to our theological literature. CONTENTS. 8ERiM0N I. CHRIST THE SOURCE OF ALL BLESSINGS. PiiuG 0/ Him are ye in Christ Jesus, vho of God is made unto us wisdom, aitd njfiteousness, and sanctijication, and redemption. — 1 CoR. i. 30 . . ? SEKMON II. LIVING AND DYING UNTO THE LORD. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord ; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord. — Rom. xiv. 8 25 SERMON III. THE HOPE OF GLORY AND THE CHARITIES OF LIFE. It duth not yet appear what we shall he: but we know that, when lie shall appear, we shall be like Him ; for we shall see Him as He is. — 1 John iii. 2 . . . . 3H SERMON IV. THE HOLY TRINITY. And He showed me a pure river of wafer of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. — Rev. xxii! 1 6£ SERMON V. THE SORROW THAT EXALTS AND SANCTIFIES. SliSied are they that mourn, for they shall he comforted. — St. Matt. y. 4 . 67 SER.AION VI. THE PL RIFYING POWER OF TRIBULATION. Whatarc these which art arrayed in white robes? and whence came they f .... rhtxe are they 'vhich came out of great tribulation. — Rev. vii. Iii, 14 7^ \i CONTENTS. SERMON VII. THE GROWTH OF THE DIVINE LIFE. PAGE / vnite unto you, little children, because ye hare Tcnmon the FcUher. — 1 John ii. 13 . . 92 SERMON VilL LESSONS FROM A MONARCH'S DEATH. (Preached on the Sunday after the death of Willi ina IV.) Tlius saith the Lord God ; Reviove the diadem, and take o§ the crown I EzEK. xxi. 26 106 SERMON IX. DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. Ye are become dead to the law by the body of Christ. — Rom. vii. 4 . . . .121 SERMON X. THE RESTORER OF MANKIND. I mil restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord. — JiiR. XXX. 17 138 SERMON XI. THE TRUE FAST. (Preached for the Mendicity Institution, at St. Stephen's Chapel, Dublin, Sunday Morning, July 23, 1837.) [g not this the fast that I have chosen? . ... Is it not to deal thy bread to the liunrjry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house ? I17tC7i thou seestthe naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? — Isaiah Iviii. C, 7 153 SERMON XII. THE WAY TO DIVINE KNOWLEDGE. (Preached for Peter's Schools, Peter's Church, Jan. 28, 1838;) (/ any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of Ood.—ST. JouN vii. 17 168 SER]\ION XIII. THE ASCENSION. (The Ascension Day.) WkUe thcii beheld. He was taken up; aii.t a cloud received Him out of their v'lht.—AcTn i. S) 1M9 CONTENTS. vii SERMON XIV. THE FOLLY OF MORAL COWARDICE. Be not imu, therefore, ashamed of the testimony of the Lord. — 2 Tim, L 3 . 199 SERMON XV. THE WILL OF GOD TOWARDS HIS CHILDREN. ft w not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish. — St. Matt, xviii. 14 214 SERMON XVI. STRENGTH AND MISSION OF THE CHURCH. (Preached at Leeds Parish Church, Nov. 21, 1841.) The Lord hath founded Zion, and the poor of His people shall trust in it. — Isaiah xlv. 32 227 SERMON XVII. THE INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. (Preached at St. Stephen's Church, June 4, 1837.) And. hch.oid, 'he whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw Him ihey besought Sim that He would depart out of their coasts. — St. Matt. viii. 34 288 SERMON XVIII. THE ADVENT EXALTS HUMAN RELATIONS. (Preached for the Western Lying-In Hospital, Dublin, December 2, 1838. Advent Sunday.) And she h-ought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped Him in swaddling "loth'"^, and laid Him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. — St. Luke ii. 7 264 SERMON XIX. DANGER OF BACKSLIDING. (Preached at St. Anne's Church, Dawson Street, July 2, 1837.) Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love — Rkv. u. 4 271 SERMON XX. THE WORD OF GOD. (Preached at St. Stephen's, Mount Street, June 18, 1837.) Thf p^cplc pressed upon Him to hear the Word of God. — St. Lutis v. 1 . . 287 rlJi CONTENTS. SEEMON XXL THE CLAIMS OF SPIRITUAL DESTITUTION. (Preached at St. Patrick's, Nov. 28, 1844, for the Additional Curates' Fund.) PAOB ... Having hope, when your faith is increased, that we shall be enlarged by you, according to our rule abundantly, to preach the Gospel in the regions beyond you, and not to boast in another man's line of things, made ready to our hand. — 2 Cor. x. 15, 16 ......... 302 SERMON XXll. THE BLESSEDNESS OF SUBMISSION. (Preached at the Magdalen Asylum, May 28, 1837.) For my yolce is easy, and my burden is light. — St. Matt. xi. 30 ... 817 SERMON XXIII. THE HOLY TRINITY. (Trinity Sunday, May 21, 1837.) And the Word ivas God.— St. J onii 11 328 SERMON XXIV. WATCHMAN, WHAT OF THE NIGHT? (College Chapel, Friday, May 31, 1839.) fie calleth to me out of Seir, Watchman, ^chat of the night ? Watchman, tvhat of the night 1 The watchman said. The morning cometh, and also the night : if ye will inqidre, inquire ye ; return, come. — Isaiah xxi. 11,12 . 339 SERMON XXV. THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FINAL JUDGMENT. (Preached in belialf of the Association for the Rcli ^f of Distressed Protestants, St. Peter's Church, Dublin, Sunday ''uue IS, 1841.) And the King shall answer, and say wnto tha.t. Verily I say wtito you Inasmuch as yj have done it unto one nf the least of these my brethren, j/c have done it unto vie. — St. JIatt. xxv. 40 » 347 SERMON XXVI. ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 'First Sunday after Trinity.) BiJ/ween ui and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot ; wither can they pais to us, that would come from thence. — St. Luke xvi. 2(> 369 .^:^y;mfn;' OX.OGI SERMON I. CHRIST THE SOURCE OF ALL BLESSINGS. 1 CoiuNxniANs I. 30. Of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made imto us uisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. The relation of Christ Jesus to the Church at large bj covenant, the relation of Christ Jesus specially to those within that Church, who, fulfilling the terms of the covenant, make the promised blessings their own, — is the most wondrous of all conceivable subjects of thought. In the view of the inspired teachers it seems to absorb everything into itself, to comprehend everything, to transform everything; it is the sun in the vast heaven of their contemplation, attracting all around it, and by whose light alone every object, to be visible at all, must be seen. It is as if they had suddenly received new organs adapted to a new and spiritual illumination, and become utterly blind to every other ; — it is as if ordinary men were but as those who walk in sleep, who come forth in their dreaming state uttering strange fancies of unreal and shadowy worlds that each builds for himself and none can communicate to his fellow; but that these men were given to burst the slumber, to see the vast, solid, immutable, reality of things, the true unshaken world, — the same for every unsealed eye that beholds it, — and thence evermore cried aloud to the dreaming millions around them — " Awake, thou that sleepest ! and Christ shall give thee light." And all this, which is the unrivalled character of the New Testament, Avithout a particle of mysticism, of cold unpractical exaltation, Wlien ti. li 10 CHRIST THE SOURCE OE [Serm. i. men desert the homely familiarities of life, it is easy to glide into ccstacies ; persons of warm fancies are perpetually doing so ; and we know liow such perilous excitement is pleasurably maintained as long as the dull realities of daily existence are forgotten ; but one harsh thought of the actual world destroys all the enthusiast's power, unnerves the wings of fancy ; it is, — to use a mechanical metaphor, — the jet of cold water which at once condenses all the evaporation ! But the Apostles, in tlieir hours of brightest thought, are at home among the minutest concerns of common life, they accompany us into every recess of domestic duty, tlieir "bread of life" is ^'- daily bread;" and perhaps they are never more truly elevated than when they discourse of the humblest topics of the Christian's household. The lark when half hidden in the clouds can discern tlic minutest speck among the grass and flowers ; the spirit of Paul and John could look forth from its place of repose in heaven to see only the more distinctly every affection and duty and relationship that belongs to the lowliest earthly estate. And thus nothing is forgotten, but all is sanctified. Life is here ; but life blended with the Life of heaven. The great characters of human existence are unchanged, its relation- ships, — father and child, monarch and subject, master and servant, husband and wife, — are as before ; but there is a seal upon them stamped by the signet of God, — they are all " in Christ." " Children, obey your parents, in the Lord." " Pay ye tribute, for they are God's ministers.'''' " Servants, be obedient, — as the servants of Christ, — for ye serve the Lord.''' " Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church." This new and celestial connexion with Christ became the ground and motive of everything. The Church was intended to be the world, but the world of Christ; it was to be " the City of God," a specimen of what, even on earth and before the redemption of the body, a polity might be through every legion of wliicli the living graces of Christ were circulating. Serm. I.] ALL BLESSIXGii. 11 And thus all tlie chief features of human life were preserved, the lines of the portrait remained ; but thej were coloured with a Divine pencil, the hues of heaven were on them, " into tiiat Image" were tliey "changed, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord!" From birth, then, (for men, to live eternally, must be " born of the Spirit," which is " the Spirit of Christ") to death (for men, to live eternally, must "fall asleep in Christ") He is the one central glory of the Church. The covenant is " the covenant of God in Christ," it is " His p)omise in Christ;" His purpose was "to gather in one all things in Christ;" that all might be "one in Christ Jesus," all "one body in Christ." AVe need not wonder, then, tliat in the passage before us He is set forth as the ciiannel of every spiritual blessing; that on Him all is made to depend which fit^ the trembling sinner's soul for glory. But sliall we not wonder at those, who, reading such things of this wondrous Being, seeing in Him tlie golden link that binds the spirit of a man to the God who inhabiteth eternity, can yet conceive that the nature of man, or of angel, was adequate to accom plish what He accomplished ? to be " the express image of the Father's person," and thence to be to us, " from Him " as Fountain, our wisdom, our righteousness, om* sanctification, and our redemption ? The Apostle in the context is speaking of the rejection of Christ, — his rejection among Jews and Gentiles. He declares that this great object, — a crucified Saviour^ — was " to the Jews a stumbling-block, to the Greeks foolishness." In truth, it was a trying office the Apostle had to discharge. Ole had to publish to the world as its only Hope, a man des()iscd hj his own nation through life, and dying as a malefactor at Ihcir hands. It was not merely to vindicate the innocence of this man, for in that the world could have been little concerned ; it was to declare Him " the power of God and the wisdom of God," to force them to see. through all the degradation and the B 2 12 CHRIST THE SOURCE OF [Serra. i. horrors of this man's death, the eternal purposes of heaven stretching into dim infinity beyond them. It appears to me, yet I do not offer it as more than a conjecture, — that the expressions of the Apostle in the text are fitted with a very peculiar adaptation to the passage preceding it. In the 27th and 28th verses he mentions four classes of persons and things which are concerned in this great work of salvation through Christ, though in difi'erent ways : the foolish things of the world, the weak things of the world, the base things of the world, the things which are not, — the absolutely non-existent. These are (in the mysterious working of God) the commissioned army of Heaven, these are the instruments by which the stupendous pm-pose of Divine mercy is to be wrought out. The result he states in the 29th verse, " that no flesh should glory in His presence," that the power might be clearly seen to be that of God alone,— seen, alike by those who are to receive the benefit, and those who are to be the means of be- stowing it. But in the Divine Martyr of the Cross, the Church was ever to find its image and model ; and hence (as it seems) the Apostle proceeds to invest Christ with an attribute "answering in each instance to the classes already mentioned of His " servants and followers." " The foolish things of the world " shall " confound the wise," for Christ is made unto us " wisdom ;" " the weak things of the world" shall " confound the mighty," for Christ, in being made to us " righteousness" or " justification," has already, in the weakness of humble humanity, overcome principalities and powers ; " tlie base and despised things of the world hath God chosen," for Christ is made unto us " sanctification," — the sowrce, and the earnest, and the beginning, to " him that humbleth himself," of eternal and ineffable glory; the " tilings that are not" shall " bring to nought things that arc,"— shall supersede, eclipse, and transcend them,— for Christ is made to us " redemption," He rescues from bondage thousands who till His redemption " were not," did not exist in the empire of Divine mercy,— He Serm.i.] ALL BLESSINGS. 13 shall achieve that still more wondrous "redemption of the lody^' which I think to be the " rcderaptioit" mainly intended here, — whereby a frame virtually non-existent shall be re- created to immortality and blessedness unknown in " the things that are," — in the present creation. And thus arc the gifts which Christ bestows, ordained to be the glorious supplements of the infirmities of His Church ; His wisdom, of its ignorance ; His justification, of its helplessness ; His sanctification, of its debasement ; His redemption, of its nothingness. But whether this was the peculiar course of thought in the Apostle's mind or not when he framed this memorable sen- tence, the instruction it contains remains substantially the same, the consolation it tenders to the dependent Christian equally unaltered. Let us for a while reflect on it ; it is a miniature of the Gospel portrait. Wondrous words indeed are these ! So few, yet so rich with boundless meaning ; level to the capacities of children, profound enough to exhaust the conceptions of angels. It is my wish to speak, for the present, briefly and simply of them, avoiding the harsh and unpractical controversies that have peculiarly harassed this passage, as they have done every passage of Scripture in direct proportion to the fulness of its blessedness of consolation, — for these are as insects that ever select the ripest fruit in the Eden of God to fasten on and to corrode. My own object (I will confess it) has long been to strive after that great and single thought of which all these controversies as to the Work of Christ in relation to the soul of Man, — His righteousness imputed and His holiness imparted, — seem to present us but detached and therefore lifeless portions. These disputations give us truth indeed; but truth partial and imperfect : it is as if one should labour to reflect the whole amplitude of Heaven in each of the scattered fragments of a broken mirror. And when these poor fragments are bound together in the framework of a 14 CHRIST THE SOURCE OF [Serm. i. human system, tlie case is little mended ; they arc fragments still; the joinings and tlic fissures are too palpable,— they still cross and distort the image. What then is that great and fundamental thought which, if any other, involves in it the fulness of the Gospel ; on which all the breadth and fulness of Divine glory rests reflected ; which suffices to all who would be humbly happy, wliile it presents unfathomed mystery to all who would dare be more ? What but this— that as the basis of all knowledge of God is contained in the revelation of His threefold unity ; — so the root of all Christian Faith as to God's Work in Man is in the parallel and not less wondrous truth, that we are called to be One with Him. Mysterious as is the oneness of the Father and the Son, it is not one whit more mysterious than the oneness of the Eegenerate Spirit of Man with the same God in Christ Jesus. It is the perfection of this union which all the rival dogmas attempt, after their fixshion, to express;— it is the full conception of this union which ought to supersede all these contentions, by placing us on a height from which we can aflford to look down upon them all ! .And now let us see how the thought is worked out in the words before us. St. Paul seems to have had in his mind (for many are the relations tliat meet together in a single passage of the Holy Ghost's writing) a conception of the gradual gi-owth of the Christian spirit under the hand of Christ, from its dawn of grace to its final fulfilment in glory. He seems to view Christ as the great dispenser of the Faiher's treasures, accumulating gil'ts upon the Believer's soul till it brightens into the very Image of Himself; to view it rising higher and higher, as it is drawn nearer and nearer to Him, till the crisis of the final redemption is come and it is lost from the eye, hidden beyond the clouds. I do not myself mucli sympatliise with the spirit of precise and uniform measurement that some I,ersous jjrofess to be able to apply to the history of the Cliris- tian Course ; yet in this place stages of progress seem certanily Serm. i.] ALL BLESSINGS. lb intimated, blessings that surpass each other ; the words are as the ladder in the Patriarch's vision, " set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven ; and hehold, the angels of God asccndhig and descending on it." In God Himself, — the pure, essential Dietj, — the whole is based. "Of God are ye in Christ;" and Christ is "made unto us" all these blessings " from God." God is the ultimate Source and Cause of the entire ; Christ acts as the minister of His mercies ; " a Person divine and human is the appointed Mediator between the human and divine. " From Him' or " out of Him," the verse begins, " are ye in Christ Jesus;" born of God Himself by the instrumentality of Christ, and known for the children of God when wearing the signature of Christ. As tliere is no other channel to God but Christ Jesus, so there is no other beginning or termination to the work of Christ Jesus but God. The language of Scripture on this point is wonderful, unfathomable. It would appear that, as regards the work of grace, God sees nothing from His tin-one but Christ Jesus alone and altogether; as if all else was covered with clouds and darkness impenetrable to the eye of Divine love. It would seem as though the radiance that issues on all sides from the Divine nature were separable into distinct beams; that every ray of mercy gathered through this medium to the world, while all beside and beyond it bui-st forth only to scorch and to wither. The Church is His Body ; and it is only as His Body that it is known or numbered, in the Councils of Heaven. The mei'cies, whatever they be, that stretch beyond the Church in the scheme of grace, are but the diffusive blessings that spread around His mystical Body, even as the hem of Ilis garment had healing virtue of old ; they are still given to glorify Him, and as appendages of His royalty. But, as all descends through Christ, so all descends from God. The Divine nature is still sovereign in this mysterious economy ; the Christian Avould be but an idolater if he failed to recognise this. In adoring 16 CHRIST THE SOURCE OF [Serm. i. Christ with all the fervour of utter worship, you must look beyond the man ; the imagination must, indeed, fail to con- ceive Him, but the Reason must learn to acknowledge the co> eternal " Word of God," who, " with God," " was God ;" and to know in that infallible Being, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the last source of eveiy blessing the human Jesus gives. " Of God are ye in Christ Jesus." How, then, is this mysterious union wrought, by which we are thus connected with the Godhead by being " in Christ Jesus?" Brethren, there are two senses in which such a question as this may be understood ; two senses which I heartily wish, for the peace of the Church, had been oftener carefully dis- tinguished. If a man ask me, what is the very nature itself of the union which takes place between a Christian and His God through Christ, — what is the actual process by which the work of Christ becomes appropriated to us and so gains us this blessing, — I reply, that I know not, and in this world never expect to know. The subject, in this view of it, lies utterly beyond all human conception. Whether wrought within us or without us, — whether indwelling or imputed, — the process itself is wholly inconceivable to a being formed as man is. Explain it to the utmost, and upon any system soever, we must come at length to something we cannot explain ; and to see this clearly from the beginning, is the best security from fruitless, and irritating, and dangerous disputation. The connexion between Christ and the Soul is as really a mystery as the con- junction of God and Man in the Incarnation. Sometliing there must be, — something there is, — as Scripture most amply attests — done for us when we are indeed " translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son," of a nature to us unimaginable, of which we cannot be directly conscious, which is known only to the Eternal Spirit that works it. We only know, that from being " born of the flesh," " earthly, sensual Serm.i.] ALL BLESSINGS. 17 devilisli," — we become " born of the Spirit," introduced into the family and household of God ; — we only know, that there is an interchange by vvdiich as Christ became man without ceasing to be God, so is the Regenerate, without ceasing to be man, identified with Christ, and righteousness, holiness, im- mortality, all things ; — but how this is wrought, or can be wrought, no human theory has ever explained, no wise man will ever think of attempting to explain. We adore the mercy, we enlarge upon the blessing, but we comprehend it not ! We live a natural life, but no man has yet discovered what is the 'principle of natural life. We see, and rejoice in the noontide light ; but no man can tell hoio it is that light affects the optic nerve and wakes it into apprehending the thousand hues and shadows of loveliness with which God has invested His creation! Our very thoughts and their course are mysteries whose sources we cannot sound. It is hard, is it? to under- stand how we can be one with Christ in His privileges ? let U3 first try can we understand how we are able to entertain the question, to think of that or of anything ! But if a man ask the wiser question, — what are the circum- stances of this union whose basis is hid in fathomless mystery? what are the Scriptural characteristics of the connexion ? we can then reply by stating the results perpetually dependent on this blessed participation ; the gifts by which this hidden glory makes itself known. We can reply with the text, that it is by Christ's being " made to us wisdom, and righteous- ness, and sanctification, and redemption." We can express Him by His effects. He is made to us Wisdom by enlighten- ing us, Eighteousness by justifying us, Sanctification by purifying us, Eedemption by purchasing us into immortality. Yet, while thus insisting upon the results, Christ — tlie ground and cause of the results — must ever be included as part of the blessing ; if it be folly to think to explain the fact, it is far more deadly error to forget it. In every one of these parti- culars. He is alike the Giver, the Gift, and the Object of the 18 CHRIST THE SOURCE OF [Seim. i. Gift ; in every one of them He is (as is intimated in the expression " made unto us") identitied with His people in the spiritual bonds of the same body and blood. We have spoken of the passage as designating a progress of blessings ; let us contemplate the Christian Soul making its first step upon this path of peace ; and then, as possessing in Him who gave the power to make that step, all the fulness of grace it can lead to ! Wisdom — the apprehension of the true and Divine know- ledge — is just this first stage ; the clearing of the eye of reason for the prospect itself of eternity and of God. Christ who gives it, — Christ who of old was declared under the title of " Wisdom," — He also is the Object most prominent in the foreground of the Picture which spiritual wisdom presents to tlie awakened soul of the convert. Christ, I must repeat, is here declared to be " to us made Wisdom," not so much because He is the giver of wisdom as because He is the ground and object of it ; not so much because He declares to us the truth as because He is the truth. He gives us knowledge in giving us Himself. It is as Light is said to sJioio us all things ; while in reality all we see is still only liglit itself. The revcaler is also the revelation. It is hence that St. Paul speaks of this " wisdom of God in a mystery" as that which Jew and Gentile alike spurned; — like the unhappy seceders of our own day, the wisdom of Christ's words they might allow, but the wisdom that saw in Himself the ohject of His own language, that turned the eye of the Soul on Him not merely for what He said but for what He did, — not as an inspired Preacher only, but as a Divine King and Priest and Sacrifice also, — this they could not receive. They could tolerate Christ on the Mount, but not Christ on the Cross, And hence they lost the blessing ; to such Christ was not " made wisdom ;" for round the Cross all the truest glories of Divine wisdom gather; and they who will not study heaven there, can never know it. But oh, the blessedness of that soul which, undisturbed by Sei-m.i.] ALL BLFSSLVGS. 19 these vain suggestions, opens for the first time to the full appreciation of " the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ," and feels tlie liighest wisdom of earth grow pale in com- parison ! That bright infancy of grace, which has so much of the simplicity and devotedness of the infancy of nature ! and to which on the other hand (let me add) the youth of Nature seems so peculiarly adapted. Think not, ye who are young in the life of this world, that the time is not yet come for this stage of the Christian course. The wisdom of Christ is the prerogative of no special age ; but if its general spirit could claim any as peculiarly its own, would it not be among the young it would most naturally seek its disciples ? Christ took children in Ilis arms to bless them; you are baptized as infants, that there may be no delay in exercising its pledged graces aiid verifying its solemn vows. I speak for Christian educa- tion, which itself is built upon this principle ; whose express object, wherever it is rightly conceived, is to assist tliis growth in grace, to sustain, guard, and cherish it by every human help. What, indeed, seems to combine more truly the loveliest and best of earth and heaven, than this simplieily of Divine wisdom in childhood and youth ; this early sur- render to God, which makes the life of nature and of grace begin almost together; which, by hallowing every innocent enjoyment with gratitude to its Giver, tits almost for heaven the mirth itself of this world, where mirth is so seldom wholly guiltless '? And now, before advancing farther, it is fit to mention to you (what our version very inaccurately conveys) that the first of these four important words is meant to embrace the rest. The " righteousness, sanctification, and redemption " are the ingi-edients of the " wisdom ;" the exact translation of the original being, — " who is made unto us a wisdom from God (in contrast to the false wisdom which he had censured) — even righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption," Christ is our wisdom in being to us these things; that is — He is the 20 CHRIST THE SOURCE OF [Serm. i. prime object of all true wisdom, inasmuch as He is the source of all true blessedness. This blessedness, we see, is threefold ; and one word, Christ, expresses it all. I have no intention now of dilating on each of its members ; we have no time to follow the course of each of these rivers of Paradise as they flow, and shall for ever flow, througli the spirits of the elect of God ; I pause rather by the Fountain ; come and see how they issue from it. I must again remind you to weigh well the force of the expression, — " is made unto us." Let no man persuade you that this can be satisfied by any remote or indirect connexion with Christ ; it is intimate as life is ; He Himself is made to us the thing He gives. As one with Htm, we obtain the whole inheritance of Grace and Glory. The instant that we are incorporated into the mystical body of which He is the head ; the instant in which we are made living stones of the temple of which He is corner-stone ; the instant that we become branches of that celestial vine, — that instant we possess the seed of the entire, and all the life of the Christian,' — yea, all his eternity is but the less or greater development of the Christ he bears within, around^ and upon him. I have spoken of a progress of blessings ; it is a progress to us ; but not in the gift of Jesus Christ; — to receive Him is to receive the germ of every blessing that is written in the Book of God. One with Christ, we must have pardon ; for how could God love the Head and hate the Members? One with Christ, we must have sanctifi- cation ; for how could He that is boundlessly pure remain one with aught that is wilfully unholy? One with Christ, we must have the prospective redemption of the whole man to glory : for how coidd He abandon to the everlasting grave a portion of His own being, such as He has deigned to make us, — and think His happiness complete? Thus in blending Himself witli ns, " He hath done all things well ;" He has in that one unfathomable mystery accomplished all mysteries. He is — not the declarer only, or the means only, or the Seim. I.] ALL BLESSINGS. 21 instrument only, — lie is " made unto us " — He hath Himself become — righteousness, sanctification, redemption. We have justification as we are seen in Him ; we have sanctification as He is seen in us ; we have increasing holiness, and mutual com- munion, and ultimate redemption, as both combine. " Abide ;->^^^ / in me and I in you. . .He that abideth in me and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit," — there is our holiness. '^ As ^.^-■'■' thou. Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us,'' — there is our bond of mutual communion. " Ye are ^aCi 3 dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God ; when Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall i/e also a-pjpear with Him in glory, '^ — there is our ultimate redemption of body and spirit into the mansions of eternity. Christ reappears in all ; for all the New Testament theology is but different per- spective views of the one unchangeable object — the gift of Jesus Christ; seen in one direction it is Pardon, seen in another, it is Holiness, seen in another, it is Glory. He justifies as Christ crucified and risen without us; He sanctifies as Christ crucified and risen within us ; He glorifies in virtue of both, as Christ enthroned in the fulness of consummate power, and at length " subduing all things unto Himself." Feel and know this as it ought to be felt and known ; and you may leave the rest to the schools. These are days of harsh dis- putings, days when men are very bitter to each other for the love of God ; I know not how others feel ; but it seems to me as if, — could a man once thoroughly realize to himself the depth of this union with the infinite purity of Christ, could he once realize the heaven that is in liim when Christ is there, could he gaze, not to question and criticise, but in humble adoring joy, upon the face of the risen Jesus, and there but once behold his own " acceptance in the Beloved ; " all diffi- culties were dissolved in that blessed vision, every doubt would be forgotten in the fulness of its glory ! Fix soul and spirit steadily upon the oneness of the Son of God with the forgiven and adopted sons of men, and all the littleness of proud rest- 22 CHRIST THE SOURCE OF [Serm, i. less disputation will disappear from the view, consumed in the blaze of that transcendent thought. " He is made unto us righteousness, sanctification, redemption ; " what need of more? for all the practical purposes of comfort and holiness, what need of more ? Why raise troublous and perplexing questions as to precise dates of pardon and purification ? Eeceive the full blessing of Christ by faith, and in His ordinances ; and these, and " all things," are yours ; for " ye are washed, ye are sanctified, ye are justified, in the Name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." Alas, that with something of the plain simple-hearted trust with which in the Church's first days these things were received, we could learn rather to realize the truth than to contend about its nature ! We have a glorious inheritance; and instead of entering in and taking possession, we fritter away our short allowance of time in dis- puting about the wording of the title-deeds ! Oh miserable, frivolous, faithless mockery ! Conceive that, instead of receiv- ing the sacramental token of remission, and hearing or reading the word of life, you stood in the very light of the vision of God; that you heard His own blessed voice pronounce the Avord of acceptance that translated you from the kingdom of darkness, and made you one with Him in His Divine Son ; that thus assm-ed and thus delighted, lost in inexpressible gra- titude — with all the past of wretchedness, all the present and future of glory, pressing upon the soul ; — conceive, I say, that in such an hour you were to turn to the blessed Eevealer, and tell Him you could not be content to receive or enjoy His favours, unless He should explain with minuteness the precise mode in which this gift of Himself was to operate upon every separate faculty of your soul, and every particular relation between you and Him ! The feeling and the cry of faith is — He gives us Christ, and in Him all things. Christ cannot be ours and any grace be absent ; this King cannot enthrone Himself in our Spirit and not bring willi Him His whole retinue of blessings. Blessings may — they must arise in Serm.i.] ALL BLESSINGS. 23 succession to creatures that live in successive time ; but the first instant that Christ is ours tlie seed of every blessing is ours, a life of sanctification is hidden in tliat moment, nay, — a long perspective of infinite glory is tlicre,— death is conquered, Satan chained, and Heaven won ; for He veho accomplished all these things " is made unto us rigliteousness, and sanctifi- cation, and redemption." The gift is ours, let it expand as it will in our heart and life : Christ is here, and He, the " Son over His own house," will take care to rule it in wisdom ; in having Him we have pardon, in having Him we have holiness, in having Him we have heaven itself, — " raised up together, and made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." All this is mysterious, indeed ; of course it is ; who is he that will believe God made one with man, and have the union wrought icithout mystery ? Children of the living God ! ye walk in mystery. Your spiritual birth is a mystery, your fellowship with Christ is a mystery, your daily graces are a mystery, your triumphant death is a mystery, your resurrection to glory will be but the consummation of mystery. j\Iyslcry there must be wherever an infinite Creator and his iinite creature embrace ; and it is, therefore, your glory that you are thus robed and shrouded in mystery. Trast no one who would draw you forth from it : it is the awful shadow which eternity casts across time. Believe no one who would give you a religion without much and solemn mystery ; — and above all, when you think of God in Christ, of what He lias done, and what He still does, and what He will do, be well assured that in all His dealings there must be much you can never expect to lathom ; before which, therefore, you can but bow in prostrate humility of adoration ; knowing — simply knowing — that all He will do He can do, such is His power ; all He can rightly do He will, such is His love ! These things are " known in part," and therefore, we can of them but " pro- phesy in part." But there is no one who knows not what ought to be the practical working of such a faith. He is all 24 CHRIST THE SOURCE OF ALL BLESSINGS. [Serm. i. things to us, that we may be in all things His. He is to us " righteousness," that we may rejoice in His pardon with a joy of the Holy Ghost ; He is to us " sanctification," that we may bear the fruits of His indwelling Spirit ; He is to us " re- demption," that we may walk in white as being " worthy," — worthy to " follow Him whithersoever He goeth" hereafter in glory, as following Him whithersoever He goeth in sadness and suffering now. Go forth, then, ye ransomed ones, and remember that you bear through the world this day the image and superscription of Christ Jesus ; in whatever company of men you stand, forget not that His signature is upon you ; — and when men, thoughtless and ungodly, would win you from His service, tell them, that there is One in heaven with whom you are one, that you live as members of His spiritual frame, incorporated into Him, in and by Him righteous, sanctified, redeemed ; and that being thus not your own but His, you are resolved, whatever the dreaming world may say, in Him to live that in Him you may die, — in Him to die that in Him you may live for ever I SERMON II. LIVING AND DYING UNTO THE LORD, Romans XIV. 8. For whclher we live, we live unto the Lord ; and whether we die, we die uiUo the Lord. The Cliristian Church, my dearest brethren, is now advanced tlirough many ages of its existence ; but from its infancy to its maturity that natm-al human heart, on which its principles have had to operate, has continued the same. The being whom we find around us in the daily walks of life is the very being whom we meet in the pages of the New Testament : — the passions, — the hopes, — the fears, — the desires,— the preju- (iices, — which we find mirrored in its records, might, — except for the mere peculiarities of circumstance, — have been reflected from the human breast of this age, as well as from that of eighteen hundred years ago. It is this identity, indeed, which makes the little volume of the New Testament so invaluable and so perpetual a guide to the sincere disciple of Christ. In every sentence he recognises himself, — in every sentence he reads his own necessities, supplies, exhortations, censures, warnings : — the same corruptions which are now leading us astray are there enumerated and exposed ; the same feebleness met and strengthened ; the same temptations rebuked ; tlie same Almighty Spirit promised; the same eternal reward suspended in the distance, — a reward of which it can only be said that its colours are augmented in brilliancy as the scene draws nearer, — for whatever be the time of the expected advent, it is at least certain that " now is our salvation nearer 11. C 26 LIVING AND DYING [Serm. il then when" they (our Christian forefathers) " believed." The New Testament is, then, to ns and our successors the same precious inheritance its gospels, and epistles, and prophecies were to the first believei'S ; with this only difference, — that as prophecy gathers to fulfilment, as the shadowy outlines of pre- diction begin to fill and flush with the vivid colours of fact, the story of Christ the Redeemer, and of the human heart as acted on hy Christ, — the Bible-history of man, — becomes still more authentic and still more valuable. Truly, — " whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope" (Rom. xv. 4) ! And hence, — when we hear men sighing for something above and beyond the Scriptures, when we hear them demanding " infallible" earthly guidance, — ecclesiastical oracles who are to be the sole commissioned delegates of the spirit of truth to mankind, — we may well censure, — not merely the presumptuousness of the request (involving a secret infi- delity), but the unhappy misconception it betrays as to the whole purport of the Scripture revelation itself. Were it the purpose of God to make us the cold professors of a system of theology drawn out into long deductions and' fortified at all points ; were we to be (reversing the Apostle's language) " able ministers of the New Testament, not of the spirit but of the letter," — such guidance from some permanent external authority might be requisite ; for such guidance is certainly, in a very limited degree, to be found in the New Testament. But the object of the Scripture revelation of God is essentially a practical object ; it seldom declares truths, except so far as they are necessary to found motives and directions for that new and spiritual life which is the great and ultimate end of the whole as a revelation of God to man. . . . Understood in this, its true light, — how admirably fitted is that little volume to be the perpetual directory of the Church ! Over and above the preaching of Christ Himself, it gives us, — not merely doctrines of belief, nor merely {)rccepts of conduct, but ourselves Serm. ii.] UNTO THE LORD. 27 in all tlie difficulties of trial and temptation ! It shows us not what men ought to do solely, but what men have done and may do. It brings before us the wondrous picture of that infant Church, when as yet fresh from the hand of God it breathed of its origin, — when, among the thousands it already included through some of the most civilized regions of the earth, but one heart beat, one hope was felt, one heaven anti- cipated : and while thus it exhibits by example what a Chris- tian should be, — in what Christians have been, teaches us to sigh, — would to God that it taught us to pray and to labour that we may be meet I — for the return of that golden age ol our religion, in the return once more to earth of Him whose omnipotent Spirit produced it ! But I have said that, even in this blessed picture, the New Testament story exhibits the weakness of men as truly as their excellences. It does; and in this lies half the vadue of the record. The same natural tendency to pass fr'om a high and inward and spiritual religion into the cold for-, malities of profession, which is now afflicting the Church (and for which some among ourselves have attempted so injudicious, so profitless, a remedy in external separation, — as if the work of " Christian separation" was to be wrought by the coarse machinery of external observances, and not by the " sword of the Spirit" rending asunder the ties that bind the world and the heart) — is found already menacing the earliest Churches (in which, I may add, no such remedy was ever prescribed); — the same occasional narrowness of mind which loses the substance in the form of godliness, and the same uncharitable estimation of minute differences in comparison with the great principles of faith and hope and love, — which so often chill the ardour and cordiality of Christian communion in our own days, — these are no novelties in tlie heart of man, — you find the same unhappy tendencies in the first records of the Church of Christ, — restrained and suppressed, indeed, by the over- ruling authority of the Apostles, by the recent and remera- C2 28 LIVING AND DYING [Serm. ii. bered lessons of tlie Saviom- Himself, and perhaps, still more, by the pressure of external persecution -which tightened the bonds of mutual affection among these exiles in the world ; — restrained, I say, but still too clearly manifested in this principle, and too surely prepared for the Church of succeed- ing ages ! In the chapter from which the passage before us is ex- tracted, we have a striking instance of these very tendencies, as well as of the spirit in which they were met and remedied by the inspired guides of the primitive Church. I select the subject, and enlarge upon it; because it is specially applicable to those church-dissensions of our own times, in which an erroneous conscientiousness has driven from the field of our communion into a dreamy sectarianism, so many of the devoted children of God ; and because, in ex- tending the principle here developed, you will find the sim- plest example and guidance for the determination of your own course in similar cases. Observe then, — in reference to the chapter before us. — The first believers, gathered alike from the two Bible-divisions of the world, — from Jews and Gentiles, — brought into the new religion many of the prejudices of their preceding life. Eminently was this observable in the Jew, who, educated in the bondage of a strict and ceremonial creed, mis- took the fetters of that bondage for the badges of freedom,— and could not endure to believe that system superseded which had made the boast and glory of his nation. Brought up in the shadowy twilight of preparatory forms and observances, the Christian Jew could not bear to resign these cherished privi- leges of his youth ; and begged hard to be allowed to perpe- tuate these shadows, even under the now orient beams of the " Sun of riglateousncss" itself! Feelings whose very weak- ness was interesting contributed to the delusion. For ages the glory of Israel had been identified with its law ; the Jew could scarcely feel as a patriot and consent to desert it; his hopes for the future, his remembrances of llie past, Serm. ii.J UNTU THE LORD. 29 were interwoven with his veneration for the ceremonies and sacrifices of the Mosaic code ; to forsake it were to for- sake the faith of his ancestors, — the faith ennobled bj kings and consecrated by propliets, — nor this alone, — it were to desert the daughter of Zion in the hour of her misfortune, when the Pagan spoiler was already among her palaces ! Judaism had become eminently a political religion, — it held the sign and countersign of those who loved the soil of Israel ; to meet and Avhisper of the elder glories of Sinai and the mystic promises of prophecy, had become the favouiite occupation of the despised and degraded Jew, when ■ ever he could evade the vigilance of the detested foreigner whose foot polluted the vineyard of the Lord. These things bound him to the creed of his fathers, — but speaking in Ireland, need I enlarge upon the nature, — or the power, — or the prevalence, — or the misfortune, of such misdirected though not unamiable national affections in retarding the progress of fi-ee discussion, — of truth and of reason? The consequence of all this, when the gi-eat revolution of Christianity took place, was natural and inevitable. The Christianized Jew, — though he surrendered (for it was of the very essence of Christianity to do so) his notion of the in- tended eternity of the Jewish Law of ceremonies, — though he admitted that " Christ is the end of the Law to every one that belie veth," that in Him all the scattered rays of type and prophecy converge and are for ever lost, — yea rather are fixed and eternalized, — yet still could not resist his tendency to preserve some fragments of the old preparatory creed, and in- corporate them into the spiritual religion of Christ. The abstinence from peculiar meats, the observance of peculiar days, and others of the formal traditions of the synagogue, he was loath altogether to resign, though he could not alto- gether justify . . . Now what I wish you to observe is, the manner in which the Apostle deals with this critical question. Are Jew and Gentile to be severed for this difference ? 30 LIVING AND DYING [Serm. ii. Remark, then, tliat St. Paul feels and acknowledges the difference that separates ih^Q fundamental question of the faith of Christ from those of merely subordinate importance. Upon the former he will admit no compromise, no compensation, no second opinion. That Christ, — the commissioned Son of God, and himself " Grod manifest in the flesh," — is the sole hope of the believer, exclusive of all reference to human merit ; that if man will be just before the living God, it is only in and through Christ that he can be accepted as such ; that His work is a complete work, to which man can add nothing, but Jrom which man receives everything ; — that this is the cardinal fact of the religion which God brought from heaven to earth, and that in this, as in a germ, is enfolded the whole glorious story of eternity, — St. Paul insists, — reiterates, — enforces. Whatever enfeebles this, is poison to the very vitals of the truth ; and, therefore, with the questioner of this the Apostle will hold no parley. " Am I not an Apostle?" is the answer. *' Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other Gospel unto you, than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accm'sed!" To disbelieve, — or to corrupt, — this doctrine, — would be to neutralize the whole blessed work of God to man ; no error, then, can be overlooked which would reduce or qualify the Mcssiahship of Christ, — as Prophet, Priest, and King, to His people. Upon this he is peremptory ; — upon this, in the very spirit and energy of Christian love, we must be peremptory likewise ! God grant that no fear of man may ever unnerve the resolution with which His ministers shall preach, — serene among the contending errors of rival sects, — that consoling doctrine of the cross to the blood- bought people of the Redeemer ! But when from that doctrine, which is the corner-stone of salvation, the same Apostle descends to the harmless pre- judices o.f the ignorant but conscientious Israelite, — the super- fluous zeal of the feast-day and the fast; — when from the mighty theme of the dignity and the office of Christ, he comes, Serm. ii.] UNTO THE LORD. 31 as ill the chapter before us, to reconcile the prepossessions of Jew and Gentile about their favourite ceremonies, — we find him in another and even more attractive position. Of his own opinion, indeed, as to the value of such restrictions, there can be no doubt. The abstainer from peculiar meat is " weak in the faith." " There is nothing," says St. Paul, " unclean oi" itself." " The kingdom of God is not meat and drink ; but righteousness, and peace, andjoy in the Holy Ghost." Yet — " Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not!" — ^^ receive him, — not to doubtful disputations!" And this because " to his own master he standeth or falleth." " We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak." Nay, — if our happier freedom insult or distress him, we ought to sacrifice our very freedom for his sake : — for (ver. 21) " it is good neither to eat flesh nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbletli, or is offended, oris madeweak." There is even a certain respect due to an unimportant error, when it takes place in the spirit of devotion to God ; — that common spirit sanctifies all, — " for none of lis liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself :— for whether we live, we live unto the Lord ; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord : whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord's !" (ver. 7, 8.) You have now a statement of the disposition with -which the inspired Apostle regarded errors in the Church of Christ, — a spirit so Avidely differing from ^hat which has dictated much of the wild enthusiastic separatism ot iLc present day. Do I err when I would reduce it to the general maxim,— that in the cardinal points of the Christian faith, the evidence of inspiration should determine all ; that in the minor differences of view, the principle of charity — wrought in us by that very belief of the main and fundamental truths — should be the guiding star, and everything gently dealt with, which, without impeaching the purity of the faith, is done in the spirit of devo- tion to that Christ who is " Lord both of the dead and living ? " We have seen the occasion of this maxim, in whicli St. Paul 32 LIVING AND DYING LSerm ii thus passes from outward forms to the inward and Spiritual Kingdom of God in the heart ;— let us rest for a moment upon the maxim itself. " Whether we live, we live unto the Lord ; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord." The " Lord" here spoken of is at once Christ and God ; as is manifest from the ninth verse, where Christ is identified with the " Lord of the dead and the living,"~from the tenth verse, where He is declared to be the supreme Judge of the world,— and finally from the eleventh, where the Apostle, to estabUsh that title, directly applies to Christ that solemn declaration of the forty-fifth of Isaiah,—" I am God, and there is none else; unto Me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear!" The God, then, to whom this utter and unreserved surrender of the heart is required, is the God who was revealed in Christ Jesus ; and who, by the mysterious union of the Divine and human natures, has consecrated the one by the other, and for ever reconciled both ! Unto Him, as Christians, we are called upon to live ; He who is the principle of our spiritual life is also made the object of it ; as the vapours of the ocean supply the rivers that return into the ocean itself. Unto Him, as Christians, we are called upon to die ; He who died for us is made the object of our death likewise ; that as " our life is hid with Christ in God," so " when He who is our life shall appear, then we also may appear with Him in glory." ... No reserve, you hear, is admitted in the statement of our profession ; we live and die to Christ ; our whole nature, in all its aspects and positions, is offered to Him, as one solemn and perpetual sacrifice ; " bought with a price," we are delivered to Him as His own spiritual property in this world; "we are Christ's, and Christ is God's,"— so that, as it were, through Him, as man, wc pass into the very presence of the Supreme Divinity, enter within the verge of that ineffable Nature Avith which lie connects us, and catch upon our weak and shivering humanity the beams of the everlasting light of God ! Serm. ii.] UNTO THE LORD 33 It -would be superfluous to enter into explanation of the meaning of phrases too manifest for elucidation. " To live unto God " cannot but be understood by all who remember that, at every hour of life, they are in truth "living unto" some object or other, whether it be worthy or unworthy the affections of a human heart. To some object their nature is consecrated, — to some object the living sacrifice of the soul is perpetually presented. It is the very condition of our being, the most simple and the most universal of all ; and hence it is that the Apostle employs, as the common character of the reno- vated heart, the quality of the object it embraces. In this very assembly the same sovereign test is applicable, — is even now applied by the all-perceiving Spirit of God. He can tell, — what I dare not pronounce, — whether, even in this hour of prayer and penitence, you have truly " lived unto God ;" and how far the heaven of your secret hopes and supplications is that heaven which He has promised to His believing children, that heaven of which it is the highest and holiest character that " the life unto Him" is there immortal ! What, then, is it to "live unto God?" What is it but to return Him his own rights in the human heart; to con- centrate on Him those affections which originally were formed for Him alone ? What is it but to know and feel that even Avhile this shadowy world encompasses us, there is around and above it a scene real, substantial, and eternal ; a scene adequate, — and at this moment adequate, — to answer all the ardent longings of our bereaved souls, — a scene in which every holier afibction, widowed and blighted here, is to be met and satisfied ! ... To live in this belief, — this hope ; to read in the death of Christ death itself lost in immortality ; to make the God of the New Testament the Friend, the Com- panion, the Consoler, of all earthly sorrow; to feel the brightest coloui'S of ordinary life fade in " the glory that shall be revealed," — this is to live the " life," that heralds the immortality, " unto God!" 34 LIVING AND DYING [Serm. ii. The immortality unto God ! For this is the heaven of the Christian. " Whether we live," says the Apostle — and heaven is the eternal lite, — " we live unto God !" Brethren! beloved brethren ! have we learned to desire an eternity such as this ? I have endeavoured to speak to you plainly ; I will make an effort to be yet more distinct. . . . Let us suppose that by some supernatural agent an offer were suddenly made to each of us, of at once being admitted into the immediate pre- sence of God in Heaven ! Remembering what the laws are by which that abode of blessedness is governed, — remembering tlie strict and undeviating purity which it is represented as exacting from all who are its residents, — remembering that a God who cannot endure inirpiity is there more immediately present to his creatures, both in the person of the Lord Jesus a!id in the clearer revelation opened to the minds of the lilest with regard to God's character and dealings, — remem- bering tiiat this kingdom of everlasting righteousness is only known to us by the plain intimation, that its wliole tone of existence is opposed to all that is scri])turally called " the World," — and that a breath of unholincss cannot be suffered to taint its atmosphere of perfect peace, — holding all this in mind as the true portraiture of the Heaven of the New Testa- ment,— I ask you, whether, with hearts whose every pulsation heats for worldly interests, with affections that not (on perhaps only too favourable a calculation) for one half-hour in the twenty-four are really lilted from the dust of the path on which we are together creeping to the grave, — with hopes that never were taught to stray beyond the clouds of this world's foul atmosphere, — with all your busy dreams about you (for we walk in visions), in none of which do Heaven or its God find a moment's place--(3hristian3 I I ask you, would you unhesi- tatingly rejoice in the offer? I do not ask you whether you would assent with your lips to the proposal ; for, associating as we do Heaven with Happiness, perhaps no one would delibe- rately and verbally refuse it ; — bnt 1 ask you, whether, with Serm. ii.J UNTO THE LORD. 36 that spring and rapture of the heart which a great worldly- prosperity brings, you would (bearing in mind the true nature of the change) grasp at the proposal, and call aloud for death to open the gate of the Kingdom of God ? Would your inmost Soul accept the change ? Would you agree to cast aside all the hopes and enjoyments of your state in this life, to be the calm and peaceful adorer of the world to come ? Even to the afflicted I might ask — would they accept peace on such conditions as the peace of God imposes? Alas! few can sincerely answer that they would. The heaven of the gospel is no heaven to those who have not learned the holiness of the gospel. Is not the test, then, simple and decisive ? Can we deem that we are " living unto God" in this world, if we shrink with dread from the notion of living unto Him in another, and living unto Him for ever ? What, indeed, is the Heaven of every man but the conceived realization of his own cherished wishes I As this ideal happi- ness varies, "Heaven" (which is but the expression of its ultimate completion) correspondingly varies. Accordingly, if you listen to the confidences of any man, you will infallibly detect in what quarter his Heaven is situated. It is a pole to which the magnet of his mind perpetually trembles. Thus it is that the world is filled with a thousand forgeries of heaven, — the illusion of that Deceiver who spreads out these phantoms of happiness to hide the yawning portals of min behind them! And hard indeed is the work of the servant of Christ, among all these gaudy visions of flushed and passionate pleasures, to secure even a glance at the cold outlines of the heaven he proposes. In the midst of a crowd of impassioned visionaries, he feels how unwelcome is his intrusion. When every mind is encompassed with its own favom-ite scenery, how can he, with his fond anticipations of spiritual enjoyments, expect even the refuse of men's thoughts ? Will the walls of a church transform the souls and bodies of the listeners, — that those who are worldly and sensual up to its doors, shall entei 30 LIVING AND DYING [Serm. ii. them disengaged, and prepared to liear of eternal purity ? We may crowd the temples of the Most High, but is it not too often as those whom the Prophet saw in the midst of the holy places; the visions of our idolatry accompany us even into the house of the living God ; and though we kneel as in adoration, our busy hearts neglect to adore, and we are still, — " every man in the cJiamhers of Ids imagery! "... God gi-ant to us a strong desire to live the " life unto God," — by patience and faith " to walk as seeing the Invisible," — to yearn after that devotion of heart and soul unto Him, which, begun in this world, shall be perfected and consummated' in the world of eternal peace ! To that world you know the passage. The Apostle has not neglected to state it. " Whether we die^ we die unto the Lord." When he wrote, there was a touching earnestness in the expression. Surrounded by ])crsecution and distress, not certain but the next hour might bring the stake or the lions> the Apostle could indeed speak of death as a familiar theme. But he had been accustomed to look upon it with a welcoming eye. " To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." He could declare himself desirous "to be absent from the body, and present witli the Lord:" — " to be with Christ, which was fivr better." And oh ! brethren, — to us also, who, with what- ever preparation of heart, must pass through that tremendous hour, which no imagination can anticipate, and which none can return to tell of, — to us wlio must each in loneliness tread that valley of the shadow where the friend dearest and most devoted can no longer accompany us, — to us is it not also fitting to be preached that we should make it the lesson of lit'o, "to die unto the Lord?" To tlie Christian who is worthy of tlie name, I need not tell you that that liour, which fancy invests with so fearful a gloom, is indeed radiant with a life from heaven, alight beseeming the birth-day of eternity! He " dies unto the Lord," because his earnest trust in a recou- Serm. ii.] UNTO THE LORD. 37 ciled God has tauglit him to gladly yield his life where he had long yielded his heart and hopes. He " dies unto the Lord," because he feels that such a death is the crowning act of that sacrifice which it is his whole desire to make of himself to his eternal Master. He " dies unto the Lord," because he has long since lived unto the Lord, in dying unto the world ! Above all, — he " dies unto the Lord," — because he knows that death is but the passage into a wider scene of service, a more transcendent and more abiding scene for the exercise of his revived, — his thence for ever undying energies, in the cause, and to the glory, of God : — because he knows that no servant of Christ passes from this world into a heaven of lethargy and superannuation, but into a scene of busy happiness, where new faculties are given for new purposes, — where the spiritual mind is strengthened to will, and the spiritual frame is strengthened to act, with redoubled powers, in the service of the Creator, — and where, therefore, to " die unto the Lord " is to assume a new and better life, — to live unto the Lord, and through the Lord, and for the Lord, and with the Lord, — for ever and ever ! SERMON III. THE HOPE OF GLORY AND THE CHARITIES OF LIFK 1 John III. 2. It doth not yet appear what we shall be : but we know tJtat, when he shall appear, we shall be like him ; for we shall see him us he is. Coming before you this day, my brethren, to appeal to your Christian sympathies on behalf of poverty and orphanage, I know no other artifice of persuasion than to exhibit the sim- plicity of Christian motives. To advocate the claims of those who are thus compelled to be annual dependants on your benevolence, I have no magic of eloquence beyond that which speaks of yoiir own free and unmerited prerogatives in a Saviour; — to plead the cause of poverty, I have no resource but to point to your wealth in "the riches of Clirist;" — to plead for destitution, I can only speak of Him who has said to each confiding disciple, — " I will never leave thee nor forsake thee," — to plead for orphanage, I can but echo that voice which whispered on the night of betrayal, " I will not leave 1/ou orplians ;" — to plead for those, — young and untaught, — wliosc boon for eternity you may be instrumental in saving tills day from being blighted for eternity, I have no better rhetoric tlian to speak of the splendours of that everlasting iiilicritance which the Victor of Calvary has won for them and for you, that Divine country to which you profess to be travellers, and the way to wliich you will surely not refuse to f;icilitate for tlicsc weaklings of the flock of Christ ; that region of which all, or the highest that is directly revealed to us, is, — tiiat its blessedness consists essentially in reflecting the Serm. III.] THE HOPE OF GLORY, f Christian joy; it Bonn, in] THE CUARITIES OF LIFE. 4.'5 is not separately manifested because everywhere manifested ; because every exhortation to humility, and joy, and love, is an exhortation to heaven itself, — and every congratulation upon the attainment of such blessed emotions, is a congra- tulation upon having already arrived within the verge of Paradise ! But I might say more. I might ask, if this minute ana distinct anticipation of the world to come might not itself injure the completeness of a trusting faith ? Am I too subtly refining upon the delicacy of Christian feeling, when I say that in the very obscurity, — the golden mist, that rests upon the features of the celestial landscape, there is in us now hovering on its borders, room for a more total and self- abandoning trust in Him who is to guide us for ever through it V The Father of the Faithful " went out," it is said, " not knowing whither he went!" And every true descendant in tlie lineage of faith will but rejoice in that ignorance which urges him to cling the closer to his Immortal Friend ; which bids him gladly, for intimations which could but be obscure at best, substitute omniscience itself ; and teaches him to cry, — " Lord, I know but faintly what it shall be, and I ask not to know ! Only assure me that thou wilt be there ; I have long been accustomed to gather my every concep- tion of happiness around thy name ; thou art to me the abstract and representative of it all; I will not insult the anticipation of thy presence with calculations of time and place. Be but thyself there; I know my only heaven in thee!" Surely this would aid the discipline of the emotions into the obedience of a perfect faith ! But suppose that faith realized in all its God-given strength and certainty ; suppose that " walk- ing by faith " had at length attained almost to " walking by sight;" that, — as the daily proverb proclaims that " seeing is believing," so the Christian could boldly reverse the thought, and ahnost dare to affirm, that " believing is seeing:" — U ♦« THE 110 rE OF GLORY AXD [Serm. iii. this a state in which we could pronounce it well that it should be distinctly " manifested what we shall 5e" ? I cannot think it. Man, though made for heaven, is made for earth also, — for earth, the trial-gi'ound and seminary of heaven. Conceive Iiim then, by the vision of a perfect faith applied to a perfect revelation, suiTOunded with, and lost in, the dazzling light ot other worlds; the story of eternal life unfolded in all its minuteness; every separate source of felicity analysed and recorded; the melodies of heaven almost echoing in his earthly ears ; — would such a man be fitted for the daily duties of life ? Blinded by the lustre of the eternal noon, could he walk in safety, and with the gentle firmness of a Christian, through the paths of the spiritual life, strewn as they are with duties and demands ? His eyes wildly and solely fixed upon the glory to come, would he not be apt to go astray upon the way that leads to it? . . . Yes, it is well that even to the l)erfect it should not be " manifested what we shall be ;" that it sliould be a " glory that shall he revealed," a " glory ready to be revealed in the last time ! " But God is equally wonderful in Ilis words as in His silence, in what He declares as in what He refuses to declare. And here He has told us not " what we shall be," and yet more than we could dare to dream ! Heh as constituted Himself i\ii the Image of our blessedness ; and in so doing has confirmed the representations I have given, as well as secured the pur- ])oscs of His revelation, with a depth of wisdom which I cannot but pause for a moment to contemplate. " We know not yet what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear, loe shall be like Himy ^^'■hat is God as apprehended by man ? The aggregate of all oncitivahlc. liiunan perfections carried to infinity. What is it to know tliis God? To believe that there is realized in existence a Being com|n-ehending the full measure of tliese excellencies. ^Vllnl is it fo l.,ve God? To adore with earnest Hiid with gral.t'iil li.-art that impersonation of su|)ronic ])er- Serm. Ill] THE CHARITIES OF LIFE. 47 fection. It is of" the very essence of such knowledge and such love, to desire to resemble its great object ; and that desire will increase with every increase of that excellence in the worship- per's heart which it adores in God. Is it not then a glorious device of the Author of the Faith, to give us such a glimpse of the future Avorld as must fall darkly and coldly on the eye of tlie unregencrate ; but in the heart touched by a diviner glow must not only be at once intelligible, but must make a deep earnestness for possession, — nor that alone, but must actually increase that earnestness exactly in proportion as grace itself increases ? So that as the heart rises in holiness, the reward rises in beauty; as the work of God in time becomes more consummate, the recompence of God in eternity becomes more attractive ; and men can truly wish for heaven, only when they have its image already in their hearts ! Can you not now perceive the force of the verse that immediately follows — " And every one that hath tliis hope in him, purijieth himself even as He is pure " ? I need not observe how this representation at once silences those who accuse the rewards of our religion as making it only a more prudent variety of selfishness. They know not of wliat they speak. Liberation from physical infirmities, — perhaps even a moderate participation in physical enjoyments, must indeed be elements of some value in every estimation of an ideally perfect state of happiness, to a being framed as man is framed ; but if the essential blessedness of heaven be that which St. John proclaims, — the resemblance to its God, — it can only be a reward to those who covet to be like Him! But is this sublime conception of the inspired penman a principle exclusively Christian ? For all practical purposes it is ; in idea and expression it is not wholly so. Bear with me for a moment longer, while from the very failures of human wisdom I would ask you to borrow a new leaf for the wreath that crowns your own adorable faith ! 48 THE HOPE OF GLORY AXD [Serm. iii. In that olden time when as yet " the Light " had not shone " to lighten the Gentiles," there were men who dared to con- ceive of human perfection as consisting in a likeness to Deity. The Christian pulpit acknowledges a sincere sympathy with every honest effort of man to rise above himself, and it need not be ashamed to repeat their reasoning They speculated somewhat in this manner. . . .Virtue itself, — what is it but the approach to some glorious ideal of perfection? God, — what can that mysterious Nature be but Itself the Cause and Fountain of all which we are accustomed to venerate as ex- cellent or adore as lovely? These things then are not two, but one ; and if man will raise himself to the highest point of his nature, he will make it the office of his life to imitate God! These were surely high and holy thoughts. Our nature may well be proud of them; — but, in sad truth, our nature was little the better for them. The reason was obvious. The object of Imitation was utterly disproportionate to man. When the first glow of enthusiasm had passed away, the proposal seemed extravagant, to copy the Infinite. The God who was only known as the mysterious Principle of the Universe, swelled into an immensity that defied all efforts at imitation — But again, — every attempt to practically and permanently elevate, I will not say the mass of mankind (for that was never under- taken), but even a single individual, seems to be vain, in which the affections are not called into play. But where were the affections that could embrace immensity ? Where was the love, or the hope, or the gratitude, that could fasten upon this dim and shadowy Abstraction ? what emotions could the human heart own in presence of this mighty Principle of l*owcr ; except, perhaps, a vague and shivering terror, a blind dread, that froze and paralysed the soul, instead of animating it to tlie blessedness of adoration ! Brethren in tlie liope of Christ ! ine know how this problem has been solved. We know of a God, who, without parting with one ray of that transcendent essence by which He is Serm. iii.] THE CHARITIES OF LIFE. ^9 alone in the Universe, — its Creator, its Sustainer, and its GoveiTior; — who, Avithout violating one jot of the truth of His own unfathomable natui-e, has yet so presented Himself to us, as to encourage even the faintest aspirations of the feeblest heart to repose in the bosom of a Brother Consider this. We can conceive since the fall, perhaps but two courses by which the God of mere abstraction could become the object of special and direct affection to an ordinary human heart. Let Him remain in His incomprehensible infinity, but mark a peculiarity in His favours, or let Him extend His favour to mankind, but descend from His infinity. He has done both. He has in one dispensation narrowed the field of His favour, He has in the other diminished the distance of His nature. Yes ! we now know that there is a God whom it is no longer a hopeless enthusiasm to call on man to imitate ; — one with whom, it would seem, a connexion so perfect may be esta- blished of heart and hope, that all the story of His earthly career is spiritually acted over in each of His earthly followers — who are declared to be " born with Christ," " sulFering with Christ," " crucified with Christ," " buried with Christ," " risen with Christ," " exalted with Christ," — until at length these analogies are lost in a deeper and more heavenly resemblance when, admitted into the sunlight of His glory, they catch the reflection of His eternal beams, — as they gaze approach, and as they approach become more and more completely invested with His radiance, are transfigured as they adore the God and Man, in the clear truth of His own unshadowed essence, — " are like Him, for they see Him as He is !" That likeness, brethren, is even in this life begun, and begun from a similar process. We are " called the sons of God " even now ; and no spiritual child of God is without the paternal image that authenticates and attests his descent. We. are even already " predestined to be conformed to the simili- tude of his Son." The impulses and contemplations to which 60 THE UOPE OF GLORY AND [Serm. iit even faith attains, have in themselves a transforming energy. Clinging to Christ, we must in the very act of adherence to Him as our Redeemer, walk in His footsteps as our guide : and looking habitually upon His revealed excellencies, we cannot but love what we behold, and, in a measure, become what we love.... Even in the ordinary course of liuman affec- tions, do you not recognise this assimilating power of all genuine attachment? It is thus that two beings joined in mutual affection become each what neither was before ; each catches from the other a tincture of that other's nature; — it is thus that through all the variety of the connexions and affinities of life, the changes of character reflect the changes of attachment. And to this, as to every other of the holier laws of the human heart, the religion of Christ presents its lovely counterpart. Christ has borrowed of us all that A\e ever hud of innocence, our nature in its incorruption, — tliat He may bestow upon us in return, the likeness of His own perfections. And of this transcendent boon, I repeat, that even now, amid our trials and our tears, we possess the foretastes, the pledges, the opening dawn ! But why is not this transformation yet more complete? Precisely because the vision of this our Christ is not itselt CDmplete or accurate; because, conceiving our celestial King (as I before noted) by such elements of spiritual beauty as the grace of heaven enables us to find or to conceive in ourselves, rudiments of human imperfection inevitably adhere to all our portraits of these consummate glories. [And perhaps it was to something of this kind that the blessed Paul alluded, when, after speaking of having " known Christ after the flesh," he determined " to know Him so no longer."] But when the feeble conceptions of a too feeble faith shall have been ex- changed f )r the full and aeeurate evidence of sight, no sueh weaknesses in the suhjeet shuU mar the beauty of the object; no distance shall diniini^h, no spot shall stain that everlasting ISun. It must therelbre exercise a tenfold power of attracting, Scrm. iii.l TUB CHARITIES OF LIFE. « animating, illumining ; all within its sphere must be rohcd in its beams, and present a copy of its light. Can you not then understand and acknowledge the force of our inspired Apostle's divine argument, when, building the resemblance upon the vision, he declared that " we shall be like Him,^ we shall see Him as he is'"? As Moses, returning from converse with his God, was obliged to veil a face shining with a light reflected from that living Light, so, and for the same reason surely, was it, that Jesus offered the memorable petition to Hig Father, " that they whom thou hast given me may be where I am, that they may hehold my gloryT (John xvii. 24.) Yes ! blessed Lord ! that we may behold thy glory, and be gloriiied with and by it ; that after conceiving thee long and faithfully but dimly here, and to the last grieving over the dishonour our best conceptions do thee, we may at length " awake in thy likeness, and he satisfied! " Ere that awful hour of manifestation, when Jesus shall be triumphant in His servants, and His servants triumphant in Him, a period must elapse to all ; a period of whose length no man can dare to pronounce. We know that as He once appeared in humiliation, Pie shall assuredly appear in glory ; we know that as the earth trembled at His resvirrection, it shall yet tremble at His advent ; that as the attesting sun was darkened at His death, so shall He Himself eclipse it by the splendours of His coming. " When He shall ajppear,''' we shall be like Him. Brethren beloved! as you would indeed pre- pare your hearts for that glowing image of God to be thus impressed for everlasting, cultivate the contemplation and the- likeness of His natm-e now ! If Christ is, indeed, " in you the hope of glory," oh ! let Him be in you also the impulse and the example of a Christ-like life. The practical value of these views of the gradual transformation of our nature by the knowledge and the vision of God, lies mainly in this,— that they tend to give us some conception of the inioardness and depth of the spiritual change needed in man, and thus supply 52 THE HOPE OF GLORY AND [Sorm. nr. motives to extraordiuaiy measures of vigilance and pui-ity. •' He that liath this hope in him, pm-ificth himself." He knows that the resemblance to God is the great element of the celestial state, and that the depths of the Spirit are the scene and subject of that resemblance. He therefore labours that God's image be so reproduced in his heart, that not merely his outward actions, but his motives and principles of action, may be such as harmonise with those of the august society he anticipates. For the action abides only in its desert, — its reward or its punishment ; but motives and principles pass the grave, they become part of our moral identity, — as they are now, so will they endure for everlasting. We construct ourselves for glory or for ruin ; each day adds a new element for good or evil to that nature which (as it were) by its own elasticity will spring to heaven, or by its own dead weight descend to kindred darkness. With this view, learn to test all things by the standard of the sanctuary ; of each thought, and impulse, and purpose, and project, ask how far it bears the impress of that likeness which is to be, in the glorified nature, the ground and substance of eternal bliss? How far is it recognised by angels ; how far is it authenticated by tlie example of that incarnate Son of God who came to be to us the express image of His Father's glory ? Thus living, eternal life itself is begun in our hearts ; thus, and thus only, under the teaching and moulding of the divine Regenerator of our nature, does the heavenly life in time, anticipate, and herald, and prepare, — and blending with it at length is lost in, — the life of heaven for eternity ! I have spoken to-day of the joys of eternity ; I have now to speak of the charities of time. As I before declared to you, so do I now repeat, — he little knows the mystic bond that unites the Christian motives and emotions, who can conceive such a transition sudden or abrupt. I trust in God your hearts will prove tliis day, that to lay the foundations in the God of love, and in the world where His love is mani- Serm. in.] THE CHARITIES OF LIFE. 53 festcd, is tlie surest art to build the fabric of charity. Yea. this union of joy and of tenderness is a wondrous paradox in the daily and hourly story of the Christian experience. Anti- cipations of unimaginable glory, themselves the very motives (and that from no sordid calculation, but from the native force of the feelings tlicmsclves,) — the very motives, I say, of humble, lowly devotedness! and those men who habitually live in a region of reposing expectation, compared to Avhich the consciousness of royalty itself is a shadow, — the very men whose self-abasement is willing " to spend and be spent " in the cause, not merely of Christ, but of the meanest dis- ciple that bears His name ! It is a wondrous combination. Trembling hearts, that yet are bold to claim kindred witli the Lord of a Universe ! Eesolute, — undaunted, — unconquerable believers, — men of panoply and prowess in the warfare with the powers of darkness, whose brows are bound with tlie wreaths of a thousand spiritual triumphs (" through Christ that strengtheneth them ") — who yet shall soften as cliildrcii at the story of grief, shall gladly wear away strength, and health, and life itself at the bedsides of distress,— shall lavish all that is theirs to soothe a single pang, (these princely Pilgrims of Eternity !) and claim to themselves, as in tlie compass of an iuiinite benevolence, the whole sad inheritance of human woe ! In hearts such as these (God grant they may be many here!) I still touch but one string when I " modulate " from the joys they anticipate to the sorrows they love to assuage ; from the triumphant repose of immor- tality to the minute but all-important labours that in their own vicinity, as, — thank God ! — in so many others, are educating souls by instruction, and precept, and example, to attain it ! Brethren in Christ! I have done. You now know the nature of our wants and our dependence. We have spoken largely this day of the image of God upon the soul of man ; 04 THE HOPE OF GLORY, (Sec. [Serm. iii. and of its completion in the eternal world. Remember that when Christ would mark out His own from the mass of mankind, it was " by this sign," " that they should love one anethery In this, then, above all things, save that love to God of which it is the product, rests the perfectness of the spiritual image in tliis world ; in this, above all things, rests to ourselves the practical test and pledge that as we are " now the sons of God," so, " when He shall appear," and when we shall be admitted to contemplate and to study Him^ the very essence of whose nature is love, we shall indeed " be like Him, for we shall sec Him as He ia." SERMON IV. THE HOLY TRINITY. Revelation XXII, 1. And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. Tins is a scene from heaven. It is a pictui-e of the presiding Powers and Principles of lieaven ; a group of symbols expressing in the shadowy language of time and sense tlie ineffable realities of eternity. Eye hath not seen nor ear heard the true antitypes that answer to these images ; tho- roughly to know them is the experience of another form of existence, when new requirements shall bring new faculties ; but it is given us to see, though as in a mirror darkly, yet as in a mirror truly ; and from these representations, suited as they are to our present imperfect state, to collect the very substance and real being of things everlasting. These Per- sonages that occupy the one undivided Throne of heaven, and before whom in equal adoration the heavenly worshippers fall prostrate ; this bright effluence that proceeds from them both as from a fountain deep and central, and which, per- vading the City of God, feeds and quickens the tree of life ; — do these bring to you no thoughts that harmonise with that great Mystery in which the Church of the living God, the faithful conservator of the faith once delivered to the saints, calls upon her children " by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity?" Surely it is no ether than this Mystery of the threefold Deity that is M THE HOLY TRIXITY. [Serm. iv. shaclowccT to us in tliat Throne of the Father and the Incarnate Son, from whose depths is gushing the spiritual river of life, — that same river of living water, of which this evangelist has told us that Christ " spake it of the Spirit which thej that believe on Him should receive." Surely it is nothing less than this, that the revealing Angel would exhibit to us as filling and glorifying the City of Peace, the new Jerusalem of God ; even as the belief of it is now the glory and adorning of His ]\Iilitant Church below. Long may that belief con- tinue to animate and console us here; so shall we be meet partakers of tliose holy mysteries, when at length admitted to pass from faith to sight, and to study our celestial theology in the very presence of its divine object, whose " face " we shall then "see," and whose "name shall be in our foreheads!" Long may the Church, undismayed by the audacity of heresy, .... but I need not oifer the prayer, for the Church's life is in Christ's promise immortal, and it lives but by this truth. It lives but by this truth ; for its life is in the indwelling of Christ, and were Christ not God, His indwelling were a fable and a mockery, its life is in the abiding presence of the Spirit; and were the Spirit not a Person divine, how were He thus universally to abide and to intercede, without invading the deepest and holiest prerogatives of the eternal God? how shall not the Church adore these as God who do for lier, and are to lier, all that her highest conceptions can imagine her God to be and to do ? or in what terms shall she define her God which shall exclude the characters and properties that Revelation ascribes to her Sanctifier and lier Redeemer ? Her life is blended with the life of Christ and of the Spirit ; she breathes but by these divine ]\Iinisters of the divine Father ; forsaking the blessed truth of their essential divinity, she abandons the very charter of her existence ; — for she exists no longer, the spouse of Christ has no longer a being on earth, when surrendering the awful and glorious claims which St. Paul and St. Peter have not hesitated to vindicate to every Serm.iv.] THE IIOIA TRTNITY. 57 faithful member of lier body, — tliose of being " partakers of the divine natm-e," of being " filled unto all the fulness of God," she sinks into the cold creation of a human prophet, with no treasury of graces beyond the poor products of human faculties and human feelings ! Let us then return to our text; but return to it through an avenue that may open on either liand wider prospects of spiritual truth and beauty. The Trinity in Unity, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, is presented to us in two aspects in the volume of revelation; antecedently to the incarnation of the Son, and subsequently to that event. Rightly to distinguish these, may clear our views, and by the simple force and symmetry of truth tend to obviate many objections. And first, of the first. (1.) In the very first verses of the first Book of the Bible we discover plain manifestations of a threefold operation of Deity ; the unapproachable Godhead creating by the instru- mentality of the Word and through the life-giving efficacy of the Spirit; — and to this plurality (of which there is a faint image in our own nature) it is the all but universal attestation of the Clim-ch that the Deity refers when, as President of this mystic Council, he proclaims His will, — " Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ! " The truest and safest comment upon the whole procedure, is the opening of St. John's Gospel, in which, with manifest reference to the parallel commencement of Genesis, and with the direct purpose of connecting it with the incarnation of Christ, and the new creation thereby wrought, he declares that " in the heginning'" was the Word, — distinct from God, for He was " with God," yet one with God, for He " was God," the very Creator, for " all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that v/as made." After the formation of man, thus framed to be an image of the Trinity, relationi'' of course arise between him and his Framcr; the drama (so to speak) of the moral history of the world is arranged, the II. B 5S TUE HOLT TRINITY. [Serm. iv. Personages are prepared, and the action of the eventful per- formance is to commence. And solemnly it does commence. In that mysterious Garden where the spotless infancy of our race was passed, a Being is alone with man, who wields the powers, bears the title, and publishes as His own the Law, of God. On the unveiled face of this Being Adam is permitted to gaze, the awful yet winning accents of this Being to hear and to understand ; even as " the pure in heart" are promised once more to behold Him, and to grow brighter as they behold. But, — I catch a voice of many thousand years later which tells me, " no man hath seen God at any time, the only- begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him ; " and another which echoes and strengthens it, — that He is one " whom no man hath seen, nor can see." What! " no man hath seen'' Him whom Adam saw alike in anger and in mercy, whom Abraham beheld and the Patriarchs, who proclaimed to Moses " / am the God of thy father, — I am that I am," whom the same Moses contemplated till his human countenance burned with the reflected glory of God, whom Isaiah beheld worshipped by all heaven? What! "no man can see" Him of whom it is distinctly promised that His servants shall " see His face," and " see Him as He is," inso- much that He shall be the very Light of the future world in the blaze of an omnipresent splendour ? How shall we reconcile these things? Let Him declare who spake as never man spake ! " Jesus saith unto him. Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip ? He that liath seen me hath seen the Father ; and how sayest thou tlicn, Shew us the Father?" — Let his Prophet declare, who names the Child of Bethlehem "the everlasting Father" as well as tlic Prince of Peace; let his Apostle declare, who tells us that " God was in Christ," — that He is " the image of the invisible God," " tlie brightness of His glory, and the express image of His Person." This solves the difficulty which nothing else can ever solve. Every manifestation of God that has ever Serin. IV.] THE HOLY TRINITY. 59 made our world a temple, was the manifestation of that eternal Word and Wisdom, who is "with God" and "is God;" the Father, or absolute Fountain of Deity, is Himself inedible, inaccessible ; no created thing hath ever beheld the Godhead of the Father save as it is one with the Godhead of the Son ; or hath ever felt the quickening life of the Father save as it is one with the quickening life of God the Holy Ghost. Thus, then, the Trinity glorifies the pages of the Law and the Prophets no less really than it glorifies the pages of the better Covenant. Thus, long before the divine Incarnation, the Word of God, not yet the Jesus, nor yet save in designa- tion the Christ, was busy in mercy and in judgment among men, — visibly by Himself made manifest, invisibly through His Spirit. God was not pleased till the fulness of time to be "manifest in thejlesh^'' nor "took He on Him," we are told, " the nature of angels ;''"' in some mode distinct from these He contracted His infinitude to meet our limited facult'es. The Prophets speak of this visible exhibition of the Son of God as outgrowing the powers of human or even of angelic endurance. Isaiah tells us that the seraph ims veiled their faces with their wings at the insufferable glory of One whom St. John expressly declares to have been no other than Christ ' our Saviour; nor can we doubt when we compare a description of Christ almost verbally the same in the Book of Kevelation (i. 13, 14), that the same eternal Word is shadowed to us in that "Ancient of Days" to whom Daniel saw the Son of Man approach, thereby foretokening that union of the human nature with the divine which was at length to found our redemption. (2.) This brings us to the other aspect under whicli I have said the Trinity of Fatlicr, Son, and Holy Ghost is exhibited to us in the New Testament. It does not oppose the former, it \5 founded upon it; it only draws it nearer to our hearts in applying it to the immediate work of our salvation. 60 THE UOLY TRINITY. [Seim. iv. Christ then is the " Son of God," in another sense not eternal ; God must consequently be his Father, in a corre- sponding sense not eternal ; and the Holy Spirit is sent from both, in a sense not eternal but beginning and continued in time. In this way it is that these mysterious Agents operate directly in preparing us for glory, and it is in this secondary form that they are presented to us in the text. If this appear to you to require a little thought, you will, I am sure, acknowledge that the subject is one which deserves some reflection. The distinction I speak of, between the eternal Trinity and this subordinate manifestation of it in the work of our redemption, lies in fact at the root of the whole con- troversy between us and those impugners of the Christian verity, who are doubtless at this moment in more than one assembly of your city endeavouring to cloud and perplex the testimony of Scripture to the deity of Christ and of Christ's Spirit. We observe, then, that at the incarnation of Christj when God descended into Man, the whole Trinity, itself unchanged, assumed a new and peculiar position conformable to this wondrous revolution. The eternal Word, in being made flesh througli the overshadowing of the Spirit, acquired a new title to being the Son of God; ''therefore,'' declares the angel in St. Luke, " that holy thing which shall be bom of thee shall be called the Son of God." In His resurrection again, as St. Paul more than once attests, His claim to this Sonship was confirmed and declared. The Son of God, then, and His eternal Fatlier, have (so to speak) again met on the platform of this world, and there acquired new titles to Paternity and Filiation. While the Holy Spirit, coming among us as the Paraclete, proceeding from this Father and this Son, is no longer merely the Holy Spirit of the Old Testament, but a Spirit sent forth with powers before unknown, but derived from the incarnate Christ, of quickening, strengthening, and refreshing the children of the Futlicr of Christ Jesus. Here, Serm. iv.J I'llE HOLY TRINITY. 61 then, is the Trinity of the new creation, as the former was the Trinity of the old ; it is the same in substance, but the colours are brighter, the attitude nearer and more endearing; the difference is only such as is between the God of the universe and the God that lives in the believer's heart. And this new, and to us even more interesting form of the Trinity, arising out of the incarnation of its second Person, is to last for ever; based upon the former, blended with it, and at last (though preserved) all but merged in it, at that wondrous period when, as St. Paul has told us, the Christ is to be subject to the Father, and " God all in all!" With this distinction of the Trinity as viewed before and after the redemption, present to our minds, let us turn to the text, — let us turn to the Book from which the text is taken. Whatever, in this wondrous Book of the Church, is obscure, this, at least, is clear enough ; this, at least, humbly and patiently meditated, may win the blessing its last chapter promises to him " who keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this Book." But I shall be brief and summary, as the time demands. Suppose, — which I utterly deny, — that the reception of mysterious truths in religion could not be shown in any other Avay to affect the heart and life, is there not one way, — most important, most impressive, — in which they are calculated to exert a beneficial influence ? If there be anything more than another in which the religious habits of our age are peculiarly defective, it is in the feeling of awe. We are not satisfied unless we have measured with the foot-rule of our understand- ing every side of every truth we profess; unless "our hands have handled of the Word of life." The finger must have been in the print of the nails and the hand in the side, or we will not believe. We have (I fear it) too much of the spirit of the heathen victor, who rushed into the Holy of Holies to discover what was there ; too often (I fear yet more) like him 62 THE HOLY TRINITY. [Serm. iv. we return from our scrutiny, contemptuously assuming that there is nothing where we have seen nothing. How in our times the rapid progress of natural knowledge may, and does, assist this spirit of proud discontent, it is unnecessary to insist. But, for the tendency in all its degrees, the revelation of mysterious truths is the trial, and, duly received, the remedy. In the old dispensation, religious awe was secured by means outward and occasional ; the solemn Temple service, the frequency of miraculous interpositions, the prophetic teaching, the very obscurity of that shadowy region of types and forms in which their ceremonial religion lay ; — in ours, where these things have been laid aside, the object is provided for by those fuller declarations which we possess of the properties of the Divine nature in itself and in its mystical communion with the spirit of man. And thus our God becomes more awfully unfathomable to the reason in proportion as He draws more nearly, more lovingly, more blessedly to the heart ! This statement applies more or less to all the mysterious disclosures of our system. But this mystery of the Trinity forms the foundation, and the motive, and the strength of the practical life, in a manner so peculiar and eminent that it would be unpardonable to omit it; more especially as this very relation to practice is one of the most powerful scriptural proofs of the reality of the doctrine. It is always somewhat presumptuous to affirm what are God's final objects in any dealing with man ; Revelation, however, seems to encourage us in believing that the chief ultimate object of religion is to elevate man into affinity, and thence society, with his Creator. For this he was created in Paradise ; this the new creation is to regain. This affinity can be founded only on resemblance or community of nature. Ilence was he made at first in " the image" of God ; hence are we perpetually reminded that the spiritual life on earth is conformity to the image of the Son; hence the glory of Serni. IV.] THE HOLY TRINITY. 63 heaven is declared to consist in being " like Him," as " seeing Him as He is." And hence, as beings that love tend to like- ness and imitation, so is the perfection of our religion the love of God ; a love perpetuated into the next life, beyond the compass of faith and hope, because the likeness is meant to grow more and more perfect for eternity. To ensure this community of nature, we know that Christ came on earth in ours ; in order that first occupying our nature. He might spread His own through us. So completely is this the great cha- racteristic of our religion, so really does everything arise out of this and resolve into it, that the best index of its purpose, its surest expositors, its perpetual and living Scriptures, — its Sacraments, — are wholly meant to represent and to cement this very connexion. The idea of both, — not the only but the chief idea, — is the mystical incorporation of man with his redeeming God. Now mark, — through the entire compass of the New Testament, this mystical communion between man's soul and the Powers of eternity, is, without a shadow of distinction, referred to God, — to Christ, — and to the Holy Spirit as its objects. To unite with the one involves union with the other two : — as we have *' the fellowship of the Father," so have we " the fellowship of the Son" and " the fellowship of the Holy Ghost;" as we are " baptized into the name of the Father," so are we " baptized into the name of the Son" and " the name of the Holy Ghost ;" as God is our life, so is " Christ our life," and " the Spirit is life." That is to say, — the perfection of our nature, the final object of the whole work of God in redemption, is equally attained by blending that nature with God Himself, with God's Spirit^ and with wTiom ? A man, a brother man to Moses and Isaiah, to Paul and John I He that can believe this, may surely go a little farther and believe the Trinity ! If, then, the whole pui-pose of Scripture be, as they tell us, " practical, " I affirm that its practice is " rooted and grounded" in this our belief. I will not condescend to 64 THE HOLY TRINITY. [Serra. iv argue this great doctrine from debated text and isolated passage ! I find it in every page of the New Testament ; it is omnipresent in revelation, like the God it declares I Wherever it is not asserted it is assumed ; it is not one thread in the weh, but the ground of the whole texture. It is like the clouded sun at noonday : you cannot always see the very '.•lessed fellowship of the Father and the Son, the misery of our nature is irradiated and consumed in the light of heaven, sin cannot darken us with its shadow, and Lent itself becomes almost a season of rejoicing ! We know not our own pri- vileges! We are called into the family of God, — we are placed as guests at the banquet of heaven, — the treasure- cities of eternity are exhausted of their wealth to adorn and enrich us, — " He who spared not his own Son, how shall He not with Ilim also freely give us all things?"— But lonely, Seriu.v.] EXALTS AND SANCTIFIES. 77 and languid, and loveless sit we ! as if the poorest suppliant in this church who knows and loves his Saviour were not the hero of an eternal story, — were not a chosen brother to Ilini who is only " the firstborn among many brethren I " Come, then, we will grieve for sin I We will weep over that which made our Beloved weep I Mom and eve shall hear our sighs befitting the time of holy sorrow ! We will mourn yet more as we approach nearer to that melancholy week when the " Man of sorrows " " having loved his own, loved them unto the end.". . . But, as " He was delivered for our offbnces," so was He " raised for our justification." Lent is brightened by its anticipated Easter ! Amid all our griefs, a subdued and heavenly joy shall accompany us! Christ was crucified for us, — He is now rejoicing; we who have been crucified with Him, with Him will even now rejoice ! And each day, as we read and hear of mournful things, — of the betrayal, and the garden, and the cross, — we will tell our friends that whether to grieve or joy we know not ; for the gloom of the trial and the glory of the triumph are mingled in our thoughts. On the one hand, Christ is " set forth evidently crucified among us," — on the other, we see " the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God^ On the one liand, " Behold the Man ! " and the crown of thorns, — on the other, " Behold the Man!" and the crown of glory, and the raptures of an assembled universe ! ... But, whether on the Cross or on the Throne, in Him alike and in Him alone will we glory ; — He alone has " blessed " us as " mourners," — and from Him alone (God grant to all His people the power to keep the resolve!) — from Him alone, in the midst of a flattering and seductive world, will we receive the pro- mise as true, that such mourning shall yet be " comforted," — that they that mourn in Zion shall indeed receive " beauty for ashes^ the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, — that they may be called trees of righteousness, tlie planting of the Lord!" SERMON VI. THE PURIFYING POWER OF TRIBULATION. Rev. VII. 13, 14. What are these tvhich are arrayed in white robes ? and whence came they T . , . These are they which came out of great tribulation. Breturen, how profound is the subtlety of the sinful heart ; how perfect is that terrible science of self-deceit by which, from the dawn of reason to the hour of death, we learn to reconcile our worse and our better natures ! Surely the " tree of the knowledge of good and evil " might well be to us a for- bidden tree; for the knowledge of sin has only driven us upon the art of excusing it, — the wretched art of supplying apologies for predetermined crime, — the fatal power of pre- serving ourselves in an unbroken dream of imaginary safety from that wrath of God, which yet we cannot deny to be expressly " revealed against all ungodliness," — of investing a perilous folly with the air of innocent playfulness, — of gloss- ing over darker deeds with the poor pretences of passion and hastiness, — of, in one form or another, soothing a muttering conscience, and forcing reason, against its plainest evidences, to believe that an unimpressed, unspiritual nature can be that nature to which eternal Justice has affixed an eternity of rewarding happiness. Unable to question the solid reality of the glory revealed in Scripture, and equally unable to sur- render our earthly shadows, we live in a miserable indecision between them. Wc would come to blessedness, but we cannot bear to walk the pathway that Christ has traced : wc promise willing service to God in heaven, but we beg that the heart Serm.vi.] TUE FURIFYING FOWEH, d:c. 79 jiiay have its own way on earth. And thus, day after day, instead of being the chihlrcn of God, Ave waste our hours in persuading ourselves that we are so, or " special-jileading " with the Majesty of heaven to show cause why we are not ! Now, brethren, recur to the text, and see what encourage- ment it affords to these wretched infatuations. " What are these which are arrayed in white robes, and whence came they ? . . . These are they which came out of great tribulation." A mighty scene is opened here. The scene which one day, when the curtain of eternity rises, will disclose itself to every one of you, is anticipated in this page. May we so gaze on the reflection as to fit us for the reality ! Oh may we, — exiles as we are, — so feel and think of this celestial home, that our domestic affections may akeady cluster around our " Father who is in heaven," and our hearts and hopes be there, to " make ready the way before us !" The Prophet of the New Testament tells you the things which he learned from the mouth of Christ and of angels, when he was (as may you be now, in a sense less miraculous perhaps, but not less important) " in the spirit on the Lord's day." He beheld hosts of the blessed (who can say — God grant it ! — but that he beheld in that prophetic hour some of the very listeners who are now before me?) — "a multitude of all nations and kindreds," encompassing the visible throne of God and of the Lamb. How all that is loftiest in human conception — its learning, its philosophy, and its poetry — pale before one glance at such a scene ! Sorrow had passed away, the unclouded dawn was begun. All that humanity groans for, all that man asks of nature and that nature cannot give, all that love (the essential Spirit of the universe) outpoured upon its chosen objects could bestow, — all was seen to be the bright lot of these blessed ones, and all was for eternity ! The wandering soul had reached its centre, the ultimate perfection was attained, and human life ceased to be an enigma. The love of knowledge was satisfied in the perpetual cuntcnipla- fiO THE PURIFYING POWER [Senn. vi. tion of the substantial truth ; the love of beauty in the un- veiled source of all that is beautiful ; the love of happiness in the enjoyment of secure and perpetual bliss ; the love of the fellow-creatures in the society of holy and responding brother- spirits :— and this was to be for ever ! . . . John tells us little of his own feelings in his volume of prophecy ; but we can learn from our own hearts what must have been the thouglits of the good disciple when he beheld this destined heritage of his regenerated human nature ... He referred humbly to his guide to learn the history of these happy spirits, and what was the reply? "Whence came they?" Was it from the haunts of idleness and folly,— was it from the tables where luxury robs the poor of their patrimony of charity,— was it from scenes of passionate excitement, the fever of partizan- ship, the struggles of rival ambition,— I am not speaking, you perceive, of open crime ; I talk of ourselves, who say we " look for an heavenly country,"— was it from frigid and unthought- ful worship, from heartless prayer, and indolent duties,— that these sainted champions of the Cross ascended to their God ? No, brethren, no,—" These are they which came out of great tribulation !" They walked a painful and laborious road on earth, before they reached the " City of Peace ; " they ran counter to all the most cherished idolatries of their nature, before they were admitted to " see God;" they crucified every con-upted principle, before they obtained that better nature, which is at once the foretaste of eternal happiness, and its necessary qualification. If the portraiture of that undying felicity fires your hearts and imaginations, in the name o'f common prudence I call on you not to neglect the requisites. Peace is won tlirough war ; if you wiU have rest hereafter, you must not slumber now. The repose of mind whicli our faith b.-3tows 13 no indolent lethargy; this is the " peace" of " tlie world," and it is " not as the world giveth peace" that Clirist giveth it. The peace of a Christian spirit is not gained until after much contest, and where it exists it is eminently contra- Serin. VI. J OF TRIBULATION. 8\ distinguished from all worldly principles of quiet, — first, in being not a passive principle, but a source of constant activity, — and secondly, in not resulting from the cessation of outward afflictions, but possessing a capacity of perma- nence, of triumphant vitality, in the very midst, — not seldom in virtue, — of those persecutions which destroy all worldly repose. I repeat, brethren, that when I speak of the toils which must preface your everlasting happiness, or your Christian peace on earth, it is not to the open despisers of God that I am speaking, — to those whose whole life shows them beyond all the forces which we could here bring to assail them. No, brethren, it is to you who have learned the language of religion, and understand its feelings ; to you who profess to fulfil in your life the pledges of your Baptism ! It is to you who, living as others live, yet persuade yourselves that you " are not as others are;" and who, though on your deathbed you may not be able to summon from the recollections of a life, a single instance of an evil propensity conquered, a bright afiiection enkindled, a sacrifice endured, — yet have learned to repose serene in the confident conviction, that, beyond the chasm of the grave, you are to find the glorious form of the Eedeemer waiting to conduct His tried and faithful servant into everlasting happiness. This is, indeed, the most irrational of all the delusions of the corrupted heart ; and unhappily, in opposing it, we have to oppose an evil that in some manner is produced by the very spread of Christianity itself. It is not where the nominal profession of our faith is accompanied with direct persecution, that this monstrous expectation of securing heaven without a struggle against a nature radically corrupt, has place. It is where the religion is outwardly popular, where sincerity is untested and fortitude undemanded, — there it is that men dream that human nature can be subdued without a struggle, or that it requires not to be subdued at all, — there it is that we forget how tho.'^e who are 82 THE PURIFYING POWER LSenn. vi, '* clad in white robes" are " they that have come out of tribulation.'^ Brethren, tnj object is to remind you that tliis self- deceiving forgettulness is the deepest illusion of him who exists but to destroy you, of him whose principle of life is hate. My object is to rouse you to a conflict which you must rouse yourselves to encounter, or forego advantages which are bestowed only as the prizes of victory. And thence, — to suggest to you a careful retrospect in order to determine whether this contest has actually taken place, and to remind you, that, if it has not, if in some period of your life this internal struggle has not occurred, if you cannot remember a time at which you have earnestly prayed for strength, at which, becoming more and more aware of the difficulties and dangers of your state, you have cried aloud again for relief, at which re- ceiving some consolation, you have risen, — and perhaps fallen, — and " being in an agony have prayed yet more earnestly," and have risen again, — at which, in short, you have gone through some, whether more or less, of the phases of this spiritual warfare ; — if, I say, you cannot recal (and recal with facility, — for to be genuine it must be of a felt importance which must make it for ever a prominent object in recollection) a series of changes like these, terminating in a better heart and higher atFections, — then it is highly probable (not perhaps absolutely certain, but probable to an alarming degree) that your spiritual state is one of extreme and momentous peril, of peril great iiidicd at the present moment, but growing in intensity every ii'Hir you delay, from the operation of habit in strengthening the obstinate grasp of the world on your hearts. This is the inquisition I want you to make ; these are the signs of salva- tion wliich cannot deceive. These are " the marks of the I.ord Jesus" which, as Paul bore them in the body, we should bear in the spirit. All the formalities of public, or even pri\:ite, worsliip may deceive us as a token of the change,— ^cn[)liu-e-rcading may deceive, — religious society may deceive, Sei-iii.vi.] OF TRIBULATION. 83 — habits of religious conversation may deceive,— -even a con- siderable interest in the fortunes and progress of the Gospel around us may deceive, — but these things cannot deceive ! To have struggled through our novitiate of religion, — to have sorely lamented and earnestly supplicated, — to have lingered on the borders of a worldly life, sorrowing — for that is human nature — to leave it, yet each hour feeling its ties relax, — to have, perhaps, been taught dependence by a lapse, and blotted out the record of it by a repentant appeal to the Saviour, and to have risen renewed from the failure, more strong because more cautious, — and fortified at length in determined holiness ; — all these are experiences which he who has known has peace, which he who has never known may tremble for his final security. There may be immaculate exceptions from humanity who are independent of sucli a discipline, and who glide into Christianity as their native religion ; assuredly few of us have ever seen even the image of such perfection in the natural man ; and I suspect that if any such existed, they would be the last to perceive their own privileges, or to deny the necessity of that purifying " tribulation" of heart which seems the destined condition of spiritual perfection to every child of man. [II.] For, brethren, upon what ground could you stand in resisting the necessity of this conclusion ? that a work of much and urgent toil, wrought under the superintending grace of God, is requisite to secure your safety ; and that, where you cannot cite such an experience, you are in deep danger of not having yet substantiated your claim to adoption in Christ as the sons of God. Will you derive such a conviction from the nature and con- dition of the human heart ? Oh, brethren, what hope can the indolent Christian discover here? Surely you cannot but perceive that if the religion of the Gospel be indeed a restora- tive process, which presupposes a fall from original righteous- ness ; — if its purpose be to remove old objects of affection, and 84 THE PURIFYING POWER [Serm. vi. replace them by new ones ; if, in doing so, it has manifestly to contend with the wliole current of nature and habit ; and if tlie customary life of an unconverted man possess scarcely an internal principle of action in common with that of a converted man, beyond a general sense of right and wrong ; if the new heart is not merely a different heart, but a contrary heart, — if this be true (and few Christian men will deny it to be true, that this is the purpose of Christianity as an inward system), — can it be questioned that an operation, or series of opera- tions, so fundamental, so extensive, so profound, are not to be achieved without difficulty, and perseverance, and prayer, and tears ? It is surely nothing but the most melancholy forget- fulness of the real natm'e of the human heart, as contrasted with the objects of the religion brought to work upon it, that can leave us sunk (as thousands of us are) in the miserable illusion that we can be Christians by little more than naming ourselves such, — that we can reach our God without moving a step to meet Him ! But in answer to such statements as these, of the mutual relation of Christianity and the heart of man, it is said, " we have not to destroy affections, but to change their ohjects in this process ; and this may be gradually effected without any very perceptible effort." Alas ! this is the very reason why I insist upon the difficulty. . . Were the religious affections essen- tially new, we could assign no rules as to their entrance or their departure. They would be wholly out of the sphere of our calculation. It is in the alteration of their objects that we can understand the labour and trial of this great change. It is in this way that we can perceive that the education for the Christian profession is laborious, like that for every other " profession," which leaves the man and his faculties the same, and wholly alters their mode of operation. ... If our love of liappincss— our desire, that is, of having the constant means of gratifying our various wishes — were to be changed into some feeling utterly unlike it, by the operation of religion, wc could Serm. VI.] OF TRIBULATION. 85 ill say whether a change thus inconceivable would prove a source of toil or of ease to ourselves. But if, our love oi happiness remaining, its objects be made to suffer a total alteration; — if, loving happiness as before, we form to our minds a new species of happiness, a happiness whose Author and whose scene are beyond this world, a happiness which, as it can little turn upon our present experience, must (unlike our ordinary conceptions of the common objects of desire) be not known, but trusted for, that is, be the object not of sense, but of faith, — if this great revolution in the objects of our old faculties take place, then indeed we can perceive what a labour of mind is requisite to impel a new stream through these old channels, to fit the former machinery to higher purposes. And certain it is, brethren, that these higher purposes require a new " moving power," — even the " Spirit of God.". . . But this point I waive ; I only ask you, can it be doubted that a change of heart such as this supposes, is no alteration which leaves us suhstantialh/ unchanged, but, on the contrary, a total transformation, and thence an epoch in every one's existence, — an era which, constituted as the world is in relation to the Christian disciple, can scarcely fail to be more or less prominent in the history of every human life ? Have you, my brethren, yet passed this momentous crisis? If you have not, remember that, whatever be your fortunes in this world, it is but too probable that the only date that will ever be of importance in eternity is yet to come ! But, perhaps, this sort of argument in favour of the impor- tance of this change, and the unremitting toil which is re- quired of those who would realize it, may appear too abstruse and recondite ; for, alas ! how obscure appear all reasonings that we have no wish to follow! I refer you, then, not to the internal knowledge of the general heart of man, but to your own daily outward experience. You who think that the world can be deserted without a sigh, and heaven won without a struggle, I turn your contemplation to the world that sur- eC THE PURIFYING POWEH [Serm.vi. rounds you. If to secure mere physical comforts, — to gain a common livelihood (and remember one God is the God of all ; His laws govern this world no less than the world to come), — such a weight of toil is required, such patience, sucli endurance, such incessant demands on the spirits and the intellect ; shall we say that an eternity of happiness is to be won by no trouble at all ? that for a good, uncertain in acqui- sition, and perishable if acquired, the providence of God has decreed the necessity of careful previous exertion ; and that for a good, certain in acquisition and eternal in duration, He requires no cost or preparation of any kind, no discipline laborious or protracted, no sacrifice beyond what fashion or convenience may please to dictate? But, brethren, this is a class of arguments that wears a more terrible aspect still ! If it directs us to the conditions of our salvation, it also directs us to the terrible consequences of our sin. I have been asking you how it is that your eyes (ye who walk as Christians) can see the promises of Scripture, and yet be blind as to the conditions ; and I have enforced the interrogatory by a reference to the conditional character of all the calculated happiness we can observe on earth. I now ask you, on the same grounds, how is it that no earthly power can secure your (let me not say '■'■ your^'' we are all one in this blindness !) — can secure our practical belief in the terrors of its threats f Docs the course of tJiis world justify the belief that its God holds the gates of the everlasting Eden open to His revilers or His neglectors on earth ? What character do you discover in the God who governs you? We walk in this world through the midst of gloomy indications of vengeance. Take the palmary instance of the fact. Death, itself the wages of sin, is every hour reminding us of tliat cause which " brought death into tlic world and all our woe ;" and yet, Avith death around us, we dream that God cannot punish ! We who have been by that God permitted to read His word, cannot but know that we are mortal because wc are sinners, — tliat tlie Scrm. VI.] OF TRIBULATION. 87 funeral processions whicli, as if by God's special appointment, in almost all countries are marked with a melancholy pomp, are but the solemnities of a legal execution, the grave fulfil- ment of the penalty that man incurred when first he separated from the Source of life ! In misfortunes expected, — in sudden calamities, — in wars and pestilences, — in the very satiety and restlessness of prosperity itself,— we only read inscribed on the fiice of things the terrible justice of the God we have to do with ! Nay, to such a degree is this character of con- demnation gi-aven on the earth, that there have been those who have declared they could recognise no trace at all of beneficence in the Creator, or at least but a slight and ambi- guous one ; that He has revealed Himself to His creatures as a Being of inexorable severity only; and that His very mercies were only apparent, and merely intended to deepen by mo- mentary gleams of light the terrific darkness of His general dispensations. This is indeed a representation exaggerated, partial, and false ; but who will say that such views are with- out plaiisihility f And this is all that the argument requires. If the evil of life, if its punitive character, be prominent enough to give currency to such a picture of the God who governs it; if, as we know, the gods of uninstructed nations (fair indications of natural convictions) are almost invariably personifications of the terrible; if in every cup bitterness enough is mingled to have the effect of thus poisoning the reason of men against their Maker ; — I ask Avhat ground is there for the hope that the justice of God is not answerable to His scriptural representations of it? What ground for the supposition that the mercy of God is boundless, in any sense which can set us at our ease in the ordinary negligent Chris- tianity of daily life? What then is the result of our argument, as far as it has yet proceeded? We are in the habit of denying,— that is, our conduct tacitly denies, — that we are bound in any sense to labour for eternal life, to " strive to enter at the narrow 88 THE PURIFYING POWER [Serm. vr. o-ate." We substitute the visions of indolence, an Epicurean Christianity, for the persevering activity of believing men. We reduce our Christianity to the miserable standard of custom, and we join with mankind to forget God in the easy decencies of religious observance. . .In opposition to this, I have urged that the very purpose of Christianity negatives such a mode of operation. If its purpose be to change the licart, the heart itself must be engaged in the work; and a long course of prayer and vigilance is needful to substitute heavenly for earthly motives and affections. . . Again, I have urged that the whole course of God's providence evinces that happiness is not to be attained by reasonable beings without the patient efforts of a faith reposing on the future; that, to put the thing in the most general way, pain, in some form or other, is the common condition of promised pleasure ; and not only this, but that we are waiTanted by all around us, in denouncing the terrors of eternal ruin against wilful neglect. ... So far (and oh ! how fatal is that familiarity with such truths which has rendered it almost impossible to impress them as they deserve !) I have but asked your reason and experience to accompany me in demonstrating, that those robes of unsullied purity of which the text speaks are worn only, or almost only, by those who have "come out of great tribulation," who have gained the rewards, because they have borne the toils of the conflict ! But here is an authority beyond reason and experience, and to that I would finally invite you ! You who fancy that, under the ample canopy of the Christian name, you can dream your way to heaven, dare you appeal to the revealed purposes of Christ as He Himself has explained them? There is perhaps nothing which to a careful observer more eminently marks the divine presence of our Lord, than the constant union in His predictions, admonitions, and consolations, of great threatened affliction with gi'cat promised success. Two characteristics which in a tcoi'ldly enterprise are almost Serui. vi.J OF TRIBULATION. B9 irreconcilcable, our Lord, from the commencement of His mission to its close, calmly predicts, and predicts without an effort to conciliate them. The religion is to be continually- persecuted, and continually triumpliant. And this declaration was derived from no previous experience : when the new faith had scarcely attracted the notice or jealousy of a single opponent, its Founder began to give it laws co-extensive with the world, to assign the mode of its future action, and to assign it on principles applicable to all the climates of the earth and all the ages of time. And still the two prominent characteristics were preserved, — the continued victory, and the continued persecution. And not only was this an external victory, an outward dissemination of the faith, but also an internal triumph, a spiritual happiness. " In the world ye shall have persecution; but he of good cheer, I have overcome the world." And I cannot but here remark that this difference is observable between the predictions of our Lord and of His apostles ; that whereas they predict mere facts, as those who are instructed by another. He predicts the whole (yperation of the Christian principles themselves, as became the Author and Mechanist of the entire system ; the apostles predict the persecutions as circumstances to occur, but Christ predicts the necessa'ry operation of the principles tliat are to produce at once the persecutions and their con- solation ; the apostles declare facts, Christ declares laws and relations, — a difference so minute and refined, and correspond- ing so exactly to the different capacity and dignity of the persons, as 1 venture to say no possible supposition but that of strict truth can satisfy. But what I am now insisting on is tne inseparable scriptural connexion of the toil of attainment with the final happiness of the Christian. You remember how, in tliat succession of blessings with which so appropriately the teaching of Christ on earth is opened in the first of our Gospels, it is declared that they which mourn sliall be comforted and that they II. o 90 THE rURIFYINO POWER [Serm. vi. which are persecuted for righteousness' sake possess the kino-dom of heaven. And the same connexion thus introducing His mission, our Lord, as you know, unceasingly urges ; con- summating all instruction by His own example, in which affliction and holiness were so perpetually united,— affliction attesting holiness, and holiness sanctifying afflictien. His apostles took up the same strain, and continually and earnestly declared that we " must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God." Nor is the succession of such doctrine lost through all the ages of the Church. How could it? for it is built upon the sameness of the corrupted human heart, and the sameness of the religion designed to restore it. And is it, brethren, in despite of such authorities as these, that we have constructed for ourselves a luxurious Christianity, in which the sacrifice of Christ is the only sacrifice we can understand, and His holiness the only holiness we deem required of God? Awake from this deadly lethargy, and in the midst of enormous privileges, cease to pervert yom' Christianity to an aggravation of your curse! Know that your self-deceit cannot deceive God ; awake then, brethren, and know,— and that in whom God accepts He looks for the history of depravities painfully conquered, affections enkindled, patience exercised, and victory fairly won ! If you cannot point to any such records ; if, from birth to this day, you cannot name one hour of conflict with a world " that lieth in wickedness ; " can you deem that you are qualified to be incorporated into that bright band which has come — and, while the world and the heart remain the same, must ever come — "out of great tribulation ? " Can you arrive at that abode where " the Lord wipes the tears from all eyes," if you have never shed a tear? Can you, in one word, have fulfilled tlie terms of a profession which is, everywhere in Scripture, and on the most permanent grounds, designated as a warfare that tries every principle of ilie spiritual nature, without being once conscious of the preseiice ot your adversary, or once cngnged in anything like Serm. VT.] OF TRIBULATION. 91 actual resistance ? Js religion intleod a prniciple so indejimte that, It It come at all, it will pass like a summer-cloud, unheeded, over the surface of our hearts ? Never imagine it I Be assured that the " white robes " of the blessed are not the robes of indolence, but the mantles and decorations of conquest! Be assured, also, that if (as the passage continues to say) these blessed spirits " serve God day and night in His temple," it is because their hearts have learned here the elements of that holy service, and their voices have been tuned on earth for tiie harmonies of heaven I SERMON VII. THE GROWTH OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 1 John II. 13. / vmU unto you, little children, became ye have known the Father. Brethren, the knowledge which St. John stated to be the basis of his exhortations, I am here this day to beseech you to provide and ensure. He wrote to "little children" because they had '* known the Father,"— 7 speak to you that you may enable them to attain the same inestimable wisdom. He thought it not below the dignity of a pen which had transcribed the discourses of a God on earth, to condescend to encourage the progressive piety of children ; Christians, think it not below yours to hear the story of their wants, and to meditate the means of their relief! Yet how can I resume the topic which he left in this briei form upon his inspired page, without a moment's melancholy recurrence to the difiference (too certain !) between the corre- spondents Tie addressed and the audience that I address ? His letters, intended for the general Christian world, bore indeed no specific direction ; they were the common property, as they are to this day the common heritage, of the Church. But we know what that Church was, when it received them fresh from the living Apostle. We know its enduring faith, its holy hope, its sufferings which were triumphs, its earthly defeats which were heavenly victories. They who are learned in the history of that wondrous time, have read of a love not only stronger than death, but stronger than the protracted death Soim. VII.] TJIE GROWTH OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 93 of a life of persecution. They know that peasants from the plough, and slaves from the market-place, achieved wonders of fortitude such as the proud philosophy of old time had scarcely dared to imagine in its brightest visions of human perfection; — that poor men — unconscious heroes who had never heard of heroism — not only sought the flames {that might be the weakness of enthusiasm), but — what no enthusiasm but that of God's eternal Spirit ever wrought — from the heart of the flames called for pardon upon the oppressors ; so that the fires of pprsecution and the prayers of the persecuted rose, for vengeance and for mercy, to heaven together ! Such was that early Eden of Christian history, before the enemy had darkened its glory with his shadow. We deny not — the Scriptures themselves deny not — that stains here and there might exist amid so vast and varied a body ; weak brethren might fail, and false brethren might intrude ; but altogether the effect was such as the world nevei witnessed before or since. In that new-bom Church, human nature, as if recent from its contact with Deity in tiie person of the incarnate God, seemed once more to have iss;ied in primitive beauty from the divine Hand, and again to have caught the original impression of the Maker, Eternal Purity had been on earth in the form of Jesus Christ, and, though He had passed away, the world where He walked was still fragrant with His presence ! The Sun Himself had set, but the clouds yet burned with His glory, and twilight was still to defer the darkness to come ! Such was the Church that St. John addressed in the Epistle I have cited. I turn to my hearers^ and I ask for that lovely image I Whither is departed this radiant glimpse of the heaven to come? Is it among you, brethren? or has it returned to the God who gave it ? . . . Oh ! if at this hour, in the throng that now listens to these words, I could feel myself addressing an assembly such as those holy conventions of old, that met — not in a temple like this — but in caves and 94 THE GROWTH OF THE [Serm. vii. Bcpulchres, to worship a God whom the world denied, — if, in surveying this fair an-ay of stately and decorous Christianity, I could discover the hope that brightened the martyr's prison with visions of heaven, — if, in the crowd of pledged professors of the faith of the Cross set before me, I could behold the fitting successors of men who cast their whole earthly wealth into a common treasury of charity, — of females (the ladies of an age as rich, and, in many respects, as refined as the world ever saw) who cast their ornaments at the foot of the cross ; — if I could believe this, or hope it, or imagine it, would I address you, as now I am doing, in the style that education and refinement demands of its orators ? or would I not rather — trusting in tried hearts — spurn aside all the pomp of appeal and all the labour of argument, — and, speaking as my author spoke, and speaking no more, tell you that these " little children" whom I plead for to-day, endeared to you as they are by every local connexion, — if you will have them such as St. John would " write" to, or such as St. John's Master would adopt, — must by you, by you alone if at all, — by you, their natural protectors, — be taught to " know the Father! " For them I have to speak, but not for them only. If you hear me on tJieir behalf, you are also to hear me on your own. If I plead for children, I speak to men ! Your hearts are indeed the tribunal before which I have to advocate the cause of this, your own parochial charity. But let me not forget that I have an office more momentous I They are also the tribunal before which, in common with your own accustomed minister, — with all other ministers on all other occasions, — I have to plead the cause of a charity more intimate to each of you, — that reflective charity, that holy compassion, by whicJx the converted soul of a perishing sinner learns at last to take pity on itself! For such an application I need not overpass the text — the pregnant text— before us. It presents two or three difierent aspects, and you will permit me to invite your attention very Seim. VII.] DIVINE LIFE. 9d briefly to each. The " little children" whom St. John ad- dressed, though here I have little doubt the term is to be understood literally, yet, you must remember, shared that title in the Apostle's vocabulary of love with all hurnhle Chris- tians of all ages of life. Nor was this phrase, in this extended sense, peculiar to St. John, though so often adopted by him, and so characteristic of his lovely nature. " Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children,''' writes St. Paid. Again, *' As my beloved sons I warn you," — " I speak as unto children,'''' — and " my little children of whom I travail in birth.-" Christ Himself had authorized the beautiful metaphor, both by His express use, (John xxi. 5,) and still more, by the spirit of His teaching. Now, of two aspects under which the ascription of " childhood " to Christian discipleship might be viewed, it is observable how distinctly characteristic is the separate adoption by the two apostles, — how the tone of each character reveals itself in the employment of this simple term. The remark may seem somewhat refined, — perhaps over- strained, — yet surely it is in such minute and delicate shadow- ings that real genuineness best discovers itself. Observe, then, if St. Paul addresses his converts as " children," it is as his own children he chiefly regards them. The active, energetic minister of the Gentiles identifies his people and himself in the bonds of a familiar relation; and, justly proud of his fruitful labours in the Gospel, rejoices to think not only that the brethren of Ephesus or Corinth are the people of Christ, but that they are so through his instrumentality. But St. John, — gentle, contemplative St. John, — if he terms the members of the Church *' little children," does so without any direct personal purpose. It is not as the children of his own apostleship, nor always as the children of even the heavenly Father, that he loves to regard them. The profound sim- plicity of his mind usually seeks nothing more by the term than to convey the general idea of innocence, dependence, himiility, and love. How characteristic of two natures, Avliich, 1/6 THE GROWTH OF THE [Serm. vn. both admirable, were yet admirable in ways so unlike ! — two natures which, it is scarcely too much to say, are types to the Christian world in every age of two great classes of believers, that — each imperfect without the other — combine, when united in the fellowship of the Church, to exalt it to " the measure of the statm-e of the fulness of Christ." The one, — St. Paul, — ardent and impetuous, imprints his character upon every page, presents himself in presenting Christ, and throws into the cause of the Gospel the whole energies of a spirit, which in its highest exaltation is still St. Paul's. The other, in whom affection seems to have consumed in its heavenly flame, or assimilated to its own substance, every other power, loses himself in adopting Christ, and seems to speak to man- kind from the mystical depths of another being, until it is no longer the man, John, we hear, but a half-beatified spirit, reiterating its lovely, simple lesson of love. The one, various, eloquent, " all things to all men," can never forget that his converts are the babes of his own spiritual fatherhood in this world, his special crown of rejoicing in a future ; — the other, with but one idea, but that the highest of all, is himself so infantine in the character of his dove-like nature, as scarcely to wish to be aught but a child among these children of paradise ! Besides the literal use of this term, (to which I shall have again to return, — for I am to-day the advocate of no figurative or ideal childhood, but of real and immortal spirits schooling in this great academy of the world for heaven or for hell !) and the metaphorical uses — personal and general— which I have noticed, there is yet another figurative use of the term, which indeed many learned men have supposed to be intended in this very passage, but which at all events is frequent in the apostolic writings. It is that in which life— being no longer the growth, maturity, and waste of the body, but the " life of God in the soul of man"— is measured upon a higher scale than the coursr^ r.f fleeting years, even by the progressive strength Serm.vii.] DIVINE LIFE. 97 of God's Spirit in the heart. In this sense the *' children," " young men," and " fathers" of this passage, are regarded a3 symbolizing three great stages of spiritual advancement ; and, whether St. John so intended it or not, such an intei-pretation of the passage contains a mighty truth. This brings us altogether out of the natural and visible world into that mysterious sphere of divine agency where God is alone with the human soul. It is not by the annual revolutions of a visible sun that the progress of such a life is noted, but by the advancing beams of the eternal Sim of the spiritual heaven. That '* city" — and the human soul even in this world may in some respect be such — " hath no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it ; for the glory of God doth lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof." (Rev. xxi. 23.) Now the passage, we see, attributes to this blessedness pei-petual ad- vancement, — advancement from holy to holier ; and it is on this glorious prospect I would have you meditate, and perhaps assist you for a while to arrange your thoughts. For this internal life of God in the heart is subject, as everything perhaps but God Himself is, to the great law of progress. " Never man reached at once the lowest depravity," says an old author ; Christianity shows us the fairer aspect of the thought in showing that man is not destined to be suddenly perfect. Everywhere it speaks of gradual development, of structures that are themselves the basis of new structures of holiness, of a journey prosecuted through many stages. The " truth" is now a life infused, now a seed planted and watered, now a light brightening more and more to the perfect day. It is the feebleness of childhood, the vigour of youth, the stability of manhood, the settled dignity and calm repose of age, — in all a continued identity of the principle of life, but a difference in its degrees of manifestation. " I speak unto you," says St. Paul, " as unto habes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat ; for hitherto ye were not able to bear it." (1 Cor. iii, 1, 2.) " As new-born babes," says 98 THE GROWTH OF THE [Serm. vii, St. Peter, " desire the sincere milk of the word," — evidently an early stage of the Christian life, — that for which the "milk"' of the word is appropriated,— and that, too, not so much enjoyed as " desired." While, again, St. Paul looks forward to the glorious period when " we shall all come unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of Christ's fulness." . . . Reflect, then, a moment on this aspect of the passage, — on this progressive growth of the divine life ; a point so bright with consolation to every traveller on the way to perfection, — to all who, " forgetting those things which are behind," would stretch forward, bating no jot of heart or hope, for the cro\vn of promise. Surely, then, formed as man is, I cannot doubt that, in his present state, this principle of perpetual advancement, which supplies a constant motive for activity, and an object ever renewing in size and splendour as we approach it, is more suitable than even an inactive monotony of perfection, — if indeed, to a nature like ours, per- fection were conceivable on such terms. When you remember how large a portion of our nature is made up of principles progressive in their very essence, you will be inclined to conclude, that if Christianity — that " truth" which is the sup- plement of our nature — be destined to feed the whole man, if this blood of life be meant to circulate through every vein and artery of the spiritual frame, then it is likely to be in its tendency an active, growing, or progressive system of inward holiness in order to suit a large portion of a system which, in this life at least, unquestionably is so. " Desires" exist, and they are in their nature active, energetic principles — seeking, coveting, aspiring. Now, if Christianity, which gives new objects and purposes to all our faculties, be formed to corre- spond to our " desires," it must not anticipate but excite them, — excite in order to gi'atify. This, then, supposes the divine objects of such holy desires to be constantly increasing in brilliancy and loveliness, in order that the desires of the purified heart may never expire in gratification, or fade into Sena. VII.] DIVINE LIFE. 99 satiety. Now, what is holiness but this brightening presence of God worshipped by affections that thus grow as they gaze ? Or view it in another way, — to love the perfection of the Gospel as personified in the Author of it, even the Father of heaven, is to see that perfection more thoroughly (for such is the very property of spiritual enlightenment, as well as, in a great degree, the property of even the natural mind, — to see excellence more vividly the more we love it). But must not the better sight of perfection quicken, in its turn, the very love that gave that better vision ? And thus the object more prominent, and the love more animated, will perpetually call each other into new and brighter existence ; every per- ception of God will set the heart on fire, and every burning emotion of holy love will in return bring God nearer to the soul; His presence will answer the demand of the adorer, and the adorer will rise, as his demand is granted, in prayers for a closer and yet closer presence ; and where — where — shall this progress to infinite perfection end? Never in this world, — never, perhaps, in the next. Our perfection for eternity may be progress for eternity ! Such at this hour may be the perfec- tion of the angels. And the whole universe of pure born and regenerate beings may be conceived as scattered at different points along one vast highway leading to the light inaccessible where God dwells alone, in the secret sanctuary of His own infinite attributes; all travel incessantly towards the light which glows brighter and brighter on them as they advance, — for the progress is their happiness. We, — alas for fallen human nature ! — are far back upon the course ; but still it is a common course to all, and the good and great of every world are our fellow-travellers to God ! Am I intelligible to your hearts? Do you understand me when I speak thus of the Christian progress to God, — or rather perhaps I might say, — of that telescope of love by which he brings the light of God nearer and brighter to his soul ■? I do not ask you to agree with my reasoniiujs : — God 100 THE GROWTH OF TEE [Serm. vii. knows I state them with humility, and a deep sense how feeble is the grasp that the creature of an hour can lay upon the purposes or the processes of an infinite Providence. But I do ask you to understand the feelings and the experience to which I am appealing. Be with me in the fact, whatever becomes of the argument ! Agi-ee with me that to love God is to have Him present; that to have Him present is to love Him more and more ; that to love Him more is to increase the glory and frequency of His blessed visitations ; — allow this to be the record of your own experience, and I ask not what it proves, — whether religion be a progressive thing or a stationary thing; I only Icnow it proves a point beyond all doctrines, or theories, or systems, — it proves that you are the children of God, — " little children'' in the noblest and fairest sense of the phrase. But oh ! if you cannot understand anything of all these details of the Christian's history, if they ^e colours to the blind and music to the deaf, then are you indeed " children" in the lowest sense, — children in the life of Christ, — babes who are still unweaned from the " milk" (as St. Paul calls it) of ceremonies, and observances, and worldly elements ! Ah, brethren ! if your closets have no account to give of rising contemplations, and quickening feelings, and those blessed visions which the " pure in heart" are promised, — if everything which tells of the neighbourhood of God is to your hearts, as perhaps at this moment when I speak of it, a strange, mystical, extravagant rhapsody, — Tiow will you bear the blaze of His real and actual presence, that blaze which either glorifies the soul with its light, or scorches and withers it for all eternity ! Here, then, is the point. Is there one among you who has felt the first celestial breathings of the life of God, but felt no more, — an infant in the faith ? Oh, my brother and friend I do you then feel no ambition to escape this poor and feeble childhood? to be no longer a minor in holiness? to " come of age," and assume the full I'ights and privileges of tlie heavenly Serm. vii.] DIVINE LIFE. 101 citizen? Now that God's grace has made a rent in the barrier between you and Him, can you not catch a glimpse of tlie glorious scene beyond ; or will you stand for ever at the gates of paradise? "For ever!" Alas, you cannot stand there for ever ! Day treads on day, Sabbath on Sabbath, month on month, year on year ; and if your deathbed finds you the same weakling " child" that this Sabbath morn sees you, can you expect to be the " perfect man" of eternal life ? And is there a drop of more exquisite bitterness in the cup of everlasting perdition, than the knowledge how near you shall have been to the happiness you have lost? What spectres, in all its populace of devils, has hell itself more horrible, than the recollections of warnings given in vain, opportunities possessed in vain, exhortations heard to be talked of and forgotten ? May God avert it ! But we dare not disguise the truth, — is it too much to say that, at this very hour and in this very place, there may be those, — and they not the worst of my listeners, — who will one terrible day remember this morning's discourse? and weep bitter tears at the thought that, humble and feeble as was the minister, his words at least were true ! But I pause. Perhaps I have too daringly raised the shroud that envelops terrors which it shocks to name. Pardon me, beloved brethren, pardon me, when you know that every word which I speak to you I feel to be still more awfully applicable to myself and my brother- ministers, who, offering ourselves as instructors, are guilty with a tenfold guilt if we forget our own lessons ! I have spoken to you of the " childhood " of the Gospel, in its various senses of approval and disapproval ; and before I attempt once more to recal it to your hearts, I will ask you to consider for a moment the other phrase of the text, — which indeed can have only one sense, but that a sense of deep and glorious import. " Because ye have known the Father." " To know God" or " Christ," in the dialect of heaven, is a term expressive of a peculiar operation directed towards the 102 THE GROWTH OF THE [Serm. vii. Supreme Being, wliicli in its entireness, as produced by the Spirit, I do not pretend to explain adequately, but on which, we may at least be certain, the understanding and the affections are both engaged, — the one informing, the others animating, much in the manner which I have already attempted to describe, when speaking of the progressive attainments of a Christian soul under the tutelage of divine grace. We find, or make, many divisions and subdivisions of our mind ; we " know" with one part, we " feel" with another, and so forth; the Spirit of God regards these compartments very slightly, and with a single impulse converts the whole man to His purpose. Nor would I delay you among these minuter inquiries as to the import of a word, except for the purpose of drawing one important practical conclusion. It is that the use of the term, " knowledge'' of God, to express the entire conversion of the whole nature to that Great Being, seems clearly enough to carry with it one important principle — namely, that the apostles considered that a right appre- hension of God, if once obtained in all its perfection, drew with it by a sort of moral, or at least a spiritual necessity (a necessity according to the laws of divine grace), a real prac- tical love of Him. " This is life eternal to knoio thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." And a remarkable expression in Jeremiah makes it identical with the chief exercises of benevolence. " He (Josiah) judged the cause of the poor and needy ; then it was well with him : was not this to know me? saith the Lord." (xxii. 16.) But what is the extent or compass of this knowledge of God which is thus to purify the whole being? The text replies, when it declares " ye have known the Father^ To know God as the Father, — of the world, of Christ Jesus, and, through Him, of the inner world and family of believers, — is to adore tlie source of so much that is wise, and powerful, a7ul compassionate. To " know" here is to "love;" this light of kii'iwlodgc cniinot l)e without heat of aflfoctinn. Remember, Somi. vn.] DIVINE LIFE. 103 ye Avlio read and dispute, and call your disputation " know- ledge," that the knowledge of which inspiration speaks, is the knowledge not of a thing but of a person, not of a person merely but of a God, not of a God only but of a Father ! Yet, on the other hand, remember also, — that duly to know this God as a Father, you must know the facts by which Ilis fatherhood has manifested itself upon earth ; and that these facts are contained exclusively in one unerring depository. *• Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God." It is as the advocate of the diffusion of that Word of God in your own vicinity, among your own dependants, that I am here this day. God who has made faith depend upon the spread of His Word, has made the spread itself of His Word depend on causes even more human and secondary. I can seldom undertake a task like the present, even in the most restricted sphere of local charity, without astonishment at reflecting on the extent of this principle of mutual dependence of man on man in the universe of God ! Wondrous, complicated machinery of Providence ! We know not what His real ultimate purpose may be with regard to these poor beings. We only know that, whatever it be, it will be wisest and best, since it will have been His. Nor does it militate against His wisdom thus to suspend man on man ; nay, it redounds to His wisdom. A machine of in- finite intricacy only proves an operator of infinite skill. Yet with all this, how awful it is to reflect, how astounding to capacities like ours, that the everlasting destinies of so many undying essences should in all human probability be suspended upon the apparently casual emotions of some liundreds of their fellow-creatures ! that, under the high mysterious permission of Providence, a pang of wretched avarice in one person here may in the process of events condemn a soul to eternal ignorance of God ; that another, to reserve the purchase of some paltry article of dress or ornament, may contribute to 104 THE GROWTH OF THE [Serm. vii. deprive one of her own sex of the instruction which one day would have saved her from degradation and ruin, — and thus may become in a manner an accomplice in the destruction of an unhappy sister ; that another, because, as the phrase is, he would not be " talked out of his money" — ashamed of gene- rosity, (for men can be ashamed of a good impulse) through some momentary caprice — should have it in his power quietly to sign the death-warrant of some miserable child, ill provided, ill instructed, abandoned to idleness, to profligacy, perhaps at last to public crime and public execution ! Oh, may the God who has, for your own trial, left such powers in your hands, — may He, I pray, teach you on such occasions as these how to use them ! 1 liave been discoursing of " little children " at great length to you, in all their figurative applications. When I thus come to the reality, I scarcely know how to proceed. But I must be tlieir spokesman ; they cannot speak for themselves ; many of them know not the real value of the religious knowledge they are receiving, nor the terrible loss if they are to receive it no more. But oh ! the world will soon teach these exiles from your charity that hell is open to receive those whom you have banished from the path to heaven I And in such an event, what shall we say of the Judgment of Qod, who has not given to any being in this church one farthing of wealth for which He is not exacting a rigorous account. Remember the parable of the talents ; and remember that even the luck- less wretch who " buried " his talent, may be outdone by him who squanders it in purposes of evil. The collection of this day is of vast importance to the success of the establishment ; over and above your annual subscriptions, it is essential that you should be liberal now. Brethren ! Christians ! you must not shut your hearts upon these young creatures, — by every tie of nciglibourhood the appropriate objects of your charity, — w hose angels in lieaven are watching this moment the changes Sorm.vii.] DIVINE LIFE. 105 of your minds? Shall Christ in vain cry aluud to suffer these children to approach Ilim, and will you forbid them?... I said, a while ago, that these purposes of generosity or avarice would he casual and accidental. But no, — they are not casual ! It is no exaggeration to affiiin, that, even in this matter, mighty agencies are at work at this moment in your hearts. The Spirit of love, and the hater of souls, who would rejoice to ruin you in ruining these little ones, are busy amongst you ! The point to each may be a slight one, but it shows how the balance inclines as well as if thousands were at stake. Hesitate not, brethren. Follow the loving impulse where it leads you. And if I have told you aright this morning, of the progress of a Christian in the knowledge of God ; and if, as I spoke, you aspired after such a progress ; and if you believe with St. John that he who will love " God whom he has not seen," must be able to " love his brother whom he has seen " — then, in the name of the God of charity, look upon these objects of Christian affection, test th^ reality of your feelings by the reality of your works, and uniting as the redeemed of Christ in this holy tribute to the children of His love, teach, oh teach these young but immortal spirits to '* know the Father!" n. SERMON VIII. LESSONS FROM A MONARCH'S DEATH. (Preached on the Sunday after the death of William IV.) EZEKIEL XXI. 26. Thus saith the Lord Ood ; Remove the diadem, and tal-e off the crown t The religion which we profess, brethren, is at once the most peaceable, the most obedient, the most loyal, and the most levelling, equalizing, and humiliating religion in the world. While our whole faith breathes the spirit of submission to all constituted authority, and in confirmation of its requisitions declares that God Himself (doubtless to assist us in imagining to ourselves His supreme empire) has ordained the existence of governments and policies on earth, and while it thus con- tinually adjures us by our loyalty to our God to be loyal to Ili^s officers and servants ; — at the very same time it assimilates the prince and the peasant in one lowly condition^ and its stated services witness, united in the community of their filial relation before the heavenly Father, the rich and the poor, the mighty and the mean. The Spirit of that faith, " whose service is perfect freedom," makes all its possessors obedient, just because it enfranchises them all; in liberating them from lhe dominion of Satan, it reconciles them to all legitimate earthly thrones. Christianity is indeed the religion of social order and genuine patriotism. The wisdom that descends from heaven is full of peace and promise for the kingdoms, as well as for the individuals, of our earth ; it is the true bond and ligature of public subordination ; it is full of loyalty and even devotedness to appointed authorities, at the very time Serm. viii.] LESSOXS FROM A MONARCIVS DEA Til. 107 that (in another sense and view) it rends the barriei-s that rank has established between men, and equalises all in tlie sight of a just and holj God. And not only do these apparent contrarieties coexist, but the one actually arises out of the other. The same unworldly humility which makes all Chris- tians feel themselves on a common lowly level, — the sam<' wisdom (holy and heaven-taught) which lets them see that all mankind are one in original corruption, — these qualities it is which, by natural consequence, inspire them with willing attachment to authorities appointed of their God. The spiritual Church of Christ is indeed the true republic political dreamers have only imagined; there alone the theories of universal equality are fully realized ; but it is the very essence of this equality to produce submissiveness to all things but vice, — for it is the equality of hearts equally sinful, redeemed by a salvation equally gratuitous. The happy members of this great polity of believers acknowledge that they stand before God undistinguished save as His mercy may please to dis- tinguish them ; they exult in no privileges but the holiness wliich is the gift of His Spirit ; and, even iu their joy at the possession of that unspeakable blessing, they rejoice with unen vying humility, and ask not which is "to sit on the right or the left hand of Christ in His kingdom." In such a state of mind, (the true Eden of our souls, the true recovery of our perished paradise,) the differences that during this brief hour of existence are placed between man and man would become wholly indifferent, if these differences did not themselves imply rights which originate duties, that call for constant Christian obedience, and for the careful cultivation of the spirit of meekness, which alone can make that obedience to temporal superiors pleasing to the God who commands it, or a pleasure to man who renders it. Hence, the enthusiasm that supports with a rampart of hearts and arms the consti- tutions of free countries, is not merely justified, but encouraged, by our high and holy faith ; and not oiiiy lives, but Uvcs bcM, II 1 103 LESSOXJ FROM [Serm. viil where Christian humility has made its home. Our faith is not formed solely for contemplative solitude, though it often loves and affects it ; when once this vital principle has taken pos- session of the heart, it can animate and vivify every duty, no less public than private. It is as universal as tlie light, that so often is employed as its emblem. The Christian, brethren, is the true politician. No crisis or conjuncture can take Mm by surprise. His rules of action, in the storms of public com- motion, are as simple and undeviating as in the privacy of his domestic life. In no case to prefer his personal interest to the public good; to hold the faith of his Lord and Saviour the main instrument of general happiness, and its diffusion the great object of social changes ; and, as a part (and no unim- portant part) of that faith, to stand by the forms of authority tliat time, law, and experience have consecrated, and regard disobedience to such a supremacy warrantable only when obedience to the higher authority of God [plainly revealed in His Scriptures) interferes to command it. Oh, brethren ! if our hearts were but duly sanctified with the beautiful humility of Christ, how little would the busy casuistry of political reasoners disturb or perplex us! How little our fidelity to earthly dominations could be tampered or trifled with, if, abandoning the petty ambition that makes each of us strive to be his own king and governor, we could become informed by that Spirit of God, which, whether it move over a physical or moral chaos, is alike the Spirit of order, harmony, and peace ! I cannot believe, brethren, but that I have your sympathy in tliis line of observation. When tlie general mind is roused by recent change, and the pulse of a nation beats quick with unwonted emotion, God forbid, if that emotion be a war- rantable one, that the ministers of Christ should be dead to its impulses, that the pulpit alone should be insulated from the nniversal excitement. . . . Our religion teaches us no such maxim. In making us strive to be guides to our fellow-men, it does not make us cease to be their fellow-men. I say, God Serm. VIII.] A MONAHCirS DEATH. 109 forbid that we should substitute for Christiauitj an unchristian stoicism ! tliat when a nation is in tears, our eyes alone sliould be dry ! that when it rejoices in the fervour of a renewed and augmented loyalty, we alone should affect a frigid indifference ! Our Master did not feel so towards His country, nor do we towards ours. The Divine PMlanthropist, who laid down His lifeyor the icorld, was also the first of j'ja\licre no pgr- Scmi.viii.] A MOJ^WnCirS DEATH. 113 sonal interest is concenied, who reads tLem with even the shadow of an emotion? But, — when an exalted name has vanished from the earth, when that which once lived and breathed, the impersonation of power, has been borne away to be entombed in the stately sepulchre of history, — the general heart is arrested, the mission of Death seems to come direct from Heaven, and that decease, which is only the fulfil- ment of nature's universal law, startles us like a miracle, and seems to be an immediate interference of God. It is not my purpose now to delay you with any protracted investigations as to the causes and reasons of this very in- teresting difference in the natural feelings, upon the occasion of misfortunes, the same in real experience, occurring to the great and to the lowly. Yet, perhaps, we ought not wholly to overlook the inquiry. It may sometimes be a mere form, or at least result, of the veneration with which we honour the authorities constituted in the land, which, if it be cultivated, may arise to a spirit of attachment that feels every grief of a virtuous public governor as its own. But the emotion is seldom thus unmixed. No doubt we cannot help, in spite of all our reasonings, constantly associating great happiness with great power; and the contrast of the supposed height of enjoyment with the depths of the feelingless grave, creates a mixture of pity and surprise which meaner instances cannot reach, because they cannot imply the contrast. And, even apart from any ascription of happiness, there is no doubt that tiie contrast between a power that subjected all, and a weak- ness that is itself subjected to the common lot, has a tendency to affect the soul with a great and unusual emotion. Again, loving power as we do ourselves, we cannot help in some measure sympathising with its possessors ; — particular cases of envy, or jealousy, or such like, omitted, wc naturally enter into their successes, exult in their exultation, weep with their sorrows, and are stricken with their fall. Instances of this are abundant. To such a degree of force may this sympathy arise, 114 LESSONS FROM [Serm. vin. that in the days of the ahnost miraculons successes of the gi-eat tyrant of this century, tliere were men (and it is intel- ligible that there should be) who, in the fascination of Lis glory, and though included with their country as his enemies in war, almost forgot the ties of country and allegiance, and would in their delirium have given up all to one who seemed born the natural governor of the world, I need not refer to the striking instance of the same principle afforded in the arts of fictitious representation, where agonies that would lose their interest as the agonies of daily people, move us with the deepest pity as the agonies of kings. . . . I will not detain you with any further examination of this point as a matter of theory ; but I cannot forbear making one or two observations on it, as a matter of practice. In the first place, that "where it exists merely as a consequence of the sympathy with power, it is often of the highest benefit to public stability; and that hence we may remark how admirable is the wisdom and goodness of Providence, who overrules a feeling in itself so questionable, to the best purposes of human peace and happiness. In the next place, that where our regret at the accidents of greatness arises from a veneration for legitimate authority, and for the great as bearing it, it is a feeling wholly to be encouraged and strengthened. And in the third place, that with all this natural devotion to power, it is truly melancholy to reflect how sadly the principle seems to expire just where it ought to act in its greatest vigour. Our Bible unfolds to us a King whom it styles " the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords ; who only hath immortality, dwelling ill the light which no man can approach unto ; " — a Monarci whose power is infinite, and whose love is imbounded as His power ; One whose holy sovereignty is formed to attach every better feeling of our hearts, and who sets us here with the sole view of disciplining and confirming those feelings : — subjects and soldiers, to vindicate Ilis throne, and combat for Ilis cause Serni. VIII.] A MONARCIFS DEATH. 115 with "weapons not carnal." Yet the man whose heart beats for his country's cause, is dead to tlie patriotism of " a better country, that is an heavenly;" the man who boasts (and honourably boasts) that he loves and appreciates the free constitution of his birth, has no feeling or understanding foi the magnificent polity of heaven ; and he who would shed his blood to defend the kingdom of his earthly master, has no solicitude "to sit down in the kingdom of God." Alas! we worship the shadows of Power, and we have no adoration for the Substance ! We pour out a world of feeling, treasures of rich and noble emotion, upon the instruments of authority, the mere subordinates of God, — and we have no loyalty for Him who moves the whole machinery, and from whom all force is derived, not more in the physical universe of matter and motion, than in tlie moral world of governments, powers, principalities, and laws ! You know, brethren, why it is that I address to you, this day, remarks and exhortations of this character. You know that since we last met in this place, a great event has agitated the public mind, — an event of the kind that makes epochs in the history of nations. At such a time the dullest awake to reflection; the reflective are quickened to keen and serious thought. Great events of all kinds are awful monitors ; but, most of all, events that come about according to laws of regular succession ;— these apprise us, w^ith a power that cannot be evaded, of the unceasing flow of the time which we are all so deeply interested to employ to purpose. In being seras of national history, they also become to every individual asras in his own personal history. They force upon us the conviction that we are indeed in the midst of a system of universal cliange ; that we ourselves are under this law of all created being ; that every hour we too are changing for good or evil ; until that last solemn hour Avhen, in the Apostle's language, " we shall all be changed,"— to change no more ! These are reflections which evenj great alteration in the story of nations 116 LESSONS FE02I [Serm. viii. must bring \\\t\\ it. We can arrive at 710 new landmark upon the long pathway of history, wliich will not summon such reflections as these. But I Avould ill do justice to the subject of our meditations at this time, if I confined your thoughts to the general subject of earthly and successive change. This, brethren, is no common change. The inheritor of the throne of a thousand years has passed to his fathers. Death has been busy, reading once more his terrible lesson to living men ; proving, in a new instance of power, that he is indeed " the last enemy that sliall be destroyed ; " and that no control (however widely recognised on earth) shall interfere with his supremacy, save His, Avho, *' through death destroyed him that had the power of death." Alas ! brethren, what availed it, that, placed at the summit of the first social system on earth, our departed monarch saw no recognised dignity intervene between himself and the beings of a higher world? Wliat availed it that lie stood (by the constitution of his country) tlie source of all the innumerable streams of honour and distinction that se])arate, and (like other streams) while they separate really unite, the divisions of society, in this vast and complicated empire? These things vanish as a morning dream, when from the secret throne where sits the Governor of all worlds, is heard the sentence of the text — " Remove the diadem, and take off the crown! " Of all the tributes that his subjects paid him, he takes with him from the world but one, — you ])ay it, brethren, in this temple ! Yes ! he for whom your jiraycrs so often have risen to the throne of heaven, he for wiiose temporal and eternal welfare, each Sabbath-day, ten thousand ministers offered the incense of their supplication, — he is no more the subject of prayer: let us trust in God that he is gone to receive its fruits! Your labours here are true and permanent benefits; the loyalty of prayer is the f-iipport of monarchs when all other supports foil. " There is no king," .says llic Psalmist, " saved l>y the multitude of an host Semi. VII 1. 1 A JWXA RCirS DEA TIL \ \ 7 . . . Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear Him, upon them that hope in His mercy." In the lovely relationship of prayer, the highest and the lowest maybe invisibly united; those who could not aid their monarch in any other way, were rich in prayer ; and often doubtless the devoted piety of some lowly subject, by its secret interest with Christ, has aided the ruler of millions in obtaining favour with the Ruler of the universe ! Sabbath after Sabbath, brethren, we preach to you of death and eternity. It is the great, the perpetual, burthen of our discourse. We cannot help its monotony. The sin that brought death into the world is in fault for that ! When men are holy enough to hail the death that opens the pathway to eternity, we will cease the strain, — but not till then ! . . . And with all our repetitions and variations of the one tremendous theme, how seldom we can enforce it upon men's hearts ! how seldom we can fix a thought that will pass the doors of our chm-ches ! But here, brethren, you have circumstances themselves and history preaching to you ! These tcn'ible orators deal not in figures of rhetoric or artificial declamation. The stern reasoning of events is all they bring! Where we argue to the understanding, they address the eyes and the heart ! And would to heaven that at this hour (how much better than a world of sermons !) it Vv^ere given to us all to cast an eye upon the scene that now encompasses the perishing remnants of departed Boyalty ! The dignity of the sovereign still invests the lifeless form ; it is fitting that the useful distinctions of time should follow to the tomb, — if they deepen the impressions of authority during life, they become still more touching instructors in death. Man, by a most just and noble instinct of respect, venerates the body for the soul ; and honours the temple, though the God has fled. But there — night after night, and during days whose gloom is more melancholy than night — the stately vigils of a king are held ! The magnificent chamber darkened to the likeness of a tonil), the long aiTay of mourning watchers (mourning in truth a:^ 1 1 8 LESSONS FROM [Serm . vi 1 1. well as show, — for our monarch was loved by his people !) the sadness that hangs like a cloud over that majestic pile, — itself a monument of buried ages, — the dreary bustle of preparation for the final solemnities of a regal interment, — these are things that would move, if any thing could move. And if I dare unfold the page of a deeper sorrow, if I presume to point your eyes to the venerated form of that imperial widow, the woman of many virtues, whom her subjects knew but to love, — if I point to that form bent by a sorrow only the more affecting, because struggling to be repressed in the midst of that scene of crowded and stately woe, — it is not that I would idly intrude upon griefs too sacred for public utterance, but because I would beseech you in prayer to ask of the Comforter of mourners to be with her in her affliction. But, God be praised ! we have reason to know that she is no stranger to that path of consolation. Brethren, if it indeed be " good to go to the house ot mourning," you have here ample means of familiarizing your hearts with plaintive and touching traits. Need I remind you that — as if to aggravate the contrast between the excitement and fulness of life on the one hand, and the perishable tenure of its glories on the other — our noble-souled monarch was sinking fastest upon the very day that his people were exulting in the anniversary of their country's greatest victory? that the pomp of mimic warfare in an hundred fields was animating the general heart with images and portraitures of lofty achievement, at the very liour when gloom was deepening over the couch of a king, and in those who hoped the longest, hope itself was wrestling with despair? Or shall I remind you, — for in such instances the minutest circumstances acquire a melancholy interest, — tliat almost his last beam of intellect was spent by our true-hearted monarch in a recollection of the glories of his country and of her chieftain ; — his last bodily effort, in grasping the banner that symbolized her fame? But wliy do I introduce sucli topics? He is no wise Sena, villi A MO,\ARCirS DEATH. 119 man, brethren, who neglects the mention of such incidents as these, or disregards or repulses the emotions they tend to produce. They all — however slight in themselves, and often the more because they are so — aid in deepening the memorable contrast between all that this earth can afford, — its glories, its power, nay, its very virtues, — and the immutable attributes of the world to come. And even where they do not produce this determinate effect, they act to soften the heart with a gentle and benevolent sympathy, — the very soil that Chris- tianity asks to be sown in ! . . . And, therefore, I do not hesitate to remind you of the last and most touching of these contrasts, — that if he whom we lament had but lived a few days longer, had he but lived in health to see the setting of to-morrow s sun, the celebration of his commemorated accession, — his seventh anniversary, — was to liave filled the nation with demonstrations of joy, — and, we may honestly say it, no feigned or unreal joy ! . . . Let us hope that the joy which is silenced on earth is taken up in heaven ! The temptations and difficulties of courtly life will not be forgotten in the estimate of a merciful judge ; and if we trust the accounts of the calmness, serenity, and confidence of his latter days, we may hope that on that day, while we are walking in mourning garments and wearing the solemn hues of duteous regret, in the heavenly Zion there may be the " oil of joy " instead of our "mourning," the "garment of praise" instead of our " spirit of heaviness ; " that the angels may there be celebrating a loftier " accession " to a brighter crown, — even the " crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love Him." Brethren, a different occasion now calls for the feelings of national joy which to-morrow's anniversary was to have brought. He is criminal, unworthy, unchristian, who refuses them. I have before told you that our faith not merely countenances but encourages those noble enthusiasms, which exalt the approbation of legitimate authority into an affection ; and that it is in the best part of our nature to concentrate that 120 LESSONS FROM [Scrm. viii. affection for autliority into a generous attachment to its bearer. But I am not here to call upon you to stand reso- lutely in defence of public order, whenever and however assailed. The weapons of this place are prayers. . . And he who, in the true Christian spirit, feels that all countries are great only in proportion as they make God their guide and governor, — thus perpetuating, as it were, a spiritual theocracy, — will surely not forget to make his morning and evening supplications to the Lord of all, that in His mercy He may direct the counsels of the young inheritrix of so glorious an ancestral possession ; that He may inspire her with the prac- tical conviction, that she is His deputy, entrusted with His authority, bearing His commission; that it is at once her duty and her privilege to support the public honour of His name, and the spread of His Gospel, — and the stability of His Church, as the means of both ! May the God who has so long made Britain the modern Israel of His protection, still hold over it, and over her whose youthful arm now rules it. His helping and directing hand ; that under the continuance of His special favour, — basking still in the brightness of His warming and enlightening beams, — our country may grow in the true prosperity of righteousness ! And — for I would not that we should part without something of a character still immediate and personal — may we too be enabled to feel the importance, each of us, of his own position in such a country ! to feel that the example of every man radiates farther than he can himself see or know, — and that it becomes him who professes a pure and holy faith, to evince by his conduct that purity and holiness wliich it prescribes, " that by well-doing he may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men;" — and thus to evince that, however malignity may misrepresent our divine faith, none is more unswervingly true to his earthly monarch than he who owns allegiance to " that King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God," — to whom "be honour and glory for ever and ever! Amen." SERMON IX. DYING TO glN AND THE LAW. ROMAMB YII. L Ye are become dead to tlie law by the body of Cfuist. These words form part ot a passage supposed to be among the most difficult in the writings of the Apostle Paul — one, it is thought, of those dark and involved argumentations to which the perplexed believer must apply St. Peter's designa- tion of " hard to be understood," and on which the unbeliever is almost justified in sarcastically commenting that the Reve- lation requires a revealer, and that the mystery hidden from the foundation of the world is a mystery still. Though I cannot but think (as I will just now endeavour to show you) that the difficulty has here been most needlessly exaggerated, and that the perplexity in the scriptural student's mind is derived rather less from St. Paul than from St. Paul's ex- positors, whose conflict of illustrations produces obscurity (as opticians tell us that interferinr/ waves of h't/ht produce dark- ness) ; — yet even if this passage, and many other passages that occur in the same profound page, were really as obscure as they are sometimes alleged to be, it might reasonably be questioned, how far the fact of such obscurity ought to occa- sion discouragement to tlie honest disciple, or can justify the negligent disparagement of the gainsayer. It is certain that, in the practical working of a revealed religion, if perspicuity have its general utility, occasional obscurity may be shown to serve most valuable purposes also ; — that it manifestly (and to oui il. 1 1 22 DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. [Serm. ix. daily experience) effects what no other obvious disposition of things could effect, by testing zeal for truth and sincerity of heart to a degree highly suitable to a state of trial ; while it also provides for those gradations and diversities of spiritual knowledge so accordant with the character of variety ob- servable in all the works and arrangements of God. It may also be easily evinced, that the objection would lie with Dearly imabated force against every form of divine enlightenment short of that which would violently constrain belief; and it may then be candidly asked, — remembering our Lord's solemn declaration about the inability of even a visitant from the dead to overcome the infidelity of the heart, — whether we ought not gratefully to adore the mercy that saves from a measure of light which would leave us so utterly, so abso- lutely inexcusable ? That men, under a demonstrative Chris- tianity, would be better men, I think exceedingly doubtful ; that, if unimproved, they would be far more guilty, no one surely can question. Among the difficulties of Scripture study, thei'e are some which plainly belong to the form and matter of the revelation itself; and these we are to receive, as we receive the earth itself, from the same bounteous hand for our hodily sustenance, — as the appointed material of necessary, honourable, and not unpleasing toil. " If thou searchest for wisdom as for Md treasures^^ says the great Master of Prudence, intimating at once the value and the difficulty, " then shalt thou under- stand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God." (Prov. ii. 4, 5.) But, as there are these inevitable trials in the pursuit of religious truth, — difficulties inherent in the nature and circumstances of the communication (difficulties, I may add, which no form or theory of Christianity, even Romanism quite as little as any other, has shown us how to obviate), — so there arc difficulties extrinsic, superadded, and unnecessary, which we ourselves introduce, and for which our own prejudices, or vanity, or caprices, alone are answerable. Senii. IX.] DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. 123 Among these sources of perplexity (as I am not now to tliink of enumerating and exposing them) there is one which is, perhaps, less observed than any other, and yet it would be hard to estimate adequately how far it has really operated to obscure and entangle the revealed record : I mean the effort to insulate tlie word in separate oracles, and tljea to make it say in each of them more than it purposes, perhaps, to say in all ; to find (in something of the spirit of the old Hebrew critics) a separate mystery disconnected from all others, in every phrase and almost in every word. This — like so many of the most seductive extravagances in every department of action and of thought — is partly the exaggera- tion of an excellent principle, the principle of unbounded veneration for all, without qualification or exception, small as well as great, which the Spirit of God has given. But when to this is added the tendency of an impatient curiosity (another exaggeration of right principle) to pursue every glimpse of light which it fondly hopes will manifest in one flash the whole mystery of God ; and when tliis appetite for a knowledge perfect and absolute has to work upon materials so limited, it is true, as are offered in the compass of the New Testament, but yet in which, at the same time, comprehensive comparison is so laborious, the result I speak of may surely be expected. We may expect that, on the one hand, the force of position will be lost; on the other, that phrases will often be overcharged with significances altogether ti-anscending the simple purport of their inspired employers. You can conceive that, if a naturalist had but a single leaf or flower to study, or limited JiimseTf by some perversity to it alone, he would endeavour to discover a world in his specimen, and exhaust all the powers of the microscope to detect wonders within wonders without limit. How this tendency to find all things in all, is increased by the urgencies of controversy, it is needless to remark. If the botanist had to overthrow a rival theory of fructification, or to establish one of his own, you know liow j2 124 DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. [Serm. ix. preternaturally augmented would become his powers of micro- scopic vision. Every visionary notion in religion boasts its text or two, and can boast no more ; but its supporters hold the text or two so near their eyes that they hide the rest of the Bible. Such remarks as these, bearing upon a very ordinary tendency in critics and interpreters, are, I believe, usefal at all times. They are at present suggested by an instance of certainly very inferior relative importance, inasmuch as no special doctrine appears to have been based upon it; but which, nevertheless, as being part of a long and most mo- mentous discussion which has formed the field of controversy from (as it would seem) the days of St. Paul himself, derives importance from its situation and connexions. The context that precedes the clause before us has been by many sur- rendered as hopelessly obscure; and yet I am inclined to think that the principal obscurity has been created by that closeness of inspection which lessens the field of sight, accom- panied as it usually is by the compensating tendency to make each expression of the inspired record signify something above and beyond the simplicity of the sacred author's purport. 1 must now solicit your patient attention, and beg to refer you to your Bibles for the entire passage. I am mistaken, if a close examination of the whole do not evince at once the minute and perfect skill with which the reasonings of the inspired writers are constructed when they appear to cursory view least systematic ; and the soundness of the great canon, that the first and beat and most satisfactory of all investiga- tions of Scripture is that which, not confining itself to isolated phrase, takes in the wliole scope and connexion of the record as it lies. I must confess, however, that if a confirmation so honourable to the structure of our inspired volume, and if a simple elucidation of tlie word of life do not bring their own reward, I cannot promise you any in an inquiry that must necessarily engage the reason far more than it can excite the imagination. Serm.ix.] DYING TO ,b7.V AND THE LAW. 125 St. Paul is engaged in the management of his great argu- ment relative to the superiority of the Gospel dispensation above that of Moses, and the necessity inherent in the nature and connexion of the two, that the one should supersede the other. Now, there are two aspects in which the religion of Christ may be viewed, and we should never magnify the one at the expense of the other ; as a principle of life and hap- piness, and as a principle of subjection and obedience, — life that quickens obedience, obedience that manifests life, — life that makes obedience delightful, obedience that makes life visible and practical. If you turn with me to the preceding, the sixth, chapter, you will find this representation a clue to the involutions of its rapid eloquence. That chapter is com- posed of the answers to two objections, and the objections and their respective answers (so often hastily confounded) are specially directed to special and distinct views of the Gospel. The former objection speaks of life, and it is answered out of the nature and characteristics of spiritual life and death ; the latter objection speaks of subjection, and it is appropriately answered by citing the characters and contrast of the sinful and the righteous service. The one asks (ver. 1), shall we abide, or "live," (ver. 2,) in sin, that gi-ace may abound? and the answer is that we are dead to sin, that the old nature is crucified (ver. 6), and that therefore it is unnatural, in the nature of things incompatible, that we should live to it. This death to sin is declared to be publicly solemnized in tlie expressive rite of baptism ; and in it, as well as in the resur- rection that follows it, we are declared to be copyists and partakers of Christ, — " baptized into Him," into His death, His resurrection, and His eternal life (ver. 3 — 11). The con- sequence drawn from this (ver. 12 — 14) is, that sin should not " have dominion over us," that it should not be suffered any longer to intrude its foreign tyranny upon the purchased possession of God ; and this forms the transition to the topic of the second objection, whicli turns upon the cardinal idea of 126 DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. [Serm. ix. subjection, and asks — " Shall we sin because we are not under the law, but under grace?" The course of animated appeal that replies to this interrogatory (ver. 16 — 20) is fitted to it with exact and exclusive propriety. We are declared to be no longer " the servants of sin," but " the servants of right- eousness ;" that whereas, in the bitter bondage of nature and the law, men were " free from righteousness " (ver. 20), they are, under the dispensation of grace, " free " (or raXkox freed) — emancipated — {iXevOepcodevre^) — from sin, and formally articled to that holy servitude of godliness and love, whose " gift is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord " (ver. 23). . . . Having thus concluded his double course of illustrative exposition, St. Paul now passes (ver. 21) to a further con- sideration, which results from both, and manifestly is framed to allude to both. He speaks of " the fruits," or consequences, of the ways of nature and grace : and to each he applies the notions, before so copiously treated, of service and of life. Now, the "fruit" of bondage is properly its "wages," the fmit of God's service is " a gift." And therefore it is, that, binding the whole argument and all its topics, — life and free- dom, death and bondage, and the fruits of each, — into one summary, he declares, that "being freed from sin, and servants to God, ye have yowx fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life ; for the loages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal Zi/e." We now arrive at the passage so much contested, the analogy of the deceased husband and surviving wife, in which so many have found an instance of what they are pleased to cr.ll St. Paul's " popular appeals," and " hasty comparisons," and " resemblances that must not be too closely pressed," but in v^hich I trust to show you an apt and perfect sequel to the whole course of the preceding reasoning. It appears, then, that the Apostle, having, as we have seen, in the close of the last chapter, united into one mass and inter- woven in the texture of his language the two topics of that Serm. ix] DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. 137 chapter,— the death to sin and the new obedience unto God,— opens this with a new and distinct illustration, in which he continues to represent this great revolution in colours yet more vivid, and with an outline jet more precise. The passage in which this is effected runs thus : — (1) " Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he livcth ? (2) For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the lav.- to her husband so long as he liveth ; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of hei' husband. (3) So then, if while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress : but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law ; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man. (4) Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ ; that ye should be married to another, even to Him who is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God." The general purport of this illustration is, I suppose, mani- fest enough ; it obviously describes a great change, — a disso- lution of old connexions, and a formation of new ones ; the government of the law and the espousal to Christ are mani- festly contrasted ; and the readers of the Epistle are pointedly warned of the duties that belong to that great and blessed engagement. . . . But when from this distant and rapid view we approach to a closer investigation, and (as is requisite in all comparisons) seek to appropriate to their due realities each person or object in the similitude, the case becomes more intricate, and this famous illustration, if we are to trust sonii: of our expositors, is little better than those meteoric lights which, seen afar, are luminous, but under a closer gaze arc- found to be dark and raylcss. The Apostle, it is urged, would compare the union under the Lriw and tlie Gospel to the marriage-bond. The bond is severed by the death of one of the parties. Tho deceased 128 DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. [Serm. ix. husband is the Law now extinct, the second husband is Christ, the wife is the Church of' God under the two dis- pensations, — that Church which, at the death of that Law (which was her former spouse), is released for a new and higher connexion. But to this is opposed the startling fact that in the application of the allegory by him who best under- stood his own meaning (in the 4th verse), it is the Wife — the Church — who is said to be dead, — " Ye are become dead to the law by the body of Christ ;" and in the 1st verse, — the preamble and natural index to the purport of the whole, — it is said that " the law hath dominion over the person (for thus general is the word in the original, row dvdpcoirov) as long as that person liveth,'^ thus evidently resting the wife's right to liberation upon her death, upon her having ceased to live, and being thus emancipated from the power of the law. In- numerable have been the expedients adopted to escape this difficulty. Some have held that the words which we render " as long as he liveth," should be rendered " as long as it (the law) liveth, i. e. is in force," — an opinion as old as the days of Origen, and advocated by Doddridge. Otliers have said, — to obviate tlie apparent inconsistency between the decease of the husband in the allegory and of the wife in the application, — that we are said to be dead to the law because the law is dead to us, and that St. Paul adopted this circuitous form of phrase to avoid offending the Jewish converts, who could not bear to hear it openly preached that the Law of Moses was itself no more. Such names as Grotius, Whitby, and Ham- mond have sanctioned this supposition. After what has been stated of the accuracy and precision of the reasoning of the hist chapter, you will not readily believe that St. Paul is not tiie best guide to his own interpretation here ; or that it is not our safest plan — witliout altering the natural force and signifi- cation of words, altering the venerable landmarks of inspira- tion — to try if we may not penetrate to an internal harmony more perfect, in the record as it lies before us. Sena, ix.] DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW 129 For this purpose, I must rccal to your remembrance the discussion that precedes the passage. St. Paul has established the two great characteristics of the new dispensation, — the death to sin which heralds tlie life to righteousness, and the emancipation from sin which gives the Christian freedman to the service of his God. With both these great ideas — pro- minent and governing ideas — in his view, he enters upon the passage under consideration. In reaching it, however, his mind passes through, and takes the tincture of, an important connecting notion, — the notion (as we have seen) of the " fruits," — the results in hearts and habits, — of the dispensa- tions of law and grace. When once his thoughts (guided by Heaven in their progressive changes) had come upon this great practical consideration, expressed in the metaphor I have cited, what was more natural or less abrupt than the transition into the peculiar form of allegory before us, in which these " fruits" are represented as the results of a mystical marriage ? The mere suitability, then, of the ideas might lead you to conjecture that this passage is intimately connected with, and corroborative of, the discussion in the preceding chapter ; but there is evidence more direct to establish it. In the fourth and fifth verses, you find the very term of which we speak (as a connective between the two trains of thought) employed in its new sense. It is there said that we are " to bring forth fruit unto God," instead of " bringing ioxih fruit unto death ;" and this blessed result is declared to follow upon the espousal in the allegory, — upon our being " married to another, even to Him who is raised from the dead." This passage, then, con- firms, repeats, all that has gone before; it docs not alter its bearings or displace its relations. Like it, it speaks of a soul that once lived to sin and lived to bondage; like it, of a death which exalts the same soul to righteousness and to freedom. How, then, shall we dispose the personages of the allegory, to harmonize perfectly with itself, and with all that precedes and follows it? Shall we not say that the >i-ifi, indeed, the 130 DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. [Serm. ix subject of the mighty change, represents the soul (whethei individually of each Christian, or collectively of the general Church) ; that the deceased husband^ whose claim and power expires, symbolizes, not the Law (as commonly held), but the principle of sin, to which the Law ministered, and to which so much of the preceding chapter describes the re- generate soul as "dead" — dead to sin, because sin is dead? And when St. Paul describes the woman as " loosed from the law of the husband," " free from that law," and "answerably dead to the law" shall we not plainly perceive that " the Law " in the parable is not represented by the dead husband, but by " the law of the husband," the matrimonial obligation^ which kept the soul in bondage as long as sin was alive, but which ceases for ever when sin — the soul's gloomy consort and tyrant — has expired? Under this interpretation, all is complete and consistent. The Law — by the universal prin- ciple of law — has dominion over the woman as it has over all, as long as life lasts. But with death the obligation terminates ; over her that is mystically dead the condemning Law loses its stern control. How then is this death produced ? The second and third verses purposely tell us ; with a view to preparing the way for the new connexion that is to follow that mysterious death. It is itself a result or necessary accompaniment of the death of the husband; here is the momentous peculiarity of this case; the husband is the principle of sin, and the death of sin in the soul is the death of the soul unto sin. In tliis way, conformably to the Apostle's assumption in the first verse, the power of the Law — that is, in the allegory, the old matrimonial bond — expires, in point of fact, by the simul- taneous death of both the parties, but mainly (for this is the chief scope of the whole) by the death of the wife, as he had said above (so exquisitely harmonious is the management of \\\^ figure all through) — " the one that is dead is freed from ein." Thus is she freed from the obligation of her miserable bondage; she is enfranchised by Ilim who has slain her Serm.ix.] DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. 131 accursed companion through His victorious sacrifice; she is " dead to the law by the body of Christ." The death of sin and unto sin liberates from the law, and opens the way for the new and celestial union. The law bound the wretched soul in servitude to sin, for " the strength of sin is the law" — it gave sin its sinfulness, and gave no power to escape it ; nor could this terrible espousal to evil be broken, in the nature of things and God's providential dispensation, except by that decease of sin, which left the soul correspondingly " dead to sin," " dead, then, to the law " (which can only govern the living), and free to form the new and sacred union. The main subject of the allegory, then, is not the death of the law, but the death of the soul to sin and the law : it is this which assimilates it to the reasoning it follows, and incor- porates it in the mass and current of the Apostle's discourse. How strongly the interpretation which considers the deceased husband to be the conquered principle of sin, is confirmed by the form of expression in the fifth verse, I need not now remark. But it is worth while to call your attention to the sixth verse, as a proof that the two great subjects of which I spoke at first were never out of the Apostle's calculation, through all this comparison, and hence as a proof how closely it is connected with the entire. Summing up the past dis- cussion before he proceeds to a new one, he recals again the two main characteristics of the gift of God which he had bound together in the illustration, — the death to sin, and the new service to Christ, " We are delivered from the law " — that, namely, sin, being dead (or, " we being dead to that") — " wherein we were held ; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter." Surely this, a professed inference from the passage we have discussed, evidences that that passage itself must contain these elements, — must embody in one forcible example the fundamental doctrines of the spiritual death to sin as the great initial step in the (Jliristian course, and the fruits of 132 DYING TO SIN AND THE LA W. [Serm. ix. obedience to God as the manifestation of the spiritual resur- rection. But after all, it may be asked, whether it must not be admitted that St. Paul's illustration would have been clearer and simpler, if he had symbolized the expired law by the expired husband, and regarded the soul not as itself dead, but as living and liberated by the death of its party in the nuptial contract? It is at all times exceedingly dangerous to imagine improvements upon the Spirit of God ; but in this case I have no hesitation in replying that such an alteration would dilute and enfeeble the strength of the whole parallel. St. Paul — (it is one of the loftiest characters of genuine inspiration) — abounds in expressions and arguments that seem forced and over- wrouglit, until inward experience has raised us to the level of his language. And as I do believe that the great power of this remarkable passage eminently consists in its representing the soul of man as resigning the very principle of the earthly life and its condemning law before it can combine with Christ, in its thus bringing up a dead bride to this solemn spousal to receive from her beloved a new life of grace as her nuptial dower, therefore do I feel — and I know that I do but too feebly feel — that to lower this relation of the parties would be to Aveakcn the true and thrilling purport of the original. In the sixth chapter he had spoken of death to sin ; he now presupposes that death realized, and he shows that death to the law is its necessary accompaniment, — for that the law hath no control over the dead, that they are beyond its powers of cold command and inflexible vengeance. And if you would trace the force of this connexion or (in a manner) this practical identification of sin and the law so conspicuous in all the theology of St. Paul ; if you would see liow he clears the law of sinfulness, yet shows that to us it must be " the law of sin and death," — you will find it exactly where it is demanded by the symmetry of the whole discussion, in the reasoning that follows tlic passage before us to the end of the chapter. Serm. IX.] DYIXO TO SfX AND THE LAW. 133 Into this I cannot now undertake to conduct you ; indeed, I fear you will tliink that I have too long detained you among these more minute and elaborate inquiries, which are seldom popular, because they demand something from the listeners as well as the preacher. Let us then, before we part, rise for a while from discussing meanings to feeling them ! " Ye are dead to the law " and " by the body of Christ," — a phrase which imports Christ's incarnate nature in general, but more eminently that nature as sacrificed, — as in that of Col. i. 22, " He hath reconciled you in the hody of His flesh through death^' — or in the very perfect parallel of St. Peter (ii. 24), " He bare our sins in Sis own hody., — that we being dead to sins should live unto righteousness," which gives us the same ideas in the same connexion. " You are dead unto the law " — unto the law considered apart and unaccompanied, as the organ of command and punishment — that ordered and avenged. " You are dead " to that which exhibited your God as a God only of teiTor and retribution, who gave you "statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby you should not live." (Ezek. xx. 25.) You are dead to the law as a sole covenant of life, for it is " the ministration of death ; " you are dead to it as a principle of life, for " the letter killeth " and " the flesh profiteth nothing." To this law you are " dead " in being dead to sin, you stand in the same relationship to it as those whom men call dead, but avIio indeed are " alive unto God," — who, " through the grave, and gate of death," have passed into another world and a higher form of existence. The law — solitary and terrible — was, as such, an element in the old world of sin and Aveakness ; it was the curse suspended over the head that could not stir to escape it. All perfect indeed, for it was a copy of the mind of God ; but dreadful to behold, for it was above the strength of man. It was the presence of Jehovah in a world unworthy of Him ; and it consumed where it shone. To this frowning and fearful avenger you are dead, — "the body of Christ" has wi'ought 134 DYIXO TO SIN AND THE LA W. [Serm. ix. this glorious decease, the lightnings of heaven have fallen on Calvary and expired there, and you can now triumph by death as He has done ! *' Ye are dead." This spiritual death must surely be in some profound sense — so often and so earnestly is the phrase reiterated — the mystical image of that death from which it derives its name. Whither does death conduct us ? " To-day thou shalt be with me in paradise," said the Lord of life to the dying penitent. He Himself " preached to spirits in con- finement," — preserved in the secret citadel of God, — a world where, as He declared, " all live unto Him," and whose hap- pier region perhaps is typified in that " bosom of Abraham," which the Jews employed to express it, and which our Lord has consecrated by His adoption. His servant, " absent from the body," expected to be " present with the Lord," desired " to depart and be with Christ, which was far better," — to " die unto the Lord," and " whether he waked or slept, to live together with Him." The triumphant fulness of heavenly glory seems to demand the body no less than the spirit ; and may we not fairly deem, with many of our sagest and holiest divines, that there is beyond this scene, in some lone region of the illimitable universe, a home for the spirit unbodied, or clad, it may be, with some finer and invisible materialism, where in the calm expectation of consummate bliss it learns the art of higher happiness, and trains its faculties for coming glory? Is there not a world of spirits — the antechamber of heaven — where the eye, long accustomed to the gross darkness of the flesh, is gradually couched for the luminous presence of the inefi'able One, a gentle twilight between the night of this life and the morning of immortality? Thither, doubtless, often descends from the throne of His glory, — there, perhaps, more constantly dwells by some unimaginable Shechinah, — the Man Christ Jesus with whom *' our life is hid," and who, by promise and earnest of the fulness to come, teaches His expectant people tliat they have indeed "a building of God Scrm. ix.] DYING TO SIX A XI) THE LAW. 135 eternal in the heavens." And as in all our pliysical changes, spiritual changes more intimate and essential seemed pictured, I cannot but think tliat as our death represents the spiritual deatli that opens the Christian's course, so this intervening state of holy anticipation seems eminently to represent the peculiar blessedness that follows that " death to sin " and " to the law." Few are our intimations of the condition of the saints departed, but these few breathe of profound repose, tranquillity whose stillness nothing further can distui'b. They are " asleep in Jesus." The bodies that arose at the cruci- fixion were " the bodies of the sleeping saints." They are blessed, " for they rest from their labours." " We now groan, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body ; " but when tlie first great step towards it shall have assured all the rest, we can afford in joyful peace to " wait." And if sucli a state be real (and some such state can scarcely be denied), peaceful, though till the final resurrection incomplete, full of quiet hope and calm confidence that blessings possessed are the heralds of blessings far gi-eater to come, — if death does release the children of God into this, or some such, happy territory, — how, think you, do its tranquil people look back upon the life of this world — that restless and unhappy tumult in which they once were struggling ? They may remember it, — faintly recal it as some confused and painful dream; but the motives, and principles, and practices of that shadowy state can have no further relation to them, and their thoughts wander no longer among its sorrows and its guilt. They are "dead" to that world, "dead" to its sin, "dead" to its avenging law. It cannot cast its shadow across the grave ; it cannot prolong one pang of bitterness, one touch of tempta- tion. Its waves are broken beneath the walls of that sheltered paradise. These are the franchised of Christ and of death ; dust has returned to dust, that the spirit might return unto God : they have died into His eternal life ! Brethren, such is the story of the dying saint, such his oblivion of the past. 13G DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. [Serm. ix. — liis glory ever growing and gathering for the future ! Such is his entrance into a new world, — serene and lofty as the heavens spread above the storms, changeless and eternal as the heart of God. This is the story of the dying saint ; such dying saints must you even now be, if you would live even now with Jesus. Such a death to a world of embodied wicked- ness, — its principles, its habits, and its hopes ; such death to a law of terrors, that you may rise to a law of love ; such dis- solution of the old tie, — accursed not in itself, but its object, — that it may be renewed in a tie of everlasting sanctity ; such an end, — final and irrevocable, — to that deadly wedlock with the principle of evil, that the marriage-feast may be held which all heaven shall sanction, and the " King's Son " receive his bride ! Widowed she comes, but not joyless ; for she remembers that her widowhood is her glory ! Some faint remembrances of that dark espousal may linger ; she may still hesitate to exchange the weeds of her mourning for her bridal robes ; we will not speak harshly of the weakness, for we know it must pass away. Are these phrases strange ? Why should they not be, when they speak of changes vast, and startling, and momentous ? what ordinary language shall fitly characterise these hidden miracles of the soul ? They are the phrases of God's Spirit, and not mine ; " take heed how ye hear " them ! But you know they are not strange, who have ever beheld the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, that " glory" which is mercy, forgiveness, and immeasurable love; and who, dying — yea, long since dead — to the law of fear, and coldness, and distance, and repulsiveness, have, even in the midjt of this daily world of aim without object and labour without profit, found within you a loving power to live in his spiritual, and prepare for his immediate, presence. To you may the sternness of command be more and more lost in the suggestions of grace ; and the law, substantially unchanged, brighten into the spontaneous dictates of gratitude and love ! Dead to the hiw as the gloomy legislation of death, may you Senn. ix.J DYING TO SIN AND THE LAW. 137 live to it as the " law of the Spirit of life," knowing it in that nobler shape in which it is but the type and iovrn Ly which love joyfully moulds itself, the standard to which the spiritual affections delight to conform, whose only compulsion is " the love of Christ constraining " them ! May you he enabled to make the law your model, not as the servile task of your bondage, but as the will and very image of Ilini whom you adore, and in adoring im itate (for imitation is the perfection of worship), being " as obedient cldlJren,''' — they are His own words, or who would dare to utter them ? — " holy as He is holy," " perfect as He is perfect," " pure as He is pure," " doing righteousness as He is righteous," " walking in the light as He is in the light," — inasmuch (to blend all in one word, — our hopes, our happiness, our life) " as He is, so ara we in {he woild ! " SERMON X. THE RESTORER OF MANKIND. Jeremiah XXX. 17. / will restore health %mto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord. The words that were spoken Iby Jeremiah to console the hearts of Israel, had a deeper significancy for the Israel of all ages. The ministers of Christ stand forth with a heaven-sent commission to restore ; it is the leading character of all their teaching. It is even felt to be so by those who reject it. And I know no more melancholy contemplation than is afforded by the sight of the numbers who, feeling the necessity, and even believing the reality, of this restoring efficacy, support with all their hearts and souls the existence of the Christian churches that are formed to minister to its operations ; acknowledge in all their words, and in many of their actions, the beauty and perfectness of our doctrine, as distinguished from all other kinds of moral instruction ; contend for it earnestly in conver- sation, public and private ; declare unreservedly for Church- teaching, in preference to all other teaching; and yet — as if no churches existed, as if no real change had come upon the spirit of things by the preaching of Olivet and the death of Calvary — live and move, devoted Christians, without Chris- tianity ! Now, brethren, what I would propose, on this occasion, to your consideration, is this. How deep are the wants which our faith supplies, and how wide is the feeling of the beauty and power of the remedy ! — both (in combination) supporting the Serra. x.] THE RESTORER OF MANKIND. ir,9 pcmianence and (so to speak) the popularity of that faitli ; both, without spiritual assist—the gift of God. Is it then a vain or daring course of the Christian minister, to attempt to analyse the medicine in order to show its suitableness, as long as he teaches that it can successfully operate only through a God- Serm.x.J THE RESTORER OF MANKIND. 151 given acceptance of it? To deny that we may reverently look into these things, — on the ground that God alone can apply them, — would, by a false humility, be to enthrone the sovereignty of grace upon the ruins of reason. No; examine all, learn all, search all, — as long as you re- member that, whatever be your admiration of the plan of the Gospel, " no man cometh to Christ, except the Father draw him." Finally, my brethren, and before we part, reflect how tlie religion of Christ (considered as we have considered it) regards the world into which it enters ? As a vast hospital^ crowded with every wretched variety of sickness. From the burning fever of violent passion, to the cold palsy of heartless neglect, it contemplates all, and understands all, and is adapted for all. The sovereign restorer is busy among the throng ; the diversities of misery are familiar to its diversity of powers. It interprets their griefs for those whose miserable restlessness betrays the disorder they cannot themselves com- prehend ; and it interprets, only to restore. And, brethren, what the world at large is, this assembly is also. Is not this very room, — and every other crowded temple of our city this morning, — an hospital of the heart? Every Christian con- gregation is but a miniature of the Christian world. Am I mistaken (would to God I were !) when I say that here, too, there sit at this hour more than one sufferer by the maladies of our miserable nature, aggravated by the pestilential atmosphere of the world we have to live in? Am I deceived (would to God I were ! but the pulpit is not the place for flattery) when I say that even here, there are at this moment more than one who come to ask for a remedy they will not accept, and to worship a God whom they will not serve? Oh, brethren, if any of you there be who feel the feebleness, and require the cure, beware of saying to the ministers of Christ, as Job did to his friends, " Ye are forgers of lies, and physicians of no value ! " When you come to the church of 152 THE RESTORER OF MANKIND. [Serm x. God, you come to the great dispensaries of heavenly liealth. Pass not from onrs this day without profit. Our Master, brethren, was assailed because He healed on the Sabbath-day ; but to us (as to Him) it is not only "lawful to heal on the Sabbath," but the Sabbath is peculiarly appropriated for tlic blessed work. May the serious thoughts and holy aspirations of this day, register ours in heaven, as one distinguished in the history of souls restored and regenerated for eternal glory I SERMON XL THE TRITE FAST. (Preached for the Mendicity Institution, at St. Stephen's Chapel, Dublin. Sunday Morning, July 23, 1837.) Isaiah LVIII. 6, 7. Fs not (his the fast that I have chosen ?..../$ it not to deal thy bread to tne hungry, and that thou, bring the poor that are cast out to thy home ? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him ; and thai thou hide not thyself from thine oivn flesh? Brethken, the passage wliich I have just read to you, and which, I trust, you will feel to be practically appropriate to the occasion on which I have to address you to-day, is one of those in which the purity and holiness peculiar to the Gospel seems to Le foretokened in the morality of the prophetic canon. Isaiah has been termed the Evangelical Prophet ; and he is so, not more in the transcendent clearness of his predictions of evangelic facts, than in the corresponding brightness of his anticipations of evangelic holiness. As the inspired writers approached the great centre of purity, they became more and more deeply tinged with the glory they were approaching. The twilight clouds were red with the coming Sun. The odour of celestial sanctity which filled and encompassed that Divine Person who was essentially and inherently holy, diffused itself (as in those eastern islands of Avhich we read) far along the wide extent of the Old Testa- ment records; and might have given to the Jewish reader who travelled among them constant and beautiful notices of the fragrant scenery — the balm of still more ethereal doctrine — lie was approaching, and of Ilim, its presiding Spirit, — II. L 154 THE TRUE FAST. [Serm. xi. Him who (as the sacred song mystically has it) is, above all, '■'■perfumed with myrrh and frankincense." I do not, indeed, mean to assert that the moral illumination of the prophets always increased in direct proportion to their proximity to the age of the Lord whom they predicted. Such an assertion would be hasty and ungrounded. No such law is discernible in the distribution of prophetical inspiration. When Moses predicted the Prophet that was to succeed him at the distance of centuries, he was, perhaps, vouchsafed a vision of the glory to come more perfect than Isaiah ever possessed, and an apprehension of eternal goodness more unclouded ; when the father of the faithful " saw the day " of Christ " and was glad," the feeling of joy which our Lord represents him as experiencing, in the perception of the blessed vision, seems to point to a degree of spiritual ex- altation beyond, perhaps, that of the most favoured of his followers in the lineage of faith. Isaiah himself surpasses those who succeeded him. And, therefore, when I speak of moral illumination growing with the nearness of the prophets to their Lord, it is a diflferent sort of proximity or distance to which I allude. It is no measure of time or space that can mark the position of a prophet's spirit in relation to the God who illumines it. It is on the scale of a more mysterious spiritual measurement, that we are to compute the comparative distances at which it pleases the Source of all excellence to hold the minds whose ecstasies contemplate, and whose words reveal, the dispositions of His future government. He to whom " a thousand years are as one day," can extend the arm of His power and the breath of His Spirit as well across the chasm of a thousand years as across the narrow interval of a single day; just as He to whom " one day is as a thousand years " can, in the unexpected turns of His providence, cover the events that a single day is to bring forth, with the mystery that shadows those of a thousand years to come I When, therefore, I say that the affections of the prophetic Serm.xi.] THE TRUE FA^iT. 155 messengers were inflamed by the same glorious Source that enlightened their understandings ; when I profess to trace in their writings a parallel growth of hioicledfje and of holiness, and to see, in the hearts of those who were admitted into the more secret sanctuaries of the Divine counsels, all that deep veneration and all that practical piety which befitted such a privilege ; it will be obvious to you, my brethren, that I refer to no nearness in place or time to the God who inspired them and whom they adored. It is the deep intimacy of the Spirit that I allude to ; the internal contact of God with man. I call them nearer to God, when their vision of His glory was more perfect; even as we count ourselves nearer to some earthly object of admiration, when our dim and shadowy vision gives place gi'adually to distinct and definite perception. But these are idle comparisons ! What earthly object, how- irver magnificent, can suggest the feeblest conception of what they beheld ? Supposing the mind to be previously unaffected, what earthly object would, l)y the mere perception of it, produce such terrors as those which Daniel describes in narrating that awful vision by the river Hiddekel ; when, as he tells us, " I was left alone " (for his companions, though they saw nothing, had fled with an inward and mysterious terror), "and I saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me; for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength : yet heard I the voice of his words " ? or that of St. John the divine, when seeing the Lord Jesus in His glory, he " fell at Ilis feet as dead ; " until the same Christ who had made him His chosen friend on earth, became his Friend also in this awful crisis ; and, in the same tone with which He addresses the timidity of every trusting believer, said — " Fear not ! I am the first and the last " ? I am not now, brethren, about to carry this profound and mysterious subject to any farther detail. I am not about to argue (as I might, perhaps, do) that these prophetic visions — these wondrous intercourses between the uncreated God and l2 156 THE TRUE FAST. [Serni. xi. Ilis creatures — are a mighty testimony to the high capacities of our mental nature. I am not about to insist that they form a positive, direct, and palpable evidence that our souls are made capable of the presence of the eternal Spirit ; and that, though compassed by the evils of mortality, and frail through their dependence on a frail body, these souls are formed to repose in the courts of heaven, and fitted for the audience-chamber of the eternal God! Yes, — I might argue that if to us the influences of the heavenly Spirit are inconceivable, yet Moses spake to his Maker — substantially the same Spirit — " face to ftice ; " that if the agency of the celestial upon the earthly be ever a temptation to the agonies of incredulity, yet " of old time . . . holy men of God spake as tJiey were moved hy the Holy Spirit,''^ and that their inspirations are an instance and a proof to us, of what it is within the laws of the spiritual world to effect ! Oh, Christians, " who sorrow as those without hope ! " ye whose temporal unhappiness have so clouded your religious horizon, that in your earthly troubles you lose the guiding star to heavenly peace, — becoming infidels in misfortune, and misdoubting the Spirit of consolation when most you need Him to console, — turn, I pray you, to the prophetic records, and learn, and be wiser as you learn, how the captivity of the ])rophets of abandoned Judah was illumed by the glorious presence of the Spirit of God ; how those very " rivers of Babylon " by which the people " sat down and wept " — the "■ river of Chebar " and the " river of Ulai " — were made the especial theatre of some of the most magnificent manifestations of the Lord Jehovah's helping and consoling presence, that are contained in the whole series of the prophetic visitations I . . . But (as I said) it is not to these subjects, profoundly interesting though they be, and though the text before us might naturally invite such considerations, that I would now conduct you. I return to the point. I recal to your contemplation how closely allied — the text is an instance — are the supernatural Serm. XI.J THE TRUE FAST. 167 illumination and the moral elevation of tlie prophets of God. The more their souls were opened to the future, the more they imbibed its holy influences. Christ Jesus — the Messiah who was to bring in an everlasting righteousness — was present not more to the vision of such men, than to their affections. Living in the august presence of God, their practical life took its complexion from their habitual society. . . . True it is that, now and then, the Lord of holiness, for His own mysterious purposes, suffered the accents of genuine prophecy to pass from profane lips ; but He gave to such no continuous com- mission to instruct His people. They predicted not by rule, but by exception. If all prophecy be miracle in relation to the common laws of knowledge, theirs was a miracle even in relation to the scheme and world of miracles. ... In every age of His dispensations, it has been the undeviating law of God to combine together the real knowledge of real truth with the habits and feelings of real goodness. He has made the pathway to His truth to lie through the heart; He has made, in all ages, the practical devotedness of a good life to be at once the preparative of belief and the consequence of it. How it springs (in all its rich varieties of charity) from a knowledge of the truth, I need not now detail ; how it leads to such a knowledge, I leave Him to convince you who has declared, " If any man loill do His loill, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God ! " Here then, brethren, is the reason why I have insisted on the moral elevation and personal holiness that characterised the prophetic calling. Here is the reason why, in selecting a passage of deep practical import for our consideration on this festival of charity, I have thought it right not only to declare to you, as a mere revelation of truth, what the Spirit of God spoke through the lips of Isaiah, but also to remind you at what time the Isaiah lived who delivered it, and in ichat manner he and his prophetic brethren were wont to live and act in virtue of their high privileges I have told you that in the 158 THE TRUE FAST. [Serm. xi. exact proportion in which they obtained glimpses of the truth of God, they manifestly increased in love to Him and to man for His sake. I have told you that the nearer they stood in their hours of vision to the unveiled glory of the coming Messiah, the more ardently burned their hearts, and the more fervently were fixed their resolutions of unwearied practical charity. I have reminded you that the blessed truth of the text was spoken by one whose soul was familiar with the laws and designs of Providence, and, as it would appear, in the very spirit of that prophetical familiarity; and I have selected this very passage out of a host of similar passages (for, blessed be God! the whole Bible is but one long revelation of the essential beneficence of our Maker) , in order to impress upon you the glorious identity of the eternal principles of Scripture morality in every age — before Christ, and under Christ, and after Christ. Christians, need I make the application ? Are your hearts able to receive it? If those who lived in the shadowy realms of type and vision could feel the force of maxims so pure and benevolent, — if a promissory Christ could create so fervent a flame of charitable zeal in the breasts oi the prophets,— what becomes yott who have (as the Apostle appjies it) " the word nigh you, even in your mouth and in your heart; that is, the word of faith which we preach?" Had those men visions of God? What then? do not we, if we possess faitli, "endure as seeing Him toho is invisible?'''' Had these men spiritual gifts? What then? have we no Spirit to enlighten us— no j)rivilege of prayer that secures His presence? Brethren, " tliere are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.'' The proplictic messengers — these ''holy men of old" — had no monopoly of the infinite Spirit of holiness ; their gifts are recorded not to dishearten, but to encourage us. If such blessings were bestowed in the old time, Avhat will be done — what is done— in that Avhich is preeminently the dispensation of the Spirit; that in which, in literal truth, (how we can fc.hunber in thr midst of Kuch truths — "dark with" our very ScTin. xi] THE TRUE FAHT. I59 "excess of liglit!") the Spirit of God forms a ready and perpetual channel of communication between our hearts and the Source of all holiness,— a ladder, like that of the patriarch's vision, from earth to heaven ! If formerly that Spirit bestowed isolated gifts of practical holiness on isolated individuals, is He not now, as it were, the Sensorium of the entire Christian system, the ineffable medium through which it receives the impressions and impulses of that divine Essence which is evermore around it, in which " it lives, and moves, and has its being ! " Brethren, with such an aid as this, are tee unable, Avith our distinct apprehensions of divine truths, with our unclouded knowledge of the essential goodness of the Divine character as revealed in His incarnate Son — are ice, I say, who possess the harvest that ages were spent in maturing (for it was decreed " that they without us should not be made perfect"), are we unable to realize the unworldliness, the benevolence, the charity that the prophets of the elder time, seeing their God through a cloud (of radiance indeed, but still a cloud), could preach, and practise, and perish as martyrs to support in the world? You see now, brethren, Avhy I brought Isaiah before you, and his brother prophets, — these men wdio were holier, and heavenlier, and richer in the woi'ks of love, upon an anticipated Christ, than we are in a Christ already our crucified example. These men of God knew no divorce between belief and love ; between living perpetually in the presence of a benevolent Lord, and imitating His benevolence to their fellow-creatures.' As it is the Spirit of truth that has solemnised the union c the principle of faith with the works of charity, so it is, anc in all ages has been, the master-policy of the spirit of evil to effect their separation. But Avhat " God hath joined together let no man put asunder! " This same purpose of separation, which in darker ages (as -we call them) the enemy of man sought to accomplish by making faith stand for a catalogue of supcrstitioup observancos, — similar to \\\q fusts of which the 160 THE TRUE FAST. [Serm. xi. Prophet speaks in the text, — he now attempts to accomplish by exaggerating and perverting its more legitimate signitication. The former cheat became impossible when the Scriptm-es began to be read; the latter, I trust, will become equally rare, as the Scriptures begin to he felt ... So subtle is the dexterity of the human heart in evil, that even from the most salutary truth it can extort a poison . . . The principle of religious dependence which in the Scriptures is called "fai'th,^' — that principle which begins in a making to feel and know a Redeemer (that is, a pardoning and restoring God) to be needed and to be provided, which continues in habitually depending on Him, and making a communion with Him the business and happiness of life, and vvhicli naturally acts itself out in works of love to men, — that principle whicli, restoring the communication between fallen man and his Maker (a communication for whicli his unfallen nature was originally made), must obviously be the highest and purest state of minds on this side of the grave, — that principle which is nothing more or less than the general religious principle as exerted by a frail towards a perfect nature, turned into the channel of Christ's redeeming work and regenerating promises, and matured to a simpler purity by His gracious Spirit, — that principle which is thus in its inmost essence a principle of unworldly and absorbing devotion, in its very nature a liheralizing principle ; for what will liberalize our hearts as to worldly possessions, if continued converse with a higlier sphere of being does not, and what will make us actively loving and merciful and charitable towards every brcatliing thing, if habitual confiding access to a God whose essence is love, and who cliarges us on our loyalty and gratitude tliat we make ourselves tlie ministers of His mercies, do not? — This principle, I say, thus in its essential quality formed to be obviously the masier-spring of the whole system of life's duties, — tliis principle, by which the Spirit of God, who bestows it, may in a manner be said at the same moment to justify and sanctify us, — this principle which, in a word, Serm.:ii.] THE TRUE FAST. 161 puts our human souls in the full sunlight at once of divine favour, and divine holiness, — a principle which is in itself so noble, and in its necessary results so pregnant and productive, — this (by the miserable ingenuity of the depraved heart of man) has been perverted into a barren act of speculative con\'iction, an audacious assumption of divine favour, and a secret internal justification of indolence, covetousness, and unspirituality. This subject [practically simple enough — else how was "the Gospel" ever "preached to the poor?") has been so beset by the thorns of controversy, (another device of Satan,) that I suppose it may be necessary to say that in making these melancholy assertions, I allude to no professed sect, party, or denomination whatever. No, Christians and brethren ; the only sect I allude to, is that terrible and wide- spread sect which began at the Fall, and will, I fear, continue to the Judgment, — that sect whose birth is in the unchanged evil of the human heart, of which the devil is arch-heretic and founder, — that sect without a name, which in one form or another has in eveiy age compromised between heaven and hell, by giving its beliefs to the one, and its conduct and heart to the spirit who governs the other ! Oh, brethren, whatever outward modification of Protestantism you embrace, avoid this master delusion ! Let no man lull your constant " diligence to make your calling sure," on pretence of selling you a clieaper talisman for heaven ! Let no man persuade you that heaven is to be won by anything which does not necessarily bring with it the "purity of heart without .which " no soul " shall see God ! " Let no metaphysical subtleties (the mis- fortune of our age) about the cause, or the essence, or the period of justification, cheat you into dreaming that anything can be a principle of justification before the tribunal of God, which is not also, in its necessary results upon your hearts and life, a principle of sanctification fitting you for His divine approval ! Be content to " hunger and thirst after righteous- ness," to live habitually in the presence of Christ, to verify 162 THE TRUE FAST. [Serm. xi. constant faith by constant love, — and you can afford to resign to the God of the universe the mysteries of His providence in the work of salvation. Brethren, our work of love this day has warranted my enlarging on this everlasting connexion between your faith as believers, and your development of that faith in universa charity. I will go yet further, and suggest, that your habits ot benevolence in this life, — those habits which this day we are calling upon you to exercise, — are intended as a training for a love more perfect which is to the glory of a future state, a love concentrated upon a diviner object ! Bear with me a moment while timidly, indeed, as becomes a feeble fellow- sinner, I would dare to speculate on that world which you are now educating your hearts to enjoy ! Yes, the tenderness of soul which strengthens in this morning's act of charity, may be disciplining itself for a higher sphere ; this day may bear a fruit to eternity ! The whole religious providence of God towards man in every age has been a system operating by the combined influ- ences of faith and love, — both directed towards His own perfect essence. In the Old Testament dispensation (as you read in the noble summary in the Epistle to the Plebrews) faith was the leading principle, — faith dependent on a God who appeared as a rewarding and avenging Power. In our dispensation, where God has allayed the terrors of His power in the mercies of Jesus Christ, love mingles largely with our devotional states ; and, as I believe, in the dispensation ta come, faith will fade before the absorbing lustre of her sister grace, and LOVE, consuming and transforming all to its own substance, rule for ever the glorified spirit of man ! In our existing condition, what is faith but love relying on support? What is love but faith forgetting the support in the sup- j)orter? Now, in a higher state of consummate perfection, a higher motive will be ours than the consciousness of afeeble- n(ss that requires constant support. . . Admitted to the presence Serm xi.J THE TRUE FAST. 163 of the eternal Source of all good, the answering affections of the purified heart will secure allegiance by their own inde- pendent exercise. " Underneath will be the everlasting arms," as before ; but we shall be too much engaged in looking on the glorious countenance of the Supporter, to be much engaged in relying on the support! If even in this world we can, as St. Peter tells us, " become partakers of the divine nature," can we doubt that such a participation is meant to form the main glory of the next? and if this be so, is it not remarkable that this celestial principle of love (which seems to be the final perfection of man and the central principle of the Gospel dis- pensation) is really the only one in which we can perceive the possibility of a reciprocation between our God and ourselves ? If ice rest upon God ^ij faith, yet He cannot rest upon us ; if we pour ourselves upon Him in gratitude, yet He cannot return gratitude to us ; if we approach Him in fear, yet He cannot fear His creatures; — but in love alone our God and we are fitted to combine! there alone the human and the divine nature are one ! " We love Him, because He first loved «. Ix'h'eve the Gospel is to believe a great deal. It Serm. XIV.] OF MORAL COWARDICE. 203 13 to be firmly persuaded (wlietlier by argument or any other means) that there was a period of our world at which a series of events occurred wholly unlike everything that engages our attention in the daily course of experience : to be persuaded that there was a time when, to remedy human sin, the Creator of the world descended into His own creation in order to become its Saviour; that, for this purpose, assuming all the weaknesses incident to our flesh, sin alone excepted, He was familiar as a daily friend with the creatures He had made, and died at length by their hands ; that, rising again. He demon- strated the fulness of His triumph over the powers of darkness, and, sending the gift of His illumining Spirit, founded upon earth a society whose oflSce it is to look unto " the Author and Finisher of their faith," and live as those who expect the return of their absent Lord to establish a kingdom of ever- lasting righteousness. This is to believe the Gospel. You see that it brings you wholly beyond the limits of common experience; it calls you into a new and spiritual world, go- verned by laws unlike any to which you are here habituated. Brethren, I am forced to ask, — How many of us can sincerely say we are " believers'" of these facts ? How many of us have any but a faint and transitory notion that all this ever hap- pened ? How many of us can honestly say that we have as clear a conviction of the life and resurrection of the Lord Jesus as we have of any the most distant incident of our own past lives ? Is it conceivable that truths so tremendous could really be believed, — truths in which we are all so profoundly con- cerned, — and yet produce not the slightest result upon conduct and feeling ? No, the unchristian in practice is an infidel in theory ; he feels not because he believes not ; he believes not because he attends not; he attends not because the spirit of darkness is ever busy blocking up every access to his mind with the shadowy fears, and hopes yet more shadowy, of a ruined and perishable world. But the spirit of darkness has other engines as destructive as unbelief itself: — o 2 204 THE FOLLY [Serm. xiv. For instance, there is the agency of indolence. Belief is here arrived at, perhaps ; a speculative conviction of the ti-uths of the Gospel : and there are, accordingly, some symptoms of life, admissions of the enormous importance of religion, abstinence from ordinary vices, efforts towards a more diffusive charity. A suspicion is also entertained that a mightier change is required ; and that all this, though it be among the fruits of the regenerate nature, is yet not the regenerate nature itself. Occasional prayers are now offered to God for His assistance in this greater work; purposes of commencing it are made, and repeated, and made again ; yet how is it ? years follow years, — the soul is hastening to judgment, — and the change never comes! It is prayed for now and then; it is asked with very tears, now and then; under the urgencies of a powerful preacher, or of a faithful friend, it is acknow- ledged to be the one eternal truth of God ; — and yet the change is not come, the step itself which brings the spirit of a believer into the circle of the people of the Lord is not effected! There are times — and at some period or other they come (awful to think !) in, as I believe, the lives of nearly all hearers of the Gospel — when the light of divine truth seems to shine with unspeakable glory upon the soul, — it may be in aflSiction, in prayer, in contemplation, or when listening to the preaching of the word, for the outward occasions are many ; there are times, in the life of almost every man, when earth half disappears, and heaven is nearer to the mind, and at which a sanguine or susceptible temper is apt to believe that it could for ever resign heart and life to the dominion of God; and, nevertheless, let the occasion pass away, and the emotion passes with it, — the tide ebbs, and leaves the heart dry as ever, — and the momen- tary Christian goes forth into the world, through sheer indo- lence, once more a worldling, gaining nothing by the tempo- rary piety but a confirmed distrust in every return of better feeling ! . . . Dear brethren, if this case apply to any of you, in the name of Christ and of your own salvation, I call upon Serm. XIV.] OF MORAL COWARDICE. 205 you to receive such visitations of the Spirit of God as pledges of His abiding presence, and encouragements to progress. If any of you have known such hours of blessedness, oh, relin- quish not by indolent neglect these bright promises of the heaven that awaits you ! They are the twilight of the celes- tial dawn, the foretaste of Paradise. If God has thus drawn near to you, will you not indeed cultivate His glorious ac- quaintance? By being visited with such feelings you have been specially marked out, as having in you a something not wholly unfitted for the kingdom and presence of God. The eye of that God is lovingly upon you. The hosts of the blessed are anticipating your companionship in their own holy regions. Will you by indolent neglect, and that wretched indecision which hovers between sin and holiness till death cuts short the question, forfeit the inheritance of glory which was more than ever your inheritance from the time that the Spirit of God called at your heart and made you feel the value of your inestimable privileges ? Called, as all are, to be the children of God, you are called in a special sense to whom God has even for the briefest period made Himself known, in feelings of piety sent by Him, in tenderness of spirit sent by Him, in holy hopes sent by Him, in deadness to the world sent by Him, in humble happy dependence. His, and only His, invaluable gift ! We have spoken of the terrible power of indolent indecision as an instrument of Satan for preserving the spirits of men in captivity to his will. The text intimates another yet, — shame, or the fear of man's opinion. And truly I believe that no snare ever invented by the adversary of man has secured a larger array than this of recruits to the army of evil. Dis- belief is blind to the Go.spel ; indolence evades it; but shame alone deserts and degrades it. " Be not thou," says the Apostle to his convert, — " be not thou, therefore, ashamed of the testimony of the Lord." Feel no siiame in executing the honourable office of witness to His truth. Chosen as a minister 20© 1'I1E I^'OLLY [Serm. SiV of the Gospel, exult in your high commission, and let the world perceive tliat you value the reproach of Christ above all that world can offer ! For my own part, I, Paul, " am not ashamed, for I know in whom I have believed ;" or, as he expresses it elsewhere (Rom. i. 16), "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ ; for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." That there ^s, then, such a feeling — monstrous though it be — as this, of being ashamed of goodness in every form, but more especially of being ashamed of professing discipleship to Christ, it is, I suppose, unnecessary to remind you. (All of ns may see it in the world ; not a few of us, I fear, may detect it in ourselves.) We all know that there are those who, incapable of shame in the commission and the avowal of the grossest profligacy, will yet blush to be convicted of having yielded for a moment to a transient impulse of religious emo- tion. The fact being certain, I ask you to contemplate the utter extravagance of this perversion of feelings. And if there be here any who recognise, in any of its degrees, this weakness among their own, I beseech them to reflect how utterly irre- concileable it is to any principle even of that common reason which we all acknowledge as the guide of life. . . . And, per- haps, the simplest mode of effecting this — for I would address you with studious simplicity — is by comparing our views of worldly and of heavenly things, and showing how strangely the wisdom which governs us in the things of earth, deserts us when once we pass to the higher platform of the eternal world. To any listener, then, who would be a Christian, but dares not, — to any whom a miserable dread of his fellow-sinners ])rcvents from avowing his terrors or his hopes in Christ, — to any who would tremble before God only that he trembles before a brother worm, — to any who, in whatever degree, (for this folly is of numy degrees, and few wholly escape it,) is " ashamed of the testimony of the Lord," I put it simply, '>nl eanirslly, — lb>w is such a ferliii;^- jiistilialiU> \\\w\\ any Sonn. Xiv.J OF MORAL COWARDICE. 207 grounds of reason ? I do not now oppose it as opposed to the express commands of Scripture, though these, indeed, are re- iterated and impressive ; I oppose it merely upon the grouinl of its utter inconsistency with the principles which you your- selves recognise as the governing principles of this our daily life and experience. For, in the first place, you who are ashamed of your fellow-men to avow the profession of Christ, is it that you ar" ashamed of helieving certain established truths, such as the Gospel comprises? Are you ashamed of confessing that, however the half-learning and entire corruption of a few wretched objectors have laboured to sap the mighty basis of the Gospel revelation, you still can perceive, in that wondrous story, the lineaments of truth, — a power and an evidence such as falsehood never possessed? Is it of this conviction you are asliamed ? I will not tell you that such shame is a foul deser- tion of a cause you cannot disbelieve ; but I will ask, — Is this to be the only conviction, the possession of which brings shame and timidity? Does shame attend the deep convictions that regulate daily conduct ? Has any man, upon any other sub- ject, ever been ashamed of avowing a belief founded upon adequate testimony ? ashamed of employing his intellect in the discovery of truth, and arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? I will state an instance. Has any man ever, — fallen as huma- nity is, — has any man ever (supposing him of common honesty) learned, upon unquestionable proofs, the certainty of a deed of friendship done him by a disinterested benefactor — a deed noble in all its circumstances, important in all its results — and bhished to avow his belief that the deed was truly done? Conceive him snatched from awful danger at the peril of a life ; conceive enormous debts freely discharged; conceive him rescued from the horrors of a prison ; and can you imagine the rescued man ashamed to avow his Icnowledge that he owed it all to the free, unconstrained compassion of a friend ? Who here would not .shrink from tlic ^neanness of such falsehood of 20S THE FOLLY [Serm.xiv heart ? Yet, behold, in this Gospel story we have all these very circumstances acted upon the great theatre of eternity ; we have a rescue from peril by the very death of the Rescuer, and a security offered of everlasting life; we have the free cancel of debts never capable of discharge by us ; we have the precious purchase-money of redemption paid, even the blood of the Lamb without spot ; and yet, in the company of our brothers and sisters of the dust, we have the inconceivable meanness to evade admitting our helief in the reality of these inestimable blessings ! We cannot shake off the conviction, but we would hide it! We cannot burst the bonds of our belief, but we are heartily ashamed of the disgrace of being convinced by the Gospel ! But, again, you who blush to be thought a Christian, — Is it of tlie prudence of your course you are ashamed ? of the fact that, while others are dissipating the short allowance of life to no purpose, you are laying up treasure where the moth does not corrupt nor the thief plunder ? I ask not what the Word of God declares of your cowardice, but I ask Avhat judgment your own daily -practice passes upon it. Is, then, a prudential regard to a man's own welfare so universally dis- credited upon earth that you should tremble to be detected in evincing it? Are you ashamed that men should know that from morn till night your thoughts are busy in securing the wealth of tiiis world for yourself or your possible descendants ; that at every hour there burns in the temple of your heart the fires of that idolatry whose god is " the god of this world ;" that every second thought is devoted to the great purpose of augmenting possessions, extending connexions, advancing your personal importance? Or, on the contrary, is it not certain that no character possesses more of general esteem than he who, from tlie cradle to tlie grave, has lived exclu- sively for such purposes as these, if he have but pursued them without any striking violation of the common rules of honesty? buch is worldly prudence and its estimation. Now, change Serm. XIV.] OF JfOJiAL COWARDICE. 209 the scene, expand the prudence until it takes in the concerna of an eternity, and is the estimate to be altered? Alas! you value yourself upon the long-sighted prudence whose calcu- lations are bounded by the gi-ave ; you are ashamed of that which comprehends the happiness of immortality; you glory in pursuing a wealth that withers in your hand; you blush to be known as a speculator in the treasures of heaven ; you exult in doubling that income which, after all, no accountant would assure to some of us for five years, or four years, or a single year: but when the calculation swells till it embraces the territories of God's coming kingdom, an inheritance that cannot fade, a crown of glory, immortal in the heavens ; when the " bidding" is for the fee of a celestial estate, it is no longer " prudence" to pursue the speculation, it is " enthusiasm," and " fanaticism," and " hypocrisy," and the rest, — and you are ashamed to avow it ! Again ; if indeed it be not of the prudence of your religious calling you are ashamed, is it of 7/our superiority to common temptations, of hopes that place you above the pleasures of this world, and a serenity unaffected by its troubles ? There are those who have even attained to this pitch of habitual piety, and yet, melancholy to say, have still the weakness to dread the scoff of fools, and who would willingly evade the topics they love in solitude, when engaged among the societies of unbelieving men. You are ashamed, then, to publish your very superiority, to let men see and know the purifying power of the principles you profess ! But was ever man, on any other subject, similarly ashamed? It is a total mistake to suppose that Christianity is the onh/ profession that requires a supe- riority to temptation. The truth is (and it is an awful truth, as it tells upon our state before God) that men do commonly, for the purpose of securing earthly distinction, endure a series of preparatory trials, and difficulties, and self-denials, at the very least equal to what would have vanquished a corrupt nature, and secured, under the blessing of Christ, a high place 210 THE FOLLY [Serm. xiv. in the everlasting world. There is probably not an individual here who cannot remember that, within the past week or month, he has, through respect for man or for his own future advancement, laid himself under restraints precisely the same in severity as religion is perpetually asking, and perpetually asking in vain ! So much for the common excuse derived from the power of temptation and the corresponding mercy of God ; so much for the expectation that God will pardon us in con- sideration of the force of a temptation which the presence of a single bystander would have ensured our triumphantly con- quering ! If, then, it be certain that every worldly pm-suit requires for success a superiority to temptations of some kind, is it not most inconsistent to see no glory in the Christian conquest of difficulties, and all that is splendid and attractive in the con- quest of them for the poor purposes of earthly advancement ? When we see the young labourer among yourselves who, for years, toils through the dull difficulties of his preparatory study on the faint, uncertain hope of reaping future fame, we sympa- thise with his hopes, we wish good speed to his courageous ])erseverance ; it is so in every profession and pursuit of man- kind, but one ! Extend the hope to the skies, exchange an earthly for an immortal scene, let the crown which hangs in view be not this world's, — an apparent crown of glory to the eye, a real crown of thorns to the brow, — but such as Christ wore, — thorns for a while in this world, glory in the next ; let this be the prize for which the ambition is aroused and the f^truggle made, and all the admiration vanishes ; and the com- batants themselves, in this heavenly conflict, become half ashamed of exhibiting their own victories, or being known in the grace and power of God to' have achieved them ! Once more I ask of you who tremble at the sarcasms of man, are you indeed ashamed of communion with God/.oi' that high and holy privilege which enables you, even in this life, to traverse uncliallengcd tlic cDiirts of hoaviMi? Do you dread Serm. XIV.] OF MORAL COWARDICE. 311 that man should know that th(; Holy One who inhahiteth eternity has deigned ere now to sanctify your heart with His j)resence ? Do you fear it should be whispered among men, that to you hatli been fulfilled that bright promise of the Saviour to His people, — " If a man love me, lie will keep my words ; and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." (John xiv. 23.) Alas! in tJiis instance, too, how strange is that perversity which alters every principle of ordinary life on the field of religion! Men are respected in the dignity of their acquaintance ; to be familiar with the gi-eat is, in a manner, to share their greatness ; and even beyond wealth itself is the peculiar power of rank, and of association with rank. But shift the scene, as before ; instead of the transitory splendours of earthly greatness, let the curtain rise upon the unclouded Majesty of heaven ; let tlie Monarch of the universe (of whom all earthly authority is but the image) be the acquaintance sought, or the guest received, and — oh, incredible impiety, lost in still more incre- dible folly ! — men regard with contempt or neglect the being thus favoured (and every genuine follower of Christ is thus favoured) ; dignities like these have no attraction ; the God of all glory wanders through His own world almost unac- knowledged, or is abandoned to the hospitality of the poorest and most destitute hearts ; and it is well if even these are not driven by the contempt of their fellows to secrete, in very shame, the Divine Inmate Avho honours them ! Such, then, is the " scandal of the Gospel," — such the being " ashamed of the testimony of the Lord." The Apostles, who were placed Vimon.^ professed unbelievers, had many additional causes ; to which, of course, in addressing a Christian con- gregation, it is needless to allude. The marvellous humiliation of the life of Christ, and the ignominy of His death, were common subjects of heathen, as they are to this day of infidel, sarcasm. I need not tell you (I trust) that these are the very circumstances which raise to its liiglirst sublimity " the 2 1 2 THE FOLL Y [Serm. x i v mystery of godliness, — God manifest in the flesh.". ... I have preferred to consider this cowardice in our Gospel profession as it exists among ourselves, — among us who boast to be Christians, but so seldom boast to be Christ-like ! I know that this dread of man's opinion is not without its causes. I know that the world loves to be undisturbed in its indulgencies ; that the surest way of being so is to set the tone of public fashion against that public disturber, the Gospel of Christ ; and that everything thus unfashionable is, to feeble and unsteady minds, the subject of shame. I know that unbelief represents the aims of religion as shadowy visions, without base or substance ; that for such purposes constraint seems preposterous ; that the Gospel, which calls for such restraint, is therefore despised as a dehision, or repelled as a nuisance ; and that, even for the humble believers who look for the coming of Christ, and who know that this world is but the antechamber of another, it is hard to war — short and preparatory though life be — against the absence of sympathy and the presence of contempt. All this I know ; but I know, also, that it is all destined to form a portion of that necessary trial which alone can confirm in habits and principles meet for heaven. I know that " whom He loveth He chasteneth ;" that not one affliction is visited unnecessarily upon the children of the heavenly Parent ; that, hard as this trial may be, yet we are called upon " to endure hardness as soldiers of Christ." If there be any among you who feel the severity of this ordeal, — who, consecrating the earliest energies of life to the cause of Christ, yet dread the scoffs of the unhappy rebels against that cause, that surround you ; still more, if there be any who, with a lingering disposition for religion, are yet deterred from being all that the Spirit of God could make them, by the fear of some wretched bystander, who selfishly spreads his own sin for fear of being himself discountenanced and deserted in his vices ; if any such cases be now before me, I point then to the future as the glorious compensation foi Serm.xiv.] OF MORAL COWARDICE. 213 all ! Such are on the borders of the kingdom of God : may no power of Satan, maj no influence of example, no indolence of delay, no return of unbelief, no advice of evil counsellors, no scorn of fools, prevent them from achieving the passage ! They may be scorned, — what matter ? they will be saved ! To each and all let them answer with the Apostle, who endured woi'se than they can ever be called to endure, — " God forbid that I should glory save m the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world !" Ashamed of Christ ! — of Him who has redeemed man's nature from wretchedness, and fii'st given to the race a security of immortality, an interest in an eternal world! Ashamed of Him who is the " express image " of God ; " in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily ;" "by whom the worlds were created," and who still sustains the worlds from annihilation by the power of His might ! Ashamed of Christ ! — of Him who was not ashamed to endm*e all the bitterest mockeries of sinners for my sake ; for my sake to exile Himself for long years from the immediate glories of heaven ; for my sake to wander among the lost and ruined of the earth ; and still for my sake to close a life of sorrows by a death of bodily and mental torture ! Ashamed of Christ ! — of Him who rose triumphant from the grave ; and though no fleshly eye can behold Him, even now sitteth at the right hand of God, " in the glory of the Father ;" yet, amid all His glories, pleads for my sake the obedience of Gethsemane and the Sacrifice of Calvary ! . . . . Oh, may many here be enabled to return such an answer as this to the calumnies and reviling of tlie world ! Happy are they, and yet more happy in all that outward unhappiness which fortifies them more and more for everlasting bliss ! Happy, indeed, are they who thus live, con- fiding that, however it may be delayed, a time shall come when the truth of that Scripture shall be proved, — " Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of ofience ; and whosoever be- lieveth on Him shall not heashamedT' (Isa.viii.l4; Rom.ix.33.) S a R M O N XV. THE WILL OF GOD TOWARDS HIS CHILDREN, Matt. XVIIL 14. ft is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these Utile onci should perish. It is in behalf of those " little ones " of whom the Redeemer spoke that his minister has this day to address you, — the "little ones" whom the Father wills not to perish. God knows I can say, with the deepest sincerity, I heartily wish they possessed an advocate better qualified m strength of mind and of body to plead their cause ; with yet deeper feeling I will say, would to God the audience who hear me were all sufficiently exalted in the simplicity of Christian affection to be independent of the outward and accidental qualities of the advocate ; sufficiently partakers of " the mind which was in Christ Jesus," to feel that, in the simple words which I have just read to you from one of His heavenly discourses, there lies a power of appeal which as no art should be permitted to lessen, so no art ought to be capable of heightening. Oh, beloved brethren, rejoicing as I do to see, in defiance of some difficulties, so many of you assembled to-day upon this holy work, I cannot, nevertheless, forbear to put it to you, — How shall we answer it to ourselves, how answer it to God, that, on any occasion like this, motives of various shades and kinds — for I will not take upon me to analyse them — should draw us together to prayer and to the word, and yet that the same- facilities of prayer, the same eternal Gospel, fresh from the lips of Jesus, sliould be before us every successive day of our Serm. XV.] THE WILL OF GOD, ike. 215 lives, yet that the prayer shouUl so often be cold or neglected, the Gospel so often unread; because the one must be offered up in that solitude of tlie heart where God alone is present, and the other, the Gospel, is presented, not in the artificial form of a preacher's discourse, but in the naked simplicity of Christ's own divine eloquence ? But, dearest friends, whatever be the spirit which has prompted us to assemble here this day, there is a Spirit which can convert all our motives into impulses of blessedness : may He, at this hour, enlighten our souls to a full intelligence of that word of truth which is no subject of momentary display or of momentary excitement, but tlie very law of life, whereby you, and 1, and all of us, shall in a few more years be ti'ied, and on the love, or the neglect, of which are poised the destinies of an eternity ! I have this day to implore you to a work of charity ; but my duty extends farther. In remembering these children of the Gospel I am not to forget you. I am not to forget that, in beseeching you to provide for the souls of your fellow-men, I am also to call upon you to provide for your own. I am not to forget that, in asking you to contribute to this small Avork of occasional charity, I am also pleading to immortal souls for their own salvation ; entreating spirits born for eternity not to forget their own high heritage ; beseeching my fellow-sinners (so many of whom I have known in all the intimacies of private acquaintanceship) to forget the advocate in the cause he pleads, and (even under a ministration so feeble) to " awake," — if not before, yet now^ — " to awake, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give them light.". . . For such a purpose I need not go beyond the beautiful passage which I have selected for our thoughts upon this day. I chose it because it bears an obvious and simple reference to our immediate business of educational charity; but, in truth, it bore with our Lord, and should bear with us, a far deeper and more comprehensive meaning. When our Divine Instructor declared that "it is not the 216 THE WILL OF GOD [Serm. xv. will" of the Father "that one of these little ones should perish," He understood by that tender title something far more than the infancy of nature ; He meant to typify the lonely childhood of a Christian souL The " little ones " of tiiis heavenly Parent are they who, with the gentle dependence of children, cling to Him as their sole support, and, with the pure-minded innocence of children, " keep themselves un- spotted from the world.". . . In this view, then, let us (invoking the directive grace of God upon our thoughts) dwell for a while upon the power and importance of the revelation made to us, in this passage, of the words of Him " in whom were hid all the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge." (Col. ii. 3.) Remember from what lips these momentous words fell ; remember that they are, indeed, the words of Him who " knew the Father," for He was one with the Father ; and whose sole object in uttering them was that He might sanctify you, in common with thousands of the blessed, to a meetness for the inheritance of His own everlasting kingdom. The text, then, answers the two questions that most concern mankind ; it declares the character of God, and it declares the character and qualifications which He considers necessary in iJwse whom He wills to be eternally happy. I. To any human being capable of reflection, and believing in his own immortality, there can be no subject of so vast an importance as the real nature of the divine character. Were life to terminate in this world, could we indeed be certain (and you know that the infidel himself cainiot be certain) that the dust, which is all that remains to the eye, of departed man comprised all his immortality — could this be proved, which never can be proved — there might then be some poor ground for carelessness as to the disposition of the God who rules so pitiable and momentary a scene. We might say. (as millions do say — the practical infidels of Christian countries) that we are content to live as our fathers have lived, trusting to experience and to our own natural sagacity to guide us Sena. XV.] TOWARDS HIS CUrLDREN. L'17 througli the circumstances in which nature or chance has placed us : much, in short, as the illiterate classes in a nation trouble themselves little about the details, or the machinery, or the character, of the government that controls them But if it be certain, or probable, or possible, that, after the brief and disturbed dream of this life, we are, every one of us, destined to pass into a scene of which, apart from Revelation, we can only form foint and shadowy conjectures ; if it be certain that the character of this scene must depend directly upon the character of the Being who has created and ever governs it; if, to resume tlie comparison I just employed, the poor man were made certain, that, whatever be the tone of the government under which he now lives, he must shortly pass into a country where his whole prospects of advancement depend upon his suiting himself to that character, whatever it may be — what would be his, what ought to be our, intense curiosity to catch even a glimpse of the real nature of the administration on which we are all thus awfully suspended ! how earnestly ought we to inquire, with how passionate an interest ought we to ask of any who profess to know, what is the real disposition of this mighty Governor? if we are in His favour, how shall we preserve it ? if so miserable as to have lost His countenance, how, oh, how shall we appease Him?... I pause, and ask, — How many in this assembly have ever seriously put that question ? how many have ever, have once, in their whole existence, distinctly asked of themselves, their Bibles, or their Minister, what is the temper of the God upon whom they are to rest their whole prospects of eternal happiness? Oh, brethren! how zealous is the curiosity with which you study the minutest details of ordinary political intelligence : with how earnest a countenance, and how animated a spirit, do you ask and discuss each day's report of the progress of earthly policies ! nay, there are naines, mere names, connected with such subjects, which, were I now to pronounce them, would at once divide this assembly II. 1' 218 THE WILL OF GOD [Senn. xv. into hosts of eager and resolute partisans ; yet here you have before you the politics of a universe, a government that stretches from eternity to eternity, an administration upon which every soul is dependent for an everlasting issue : we go among you, we tell you " the news" of this gi-eat kingdom ; v/e tell you of the stability of its laws, the wisdom of its management, the riches of its resources ; we tell you of that revolution in its affairs at which angels themselves shrink in astonishment, that revolution which sent the monarch of a boundless empire beyond the stars, to die by the hands of his own rebellious subjects, that no soul here should perish ; we tell you all this, — we repeat it, — we reiterate it, — you know that it is all true, that prophecies and miracles, and the tortures of martyred thousands, are pledges of its truth, — what then? you listen in silence, or impatience, or listen not at all, and turn to devote the faculties that God meant to contemplate the mysteries of the policy of a universe to the politics of nations contending for a few fields a thousand miles away from you, or to the politics, almost as exalted, of the village and the neighbourhood at your feet ! ■ Let me suppose you, however, — may God's inworking Spirit verify the supposition ! — let me suppose you alive to the tremendous importance of discovering God's real character and purposes about you, thrown as you are on His mercy for eternity. Now — not to be minute — there are two obvious sources from which you may have a chance of deriving such intelligence, — the world around you (as far as your experience of it extends), and the express revelation of God Himself, if such a revelation exist. Regard, then, the former of tlicse sources. Alas ! its answer is not only precarious from our very limited knowledge ; but even, as far as it goes, clouded and comfortless. In a world lost and ruined as ours is, — a world which, perhaps, among the infinity of worlds that occupy the depths of space, is the only one into whicli tlie pestilence of sin has entered ; in such a world there is much Serm. sv.] TOWARDS JUS CHI LDREN. 219 to darken our apprehensions of tlic essential goodness of God. The terrible prominence of evil around us, the afflictions that encompass and harass even the best, the facility of ruin, tlic difficulty of recovery, the uncertainty of all, these are the signs and tokens of (as it would appear) a government of terror and of vengeance, — a government in which severity is the rule, and mercy the exception. To those who patiently regard the scene around them it must always, indeed, be evident that the Ruler of the world might have made all mankind far more unhappy than He has made any of them ; but yet it must also be quite as evident that it was in His power — as mere power — to have made them far more happy likewise. And, unfortunately, it is just in proportion as sorrow presses heavily upon the heart, — that is, just in pro- portion as consolation is needed, — that, to the uninstructed mind, the darkness of God's dispensations appears terrific, for we all have experienced how the mind reduces everything to its own colour : that as the Spirit of God has said, that " to the pure all things are pure," so to the sorrowful all things are sad ; until to the weary and despairing mourner — do I speak to none who can sympathise in this ? — the world blackens into one tremendous midnight, and God Himself seems but to assume the features and attitude of an Almighty Avenger. If such be "the faint and uncertain sound" with which the world answers to our demand upon it to reveal the character of its Maker, we must then turn for instruction to a less distorting medium for the light of Divine truth — to the express declaration of that God Himself in His Word. 1 suppose you, of course, to be, at least speculatively, believers m the Divine authority of that Word. I address professing Christians. I suppose you to have learned the few and simple proofs by which for eighteen hundred years it has silenced infidelity ; and established itself to be the very image and portraiture of the mind of God. Let us, then, examine the original by the image. p2 220 TEE WILL OF GOD [Serm xv, I take mj stand upon tlie text which the business of this day has put before us. Hundreds crowd upon my mind, but to see clearly we must contract our circle of vision ; and this holds the essence of the gospel character of God. Yes, the world may robe our God in the terrors of an avenger, and Revelation itself may confirm but too certainly the truth that He will avenge; misfortune may darken the spirit and dim its prospects of heaven ; tlie traces of ruin (moral and physical) that everywhere encompass us may affright : but as long as faith enables the trusting Clu-istian to hold in bright remembrance tins publication of the will of tlie God of all this apparent evil, that Christian cares not. "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish." Here, then, — casting aside all the dark and troubled speculations which partial views of this world may create, — here is the character of the God with whom you have to deal ! The whole mystery of Providence is not, indeed, solved ; trials, uncertainties, evils apparent or real, are left as they were ; but through them all the eye of faith (seeing all by the light of promise) penetrates, and still beholds, presiding over the disorders of the world, a law of love, even the power of that God, who, armed with terrors for those who wilfully despise Him, yet wills not that one trusting believer, one of the "little ones" of His own family of faith, sliould ever perish from the way of life. And THUS it is that our text answers the first question — the tremendous question as to the character of God. There is such a doom as " perishing," it is mentioned in the text ; there is such a law as God's decreeing that the guilty should perish, it is intimated in the text: Z>w< there is of the same God a determination and a purpose, that those who love Him should be His, and His for ever — for that is the direct object of the whole to declare. II. With such&. God asthis, who would not rather be in alliance than in warfare? Here, then, is a second point of vast moment. Serm. XV.] TOWARDS HIS CHILDREN. 2i'l I told you that the text dechired more than the character of God. It declares the character and qualifications of those ichom He selects as Ilis chosen people. "Would you belong to that bright and holy band ? Have you, indeed, no ambition to secure a place among the redeemed people of God — among those who from age to age have passed from the grave to glory, and who now^ witnesses of that truth in heaven for which they toiled and suffered on earth, are perhaps contem- plating your career, and sympathising in your trials ? What avails it that God should publish Himself as a God who wills the happiness of every creatm-e, if the obstinate perversity of our own hearts render us deaf to all His overtures of mercy, and generate a character to which it is absolutely inconsistent with the majestic harmony of all His own high attributes that He should be ahle to extend favom* or protection ! What, then, is the character which the text ' supposes ? The Father wills not that "the little ones" should perish, — the confiding and childlike dependents on His mercy. The humble in heart, then, are they on whom the special power of the promise rests. . . Here is the marvel and the mystery of this Gospel which we preach. Here is that tremendous pass at which it breaks company with the whole throng of this world's daily maxims. Here is the point where you are to examine to which train and procession do you belong, — the procession which is gorgeous with all this world's glories and animated by its pride, or that lowly company of the saints whose glory is to carry the standard of the cross, and whose pride is to be ever nearer and nearer to the humility of Him who died upon it! Self-exaltation is the master-principle of the world; self- annihilation must be yours, or you can never hope to see the rewarding smile of Him who has declared that " he that humbleth himself shall be exalted:" that "the poor in spirit are blessed, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven :*' that though He be " the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name ia Holy," yet He " dwells with him that is of 222 THE WILL OF GOD [Serm. xv. a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones." This awful truth, that between the world's glory and God's glory there is a variance which no art of self-delusion can reconcile ; that no human heart can idolize the one and truly adore the other ; that if you will, indeed, struggle for the eternal prize, you must silence every pulse of worldly ambi- tion, tear from the soul every longing desire for the miserable excitements that consume away your years ; and, receiving a new nature, cast yourselves, in trembling hope and all the lowliness of infancy, as " little ones " at the feet of God ; this seems to many " a hard doctrine," — " Who can bear it?" To some it is " enthusiasm " (the world never wants a name to stigmatize a truth with) ; to some it is "fanaticism;" to some again it is " hypocrisy." Brethren, we cannot pare, and shape, and fashion Cliristianity to suit any man or body of men. It is the unalterable decree of God, as promulgated in His Word, that the sinful nature can never behold the sinless glories of His kingdom ; that it is only as justified by the humble faith which is the characteristic of these " little ones " of the divine family, of whom we are speaking, that man can enter into life ; that this humble faith works a change in the whole tenour of the life and habits ; so that the believer is one who walks in a new world, encompassed by new objects, and seeing by new and gifted organs ; that to the contem- plation of such a one, all the boasted glories of this world of a few seasons are a withered and melancholy pomp ; for to his vision — whether in prosperity or affliction, in business or retirement, in crowds or in solitude — there is ever present a glory before which the loftiest mockery of greatness the earth ever offered is pale and colourless, even that gloiy which the dying martyr saw when he exclaimed, " Behold, I see tlie heavens opened, and tlie Son of Man standing on the right hand of God!" (Acts vii. 56.) I cannot now pause to reason the matter more minutely. Do Sunn. \v.] TOWARDS Ills CHILDREN. 223 you believe, in spite of uU the sneers of a Satan-promptetl world, that this is indeed the better course, to join yourselves in humility of faith to the little family of the children of God? Why delay, then, an hour to resolve upon the change -which is to change an eternity ? Have you so little experience of the seductions of the world, that you think their weakness admits of delay ? Or rather, do you not know, from old experience, that the terrible probabilities are, that many here, now moved, it may be, by the teiTors of the warning, will not have passed from this church, and entered once more upon the world, for one hour, when old habits will resume their course, old companions their power, this admonition vanish as a dream ; or rather, let me say, the severed dream of life will reunite again, the slumber recommence, and sink as deep as if it had never been broken ? And must it indeed be so ? Must eternal spirits be lost in the midst of all the richest graces of God — His word, His sacraments. His services, the prayers of His foithful people ? No ; I will dare to hope for better results. I have told you of the character of the God who is to judge you and me, — how that He is revealed in the Gospel as one who waits for you, who beseeches you, who wills not that the " little ones should perish;" I have told you of the humble holiness which must form the character of a child of His family ; I have implored of you to remember the awful necessity of this mighty change, and the still greater awfulness of the short uncertain period allowed to effect it : and I tcill hope that all this is not in vain. It may be that another time may come when we shall rejoice over even this morning's humble labour. Yes, it may be; and such hopes are among the few earthly consolations of the Christian minister's course; that, hi that holier world where the redeemed of Christ are hereafter to meet, where friendships more durable than this world's are united, and " the communion of saints" is complete, some one of those that are now before me may recur to this very occa- sion as one upon wliich for the first time the heart was, under 224: THE WILL OB' GOD [Senu. xv the Spirit of tlie living God, touclied for higher things, and from which it retained the impression, until, after prayer and anxiety, faith had at length effectively laid hold upon the in- carnate God of Calvary, heaven became a known and felt reality, and the Christian's triumph was secured for eternity.. Would to God it might be so ; deeply should I rejoice at the message which brought me here this morning to invite my fellow-sinners to that God who will not have one trusting believer disappointed of his hope of immortal blessedness ! But I must pass from these exhortations to the more imme- diate business of this morning. I must leave them to the Holy Spirit of God to preach to your hearts. Eemember, it is not that I would waive them, now, or ever. I had rather (and I take upon me to say that, with all their ardour for its welfare, the managers of this charity had rather) that one soul purchased by the blood of Christ were really aroused to its high calling by these words, weak as they are, than that un- counted thousands were cast into its treasury. But the more direct purpose of our meeting calls me to provide for it; the young disciples of Christ, who rest upon your liberality, requii'e me not to forget ^Ae???,— the cause of pure and scriptural edu- cation bids me remember its demands. I am here this day to ask of you to support the claims of one hundred and fifty pupils receiving in this place, under careful guardianship, the means of an independent livelihood in this world, the means of securing an everlasting inheritance in the next. I am here to ask of you, rich, and prosperous, and enligh- tened, to step between these poor children and tlie chances of temporal and eternal ruin. I am here to beseech you, whatever be your denomination of Christianity, to respect and support establishments where those Scriptures which we all in com- mon acknowledge to be the direct effusion of God's Holy Spirit, and the unerring test of religious truth, — for to the Scriptures all alike appeal,- are made the great basis of Serm. XV.] TOWARDS HIS CHILDREN. 225 instruction in the law of eternal life. , . . Those who have had but the poor lessons of worldly experience, know how de- pendent are the fortunes of life upon its commencement : tliey know that those lives of crime, and those deaths by legal punishment, which pollute the records of our unhappy country, and which curse its beauty as Avith a pestilence, that these are directly traceable to the wasted summers of boyhood, to our peasant youth -without education, and to their education (when it comes) without religion. These are the maxims of the commonest worldly prudence. A statesman who was an atheist would prefer that the people he had to control were believers in God and His futurity ; a landlord who was him- self the slave of profligacy and of folly would yet prefer that his tenantry were a moral race, and would gladly give to the people the virtue he himself rejects. Such is the everlasting word, the eternal bridal, which God Himself sanctified of old, between holiness and happiness, that even in this world the way of its peace is often the way of God ; and "righteousness," still, as ever, " exalteth a nation." And thus taking the matter upon the lowest grounds, — looking upon you, not as the elect of Clirist, but as men concerned, for your own sakes, in the welfare of the thousands who every year swarm into life around you; not as Christians, but as Irishmen and Irish- women, to redeem your country from tlie pollution of blood, from being the anathema of the civilized universe, — I call upon you this morning, largely and liberally, to support an institution that would educate its starving and shivering poor. . . . Do I desire to address you upon narrow or exclusive principles ? God knows I do not. Shall they be Romanists, or shall they be Protestants? I say, make them Christians. Call them by what name you please; but teach them, oh, teach them, from the full measure of God's own pure and holy volume, unclouded, undiminished, unmutilated, that man's life is precious in the sight of God ; that souls are indeed im- mortal and destined for immortal recompenses ; that the blood 226 TUE WILL OF GOD, &c. [Ser.ii. xv. of the murdered calls to heaven for vengeance : teach them that the God who sent His own and only one to die for man- kind, is no God of a party or a faction, but a God of love, and who would have all mankind brothers in love. Teach them this ; show them how all the law of Christ, and the story of Christ, declares such lessons and exemplifies them : be sm-e tliat in lieart and soul they understand it, and I care not wliat you term them, in what division of the catalogue of party you class them ; I only hnow that so trained they are trained to be "tlie children of God, and heirs of the kingdom of hej javen. Here, then, is the simple story with which I am this day attempting to interest you. It needs no artificial colourings. A hundred and fifty eternal souls dependant for their guidance to immortality upon your wish to secure it to them. Oh, surely, of all branches of charity that which most truly approaches the celestial charity of Christ Himself, is cliarity to the souls of mankind— charity of education ! Were the bodies of the starving poor to perish in heaps at your doors while you were revelling within, you would, indeed, be criminals before God ; yet even this criminality is not equal to that of the professing Christian, who, with the sacred words of Divine love ever upon his lips, can see around him the undying souls of his fellow- men in training for ruin, and yet not cast one coin (beyond what shame extorts) into the purse that Christian charity is collecting to guide those souls to salvation. Can you, indeed, believe that to the never-fading glories of God's right-hand there is but one way, that that " way" is Christ Jesus (as He has declared) ; that that way cannot be known unless it be ex- hibited ; that it cannot be exhibited unless you yourselves step forward to invite ? I will add no more. May the Spirit of God take up the cause of these children in the hearts of each of you! May He enlarge your feelings, strengthcD your liberality, and, in His own glorious hour, reward you in the everlasting kingdom of tlie just in glory I SERMON XVI. STRENGTH AND MISSION OF THE CHURCH. (Preached at Leeds Parish Church, Nov. 21, 1841.) Isaiah XIV. 32. The Lord halh founded Zion, and the poor of His people shall trust in it. Such, brethren, are the encouragements that consoled the ancient city of God in the day of her trouble. Harassed by her rude neighbours of Philistia, her garrisons already stormed, her armies scattered before the idol-worshippers, her own very sanctuary threatened with violation, she was bade remember her Eternal King, and take comfort in the thought of that watchful Guardian who sooner or later would assuredly avenge lier wrongs. Often was she taught the same lesson ; aud often, in despite of her own froward and unbelieving heart, was the prediction realized. The Lord still " loved the gates of Zion;" the streams of His holy " river still made glad the city of God;" and He was " known in her palaces for a refuge." But a gloomier hour at length arrived. Even Divine patience has its limits ; and the last dread crime of Zion could only be expiated in her ruin. Blood had flowed beneath her hands, every drop of which was worth a universe ; and she had in- voked its curse upon her own head and the head of her chil- dren. And now, behold, in the fearful words of her own prophets, " tlie lion is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of the Gentiles is on his way ;" — " Jerusalem is ruined and Judah is fallen ; because their tongue and their doings are against the Lord, to provoke the eyes of His glory.'* 228 STRENGTH AND MISSION [Serm. xvi. But what? is this the city of which such glorious things are spoken — that " the Highest Himself should establish her, that she should not be moved?" Where are His mighty promises of perpetuity ? Where is that foundation which no power should ever shake — that Zion, in whom " the poor of His people were to trust!'''' Brethren, look around you, and you behold the evidences of its existence, and of the eternal faithfulness of Him who is pledged to its immortality. A greater than Zion inherits her name ; a greater than Zion bore it in the far-reaching scope of the prophetic vision. That " city of the great King" was but the perishable emblem of a " city whose builder and maker is God." It is true, she was honoured by His sym- bolic Presence, and sanctified by His sacred worship ; it is true, that for ages she alone, in a world of darkness, held the precious lamp of His truth : but what are these characters of honour to hers whose every living stone is quickened with His indwelling energy; whose worship is no more in type and shadow, but in spirit and substance; whose preaching and teaching, no longer shrouded in obscurity, and limited to a corner of the earth, spreads over all lands, embraces the whole family of mankind, and makes even the course of that sun whose " going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it, and from whose heat there is nothing hid," a faint image of the power with which she diffuses, through all nations, " the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ ?" What destiny God may yet have in store for His ancient people it is not for us to fix with precision ; but this of un- broken perpetuity, as His earthly dwelling-place, is plainly not tlieirs. Few candid students of prophecy can indeed doubt that a great destiny is yet reserved for the earthly Israel; that if the fall of Israel brought the beginning of blessings to the human race, the restoration of Israel is to be the means of their consummation ; that God will yet bind together the two Serin, xvi.] OF THE CHURCH. 229 severed dispensations, making them give and receive mutual lustre ; will vindicate " the law" and yet more " the prophets," but most of all, that Christ to whose final triumph they and their nation shall again minister, not in rejection, but acceptance ; not in guilt, but glory. Still, in even this high destiny all the fulness of prophetic announcement is scarcely realized. The unbroken continuance of presence and blessing, so often predicted, has in their instance been fearfully inter- rupted. Israel after the flesh is referred to the distant future for her glories ; we must then sometimes seek a Zion for David and Isaiah, whose glories are present, abiding, perpetual. In that element of His inheritance the spiritual Israel takes the place of the natural ; the new Jerusalem of the old ; the mount Zion, which includes " the general assembly and church of the first-bom," of that which bore but the children of unhappy Judah. And thus, " even that which was made glorious had no glory in this respect, by reason of the glory which excelletli. For if that which was done away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious." (2 Cor. iii. 10, 11.) Why do I impress these things upon you, brethren ? Be- cause I would gladly lead you to feel the importance of your position as the members of this divine society — the Holy Catholic Church of Christ — in order that you may feel the community of interest which unites each such member witli all, and may recognise the claim that every province of the great empire of Christ possesses upon the affectionate consi- deration of the rest. I am here to speak of the great necessi- ties of a sister Church ; of her labours in the cause which you love; of her difficulties with which, I can scarcely doubt, you will be prepared to sympathise. Something of such matters I must say; but though charged witli her interests, I can scarcely in this place think of entering into minute details of her position. Another opportunity will, with the divine per- mission, offer for that. This is the place for the broad prin- ciple.^ of the truth; and I know well tliat, if you but feci tlicm 230 STRENGTH AND MISSION [Serm. xvl as they cicserve to be felt, the vest will follow of itself. Once learn to love Christ in His Clim-ch, and the Church as in Christ, and every source and channel of charity to His destitute members will spontaneously open. Mark, then, what the text affirms. " The Lord hath founded Zion ;" this is the guarantee of His love and her stability; — " the poor of His people shall trust in it," or, as the margin has it, " shall betake themselves unto it ;" this is one purpose of her divine mission upon earth, — the care, the teaching, the education, the guidance of the poor. I. The strongest, most fundamental title of protection is creation. Even am^ong ourselves no one frames an object in order to destroy it ; he who makes, makes that he may pre- serve. A man has mixed up his own labour with his own manufacture ; it becomes a portion, as it were, of his being ; and to destroy the immediate creature of his own hands be- comes a sort of indirect suicide. It is thus that men justly delight in achieving those lasting performances which perpe- tuate themselves after death ; it is thus, (and stauding in this noble structure I can urge the conception with all the vividness of .reality,) — it is thus that good men rejoice in the opportu- nity of accomplishing works that shall endure when their own course is over, and multiply the blessedness which they are no longer at hand to diffuse. These permanent monuments of usefulness are, as it were, the heirs of their purposes, the executors of their benevolence; and silently represent for tliem their plans, their hopes, their desires, to posterity. And if this be so in human nature, shall there be nothing to com- pare with it in the Divine? God, indeed, who is eternal, can require no successor to whom to devise His purposes of love ; but all the claims that " the thing framed" can have on " him tliat framed it," hold with tenfold force when the object is not, as in our humbler works, the mere apposition of pre- existing materials, in which nothing is ours except the order of arrangement, but is itself, alike in matter and in form, the Serra. xvr.] OF THE Cin'h'CIf. 231 direct offspring of His own inexhaustible power and goodness. It is hence that the creation — wherever the creation is incorrupt — looks with trust and confidence to the Parent of all ; knows, by instinctive conviction, that what He called into being He is resolved to preserve in being ; boldly denies the natural pos- sibility of absolute annihilation in any region of His universal empire ; and though it admit that when evil — the only thing that God has not made — intrudes, weakness accompanies it, and that rebellion dissolves the implicit compact between the Father of holiness and His offspring, yet, even here, sees in all the partial changes of sin and death only the working out of some more extensive and immutable plan, in which evil itself shall yet be shown to have performed some merely sub- ordinate part, and, as an unconscious or reluctant slave, to have contributed, on the grand balance of the whole, to the ultimate glory of the One Supreme unchangeable God. Thus is the Maker bound to the made ; thus is creation in itself a presumptive title to protection. And it is abundantly plain that the strength of such a bond will ever increase Avith the toil expended on the object produced. Your own manu- facturer will tell you that the result becomes more precious with the capital invested ; that the hopes and interests of the artist are more and more interwoven with the work in propor- tion to the time, and the thought, and the labour, and the expense its construction has involved. As he gazes on the consummate result, it represents to his mind the whole mass of these the whole elements of its formation ; he feels that more of himself is contained in it, and he identifies its success and its reputation with his own. Sliall we venture to apply this also to the Supreme Architect of the world? We can scarcely do so. The Scripture, in condescension to our capa- cities, has represented the Omnipotent as resting from His six days' labour ; but the same Scripture has taught us that such a phrase is but a figurative one as applied to the sublime repose of a Creator who " worketh hitherto," and merely 233 STRENGTH AND Mlii^lOX [Serm. xvi. expresses the cessation of a particular form of His ever active energies, when i<- speaks of Him as " the Creator of the ends of the earth," who " fainteth not, neither is weary." Are we, then, to admit that here no claim remains ; that this most touching ground of protective mercy is inapplicable to the God of the Bible? Not so. He has so provided that this too should be an argument of our undoubting dependence ; unable to know pain and weariness as God, He has become Man that He might do so ; and He who without the lifting of an arm called a universe into being, has shed His own life in agony to create a Church. Behold, then, how, as His own, " God loved the world i^ how, as not only His own, but His own in pain and anguish, and endeared to His inmost heart for ever as such, God hath loved His Church. He spoke to bid the one. He died to make the other, exist. The Lord hath founded Zion ; so too hatli He the world : but this (as Jericho of old) was " founded in the death of a first-horn ;'''' the streams that make glad this city of God are the water and the blood that flowed from the pierced side of the Founder. When He beholds His Church He sees in it the monument of His own inexpressible sorrows ; as mothers are said to love with special tenderness the child whose birth was one of peculiar anguish and peril, surely so does He feel this offspring of His divine agonies drawn closer to His eternal heart by the thought of all it cost to give her being. Then, again, in this Church of His is His own honour pledged. He hath not covenanted with the world that now is to immortalize it ; but He has passed His own Word for the perpetuity of His Church. Nothing so framed was ever framed to perish ; He has infused into it His own Spirit, and His Spirit is life. Even this were security enough ; but His oath is securer still. That the Church of Christ should fade away from the earth, would fill even heaven with dismay ; for it would perplex the very angels as to the changeless truth of Serm. xvi.] OF THE CHURCH. 233 Ilim who has promised it immortality; yea, heaven's own foundations should totter if that Clmrch, whicli is the ante- chamber of the kingdom of glory, which is, saitli St. Ambrose, " the image of the celestial," Avere to wane and disajipear. It may be corrupted, it may be enfeebled, it may be perse- cuted, or worse — it may persecute ; it may be ignorantly enslaved in one division, or insolently turbulent in another ; it may, in short, be all that the subtlety of the tempter, during his permitted hour, can make it: but it cannot perish. Its day of purification must come at last. The Church may forget Christ, — it is nowhere promised that she shall not ; but Clirist cannot forget her ! " Thy sun shall no more go down ; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord is thine ever- lasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended. Thy people also shall he all righteous ; they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hand, that I may be glorified." [Isa. Ix. 20, 21.] But even more, is not this Church, in its ultimate perfec- tion, set forth as the very reward of all the sorrows of its Lord? and shall He be defrauded of His recompense ? To " see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied" is His destined crown, this "joy set before Him" was that which enabled Him to " endure the cross, despising the shame." Every one of you, then, that lives in faith and purity within this holy society, becomes an element in the happiness of Christ ; and, glorious thought ! can make heaven itself to Him more blissful. Every one of you that resigns a world of corruption for the holy sim- plicity of the Christian life, adds a new joy to the joys of even an enthroned God. And if this be so now, what shall it be in the day of the regeneration ? The Church that shall end, as it began, with none but saints its members ; the Church that shall be by Christ presented to Himself " a glorious Church, without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing;" how shall its solemn entry into the prepared kingdom fill the lieart of its almighty Guardian with an ecstasy which, even amid I] Q 234 STRENGTH AND MISSION [Serm. xvi. all His accumulated glories, it is yet reserved for Him tc experience ! Yet, why insist upon these things? All these relationships are below the truth. There is more than creation to bind the (church to Christ, more than promise, more than reward ; there is communion, oneness, identification. A man may desert his child ; he cannot desert himself. Even though the Kedeemer could forget His espoused Bride ; even though He could deny His plighted promise ; yea, though He could aban- don His own reward; He cannot abandon His own body. The people of Christ, once received into His covenant, and there abiding, are interwoven into His very nature ; " we are members," declares the ApostlC;, " of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones." With such a union there can be no sepa- ration ; if Christ be immortal the Church is so ; when He dies she shall perish, but not till then. Such is the Holy Church of God, her dignity, her pro- mises, her privilege. Let not such expressions as these be weakened in your estimation by any distinctions of visible and invisible Churches. For my own part, — 1 would not dictate to others upon a point on which many of our holiest and most gifted divines have been divided ; but, as far as my own researches have extended, — I know of but one Church in the New Testament ; that which was visibly founded on visible Apostles, Jesus Christ Himself being its visible chief comer- stone; and I confess I cannot but regard it as eminently unfortunate that any other conception of the Church of Christ should ever have gained currency within her borders. It is true that Christ's promises are conditional on repentance and faith, to all who are capable of exercising those graces ; it is also perfectly true, that those alone who fulfil the conditions really, and in spirit, adhere to the Head ; but this, surely, no more constitutes these hap|)y and holy believers a " Church," in the scriptural sense of that term, than the loyalty of a few members in a disaffected corporation constitutes them the cor- berm.xvr.J OF THE CHURCH. i35 poration, or the fidelity of a few soldiers in a mutinous army constitutes them the army itself. That the Church should be corrupt does not annihilate its existence, or destroy its essen- tial being as a society. That the body should be all more or less infirm with the exception of a single arm, does not make it necessaiy to call that arm the body ; still less, to rob the sickly frame of its appointed rights — its sustenance for the present, its hopes for the futiu-e. I should not have mentioned this point at all (because I have no time to do it any justice) were it not that it bears directly on my business here this day. For one of the evils of this refinement of the Church into the ideal company of the Elect is, that it cuts all the tenderest nerves of sympathy between godly men and the visible Church of Christ around them. It is impossible for them to sympathise, on purely scriptural grounds, with a society which they have been taught to imagine is nowhere — or scarcely — recognised in Scripture. It may be a valuable community, but it is not theirs. They admit it to be a useful machinery, perhaps, — a tolerable instrument, as times go, for spiritual benefit ; but they do not see in it a direct appoint- ment of Heaven, an immediate object of divine superintendence, a society intended to engage and to foster their afiections, dear for its own sake, and for Christ's. And these being the considerations that impress godly men most deeply, the Church thus loses her highest, holiest, and most engaging claims. Calculation takes the place of a bright and happy enthusiasm ; the Spouse is regarded as a useful servant, not as, amid all her misfortunes, the still cherished Bride of Christ. And thus, instead of the topics that Paul has given us, and Isaiah, and the Lord Himself, we have to descend to low calculations of economic utility. Not that we dread such inquiries as to the social value of the Church ; but certainly we would rather not be always obliged to stoop to them. But I must proceed ; for I am aware I cannot venture to detain your attention at present beyond a limited period. I Q2 236 STRENGTH AXD MISSION [Serm. xvi. tui'ii, then, for a moment, to the other branch of the text ; — to that which predicts that this Zion of God shall be the resort of His poor, and the object of their trust, II. How does the Church of Christ fulfil this promise? In wliat capacity does she present herself as the appointed guide and friend of the poor ? This is of moment to my case; for it is to enable her to be such that I desire to engage your exertions. Brethren, the Church of Christ is one vast institute for the benefit of the poor. He who loved all, eminently loved them ; professed Himself eminently their gospel preacher ; declared that the heaven He preached, though open to all, was still peculiarly a heaven for them. And His Cliurch has ever, even in her darkest days, retained much of the character He thus impressed. There were times when, in her overweening secularity, she taxed the rich to supply her undue ambition ; yet, even then, to do but justice to those ages of aiTogance, she had still an open hand for the poor. But it is not of her temporal charities I speak now. It is in the doctrine she preaches, and the way she preaches it, that the Church is indeed the poor man's consoler. It is in meeting his sorrows with tidings of glory to come, in brightening the gloom of his humble home with the hallowed light of eternity, in soothing his days of hard and heavy toil with her peaceful sabbaths, in watching over his bed of sickness with a patience as unwearied as if his poor chamber were gorgeous with gilded ceilings and silken tapestry ; it is in these things that the Church carries on that loveliest attribute of her Lord, — " Thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress ! " And then the truths she teaches him, — how elevating, how enlarging, how fortifying, how exalting! I thank that God of grace that there arc within her precincts hundreds upon hundreds of pastors who have no otlicr feeling ; men as sin- cerely devoted to the work of Christ as any Church in the Soim. xvi.J OF THE CHURCIL 2Z1 world can produce. Brethren, you must not desert this Church of Ireland ; you must learn to love this poorer sister. A common interest ought to endear us to each other ; for what are we but the outpost in a contest which you will yourselves have to endure ? But why do I speak merely of the Church of my country ? I tell you my country herself asks for scriptural education ; the poor Irishman loves it, when he dares. That noble country, that land of generous hearts, what does she want to make her worthy to accompany you in history but the uncorrupted truth of Christ that you possess ? Will you not unite in the blessed office of diffusing it ? Will you not awake among yourselves and your friends a holy enthusiasm for this high enterprise, now that it is undertaken with auspices that authenticate it to yom- understandings no less than to your hearts? You may allege, that you are too often appealed to on these Irish charities ; that you cannot distinguish between their rival claims. Brethren, it is not for me to criticise the principles or the operations of bodies, which, no doubt, all mean well ; but I must be permitted to say, that the authority by which this Society is presented to England sets it far above every other, however ardent or devoted. Its connexion with the legitimate governors of the Irish Church affords a security to which no other can pretend. The Educational Society of the Irish Church, the Society of her Bishops and her Clergy, is this day recommended to your affections; I trust in (\oA, recommended not in vain. SERMON XVil, THE INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. (Preached at St. Stephen's Church, June 4, 1837.) Matthew VIII. 34. And, behvhl, the whole city came out to viect Jesus: and when ihcy saw Him, thty besowjht Him that He would depart out of their coasts. This verse, my brethren, is part of a passage which connecta together two very remarkable scenes in the life of Christ. Short as it is, and perhaps of no great apparent importance, it is nevertheless not to be lost and consumed in the wonderful tales of miracle and mercy which precede and follow it. The story of the Gospels, rich in abounding usefulness, is scarcely more instructive when it describes the conduct of God, than when it recounts the corresponding conduct of 7nan ; and to enter fully into the spirit of the whole, both must be taken in, as correlative parts of one all-important narrative. The Gospel has a double nature, like its Author. And not when the om- ]iipotence of the Son of God flashes out in the miracles of the Son of Man ; not when His prodigies of healing and sustaining are heaped before us in all the bright profusion of a benevo- lence almighty as it is benevolent ; not when (raising others from the dead as a foretaste of that last grand " declaration according to the Spirit of holiness," when He rose Himself triumphant over the tomb), He cried, " Lazarus, come forth !" or to the corse of the ruler's daughter, " I say unto thee. Arise! " — not even in such wonders as these lies a deeper spring of thoughts than in the parallel narratives of the emotions and feelings of the frail and mingled crowd that heard Him. If Soim. xvii.l INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. 230 the one class of memorials seem now and then (in happier moments) to exalt us almost beyond what we are, the others too truly inform or remind ns what we are ; if the consciousness of participating in spiritual unity with hick a Being as our Prince of Peace sometimes lifts us beyond the lowly level of humanity, the consciousness, confirmed by the same faitliful pages, of sharing in the corrupted nature of those who neg- lected, or despised, or persecuted, or murdered Him, may well restore us to the grave sadness of a Christian humility. Thus is Scripture perfect in its combination of records and its balance of motives; thus is it profitable not more for "doctrine" than for " reproof and correction." In truth, the richest harvest of godly knowledge lies not among those demon- strations of divine power which were presented by our blessed Lord ; the heights of those omnipotent examples (though far indeed from barren) are perhaps too lofty to admit of general or easy cultivation ; and though I firmly believe not a wonder that is recorded of Him is without a deeper significance than we commonly imagine, yet the readiest, and most abounding fruit of instruction, is to be gathered in the lower territory of the Gospel, in that region where the divinity seems to lose itself in the manhood, — in the discourses of the divine Preacher Himself, and in the doings of His majestic lowliness. And (as I have said) not least of all is instruction to be gained from the recorded conduct of tlie mixed multitudes who came within the sphere of this Light of the world ; and by some of whom the rays of His celestial influence were happily ab- sorbed into their very being ; by some, flung back ungraciously to the source itself of the illumination ; by some received, indeed, but received only to be distorted in passing tlirough a thousand fallacious and perverting mediums of passion, and prejudice, and precipitation. The results of the preacliing of our Lord were, indeed, indi- vidually various. Ilis own heavenly teaching was not without its fruits; althougli the task and t:i.> glory of immediate con- 240 INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. [Serm. xvii versions were principally permitted 'to His ministers. There were those who besought Him to remain, as well as those who " besought Him to depart." In one place we read that " the people sought Him*, and came unto Him, and stayed Him, that He should not depart from them," (Luke iv. 42,) and just after that, they " pressed upon Him to hear the word of God." (Luke V. 1.) The honest-hearted officers pleaded to the Pharisees that " never man spake like this man," (John vii. 46;) and " many of the people said," on the same occasion, '* of a truth this is the Prophet." But the general complexion of the case is sadly different. The occasional virtues of indi- viduals are lost in the criminality of the nation. The impulses in His favour were few and incidental ; the current against Him strong and steady. And the request in the text, that the Lord of life should depart from their too-honoured coasts, was only one of the earlier incidents of that drama, terrible in its consistency of crime, which ended with the suicidal impreca- tion, " His blood be upon us and upon our children ! " My present object (in accordance with the remark which I have already made relative to the importance of considering the human and corrupt examples, no less than the divine and holy Example, of the Gospel narrative) is to lead you to reflect how complete and how melancholy is the portraiture presented to all following ages in the histories of Christ's rejection : an example wliicli is so perfect in its development of the profound depravity of our nature as to induce me to think that the season, the place, and the other circumstances of the Great Sacrifice, were selected out of the mass of historical situations and possibilities which lay before the divine Disposer, with an express view to the formation of so tremendous and unparal- leled a warning of the heart's deceitfulness and desperate wickedness, to all who were to follow the age of Christ's appearing. For, brethren, (to illustrate the nature of such reasonings more fully,) we are not to imagine that, among tlio unnumbered Serm. xvii.J IS GRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. 241 and careful preordinations of God in relation to the personal office and achievements of Christ in the great event of human history, the precise time, place, and other similar circum- stances, even to tlie minutest particular of time, and place, and cu-cumstance, were not every one of them matters of divine forethought and prescription. Wlien we find not only the country of His birth foretokened, but tlie very city of it ; when we find not only His descent from Abraham pi'oclaimed, but His descent from a special tribe of Abraham's family — and not only from this special tribe, but from a particular royal line; when we find the state of the general world at His coming not obscurely shadowed forth, and, still more, the very year of His great sacrifice predicted, and the accompanying condition of the former hut forsaken nation of God declared ; can we doubt (seeing thus the particularity of the prophetical annun- ciations) that there were reasons in the divine counsels for every further specialty of His history, though not prefigured in the prophetic canon, — that the world was duly prepared for Him no less than He for the world, — that the precise con- dition of the people among whom He came, and no other condition of that people, and no other people of any condition, suited the exact designs of Heaven ? And if we suffer the impulses of such reflections to extend, they will surely end in an assured conviction, that there is not a detail (of whatever apparent in-elevaney) in the histories of Christ which may not have had its definite reason in relation to the entire plan of redemption, as it assuredly had its general fore-ordination, or foreknowledge, in the eternal ])urposes of an all-purposing God. There is one class of purposes, then, whicli is of all others the most easily comprehensible ; the purpose of exanii^le and admonition. If you remember that the high providence of God has seen fit to leave His Church no infallible external guidance peculiar to them beyond the writings of tlic New Testament, it will tend to impress upon you the exceeding 242 INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. [Serm. xvii. importance of every line in such a volume so circumstanced. Such a volume is not likely to contain much that is irrelevant. And it is in this way that I believe that the Scriptures of the New Testament were in the deep purpose of God so arranged, in their historical part, as to fitly become to us very much what the typical details of the Old Testament ought to have been to the Jews ; an outward and palpable representation of deep and eternal moral truths, a visible external detail, con- fined to a special race of mankind, of that which is invisible, internal, and universal as the human heart. So that the realities of the ancient types become themselves instructive types to all future times. The story of Christ incarnate in Judea is the story of the Christ that spiritually visits every natural heart of man. I say, then, that the age of the world, and the peculiar position of the chosen people at the time when our blessed Lord came down to tabernacle in human flesh, were of all ages and national positions the most admirably formed to call out the excellencies of the superhuman Sufferer and the corres- ponding character of the unregenerate soul ; that thence (through that divine and adorable mercy which works good from evil) the history of such a heing so j^^cLced becomes an example surpassing all other supposable examples, for tlie everlasting instruction of posterity. I must content myself, this evening, with offering only one or two very simple illustrations of a proposition which your own research will easily extend, or which some future oppor- tunity may enable me to accompany you in extending. In the first place, then, (to commence this melancholy expo- sition of criminality,) regard the political condition of the people among whom the Lord of glory was manifested in the flesh. The royal philosopher has said that " it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting," and that " sorrow is better than laughter ; for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made bettor," (Eccles. vii. 2, 3;) Serin, xvu.] INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. 213 and tliese sayings, no less true than beautiful, arc confirmed by general experience. But there are exceptions to the rule ; and the fallen condition of the kingdom of the Preacher himself was destined to form a prominent one. It may, perhaps, be said with truth, that the state of mind in which — all requisite previous instruction being supposed — sorrow is found to indurate rather than to soften, in which the most powerful of all moral medicines becomes a poison, and in which the spirit, instead of being broken and contrite by affliction, becomes habitually impenitent, and desperate with its woes, is that condition of human nature which (if we were to select among the varieties of depravity) is actually the farthest from God. Now and then this frightful condition is on a large scale developed upon earth in famine, and plagues, and other such visitations; and those who have witnessed it want no explanation of what the misery of hell consists in. In cases of extreme and urgent misery, however, when life itself is to be struggled for, it would be vain to offer instruction or con- solation ; and where the contrast is to be exhibited, and the corruption that refuses the consolation to be displayed, an in- stance must be sought of less immediate and crushing anguish. That instance was furnished in the Jews. When the Messiah appeared, they were an oppressed and unhappy race. Pos- sessing little national consequence, and only a shadow of inde- pendence, they were continually forced to see their ancient religion reviled, (and we know the miserable heroism of their attachment to it!) their hallowed services mocked by the brutality of a ferocious heathen soldiery, their rights of pro- perty violated by the officers of a totoign oppression, their very lives endangered ; for did not Piiate " mingle their blood with their sacrifices?" Their own ruleis only aggravated the general misery. Contentious, arrogant men filled the chairs of the prophets ; and the venerable higli priesthood had become the reward of successful bribery, or more sanguinary audacity. Such an instance of national depression, in contrast with former 244 INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. [Serm. xvii. grandeur, was at that period — at any period— not to be paral- lelled on earth. In the midst of such a scene appeared the promised Restorer. The Spirit of God moved over the chaos of their fortunes, and would have harmonized the whole for ever. But the Messiah invoked His countrymen in vain. They had no heart for the happiness He could offer them. Like many in every age since theirs, they could sigh for national regeneration, but they could not begin with individual reform. Here, then, was consummated the depravity. The sorrow that should have prepared their hearts for the good seed of the word left them harder, more obdurately vicious, than ever. They could follow their Theudas and their Bar- cochebas, but they could not accept the lofty and beautiful emancipation which Christ proclaimed. They could worship the false lights of false Messiahs, — they went astray while the Light of tlie world was among them. They " turned from all He brought to all He would not bring;" and refused allegiance because the Lord of Eternity would not condescend to accept the paltry honours of an earthly throne. Here, then, is the point. That the condition of the Jewish people — reduced to the lowest ebb by afflictions, and, never- theless, only more abandoned in iniquity as individuals as they sunk deeper in calamity as a nation ; covered with sores and weakness, yet unable to recognise and adopt the Phy- sician — presents a specimen of the hopeless ruin of the human heart, such as no other nation or age could (in this definite and tangible form) have presented ; and that (as I conceive) such a condition of things ^vas chosen by the supreme Disposer with a view to impress the terrible example upon our hearts. These things were " written for our learning, that we, through patience, and comfort of the Scriptures, might have" — shall I say — " hope ? " Yes, truly, for those who have already learned the discipline of that '■'•fear'''' which is "the beginning of wis- dom;" for those who already know how to walk in the " fear of the Lord" as well as in the '* comfort of the Holy Spirit." Serm. XVII.] INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. 245 (Acts ix. 31.) Hope? Yes, but hope only for those who realize the beloved Apostle's indications of a genuine hope, when he tells us that " every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He (Christ) is pure." (1 John iii. 3.) The Jews, then, were an example, or type, of slavery that would not accept real freedom. I said that they were an example of this unfruitful affliction in a definite historical form : and I said so because I would not have you to dream that they stand alone in tlieir folly. The Christianity of our time has little cause to exult over the legal righteousness of the synagogue ; as little, to reproach the Jews of that day with sorrows that brought no profit, and opportunities neg- lected. Did they alone groan under intestine dissensions? did they alone groan under a foreign tyranny ? Alas ! is not every unconverted heart an abandoned Israel, perplexed with the conflicts of internal passions, and ground down by the incessant tyranny of a despot more merciless than any earthly governor? Wretched disguise of hollow happiness! Those who have watched the manners of the slaves whose necks are cursed with the tyranny of American freedom often tell us that there is a remarkable, and, at first glance, a very sur- prising peculiarity in their habits. The stranger does not discover, as he expects, the gloom and reserve of sullen despondency, but rather an excessive levity, a reckless gaiety of spirits, that seems to contrast most inexplicably with their miserable situation. But the wonder soon disappears. The gaiety is quickly detected to be an irrational mirth, the most horrible result of despair and degradation. Hopeless, thought- less, feelingless, they snatch the momentary respite from the whip, and endeavour to make up by an overstrained effort of compulsory joy, for the shortness and uncertainty of their unhappy festivity. Their miseries breed their vices ; and pro- fligacy is but the refuge from despair. I have never read such descriptions as these witliout thinking how truly they picture 246 INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. [Serm. xvii. the general aspect of the world. The same unmitigated slavery, the same transitory reprieve, the same feverish excitement, the same profligate abasement, the same dark and dreaded punish- ment, overhanging the whole ! Such is one admonitory aspect of the Jewish example. The subject is fruitful of 7nany warnings ; but we must pass rapidly on. If time permitted, I would more particularly wish to enlarge upon the peculiar opportunities which the state of the Jewish RELIGIOUS system afforded for calling out the various per- versions of truth, — hypocritical, free-thinking, and mystical, — under the notice, censure, and correction of our blessed Lord. It would not be difficult to show that, in our own day, per- versions exist almost literally parallel ; so perfect is the Gospel type for the Church's instruction. But the subject is too extensive for any incidental treatment. I hasten to a point more simple and quite as instructive. I affirm, then, in the third place, that the history of the mission of Christ, as connected with the Jewish people, pre- sented an instance — a "prerogative instance" — of the mass of INCJRATITUDE wliich mingles in the corruption of the human heart, such as no other connexion could have furnished in any age or country of the world. Whatever doubts may have attended the former reasoning, here we argue with absolute certainty. The elder revelation, which we receive as the only revelation of its date, stands alone, because the people it con- cerns stand alone ; and if the people were not a solitary instance of ingratitude, that revelation (which assumes the peculiarity of their position, which again is the point on which we found the ingratitude) could not he true. On this point, then, (as to facts and circumstances,) we are left in no perplexity of hypothesis or conjecture. It is true that all living beings are indebted to the Creator for the original and basis of all blessings, the gift of existence. It is true that, 50 far, all human beings are bound to grati- Serra.xvii.] INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. 247 tude. But though existence may be a necessary groundwork upon wliich alone blessings can be wi-ought, and in this relation may be itself regarded as a blessing in being prepa- ratory to possible blessings, yet it is very certain that it may likewise be the ground of misery, and thus prove, in this relation, eventually a curse. Our Lord bears out this lan- guage, in speaking of one to whom " it Avould have been good if he had never been born." And in such cases a feeling of gratitude is plainly incompatible with common consciousness ; that is to say, gratitude except ^ov possible advantages, a feel- ing too indistinct for notice, not to say too rational and collected for a state of tlie turbulent and agonized depravity I am adverting to. But suppose the existence adorned with the usual mercies of Providence : even then general obli- gations, which are participated with the universal world, at best produce but little impression. The beneficence which is divided among so many seems proportionably lessened to each ; a supposition, indeed, wholly inapplicable to an infinite Benefactor, but not the less common on that account. Besides^ they are felt as laws of nature rather than as acts of nature's Lawgiver ; and we are as little affected by them as by the physical ordinances that the earth should revolve, or that the sun should give its light. The chief reason is, however, that, applying to God the littleness of man, we cannot conceive the immensity of a love that can extend to all the earth, and yet be a personal friendship to every individual. But the belief of special favours, tlie knowledge that God has done for us what He has not done for any but us, the conviction that He who governs others by general rules of providence has chosen us out as the peculiar tlieatre for the display of distinguishing graces, this individualizing of divine favours is that which powerfully moves to gratitude, and, in the natural course of things, demands a rich return from the heart. And so it ought to be. For though others who have received much ought not to relax in gratitude at the sight of greater favours denied, 248 INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. [Serm. xvii. yet, assuredly, those who have received more ought to increase in gratitude at the enjoyment of greater favours received. All nations were reasonably — and are at this day in reason and conscience (tlie reason of the heart) — bound to Avorship the unseen Cause of benefits which, however ignorant in particu- lars, they at least felt, and feel, to be provided for their use, not produced by their power ; nor should the invisibility of the Giver diminish the gratitude for the gift, any more than it would diminish it in any parallel instance of daily life. He who receives an anonymous charity is not the less deeply affected with gratitude because the donor is unknown; the gratitude is generated in the heart irrespective of the object ; the winged feeling lives and breathes, though it knows not where definitely to rest and settle. And thus it was that the unknown God of the Athenians claimed by a perfect right the acknowledgment of the natural heart, even before Paul had declared Him whom they " ignorantly worshipped." But all these vague uncertainties of feeling centre upon A revealed God. The Jews had lived upon a far higher level than I have described, both of heavenly knowledge and of heavenly favour. They knew the Benefactor, and they knew Him their oion peculiar Benefactor. In the beautiful language of their legislator, — " The Lord's portion is His people, Jacob is the lot of His inheritance," (comparing Him to some great king — as in the preceding verse — who, after dividing his realms among his chieftains, selects some one lovely and favoured spot as his own special domain and royal residence.) " He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilder- ness ; He led him about. He instructed him. He kept him as the apple of His eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young," (you remember the resumption of the meta- phor by our Saviour in a still gentler form,) " sprcadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, bearcth them on her wings ; so the Lord alone did lead him." (Dcut. xxxii. 9 — 12.) Truly might the Psalmist say, " He hatli not dealt so with any nation.' Sei-ra. xvii.] INGRATITUDE OF TIIK JEWS. 249 (Ps. cxlvii. 20.) Their whole history liad been one tissue of divine interpositions, their blessings were rewards, their mis- fortunes punishments: and that temporal scheme of providential justice, which is vainly sought on this side of the grave in all other histories, was almost realized in the Jewish. As the fulness of time adv^anced, the prophetic messengers foreshadowed the breadth and freeness of the evangelical spirituality ; and this left the people wthout excuse in retaining the narrowness of national prejudices. No honest reader of Isaiah could escape feeling that a time was to come when the Spirit of God would demand the world for its inheritance, and the slender stem of Judah's mercies swell into a cedar whose branches should cover the earth. Yet Jesus, the substance of all the ceremonies of the law, and the fulfiller of all the morality of the prophets, — Jesus, " to whom give all the prophets witness," not more in precise predictions than in the whole cast of their thinking, (as some reflectors give back an accurate image of the sun, while others give a general diffusion of his light,) — Jesus was (as those prophets had foretokened) " despised and rejected of men!" But had He been rejected of others — had Athens rejected the great Teacher for her philosophers, or Rome despised the Captain of Salvation for her warriors — we had lost a mighty document of human depravity. No ; " He came unto His own, and His own received Him not !" They who, through a long coui'se of centuries, had been educated into expectation of the ever-blessed Visitant perverted the expectation, reading it by the corrupted glare of their own ambition ; and though miracles more wondrous than those of their greatest leaders were performed before their eyes, — miracles that identified the Saviour with the Angel and Guide of their whole past history, — yet the infidelity of the heart prevailed to poison the reason, and they rejected Him ! Nor is it to be said, to countervail the accusation of ingra- titude, that they preserved their allegiance to God while they refused Christ, whom they did not recognise as His Messenger II. R 250 INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. [Serm. xvii The circumstance thus pleaded is the very one which con- stitutes or heightens the special charge of ingratitude. For the Messiah's ministry was so arranged as to form a perfect trial of the heart; and it was the blindness of heart alone which was unable to perceive the Godhead under the veil. There was no possible proof refused, whether internal or external, in demonstration of the truth of the Mission, except one which the corrupted heart demanded, and which, hecause the Mission was to be a trial of heart, God on that very ac- count denied ; I mean the direct and continued display of earthly majesty and dominion. This was refused, because he who could not recognise and adore a Saviour without the accessories of worldly distinction was not deemed worthy to receive Him at all. In external condition humble as the humblest, the Divinity broke out in flashes of exceeding splen- dour to those whose passions would allow them to interpret it; and Christ walked the earth an enigma, whose solution lay in every honest heart. The " mystery of godliness" was addressed to the godly. What evidence, consistent with the general plan of redemption, could be offered of the true Messiahship of our Lord which was not liberally given ? and shall we excuse His persecutors of ingratitude, because that tumult of passion, which was the very source and fountain of the ingratitude, continually interposed to cloud the conclusions of their reason? Tlie reason was proclaiming Him the Deli- verer, while the passions were refusing allegiance ; and to say that the enemies of Christ were not ungraioful in assailing Him, because they persisted in not pci-ceiving Him to be the Messiah, would be to say that ingratitude to Christ only then becomes possible when circumstances have rendered it impossible. For my own part, I believe that Jesus xcas largely felt to be the true Prophet, both before and after His death ; but that the hostility of vice was so unGonc|uerable, as that the belief was overwhelmed and buried in the abyss of passion. The men that saw Him scatter miracles around Him, Serrri. xvii.J IXORATITUDE UF THK JEWS. '2o\ and radiate mercies as the sun does light, assuredly knew Ilim to be the Messiah, though they could not bring their hearts to confess it. Holding, then, that the reason and conscience of Israel knew their Lord, while its passions and depravity refused Him, — holding that every opportunity of identifying the Lord Jesus with the promised Deliverer was bestowed, short of a direct concession to vice, 1 proceed to build, upon the verif circumstances of His manifestation, that testimony to the extent of human ingratitude which I conceive to have been designed by the divine counsel as a tremendous lesson to every future age. The main force of the ingratitude, then, lay in the very humility of the Redeemer's condition. He came among His countrymen as a poor and humble dweller in their native Galilee, — the fires of His omnipotence suppressed, the " glory which He had before the world was" left behind Him in the eternal bosom of His Father. Here, then, was a trial of tlie heart, — the evident God of their fathers (at the lowest, His evident Messenger and Friend) asking the hospitality of His ancient people. Here was the one only instance^ the solitary opportunity, that has ever occurred, or can ever occur, from the creation of the world to its conflagration, for man to return a personal acknowledgment of benefit to his God. The God who had filled their sacred records with glory was among them, and " had not where to lay His head." I repeat that unbelief must not protect them, when the imbelief was itself a crime of the heart. Had he come as He once appeared to their lawgiver on the Arabian mount, — the mount " that burned with fire," in " blackness, and darkness, and tempest;" had He come as His Angel descended on the host of Sen- nacherib ; had His advent been with all the insignia of worldly dominion, — a rival Cassar, — who toould or could have refused Him ? and where would have been the ingratitude of rejection? But no ; He came to try wlicther His own would receive One in whom the rest of the world could take no plea- k2 252 INGRATITUDE OF THE J1.WS. [Serm. xvii. Bure ; He was received with the crown of tliorns and the cross ! If such a point as this singular example of ingi-atitude can receive any further illustration, we might easily suppose a fit- ting parallel. Imagine that our own native land had been placed by divine Providence under a similar course of protec- tion ; conceive that in its battles the powers of heaven were seen manifestly interfering ; suppose that its rulers were guided by an undeniable divine impulse, and its moral education con- ducted by commissioned messengers of Heaven encouraging or reproving the general mind, and all referring their authority (fortified by miracles and prodigies) to one celestial source of power and knowledge. But misfortune reaches our land, — the fatal recompense of carelessness and crime. After many days a wondrous, but not unpredicted, event takes place. In our streets and fields appears a Being not of this world, a meek Omnipotent, spreading blessings by no tardy mechanism of nature, but with the direct and rapid strokes of almighty power. His own declarations, joined to all around Him, pro- claim to those good hearts who can read the language of Hi? actions, and to the reason of all men, that He is, indeed, the Being from whose inexhaustible beneficence the past recorded glories of our people had sprung, whom some mysterious ordination had sent to take refuge among us. Yet we have no mercy upon the merciful; we seize the advantage of His human form, and through His assumed mortality afflict Him with the death of robbers and murderers. Can you bear the thought of such atrocious ingratitude ? Is it in your nature to conceive the actual commission of it by your own hands ? To be unmoved by a friendship that passes all examples of devotion ; to be hardened to reasonings of exquisite applica- bility and truth ; to deny the day when the light is shining into your eyes, — is this conceivable? Christian brethren, remember Nathan's reply to David. As near as it is possibk for any living beine; to approao^i the sin of Israel, so noar do Serm. xvn.] INGRATITUDE OF THE JEWS. 2o3 those approach who, in our time, desert tlie banner of the Redeemer. You cannot directly insult His form on earth ; you cannot weave the bloody coronet for the brows of the King of kings; you cannot, with your own liands, nail Illm to the accursed tree: but you can (an Apostle declares it) " crucify to yourselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame." Do you take advantage of the terrible ]>nvilcge? Do you exult in this figurative crucifixion of your Lord, and thus identify yourselves with His murderers ? Oh, fellow Christians, before every one of you this night hath " Jesus Christ been evidently set forth," as before the Gala- tians, " crucified among you." Will you learn the awful history only to copy it? Opportunities abound for the crime. He who persecutes the least of the disciples of Christ perse- cutes Christ Himself. He who reviles the Gospel, reviles Him who sent it; and cries, "Crucify Him! crucify Him!" ever- more from the depths of his heart. If the wretched Jew had the visible Christ to assail, have not we tlie Christ that is accurately reflected in the Gospel? if he had a Christ to hehold, have not we a Christ to contemplate ? But no ; you will, with God's blessing, cherish better thoughts. You will not begin by bidding " Christ depart from your coasts," and end by crucifying Him. Nay, rather let me trust that you will learn more and more to be " crucified with Christ," as the Apostle says he continually was ; that, like him, you will learn to " crucify the flesh with the affections and lusts," until at length you reach that sublimcst point of all with which he closes his Epistle, when he declares that, by the Lord Jesus Christ, " the world is crucified unto him, and he unto the world!" Such a state of heart and soul prayer alone can bring; and to prayer, and the God of prayer, I leave you. SERMON XVIII. THE ADVENT EXALTS HUMAN RELATIONS. (Preached for the Western Lying- In Hospital, Dublhi, December 1, 1S38. Advent Sunday.) Luke IL 7. And she hrottglit furih her firstborn son, and icrappcd Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger; because there ^vas no room for them in the inn. When you remember, mj dear "brethren, the peculiar and very touching occasion on which I have been requested this day to address you, as well as the solemn introductory festival which the Church celebrates on this day, you will have no difficulty in conceiving the association by which the passage I have just read is connected with my present labours. Blessed Christi- anity ! Few, indeed, are the occasions of benevolence to which it does not furnish motives, or impulses, or examples, or sugges- tions. Few are the forms of human sorrow, demanding human relief, which will not be found represented, in a shape more affecting and more exalted, in those pages of which the divine Hero was " a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." And common as, in one form or other, is that work of charity which I am now called on to perform among you, let us not forget, let us rejoice to remember, how exclusively it is a Christian work, this business of public appeal for public benevolence upon religious grounds and motives. Antiquity knew nothing of it ; we ourselves know nothing of it until every lower motivt either fails in strength or is misplaced in application. As long as the ordinary business of the world is in progress, worldly motives are sufficient to keep the wheels of the vast machinery in ceaseless activity; now and then they may have energy for Sunn, xvui.] THE xiDVE};T EXALTS, &c. 255 even a better sphere of operation ; men, from a sense of mterest, will be just, from a natural affection will be sometimes sin- cerely kind. The enthusiasm of 'party will often incidentally urge to vast and real sacrifices ; and men will do good to some of their fellow-creatures, to vex and exasperate others ! Buf these are low motives, degrading motives, at best weak because occasional and limited, motives ; and when more than this poor and perverted benevolence is wanting, when deeper springs of mercy nmst be sought, and demands more pressing urged upon the heart, the lever that is to stir the mass must be fixed upon the Gospel as its fulcrum. A new body of motives must be summoned into action. " The powers of the world to come" must be brought to viviiy the cold and deadly fee- bleness of the world that is now. If earth is to be regenerated, heaven must be opened ; and the form of immortal love that is there enthroned must be discnsliroudcd of its veil of clouds, to transform, by the penetrating power of its glories seen and known, tlie adoring heart into His OAvn image and likeness. And I have to speak to you this day of claims thus elevated by every heavenly consecration, as well as endeared by every human tie. We approach in time, let us also approach in thought, the sacred season of Bethlehem, the announcing angels, and the worshipping sages. Let us upon this advent festival feel ourselves where we are — in the early twilight of the Christian dawn ; the clouds faintly tinged with the promise of the yet unrisen Sun. Such a time, and all its crowd of recollections, will plead for those for whom I can but feebly plead. And having to speak for woman in her most touching character, her most fearful earthly trial, I thought it well to remind you of Him who was pleased to enter upon humanity a^ you have done, to connect Himself in tlie relationship oi childhood witli an earthly mother, and in the voluntary humi- liation of His birth to sanctify that destitution, (that poverty embittering the natural agony of the hour,) which you are thia morning called upon to respect and to relieve. 256 THE ADVENT EXALTS [Serin, xviii Let us, then, pause, for awliile upon this gr^^at model thus beautifying every natural relationship, and entering inio the world He created in order to re-create it after a divint^r fashion. Let us regard Hira as He came among us, a j\Lin among His bretliren ; so mysterious, yet so simple, yea, the more mysterious in His very simplicity. Why, then, was it that tlie eternal Son, wlien He abandoned that " glory which He had with the Father before the world was," and determined to be " the Man Christ Jesus,"— why was it that, instead of wonders in the heavens and the earth attending His coming, the convulsion and terror of a universe attesting the descent of the Godhead into His creation. He was pleased to make His apparition on the scene of the world even as others do ; to be the infant and the child before He was tlie man; to be subject to the filial obligation in the ful- ness of its legitimate extent ; and to be all this in a situation in which such ties were stripped of all that could recom- mend them, apart from their own intrinsic value, — a situa- tion in which wealth could not adorn, nor authority dignify them ? . Not to delay upon other explanations of this fact, and to dwell more forcibly upon that which more directly concerns our present purpose, assuredly one prominent reason was that, separating, by means so much more intelligible than argumentative statements, what was essentially excellent in human nature from its depravations and corruptions. He might bestow a special dignity upon those primary connexions of human life upon which the rest so mainly depend, and in which the tenderer and better affections of the heart find, and were meant by our Creator to find, their peculiar sphere of exercise. Nothing can more truly show that nature and reve- lation came from the same hand, than the assumption into revelation of all that is innocent in nature. When God, as Creator of the workl, bound together all the variety of human connexions by all tlie variety of corresponding afiections, He Serm. xvfu.] HUMAN RE LATIOXS. 257 wrought a work destined for everlasting ; dispensations may change, but these things arc not meant to change : the second and higher revelation did not purj)ose to obliterate them, — it presupposed them, it encouraged them, it consecrated them with the blessing of the skies. And thus it is that, when from the perusal of the New Testament a man descends into the charities of social life, things do not seem changed in their position, but wonderfully beautified in their complexion; a diviner glow rests upon them and a holier sanctity. There is a change, but it is a change that adorns without disturbing. It is as if a man who had lived in a twilight world, where ali was dimly revealed and coldly coloured, were suddeiily to be surprised with the splendours of a summer noon. Objects would still remain, and relations be still unbroken ; but new and lovely lights and shadowings would cover them : they would move in the same directions as before ; but under an atmosphere impregnated with brighter hues, and rich with a light that streamed direct from heaven. Now, as I have intimated, by what means could this high result have been attained with such force, directness, and cer- tainty, as has been effected in the adoption by our God Himself of those very connexions? " By their fruits ye shall know them," was His own maxim, and He was willing to be its perfect illustration. How feeble was the commandment of the elder law, " Honour thy father and thy mother," com- pared with the tacit command and overwhelming inducement which the believing Christian recog-nises in the fact that God Incarnate Himself was obedient to His earthly mother, and voluntarily subject to even a reputed father! How stern the aspect of that precept which, under implied conditions of punishment, declares the inviolability of the marriage con nexion, compared with the softening grace with which the T)resence of the Lord hallowed a poor man's marriage at Cana, and tlie consecration which, in adopting it as the emblem of His own iiiunnrtal briflal with the Church of the redeemed, 258 THE ADVENT EXALTS [Serm. xviii. He lias for ever cast around the ceremonial of a Christian union ! . . Yes, it has been said that the burial of Christ has sanctified the grave ; it may as truly be said that the life of Christ has sanctified all the relations of human existence. If in passing through the grave, on His return to the throne of heaven, He left there the odour of His transitory presence, as truly has He, in passing, whether literally or spiritually, through all the holiest connexions of the human heart, left in them an ineffable sanctity, recast them under holier auspices, baptized them with (as it were) the very " waters of life," and regenerated them into the types and symbols of immor- tality ! ... If ice were to conceive a God upon earth, we would surround Him with that which seemed to us the most to befit His presence, as the most to declare His attributes. We would enshroud Him in the lightnings of the skies, and make Him speak in its thunders : if He descended at all to the level of humanity, it should be in the state and equipage of a monarch ; He should move encompassed by an imperial re- tinue, — the angel-warriors of heaven ; and His very favours should be distributed with that sovereign goodness in which tlie sovereignty is at least as clearly manifested as the good- ness, and he who receives is made to feel that he is indeed a receiver. But when God would indeed be man, — when, having of old " seen that all was good," He now saw tnat almost all was evil, and would once more behold it as He made it, when this high resolve of Heaven was indeed to be realized, — He looked abroad to see wliat in humanity was worthiest His assumption. The splendours of an earthly, 2^ provincial monarchy could not attract Him who was familiar with the dignities of an adoring universe. But tlicre was that which even He could regard with approbation. From that store He selected His liuman attributes ; in that dress He in- vested His earthly nature : that was the true mantle of His royalty. The love of the son to tlie parent which He exem- plified ; tlie love of the brother to his brethren which He felt; Serin, xviii.] HUMAN RELATIONS. 259 the love of the husband to the wife which He approved and typified : these were the elements of humanity which their Creator did not tliink unworthy of acceptance ; and to display which, in the long course of daily life, He selected a position among the varieties of human existence in which, apart from every shade or colouring of interest or ambition, tliey alone, ir. truth, purity, and fervour, might be simply and uuafFoctcdl'* exhibited. And to those who can read His divine story as ix ought to be read, not even when He shall come hereafter in the " glory yet to be revealed," surrounded by all those beings of light whose very light shall be but the reflection of His radiance, — not when the whole elemental system shall, as we are led to believe, by some unimagined process, " dissolve with fervent heat" before the terrors of His presence, — not even then sliall a more celestial glory rest upon His form, than when, " a first-born infant" in the arms of His spotless mother. He was laid, amid her tears, in that wretched hovel, assumed the feebleness of infancy, and the tender subjection of childhood ; and in showing us, by His own inestimable example, what sinless man should be, left us every pure affec- tion unbroken, and only fastened their ties more permanently by linking them all in one blessed bond to the love of God made visible in Him ! So far, then, you can perceive a strong reason for the manner of Christ's incarnation, — for His advent among us in the simplicity of our ordinary manhood. You can perceive that it conferred an inexpressible dignity upon the relation, above all others, of the mother and the child : and I would add that of His design to exalt this as well as the other natural relations, to make them high and sacred elements in tlie religion He was about to establish, a most lovely proof is insinuated in the constant employment of all these con- nexions and feelings to symbolize the eternal realities of the spiritual world. We may easily believe that, for such a purpose, only those elements of earth would be adopto 1 which 260 THE ADVENT EXALTS [Serm. xviii. possessed a kind of natural holiness, preparing tliem to be the types of these celestial connexions. Love itself, in all its forms, would seem to be the type or image of some still diviner affection of which man is susceptible towards God ; so that the earthly exercise of this (and similar) virtuous emotions, might be a kind of preparatory discipline for, (at least a shadowing forth of,) that future exhaustion of the whole soul upon the supreme excellence of God manifest in Christ, in which it is, over and over again, intimated that the perfection of celestial blessedness consists. To some such training of the heart St. John would appear to refer in those well-known words, " He that loveth not Ms brother whom he hath seen, how can he Jove God whom he hath not seen?" . . . And, in intimating the nature of these eternal relationships, I have sometimes thought it observable, that the very connexions peculiarly insisted on by Christ, were those in which He Himself was not pleased temporally to manifest Himself upon earth. Tlie relation o^ fatherly affection, in which (as displayed to man) His divinity unites Him with His own divine Parent, is one of these. " The sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty" is (as you know) a peculiar title of the faithful of Christ. But a still more constant and emphatic instance of the principle is the relationship of husband and wife as applied to the everlasting union of Christ and His Church ; on which I need scarcely dwell, as you must be aware that through every part of the prophecies, through remarkable parables, detached expressions, and even miracles of Christ Himself, and through the apostolic Epistles, this remarkable figure is employed. Does not this lavish use, as applied to the re- deemed, of the very titles which, in any literal sense. Pie rejected, seem as if the Blessed One, while here on earth, had purposely withdrawn Himself fi-om these peculiar connexions, in order the more completely to concentrate the undivided affections of His human nature upon His redeemed followers foi all eternity? And it is remarkable that wliilc //"r vojocted this Serm. xviii.j UUMAX RELATIOSS. 261 literal union upon earth, His followers, to whom it is per- mitted upon earth in His absence, are to be without it in heaven, where it is expressly affirmed that " there is neither m&rrjing nor giving in marriage," but where it is also declared that " the marriage su})per of the Lamb is prepared, and His wife hath made herself ready ! " , . . There I's, then, there is in the world to come a state of being which shall display to man the realities among whose shadows he is here and now a wan- derer ; there is something which shall not deceive, which shall not disappoint, which shall not disappear; something which shall meet the full impulses of the human affections, shall raise tlicm, by raising their objects, shall give them a sacred- ness such as even in their present beauty (and it is great) they cannot dare to claim : there is an object for whom we are made, and out of Avliom we cannot rest ; who is the secret want of our hearts even when we go astray from Him ; and whom we desire when we know it not ! If Christ, then, sanctified some of our affections in this world by assuming them. He still more gloriously exalted others by making them the representations of the attachments of mortality. On this occasion you are addressed in reference to that peculiar condition of Imman nature which forms the common basis of all the subsequent relations of life ; and surely I do not err in believing that the Christian, thus appealed to, will feel a new claim upon him, in considering that he manifests respect for what Christ respected, that he assists those to whose peculiar circumstances God Himself, Avhen He adopted our nature, was pleased to add inconceivable dignity, in allowing that nature, though miraculously formed, to be nevertheless not formed as Adam was formed, but, in the language of the Sacred Record, " made of a woman." Yes ; the passage before us speaks of her : it speaks not merely of tlie " first-born," but of her who bore Him, and whose mysterious agonies were unsupported by the aids of wealth and the appliances of luxury ; who was rejected when 262 THE ADVENT EXALTS [Serm. xvm. she would have given to the immortal Infant the common comforts of that trying hour ; and who had to place among the beasts of the field, less insensate than man, the " life of the world " thus cast forth to die ! But Avhat was this but the echo of a distant prophecy- heard across four thousand years ? As in Adam all died, so in Christ were all to be made alive ; and as in Eve was the occasion of the fall, so in a daughter of Eve was the occasion of the salvation. The " seed of the woman," destined to " bruise the'head" of the mystical serpent, promised so long, was at length upon the earth ; the poAvers of hell trembled at that little suiferer ill-protected from the inclement winds by one poor Jewish maid ; and the angels of heaven pealed forth songs of rapturous exultation over Him who was rejected at His birth, as He was rejected in His life, rejected in His death, — as He is at this hour rejected by those who call upon His name but have never imbibed His love, by them (be- loved!) who withaBethlehemite spirit, and with hearts closed to the distresses of sisters, in that fearful trial, cannot pity the sorrows of those who are weeping as His mother wept, ■But we will not dread from a gospel pulpit to speak of Jier as she deserves. The melancholy perversion of the faith, which has since so largely afflicted the Church of Christ, has ascribed to that "blessed among women" distinctions scarcely less than divine. But let not this re-act to tempt us to refuse the promised tribute of honour to her whom " all generations" were " to call blessed." Identified, as we are, with our divine ]\[aster, it is impossible not to receive into peculiar and holy intimacy that honoured being to whom the Son of God was so long subject, and whose will (within due limitations) He was so long pleased to make His own. The adoring disciple of Christ, whose imagination finds its happiest exercise among the sacred abodes of Nazareth, learns to love almost as a parerit her whom Jesus loved as such ; and joins in spirit that sainted disciple whom Christ made, as it were, Tlis inlicritor in filial Scrm. XVIII.] UU.^f Ay RELATIONS. 263 aifection (" Woman, Leliold thy son/''] and who, commissioned by the dying Kedcenier, bore the maiden-mother to liis own lioinc. . . . How wondrous, how unfelt before or since, the communion of that mother and that Son! With the full remembrance of His supernatural descent, to sit at the same daily table for all those long and untold years that preceded the public ministry of the Great Prophet ; to tender all those thousand gentle offices of life, which a mother alone can know, to a divine Child ; to recognise in Him at once the babe of her bosom and the God of lier immortality ; to catch, ever and anon, those mystic echoes of eternity which the deeper tones of His converse would reveal, and to behold, plainer and plainer as He gi-ew, the lineaments of the God impressed upon the wondrous inmate of her humble home, — glimpses of the heaven that was within, traces of the language of the skies, (she still, with that serene observance which seems to have been her special character, " keeping all these sayings and pondering them in her heart ;") surely, these were expe- riences to dignify that mother in our thoughts ; yea, to give a glory and a hallowing to maternity itself for ever. One point, above all others, added a peculiar interest to that wondrous connexion. The Virgin and her Son stood alone in the world ! alone, in the long line of the human race ! He with whom she was so awfully, yet endearingly connected, could acknowledge no earthly father, no author of His huma- nity, but that overshadowing Spirit by whose mysterious operation He had been invested with our nature. " She brought forth her first-born Son," and, as though she were a widowed mother, none stood by who could soothe her sor- rows and share her love for the new-born infant with the anxious sympathies of a father. ... I know with what viru- lence this divine mystery has been of late assailed. I am aware of the unceasing efforts of what is ostentatiously called Unitarian Christianity to undermine the scriptural proofs ol a fact to which (as you all are aware) the Record bears such 264 THE ADVENT EXALTS [Serm. xviii. evidence that it can only be questioned by questioning the genuineness of the Record itself; and which is, in point of reason and the nature of the case, manifestly required in con- sistency with the whole purpose of the advent and the atone- ment of Christ. To enter into such discussions is not my object now. Tliough, it is true, the great fact in the text, and the natural connexions of the object on which I have been commissioned to address you, might warrant them, I would be unwilling to trespass on what is, after all, the more special theme of another and greater festival ; even if my time per- mitted these minuter inquiries. It may suffice to say that, on an occasion like this, I cannot venture to detain you beyond a very limited time ; and yet, shall I pass the subject without a word? To oppose the uniform belief of the Church, (which, indeed, has rather inclined to exaggerate than to depreciate the dignity of the virgin-mother,) to oppose the unequivocal testi- mony of Scripture, there seems to be (except the utterly unsuccessful attempt to discredit the genuineness of the narra- tion) but one universal objection, — the same to this as to all other doctrines that transcend ordinary experience, — that the thing is an incomprehensible " mystery." The Church is in this holy season peculiarly busied with her mysteries ; I can- not, then, but pause, while speaking of the great mystery declared in the text, to ask, are we, indeed, the fools these men would paint us to believe such ? They would have a Chris- tianity purged of mysteries, or none ; a Christianity without trinity of j^crsons, or duality of natures, or miraculous con- ception, or atoning redemption, or sanctifying Spirit; and all these exclusions equally, because they are mysteries. They are told that the object of this religion is to bring together earth and heaven, — a world which we know little with a world of which we know nothing; and they expect to have the details of such a conjunction level to their capacities. They are told that God has interfered with the fortunes of man; and they expect the mighty transaction to proceed as simply Serm. ivm] HUMAN RELATIOXS. 2G5 as an ordinaiy treaty of peace. Tlicy admit that God lias condescended to cnli,^-litcn His creatures; yet tliey are oTjsti- natc in refusing to take anything from Him on trust. They concede that the preliminaries of ages were not considered too much to herald the advent of this great epoch ; that that "day," seen tlirough the vista of two thousand years, was enough to make glad the heart of one patriarch, — nay, that the patriarch of the liunian race himself was permitted to see in it the source of all liis consolation ; that a polity, singular in the history of the world, was for centuries maintained for the sole purpose of evidencing, and illustrating, and preparing it ; that miracles and prodigies, each enough to make the foundation of a separate system, were, aggregated together, only worthy to be the faint precursors of this Master Wonder ; that figures, each worthy alone to occupy the full breadth and height of an ordinary painting, were only the accessories of the mighty and pi-omi- nent form of that mystic Being who fills the foreground of the Christian picture: and yet, admitting all, or nearly all, this ; obliged to confess that, explain it as we may, the whole subject comes to us from on high and clothed in the light of other worlds, these objectors, — though drenched in mysteries, when they come to the scriptural testimonies to the miraculous conception, and personal dignity, and mystical offices, of Christ, — suddenly assume the utmost minuteness of sceptical caution ; set to work every refinement of criticism to extort inanity out of expressions the most positive and unequivocal ; stamp folly on the Old Testament in order to rationalize the New; contend implicitly (in this endeavour to unmiracle the advent and the person of Christ) that the vast organization of Judaism was, after all, a preparation in which nothing was prepared, a porch without an edifice, a cypher without a solution : in short, after groping through a labyrinth of preliminary mystery^ refuse to acknowledge that mystery which alone can make all the rest cease to be such. But you, my friends, I trust, have not " so learned Christ" II. S 200 THE ADVENT EX ALTry [Serm. ::vih. or Christ's Gospel. You are willing to concede to your adorable JMaster that dignity which really exalts our nature by exalting His : you are willing to admit that He, and she who bore the hallowed title of His earthly mother, were connected in ties such as they alone have ever held : you are willing to acknoAv- ledge that in that awful hour of Bethlehem there must have mingled with the sorrows of the outcast virgin the trembling joys of one who knew herself the supernatural channel of the Hope of the human race ; and that, though she might own to the feebleness of the woman in that hour of trial, and deplore amid the unworthy accompaniments of such a scene that " low estate" of "the handmaid of the Lord" which had reduced her to them, yet that, as she gazed upon that eternal Child in whom was bound the regeneration of Israel, of the world, " her soul could magnify the Lord," " and her spirit rejoice in God her Saviour!'''' If you can indeed reflect those feelings, and sympathise with that blessed mother in her fears, her hopes, her joys, your hearts are attuned as I would have them : and your thoughts from her sorrows will descend without difficulty to those sorrows, which are like hers in their agony, but not like hers in their consolations. The terrible decree, " In sorrow slialt thou bring forth," might be considered in some degree alleviated or counterbalanced in her case, by the high con- sciousness of a supernatural destiny and the confidence of divine protection it naturally inclndcd. But there are those around you, and among you, who have no such internal restoratives. There are those who, with all the physical terrors that in all ranks belong to such a period, labour under the additional horrors of a poverty far deeper than that which afflicted the mother of the Jjord of life ; those to whom the shed at Bethlehem, — miserable as it was, — would at least afford an undisturbed retreat, would offer shelter from the wind and i-ain. But God alone, and those whom, as mission- Senu. xviu.] HUMAN RELATION'S. 207 aries of charity, the benevolent piu-poses of tliis or similar institutions conduct into the darker retreats of destitution in this city, knowwhat is the real extent of human aa retchedness around us, — to what unutterable depths human life may sink, and yet exist ! Crowds imuiurcd in a single house, separated, — and scarcely separated, — by crumbling walls and floors ; not one of whom can perhaps count with certainty upon the food of a single day ; creatures whom misery has almost deprived of the feelings of that common nature which seems to have deserted them as outcasts. To this condition the perpetual fluctuations of trade will often in a week reduce men, who still are prevented from common mendicancy, by lingering feelings of independence ; who, though they cannot " dig," are still " to beg ashamed." But, in such a crisis, a man can still make head against utter despair ; though the cheek be wan with hunger, and the limbs feeble, and the heart sick with that sickness which no medicine can heal, and the demon be at hand to whisper crime, yet the energies of a man are not to be crushed by a blow, there is a faint vitality in the darkest misery, that, till nature fails, preserves a spark of hope. But when, to tliat sex whose delicate organization is always more susceptible of impressions, the terrors accede of an hour which even the best aids of prosperity are weak to lighten ; when in the midst of cold and starvation, and the mul- tiplied forms of misery, the heart-broken mother knows that the time is come when she is to add a new victim to the mass of wretchedness around her ; and when amidst tlie distraction of the scene, the noise, the discomfort, those " pangs of a woman in travail" become hers Avhich have been employed by blessed lips to express the extremity of human anguish, — what a situation is hers ! how she learns that there can be a misery more deplorable than poverty, more acute than hunger! . . When the blessed Virgin brought forth in poverty, " she brought forth h^r first-born Son;" but, oh! with the majority of these whom you are called upon to aid, ]iow dif- s2 2G8 THE ADVENT EXALTS [Serm. xviii. ferent is the case! Surrounded by the previous heirs of poverty, the miserable mother, in these gloomy abodes oi destitution, has the embittering feeling that, to a fomily already outgrowing the means of subsistence, she is adding a new, unwelcome claimant ; and in the dark, perverted, feelings of want (wliich so disnatures man!) who can doubt that, to her anguish, is often added the bitter sarcasm of the wretched husband, or the still more wretched children, who murmur that the fraction of food should be still diminished to provide for the wants of a stranger ! . . . Brethren, how can I think of such scenes as these, and not recal the difference of position in which the same trial finds those whom Providence, of its fi-ee mercy, has placed in your rank of society, and gifted with your command of resources? It is true, no earthly power can rob that agony of its sting ; the primal cm-se made no dis- tinction of classes ; and God fixed that terrible transmission of punishment on grounds too radical and permanent to admit of evasion by human skill. But to the lady of affluence, who reclines in tlie midst of a silence which even the stealthy tread of the attendant fears to break ; whose slumbers are encouraged by all the soothing appliances of medicine, and before whose muffled doors the very streets are carpeted lest they should ruffle her repose ; to her, above all, whose languid eyes, when they do unclose, rest upon those who, undisturbed by the contracting calculations of poverty, are ready to make every conceivable sacrifice to buy her a single hour of peace, and whose affection, always earnest, is quickened in intensity, and attempered to a more refined delicacy of attention, by the circumstances in which she is placed, — to her the terrible trial, when it does come, at least comes lightened of all its external terrors, and alleviated by the very consciousness of the love it calls into action. I would not claim, — it is not the will of the great Author of rank and subordination, — tliat comforts so high and peculiar as these should be tlie comforts of all ; but I would claim, that tlic common necessaries of lifc'.s most Serm.xvin.] UUMAX liELATIONS. 269 trying hour,— the few days of undisturbed repose, and the ordinary aids of medical science, — should he unprovided to none. I would claim, that the offices of this most benevolent charity, — whose sphere is a population of 70,000 human beings (for all are equally interested in a mother's health), occupying nine entire parishes, the poorest in your city, — should be aided in their work of mercy ; that, after alle- viating the sufferings of 1,570 of our poor sisters during the five years of its existence, it should not now be enfeebled in its resources. Notwithstanding every effort of economy, the poverty of the district so often demanded its aids, that, although sacrifices most creditable were made by the medical officers, the debt of the institution is now considerable. This might have been evaded by the cold severity of determined rejection; it might have been evaded by turning away the eyes from the misery that surrounded them ; by hearing without pity the shreiks of the destitute, and resolutely sup- pressing the compassion which even the practised experience of the physician cannot help feeling, at some of the forms of human woe ; had this been done, you might have been spared this appeal, but would you have it so ? Conceive, then, that you are each of you tendering your relief to that individual case whose expenses your contribution will enable the insti- tution to defray. Imagine that you see the misery, which, whether you see it or not, is truly around you. Mothers! remember your own hour of peril, and sympathise with your sisters in sorrow ! Fathers ! remember your anxieties, your fears, your hopes ! and think of those who can rival you iu anxiety and fear ; but who have no " hopes'''' but those which this day is to bring them. But why do I delay upon these lesser claims ? Christians, of whatever sex, or class, or calling, remember her who was agonized as these wretched mothers were and are agonized ; her who bore her " First-born" as the poor bear theirs, and thus for ever dignified maternal destitu- tion: remember Ilim, who even in infancy " had not where 270 THE ADVENT EXALTS, &.'c. [Serm. x\ni. to lay His head," and to whom no retreat like this was open ; but who, assuredly, when that great day comes, at which we shall all meet again, and when the love to the disciple is accepted (He has promised it ! ) as love to Himself, Avill not forget that peculiar form of charity, which, along with all its other claims, may recal to His divine remembrance, the weeping mother of Bethlehem, and that Infant who was " laid in the manger, because there was no room for them at the inn I" SERMON XIX. DANGER OF BACKSLIDING. (Preached at St. Aiine's Church, Dawson Street, July 2, 1837.) Revelation II. 4. Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Whether the exliortations contained in the second and third chapters of the Apocalypse were primarily directed to the Churches themselves which are there spcciiied, or to the pre- siding bishops exclusively, who are in each case entitled the " angels" of the respective communities, is a point which has occasioned much discussion. Perhaps the truth may lie in a medium between both. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that the title " angels " is intended for the superintend- ing ministers of these Churches ; the metaphor (from the heavenly to the earthly ministers of God) is itself natural ; and the application is confirmed in this instance by the general consent of the ancient Church. On the other hand, there are expressions in the exhortations themselves which seem to overpass an individual application ; and the Spirit seems to make constant transitions from the condition of the minister to the condition of the flock, or rather (perhaps I might say) to identify the fortunes of both, and interweave together the contemplation of their destinies. In the sentence I have read, this doubleness of application is certainly both possible and instructive. Every one knows — too many by melancholy experience — what it is to abandon the " first love " of the adoring Spirit ; what it is to have 272 DANGER OF BACKSLIDING. [Seim. xix. known the bliss of entire communion with a heavenly Parent, awful as God, Lut tender, too, as man ; to have withdrawn the heart from everything transient and perishable to fix it in undouhting faith upon the Immutable and Eternal ; to have felt in the very novelty and wonder of the emotion a proud confidence that it could never pass away ; and yet to have known it pass away gradually but utterly, the world again insensibly returning, the poisonous waters again filling every one of their old channels, the chain again tightening round the heart, and the emancipated freedman of God once more lying down in contented slavery. There are those, the great Teacher has declared, who " hear the word, and anon loith joy receive it; yet have no root in themselves, but endure only for a while," With such cases we are all familiar ; they are the standard subjects of the unhappy mockeries of infidelity ; as if our divine Master had not with a pencil of light drawn the portrait of such, and forewarned us that these things were to be. Now, as the application to the individual is but too clear and justifiable, so is the application to the general body of the Church, or of Churches, fraught with terrors scarcely less impressive. And it is in this point of view that I mean this day to consider the case. I do so, brethren, in direct reference to the peculiar occasion on which 1 have been requested to address you. The work which I am to ask you to promote, is a work which eminently recals us to the principles and the obligations of our Church Union ; which sinks the individual in the community ; and which I will not stoop to asking you to further on any grounds but those of that sacred tie that binds you in the unity of the Body of Christ with any the humblest baptized believer. I ask you to support and shelter these fatherless little ones, not merely because you are indi- vidual believers in Christ, and thence bound to works of mercy, but because of a relation above and beyond this, — because no bclievi'r (if I might so speak) is individual; his Serin. XIX. ] DAXGKR OF nACK.SHDIXO. 273 individuality is merged in liis membership; lie is one of many, of many who are one. I would recal to you those enormous obligations, so often disguised or forgotten, which in God's sight you owe to that holy Catholic Church, in the most favoiu-cd division of which you are born, to its laws, to its ministers, to its members, — yea, to the humblest and weakest infant that has ever been bonie to its font, and baptized, as you were, into the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The passage before us supplies a ready, God grant it may be a profitable, opportunity for the application I propose. What an example of the melancholy frailty of human nature is presented in the fortunes of these famous Churches of the Apocalypse ! Planted by apostles, nurtured with the blood of martyrs, animated by the effusion of the Spirit in miiacle and prophecy, ministered to by the most conspicuous saints of the first age of Christianity as their bishops and pastors, constantly visited by the inspired messengers of God, and (as here) admonished in express terms of the consequences of a lapse, and stimulated to persevere, they, nevertheless, yielded to the seductions of the enemy of their peace, gra- dually lost every remnant of primitive purity, and, deserving the threatened vengeance of God, Avere left to so utter a deso- lation, that for many an age not one hymn of praise has been heard within those walls which St. John and St. Paul hal- lowed by their presence and their prayers. A few poor relics of ancient sanctity still lie scattered among some of them, but relics that only the more sadly attest desolation. Kemem- brances of former glory have excited the piety of some of the modern residents to attempt to erect churches and gather con- gregations ; to renew in the scats of these ancient communities of holiness a fiiint image of that fervent and willing activity which in elder times distinguished them ; but such efforts, few and desultory, have not gone near to remove the heavy cloud which divine justice has cast upon these once favoured localities. 274 DANGER OF BACKSLIDING. [Serm. xix. " Their gloiy has passed away." The services of an anti- christian imposture — of Mohammedanism — have invaded the very soil upon which the sacred buildings rose ; and the ground where Christ was once so ardently worshipped, the very materials of which His temples were formed, are now desecrated to the gross superstitions of a lying and sensual creed. Among all these Churches thus living in the light of God's peculiar mercies, perhaps none was so eminently favoured as the Church to which the reproof of the text was addressed. EpJiesus is a distinguished name in apostolic history. In St. Paul's second missionary voyage we find him engaged there, strenuously "reasoning with the Jews," upon whom the efficacy of his labours appears to have been attested by their earnest requests that he should " tarry with them." (Some time after (at an early period in his third voyage) he arrives again at this great metropolis, and the whole of the 19th chapter of tlie Acts is taken up with the history of this visit. You remember that it was on this occasion that the great Apostle baptized in tlie name of the Lord Jesus, and gifted with the Holy Ghost those disciples of John, who till then " had not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost ; " that it was on this occasion that for three months he spake boldly in the synagogue, and afterwards, when assailed by enemies to the doctrine of the Cross, disputed daily in the house of a private disciple, — continuing for two whole years to preachj so as that all Asia " heard tlie word of the Lord Jesus." You remember that this Ephcsian visit was accompanied by "special miracles" of the most striking kind; that it was here and now that the evil spirit was permitted to overcome the presumptuous sons of Sceva ; and that it was here that God also manifested the mercies of His good ►Spirit in con- verting to the way of truth numbers, who (among other depravities) devoted to the miserable impostures of divination, at length " burning their books before all men," learned to Serui. xix.j DANGER OF BACKSLIDING. 275 seek for truth in the holier divining Looks of those prophets who had foretokened the coming of the Redeemer. Finally, you remember that it was here that avarice befriended idolatry ; and that, in vindicating the honour of Diana of the Ephesians, the "craft in danger of being set at nought" was (as often since) made the adversary of Christian truth. A great Church had, however, by this time been erected, and in the following chap- ter, Ephesus is again strikingly introduced to our notice. I need not remind you of that pathetic charge which Paul at Miletus addressed to the elders of this Ephesian Church ; how he tells them to " take heed to themselves and to all the flock over the which the Holy Ghost hath made them overseers, to feed the Church of God which He hath purchased with His blood ;" or how, with melancholy prophecy, he warned them that " after his departing grievous wolves would enter in among them, not sparing the flock." Too truly has the terrible pre- diction been realized. But a more glorious page belongs still to Ephesus. To tins Church, yet in its primitive bloom, was addressed that Epistle which of all the waitings of its author contains the fullest and deepest revelation of the Christian mysteries, an Epistle in which the writer seems animated by a peculiar and unwonted energy of inspiration, and which, it is obvious to any reader of its congratulations and encourage- ments, could scarcely have been addressed but to those who had already enjoyed the richest treasures of grace. The Apostle does not command them, but confers with them ; he places them on his own level in Christian attainments, and rejoices with them in a common salvation. He does not 80 much speak to them, as speak on h/^half of himself and them. If he declares " toe have obtained an inheritance," and " toe should be to the praise of His glory who first trusted," — he adds, " in whom ye also trusted;" if, reversing the order, he reminds them " ye walked according to the course of this world," he takes care with deep humility to add " among whom also ice all had our conversation." I need not enlarge 276 DANGER OF HACKSLIDINO. [Serm.xix upon this cliaracteristic of tlie Epistle to the Ephesians ; which you can easily establish for yourselves, and which cannot be easily established by anything but personal investigation. You will find that, all through this noble display of gospel truth, the writer addresses his correspondents as those who had been elevated into a participation of the mysteries he described; as those to whom specific moral commands were less necessary than exhortations to the continued and increased cultivation of the Spirit that animates and vivifies them ; in short, as those who might expect, by perseverance in prayer, that " being rooted and grounded in love," they " might be able to com- prehend with all saints what 'is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height ; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge!" These were attainments too high for novices! No beginner in the school of the Spirit could dare to hope for a learning in the things of God so vast, so com- prehensive, and so profound, as this. Such, brethren, was the Church of Ephesus in its primitive years. No cloud rests upon the mirror which these earliest records present of its primal purity. Our Christian contem- plations may dwell upon it as a holy association of ardent yet patient children of God; a paradise in which Satan might indeed birk, (for he lurks wherever there are human hearts,) but in which, as yet, he could not dare to ravage or destroy. Though alone and discountenanced in the midst of a profligate and idolatrous metropolis, doubtless they were deeply and truly happy ! At peace with themselves, and loving, with the unmeasured affection of Christians, all around them, the terrors of the stake and the lions could not ruffle the bright tranquillity of that peace and love. The glory of the inward light spread on all that circled them, and as it fell upon their afflictions, turned them to a joy better than this world's most seductive pleasures can bring. Despised, stricken, op- pressed, calumniated, they smiled upon the tormentors, and praised God in the midst of the torment : for the holy ardours Serm. XIX.] DANGER OF BICKSUDING. Ill of the " first love" could to tlie triunivliant sjiivit overbear the flames of martyrdom. And surely it was a singular testimony to the omnipotence of the Spirit of grace, that in the very capital of Eastern idolatry — in the place where Satan had set up the most superb of his idol-temples, in order to blind men to the truth that God " dwelleth not in temples made with hands;" even here arose, perhaps, the noblest and purest of all the early Churches, flourishing uncontaminated, in the midst of corruption and vice. Alas ! Churches, like indi- viduals, may mourn over the lovely recollections of childhood. The freshness of early spring belongs to the history of both alike. Each has its period of unforgotten innocence. The fervency that glories in opposition, the kindling enthusiasm that consumes before it every paltry and unworthy feeling — these are the characteristics of the youth of Churches, no less than of their individual members. . . . And even as a man overworn by the cares and perplexities of busy age, often gladly reverts to the uncorrupted hours of his dawning life, to their happy confidence, their guiltless desires, their boundless hope, so may the advanced age of Churches ; so may too, brethren, avIio in our day forget our God and neglect His word, turn back an eye of soiTOwful remembrance to those times yet glowing on the page of history, when our Church though cradled in the furnace of persecution, seemed, as it were, to borrow from the furnace its fire, and like that flame, rising as it kindled, to struggle still upwards to heaven. The first scene in the history of the Church of Ephesus is closed. It leaves a solemn and deep impression of unminglcd happiness. Christianity is seen in action ; ftiith in the Lord Jesus, worMnc] hy love. No rude dissensions disturb the beau- tiful calm of hope and peace ; heaven is reflected upon earth ; and the angels of God, as they pass and repass on their missions of mercy, acknowledge that their own holy societies can scarcely surpass the blessed communion of regenerated human hearts. 278 DANGER OF BACKSLIDING. [Serm. xix The next scene opens in tlie passage from which the words ot" the text are derived. That passage is the last notice of happy and favoured Ephesus, contained in the Scriptures of the New Testament. A mighty censor had been among its congi-egations. John, who had resided for years as superin- tendent of the Asiatic Churches, and whose affectionate heart liad been deeply interested in their welfare, — now an exile in a lonely Grecian island, banished, as he expresses it, " for the word of God and for the testimony of Jesus Christ," transmits to the growing Church at Ephesus the admonitions of the Spirit of Truth. Yes ; the man to whose unsealed eyes the Lord Jesus Himself was revealed in His glory as He had formerly been in His humiliation, the man who became the organ of prescience to the whole Church of Christ, till time shall be no more, he, thus honoured and exalted of Heaven, was at this hour a banished exile under the proscription of all earthly authority. A^lio can but pause upon such a contrast ? The mighty of this world laid their interdict upon the humble Christian teaclier, they cast him out of their coasts, and refused him all but the existence which they did not leave his brethren long ; but they could not debar him the society of God Himself! Truly, the inspired exile could endure their frown, when the Lord of the whole universe smiled upon him; truly, he could bear the absence or the discountenance of the haughty nobles of Asia or of Rome, when the hierarchy of heaven were with him in his wilderness ! Such an inspector as this Avas not likely to overlook the traces of corruption or decay in the congregations of Ephesus, He had been too familiar with infinite Purity to lightly brook even tlie earliest rudiments of evil. But a mightier voice than ]iis spoke in the message to the Church of Ephesus. " He that holdcth the seven stars in His right hand" addresses it in tills solemn exhortation. In its tenor we can but too plainly perceive, that a declension had been detected in the community once so humbly resolute in its holiness. The Serin, xix.] DANGER OF BACKSLIDIXQ. 279 Epliesian converts were still, iudeccl, a noble body. Would that our existing Cliurclies readied the hciglit of even their failure! But the seeds of ruin were sown for a future development. These Christians could still withstand the terrors of persecu- tion by the might of prayer ; but the prayers were less frequent and less ardent, and the world had stolen in between them and their God. Hear, then, what the S[)irit saith unto the ruler of this Church, and in him, doubtless, to this Church itself, — " I know thy works, and thy hibour, and thy patience, and liow thou canst not bear them which are evil: . . . and hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name's sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted. Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. Eemember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place." The remaining history of ihe Cliurch of Ephesus is not written in the h?criptin-cs of God ; it is to be collected from the uninspired records of tlie time. From these we learn that St. John himself resided there till the close of his long life ; and taught his lessons of love to the last. For many succeed- ing years it existed in the mixed condition of good and evil which our modern Churches exemplify. The great martyr Ignatius, on his road to martyrdom, addressed it with affec- tionate zeal; and bore testimony to its (as yet) continued holiness. At the close of the second century it was still the liead of Asiatic Christianity, and, under its venerable bishop, feared not to question even the growing sovereignty of the Church of Rome. But it is needless to extend the inquiry. I must not pause to analyse its ruin. A darker season came on the Church of Ephesus. It decayed with the general decay of vital godliness ; and it at length attracted the threatened ven- geance of its neglected Master. Wiiat then? — does history bear out the fulfilment of the divine menace? I will not tell you to ask the question now among the ruins of Ephesus. 280 DANGER OF BACKSLIDING. [Serm. xix. Many ages since you might have asked, whether the lightnings of divine wratli had stricken that ill-fated city and its Church ; with the Book of the Kevelation in your right hand, you might have entered the site of its streets and interrogated the city which was the light and glory of Asia, whether the vengeance of God is indeed inevitable in its visitation of sinners ; and the melancholy echoes from fragments of the desecrated sanctuaries and fallen temples of a lost Christianity alone would have answered your question with a terrible affirmative ! Now, brethren, with such an example as this before you,- with such an example written in the Scriptures of God and in those pages of authentic history which are, as it were, tlie Scriptures of His general Providence, I ask you, is it not wise to pause upon the awful tale, and question ourselves, how far it is applicable to our own condition, and what lessons as to the dispensations of Providence it presses upon our thoughts ? 1 am not about to attempt extracting remote and novel conclu- sions from the facts of this striking case ; let me but assist your minds to travel in the natural course of simple and un- laboured meditation. In the first place, then, does it not forcibly remind you, that the Providence of God oversees with special care the fortunes of GTiurcJies no less than those of individuals ; that Christians are regarded by their Master in their collective capacity ; that He delights not more in the growth of the separate plant tlian in the growth of the garden and the grove? Brethren, I cannot impress this point too forcibly upon your recollections. Churches, visible and regulated Churches, even more than scattered instances of individual piety, are the great objects of divine favour, if we may trust the records of the New Testa- ment. The spirit so prevalent in our day, of regarding individuals wholly apart from their place in a Church or com- munion of Christia7is, really finds no support whatever from the documents of our faith. I need not tell you in haw many cases the Apostles address themselves to the communities, and Serm. XIX.] DANGER OF BACK.'