Dedication

I

EVERY MAN’S LIFE A PLAN OF GOD.

Isaiah xlv. 5.—“I girded thee, though thou hast not known me,”

So beautiful is the character and history of Cyrus, the person here addressed, that many have doubted whether the sketch given by Xenophon was not intended as an idealizing, or merely romantic picture. And yet, there have been examples of as great beauty unfolded, here and there, in all the darkest recesses of the heathen world, and it accords entirely with the hypothesis of historic verity in the account given us of this remarkable man, that he is designated and named by our prophet, even before he is born, as a chosen foster-son of God. “I have surnamed thee,” he declares, “I have girded thee, though thou hast not known me.” And what should he be but a model of all princely beauty, of bravery, of justice, of impartial honor to the lowly, of greatness and true magnanimity in every form, when God has girded him, unseen, to be the minister of his own great and sovereign purposes to the nations of his time.

Something of the same kind will also be detected in the history and personal consciousness of almost every great and remarkable character. Christ himself testifies to the girding of the Almighty, when he says,—“To this end was I born, and for this purpose came I into the world.” Abraham was girded for a particular work and mission, in what is otherwise denominated his call. Joseph, in Egypt, distinguishes the girding of God’s hand, when he comforts his guilty brothers in the assurance,—“So, it was not you that sent me hither, but God.” Moses and Samuel were even called by name, and set to their great life-work, in the same manner. And what is Paul endeavoring, in all the stress and pressure of his mighty apostleship, but to perform the work for which God’s Spirit girded him at his call, and to apprehend that for which he was apprehended of Christ Jesus. And yet these great master-spirits of the world are not so much distinguished, after all, by the acts they do, as by the sense itself of some mysterious girding of the Almighty upon them, whose behests they are set on to fulfill. And all men may have this; for the humblest and commonest have a place and a work assigned them, in the same manner, and have it for their privilege to be always ennobled in the same lofty consciousness. God is girding every man for a place and a calling, in which, taking it from him, even though it be internally humble, he may be as consciously exalted as if he held the rule of a kingdom. The truth I propose then for your consideration is this,—

That God has a definite life-plan for every human person, girding him, visibly or invisibly, for some exact thing, which it will be the true significance and glory of his life to have accomplished.

Many persons, I am well aware, never even think of any such thing. They suppose that, for most men, life is a necessarily stale and common affair. What it means for them they do not know, and they scarcely conceive that it means any thing. They even complain, venting heavy sighs, that, while some few are set forward by God to do great works and fill important places, they are not allowed to believe that there is any particular object in their existence. It is remarkable, considering how generally this kind of impression prevails, that the Holy Scriptures never give way to it, but seem, as it were, in all possible ways, to be holding up the dignity of common life, and giving a meaning to its appointments, which the natural dullness and lowness of mere human opinion can not apprehend.

They not only show us explicitly, as we have seen, that God has a definite purpose in the lives of men already great, but they show us, how frequently, in the conditions of obscurity and depression, preparations of counsel going on, by which the commonest offices are to become the necessary first chapter of a great and powerful history. David among the sheep; Elisha following after the plough; Nehemiah bearing the cup; Hannah, who can say nothing less common than that she is the wife of Elkanah and a woman of a sorrowful spirit,—who, that looks on these humble people, at their humble post of service, and discovers, at last, how dear a purpose God was cherishing in them, can be justified in thinking that God has no particular plan for him, because he is not signalized by any kind of distinction?

Besides, what do the scriptures show us, but that God has a particular care for every man, a personal interest in him and a sympathy with him and his trials, watching for the uses of his one talent as attentively and kindly and approving him as heartily, in the right employment of it, as if he had given him ten; and, what is the giving out of the talents itself. but an exhibition of the fact that God has a definite purpose, charge and work, be it this or that for every man?

They also make it the privilege of every man to live in the secret guidance of God; which is plainly nugatory, unless there is some chosen work, or sphere, into which he may be guided; for how shall God guide him, having nothing appointed or marked out for him to be guided into? no field opened for him, no course set down which is to be his wisdom?

God also professes in his Word to have purposes pre-arranged for all events; to govern by a plan which is from eternity even, and which, in some proper sense, comprehends every thing. And what is this but another way of conceiving that God has a definite place and plan adjusted for every human being? And, without such a plan, he could not even govern the world intelligently, or make a proper universe of the created system; for it becomes a universe only in the grand unity of reason, which includes it. Otherwise, it were only a jumble of fortuities, without counsel, end or law.

Turning, now, from the scriptures to the works of God, how constantly are we met here by the fact, everywhere, visible, that ends and uses are the regulative reasons of all existing things. This we discover often, when we are least able to understand the speculative mystery of objects; for it is precisely the uses of things that are most palpable. These uses are to God, no doubt, as to us, the significance of his works. And they compose, taken together, a grand reciprocal system, in which part answers actively to part, constructing thus an all-comprehensive and glorious whole. And the system is, in fact, so perfect, that the loss or displacement of any member would fatally derange the general order. If there were any smallest star in heaven that had no place to fill, that oversight would beget a disturbance which no Leverrier could compute; because it would be a real and eternal, and not merely casual or apparent disorder. One grain, more or less, of sand would disturb, or even fatally disorder the whole scheme of the heavenly motions. So nicely balanced, and so carefully hung, are the worlds, that even the grains of their dust are counted, and their places adjusted to a correspondent nicety. There is nothing included in the gross, or total sum, that could be dispensed with. The same is true in regard to forces that are apparently irregular. Every particle of air is moved by laws of as great precision as the laws of the heavenly bodies, or, indeed, by the same laws; keeping its appointed place, and serving its appointed use. Every odor exhales in the nicest conformity with its appointed place and law. Even the viewless and mysterious heat, stealing through the dark centers and impenetrable depths of the worlds, obeys its uses with- unfaltering exactness, dissolving never so much as an atom that was not to be dissolved. What now shall we say of man, appearing, as it were, in the center of this great circle of uses. They are all adjusted for him: has he, then, no ends appointed for himself? Noblest of all creatures, and closest to God, as he certainly is, are we to say that his Creator has no definite thoughts concerning him, no place prepared for him to fill, no use for him to serve, which is the reason of his existence?

There is, then, I conclude, a definite and proper end, or issue, for every man’s existence; an end, which, to the heart of God, is the good intended for him, or for which he was intended; that which he is privileged to become, called to become, ought to become; that which God will assist him to become and which he can not miss, save by his own fault. Every human soul has a complete and perfect plan, cherished for it in the heart of God—a divine biography marked out, which it enters into life, to live. This life, rightly unfolded, will be a complete and beautiful whole, an experience led on by God and unfolded by his secret nurture, as the trees and the flowers, by the secret nurture of the world; a drama cast in the mould of a perfect art, with no part wanting; a divine study for the man himself, and for others; a study that shall forever unfold, in wondrous beauty, the love and faithfulness of God; great in its conception, great in the Divine skill by which it is shaped; above all, great in the momentous and glorious issues it prepares. What a thought is this for every human soul to cherish! What dignity does it add to life! What support does it bring to the trials of life! What instigations does it add to send us onward in every thing that constitutes our excellence! We live in the Divine thought. We fill a place in the great everlasting plan of God’s intelligence. We never sink below his care, never drop out of his counsel.

But there is, I must add, a single, but very important and even fearful qualification. Things all serve their uses, and never break out of their place. They have no power to do it. Not so with us. We are able, as free beings, to refuse the place and the duties God appoints; which, if we do then we sink into something lower and less worthy of us. That highest and best condition for which God designed us is no more possible. We are fallen out of it, and it can not be wholly recovered. And yet, as that was the best thing possible for us in the reach of God’s original counsel, so there is a place designed for us now, which is the next best possible. God calls us now to the best thing left, and will do so till all good possibility is narrowed down and spent. And then, when he can not use us any more for our own good, he will use us for the good of others, an example of the misery and horrible desperation to which any soul must come, when all the good ends, and all the holy callings of God’s friendly and fatherly purpose are exhausted. Or it may be now that, remitting all other plans and purposes in our behalf, he will hence. forth use us, wholly against our will, to be the demonstration of his justice and avenging power before the eyes of mankind; saying over us, as he did over Pharaoh in the day of his judgments, “Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might show my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth.” Doubtless, He had other and more genial plans to serve in this bad man, if only he could have accepted such; but, knowing his certain rejection of these, God turned his mighty counsel in him wholly on the use to be made of him as a reprobate. How many Pharaohs in common life refuse every other use God will make of them, choosing only to figure, in their small way, as reprobates; and descending, in that manner, to a fate that painfully mimics his.

God has, then, I conclude, a definite life-plan set for every man; one that, being accepted and followed, will conduct him to the best and noblest end possible. No qualification of this doctrine is needed, save the fearful one just named; that we, by our perversity, so often refuse to take the place and do the work he gives us.

It follows, in the same way, that, as God, in fixing on our end or use, will choose the best end or use possible, so he will appoint for us the best manner possible of attaining it; for, as it is a part of God’s perfection to choose the best things, and not things partially good, so it will be in all the methods he prescribes for their attainment. And so, as you pass on, stage by stage, in your courses of experience, it is made clear to you that, whatever you have laid upon you to do or to suffer, whatever to want, whatever to surrender or to conquer, is exactly best for you. Your life is a school, exactly adapted to your lesson, and that to the best, last end of your existence.

No room for a discouraged or depressed feeling, therefore, is left you. Enough that you exist for a purpose high enough to give meaning to life, and to support a genuine inspiration. If your sphere is outwardly humble, if it even appears to be quite insignificant, God understands it better than you do, and it is a part of his wisdom to bring out great sentiments in humble conditions, great principles in works that are outwardly trivial, great characters under great adversities and heavy loads of incumbrance. The tallest saints of God will often be those who walk in the deepest obscurity, and are even despised or quite overlooked by man. Let it be enough that God is in your history and that the plan of your biography is his, the issue he has set for it is the highest and the best. Away, then, O man, with thy feeble complaints and feverish despondencies. There is no place left for this kind of nonsense. Let it fill thee with cheerfulness and exalted feeling, however deep in obscurity your lot may be, that God is leading you on, girding you for a work, preparing you to a good that is worthy of his Divine magnificence. If God is really preparing us all to become that which is the very highest and best thing possible there ought never to be a discouraged or uncheerful being in the world.

Nor is it any detraction from such a kind of life that the helm of its guidance is, by the supposition, to be in God, and not in our own will and wisdom. This, in fact, is its dignity: it is a kind of divine order, a creation molded by the loving thoughts of God; in that view, to the man himself a continual discovery, as it is unfolded, both of himself and God. A discovery of some kind it must be to all; for, however resolutely or defiantly we undertake to accomplish our own objects, and cut our own way through to a definite self-appointed future, it will never be true, for one moment, that we are certain of this future, and will almost always be true that we are met by changes and conditions unexpected. This, in fact, is one of the common mitigations even of a selfish and self-directed life, that its events come up out of the unknown and overtake the subject, as discoveries he could not shun, or anticipate. Evil itself is far less evil, even to the worldly man, that it comes by surprises. Were the scenes of necessary bitterness, wrong, trial, disappointment, self-accusation, every such man has to pass through in his life, distinctly set before him at the beginning, how forbidding generally, and how dismal the prospect. We say, therefore, how frequently, “I could not have endured these distasteful, painful years, these emptinesses, these trials and torments that have rent me, one after another, if I had definitely known beforehand what kind of lot was before me.” And yet, how poor a comfort is it to such pains and disasters that they overtook the sufferer as surprises and sorrows not set down beforehand in the self-appointed programme of life. How different, how inspiring and magnificent, instead, to live, by holy consent, a life all discovery; to see it unfolding, moment by moment, a plan of God, our own life-plan conceived in his paternal love; each event, incident, experience, whether bright or dark, having its mission from him, and revealing, either now or in its future issues, the magnificence of his favoring counsel; to be sure, in the dark day, of a light that will. follow, that loss will terminate in gain, that trial will issue in rest, doubt in satisfaction, suffering in patience, patience in purity, and all in a consummation of greatness and dignity that even God will look on with a smile. How magnificent, how strong in its repose, how full of rest is such a kind of life! Call it human still, decry it, let it down by whatever diminutives can be invented, still it is great; a charge which ought even to inspire a dull minded man with energy and holy enthusiasm.

But, the inquiry will be made, supposing all this to be true, in the manner stated, how can we ever get hold of this life-plan God has made for us, or find our way into it? Here, to many if not all, will be the main stress of doubt and practical suspense.

Observe, then, first of all, some negatives that are important and must be avoided. They are these:—

You will never come into God’s plan, if you study singularity; for, if God has a design or plan for every man’s life, then it is exactly appropriate to his nature; and, as every man’s nature is singular and peculiar to himself,—as peculiar as his face or look,—then it follows that God will lead every man into a singular, original and peculiar life, without any study of singularity on his part. Let him seek to be just what God will have him, and the talents, the duties and circumstances of his life will require him to be, and then he will be just peculiar enough. He will have a life of his own; a life that is naturally and, therefore, healthily peculiar; a simple, unaffected, unambitious life, whose plan is not in himself, but in God.

As little will he seek to copy the life of another. No man is ever called to be another. God has as many plans for men as he has men; and, therefore, he never requires them to measure their life exactly by any other life. We are not to require it of ourselves to have the precise feelings, or exercises, or do the works, or pass through the trials of other men; for God will handle us according to what we are, and not according to what other men are. And whoever undertakes to be exercised by any given fashion, or to be any given character, such as he knows or has read of, will find it impossible, even as it is to make himself another nature. God’s plan must hold and we must seek no other. To strain after something new and peculiar is fantastic and weak, and is also as nearly wicked as that kind of weakness can be. To be a copyist, working at the reproduction of a human model, is to have no faith in one’s significance, to judge that God means nothing in his particular life, but only in the life of some other man. Submitting himself, in this manner, to the fixed opinion that his life means nothing, and that nothing is left for him but to borrow or beg a life-plan from some other man, what can the copyist become but an affectation or a dull imposture.

In this view also, you are never to complain of your birth, your training, your employments, your hardships; never to fancy that you could be something if only you had a different lot and sphere assigned you. God understands his own plan, and he knows what you want a great deal better than you do. The very things that you most deprecate, as fatal limitations or obstructions, are probably what you most want. What you call hindrances, obstacles, discouragements, are probably God’s opportunities; and it is nothing new that the patient should dislike his medicines, or any certain proof that they are poisons. No! a truce to all such impatience! Choke that devilish envy which gnaws at your heart, because you are not in the same lot with others; bring down your soul, or, rather, bring it up to receive God’s will and do his work, in your lot, in your sphere, under your cloud of obscurity, against your temptations; and then you shall find that your condition is never opposed to your good, but really consistent with it. Hence it was that an apostle required his converts to abide each one in that calling wherein he was called; to fill his place till he opens a way, by filling it, to some other; the bondman to fill his house of bondage with love and duty, the laborer to labor, the woman to be a woman, the men to show themselves men,—all to acknowledge God’s hand in their lot, and seek to cooperate with that good design which he most assuredly cherishes for them.

Another frequent mistake to be carefully avoided is that, while you surrender and renounce all thought of making up a plan, or choosing out a plan, for yourself, as one that you set by your own will, you also give up the hope or expectation that God will set you in any scheme of life, where the whole course of it will be known, or set down beforehand. If you go to him to be guided, he will guide you; but he will not comfort your distrust, or half trust of him, by showing you the chart of all his purposes concerning you. He will only show you into a way where, if you go cheerfully and trustfully forward, he will show you on still further. No contract will be made with you, save that he engages, if you trust him, to lead you into the best things, all the way through. And, if they are better than you can either ask or think beforehand, they will be none the worse for that.

But we must not stop in negatives. How, then, or by what more positive directions can a man, who really desires to do it, come into the plan God lays for him, so as to live it and rationally believe that he does? You are on the point of choosing, it may be, this or that calling, wanting to know where duty lies and what the course God himself would have you take. Beginning at a point most remote, and where the generality of truth is widest,

Consider (1,) the character of God, and you will draw a large deduction from that; for, all that God designs for you will be in harmony with his character. He is a being infinitely good, just, true. Therefore, you are to know that he can not really seek any thing contrary to this in you. You may make yourselves contrary, in every attribute of character, to God; but he never made you to become any thing different from, or unworthy of, himself. A good being could not make another to be a bad being, as the proper issue and desired end of his existence; least of all could one infinitely good. A great many employments or callings are, by these first principles, forever cut off. No thought is permitted you, even for a moment, of any work or calling that does not represent the industry, justice, truth, beneficence, mercy of God.

(2.) Consider your relation to him as a creature. All created wills have their natural center and rest in God’s will. In him they all come into a play of harmony, and the proper harmony of being is possible only in this way. Thus, you know that you are called to have a will perfectly harmonized with God’s and rested in his, and that gives you a large insight into what you are to be, or what is the real end of your being. In fact, nine-tenths of your particular duties may be settled, at once, by a simple reference in this manner to what God wills.

(3.) You have a conscience, which is given to be an interpreter of his will and thus of your duty, and, in both, of what you are to become.

(4.) God’s law and his written Word are guides to present duty, which, if faithfully accepted, will help to set you in accordance with the mind of God and the plan he has laid for you. “I am a stranger in the earth,” said one, “hide not thy commandments from me;” knowing that God’s commandments would give him a clue to the true meaning and business of his life.

(5.) Be an observer of Providence; for God is showing you ever, by the way in which he leads you, whither he means to lead. Study your trials, your talents, the world’s wants, and stand ready to serve God now, in whatever he brings to your hand.

Again (6,) consult your friends, and especially those who are most in the teaching of God. They know your talents and personal qualifications better, in some respects, than you do yourself. Ask their judgment of you and of the spheres and works to which you are best adapted.

Once more (7,) go to God himself, and ask for the calling of God; for, as certainly as he has a plan or calling for you, he will somehow guide you into it. And this is the proper office and work of his Spirit. By this private teaching he can show us, and will, into the very plan that is set for us. And this is the significance of what is prescribed as our duty, viz., living and walking in the Spirit; for the Spirit of God is a kind of universal presence, or inspiration, in the world’s bosom; an unfailing inner light, which if we accept and live in, we are guided thereby into a consenting choice, so that what God wills for us we also will for ourselves,—settling into it as the needle to the pole. By this hidden union with God, or intercourse with him, we get a wisdom or insight deeper than we know ourselves; a sympathy, a oneness with the Divine will and love. We go into the very plan of God for us, and are led along in it by him, consenting, cooperating, answering to him, we know not how, and working out, with nicest exactness, that good end for which his unseen counsel girded us and sent us into the world. In this manner, not neglecting the other methods just named, but gathering in all their separate lights, to be interpreted in the higher light of the Spirit, we can never be greatly at a loss to find our way into God’s counsel and plan. The duties of the present moment we shall meet as they rise, and these will open a gate into the next, and we shall thus pass on, trustfully and securely, almost never in doubt as to what God calls us to do.

It is not to be supposed that you have followed me, in such a subject as this, without encountering questions from within that are piercing. It has put you on reflection; it has set you to the inquiry, what you have been doing and becoming thus far in your course, and what you are hereafter to be? Ten, twenty, fifty, seventy years ago, you came into this living world, an l began to breathe this mortal air. The guardian angel that came to take charge of you said, “To this end is he born, for this cause is he come into the world.” Or, if this be a Jewish fancy, God said the same himself. He had a definite plan for you, a good end settled and cherished for you in his heart. This it was that gave a meaning and a glory to your life. Apart from this, it was not, in his view, life for you to live; it was accident, frustration, death. What now, O soul, hast thou done? what progress hast thou made? how much of the blessed life-plan of thy Father hast thou executed? How far on thy way art thou to the good, best end thy God has designed for thee?

Do I hear thy soul confessing, with a suppressed sob within thee, that, up to this time, thou hast never sought God’s chosen plan at all. Hast thou, even to this hour, and during so many years, been following a way and a plan of thine own, regardless, hitherto, of all God’s purposes in thee? Well, if it be so, what hast thou gotten? How does thy plan work? Does it bring thee peace, content, dignity of aim and feeling, purity, rest; or, does it plunge thee into mires of disturbance, scorch thee in flames of passion, worry thee with cares, burden thee with bitter reflections, cross thee, disappoint, sadden, sour thee? And what are thy prospects? what is the issue to come? After thou hast worked out this hard plan of thine own, will it come to a good end? Hast thou courage now to go on and work it through?

Perhaps you may be entertaining yourself, for the time, with a notion of your prosperity, counting yourself happy in past successes, and counting on greater successes to come, Do you call it, then, success, that you are getting on in a plan of your own? There can not be a greater delusion. You set up a plan that is not God’s, and rejoice that it seems to prosper; not observing that you are just as much farther off from God’s plan for you and from all true wisdom, as you seem to prosper more. And the day is coming when just this truth will be revealed to you, as the bitterest pang of your defeat and shame.

No matter which it be, prosperity or acknowledged defeat, the case is much the same in one as in the other, if you stand apart from God and his counsel. There is nothing good preparing for any man who will not live in God’s plan. If he goes a prospecting for himself, and will not apprehend that for which he is apprehended, it can not be to any good purpose.

And really, I know not any thing, my hearers, more sad and painful to think of, to a soul properly enlightened by reason and God’s truth, than so many years of Divine good squandered and lost; whole years, possibly many years, of that great and blessed biography which God designed for you, occupied by a frivolous and foolish invention of your own, substituted for the good counsel of God’s infinite wisdom and love. O, let the past suffice!

Young man, or woman, this is the day of hope to you, All your best opportunities are still before you. Now, too, you are laying your plans for the future. Why not lay them in God? Who has planned for you as wisely and faithfully as he? Let your life begin with him. Believe that you are girded by your God for a holy and great calling. Go to him and consecrate your life to him, knowing assuredly that he will lead you into just that life which is your highest honor and blessing.

And what shall I say to the older man, who is further on in his course and is still without God in the world? The beginning of wisdom, my friend, you have yet to learn. You have really done nothing, as yet, that you was sent into the world to do. All your best opportunities, too, are gone or going by. The best end, the next best, and the next are gone, and nothing but the dregs of opportunity is left. And still Christ calls even you. There is a place still left for you; not the best and bright est, but an humble and good one. To this you are called for this you are apprehended of Christ Jesus still. O, come, repent of your dusty and dull and weary way, and take the call that is offered.

All men, living without God, are adventurers out upon God’s world, in neglect of him, to choose their own course. Hence the sorrowful, sad looking host they make. O, that I could show them whence their bitterness, their dryness, their unutterable sorrows, come. O, that I could silence, for one hour, the noisy tumult of their works, and get them to look in upon that better, higher life of fruitfulness and blessing to which their God has appointed them. Will they ever see it? Alas! I fear!

Friends of God, disciples of the Son of God, how inspiring and magnificent the promise, or privilege that is offered here to you. Does it still encounter only unbelief in your heart? does it seem to you impossible that you can ever find your way into a path prepared for you by God, and be led along in it by his mighty counsel. Let me tell you a secret. It requires a very close, well-kept life to do this; a life in which the soul can have confidence always toward God; a life which allows the Spirit always to abide and reign, driven away by no affront of selfishness. There must be a complete renunciation of self-will. God and religion must be practically first; and the testimony that we please God must be the element of our peace, And such a disciple I have never known who did not have it for his joy that God was leading him on, shaping his life for him, bringing him along out of one moment into the next, year by year. To such a disciple, there is nothing strained or difficult in saying that God’s plan can be found, or that this is the true mode and privilege of life. Nothing to him is easier or more natural. He knows God ever present, feels that God determines all things for him, rejoices in the confidence that the everlasting counsel of his Friend is shaping every turn of his experience. He does not go hunting after this confidence; it comes to him, abides in him, fortifies his breast, and makes his existence itself an element of peace. And this, my brethren, is your privilege, if only you can live close enough to have the secret of the Lord with you.

How sacred, how strong in its repose, how majestic, how nearly divine is a life thus ordered! The simple thought of a life which is to be the unfolding, in this manner, of a Divine plan, is too beautiful, too captivating, to suffer one indifferent or heedless moment. Living in this manner, every turn of your experience will be a discovery to you of God, every change a token of his Fatherly counsel. Whatever obscurity, darkness, trial, suffering falls upon you; your defeats, losses, injuries; your outward state, employment, relations; what seems hard, unaccountable, severe, or, as nature might say, vexatious,—all these you will see are parts or constitutive elements in God’s beautiful and good plan for you, and, as such, are to be accepted with a smile. Trust God! have an implicit trust in God! and these very things will impart the highest zest to life. If you were in your own will, you could not bear them; and, if you fall, at any time, into your own will, they will break you down. But, the glory of your condition, as a Christian, is that you are in the mighty and good will of God. Hence it was that Bunyan called his hero Great Heart; for, no heart can be weak that is in the confidence of God. See how it was with Paul: counting all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge; enduring, with godlike patience, unspeakable sufferings; casting every thing behind him, and following on to apprehend that for which he was apprehended. He had a great and mighty will, but no self-will: therefore, he was strong, a true lion of the faith. Away, then, with all feeble complaints, all meagre and mean anxieties. Take your duty, and be strong in it, as God will make you strong. The harder it is, the stronger, in fact, you will be. Understand, also, that the great question here is, not what you will get, but what you will become. The greatest wealth you can ever get will be in yourself. Take your burdens, and troubles, and losses, and wrongs, if come they must and will, as your opportunities, knowing that God has girded you for greater things than these. O, to live out such a life as God appoints, how great a thing it is!—to do the duties, make the sacrifices, bear the adversities. finish the plan, and then to say, with Christ, (who of us ill be able? )—“It is finished!”

II

THE SPIRIT IN MAN.

Job xxxii. 8.—“But there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.”

IT is something great in man, as the speaker, Elihu, conceives, that he is spirit, and, as being such, is capable of being inspired. For he is not, as some commentators appear to suppose, re-publishing here, the historical fact, that the Almighty breathed into man, at the first, a living understanding soul; but, speaking in the present tense, he magnifies man as being able to be inspired, because he is spirit, and God that he inspires him.

I undertake to enlist you here in a range of contemplation exceedingly remote from the apprehension of most persons in our time. So completely occupied are they with the humanitarian, world-ward relations of life, that the God-ward relations pass unheeded, and, for the most part, unrecognized. Or, if they sometimes think of such relations, it is only in the sense that we are responsible to God, as we are to any human government, for what we do as men, not in the sense that our very nature has itself a God-ward side, being related constitutionally to him, as plants are to the sun, or living bodies to the air they breathe. That we may duly apprehend a truth so far out of the way of our times, and yet so necessary to any fit conceptions of our nature and life, let me bespeak, on your part, even a voluntary and compelled attention.

III.

DIGNITY OF HUMAN NATURE SHOWN FROM ITS RUINS

Romans iii., 13-18.—“Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips. Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways. And the way of peace they have not known. There is no ear of God before their eyes.”

A MOST dark and dismal picture of humanity, it must be admitted; and yet it has two sides or aspects. In one view, it is’ the picture of weakness, wretchedness, shame and disgust; all which they discover in it who most sturdily resent the impeachment of it. In the other, it presents a being higher than even they can boast; a fearfully great being; great in his evil will, his demoniacal passions, his contempt of fear, the splendor of his degradation, and the magnificence of his woe.

It is this latter view of the picture to which, at the present time, I propose to call your attention, exhibiting,—

The dignity of man, as revealed by the ruin he makes in his fall and apostacy from God.

It has been the way of many, in our time, to magnify humanity, or the dignity of human nature, by tracing its capabilities and the tokens it reveals of a natural affinity with God and truth. They distinguish lovely instincts, powers and properties allied to God, aspirations reaching after God; many virtues, according to the common use of that term; many beautiful and graceful charities; and, by such kind of evidences, or proofs, they repel, sometimes with scorn, what they call the libelous, or even the insulting doctrine of total depravity. And this they do, as I will add, not without some show of reason, when the fact of our depravity is asserted in a manner that excludes the admission of any such high aspirations and amiable properties, or virtues, as we certainly discover in human conduct, apart from any gifts and graces of religion. And it must be admitted that some teachers have given occasion for this kind of offense; not observing the compatibility of great aspirations and majestic affinities with a state of deep spiritual thraldom; assuming, also, with as little right, the want of all appropriate sensibilities and receptivities for the truth, as a necessary inference from the complete destitution of holiness. They make out, in this manner, a doctrine of human depravity, in which there is no proper humanity left.

I am not required by my subject to settle the litigation between these two extremes; one of which makes the gospel unnecessary, because there is no depravation to restore; and the other of which makes it impossible, because there is nothing left to which any holy appeal can be made; but I undertake, in partial disregard of both, to show the essential greatness and dignity of man from the ruin itself which he becomes; confident of this, that in no other point of view, will he prove the spiritual sublimity of his nature so convincingly.

Nor is it any thing new, or a turn more ingenious than just, that we undertake to raise our conceptions of human nature in this manner; for it is in just this way that we are accustomed to get our measures and form our conceptions of many things;—of the power, for example, of ancient dynasties and the magnificence of ancient works and cities. Falling thus, it may be, on patches of paved road here and there, on lines leading out divergently from ancient Rome, uncovering and decyphering the mile-stones by their sides, marked with postal distances, here for Britain, here for Germany, here for Ephesus and Babylon, here for Brundusium, the port of the Appian Way, and so for Egypt, Numidia and the provinces of the sun; imagining the couriers flying back and forth, bearing the mandates of the central authority to so many distant nations, followed by the military legions trailing on to execute them; we receive an impression of the empire, from these scattered vestiges, which almost no words of historic description could give us. So, if we desire to form some opinion of the dynasty of the Pharaohs, of whom history gives us but the faintest remembrances and obscurest traditions, we have only to look on the monumental mountains, piled up to molder on the silent plain of Egypt, and these dumb historians in stone will show us more of that vast and populous empire, measuring by the amount of realized impression, more of the imperial haughtiness of the monarchs, more of the servitude of their people and of the captive myriads of the tributary nations, than even Heroditus and Strabo, history and geography, together.

The same is true, even more strikingly, of ancient cities. Though described by historians, in terms of definite measurement, with their great structures and defenses and the royal splendor of their courts, we form no sufficient conception of their grandeur, till we look upon their ruins. Even the eloquence of Homer describing the glory and magnificence of Thebes, the vast circuit of its walls, its hundred gates, and the chariots of war pouring out of all, to vanquish and hold in subjection the peoples of as many nations, yields only a faint, unimpressive conception of the city; but, to pass through the ruins of Karnac and Luxor, a vast desolation of temples and pillared avenues that dwarf all the present structures of the world, solemn, silent and hoary, covered with historic sculptures that relate the conquest of kingdoms—a journey to pass through, a maze in which even comprehension is lost—this reveals a fit conception of the grandest city of the world as no words could describe it. Beheld and judged by the majesty of its ruins, there is a poetry in the stones surpassing all majesty of song. So, when the prophet Jonah, endeavoring, as he best can, to raise some adequate opinion of the greatness of Nineveh, declares that it is an exceeding great city, of three days’ journey; and, when Nahum follows, magnifying its splendor in terms of high description that correspond; still, so ambiguous and faint is the impression made, that many were doubting whether, after all, “the exceeding great city” was any thing more than a vast inclosure of gardens and pasture grounds for sheep, where a moderate population subsisted under the protection of a wall. No one had any proper conception of the city till just now, when a traveler and antiquary digs into the tomb where it lies, opens to view, at points many miles asunder, its temples and palaces, drags out the heavy sculptures, shows the inscriptions, collects the tokens of art and splendor, and says, “this is Nineveh, ‘the exceeding great city,’” and then, judging of its extent from the vast and glorious ruin, we begin to have some fit impression of its magnitude and splendor. And so it is with Babylon, Ephesus, Tadmor of the desert, Baalbeo and the nameless cities and pyramids of the extinct American race. All great ruins are but a name for greatness in ruins, and we see the magnitude of the structure in that of the ruin made by it, in its fall.

So it is with man. Our most veritable, though saddest, impressions of his greatness, as a creature, we shall derive from the magnificent ruin he displays. In that ruin we shall distinguish fallen powers, that lie as broken pillars on the ground; temples of beauty, whose scarred and shattered walls still indicate their ancient, original glory; summits covered with broken stones, infested by asps, where the palaces of high thought and great aspiration stood, and righteous courage went up to maintain the citadel of the mind,—all a ruin now, “archangel ruined.”

And exactly this, I conceive, is the legitimate impression of the scripture representations of man, as apostate from duty and God. Thoughtfully regarded, all exaggerations and contending theories apart, it is as if they were showing us the original dignity of man, from the magnificence of the ruin in which he lies. How sublime a creature must that be, call him either man or demon, who is able to confront the Almighty and tear himself away from his throne. And, as if to forbid our taking his deep misery and shame as tokens of contempt, imagining that a creature so humiliated is inherently weak and low, the first men are shown us living out a thousand years of lustful energy, and braving the Almighty in strong defiance to the last. “The earth also is corrupt before God, and the earth is filled with violence.” We look, as it were, upon a race of Titans, broken loose from order and making war upon God and each other;. beholding, in their outward force, a type of that original majesty which pertains to the moral nature of a being, endowed with a self-determining liberty, capable of choices against God, and thus of a character in evil that shall be his own. They fill the earth, even up to the sky, with wrath and the demoniacal tumult of their wrongs, till God can suffer them no longer, sending forth his flood to sweep them from the earth. So of the remarkable picture given by Paul, in the first chapter of the epistle to the Romans. In one view we are disgusted, in another shocked, doubting whether it presents a creature most foolish and vile or most sublimely impious and wicked: and coming out, finally, where the chapter ends—“who knowing the judgment of God that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same but have pleasure in them that do them”—there to confess the certain greatness of a being whose audacity is so nearly infinite, whose adherence to the league with evil is maintained with a pertinacity so damnably desperate and relentless. And the picture of the text corresponds, yielding no impression of a merely feeble and vile creature, but of a creature rather most terrible and swift; destructive, fierce and fearless; miserable in his greatness; great as in evil. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their way; and the way of peace have they not known; there is no fear of God before their eyes.

But we come to the ruin as it is, and we look upon it with our own eyes, to receive the true, original impression for ourselves.

We look, first of all, upon the false religions of the world; pompous and costly rites transacted before crocodiles and onions; magnificent temples built over all monkeyish and monstrous creatures, carved by men’s hands; children offered up, by their mothers, in fire, or in water; kings offered on the altars, by their people, to propitiate a wooden image; gorgeous palaces and trappings of barbaric majesty, studded all over with beetles in gold, or precious stones, to serve as a protection against pestilences, poisons and accidents. I can not fill out a picture that so nearly fills the world. Doubtless it is a picture of ruin— yet of a ruin how visibly magnificent. For, how high a nature must that be, how intensely allied to what is divine, that it must prepare such pomps, incur such sacrifices, and can elevate such trifles of imposture to a place of reverence. If we say that, in all this, it is feeling after God if haply it may find him, which in one view is the truth, then how inextinguishable and grand are those religious instincts by which it is allied to the holy, the infinite, the eternal, but invisible one.

The wars of the world yield a similar impression. What opinion should we have of the energy, ferocity and fearful passion of a race of animals, could any such be found, who marshal themselves by the hundred thousand, marching across kingdoms and deserts to fight, and strewing leagues of ground with a covering of dead, before they yield the victory. One race there is that figure in these heroics of war, in a small way, viz., the tiny race of ants; whom God has made a spectacle to mock the glory and magnificence of human wars; lest, carried away by so many brave shows and by the applauses of the drunken ages of the world, we pass, undiscovered, the meanness and littleness of that selfish ambition, or pride, by which human wars are instigated. These are men such as history, in all past ages, shows them to be; swift to shed blood, swifter than the tiger race, and more terrible. Cities and empires are swept by their terrible marches, and become a desolation in their path. Destruction and misery are in their ways—O what destruction, misery, how deep and long! And what shall we think of any creature of God displayed in signs like these. Plainly enough he is a creature in ruins, but how magnificent a creature! Mean as the ant in his passions, but erecting, on the desolations he makes, thrones of honor and renown, and raising himself into the attitude of a god, before the obsequious ages of mankind; for who of us can live content, as we are tempered, without some hero to admire and worship?

Consider again the persecutions of the good; fires for the saints of all ages, dungeons for the friends of liberty and benefactors of their times, poison for Socrates, a cross for Jesus Christ. What does it mean? What face shall we put on this outstanding demonstration of the world? No other but this, that cursing and bitterness, the poison even of asps, and more, is entered into the heart of man. He hates with a diabolical hatred. Feeling “how awful goodness is,” the sight of it rouses him to madness, and he will not stop till he has tasted blood. And what a being is this that can be stung with so great madness, by the spectacle of a good and holy life. The fiercest of animals are capable of no such devilish instigation; because they are too low to be capable of goodness, or even of the thought, But here is a creature who can not bear the reminder, even of good, or of any thing above the ruin where his desolated glory lies. O how great is the nature which is capable of this dire phrenzy.

The great characters of the world furnish another striking proof of the transcendent quality of human nature, by the dignity they are able to connect even with their littleness and meanness. On a small island of the southern Atlantic, is shut up a remarkable prisoner, wearing himself out there in a feeble mixture of peevishness and jealousy, solaced by no great thoughts and no heroic spirit; a kind of dotard before the time, killing and consuming himself by the intense littleness into which he has shrunk. And this is the great conqueror of the modern world, the man whose name is the greatest of modern names, or, some will say, of all names the human world has pronounced; a man, nevertheless, who carried his greatest victories and told his meanest lies in close proximity, a character as destitute of private magnanimity, as he was remarkable for the stupendous powers of his understanding and the more stupendous and imperial leadership of his will. How great a being must it be, that makes a point of so great dignity before the world, despite of so much that is really little and contemptible.

But he is not alone. The immortal Kepler, piloting science into the skies, and comprehending the vastness of heaven, for the first time, in the fixed embrace of definite thought, only proves the magnificence of man as a ruin, when you discover the strange ferment of irritability and “superstition wild,” in which his great thoughts are brewed and his mighty life dissolved.

So also Bacon proves the amazing wealth and grandeur of the human soul only the more sublimely that, living in an element of cunning, servility and ingratitude, and dying under the shame of a convict, he is yet able to dignify disgrace by the stupendous majesty of his genius, and commands the reverence even of the world, as to one of its sublimest benefactors. And the poet’s stinging line—

“The greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind,”

pictures, only with a small excess of satire, the magnificence of ruin comprehended in the man.

Probably no one of mankind has raised himself to a higher pitch of renown by the superlative attributes of genius displayed in his writings, than the great English dramatist; flowering out, nevertheless, into such eminence of glory, on a compost of fustian, buffoonery and other vile stuff, which he so magnificently covers with splendor and irradiates with beauty, that disgust itself is lost in the vehemence of praise. And so we shall find, almost universally, that the greatness of the world’s great men, is proved by the inborn qualities that tower above the ruins of weakness and shame, in which they appear, and out of which, as solitary pillars and dismantled temples they rise.

But we must look more directly into the contents of human nature, and the internal ruin by which they are displayed. And here you may notice, first of all, the sublime vehemence of the passions. What a creature must that be, who, out of mere hatred, or revenge, will deliberately take the life of a fellow man, and then dispatch his own to avoid the ignominy of a public execution. Suppose there might be found some tiger that, for the mere bitterness of his grudge against some other whelp of his mother, springs upon him in his sleep and rends him in pieces, and then deliberately tears open his own throat to escape the vengeance of the family. No tiger of the desert is ever instigated by any so intense and terrible passion, that, for the sweetness of revenge, is willing afterward to rush on death itself. This kind of phrenzy plainly belongs to none but a creature immortal, an archangel ruined, in whose breast a fire of hell may burn high enough and deep enough to scorch down even reason and the innate love of life. Or take the passion of covetousness, generally regarded as one essentially mean and degraded. After all, how great a creature must that be, who is goaded by a zeal of acquisition so restless, so self-sacrificing, so insatiable. The poor, gaunt miser, starving for want, that he may keep the count of his gold—whom do we more naturally pity and despise. And yet he were even the greatest of heroes, if he could deny himself with so great patience, in a good and holy cause. How grand a gift that immortality, how deep those gulfs of want in the soul, that instigate a madness so desolating to character, a self-immolation so relentless, a niggard suffering so sublime. The same is true even of the licentious and gluttonous lusts and their loathsome results. No race of animals can show the parallel of such vices; because they are none of them instigated by a nature so insatiable, so essentially great, in the magnificence of wants that find no good to satisfy their cravings. The ruin we say is beastly, but the beasts are clear of the comparison; it requires a meld vaster than theirs, to burst the limits of nature in excesses so disgusting.

Consider again the wild mixtures of thought, displayed both in the waking life and the dreams of mankind. How grand! how mean! how sudden the leap from one to the other! how inscrutable the succession! how defiant of orderly control! It is as if the soul were a thinking ruin; which it verily is. The angel and the demon life appear to be contending in it. The imagination revels in beauty exceeding all the beauty of things, wails in images dire and monstrous, wallows in murderous and base suggestions that shame our inward dignity; so that a great part of the study and a principal art of life, is to keep our decency, by a wise selection from what we think and a careful suppression of the remainder. A diseased and crazy mixture, such as represents a ruin, is the form of our inward experience. And yet, a ruin how magnificent, one which a buried Nineveh, or a desolated Thebes can parallel only in the faintest degree; comprehending all that is purest, brightest, most divine, even that which is above the firmament itself; all that is worst, most sordid, meanest, most deformed.

Notice, also, the significance of remorse. How great a creature must that be that, looking down upon itself from some high summit in itself, some throne of truth and judgment which no devastation of order can reach, withers in relentless condemnation of itself, gnaws and chastises itself in the sense of what it is! Call it a ruin, as it plainly is, there rises out of the desolated wreck of its former splendor, that which indicates and measures the sublimity of the original temple. The conscience stands erect, resisting all the ravages of violence and decay, and by this, we distinguish the temple of God that was; a soul divinely gifted, made to be the abode of his spirit, the vehicle of his power, the mirror of his glory. A creature of remorse is a divine creature of necessity, only it is the wreck of a divinity that was.

IV.

THE HUNGER OF THE SOUL.

Luke xv. 17.—“And when he came to himself he said, flow many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger.”

THIS gentleman’s son that was, and is now a swine-herd, brings his meditation to a most natural and fit conclusion. His low occupation, and the husks on which he has been feeding to save his life, recall his father’s house, and the hired servants there that have bread enough and to spare, and, no longer able to contain himself, he cries, in bitter desolation, “I perish with hunger.” And so, in this story of the prodigal, Christ teaches all men their hunger, by means of that on which they feed, and the necessary baseness of their sin, by the lowness of the objects to which they descend for their life.

The swine, according to Jewish opinion, is an unclean animal, not to be eaten as food, and therefore is not raised, except by those idolaters and men of no religion, who live as outcasts in their country. Hence it is looked upon as the lowest and most abject of all occupations to be a swine herd. He is the disgust of all men, an unclean character, who is, among other men, what the swine is among other animals. He may not enter the temple, or even come near it.

By the husks on which the prodigal is said, in his hunger, to have fed himself, we are not to understand exactly what is meant by the English word husks, but a certain fruit, the fruit of the carob tree, which grows in pods and has a mealy and sweet taste. It is described by Galen as a “woody kind of food, creating bile, and hard of digestion;” useful, as acorns are with us, in the feeding of swine, and sometimes eaten by the poorer sort of men, to escape starvation. Still it can work no injury, since this kind of fruit is unknown to us, to retain the word husks; a word that comes nearer producing the true impression of the parable, which is the principal thing, than any other which might be substituted.

The important thing to be noted, as regards my present object, is the prodigal’s hunger. About this central point, or fact, all the other incidents of the parable are gathered. And by this wretched figure of destitution, the Saviour of the world represents man under sin; he is one who forsakes the life of duty and religion, to go after earthly things. He is, therefore, reduced to the lowest condition of want, or spiritual hunger. His food is not the proper food of a man, but of a swine rather. A high-born creature, as being in God’s image, he descends to occupations that are unclean, and feeds his starving nature on that which belongs only to a reprobate, or unclean class of animals. In this lot of deep debasement and bitter privation, there is no language in which he may so naturally vent his misery as when he cries, “I perish with hunger.”

What I propose, then, for our meditation, is the truth here expressed, that a life separated from God is a life of bitter hunger, or even of spiritual starvation.

My object will be, not so much to prove this truth as to make it apparent, or visible, as a real fact, by means of appropriate illustrations. But, in order to this, it will be necessary.

V.

THE REASON OF FAITH.

John vi. 36.—“But I said unto you, That ye also hail seen me and believe not.”

IT is the grand distinction of Christianity, that by which it is separated from all philosophies and schemes of mere ethics, that it makes its appeal to faith and upon that, as a fundamental condition, rests the promise of salvation. It is called the word of faith, the disciples are distinguished as believers, and Christ is published as the Saviour of them that believe.

But precisely this, which is the boast of apostles, is the scandal and offense of men. Were the word any thing but a word of faith; a word of rhetoric, or of reason, or of absolute philosophy, or of ethics, or of grammar and lexicography, they could more easily accept it; but, finding it instead a word of faith, they reject and scorn it. As if there were some merit, or could be some dignity in faith! What is it but an arbitrary condition, imposed to humble our self-respect, or trample our proper intelligence? For what is there to value or praise, say they, in the mere belief of any thing? If we hold any truth by our reason, or by some act of perception, or by the showing of sufficient evidence, what need of holding it by faith? If we undertake to hold it without such evidence, what is our belief in it but a surrender of our proper intelligence?

This kind of logic, so common as even to be the cant of our times, has all its plausibility in its own defect of insight, and nothing is wanting, in any case, to its complete refutation, but simply a due understanding of what faith is, and what the office it fills. In this view, I propose a discourse on the reason of faith; or to show how it is that we, as intelligent beings, are called to believe; and how, as sinners, we can, in the nature of things, be saved only as we believe.

I select the particular passage, just cited, for my text, simply because it sets us at the point where seeing and believing are brought together; expecting to get some advantage, as regards the illustration of my subject, from the mutual reference of one to the other, as held in such proximity. In this verse, (the 36th,) they are brought together as not being united,—ye have seen me and believe not. Shortly after, (in the 40th verse,) they are brought together as being, or to be united,—every one that seeth the Son and believeth on him.

Now the first thing we observe, for it stands on the face of the language, is that faith is not sight, but something different; so different that we may see and not believe. The next thing is that sight does not, in the scripture view, exclude faith, or supersede the necessity of it, as the common cavil supposes; for, after sight, faith is expected. And still, a third point is, that sight is supposed even to furnish a ground for faith, making it obligatory and, where it is not yielded, increasing the guilt of the subject; which appears, both in the complaint of one verse and the requirement of the other.

Thus much in regard to the particular case of the per Eons addressed; for they were such as had themselves seen Christ, witnessed his miracles, heard his teachings, and watched the progress of his ministry. In that respect, our case is different. We get, by historic evidences, what they got by their senses. The attestations we have, are even more reliable evidences, I think, than those of sight; but they bring us to exactly the same point, viz., a settled impression of fact. That such a being lived they saw with their eyes, and we are satisfied that he lived by other evidences addressing our judging faculty, as sight addressed theirs. We take their case, accordingly, as the case proposed, and shape our argument to it.

Suppose then that you had lived as a contemporary in the days of Christ; that you had been privy to the dialogue between the angel and Mary, and also, to all the intercourse of Mary and Elizabeth; that you had heard the song of the angels at the nativity, and seen their shining forms in the sky; that you was entirely familiar with the youth of Jesus, was present at his baptism, saw him begin his ministry, heard all his discourses, witnessed all his miracles, stood by his cross in the hour of his passion: that you saw him, heard him, ate with him, touched him after his resurrection, and finally beheld his ascension from Olivet. You have had, in other words, a complete sense view of him, from his first breath onward. What now does all this signify to you?

Possibly much, possibly nothing. If received without any kind of faith, absolutely nothing; if with two kinds of faith which are universally practiced, it signifies the greatest fact of history; if with a third, equally rational and distinctively Christian, it signifies a new life in the soul, and eternal salvation.

Let us, in the first place, look at these two kinds of faith which are universally practiced; for, if faith is, in the nature of things, absurd or unintelligent, we shall be as likely to discover the fact here as anywhere. And we may discover, possibly, that the very persons who discard faith, as an offense to intelligence, are not even able to do the commonest acts of intelligence without it.

We begin, then, with the case of sight, or perception by sight. It has been, as some of you know, a great, or even principal question with our philosophers, for the last hundred years, and these are commonly the people most ready to complain of faith, how it is that we perceive objects? The question was raised by Berkeley’s denial that we see them at all, which, though it convinced nobody, puzzled every body. He said, for example, that the persons who saw Christ did not really see him, they had only certain pictures cast in the back of the eye; which pictures, he maintained, were mere subjective impressions, nothing more; that, by the supposition, spectators are never at the objects, but only at the images, which are all, intellectually speaking, they know any thing about. If they take it as a fact, that they see real objects, they do it by a naked act of assumption, and, for aught that appears, impose upon themselves. The question, accordingly, has been, not whether real objects are perceived, for that is not often questioned now, but how we can imagine them to be; how, in other words, it is that we bridge the gulf between sensations and their objects; how it is that, having a tree-picture or a star-picture in the back of the eye, we make it to be a tree, really existing on some distant hill, or a real star, filling its measurable space many hundred millions of miles distant? Some deny the possibility of any solution; reducing even sight itself and all that we call evidence mn it to a mystery forever transcending intelligence. The best solutions agree virtually in this:—they conceive the soul to be such a creature that, when it has these forms in the eye, it takes them, as it were, instinctively, to be more than forms, viz., objects perceived; which is the same as to say that we complete sensation itself; or issue it in perception, by assigning reality ourselves to the distant object. And what is this, but to say that we do it by a kind of sense-faith contributed from ourselves? In our very seeing we see by faith, and, without the faith, we should only take in impressions to remain as last things in the brain. Hence, perhaps, the word perception, a through-taking, because we have taken hold of objects through distances, and so have bridged the gulf between us and reality. Is then sight itself unintelligent, because it includes an act of faith? Or, if we believe in realities, and have them by believing, would it be wiser and more rational to let alone realities and live in figures and phantasms, painted on the retina of our eyes?

But there is another kind of faith, less subtle than this which also is universally practiced, and admitted universally to be intelligent. It is that kind of faith which, after sensation is passed, or perception is completed, assigns truth to the things seen, and takes them to be sound historic verities. Thus, after Christ had been seen in all the facts of his life, it became a distinct question what to make of the facts; whether possibly there could have been some conspiracy in the miracles; some collusion, or acting in the parts of Mary and her son; some self-imposition, or hallucination that will account for his opinions of himself and the remarkable pretensions he put forth; whether possibly, there was any mistake in the senses, or any slight of hand by which they were imposed upon? Before, the difficulty was natural, and related to the laws of sensation. Here it is moral, and respects the verity, or integrity of the agents. For it is a remarkable fact that the mere seeing of any wonder never concludes the mind of the spectator. How many, for example, are testifying, in our time, that they have seen, with their own eyes, the most fantastic and extravagant wonders wrought by the modern necromancy; and yet they very commonly conclude by saying, that they know not what to make of them; evidently doubting whether, after all, the slight of hand tricks of jugglery, ventriloquism, and magic, and the sometimes wondrous cunning of a lying character, will not account for all they saw. These doubts are not the ingenious doubts of philosophy, but the practical misgivings, questions and withholding of good sense. And here, again, we perceive, as before, that the mere seeing of Christ concludes nothing in the spectator, as regards his verity. He does not stand before the mind as a necessary truth of arithmetic or geometry; there the seeing ends debate, the mind is ipso facto concluded and there is no room for faith, either to be given or withholden. As the philosopher doubted whether the objects seen had any real existence out of him, so the practical spectator doubts, after all Christ’s wonders, whether every thing was genuine, and the Christ who lived just such a being as he seemed to be. Probably the evidence, to one who saw, was as perfect as it could be; but if we could imagine it to be increased in quantity and power a thousand fold, remaining the same in kind, the mere seeing would conclude nothing. All you could say in such a case, would be that a given impression has been made; but that impression is practically naught, till an act of intellectual assent, or credence, is added on your part, which act of assent is also another kind of faith. If God were to burn himself into souls by lenses bigger than worlds, all you could say would be that so much impression is made, which impression is no historic verity to the mind, till the mind assents, on its part, and concludes itself upon the impression. Then the impression becomes, to it, a real and historic fact, a sentence of credit passed.

We now come to the Christian, or third kind of faith, with some advantages already gained. Indeed, the argument against faith, as an offense to reason, or as being insignificant where there is evidence, and absurd where there is not, is already quite ended. We discover, in fact, two degrees or kinds of faith, going before and typifying and commending to our respect the higher faith that is to come after, as a faith of salvation. We discover, also, that we can not even do the commonest acts of intelligence without some kind of faith. First, we complete an act of perception only by a kind of sense-faith, moving from ourselves, and not from the objects perceived. Next, we pass on the historic verity, the moral genuineness of what we see, and our act of credit, so passed, is also a kind of faith moving from us, and is something over and above all the impressions we have received. A third faith remains that is just as intelligent and, in fact, is only more intelligent than the others, because it carries their results forward into the true uses.

This, distinctively, is the scripture faith the faith of salvation, the believing unto life eternal. It begins just where the other and last named faith ended. That decided the greatest fact of history, viz., that Christ actually was according to all his demonstrations. It passed on the genuine truth of those demonstrations, and set them as accredited to the account of history. Let every thing stop at that point, and we only have a Christ, just as we have a Gautamozin, or a Sardanapalus. The christian facts are stored in history, and are scarcely more significant to us, than if they were stored in the moon. What is wanted, just here, in the case of Christ, and what also is justified and even required by the facts of his life, is a faith that goes beyond the mere evidence of propositions, or propositional verities about Christ, viz., the faith of a transaction; and this faith is Christian faith. It is the act of trust by which one being, a sinner, commits himself to another being, a Saviour. It is not mind dealing with notions, or notional truths. It is what can not be a proposition at all. But it is being trusting itself to being, and so becoming other and different, by a relation wholly transactional.

If a man comes to a banker with a letter of credit from some other banker, that letter may be read and seen to be a real letter. The signature also may be approved, and the credit of the drawing party honored by the other, as being wholly reliable. So far what is done is merely opinionative or notional, and there is no transactional faith. And yet there is a good preparation for this: just that is done which makes it intelligent. When the receiving party, therefore, accepts the letter and intrusts himself actually to the drawing party in so much money, there is the real act of faith, an act which answers to the operative, or transactional faith of a disciple.

Another and perhaps better illustration may be taken from the patient or sick person, as related to his physician. He sends for a physician, just because he has been led to have a certain favorable opinion of his faithfulness and capacity. But the suffering him to feel his pulse, investigate his symptoms, and tell the diagnosis of his disease imports nothing. It is only the committing of his being and life to this other being, consenting to receive and take his medicines, that imports a real faith, the faith of a transaction.

In the same manner Christian faith is the faith of a transaction. It is not the committing of one’s thought, in assent to any proposition, but the trusting of one’s being to a being, there to be rested, kept, guided, molded, governed and possessed forever.

In this faith many things are pre-supposed, many included; and, after it, many will follow.

Every thing is pre-supposed that makes the act intelligent and rational. That Christ actually lived and was what he declared himself to be. That he was no other than the incarnate Word of the Father. That he came into the world to recover and redeem it. That he is able to do it; able to forgive, regenerate, justify and set in eternal peace with God, and that all we see, in his passion, is a true revelation of God’s feeling to the world.

There was also a certain antecedent improbability of any such holy visitation, or regenerative grace, which has to be liquidated or cleared, before the supposed faith can be transacted. We live in a state under sin, where causes are running against us, or running destructively in us. We have also a certain scientific respect to causes, and expect them to continue. But Christ comes into the world, as one not under the scheme of causes. He declares that he is not of the world, but is from above. He undertakes to verify his claim by his miracles, and his miracles by his transcendent character. Assuming all the attributes of a power supernatural, he declares that he can take us out of nature and deliver us of the bad causes loosened by our sin, Now that he really is such a being, having such a power supernatural, able thus to save unto the uttermost, we are to have accredited, before we can trust ourselves to him.

But this will be less difficult, because we are urged by such a sense of bondage under sin, and have such loads of conscious want, brokenness and helplessness upon us. Besides, if we look again into our disorders, we find that they are themselves abnormal, disturbances only, by our sin, of the pure and orderly harmony of causes; so that Christ, in restoring us, does not break up, but only recomposes the true order of nature. Inasmuch, therefore, as our salvation, or deliverance from evil, implies a restoration, and not any breach of nature, the incredible thing appears to be already done by sin itself, and the credible, the restoration only, remains.

Having now all this previous matter cleared, we come to the transactional faith itself. We commit ourselves to the Lord Jesus, by an act of total and eternal trust, which is our faith. The act is intelligent, because it is intelligently prepared. It is not absurd, as being something more than evidence. It is not superseded by evidence. It is like the banker’s acceptance, and the patient’s taking of medicine, a transactional faith that follows evidence.

The matters included in this act, for of these we will no speak, are the surrender of our mere self-care, the ceasing to live from our own point of separated will, a complete admission of the mind of Christ, a consenting, practically to be modulated by his motives and aims, and to live, as it were, infolded in his spirit. It is committing one’s character wholly to the living character of Jesus, so that every willing and working and sentiment shall be pliant to his superior mind and spirit; just as a man, trusting himself to some superior man, in a total and complete confidence, allows that other to flow down upon him, assimilate him, and, as far as he may, with a superiority so slight, conform him to the subject of his trust. Only there is, in the faith of salvation, a trusting in Christ vastly more interior and searching, a presence internal to parts internal, a complete bathing of the trusting soul in Christ’s own love and beauty.

Those things, which were just now named as pre-supposed matters, are all opinionative and prior to this which is the real faith, and this faith must go beyond all mere historic credences of opinion; it must include the actual surrender of the man to the Saviour. It must even include the eternity or finality of that surrender; for if it is made only as an experiment, and the design is only to try what the Saviour will do, then it is experiment, not faith. Any thing and every thing which is necessary to make the soul a total, final deposite of trust in the Lord Jesus, must be included in the faith, else it is not faith, and can not have the power of faith. It must be as if, henceforth, the subject saw his every thing in Christ, his righteousness, his whole character, his life-work and death. struggle, and the hope of his eternity.

How great is the transaction! and great results will follow, such as these:—

He will be as one possessed by Christ, created anew in Christ Jesus. There will be a Christ power resting upon him and operative in him; an immediate knowledge of Christ, as a being revealed in the consciousness. A Christly character will come over him, and work itself into him. All his views of life will be changed. The old disturbance will be settled into loving order, and a conscious and sweet peace will flow down, like a divine river, through the soul, watering all its dryness. It will be in liberty, free to good; wanting only opportunities to do God’s will. Fear will be cast out, confidence established, hope anchored, and all the great eternity to come taken possession of Christ will constrain every motion, in such a way that no constraint shall be felt, and the new man will be so exhilarated in obedience, and raised so high in the sense of God upon him, that sacrifice itself will be joy, and the fires of martyrdom a chariot to the victor soul.

But the most remarkable, because to some the most unaccountable and extravagant result of faith, is the creation of new evidence. The exercise of faith is itself a proving of the matter, or the being trusted. It requires, in order to make it intelligent, some evidence going before; and then more evidence will follow, of still another kind. As in trying a physician, or trusting one’s life to him, new evidence is obtained from the successful management of the disease, so the soul that trusts itself to Christ knows him with a new kind of knowledge, that is more immediate and clear, knows him as a friend revealed within, knows him as the real power of God, even God in sacrifice. He that believeth hath the witness in himself,—the proof of Jesus, in him, is made out and verified by trust. Every thing in that text of scripture, that stumbles so many of our wise reasoners, is verified to the letter:—Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is not said that faith goes before all evidence, but that, coming after some evidence, it discovers more and greater. It makes substance of what before stood in hope; it proves things unseen and knows them by the immediate evidence of their power in the soul. Hence it is that faith is described, everywhere, as a state so intensely luminous. Trust in God will even prove him to be, more inevitably and gloriously than all scientific arguments. The taking immortality by trust and acting one’s mighty nature into it proves it, as it were, by the contact of it. The faith itself evidences the unseen life, when all previous evidences wore a questionable look. And so the whole Christian life becomes an element of light, because the. trust itself is an experience of Christ and of God.

And so truly intelligent is the process, that it answers exactly, in a higher plane, to the process of perception itself, already referred to. For when objects, that cast their picture in the eye, are accepted and trusted to as being more than pictures, solid realities, then, by that faith, is begun a kind of experiment. Taking, now, all these objects to be realities, we go into all the practical uses of life, handling them as if realities, and so, finding how they support all our uses and show themselves to be what we took them for, we say that we know them to be real, having found them by our trust. Exactly so, only in a much higher and nobler sense, it is that faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. Is there any thing in this which scandalizes intelligence? I think not.

If now you have followed me, in these illustrations, which I know are somewhat abstruse, you will not complain of their abstruseness, but will be glad, by any means, to escape from those difficulties which have been gathered round the subject of faith, by the unilluminated and superficial speculations of our times. Handling the subject more superficially, I might have seemed to some to do more, but should, in fact, have done nothing. Let us gather up now, in closing, some of the lessons it yields. And—

1. The mistake is here corrected of those, who are continually assuming that the gospel is a theorem, a something to be thought out, and not a new premise of fact communicated by God,—by men to be received in all the three-fold gradations of faith. To mill out a scheme of free will and responsibility, to settle metaphysically questions of ability and inability, to show the scheme of regeneration as related to a theory of sin and not to the conscious fact, may all be very ingenious and we may call it gospel; but it is scarcely more than a form of rationalism. Feeding on such kind of notional and abstract wisdom, and not on Christ, the bread that came down from heaven, we grow, at once, more ingenious in the head, and more shallow in the heart, and, in just the compound ratio of both, more naturalistic and sceptical. Loosing out our robustness, in this manner, and the earnestness of our spiritual convictions, our ministry becomes, in just the same degree, more ambitious and mere untransforming to the people, and the danger is that, finally, even the sense of religion, as a gift of God, a divine light in the soul, resealed from faith to faith, will quite die out and be lost. Our gospel will be nature, and our faith will be reason, and the true Christ will be nothing,—all the grand, life-giving truths of the incarnate appearing and cross are resolved into myths and legends.

2. We discover that the requirement of faith, as a condition of salvation, is not arbitrary, as many appear to suppose, but is only a declaration of the fact, before existing, that without faith there can be no deliverance from sin. The precise difficulty with us in our sin is, that we can not make ourselves good and happy by acting on ourselves. Faith, accordingly, is not required of us, because Christ wants to humble us a little, as a kind of satisfaction for letting go the penalty of our sins, but because we can not otherwise be cleared of them at all. What we want is God, God whom we have lost; to be united being to being, sinner to Saviour; thus to be quickened, raised up, and made again to partake, as before sin, the divine nature. And, for just this reason, faith is required; for we come into the power of God only as we trust ourselves to him. And here it is, at this precise point, that our gospel excels all philosophies, proving most evidently its divine origin. It sees the problem as it is, and shows, in the requirement of faith as the condition of salvation, that it comprehends the whole reason of our state. It has the sagacity to see that, plainly, there is no such thing as a raising of man. without God; also that there is no God save as we find him by our trust, and have him revealed within, by resting our eternity on him. And hence it is that all those scripture forms of imputation spring up, as a necessary language of faith, under the gospel. We come, in our trust, unto God, and the moment we so embrace him, by committing our total being and eternity to him, we find every thing in us transformed. There is life in us from God; a kind of Christ-consciousness is opened in us testifying, with the apostle,—Christ liveth in me. We see, therefore, in him, the store of all gifts and graces. Every thing flows down upon us from him, and so we begin to speak of being washed, sanctified, justified, in him. He is our peace, our light, our bread; the way, the truth, and the life. And, in just the same manner, he is our righteousness; for he is, so to speak, a soul of everlasting integrity for us, and when we come in to be with him, he becomes in us what he is to himself. We are new created and clothed in righteousness, from his glorious investiture. The righteousness of God, which is, by faith of Jesus Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe, is upon us, and the very instinct of our faith, looking unto God in this conscious translation of his nature to us, is to call him The Lord our Righteousness, the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.

Such now, my friends is faith. It gives you God, fills you with God in immediate experimental knowledge, puts you in possession of all there is in him, and allows you to be invested with his character itself. Is such faith a burden, a hard and arbitrary requirement? Why, it is your only hope, your only possibility. Shall this most grand and blessed possibility be rejected? Sc far it has been, and you have even been able, it may be, in your lightness, to invent ingenious reasons against any such plan of salvation. God forbid that you do not some time take the penalty of having just that salvation, without faith to work out, which you so blindly approve!

3. We perceive, in our subject, that mere impressions can never amount to faith. At this point, the unbelievers and all such as are waiting to have convictions and spiritual impressions wrought in them that amount to faith, perfectly agree. The unbelievers and cavillers say that impressions, taken as evidences, are every thing, and that, over and above these, faith is nonsense. You that are waiting to be in faith, by merely having your convictions and feelings intensified, say the same thing; for you expect your impressions to coalesce in faith, and so to be faith. That, as we have seen already, is forever impossible. Faith is more than impression; it moves from you, it is the trusting of your being, in a total, final act of commitment, to the being of Christ, your Saviour. Impressions shot into you, even by thunder-bolts, would not be faith in you. Ye also have seen me, says Jesus, and believe not. No impression can be stronger and more positive than sight, and yet not even this was equivalent to faith. It was a good ground of faith, nothing more. Whatever drawings, then, impressions, convictions, evidences, God in his mercy may give you, they will only ask your faith and wait for it. Will you, can you, then, believe? On that question hangs every thing decisive as regards your salvation. This crisis of faith,—can you ever pass it, or will you always be waiting for a faith to begin in you which is not faith, and never can be? Let the faith be yours, as it must; your own coming to Christ, your own act of self-surrender, your coming over to him and eternal trust in him for peace, life, truth and bread; knowing assuredly that he will be made unto you all these, and more,—wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

Finally, it is very plain that what is now most wanted, in the Christian world, is more faith. We too little respect faith, we dabble too much in reason; fabricating gospels, where we ought to be receiving Christ; limiting all faith, if we chance to allow of faith, by the measures of previous evidence, and cutting the wings of faith when, laying hold of God, and bathing in the secret mind of God, it conquers more and higher evidence. Here is the secret of our sects and schisms, that we are so much in the head; for, when we should be one in faith, by receiving our one Lord, as soon as we go off into schemes and contrived summaries of notions, reasoned into gospels, what can follow but that we have as many gospels as we have heads and theories? It never can be otherwise, till we are united by faith. The word of reason is a word of interminalble schism and subdivision, and the propagation of it, as in those animals that multiply by dividing their own bodies, will be a fissiparous process to the end of the world. O, that the bleeding and lacerated body of Christ could once more be gathered unto the Head, and fastened there by a simple, vital trust; that his counsel and feeling and all his divine graces might flow down upon it, as a sacred healing and a vivifying impulse of love and sacrifice; and that so, fighting each other no more, we might all together fight the good fight of faith.

We shall never recover the true apostolic energy and be indued with power from on high, as the first disciples were—and this exactly is the prayer in which the holiest most expectant and most longing souls on earth are waiting now before God—till we recover the lost faith. As regards a higher sanctification, which is, I trust, the cherished hope of us all, nothing is plainer than the impossibility of it, except as we can yield to faith a higher honor and abide in it with a holier confidence. Every man is sanctified according to his faith; for it is by this trusting of himself to Christ that he becomes invested, exalted, irradiated, and finally glorified in Christ. Be it unto you according to your faith, is the true principle, and by that the whole life. state of the church on earth always has been, always will be graduated. Increase our faith, then, Lord! be this our prayer.

That prayer, I believe, is yet to be heard. After we have gone through all the rounds of science, speculation, dialectic cavil, and wise unbelief, we shall do what they did not even in the apostolic times, we shall begin to settle conceptions of faith that will allow us, and all the ages to come, to stand fast in it and do it honor. And then God will pour himself into the church again, I know not in what gifts. Faith will then be no horseman out upon the plain, but will have a citadel manned and defended, whence no power of man can ever dislodge it again. Faith will be as much stronger now than science, as it is higher and more diffusive. And now the reign of God is established. Christ is now the creed, and the whole church of God is in it, fulfilling the work of faith with power.

VI.

REGENERATION.

John iii. 3.—“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he can not see the kingdom of God.”

THIS very peculiar expression, born again, is a phrase that was generated historically in the political state, then taken up by Christ, and appropriated figuratively to the spiritual use in which we find it. Thus foreigners, or Gentiles, were regarded by the Jewish people as unclean. Therefore, if any Gentile man wanted to become a Jewish citizen, he was baptized with water, in connection with other appropriate ceremonies, and so, being cleansed, was admitted to be a true son of Abraham. It was as if he had been born, a second time, of the stock of Abraham; and becoming, in this manner, a native Jew, as related to the Jewish state, he was said, in form of law, to be born again. Our term naturalization signifies essentially the same thing; viz., that the subject is made to be a natural born American, or, in the eye of the law, a native citizen. Finding this Jewish ceremony on foot, and familiarly known, Christ takes advantage of it, (and the more naturally that a person so regenerated was, by the supposition, entered, religiously, into the covenant of Abraham,) as affording a good analogy, and a good form of expression, to represent the naturalization of a soul in the kingdom of heaven. Regarding us, in our common state under sin, as aliens, or foreigners, and not citizens in the kingdom; unclean in a deeper than ceremonial and political sense; he says, in a manner most emphatic,—Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he can not see the kingdom of God. And again,—Marvel not that I said unto you, ye must be born again. In this language, so employed he gives us to understand that no man can ever be accepted before God, or entered into the kingdom of the glorified, who is not cleansed by a spiritual transformation, in that manner born of God, and so made native in the kingdom. He does not leave us to suppose that he is speaking merely of a ceremonial cleansing. He only takes the water by the way, as a symbol, and adds the Spirit as the real cleansing power;—Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

I propose, now, a deliberate examination of this great subject, hoping to present such a view of it as will command the respect of any thoughtful person, whatever may have been his previous difficulties and objections. My object will be to unfold the scripture doctrine, in a way to make it clear, not doubting that, when it is intelligibly shown, it will also prove itself to be soundly intelligent, and will so command our assent, as a proper truth of sal vation. I believe, also, that many minds are confused, to such a degree, m their notions of this subject, as must fatally hinder them, in their efforts to enter the gate which it opens.

I call your attention specially to three points:—

1. That Christ requires of all mankind, without distinction some great and important change, as the necessary condition of their salvation.

II. The nature and definition of this change.

III. The manner in which it is, and is to be, effected.

I. That Christ requires of all some great and important change.

He does not, of course, require it of such as are already subjects of the change, and many are so even from their earliest years; having grown up into Christ by the preventing or anticipating grace of their nurture in the Lord; so that they can recollect no time, when Christ was not their love, and the currents of their inclination did not run toward his word and his cause. The case, however, of such is no real exception; and, besides this, there is even no semblance of exception. Intelligence, in fact, is not more necessary to our proper humanity, than the second birth of this humanity, as Christ speaks, to its salvation. Many can not believe, or admit any such doctrine. It savors of hardness, they imagine, or undue severity, and does not correspond with what they think they see, in the examples of natural character among men. There is too much amiability and integrity, too much of exactness and even of scrupulousness in duty, to allow any such sweeping requirement, or the supposition of any such universal necessity. How can it be said or imagined that so many moral, honorable, lovely, beneficent and habitually reverent persons need to. be radically and fundamentally changed in character, before they can be saved?

That, according to Christ, depends on the question whether “the one thing” is really lacking in them or not. If it be, not even the fact that he can look upon them with love will, at all, modify his requirement. This is the word of Christ, this his new testament still,—regeneration universal regeneration, thus salvation.

We can see too, for ourselves, that Christianity is based on the fact of this necessity. It is not any doctrine of development, or self-culture; no scheme of ethical practice, or social re-organization; but it is a salvation; a power moving on fallen humanity from above its level, to regenerate and so to save. The whole fabric is absurd therefore, unless there was something to be done in man and for him that required a supernatural intervention. We can see too, at a glance, that the style of the transaction is supernatural, from the incarnate appearing onward. Were it otherwise, were Christianity a merely natural and earthly product, then it were only a fungus growing out of the world, and, with all its high pretensions, could have nothing more to do for the world, than any other fungus for the heap on which it grows. The very name, Jesus, is a false pretense, unless he has something to do for the race, which the race can not do for itself; something regenerative and new-creative; something fitly called a salvation.

But how can we imagine, some of you will ask, that God is going to stand upon any such definite and rigid terms with us? Is he not a more liberal being and capable of doing better things? Since he is very good and very great, and we are very weak and very much under the law of circumstances, is it not more rational to suppose that he will find some way to save us, and that, if we do not come into any such particular terms of life, it will be about as well? May we not safely risk the consequences? It ought to be a sufficient answer to all such suggestions, that Christ evidently understood what is necessary for us, better than we do, and that we discover no disposition to uncharitableness or harshness in him. He comes directly out from God and knows the mind of God. He takes our case upon him, and is so pressed by the necessities of our state, that he is even willing to die for us.

It ought also to be observed that all such kinds of argument are a plea for looseness, which is not the manner of God. Contrary to this, we discover, in all we know of him, that he is the exactest of beings; doing nothing without fixed principles, and allowing nothing out of its true place and order. He weighs every world of the sky, even to its last atom, and rolls it into an orbit exactly suited to its uses and quantities. Nothing is smuggled out of place, or into place, because it is well enough anywhere. If a retreating army wants to cross a frozen river, the ice will not put off dissolving, but will run into the liquid state, at i certain exact point of temperature. If a man wants to live, there is yet some diseased speck of matter, it may be, in his brain, or heart, which no microscope even could detect, and by that speck, or because of it, he will die at a certain exact time; which time will not be delayed, for a day, simply because it is only a speck. Is then character a matter that God will treat more loosely? will he decide the great questions of order and place, dependent on it, by no exact terms or conditions? If he undertakes to save, will he save as by accommodation, or by some fixed law? If he undertakes to construct a beatific state, will he gather in a jumble of good and bad, and call it heaven? How certainly will any expectation of heaven, based on the looseness of God, and the confidence that he will stand for no very exact terms, issue in dreadful disappointment. And the more certainly, in this case, that the exactness supposed refers, not to any mere atoms of quantity, but to eternal distinctions of kind. His law of gravity will as soon put the sea on the backs of the mountains, as his terms of salvation will gather into life them that are not quickened in his Son.

Do we not also see as clearly, as possible, for ourselves, what signifies much; that some men, a very large class of men, are certainly not in a condition to enter the kingdom of God, or any happy and good state. They have no purity or sympathy with it. They are slaves of passion. They are cruel, tyrannical, brutal, and even disgusting to, decency; fearful, unbelieving, abominable. Who can think that these are ready to melt into a perfectly blessed and celestial society? But, if not these, then there must be a division, and where shall it fall? If a line must be drawn, it must be drawn somewhere, and what is on one side of that line will not be on the other; which is the same as to say that there must be exact terms of salvation if there are any.

Again, we know, we feel in our own consciousness, while living in the mere life of nature, that we are not in a state to enjoy the felicities of a purely religious and spotlessly sinless world. We turn from it with inward pain. Our heart is not there. We want the joys of that state.; we feel a certain hunger, at times, after God himself; and that hunger is to us an assured evidence that we have him not. I do not undertake to press this argument further than it will bear. I only say that we feel conscious of something uncongenial, in our state, toward God and heaven. We seem to ourselves not to be in the kingdom of God, but without, and can hardly imagine how we shall ever find any so great felicity in the employments of holy minds.

It is also a very significant proof that some great change is needed in us that, when we give ourselves to some new purpose of amendment, or undertake to act up more exactly to the ideals of our mind, we are consciously legal in it, and do all by a kind of constraint. Something tells us that we are not spontaneous in what we do; that our currents do not run this way, but the contrary. A sad kind of heaven will be made by this sort of virtue! How dry it is, and if we call it service, how hard a service! What we want is liberty, to be in a kind of inspiration, to have our inclinations run the way of our duty, to be so deep in the spirit of it as to love it for its own sake. And this exactly is what is meant by the being born of God. It is having God revealed in the soul, moving in it as the grand impulse of life, so that duty is easy and, as it were, natural. Then we are in the kingdom, as being naturalized in it, or native born. Our regeneration makes us free in good. How manifest is it that, without this freedom, this newly generated inclination to good, all our supposed service is mockery, our seeming excellence destitute of sound reality.

There is then a change, a great spiritual change, required by Christianity as necessary to salvation, and we find abundant reason, in all that we know of ourselves and the world, to admit the necessity of some transformation quite as radical. In presence of a truth so momentous and serious, we now raise the question—

II. What is the nature of this change, how shall it be conceived?

VII.

THE PERSONAL LOVE AND LEAD OF CHRIST.

John x. 3.—“And he calleth his own sheep by name and leadeth them out.”

IN this parable, Christ is a shepherd, and his people are his flock. And two points, on which the beauty and significance of the parable principally turn, are referred to in the text, which might not be distinctly observed by one who is not acquainted with the peculiar manner of the eastern shepherds. They have, in the first place, a name for every sheep, and every sheep knows its name when it is called. And then the shepherd does not drive the flock, as we commonly speak, but he leads them, going before. To these two points, or to the instruction contained under these two analogies, I now propose to call your attention.

I. He calleth his own sheep by name. As we have names for dogs and other animals, which they themselves know, so it was with the eastern shepherds and their flocks. This fact is shown historically, by many references. It is to this, for example, that Isaiah refers when he represents the Almighty Creator as leading out the starry heavens,. like a shepherd leading his flock;—Lift up your eyes and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number; he calleth them all by names. The shepherd in this view is not as one who keeps a hive of bees, knowing well the hive, but never any particular bee in it, but he has a particular recognition of every sheep, has a name for every one, teaches every one to know that name and follow at the call. This also is signified in the words that immediately follow,—The sheep follow him, for they know his voice,—words that refer, not so much to the mere tones of his voice, as to the fact that he is able, as a stranger is not, to call the names they are wont to answer as their own.

Under this analogy stands the tender and beautiful truth, that Christ holds a particular relation to individual persons; knows them, loves them, watches for them, leads them individually, even as if calling them by name.

In this respect, the parable is designed to counteract and correct, what has in all ages been the common infirmity of Christian believers;—they believe that God has a real care of the church and of all great bodies of saints, but how difficult is it to imagine that he ever particularly notes, or personally recognizes them. They know that God has a vast empire, and that the cares and counsels of his love include immense numbers of minds, and they fall into the impression that he must needs deal with them in the gross, or as noting only generals, just as they would do themselves. They even take an air of philosophy in this opinion, asking how we can imagine that so great a being takes a particular notice of, and holds a particular and personal relation to, individual men. There could not be a greater mistake, even as regards the matter of philosophy; for the relation God holds to objects of knowledge is different, in all respects, from that which is held by us. Our general terms, man, tree, insect, flower, are the names of particular. or single specimens, extended, on the ground of a perceived similarity, to kinds or species. They come, in this manner, to stand for millions of. particular men, trees, insects, flowers, that we do not and never can know. They are, to just this extent, words of ignorance; only we are able, in the use, to hold right judgments of innumerable particulars we do not know, and have the words, so far, as words of wisdom. But God does not generalize in this manner, getting up general terms under which to handle particulars, which, as particulars, he does not know. He is not obliged to accommodate his ignorance, or shortness of perception, by any such splicing process in words, His knowledge of wholes is a real and complete knowledge. It is a knowledge of wholes, as being a distinct knowledge of particulars. Indeed, whatever particulars exist, or by him are created, he must first have thought; and therefore they were known by him, as being thought, even before they became subjects of knowledge in the world of fact. Holding in his thought the eternal archetypes of kinds and species, he also thought each individual in its particular type, as dominated by the common archetype. So that all things, even things most particular, are known or thought by him eternally, before they take existence in time. When he thinks of wholes or kinds therefore—of society, the church, the nation, the race, he knows nothing of them in our faint, partial way of generalization, but he knows them intuitively, through and through; the wholes in the particulars, the particulars in the wholes; knows them in their types, knows them in their archetypes, knows them in their genesis out of both; so with a knowledge that is more than verbal, a solid, systematic, specific knowledge. Nay, it is more,—a necessary, inevitable knowledge; for the sun can no more shine on the world, as in the gross, without touching every particular straw and atom with his light, than God can know, or love whole bodies of saints, without knowing and loving every individual saint. In one view, it requires no particular act of tenderness, or condescension in him; it is the sublime necessity of his Perfect Mind. Being a perfect mind, and not a mere spark of intelligence like us, he can not fall into the imperfections and shorten himself to the half-seeing of our contrivance, when we strain ourselves to set up generals, in a way to piece out and hide our ignorance.

And yet we could not wean ourselves of this folly, could not believe that our God has a particular notice of us and a particular interest in our personal history. And this was one of the great uses of the incarnation; it was to humanize God, reducing him to a human personality, that we might believe in that particular and personal love, in which he reigns from eternity. For Christ was visibly one of us, and we see, in all his demonstrations, that he is attentive to every personal want, woe, cry of the world. When a lone woman came up in a crowd to steal, as it were, some healing power out of his person, or out of the hem of his garment, he would not let her off in that impersonal, unrecognizing way; he compelled her to show herself and to confess her name, and sent her away with his personal blessing. He pours out, everywhere, a particular sympathy on every particular child of sorrow; he even hunts up the youth he has before healed of his blindness, and opens to him, persecuted as he is for being healed, the secrets of his glorious Messiahship. The result, accordingly, of this incarnate history is that we are drawn to a different opinion of God; we have seen that he can love as a man loves another, and that such is the way of his love. He has tasted death we say, not for all men only, but for every man. We even dare to say, for me,—who loved me and gave himself for me. Nay, he goes even further than this himself, calling us friends, and claiming that dear relationship with us; friends, because he is on the private footing of friendship and personal confidence;—The servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth, but I have called you friends. He even goes beyond this, promising a friendship so particular and personal that it shall be a kind of secret, or cypher of mutual understanding, open to no other; a new white stone given by his king, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

Indeed, I might go on to show, from every particular work and turn of this gospel, how intensely personal it is. What is communion that is not communion with particular souls? Is it the communion or fellowship of God that he reaches only great bodies of men? If he promises comfort or support, whom does he comfort or support, when he touches no individual person? The promises to prayer—whom does he hear, when he hears the prayer of nobody in particular, and for nothing in particular? The work of the Holy Spirit in souls—what is it, in all its degrees and modes; in their calling, their guidance, their sanctification; what can it be imagined that he does which is not personal, the bestowment of a convincing, illuminating, drawing, renovating grace, exactly tempered to, and by, the individual blessed; a visiting of his intelligent person, at just the point of his particular want, sin, sorrow, prejudice, so as to exactly meet his personality at that particular time. We speak, indeed, of the Holy Spirit as falling on communities, or assemblies, but we must not suppose that he touches the general body and no particular person. On the contrary, if we understand ourselves, he reaches the general body only by and through individuals; save that there is an effect of mutual excitement, which is secondary and comes from their sense of what is revealed in each other, under the power of the Spirit in each. How then can it be imagined that God effectually calls any person by his Spirit, without dispensing a grace most distinctly and even adaptively personal?

So it is, in short, with every thing included in the gospel as a grace of salvation; every thing in the renewing, fashioning, guidance, discipline, sanctification, and final crowning of an heir of glory. His Saviour and Lord is over him and with him, as the good shepherd, calling him by name; so that he is finally saved, not as a man, or some one of mankind, led forth, by his Lord, in the general flock, but as the Master’s dear Simon, or James, or Alpheus, or Martha, whose name is so recorded in the Lamb’s book of life.

And, in this view, it is, I suppose, that the church, in baptizing her children, takes there, at the font, with a most beautiful and touching propriety, what she calls the “Christian name;” as if it were Christ’s own gift; a name bestowed by him, in which he recognizes the child’s discipleship, and which, as often as it is spoken, he is himself to recognize as the calling of his Master’s voice;—And he calleth his own sheep by name.

Consider now the—

II. Point of the text—he leadeth them out. It is not said, you observe, that the shepherd driveth them out, for that was not the manner of shepherds, but that he leadeth them, going before to call them after him. This, indeed, is expressly and formally said in the next verse—and when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him. Hence those poetic figures of the Old Testament—The Lord is my shepherd, he leadeth me beside the still waters. Thou leddest thy people, like a flock, by the hand of Moses and Aaron. Give ear, O shepherd, thou that leadest Joseph like a flock. The same custom of going before the flock pertains, even now, it is said, in the sheep-walks of Spain.

What a beautiful image, or picture, to represent the attitude and personal relationship of Jesus among his followers;—That he does not drive them on before, as a herd of unwilling disciples, but goes before himself leading them into paths that he has trod, and dangers he has met, and sacrifices he has borne himself calling them after him and to be only followers. He leadeth them out.

If driving could do any good, he might well enough drive his flock as a body, caring nothing for any one of them in particular; but, if he is going to draw them after him, he must work upon their inclinations, draw them by their personal favor to him, and must therefore know them personally, and call them to follow, as it were, by name. Just the difference will be observed in this matter that pertains between the eastern shepherds and those of the west, and north. No sooner do we come upon this latter fashion of driving flocks a-field, than we see the noting, knowing and calling of particular sheep disappear. When the driving and thrusting on before becomes the manner, there is no need of getting any one of them under a power of confidence and attraction, no need of noting them individually at all. So, if driving were in place, Christ might well enough let fall the fires of Sodom behind his flock and drive them out, as he drove Lot’s family, or his vain hearted wife, out of the city. But the best use that could be made of such a flock, after all, would be to turn them into pillars of salt and let them stand. No disciple is a real disciple till he becomes a follower, going after the shepherd, as one that follows by name, and is drawn by love.

Here then is the beauty and glory of Christ, as a Redeemer and Saviour of lost man, that he goes before, always before, and never behind his flock. He begins with infancy, that he may show a grace for childhood. He is made under the law, and carefully fulfills all righteousness there, that he may sanctify the law to us, and make it honorable. He goes before us in the bearing of temptations, that we may bear them after him, being tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. He taught us forgiveness by forgiving himself his enemies. He went before us in the loss of all things, that we might be able to follow, in the renouncing of the world and its dominion. The works of love that he requires of us, in words, are preceded and illustrated by real deeds of love, to which he gave up all his mighty powers from day to day. He bore the cross himself that he commanded us to take up and bear after him. Requiring us to hate even life for the gospel’s sake, he went before us in dying for the gospel; suffering a death most bitter at the hand of enemies exasperated only by his goodness, and that when, at a word; he might have called to his aid whole legions of angels, and driven them out of the world. And then he went before us in the bursting of the grave and the resurrection from it; becoming, in his own person, the first fruits of them that slept. And, finally, he ascended and passed within the veil before us, as our forerunner, whom we are to follow even there. In all which he is our shepherd. going before us, and never behind; calling, but never driving; bearing all the losses he calls us to bear; meeting all the dangers, suffering all the cruelties and pains which it is given us to suffer, and drawing us to follow where he leads.

And then we see what kindred spirit entered into the teachers that he gave to lead his flock. They were such as followed him in the regeneration; going up at last, according to his promise, to sit on thrones of glory with him. And it is remarkable that the apostles took it as incumbent on them always, in their Master’s law, to require nothing of others in which they were not forward themselves. Thus, when Paul says, once and again—I beseech you be ye followers of me; brethren, be followers together of me; it has a sound, taken as it may be taken, of conceit, or vanity; but, when we look upon him as a man who goes after Christ, in the ways of scorn and suffering patience; in labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft, receiving more than once his forty stripes save one, beaten with rods and stoned out of cities, running the gauntlet through all sorts of perils, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness, accounted as the filth of the world and the offscouring of all things—when we see him tramping on heavily thus, bearing his Master’s dark flag of patience and loss. and calling others to follow, we only see that he has taken Christ’s own spirit and despises even to send the flock before him, where he does not lead himself.

Ah! we have seen things different from this; teachers that bind heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, which they themselves will not so much as lighten with the touch of their fingers; priests and confessors that feed their lusts out of the charities extorted from the poor, imposing on them loads of penance in turn, to humble them and keep them in subjection; philanthropists publishing theories and great swelling words of equality, and tapering off in the commendation of virtues they themselves do not practice, and even inwardly distaste. All such are men that drive a flock. But Christ, the true shepherd, the eternal Son of God, wants nothing in his flock that he does not show in himself. He goes before them, bearing all the bitterest loads of sacrifice and facing all the fiercest terrors himself, only calling them gently to come and follow. “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me. My yoke is easy and my burden light.”

The uses and applications of this subject are many. The time allows me to name only a few that are most practical.

1. A great mistake, or false impression, held by most worldly minds, and even by some who profess to be disciples, is here corrected; viz., the mistake of regarding the christian life as a legal and constrained service. It is as if the flock were driven by the shepherd, and not as if it were led by the shepherd’s call going before. In this image, or figure, is beautifully represented the freedom of the disciple. He is one who is led by a personal influence, one who hears the voice and answers to the name by which he is called. He could not be thrust on, as in a crowd, by mere force, or fear. Christ wants to lead men by their love, their personal love to him, and the confidence of his personal love to them. And therefore the representation is, not that he is a shepherd going behind, with dogs, to gather in the flock, and keep them before him, but that he draws them after him, and gets them into such a training of confidence, that they will hear his call and follow. The whole relation, therefore, of discipleship is a relation of liberty. No one goes to his duty because he must, but only because his heart is in it. His inclinations are that way, for his heart is in the Master’s love, and he follows him gladly. It no doubt seems to you, my friends, when you look on only as strangers to Christ, that this must be a hard and dry service; for you see no attraction in it. But the reason is that your heart is not in it. With a new heart, quickened by the grace of Christ, all this would be changed. It will then seem wholly attractive. All the currents of your love will run that way, and the freest freedom of your nature will be to go after Christ. No sacrifice will be hard, no service a burden. The wonder now will be that all men do not rush in after Christ, to be his eager followers. God grant that even to-day you may have this truth, as an experience, in the choice of Christ, and the renewing of his promised Spirit.

Brethren, are there some of you that hold this same impression of the life of duty! If so, if you have no knowledge of this freedom in Christ, the sign is a dark one for you. Perhaps it is not exactly the same impression that you hold. It may be that you have it only in a degree, accordingly as you are over-legal in your conceptions of duty, and rob yourself, in that manner, of its comforts, Let your mistake be now corrected. See, in particular: that Christ is not behind you but before, calling and drawing you on. He wants your faith, wants your love, not a minute, and scrupulous, and careful piling up of legalities. You are not to stand off, doing something for him that he is to examine and report upon as accepted, by statute conditions; but you are to go after him, and be with him, and keep along in his train, feeding in his pasture, and following where he leads. This is the liberty, the beautiful liberty of Christ. Claim your glorious privilege, in the name of a disciple; be no more a servant, when Christ will own you as a friend.

2. We discover, in this subject, what to think of that large class of disciples who aspire to be specially faithful, and hold a specially high-toned manner of life, but are, after all, principally strenuous in putting others forward, and laying burdens upon others. Christ, we have seen, goes before when he leads, and so did his apostles, calling on the saints to follow. But there is a cheaper way some have, in which they beguile even themselves. It is a kind of righteousness with them that they have such stern principles of duty and sacrifice. How greatly are they scandalized too by the self-indulgence, the parsimony, the show, the pleasures, the vanities of others, who profess the christian name. And in all this they may be sincere and not hypocritical. They only find it so much easier to be stiff in their judgments, and self-renouncing in their words and exhortations, that they slide over, only the more unwittingly, their own looseness and deficiency, in the very things they insist on. How many preachers of Christ fall into just this snare: pray for us, brethren, for our temptation is great. Christians of this class commonly have it as a kind of merit, and how many christian ministers repeat the same thing, that they never ask it of others to follow. them. God forbid that they should indulge in any such conceit as that! Yes, God forbid, indeed, the conceit, for it would be one; and, what is more, God forbid that others be ever found as their followers; and for just the reason that they do not follow Christ. They half consciously know it themselves—hence their modesty. Would they could also understand how great a thing it is in Christ and his first messengers, that they go before, to lead in all sacrifice and suffering; doing first themselves whatsoever they lay upon others. I believe, my brethren, that there are almost none of us who do not slide into this infirmity, complimenting ourselves on the high principles we hold, and the severe standards we set up, in our words and judgments, when, in our practice, we fall low enough to require some such kind of comfort, to piece out our evidence and satisfaction. And then we compliment, again, our modesty, that we do not propose to be examples to others! How much more and more genuinely modest should we be, if we judged only as we practiced and set forward others in words, only as we fortify words by example. Let us understand ourselves in this; that we are not what we talk, or stand for with our words, but what we do and become.

3. Consider, in this subject, what is true of any real disciple, who is straying from Christ; viz., that his Holy Shepherd, folding the flock and caring for it as a shepherd should, does not let him go, or take it only as a fact that the flock is diminished by one, not caring by what one. He knows what one it is, and, if the wanderer will listen, he may hear the shepherd calling his name. The love of Christ, as we have seen, is personal and particular, and he watches for his flock with a directly personal care. Do not imagine, then, if you consciously begin to fall off, or stray, that you are no longer cared for by the Shepherd. Christ follows you with his personal and particular love, and will not let you go. That same tenderness which melted the heart of an apostle, when he said—“who loved me and gave himself for me,” pursues you still. It is faithful, patient, forgiving, and true; it waits and lingers, it whispers and calls, saying, “will ye also go away;” holding on upon you by a personal and persistent love, that will not be content till you are gathered back into the fold, to be, as before, a follower. And the same is true where the love of many waxes cold, and whole bodies of disciples are chilled by worldliness, or carried away by common temptations; it is not the mass only, or the general flock, that Christ regards. Each one he follows and calls, as truly as if he were the only one. The wrong they do him, and the grief he feels, is personal. By name and privately he deals with each, gathering him back, if possible, to prayer and holy living, to faith, and sacrifice, and works of love. By these private reproofs, and these tender and personal remonstrances, brethren, he is calling after all you that stray from him to-day. And, if you think you have personal apologies, or have been stolen away by temptations you could not detect, he knows exactly what is true, and will every true allowance make, and, as being faithful to you, he will make no other. Whatever grace you want to bind you up and establish you, he waits to bestow. He will not only forgive you; readily and completely, but he will embrace you heartily, and take you again to his confidence; the same sweet personal confidence in which you stood before. O, thou wavering, faltering, failing disciple I come thou, at his call, and see!

VIII.

LIGHT ON THE CLOUD.

Job xxxvii. 21.—“And now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds: but the wind passeth, and clanseth them.”

THE argument is, let man be silent when God is dealing with him; for he can not fathom God’s inscrutable wisdom. Behold, God is great, and we know him not. God thundereth marvelously with his voice: great things doeth he which we can not comprehend. Dost thou know the wondrous works of him that is perfect in knowledge? Teach us what we shall say unto him; for we can not order our speech by reason of darkness. If a man speak, surely he shall be swallowed up.

Then follows the text, representing man’s life under the figure of a cloudy day. The sun is in the heavens, and there is always a bright light on the other side of the clouds; but only a dull, pale beam pierces through. Still, as the wind comes at length to the natural day of clouds, clearing them all away, and pouring in, from the whole firmament, a glorious and joyful light, so will a grand clearing come to the cloudy and dark day of life, and a full effulgence of light, from the throne of God, will irradiate all the objects of knowledge and experience.

Our reading of the text, you will observe, substitutes for cleansing, clearing away, which is more intelligible. Perhaps, also, it is better to read “on the clouds,” and not “in.” Still, the meaning is virtually the same. The words, thus explained, offer three points which invite our attention.

I. We live under a cloud, and see God’s way only dim light.

II. God shines, at all times, with a bright light, above the cloud, and on the other side of it.

III. This cloud of obscuration is finally to be cleared away.

I. We live under a cloud, and see God’s way only by a dim light.

As beings of intelligence, we find ourselves hedged in by mystery on every side. All our seeming knowledge is skirted, close at hand, by dark confines of ignorance. However drunk with conceit we may be, however ready to judge every thing, we still comprehend almost nothing.

What then does it mean? Is God jealous of intelligence in us? Has he purposely drawn a cloud over his ways, to baffle the search of our understanding? Exactly contrary to this; he is a being who dwelleth in light, and calls as to walk in the light with him. He has set his works about us, to be a revelation to us always of his power and glory. His word he gives us, to be the expression of his will and character, and bring us into acquaintance with himself. His Spirit he gives us, to be a teacher and illuminator within. By all his providential works, he is training intelligence in us and making us capable of knowledge.

No view of the subject, therefore, can be true that accuses him. The true account appears to be that the cloud, under which we are shut down, is not heavier than it must be. How can a being infinite be understood, or comprehended, by a being finite? And, when this being infinite has plans that include infinite quantities, times and relations, in which every present event is the last link of a train of causes reaching downward from a past eternity, and is to be connected also with every future event of a future eternity, how can a mortal, placed between these two eternities, without knowing either, understand the present fact, whatever it be, whose reasons are in both?

Besides, we have only just begun to be; and a begun existence is, by the supposition, one that has just begun to know, and has every thing to learn. How then can we expect, in a few short years, to master the knowledge of God and his universal kingdom? What can he be to such but a mystery? If we could think him out, without any experience, as we do the truths of arithmetic and geometry, we might get on faster and more easily. But God is not a mere thought of our own brain, as these truths are, but a being in the world of substance, fact and event, and all such knowledge has to be gotten slowly, through the rub of experience. We open, after a few days, our infantile eyes and begin to look about, perceive, handle, suffer, act and be acted on, and, proceeding in this manner, we gather in, by degrees, our data and material of knowledge; and so, by trial, comparison, distinction, the study of effects and wants, of rights and wrongs, of uses and abuses, we frame judgments of things, and begin to pass our verdict on the matters we know. But how long will it take us to penetrate, in this manner, the real significance of God’s dealings with us and. the world, and pass a really illuminated judgment on them? And yet, if we but love the right, as the first father did before his sin, God will be revealed in us internally, as the object of our love and trust, even from the first hour. He will not appear to be distant, or difficult. We shall know him as a friendly presence in our heart’s love, and we shall have such a blessed confidence in him that if, in the outer world of fact and event, clouds and darkness appear to be round about him, we shall have the certainty within that justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne. Meanwhile, he will be teaching us graciously, and drawing us insensibly, through our holy sympathies, into the sense of his ways, and widening, as fast as possible, the circle of our human limitation, that we may expatiate in discoveries more free. And thus it comes to pass that, as the eyelids of the infant are shut down, at first, over his unpracticed eyes, which are finally strengthened for the open day, by the little, faint light that shines through them, so our finite, childish mind, saved from being dazzled, or struck blind, by God’s powerful effulgence, and quickened by the gentle light that streams through his cloud, is prepared to gaze on the fullness of his glory, and receive his piercing brightness undimmed.

But there is another fact less welcome that must not be forgot, when we speak of the darkness that obscures our knowledge of God. There is not only a necessary, but a guilty limitation upon us. And therefore we are not only obliged to learn, but, as being under sin, are also in a temper that forbids learning, having our mind disordered and clouded by evil. Hence, come our perplexities; for, as the sun can not show distinctly what it is in the bottom of a muddy pool, so God can never be distinctly revealed in the depths of a foul and earthly mind. To understand a philosopher requires, they tell us, a philosopher; to understand patriotism, requires a patriot; to understand purity, one that is pure; so, to understand God, requires a godlike spirit. Having this, God will as certainly be revealed in the soul, as light through a transparent window. He that loveth knoweth God, for God is love. What darkness then must be upon a mind that is not congenially tempered, a mind unlike to God, opposite to God, selfish, lustful, remorseful, and malignant! Even as an apostle says—Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.

The very activity of reason, which ought to beget knowledge, begets only darkness now, artificial darkness. We begin a quarrel with limitation itself, and so with God. le is not only hid behind thick walls of mystery, but he is dreaded as a power unfriendly, suspected, doubted, repugnantly conceived. Whatever can not be comprehended, and how very little can be, is construed as one construes an enemy, or as an ill-natured child construes the authority of a faithful father. An evil judgement taken up yesterday prepares another to-day, and this another tomorrow, and so a vast complicated web of false judgments, in’ the name of reason, ia spread over all the subjects of knowledge. We fall into a state thus of general confusion, in which even the distinctions of knowledge are lost. Presenting our little mirror to the clear light of God, we might have received true images of things, and gotten by degrees a glorious wealth of knowledge, but we break the mirror, in the perversity of our sin, and offer only the shivered fragments to the light; when, of course, we see distinctly nothing. Then, probably enough, we begin to sympathize with ourselves and justify the ignorance we are in, wondering, if there be a God, that he should be so dark to us, or that he should fall behind these walls of silence, and suffer himself to be only doubtfully guessed, through fogs of ignorance and obscurity. Reminded than he is and must be a mystery, we take it as a great hardship, or, it may be, an absurdity, that we are required to believe what we can not comprehend. We are perplexed by the mode of his existence and action—how can he fill all things, and yet have no dimensions? How is it that he knows all things, before the things known exist? Foreknowing what we will do, how can we be blamed for what we were thus certain beforehand to do? How is it that he creates, governs, redeems, and yet never forms a new purpose, or originates a new act, which is not from eternity? How is he infinitely happy, when a great many things ought to be, and are declared to be, repugnant or abhorrent to his feeling? How does he produce worlds out of nothing, or out of himself, when nothing else exists? How did he invent forms and colors, never having seen them?

Entering the field of supposed revelation, the difficulties are increased in number, and the mysteries are piled higher than before. God is here declared to be incarnate, in the person of Jesus Christ, and the whole history of this wonderful person is made up of things logically incompatible. He is the eternal son of God, and the son of Mary; he is Lord of all, and is born in a manger; stills the sea by his word, and traveling on foot is weary; asks, who convinceth me of sin? and prays like one wading through all the deepest evils of sin; dies like a man and rises like a god, bursting the bars of death by his power. Even God himself is no more simply God, but a threefold mystery that mocks all understanding,—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Is it revelation, then, that only burdens faith with mysteries more nearly impossible? Exactly so; nothing is more clear to any really thoughtful person than that, until some high point is passed, God ought to be enveloped in greater mystery, and will be, the closer he is brought to the mind. Knowing nothing of him, he is no mystery at all; knowing a little, he is mystery begun; knowing more, he is a great and manifold deep, not to be fathomed. We are, and ought to be, overwhelmed by his magnitudes, till we are able to mount higher summits of intelligence than now. Or, if it be answered that, in some of these things, we have contradictions, and not mere difficulties, it is enough to reply that the highest truths are wont to be expressed in forms of thought and language that, as forms, are repugnant. Nor is it any fault of these mere instrumental contradictions that we can not reconcile them, if only they roll upon us senses of God’s deep majesty and love, otherwise impossible. Our amazement itself is but the vehicle of his truth.

Turning next to the creative works of God, we find the cloud also upon these. The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth, by understanding hath he established the heavens, there is no searching of his understanding; why he created the worlds when he did, and not before; what he could have been doing, or what enjoyment having, previous to their creation; and, if all things are governed by inherent laws, what more, as the universal governor, he can find any place to do since:—these are questions, again, before which speculative reason reels in amazement. If the baffled inquirer then drops out the search after God. as many do, and says,—I will go down to nature, and it shall, at least, be my comfort that nature is intelligible, and even a subject of definite science, he shortly discovers that science only changes the place of mystery and leaves it unresolved. Hearing, with a kind of scientific pity, Job’s question about the thunder,—who can understand the noise of his tabernacle? he at first thinks it something of consequence to say that thunder is the noise of electricity, and not of God’s tabernacle at all. But he shortly finds himself asking, who can understand electricity? and then, at last, he is with Job again. So, when he hears Job ask, Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven,-he recollects the great Newtonian discovery of gravity, and how, by aid of that principle, even the weights of the stars have been exactly measured, and their times predicted, and imagines that, now the secrets of astronomy are out, the ordinances of heaven are understood. But here, again, it finally occurs to him to ask, what is gravity? and forth with he is lost in a depth of mystery as profound as that of Job himself. And so, asking what is matter,—what is life, animal and vegetable,—what is heat, light, attraction, affinity,—he discovers that, as yet, we really comprehend nothing, and that nature is a realm as truly mysterious even as God. Not a living thing grows out of the earth, or walks upon it, or flies above it; not an inanimate object exists, in heaven, earth, or sea, which is not filled and circled about with mystery as truly as in the days of Adam or Job, and which is not really as much above the under standing of science, as the deepest things of God’s eternity or of his secret life.

But there is, at least, one subject that he must understand and know even to its center; viz., himself. Is he not a self-conscious being, and how can there be a cloud over that which is comprehended even by consciousness itself? Precisely contrary to this, there are more mysteries and dark questions grouped in his own person, than he has ever met in the whole universe beside. He can not even trace, with any exactness, the process by which he has been trained to be what he is, or the subtle forces by which his character has been shaped. Only the smallest fraction of his past history can he distinctly remember, all the rest is gone. Even the sins for which he must answer before God are gone out of his reach, and can no more be reckoned up in order, till the forgotten past gives up its dead things, to be again remembered. As little can he discover the manner of his own spirit, how he remembers, perceives objects, compares them, and, above all, how he wills and what it is that drives him to a sentence against himself when he wills the wrong. He knows too that, in wrong, he is after self-advantage; and every wrong, he also knew at the time, must be to his disadvantage; why then did he do it? He an not tell. The sin of his sin will be, when he is judged before God, that he can not tell. Even the familiar fact of his connection with a body is altogether inexplicable; and why any act of his will should produce a motion of his body, he can no more discover than why it should produce a motion among the stars. The beating of his heart and the heaving of his lungs are equally mysterious In his whole nature and experience, he is, in fact, a deep and inscrutable mystery to himself. God breathes unseen in his heart, and yet he wonders that God is so far off. Death comes in stealthily, and distills the fatal poison that will end his life, unseen and unsuspected. He goes down to his grave, not knowing, by any judgment of his own, apart from God’s promise, (which he does not believe,) that he shall live again. What shall be the manner of his resurrection and with what body he shall come, he can as little comprehend, as he can the mystery of the incarnation.

Finding, therefore, God, nature, himself, overhung with this same cloud, it is not wonderful that he suffers bitter afflictions and galls himself against every corner of God’s purposes. Why is society a weight so oppressive on the weak and the poor? If sin is such an evil, as it certainly is, why did the Creator, being Almighty, suffer it? Indeed, there is almost nothing that meets us, between our first breathing and our graves, that does not, to an evil mind, connect, in one way or another, some perplexity, some accusing or questioning thought, some inference that m painful, or perhaps atheistical. Can it be? Why should it be? How can a good God let it be? If he means to have it otherwise, is he not defeated? if defeated, is he God? If he has no plan, how can I trust him? if his plan will suffer such things, how then can I trust him?—these are the questions that are continually crowding upon us. The cloud is all the while over us. He hath made darkness his pavilion and thick clouds of the skies. This man’s prosperity is dark; that man’s adversity is dark. The persecutions of the good, the afflictions of the righteous, the desolations of conquest, the fall of nations and their liberties, the extinction of churches, the sufferings of innocence, the pains of animals, the removal by death of genius and character just ripened to bless the world—there is no end to our dark questions. There are times, too, when our own personal experience becomes enveloped in darkness. We not only can not guess what it means, or what God will do with us in it, but it wears a look contrary to what appear to be our just expectations. We are grieved. perplexed, confounded. Other men are blessed in things much worse. We ourselves have been successful in things far more questionable, and when our deserts were less. What does it mean that God is covering his way, under these thick clouds of mystery and seeming caprice? In short, we may sum it up, as a general truth, that nothing in the world is really luminous, to a mind unilluminated by religion; and, if we say that the Christian walks in the light, it is not so much that he can always understand God as it is that he has confidence in him, and has him always near.

Thus we live. Practically, much is known about God and his ways, all that we need to know; but, speculatively, or by the mere understanding, almost nothing, save that we can not know. The believing mind dwells in continual light; for, when God is revealed within, curious and perplexing questions are silent. But the mind that judges God, or demands a right to comprehend him before it believes, stumbles, complains, wrangles, and finds no issue to its labor. Still there is light, and we pass on now to show,—

II. That there is abundance of light on the other side of the cloud, and above it.

This we might readily infer, from the fact that so much of light shines through. When the clouds overhead are utterly black, too black to be visible, we understand that it is night, or that the sun is absent; but, when there is a practical and sufficient light for our works, we know that the sun is behind them, and we call it day. So it is when God spreadeth a cloud upon his throne. We could not see even the mystery, if there were no light behind it, just as we could not see the clouds if no light shone through.

The experience of every soul that turns to God is a convincing proof that there is light somewhere, and that which is bright and clear. Was it a man struggling with great afflictions, an injured man crushed by heavy wrongs; was it a man desolated and broken down by domestic sorrows; was it a rich man stripped by sore losses and calamities, was it a proud man blasted by slander; was it an atheist groping after curious knowledge and starving on the chaff of questions unresolved—be it one or another of these, for all alike were tormented in the same perplexities of the darkened understanding, every thing was dark and dry and empty; but when they come to Christ and believe in him, it is their common surprise to find how suddenly every thing becomes luminous. Speculatively, they understand nothing which before was hidden, and yet there is a wondrous glory shining on their path. God is revealed within, and God is light. The flaming circle of eternal day skirts the horizon of the mind. Their dark questions are forgot, or left behind. They are even become insignificant. Their dignity is gone, and the soul, basking in the blessed sunshine of God’s love, thinks it nothing, any more, if it could understand all mysteries. In all which it is made plain that, if we are under the cloud, there is yet a bright light above.

It will also be found, as another indication, that things which, at some time, appeared to be dark,—afflictions, losses, trials, wrongs, defeated prayers, and deeds of suffering patience yielding no fruit,—are very apt, afterward, to change color and become visitations of mercy. And so where God was specially dark, he commonly brings out, in the end, some good, or blessing in which the subject discovers that his Heavenly Father only understood his wants better than he did himself. God was dark in his way, only because his goodness was too deep in counsel, for him to follow it to its mark. It is with him as with Joseph, sold into slavery, and so into the rule of a kingdom; or as it was with Job, whose latter end, after he had been stripped of every thing, was more blessed than his beginning; or as with Nehemiah, whose sorrowing and disconsolate look itself brought him the opportunity to restore the desolations over which he sorrowed. Even the salvation of the world is accomplished through treachery, false witness, and a cross. All our experience in life goes to show that the better understanding we have of God’s dealings, the more satisfactory they appear. Things which seemed dark or inexplicable, or even impossible for God to suffer without wrong in himself, are really bright with goodness in the end. What then shall we conclude, but that, on the other side of the cloud, there is always a bright and glorious light, however dark it is underneath.

Hence it is that the scriptures make so much of God’s character as a light-giving power, and turn the figure about into so many forms. In God, they say, is light and no darkness at all. According to John’s vision of the Lord—His countenance was as the sun that shineth in his strength. The image of him given by. another apostle is even more sublime,—Who only hath immortality dwelling in light that no man can approach unto,—language, possibly, in which he had some reference to his own conversion, a when light, above the brightness of the sun, bursting upon him and shining round about him, seared his eye-balls so that afterward there fell off from them, as it had been scales of cinder. God, therefore, he conceives to be light inapproachable, as figured in that experience. And probably enough he would say that, as the astronomers in looking at the sun arm their sight with a smoky or colored medium, so the very clouds we complain of are mercifully Interposed, in part, and rather assist than hinder our vision.

It is little therefore to say, and should never be a fact incredible, that however dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud, in that pure empyrean where God dwells, to irradiate every darkness of the world; light enough to clear every difficult question, remove every ground of obscurity, conquer every atheistic suspicion, silence every hard judgment; light enough to satisfy, nay to ravish the mind forever. Even the darkest things God has explanations for, and it is only necessary to be let into his views and designs, as when we are made capable of being we certainly shall, to see a transcendent wisdom and beauty in them all. At present, we have no capacity broad enough to comprehend such a revelation. We see through a glass darkly, but we see what we can. When we can see more, there is more to be seen. On the other side of the cloud there is abundance of light. This brings me to say,—

III. That the cloud we arc under will finally break way aid be cleared.

On this point we have many distinct indications. Thus it coincides with the general analogy of God’s works, to look for obscurity first, and light afterward. According to the scripture account of the creation, there was, first, a period of complete darkness; then a period of mist and cloud, where the day light is visible, but not the sun; then the sun beams out in a clear open sky, which is called, in a way of external description, the creation of the sun. How many of the animals begin their life at birth with their eyes closed, which are afterward opened to behold the world into which they have come. How many myriads of insects begin their existence underground, emerging afterward from their dark abode, to take wings and glitter in the golden light of day. If we observe the manner too of our own intellectual discoveries, we shall generally see the inquirer groping long and painfully under a cloud, trying and experimenting in a thousand guesses to no purpose, till finally a thought takes him and behold the difficulty is solved! At a single flash, so to speak, the light breaks in, and what before was dark is clear and simple as the day. Darkness first and light afterward, this is the law of science universally. By so many and various analogies, we are led to expect that the cloud, under which we live in things spiritual, will finally be lifted, and the splendor of eternal glory poured around us.

Our desire of knowledge, and the manner in which God manages to inflame that desire, indicate the same thing. This desire he has planted naturally in us, as hunger is natural in our bodies, or the want of light in our eyes. And the eye is not a more certain indication that light is to be given, than our desire to know divine things is that we shall be permitted to know them. And the evidence is yet further increased, in the fact that the good have a stronger desire of this knowledge than mere nature kindles. And if we say, with the scripture, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, doubtless the body of it is to come after. It is the glory of God, indeed, to conceal a thing, but not absolutely, or for the sake of concealment. He does it only till a mind and appetite for the truth is prepared, to make his revelation to. He gives us a dim light and sets us prying at the walls of mystery, that he may create an appetite and relish in us for true knowledge. Then it shall be a joyful and glorious gift—drink to the thirsty, food to the hungry, light to the prisoner’s cell. And he will pour it in from the whole firmament of his glory. He will open his secret things, open the boundaries of universal order, open his own glorious mind and his eternal purposes.

The scriptures also notify us of a grand assize, or judgment, when the merit of all his doings with us, as of our doings toward: him, will be revised, and it appears to be a demand of natural reason that some grand exposition of the kind should be made, that we may be let into the manner of his government far enough to do it honor. This will require him to take away the cloud, in regard to all that is darkest in our earthly state. Every perplexity must now be cleared, and the whole moral administration of God, as related to the soul, must be sufficiently explained. Sin, the fall, the pains and penalties and disabilities consequent, redemption, grace, the discipline of the righteous, the abandonment of the incorrigibly wicked—all these must now be understood. God has light enough to shed on all these things, and he will not conceal it. He will shine forth in glorious and transcendent brightness, unmasked by cloud, and all created minds, but the incorrigible outcasts and enemies of his government, will respond;—Alleluia, salvation, and glory, and honor, and power be unto the Lord our God; for just and true are his judgments.

IX.

THE CAPACITY OF RELIGION EXTIRPATED BY DISUSE.

Matthew xxv. 28.—“Take, therefore, the talent from him.”

MANY persons read this parable of the talents, I believe, very much as if it related only to gifts external to the person; or, if to gifts that are personal, to such only as are called talents, in the lower and merely man-ward relations and uses of life; such as the understanding, reason, memory, imagination, feeling, and whatever powers are most concerned in discovery, management, address, and influence over others. But the Great Teacher’s meaning reaches higher than this, and comprehends more; viz., those talents, more especially, which go to exalt the subject in his God-ward relations. The main stress of his doctrine hinges, I conceive, on our responsibility, as regards the capacity of religion itself; for this, in highest pre-eminence, is the talent, the royal gift of man. The capacity of religion, taken as the highest trust God gives us, he is teaching his disciples may be fivefolded, tenfolded, indefinitely increased, as all other gifts are, by a proper use; or it may be neglected, hid, suppressed, and, being thus kept back, may finally be so reduced as to be even extirpated. This latter, the extirpation, or taking away; of the holy talent, is the fearful and admonitory close to which the parable is brought in my text. In pursuing the subject presented, two points will naturally engage our attention.

X.

UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE.

John xx. 8.—“Then went in also that other disciple.”

IN this slight touch or turn of history, is opened to iis if we scan it closely, one of the most serious and fruitful chapters of Christian doctrine. Thus it is that men are ever touching unconsciously the springs of motion in each other; thus it is that one man, without thought or intention, or even a consciousness of the fact, is ever leading some other after him. Little does Peter think, as he comes up where his doubting brother is looking into the sepulchre, and goes straight in, after his peculiar manner, that he is drawing in his brother apostle after him. As little does John think, when he loses his misgivings, and goes into the sepulchre after Peter, that he is following his brother. And just so, unawares to himself, is every man, the whole race through, laying hold of his fellow-man, to lead him where otherwise he would not go’ We overrun the boundaries of our personality—we flow together. A Peter leads a John, a John goes after a Peter, both of them unconscious of any influence exerted or received. And thus our life and conduct are ever propagating themselves, by a law of social contagion, throughout the circles and times in which we live.

There are, then, you will perceive, two sorts of influence belonging to man; that which is active or voluntary, and that which is unconscious;—that which we exert purposely or in the endeavor to sway another, as by teaching, by argument, by persuasion, by threatenings, by offers and promises,—and that which flows out from us, unawares to ourselves, the same which Peter had over John when he led him into the sepulchre. The importance of our efforts to do good, that is of our voluntary influence, and the sacred obligation we are under to exert ourselves in this way, are often and seriously insisted on. It is thus that Christianity has become, in the present age, a principle of so much greater activity than it has been for many centuries before; and we fervently hope that it will yet become far more active than it now is, nor cease to multiply its industry, till it is seen by all mankind to embody the beneficence and the living energy of Christ himself.

But there needs to be produced, at the same time, and partly for this object, a more thorough appreciation of the relative importance of that kind of influence, or beneficence which is insensibly exerted. The tremendous weight and efficacy of this, compared with the other, and the sacred responsibility laid upon us in regard to this, are felt in no such degree or proportion as they should be; and the consequent loss we suffer in character, as well as that which the Church suffers in beauty and strength, is incalculable. The more stress, too, needs to be laid on this subject of insensible influence, because it is insensible; because it is out of mind, and, when we seek to trace it, beyond a full discovery.

If the doubt occur to any of you, in the announcement of this subject, whether we are properly responsible for an influence which we exert insensibly; we are not, I reply, except so far as this influence flows directly from our character and conduct. And this it does, even much more uniformly than our active influence. In the latter we may fail of our end by a want of wisdom or skill m which case we are still as meritorious, in God’s sight, as if we succeeded. So, again, we may really succeed, and do great good by our active endeavors, from motives altogether base and hypocritical, in which case we are as evil, in God’s sight, as if we had failed. But the influences we exert unconsciously will almost never disagree with our real character. They are honest influences, following our character, as the shadow follows the sun. And, therefore, we are much more certainly responsible for them, and their effects on the world. They go streaming from us in all directions, though in channels that we do not see, poisoning or healing around the roots of society, and among the hidden wells of character. If good our selves, they are good; if bad, they are bad. And, since they reflect so exactly our character, it is impossible to doubt our responsibility for their effects on the world. We must answer not only for what we do with a purpose, but for the influence we exert insensibly. To give you any just impressions of the breadth and seriousness of such a reckoning I know to be impossible. No mind can trace it. But it will be something gained if I am able to awaken only a suspicion of the vast extent and power of those influences, which are ever flowing out unbidden upon society, from your life and character.

In the prosecution of my design, let me ask of you, first of all, to expel the common prejudice that there can be nothing of consequence in unconscious influences, because they make no report, and fall on the world unobserved. Histories and biographies make little account of the power men exert insensibly over each other. They tell how men have led armies, established empires, enacted laws, gained causes, sung, reasoned, and taught;—always occupied in setting forth what they do with a purpose. But what they do without a purpose, the streams of influence that flow out from their persons unbidden on the world, they can not trace or compute, and seldom even mention. So also the public laws make men responsible only for what they do with a positive purpose, and take no account of the mischiefs or benefits that are communicated, by their noxious or healthful example. The same is true in the discipline of families, churches, and schools; they make no account of the things we do, except we will them. What we do insensibly passes for nothing, because no human government can trace such influences with sufficient certainty to make their authors responsible.

But you must not conclude that influences of this kind are insignificant, because they are unnoticed and noiseless. How is it in the natural world? Behind the mere show, the outward noise and stir of the world, nature always conceals her hand of control, and the laws by which she rules. Who ever saw with the eye, for example, or heard with the ear, the exertions of that tremendous astronomic force, which every moment holds the compact of the physical universe together? The lightning is, in fact, but a mere fire-fly spark in comparison; but, because it glares on the clouds, and thunders so terribly in the ear, and rives the tree or the lock where it falls, many will be ready to think that it is a vastly more potent agent than gravity.

The Bible calls the good man’s life a light, and it is the nature of light to flow out spontaneously in all directions, and fill the world unconsciously with its beams. So the Christian shines, it would say, not so much because he will, as because he is a luminous object. Not that the active influence of Christians is made of no account in the figure, but only that this symbol of light has its propriety in the fact that their unconscious influence is the chief influence, and has the precedence in its power over the world. And yet, there are many who will be ready to think that light is a very tame and feeble instrument, because it is noiseless. An earthquake, for example, is to them a much more vigorous and effective agency. Hear how it comes thundering through the solid foundations of nature. It rocks a whole continent. The noblest works of man,—cities, monuments, and temples,—are in a moment leveled to the ground, or swallowed down the opening gulfs of fire. Little do they think that the light of every morning, the soft, and genial, and silent light, is an agent many times more powerful. But let the light of the morning cease and return no more, let the hour of morning come, and bring with it no dawn: the outcries of a horror-striken world fill the air, and make, as it were, the darkness audible. The beasts go wild and frantic at the loss of the sun. The vegetable growths turn pale and die. A chill creeps on, and frosty winds begin to howl across the freezing earth. Colder, and yet colder, is the night. The vital blood, at length, of all creatures, stops congealed. Down goes the frost toward the earth’s center. The heart of the sea is frozen; nay, the earthquakes are themselves frozen in, under their fiery caverns. The very globe itself, too, and a1 the fellow planets that have lost their sun, are be come mere balls of ice, swinging silent in the darkness Such is the light, which revisits us in the silence of the morning. It makes no shock or scar. It would not wake an infant in his cradle. And yet it perpetually new creates the world, rescuing it, each. morning as a prey, from nigh, and chaos. So the Christian is a light, even “the light of the world,” and we must not think that, because he shines insensibly or silently, as a mere luminous object, he is therefore powerless. The greatest powers are ever those whi-h lie back of the little stirs and commotions of nature; and I verily believe that the insensible influences of good men are as much more potent than what I have called their voluntary or active, as the great silent powers of nature are of greater consequence than her little disturbances arid tumults. The law of human influence is deeper than many suspect, and they lose sight of it altogether. The outward endeavors made by good men or bad to sway others, they call their influence; whereas it is, in fact, but a fraction, and, in most cases, but a very small fraction, of the good or evil that flows out of their lives. Nay, I will even go further. How many persons do you meet, the insensible influence of whose manners and character is so decided as often to thwart their voluntary influence; so that, whatever they attempt to do, in the way of controlling others, they are sure to carry the exact opposite of what they intend! And it will generally be found that, where men undertake by argument or persuasion to exert a power, in the face of qualities that make them odious or detestable, or only not entitled to respect, their insensible influence will be too strong for them. The total effect of the life is then of a kind directly opposite to the voluntary endeavor; which, of course, does not add so much as a fraction to it.

I call your attention, next, to the twofold powers of effect and expression by which man connects with his fellow man. If we distinguish man as a creature of language, and thus qualified to communicate himself to others, there are in him two sets or kinds of language, one which is voluntary in the use, and one that is involuntary; that of speech in the literal sense, and that expression of the eye, the face, the look, the gait, the motion, the tone or cadence, which is sometimes called the natural language of the sentiments. This natural language, too, is greatly enlarged by the conduct of life, that which, in business and society, reveals the principles and spirit of men. Speech, or voluntary language, is a door to the soul, that we may open or shut at will; the other is a door that stands open evermore, and reveals to others constantly and often very clearly, the tempers, tastes, and motives of their hearts. Within, as we may represent, is character, charging the common reservoir of influence, and through these twofold gates of the soul, pouring itself out on the world. Out of one it flows at choice, and whensoever we purpose to do good or evil to men. Out of the other it flows each moment, as light from the sun, and propagates itself in all beholders.

Then if we go over to others, that is, to the subjects of influence, we find every man endowed with two inlets of impression; the ear and the understanding for the reception of speech, and the sympathetic powers, the sensibilities or affections, for tinder to those sparks of emotion revealed by looks, tones, manners, and general conduct. And these sympathetic powers, though not immediately rational, are yet inlets, open on all sides, to the understanding and character. They have a certain wonderful capacity to receive impressions, and catch the meaning of signs, and propagate in us whatsoever falls into their passive molds, from others. The impressions they receive do not come through verbal propositions, and are never received into verbal proposition, it may be, in the mind, and therefore many think nothing of them. But precisely on this account are they the more powerful, because it is as if one heart were thus going directly into another, and carrying in its feelings with it. Beholding, as in a glass, the feelings of our neighbor, we are changed into the same image, by the assimilating power of sensibility and fellow-feeling. Many have gone so far, and not without show, at least, of reason, as to maintain that the look or expression, and even the very features of children, are often changed, by exclusive intercourse with nurses and attendants. Furthermore, if we carefully consider, we shall find it scarcely possible to doubt, that simply to look on bad and malignant faces, or those whose expressions have become infected by vice, to be with them and become familiarized to them, is enough permanently to affect the character of persons of mature age. I do not say that it must of necessity subvert their character, for the evil looked upon may never be loved or welcomed in practice; but it is something to have these bad images in the soul, giving out their expressions there, and diffusing their odor among the thoughts, as long as we live. How dangerous a thing is it, for example, for a man to become accustomed to sights of cruelty? What man, valuing the honor of his soul, would not shrink from yielding himself to such an influence? No more is it a thing of indifference to become accustomed to look on the manners, and receive the bad expression of any kind of sin.

The door of involuntary communication, I have said, is always open. Of course we are communicating ourselves in this way, to others at every moment of our intercourse or presence with them. But how very seldom, in comparison, do we undertake by means of speech to influence others! Even the best Christian, one who most improves his opportunities to do good, attempts but seldom to sway another by voluntary influence, whereas he is all the while shining as a luminous object unawares, and communicating of his heart to the world.

But there is yet another view of this double line of communication which man has with his fellow-men, which is more general, and displays the import of the truth yet more convincingly. It is by one of these modes of communication that we are constituted members of voluntary society, and by the other, parts of a general mass, or members of involuntary society. You are all, in a certain view, individuals, and separate as persons from each other: you are also, in a certain other view, parts of a common body, as truly as the parts of a stone. Thus if you ask how it is that you and all men came, without your consent to exist in society, to be within its power, to be under its laws, the answer is, that while you are a man, you are also a fractional element of a larger and more comprehensive being, called society—be it the family, the church, the state. In a certain department of your nature, it is open; its sympathies and feelings are open. On this open side you all adhere together, as parts of a larger nature, in which there is a common circulation of want, impulse, and law. Being thus made common to each other voluntarily, you become one mass, one consolidated social body, animated by one life. And observe how far this involuntary communication and sympathy between the members of a state or family is sovereign over their character. It always results in what we call the national or family spirit; for there is a spirit peculiar to every state and family in the world. Sometimes, too, this national or family spirit takes a religious or an irreligious character, and appears almost to absorb the religious self-government of individuals. What was the national spirit of France, for example, at a certain time, but a spirit of infidelity? What is the religious spirit of Spain at this moment, but a spirit of bigotry, quite as wide of Christianity and destructive to character as the spirit of falsehood? What is the family spirit in many a house, but the spirit of gain, or pleasure, or appetite, in which every thing that is warm, dignified, genial, and good in religion, is visibly absent? Sometimes you will almost fancy that you see the shapes of money in the eyes of the children. So it is that we are led on by nations, as it were, to a good or bad immortality. Far down in the secret foundations of life and society, there lie concealed great laws and channels of influence, which make the race common to each other in all the main departments or divisions of the social mass-laws which often escape our notice altogether, but which are to society as gravity to the general system of God’s works.

But these are general considerations, and more fit, perhaps, to give you a rational conception of the modes of influence and their relative power, than to verify that conception, or establish its truth. I now proceed to add, therefore, some miscellaneous proofs of a more particular nature.

And I mention, first of all, the instinct of imitation in children. We begin our mortal experience, not with acts grounded in judgment or reason, or with ideas received through language, but by simple imitation, and, under the guidance of this, we lay our foundations. The child looks and listens, and whatsoever tone of feeling or manner of conduct is displayed around him, sinks into his plastic, passive soul, and becomes a mold of his being ever after, The very handling of the nursery is significant, and the petulance, the passion, the gentleness, the tranquillity indicated by it, are all reproduced in the child. His soul is a purely receptive nature, and that, for a considerable period, without choice or selection. A little further on, he begins voluntarily to copy every thing he sees. Voice, manner, gait, every thing which the eye sees, the mimic instinct delights to act over. And thus we have a whole generation of future men, receiving from us their very beginnings, and the deepest impulses of their life and immortality. They watch us every moment, in the family, before the hearth, and at the table; and when we are meaning them no good or evil, when we are conscious of exerting no influence over them, they are drawing from us impressions and molds of habit, which, if wrong, no heavenly discipline can wholly remove; or, if right, no bad associations utterly dissipate. Now it may be doubted, I think, whether, in all the active influence of our lives, we do as much to shape the destiny of our fellow-men, as we do in this single article of unconscious influence over children.

Still further on, respect for others takes the place of imitation. We naturally desire the, approbation or good opinion of others. You see the strength of this feeling in the article of fashion. How few persons have the nerve to resist a fashion! We have fashions, too, in literature, and in worship, and in moral and religious doctrine, almost equally powerful. How many will violate the best rules of society, because it is the practice of their circle! How many reject Christ because of friends or acquaintance, who have no suspicion of the influence they exert, and will not have, till the last day shows them what they have done Every good man has thus a power in his person, more mighty than his words and arguments, and which others feel when he little suspects it. Every bad man, too, has a fund of poison in his character, which is tainting those around him, when it is not in his thoughts to do them an injury. He is read and understood. His sensual tastes and habits, his unbelieving spirit, his suppressed leer at religion, have all a power, and take hold of the hearts of others, whether he will have it so or not.

Again, how well understood is it, that the most active feelings and impulses of mankind are contagious. How quick enthusiasm of any sort is to kindle, and how rapidly it catches from one to another, till a nation blazes in the flame! In the case of the crusades, you have an example where the personal enthusiasm of one man put all the states of Europe in motion. Fanaticism is almost equally contagious. Fear and superstition always infect the mind of the circle in which they are manifested. The spirit of war generally becomes an epidemic of madness, when once it has got possession of a few minds. The spirit of party is propagated in a similar manner. How any slight ope. ration in the market may spread, like a fire, if successful, till trade runs wild in a general infatuation, is well known. Now, in all these examples, the effect is produced, not by active endeavor to carry influence, but mostly by that insensible propagation which follows, when a flame of any kind is once kindled.

Is it also true, you may ask, that the religious spirit propagates itself or tends to propagate itself in the same way? I see no reason to question that it does. Nor does any thing in the doctrine of spiritual influences, when rightly understood, forbid the supposition. For spiritual influences are never separated from the laws of thought in the individual, and the laws of feeling and influence in society. If, too, every disciple is to be an “epistle known and read of all men,” what shall we expect, but that all men will be somehow affected by the reading? Or, if he is to be a light in the world, what shall we look for, but that others, seeing his good works, shall glorify God on his account? How often is it seen too as a fact of observation, that one, or a few good men, kindle at length a holy fire in the community in which they live, and become the leaven of a general reformation! Such men give a more vivid proof in their persons of the reality of religious faith, than any words or arguments could yield. They are active; they endeavor, of course, to exert a good voluntary influence; but still their chief power lies in their holiness, and the sense they produce in others of their close relation to God.

It now remains to exhibit the very important fact, that where the direct or active influence of men is supposed to be great, even this is due, in a principal degree, to that insensible influence by which their arguments, reproofs, and persuasions are secretly invigorated. It is not mere words which turn men; it is the heart mounting, uncalled, into the expression of the features; it is the eye illuminated by reason, the look beaming with goodness; it is the tone of the voice, that instrument of the soul, which changes quality with such amazing facility, and gives out in the soft, the tender, the tremulous, the firm, every shade of emotion and character. And so much is there in this, that the moral stature and character of the man that speaks are likely to be well represented in his manner. If he is a stranger, his way will inspire confidence and attract good will. His virtues will be seen, as it were, gathering round him to minister words and forms of thought, and their voices will be heard in the fall of his cadences. And the same is true of bad men, or men who have nothing in their character corresponding to what they attempt to do. If without heart or interest you attempt to move another, the involuntary man tells what you are doing, in a hundred ways at once. A hypocrite, endeavoring to exert a good influence, only tries to convey by words what the lying look, and the faithless affectation, or dry exaggeration of his manner, perpetually resists. We have it for a fashion to attribute great or even prodigious results to the voluntary efforts and labors of men. Whatever they effect is commonly referred to nothing but the immediate power of what they do. Let us take an example, like that of Paul, and analyze it. Paul was a man of great fervor and enthusiasm. He combined, withal, more of what is lofty and morally commanding in his character, than most of the very distinguished men of the world. Having this for his natural character, and his natural character exalted and made luminous by christian faith, and the manifest indwelling of God, he had of course an almost superhuman sway over others. Doubtless he was intelligent, strong in argument, eloquent, active, to the utmost of his powers, but still he moved the world more by what he was than by what he did. The grandeur and spiritual splendor of his character were ever adding to his active efforts an element of silent power, which was the real and chief cause of their efficacy. He convinced, subdued, inspired, and led, because of the half divine authority which appeared in his conduct, and his glowing spirit. He fought the good fight, because he kept the faith, and filled his powerful nature with influences drawn from higher worlds.

And here I must conduct you to a yet higher example, even that of the Son of God, the light of the world. Men dislike to be swayed by direct, voluntary influence. They are jealous of such control, and are therefore best approached by conduct and feeling, and the authority of simple worth, which seem to make no purposed onset. If goodness appears, they welcome its celestial smile; if heaven descends to encircle them, they yield to its sweetness; if truth appears in the life, they honor it with a secret homage; if personal majesty and glory appear, they bow with reverence, and acknowledge with shame, their own vileness. Now it is on this side of human nature that Christ visits us, preparing just that kind of influence which the spirit of truth may wield with the most persuasive and subduing effect. It is the grandeur of his character which constitutes the chief power of his ministry, not his miracles or teachings apart from his character. Miracles were useful, at the time, to arrest attention, and his doctrine is useful at all times as the highest revelation of truth possible in speech; but the greatest truth of the gospel, not withstanding, is Christ himself—a human body become the organ of the divine nature, and revealing, under the conditions of an earthly life, the glory of God! Tile Scripture writers have much to say, in this connection, of the image of God; and an image, you know, is that which simply represents, not that which acts, or reasons, or persuades. Now it is this image of God which makes tile center, the sun itself, of the gospel. The journeyings, teachings, miracles, and sufferings of Christ, all had their use in bringing out this image, or what is the same, in making conspicuous the character and feelings of God, both toward sinners and toward sin. And here is the power of Christ—it is what of God’s beauty, love, truth, and justice shines through him. It is the influence which flows unconsciously and spontaneously out of Christ, as the friend of man, the light of the world, the glory of the Father, made visible. And some have gone so far as to conjecture that God made the human person, originally, with a view to its becoming the organ or vehicle, by which he might reveal his communicable attributes to other worlds. Christ, they believe, came to inhabit this organ, that he might execute a purpose so sublime. The human person is constituted, they say, to be a mirror of God; and God, being imaged in that mirror, as in Christ, is held up to the view of this and other worlds. It certainly is to the view of this; and if the Divine nature can use this organ so effectively to express itself unto us, if it can bring itself, through the looks, tones, motions, and conduct of a human person, more close to our sympathies than by any other means, how can we think that an organ so communicative, inhabited by us, is not always breathing our spirit and transferring our image insensibly to others?

I have protracted the argument on this subject beyond what I could have wished, but I can not dismiss it without suggesting a few thoughts necessary to its complete practical effect.

One very obvious and serious inference from it, and the first which I will name, is, that it is impossible to live in this world, and escape responsibility. It is not they alone, as you have seen, who are trying purposely to convert or corrupt others, who exert an influence; you can not live without exerting influence. The doors of your soul are open on others, and theirs on you. You inhabit a house which is well nigh transparent; and what you are within,’ you are ever showing yourself to be without, by signs that have no ambiguous expression. If you had the seeds of a pestilence in your body, you would not have a more active contagion, than you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence—an influence, too, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble. You say that you mean well; at least, you think you mean to injure no one. Do you injure no one? Is your example harmless? Is it ever on the side of God and duty? You can not reasonably doubt that others are continually re3eiving impressions from your character. As little can you doubt that you must answer for these impressions. If the influence you exert is unconsciously exerted, then it is only the most sincere, the truest expression of your character. And for what can you be held responsible, if not for this? Do not deceive yourselves in the thought that you are, at least, doing no injury, and are, therefore, living without responsibility; first make it sure that you are not every hour infusing moral death insensibly into your children, wives, husbands, friends, and acquaintances. By a mere look or glance, not unlikely, you are conveying the influence that shall turn the scale of some one’s immortality. Dismiss, therefore, the thought that you are living without responsibility; that is impossible. Better is it frankly to admit the truth; and if you will risk the influence of a character unsanctified by duty and religion, prepare to meet your reckoning manfully, and receive the just recompense of reward.

The true philosophy or method of doing good is also here explained. It is, first of all and principally, to be good—to have a character that will of itself communicate good. There must and will be active effort where there is goodness of principle; but the latter we should hold to be the principal thing, the root and life of all.. Whether it is a mistake more sad or more ridiculous, to make mere stir synonymous with doing good, we need not inquire; enough, to be sure that one who has taken up such a notion of doing good, is for that reason a nuisance to the church. The Christian is called a light, not lightning. In order to act with effect on others, he must walk in the Spirit, and thus become the image of goodness: he must be so akin to God, and so filled with His dispositions, that he shall seem to surround himself with a hallowed atmosphere. It is folly to endeavor to make ourselves shine before we are luminous. If the sun without his beams should talk to the planets, and argue with them till the final day, it would not make them shine; there must be light in the sun itself, and then they will shine, of course. And this, my brethren, is what God intends for you all. It is the great idea of his gospel, and the work of his spirit, to make you lights in the world. His greatest joy is to give you character, to beautify your example, to exalt your principles, and make you each the depository of his own almighty grace. But in order to this, some thing is necessary on your part-a full surrender of your mind to duty and to God, and a perpetual desire of this spiritual intimacy; having this, having a participation thus of the goodness of God, you will as naturally communicate good as the sun communicates his beams.

Our doctrine of unconscious and undesigning influence shows how it is, also, that the preaching of Christ is often so unfruitful, and especially in times of spiritual coldness. It is not because truth ceases to be truth, nor, of necessity, because it is preached in a less vivid manner, but because there are so many influences, preaching against the preacher. He is one, the people are many; his attempt to convince and persuade is a voluntary influence; their lives, on the other hand, and especially the lives of those who profess what is better, are so many unconscious influences, ever streaming forth upon the people, and back and forth between each other. He preaches the truth, and they, with one consent, are preaching the truth down; and how can he prevail against so many, and by a kind of influence so unequal? When the people of God are glowing with spiritual devotion to Him, and love to men, the case is different; then they are all preaching with the preacher, and making an atmosphere of warmth for his words to fall in; great is the company of them that publish the truth, and proportionally great its power. Shall I say more? Have you not already felt, my brethren, the application to which I would bring you? We do not exonerate ourselves; we do not claim to be nearer to God or holier than you; but ah! you know not how easy it is to make a winter about us, or how cold it feels! Our endeavor is to preach the truth of Christ and his cross as clearly and as forcibly as we can. Sometimes it has a visible effect, and we are filled with joy; sometimes it has no effect, and then we struggle on, as we must, but under great oppression. Have we none among you that preach against us in your lives? If we show you the light of God’s truth, does it never fall on banks of ice; which if the light shines through, the crystal masses are yet as cold as before? We do not accuse you; that we leave to God, and to those who may rise up in the last day to testify against you. If they shall come out of your own families; if they are the children that wear your names, the husband or wife of your affections; if they declare that you, by your example, kept them away from Christ’s truth and mercy, we may have accusations to meet of our own and we leave you to acquit yourselves as best you may. I only warn you, here, of the guilt which our Lord Jesus Christ will impute to them that hinder his gospel.

XI.

OBLIGATION A PRIVILEGE.

Psalms cxix. 54.—“Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage.”

WHEN the eastern traveler takes shelter from the scorching heat of noon, or halts for the night, in some inn or caravansary, which is, for the time, the house of his pilgrimage, he takes the sackbut or the lyre and sooths his rest with a song-a song it may be of war, romance, or love. But the poet of Israel finds his theme, we perceive, in the statutes of Jehovah—Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage. These have been my pastime, with these I have refreshed my resting hours by the way, and cheered myself onward through the wearisome journey and across the scorching deserts of life. Not songs of old tradition, not ballads of war, or wine, or love, have supported me, but I have sung of God’s commandments, and these have been the solace of my weary hours, the comfort of my rest. This 119th Psalm, which is, in every verse, an ode or hymn in praise of God’s law,—sufficiently illustrates his meaning.

Multitudes of men, it is evident as it need be, have a very different conception of this matter. Divine law, divine obligation, responsibility in any form, authority under any conditions, they feel to be a real annoyance to life. They want their own will and way. Why must they be hampered by these constant restrictions? Why must they be shortened in their pleasures, crippled in their ambition, held back from all their strongest impulses; just those by which they might otherwise show their vigor and make a brave and manly figure of their life. But in stead of being allowed any such generous freedom, they are tethered, they fancy, tamed, subjected to continual scruples of fear and twinges of conviction, confused, weakened, let down in their confidence, and all the best comfort of their life is taken away. Could they only be rid of this annoyance, life would be a comparatively easy and fair experience.

In this controversy you have taken up with the Psalmist, he is very plainly right, and you as plainly wrong; as I shall now undertake to show, and as you, considering that God’s law is upon you and can by no means be escaped, ought most gladly to hear and discover. His doctrine, removing the poetry of the form, is this,—

That obligation to God is our privilege.

Some of you will fancy, it may be, at the outset, that the pilgrimage he speaks of is made by the statutes; that the restrictions of obligations are so hard and close, as to cut off, in fact, all the true pleasures of life, and reduce it to a pilgrimage in its dryness; But this pilgrimage is made by no sense of restriction. Every man, even the most licentious and reckless is a pilgrim; the atheist is a pilgrim; such are only a more unhappy class of pilgrims, a reluctant class who are driven across the deserts, cheerfully traversed by others, and by the fountains where others quench their thirst. There is a perfect harmony between obligation to God and all the sources of pleasure and happiness God has provided, so that there is no real collision between the statutes over us and the conditions round us. It is only false pleasures that are denied us, those that would brutalize the mind, or mar the health of the body, or somehow violate the happiness of fellow beings round us. Consider the long run of life and take in all the interests of it, and you will find that what we call obligation to God, not only does not infringe upon your pleasures, but actually commands you on, to the greatest and highest enjoyments of which you are capable.

There is another objection or false impression that needs to be noticed; viz., that the very enforcements of penalty and terror added to God’s law, to compel an acceptance of it or obedience to it, are a kind of concession that it is not a privilege, but a restriction or severity rather, which can not otherwise be carried. Is it then a fair inference, that human laws are severe and hard restrictions, and no true privilege, or blessing, because they are duly enforced by additions of penalty? It is only to malefactors and felons that they are so; and for these only, considered as being enforced by terrors, they are made. They are restrictions to the lawless and disobedient, never to the good. On the contrary, a right minded, loyal people, will value their laws and cherish them as the safeguard even of their liberty. Just so also, the righteous. man will have God’s statutes for his songs, in all the course of his pilgrimage.

Dismissing now these common impressions, let us go on to inquire a little more definitely, how it would be with us, if we existed under no terms of obligation; for if we are to settle it fairly, whether obligation is a privilege or not. this manifestly is the mode in which the question should be stated. The true alternative between obligation and no obligation supposes, on the negative side, that we are not even to have the sense of obligation, or of moral distinctions; for the sense of obligation is the same thing as being obliged, or put in responsibility.

In such a case, our external condition must obviously be as different as possible from what it is now.

In the first place, there could, of course, be no such thing as criminal law for the defense of property, reputation and life; because the moral distinctions in which criminal law is grounded, are all wanting. The laws against theft and murder, for example, suppose the fact that these are understood already and blamed as being wrongs—violations, that is, of moral obligation. And there is no conceivable way of defining these crimes, and bringing them to judgment, except by reference to notions, or distinctions already admitted. Murder, for example, can not be defined as a mere killing, or in any external way; for no external sign will hold without exception, Hence the law is obliged to define it as a killing with malice aforethought—to go into the heart, that is, and distinguish it there, as being done with a consciously criminal intent. The defenses of civil society, therefore, must all be wanting, where there is no recognized obligation to God. We are so far reduced to the condition of the quadruped races. Having, as they, no moral and religious ideas, we can not legislate. Civil society is, in fact, impossible, and all that is genial and peaceful, under the benign protection of the state, is a good no longer attainable. If a man’s property is plundered, he knows it only as a loss, not as a crime. If his children are murdered or sold into slavery, he may be angry as a bear robbed of her whelps, but he has no conception of a wrong in what lie suffers. There is nothing left us in these low possibilities, bat to herd, as animals do, and take from each other what we must; to gore and tear and devour; to fly, to hide, to quiver with terror, the weak before the strong, and so live on as we best can; for to invent a criminal law without even the notion of a crime, and to phrase it in language that any tribunal could interpret, when the idea of crime has not yet arrived, is manifestly impossible.

Again, what we call society, as far as there is any element of dignity or blessing in it, depends on these moral obligations. Without these it would be intercourse without friendship, truth, charity, or mercy. All that is warm and trustful and dear in society, rests in the keeping of these moral bonds.. Extinguish moral ideas and laws and these lovely virtues also die; for their life is upheld by the sense of duty and right. Where there is no law there is no sin, or guilt—as little is there any virtue. Of course there is nothing to praise, or confide in. Truth is not conceived. Friendship and love are things of convenience, determinable also by convenience. Chastity, without the moral idea, is a name as honorable as hunger, and as worthy to be kept. Purity and truth are accidents. Domestic faith and the tender affections that ennoble and bless the homes, are as reliable as the other caprices of unregulated impulse and passion. Without moral obligations, therefore, binding us to God, society is discontinued. Nothing that deserves the name is possible. Life, in fact, is wrong with. out a sense of wrong; society a proximity of distrust and fear, and the passions, unrestrained by duty, a hell of general torment, without any sense of blame to explain it.

But these are matters external to which I refer, just to call up some faint conception of the immense revolution it makes in our human existence, only to remove this one element of obligation. Let us enter now the spiritual nature itself, and see how much is there depending on this great privilege of obligation to God.

This claim of God’s authority, this bond of duty laid upon us, is virtually the throne of God erected in the soul. It is sovereign, of course, unaccommodating therefore, and may be felt as a sore annoyance. When violated, it will scorch the bosom ever with pangs of remorse that are the most fiery and implacable of all mental sufferings. But of this, there is no need; all such pains are avoidable by due obedience. And then obligation to God becomes the spring instead of the most dignified, fullest, healthiest joys any where attainable. The self-approving consciousness, the consciousness of good—what can raise one to a loftier pitch of confidence and blessing. It is with these obligations to God, just as it is with the physical laws. These latter, violated by neglect, excess, or obstinacy, are our most relentless enemies and persecutors; respected and deferred to, they become our most faithful friends and helpers. Did any one ever judge, on this account, that they are only hindrances and restraints on our happiness which were better to be discontinued? Loosen then the grand attractions, and let the huge bulks of heaven fly as they will. Make the stones soluble, at times, and the waters combustible, without any change of conditions; let congelation be sometimes by fire, and liquefaction by frost; let the water-fall sometimes mount upward into the air, and the smoke plunge downward on the ground. Abolish all the stable restrictions of law, and let nature loose, to go such way, or after such gait, as she pleases; and, by that time, we shall find that her uses are gone, and that all our magnificent liberty in them is taken away. The powers, which before consented to serve us, have become our enemies, and we are lost in a hell of physical anarchy that suffers none of the uses of life. Just so it would be, if we could exterminate and strip out of our way these constraints of obligation to God. We should find that even the release we covet is, in fact, the bitterest and sorest frustration of our desired liberty.

Thus how much, for example, does it signify, as regards your comfort, that this one matter, a matter so profoundly central too, in your experiences and views of life, is fixed. Opinions, sentiments, hopes, fears, popularities, and to these also you may add all the honors and gifts of fortune, are in a fluxile, shifting state. There is no fixed element in any one of them. You live in them as you do in the weather. Even the courses of your mind, and the shifting phases you pass are a kind of internal weather that never settles, or becomes fixed. But in the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable and lay hold, as it were, of the eternities. At the very center of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. And in that fact every thing pertaining to your existence is changed. You are no more afloat or a-sea, in the endless phases and variabilities just referred to, but a very large class of your judgments and views of life and acknowledged principles are immovably settled. A standard is set up in your thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law Few men ever conceive what they owe to obligation here, as the mere bond of order and mental conservation. Doubtless obligation violated, is the minister of pain, but to be without obligation, is a pain more bitter and distract ing; for it is much to know that you have a compass in the ship, even if you do not use it. Sent forth into life to choose every thing by mere interest and will, to be played with always by your passions and your fancies, and to frame your judgments apart from any fixed point or standard of judgment, life would soon become a distressful puzzle to you, which you could not bear. You would make and unmake, till you lost all stability and all confidence in your own thoughts. Your confusion itself would be insupportable. You would even go mad in the struggle; you would cry aloud and lift your dismal prayer to accident, in fault of any other divinity, for something fixed. Give me fate, give me something established, though it be a continent of fire! I can not live in these bottomless sands!

How good and sublime a gift, in this view, is the gift of law. It comes down smiling from the skies and enters into souls, as the beginning and throne of wisdom. Or using a different figure, we may say that man comes into being bringing his law with him; a law as definite and stable as that of the firmament; one that shall go with him, when consentingly accepted, and mark out the path of his pilgrimage, binding all his otherwise random exercises of desire, fancy and free will, to an orbit of goodness and truth. Every thing within him now is under a determinating rule. His soul is held in a harmonious balance of powers, like the heavenly worlds. Reason, feeling, passion, fancy, all work in together under the great conserving law of obligation to God, and the soul is kept in recollection, as a self-understanding nature. Who can think of man, wedded in this manner to the stability and eternity of God, without uniting a sense even of grandeur and sublimity, with the bond of obligation by which ne is th-u set fast and centralized in the immutable.

Consider, again, the truly fraternal relation between our obligations to God and what we call our liberty. Instead of restraining our liberty, they only show us, in fact, how to use our liberty, and how to air it, if I may so speak, in great and heroic actions. How insipid and foolish a thing were life, if there were nothing laid upon us to do. What is it, on the other hand, but the zest and glory of life, that something good and great, something really worthy to be done is laid upon us. It is not self-indulgence allowed, but victory achieved, that can make a fit happiness for man. Therefore we are set down here amid changes, perils, wrongs and miseries, where to save ourselves and serve our kind, all manner of great works are to be done. Besides, we practically admit the arrangement, much oftener than we think. Tell any young man, for example, who is just converted to Christ, of some great sacrifice he is called to make; as in preaching Christ to men, or going to preach him to the heathen; and that call, set forth as a sacrifice of all things, will work upon him more powerfully, by a hundred times, than it would, if you undertook to soften it by showing what respect he would gain, how comfortable he would be, and how much easier in this than in any other calling of life. We do not want any such caresses in the name of duty. To let go self-indulgence and try something stronger, is a call that draws us always, when our heart is up for duty; nay, even nature loves heroic impulse and oftentimes prefers the difficult.

XII

HAPPINESS AND JOY.

John xv. 11.—“These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”

CHRIST enters the world, bringing joy;—Good tidings of great joy, cry the angels, which shall be to all people. So now he leaves it, bestowing his gospel as a gift of joy,—These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you and that your joy might be full. This testament of his joy he also renews in his parting prayer. And now come I to thee, and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. “Man of sorrows” though we call him, still he counts himself the man of joy.

Would that I could bring you into his meaning, when he thus speaks, and assist you to realize the unspeakable import which it has to him. It is an impression deeply rooted in the minds of men that the Christian life is a life of constraint, hardship, loss, penance, and comparative suffering; Christ, you perceive, has no such conception of it, and no such conception is true. Contrary, to this, I shall undertake to show that it is a life of true joy, the profoundest and only real joy attainable,—not a merely future joy, to be received hereafter, as the reward of a painful and sad life here, but a present, living, and completely full joy, unfolded in the soul of every man whose fidelity and constancy permit him to receive it.

XIII

THE TRUE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE.

Revelations ii. 4.—“Nevertheless, I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love.”

THERE are some texts of scripture that suffer a much harder lot than any of the martyrs, because their martyrdom is perpetual; and this I think is one of the number. Two classes appear to concur in destroying its dignity; viz., the class who deem it a matter of cant to make any thing of conversion, and the class who make religion itself a matter of cant, by seeing nothing in it but conversion.

My object, however, is not so much to balance these opposites, or even to recover the passage of scripture that is lost between them; but it is to clear the way of all christian experience, by showing what it does and how it proceeds. There are many disciples of our time who, like the Ephesian disciples, are to be warmly commended for their intended fidelity, and are yet greatly troubled and depressed by what appears to be a real loss of ground in their piety. Christ knows their works, approves their patience, commends their withdrawing always from them that are evil; testifies for them that they have withstood false teachers, with a wary and circumspect fidelity, made sacrifices, labored and not fainted; and yet they are compelled to sigh over a certain subsidence of that pure sensibility and that high inspiration, in which their disciples ship began. The clearness of that hour is blurred, the fresh joy interspaced with dryness. Omissions of duty are discovered which they did not mean; they do not en. joy the sacrifices they make as they once did, and make them often in a legal, self-constrained manner. Rallying themselves to new struggles, as they frequently do, to retrieve their losses, they simply hurry on their own will, and therefore thrust themselves out of faith only the more rapidly. The danger is, at this Ephesian point of depression, that not knowing what their change of phase really signifies, or under what conditions a real progress in holy character is to be made, they will finally surrender, as to a doom of retrogradation too strong to be resisted. I design, if possible, to bring them help, calling their attention directly to these two points:—

I. The relation of the first love, or the beginning of the christian discipleship, to the subsequent life.

II. The relation of the subsequent life, including its apparent losses, to the beginning.

What we call conversion is not a change distinctly traceable in the experience of all disciples, though it is and must be a realized fact in all. There are many that grew up out of their infancy, or childhood, in the grace of Christ, and remember no time when they began to love him. Even such, however, will commonly remember a time, when their love to God and divine things became a fact so fresh, so newly conscious, as to raise a doubt, whether it was not then for the first time kindled. In other cases there is no doubt of a beginning,—a real, conscious, definitely remembered beginning; a new turning to God, a fresh-born christian love. The conversion to Christ is marked as distinctly as that of the Ephesian church, when coming over to Christ, from their previous idolatry. The love is consciously first love, a new revelation of God in the soul; a restored consciousness of God, a birth of joy and glorified song in the horizon of the soul’s life, like that which burst into our sky when Jesus was born into the world. All things were new,—Christ was new, the word a new light, worship a new gift, the world a new realm of beauty shining in the brightness of its author: even the man himself was new to himself. Sin was gone, and fear also was gone with it. To love was his all, and he loved every thing. The day dawned in joy, and the thoughts of the night were songs in his heart. Then how tender, how teachable; in his conscience how true, in his works how dutiful. It was the divine childhood, as it were, of his faith, and the beauty of childhood was in it. This was his first love, and if all do not remember any precise experience of the kind, they do, at least, remember what was so far resembled to this as to leave no important distinction.

I. What now is the import of such a state, what its relation to the subsequent life and character?

It is not, I answer, what they assume, who conceive it to be only a new thought taken up by the subject himself which he may as naturally drop the next moment, or may go on to cultivate till it is perfected in a character. It is more, a character begun, a divine fact accomplished, in which the subject is started on a new career of regenerated liberty in good. I answer again that it is not any such thing as they assume it to be, who take it as a completed gift, which only needs to be held fast. It is less, far less than this. To God it is one of his beginnings, which he will carry on to perfection; to the subject himself it is the dawn of his paradise, an experience that will stand behind him as an image of the glory to be revealed before, an ideal set up, in his beatitude, of that state in which his soul is to be perfected and to find its rest. In one view, indeed, it is a kind of perfect state,—a state resembled to innocence. It is free, it is full of God, it is for the time without care. New born, as it were, the spirit of a babe is in it. The consciousness of sin is, for a time, almost or quite suspended,—sin is washed away, the heart is clean. The eye is single, as a child’s eye. The spirit is tender, as a child’s spirit,—so ingenuous, so pure in its intentions, so simple in its love, that it even wears the grace of a heavenly childhood.

In this flowering state of beauty the soul discovers, and even has in its feeling the sense of perfection, and is thus awakened from within to the great ideal, in which its bliss is to be consummated. The perfection conceived too and set up as the mark of attainment, is something more than a form of grace to be hereafter realized. It is now realized, as far as it can be—the very citizenship of the soul is changed; it has gone over into a new world, and is entered there into new relations. But it has not made acquaintance there; it scarcely knows how it came in, or how to stay, and the whole problem of the life-struggle is, to become established in what has before been initiated.

There is a certain analogy between this state, paradisaically beautiful, pure, and clean, and that external paradise in which our human history began. What could be more lovely and blessed, what in a certain formal sense more perfect than the upright, innocent, all-harmonious childhood of the first human pair. But it was beauty without strength, the ingenuous goodness of beings unacquainted with evil. A single breath of temptation is enough to sweep it all away. The only way to establish it is to lose it and regain it. Paradise lost and regained is not a conception only of the poet, but it is the grand world-problem of probation itself. No state of virtue is complete, however total the virtue, save as it is won by a conflict with evil, and fortified by the struggles of a resolute and even bitter experience. Somewhat in the same way, it is necessary that a christian should fight out the conquest of his paradise, in order to be really established in it. There is no absolute necessity that he should lose it, nor any such qualified necessity as there was that the first man should fall from his integrity; for he is, by the supposition, one who has learned already the bitterness of evil, by a life thus far steeped in the gall of it. He has been outside of his paradise, to look on it from thence, as Adam had not. He has only not been inside long enough to thoroughly understand the place. He will commonly never be established in it, therefore, till he knows it more experimentally, and gets wonted in it. And yet there are a few, as I verily believe, who never go outside again, from the moment of their first entering, but stay within, unfolding all their life long, as flowers, in their paradise,—trustful, ductile, faithful, and therefore unfaltering in their steadfastness.

Still the probability that any one will continue in the clearness and freshness of his first love to God, suffering no apparent loss, falling into no. disturbance or state of self-accusing doubt, is not great. And where the love is really not lost, it will commonly need to be conquered again, over and over, and wrought into the soul by a protracted and resolute warfare. The germ that was planted as impulse must be nourished by discipline. What was initiated as feeling must be matured by holy application, till it becomes one of the soul’s own habits.

A mere glance at the new-born state of love discovers how incomplete and unreliable it is. Regarded in the mere form of feeling, it is all beauty and life. A halo of innocence rests upon it, and it seems a fresh made creature, reeking in the dews of its first morning. But how strange a creature is it to itself,—waking to the discovery of its existence, bewildered by the mystery of existence. An angel as it were in feeling, it is yet a child in self-understanding. The sacred and pure feeling you may plainly see is environed by all manner of defects, weaknesses, and half-conquered mischiefs, just ready to roll back upon it and stifle its life. The really sublime feeling of rest and confidence into which it has come, you will see is backed, a little way off, by causes of unrest, insufficiency, anxiousness and fear. Questions numberless, scruples, fluctuating moods, bad thoughts, unmanageable doubts, emotions spent that can not be restored by the will, novelty passing by and the excitements of novelty vanishing with it,—there is a whole army of secret invaders close at hand, and you may figure them all as peering in upon the soul, from their places of ambush, ready to make their assault. And what is worst of all, the confidence it has in the Spirit of God, and which, evenly held, would bear it triumphantly through, is itself unpracticed, and is probably underlaid by a suppressed feeling of panic, lest he should sometime take his leave capriciously. It certainly would not be strange, if the disciple, beset by so many defects and so little ripe in his experience, should seem for a while to lose ground, even while strenuously careful to maintain his fidelity. And then Christ will have somewhat against him. He will not judge him harshly and charge it against him as a crime that has no mitigations; it will only be a fatal impeachment of his discipleship, when he finally surrenders the struggle, and relapses into a prayerless and worldly life.

The significance then of the first love as related to the subsequent life, is twofold. In the first place, it is the birth of a new, supernatural, and divine consciousness in the soul, in which it is raised to another plane, and begins to live as from a new point. And secondly, it is so much of a reality, or fact realized, that it initiates, in the subject, experimentally, a conception of that rest, that fullness, and peace, and joyous purity, in which it will be the bliss and greatness of his eternity to be established. In both respects, it is the beginning of the end; and yet, to carry the beginning over to the end, and give it there its due fulfillment, requires a large and varied trial of experience. The office and operation of this trial it now remains to exhibit as proposed.—

II. In a consideration of the subsequent life, as related to the beginning, orfirst love. The real object of the subsequent life, as a struggle of experience, is to produce in wisdom what is there begotten as a feeling, or a new love; and thus to make a fixed state of that which was initiated only as a love. It is to convert a heavenly impulse into a heavenly habit. It is to raise the christian childhood into a christian manhood,—to make the first love a second or completed love; or, what is the same, to fulfill the first love, and give it a pervading fullness in the soul; such that the whole man, as a thinking, self-knowing, acting, choosing, tempted and temptible creature, shall coalesce with it, and be forever rested, immovably grounded in it.

The paradise of first love is a germ, we may conceive, in the soul’s feeling of the paradise to be fulfilled in its wisdom. And when the heavenly in feeling becomes the heavenly in choice, thought, judgment, and habit, so that the whole nature consents and rests in it as a known state, then is it fulfilled or completed. Then is the ideal awakened by the first love become a fact or attainment. See now, briefly, in what manner the experimental life works this fulfillment.

At first the disciple knows, we shall see, very little of himself, and still less how to carry himself so as to meet the new state of divine consciousness, into which he is born. You may look upon him as literally a new, supernatural man, and just as a child has to learn the use of his own body, in handling, tasting, heaving, climbing, falling, running, so the new man learns, in the struggles of practical life, his own new nature,—how to work his thoughts, rule his passions, feed his wants, settle his choices, and clear his affections. Thus, at last, his whole nature becomes limber and quick to his love; so that the life he had in feeling, he can operate, express, fortify, and feed, At first, nothing co-operates in settled harmony with his new life; but, if he is faithful, he will learn how to make every thing in him work with it, and assist the edifying of his soul in love.

A great point with him is the learning how to maintain his new supernatural relation of sonship and vital access to God. Conscious of any loss, or apparent separation, he is likely, at first, to throw himself out of God’s peace only the more completely, by the panic he indulges, and the violent throes he makes to re-establish himself. The feeling in which he is raised to a participation of God can not instruct him how to maintain that participation, or to keep an open state of access. How to work his will, his inward suggestions and outward duties; how to shape his life and order his prayers, so as to set himself always before God, and command a ready approach, he knows, as yet, only by the guidance of his feeling. But the struggle of experience brings him into a growing acquaintance both with God and himself as related to God, removing in this manner his awkwardness, so that he is able to reject all false methods and all raw experiments, and address himself to God skillfully, as a friend will address a friend. He knows exactly how he must stand before God, to be one with him and abide in him. He comes into the secret of God easily and, as it were, naturally, and receives the manifestation of God as one who lives in the adoption of a son.

In the same way, or by the same course of experience, he conceives more and more perfectly what is the true idea of character. At first, character is to him a mere feeling or impulse, a frame. Next, perhaps, it becomes a life of work and self-denial. Next a principle, nothing but a matter of principle. Next he conceives that it is something outwardly beautiful, a beautiful life. After a while, he discovers that he has been trying to mold what is spiritual by his mere natural taste, and forgotten the first love, as the animating life and divine principle of beauty, And so he draws himself on, by degrees, through all the variant phases of loss and self-criticism, to a more full and rounded conception of character, returning at last to that which lay in his first love. So that character is, at last conceived as a life whose action choice, thought, and expression are ail animated and shaped by the spirit of holiness and divine beauty which was first breathed into his feeling. Nothing is so difficult to settle as the conception of a perfect character; nothing, at the same time, so necessary. And every faithful christian will be conscious of a constantly progressive change, in his conception of what he is to be.

A very great point to be gained, by the struggle of experience, is to learn when one has a right to the state of confidence and rest. At first the disciple measures himself wholly by his feeling. If feeling changes, as it will and must at times, then he condemns himself, and condemning himself perhaps without reason, he breaks his confidence toward God and stifles his peace. Then he is ready to die to get back his confidence, but not knowing how he lost it, he knows not where to find it. He had been at his business, and as that occupied his attention, it took off also somewhat of his feeling: charging this to the account of sin, and not to any want of experience in turning the mind so as to keep or recover its emotions, he put his conscience against him where it ought to have been his helper, and fell into the greater difficulty because he fell into mental confusion. Or perhaps he had played with his children, or he had talked in society about things not religious, in order to accommodate the circle he was in: this touched the delicate feeling of his soul; and, as feeling does not reason or judge, the wound was taken for admitted sin. On one occasion he did not give heed to some insignificant, or really absurd scruple. On another he declined some duty which really was no duty, and was better not to be done. In short, he was continually condemning and tormenting himself, and gratuitously forbidding himself all confidence toward God. But finally, after battering down his own confidence and stifling his love in this manner by self-discouragement for many years, he is corrected by God’s Spirit and led into a discovery of himself and the world that is more just, ceases to condemn himself in that which he alloweth, so to allow himself in any thing which he condemneth; and now behold what a morning it is for his love! His perturbed, anxious state is gone. God’s smile is always upon him. His peace flows down upon him as a river from the throne. His first love returns, henceforth to abide and never depart. Everywhere it goes with him, into all the callings of industry and business, into social pleasures and recreations, bathing his soul as a divine element.

By a similar process he learns how to modulate and operate his will. On one side his soul was in the divine love. On the other he had his will. But, how to work his will so as perfectly to suit his love, he at first did not know. He accordingly took his love into the care of his will; for assuredly he must do all that is possible to keep it alive. He thus deranged all right order and health within by his violent superintendence, battered down the joy he wished to keep, and could not understand what he should do more; for, as yet, all he had done seemed to be killing his love. He had not learned that love flows down only from God, who is its object, and can not be manufactured within ourselves. But he discovers finally that it was first kindled by losing, for the time, his will. Understanding now that he is to lose his will in God’s will, and abandon himself wholly to God, to rest in him and receive of his fullness; finding too that will is only a form of self-seeking, he makes a total loss of will, self, and all his sufficiency, whereupon the first love floods his nature again, and bathes him like a sea without a shore. And yet it will not be strange if he finds, within a year, that, as he once overacted his will in self-conduct, so now he is underacting it in quietism; that his love grows thin for want of energy, and, returning to his will again, he takes it up in God; dares to have plans and ends, and to be a person; wrestles with God and prevails with him; and so becomes, at last, a prince, acknowledged and crowned before him.

His thinking power undergoes a similar discipline. At first, he doubted much, doubted whether he had a right to doubt, and whether he did doubt, and yet more how to get rid of his doubts. The clatter of his old, disordered, thinking nature began, ere long, to drown his love by the perpetual noise it made; old associations led in trains of evil suggestion, which, like armies of wrath, overran and desolated his soul. He attacked every one of them in turn and that kept him thinking of the base things he wanted to forget. He discovers, at length, that all he can do is to fill his capacity with something better,—his mind with truth, his heart with God and faith, his hands with duty, and all with the holy enthusiasm of christian hope; and then, since there is no room left for idle fancies and vain imaginations to enter, he is free, the torments of evil suggestion are shut away. The courses and currents of the soul are now cleared, and his thoughts, like couriers sent up through the empyrean, will return bringing visions of God and divine beauty to waken the pure first love and kindle its joyful flames.

At first he had a very perplexing war with his motives. He feared that his motive was selfish, and then he feared that his fear was selfish. He dug at himself so intently, to detect his selfishness, as to create the selfishness he feared. The complications of his heart were infinite, and he became confused in his attempt to untwist them. He blamed his love to God because he loved him for his goodness, and then tried to love him more without any thought of his goodness. He was so curious, in fact, to know his motives that he knew nothing of them, and finally stifled his love in the effort to understand it, and act the critic over it. At length, after months or years it may be of desolation, he discovers, as he had never done before, that he was a child in his first love, and had a child’s simplicity. And now he has learned simplicity by his trial! Falling now into that first simplicity, there to abide, because he knows it, the first love blooms again,—blooms as a flower, let us hope, that is never to wither. His motive is pure, because it is simple; and his eye, being single toward God, his whole body is full of light.

Thus far it is supposed, in all the illustrations given, that the new love kindled by the Spirit has to maintain itself, in company with great personal defects in the subject. These defects are a constant tendency in him to defections that correspond. Whenever he yields to them, he suffers a loss which is, in that case, a guilty or blameable loss. But he will sometimes be reduced or let down, simply because, or principally because, he has too little skill or insight to avoid it. And this reduction will sometimes go so far as to be a kind of subsidence out of the supernatural into the natural state. He is confused and lost, and his very love appears to be quite dead. God is hidden, as it were, behind a veil, and can not be found. Duties kept up, as by the Ephesians, without liberty, yield no fruit of peace or blessing. And now, since it is not in the nature of a soul to stand empty and fight off evil, with no power left but a vacuum, it will not be strange if he lets in the world, grows light, covetous, ambitious, and has only a name to live. All this, in one view, is but thq working of his defects. Doubtless he is blameable, in a degree, though not as he would be if he had no such defects to contend with. Christ has somewhat against him, looks on him as one made subject to vanity not willingly, or willingly in part, and waits to restore him. His very losses too will be a lesson of experience really invaluable. He has learned his defects by his failures, and the day is not far distant when the dryness of his present experience will create, in his heart, an irrepressible longing for the recovery of the ground he has lost. For there is yet, slumbering in his memory, the dim ideal of a first love to Christ. Around that ideal are gathered many distasteful recollections and associations; but there ii a faint, sweet light of beauty in the center. And now as, in turn, the world itself palls, that faint spot of light remembered as the dawn of love to Christ, will grow radiant and beam as a sun upon him. As a prodigal he will return; as a prodigal returning, be met a great way off, and welcomed by his forgiving and rejoicing father. Now he is in his love as one instructed. His defects are corrected by his failures, and, by a common paradox of experience, supplemented by his losses; and so he is prepared to stand fast in his love. Sometimes a very dull and carnal, or capricious nature will go through this kind of bad experience more than once, and then will appear to be saved only so as by fire. But, more commonly, the time past of one such misery will suffice.

XIV

THE LOST PURITY RESTORED.

1 John, iii. 3.—“And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”

THIS hope, as the apostle is speaking, is a hope to be with Christ; and as Christ is, in highest verity, the manifestation of God who is infinite purity, it is a hope to be concomitant with purity, the purity of Christ and of God; which again is but a hope of being entered into, and perfectly answerable to, the purity of God. And then it follows, yet again, that every man that hath this hope in him will be purifying himself here on earth, even according to the purity of Christ with whom he hopes to be.

Accordingly the subject raised for our consideration is purity of soul, as the aim of spiritual redemption, and the legitimate issue of Christian experience. Let us see—

I. If we can form a fit conception of what purity is. Ii we refer to examples, it is the character of angels and of God—the simplicity, the unstained excellence, the undimmed radiance, the spotless beauty. Or it is God as represented here on earth, in the sinless and perfect life of Christ; his superiority to sense and passion and the opinions of the world, his simple devotion to truth, his unambitious goodness, his holy, harmless, undefiled life, as being with, yet separate from sinners.

If we go to analogy, purity is, in character, what transparency is in the crystal. It is water flowing, unmixed and clear, from the mountain spring. Or it is the white of snow. Or it is the clear open heaven, through which the sparkling stars appear, hidden by no mist of obstruction. Or it is the pure light itself in which they shine. A pure character is that, in mind and feeling and spirit of life, which all these clear, untarnished symbols of nature, image, in their lower and merely sensible sphere, to our outward eye.

Or if we describe purity by reference to contrasts, then it is a character opposite to all sin, and so to most of what we see in the corrupted character of mankind. It is innocent, just as man is not. It is incorrupt as opposed to passion, self-seeking, foul imaginations, base desires, enslaved affections, a bad conscience and turbid currents of thought. it is the innocence of infancy without the stain—that innocence matured into the spotless, positive and eternally established holiness of a responsible manhood. It is man lifted up out of the mires of sin, washed as a spirit into the clean white love and righteousness of his redeemer, and so purged of himself as to be man, without any thing of the sordid and defiled character of a sinner.

Or we may set forth the idea of purity, under a reference to the modes of causes. In the natural world, as for example in the heavens, causes act in a manner that is unconfused and regular. All things proceed according to their law. Hence the purity of the firmament. In the world of causes, it is the scientific ideal of purity that events transpire normally, according to the constitutive order and original law of the creation. But as soon as a soul transgresses, it breaks out of order, and its whole internal working becomes mixed, confused, tumultuous, corrupt. Abiding in God, all its internal motions would proceed in the simple, harmonious, orderly progress of the firmament, and it would be a pure soul. Plunging into sin, it breaks order and falls into mixtures of causes in all its actions. The passions are loose upon the reason, the will overturns the conscience, the desires become unruly, the thoughts are some of them suggested by the natural law of the mind, and some are thrust in by the disorders of vitiated feeling, corrupt imagination, disordered memory, and morbid impulse. In short, the soul is in a mixture of causes, and so out of all purity. The man is corrupted, as we say, and the word corrupt means broken together, dissolved into mixture and confusion—which is the opposite of purity.

Or finally, we may describe purity absolutely as it is when viewed in its own positive quality. And here it is chastity of soul, that state of the spiritual nature in which it is seen to have no contacts, or affinities, but such as fall within the circle of unforbidden joy and uncorrupted pleasure. It is unsensual, superior to the dominion of passion, living in the pleasures of the mind and of goodness, devoted in its virgin love, to the converse of truth only, and inaccessible to evil. Absolute purity is untemptible, as in God. Adam therefore was never in absolute purity. His purity was more negative than positive. He was innocent, he had not sinned; but for want of an established positive purity, he was ready to be tempted and open to temptation. But if he is now among the glorified, he is in absolute purity because he is untemptible. Real chastity is that which can not know temptation, and this is what we mean by absolute purity. It puts the soul as truly asunder and apart from the reach of evil suggestion as God himself is, in the glorious chastity of his holiness.

In all these methods we make so many distinct approaches to the true idea of spiritual purity. Distant as the character is from any thing we know in this sad world of defilement and corrupted life, still it is the aim and purpose of Christian redemption, as I now proceed—

II. To show, to raise us up into the state of complete purity before God. The call of the word is,—Come now and let us reason together, saith the Lord, though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson they shall be as wool. And it is curious, to observe, when we read the scripture, what an apparatus of cleansing God appears to have set in array for the purification of souls;—sprinklings, washings, baptisms of water and, what are more searching and more terribly energetic purifiers, baptisms of fire; fierce meltings also as of silver in the refiner’s crucible; purifyings of the flesh and purgings of the conscience; lustrations of blood, even of Christ’s own blood; washings of the word, and washings of regeneration by the Holy Ghost. It would seem, on looking at the manifold array of cleansing elements, applications, gifts and sacraments, as if God had undertaken it as the great object and crowning mercy of his reign, to effect a solemn purgation of the world. We seem, as we read, to see him summoning up all angels and ministers of his will and instruments of his power, and sending them out in commission to cleanse the sin of the world, or even to wash the defiled planet itself into purity.

Or, if we observe more directly what is said concerning the particular object of Christ’s mission as a work of redemption, it is plainly declared that he gave himself for the church,—That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it unto himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish. And then again the disciple himself who has embraced the Lord, in that which is the chief mercy and last end of his mission, will purify himself, it is declared, even as Christ is pure; that is, if I rightly understand the language of the text, he will be engaged to purify himself, endeavoring after purity, such as Christ himself reveals. It is not intended, I suppose, to affirm that every disciple, in the Christian hope, has actually become as pure as Christ, but only that this is his end or mark.

But a question rises here of great practical significance, viz., whether, by a due improvement of the means offered in Christ, or by any possible faith in him, it is given us to attain to a state which can fitly be called purity, or which is to itself a state consciously pure?

To this, I answer both yes and no. There may be a Christian purity that is related to the soul as investiture, or as a condition superinduced, which is not of it, or in it, as pertaining to its own quality, or to the cast of its own habit. Christ, in other words, may be so completely put on that, the whole consciousness may be of him, and all the motions of sins give way to the dominating efficacy of his harmonious and perfect mind; when, at the same time, the subject viewed in himself, or in the contents and modes of causes in his own personality, is disordered, broken, mixed, chaotic, and widely distant still from real purity. The point may be illustrated by a supposition. Let a man habitually narrow and mean in his dispositions, fall into the society of a great and powerful nature in some one distinguished for the magnanimity of his impulses. Let this nobler being be accepted as his friend, trusted in, loved, admired, so as to virtually infold and subordinate the mean person, as long as he is with him, to his own spirit. This, at least we can imagine, whether any such example ever occurred or not. Now it will be seen that, as long as this nobler nature is side by side with the other, it becomes a kind of investiture, clothes it, as it were, with its own impulses and even puts it in the sense of magnanimity. Consciously now the mean man is all magnanimous; for his mean thoughts are, by the supposition, drunk up and lost in the abysses of the nobler nature he clings to. He is magnanimous by investiture; that is, by the occupancy of another, who clothes him with his own characters. But if you ask what he is in his own personal habit, cast, or quality, he is little different, possibly, from what he was before. He has had the consciousness waked up in him of a generous life and feeling, which is indeed a great boon to his meagre nature, and if he could be kept, for long years, in the mold of this superinduced character, he would be gradually assimilated to it. But if the better nature were to be soon withdrawn by a separation, he would fall back into the native meanness of his own proper person, and be what he was with only slight modifications.

Now Christ, in his glorious and divine purity, is that better nature which has power, if we believe in him with a total all-subjecting faith, to invest us with a complete consciousness of purity, to bring every thought into captivity to his own incorruptible order and chastity. He is such a cause upon us, when so received, that all our mixed modes of causes, will be subjected to the interior chime of his own all perfect harmony. Our consciousness even is cast in the molds of his; for he is so effectually put on, that he dominates in the whole movement of our experience. This, at least, is conceivable as being the permitted or possible triumph of faith; while, at the same time, regarding what we are in ourselves and apart from this divine investiture, we are very far from any such purity. Still the case is varied here from that which we just now supposed, in the fact that the assimilation of the subject party will be more rapid and certain, because of the agency of the Spirit concurring with the power of Christ; and also in the fact that the union established by faith is more interior and more indissoluble. He may, therefore, have the Spirit to work in him and the power of Christ to rest upon him in such measure as to be kept in the conscious chastity of Christ’s own love, year by year, and be wrought into a continually approaching assimilation to it.

The answer thus given to the question raised agrees at all points, it will be seen, with the scripture, and particularly with what is taught by our apostle in close connection with my text. On one side of it he writes,—If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; for, however deep we are in our union to Christ, or however completely we are invested in his purity, we are not in ourselves restored, in the same degree, to the character of it. We are in a kind of anticipative purity, which is becoming personal to us and a fixed habit; we are living to be pure, as Christ is; but, regarded as apart from him, the work is only initiated,—we still have sin, we are broken, disordered, and corrupt. For, as long as we abide in Christ, our action is from him, not from our own corrupt and broken nature; exactly as the apostle writes, on the other side of the text, or immediately after:—Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not. He lives in a consciousness, that is, which is not sustained by his own mere humanly personal character, but by the sense of another, and the righteousness that is of God by faith upon him.

The result, consequently, is that, being thus held up by the attachment to him of Christ’s affinities, he is growing like him,—pure as he is pure. The diseased qualities gendered in him, heretofore, are being gradually purged away. His passions are being tamed to order and refined to God’s pure dominion. His imaginations settle into the truth, and grow healthy and clear. The fashion of this world is not only broken, as it was in the first moment of God’s discovery to his heart, but the memories of it fade, the diseased longings are healed, so that all his old affinities, in this direction, will at last be extirpated. All the mixed causes involved in sin or spiritual impurity will fall into chime, and all the foul currents of evil suggestion be cleared to a transparent flow. The mind will grow regular and simple in its action, ceasing to be vexed, as it was, by noxious mixtures of fear, selfishness, doubt, and temptation. And so all the inbred corruptions of its bad state—that is, those which remain over as effects of sin, after sin as a voluntary life is forsaken—will be gradually purged away.

To illustrate how far it is possible for this purifying work to go on in the present life, I will simply say that the very currents of thought, as it is propagated in the mind, may become so purified that, when the will does not interfere, and the mind is allowed, for an hour, to run in its own way, without hindrance, one thing suggesting another as in revery, there may yet be no evil, wicked, or foul suggestion thrust into it. Or in the state of sleep, where the will never interferes, but the thoughts rush on by a law of their own, the mixed causes of corruption may be so fax cleared away, and the soul restored to such simplicity and pureness, that the dreams will be only dreams of love and beauty: peaceful, and clear, and happy; somewhat as we may imagine the waking thoughts of angels to be. There have been Christians, who have testified to this heavenly sereneness of thought, out of their own experience. And precisely this is what Paul refers to, when he speaks of bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. When the mixed causes are taken captive in the soul, and Christ is the law of the whole action, then, in the same degree, simplicity returns and purity.

Still the body is dead because of sin. Disease, corruption, so far, at least, remain, and therefore it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Perfect, absolute purity it is hardly supposable may be realized here. Enough to know that there need be no limit to the process, while life remains, and that, when life ends, it may be gloriously approximated to the state of completeness.

Or perhaps some one of my audience may just here raise a doubt from the other side,—whether absolute purity can ever be restored. Can the soul’s chastity, once lost, ever be recovered? Having once sinned, can it ever become pure in the absolute and perfect sense, as if it had not? Let no such doubt be harbored. We must not be too much under the power of social impressions. If society pronounces on the irredeemable loss of fallen chastity, society has no mercy; and pride, as well as truth, enters into its relentless judgments. Be this as it may, God has undertaken to redeem the fall of sin, and restore the soul to purity as a condition of absolute holiness. Browned by sin, mottled by the stains of a corrupted life, he has under taken still to give it the whiteness of snow. True he can not undo what has been done. The sin is committed, the corruption has followed. Therefore, if there were any prudishness in angelic minds, they might well enough refuse forever to own us as beings intact by sin. And yet God can raise us to a purity that is higher even than the purity of an intact virtue. He can make us untemptibly pure, pure even as Christ is pure, which Adam certainly was not. What we call purity in him, prior to his sin, is beautiful and lovely; a pure white lily blooming in the creation’s morning; but it is frail also and temptible, and, before the noon is up, it hangs upon a broken stem, dishonored and torn. God can raise us up, if not to the same, yet to a much higher, and stronger, and more absolute chastity, the participation, viz., of his own unchangeable holiness!

Having this view of Christ and his gospel, as the plan of God for restoring men to a complete spiritual purity; seeing that he invites us to this, gives us means and aids to realize this, and yields to them that truly desire it a hope so high as this, I proceed—

III. To inquire in what manner we may promote our advancement toward the state of purity, and finally have it in complete realization.

And, first of all, we must set our heart upon it. We must learn to conceive the beauty, and glory, and the essential beatitude of a pure state. We must see the degradation, realize the bitterness, confusion, disorder, instability, and conflict of a mixed state, where all the causes of internal action are thrown out of God’s original law. We must learn to conceive, on the other hand, and what can be more difficult—the dignity, the beauty, the infinitely peaceful and truly divine elevation of a pure soul. Nothing is more distant from us, in our unreflective, headlong state of carnality and self-devotion, than to conceive purity. It is high like God, and we can not attain unto it. And therefore our desire after it can not be duly inflamed, or kindled;—as it must be, if we are ever to obtain it. Labor then, with all closest, most persistent application, to conceive purity;—what it would be to you, if your soul were in it; the consciousness of it; the essential peace; the elevation above all passion and unregulated impulse; the singleness and simplicity of it; the glowing shapes and glorified visions of a pure imagination; the oneness of your soul with God; the conscious participation of what is highest in God, his untemptible chastity in goodness and truth. Work at this idea of purity, turn it round and round in your contemplations, reach after it, pray yourself into it, and have it thus as the highest conceivable good, the real good you seek,—to be pure. Let it be your life to envy God’s purity, if I may so speak; for, if there be any holy, and blessed, and fruitful kind of envy, it is this. Have it as the accepted aim and effort of your life, to be assimilated thus in purity to God; for when such a desire becomes practically fixed in you, the way will certainly be found. The way to purity is difficult of discovery only to those who practically do not care to find it.

One of your early discoveries will be, that the way to attain to purity of soul is, not to forsake the world and retire from it. This was the error that originally carried men and women into remote deserts and caves, and finally built up monasteries and instituted vows of single life, or celibacy. It was to get away from the world, and have nothing to think of but God, and so to present the soul as a chaste virgin to Christ. It was called the state of spiritual chastity, and the souls thus taken out of the world were supposed to be specially pure and incorrupt, or in a certain way to be. It was as if the church had prayed, directly against Christ’s word, to be taken out of the world. And then, what a horrible imposture did this unchristian gospel of purity prove itself, ere long, to be! No, the only real and truly christian way of purity is to live in the open world and not be of it, and keep the soul unspotted from it. There are no fires that will melt out our drossy and corrupt particles like God’s refining fires of duty and trial, living, as he sends us to live, in the open field of the world’s sins and sorrows, its plausibilities and lies, its persecutions, animosities, and fears, its eager delights and bitter wants.

St. Francis de Sales had been able, in his knowledge of the cloistered men and the cloistered life, to see how necessary it is for the soul to be aired in the outward exposures of the world, and, if we do net stop to question the facts of his illustrations, no one has spoken of this necessity with greater force and beauty of conception. “Many persons believe,” he says, “that, as no beast dares taste the seed of the herb Palma Christi, so no man ought to aspire to the palm of Christian piety, as long as he lives in the bustle of temporal affairs. Now, to such I shall prove that, as the mother-pearl fish lives in the sea without receiving a drop of salt water; and as, toward the Chelidonian islands, springs of fresh water may be found in the midst of the sea; and as the fire-fly passes through the flames, without burning its wings; so a vigorous and resolute soul may live in the world, without being infected with any of its humors, may discover sweet springs of piety amidst its salt waters, and fly among the flames of earthly concupiscence, without burning the wings of the holy desires of a devout life.” It was only forbidden him to say, what is not forbidden me, that here alone, in these common exposures of work and contacts of duty, is true christian purity itself successfully cultivated. Alas! for the man who is obliged to be shut up to himself, as in the convent life, to face his own lusts, disorders, and passions, and strangle them in direct conflict, with nothing else to do or to occupy the soul.

Having this determined, that he who will purify himself as Christ is pure must live in the world, then one thing more is needed, viz., that we live in Christ, and seek to be as closely and intimately one with him as possible. And this includes more things than the time will suffer me to name.

First, a willingness wholly to cease from the old man, as corrupt, in order that a completely new man from Christ may be formed in you; for, if you will halve the sacrifice and retain what portion is safe or convenient of the old life of nature, it is no such thing as purity that you propose, nothing but a baptizing of mixture and defilement. I call it a new man that you want, after the scripture method, because the character is the man more truly than any thing else, and there is no purity but to be completely new. Therefore the old must as completely die,—which it will not, if we secretly nourish and cling to it.

Secondly, the life must be determined implicitly by the faith of Christ. Purifying their hearts by faith, says an apostle; well-understanding that faith in Christ as the true sacrifice and grace, is the only power that can purge the conscience from dead works to serve the living God in purity. It is faith only that can truly appropriate Christ as a Saviour, able to save to the uttermost, and faithful to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Then again, which is more, if possible, it is faith alone that enables one to embrace Christ as a power, and live in the society of his person; for it is thus, pre-eminently, that a soul may become purified. It is Christ beheld, with face unveiled, reflecting God’s own beauty and love upon us, as in a glass, that changes us from glory to glory. If by faith we go with Christ; if we bear his cross in duty after him; if we hang upon his words, wrestle with him in his agony, die with him in his passion, rise with him in his resurrection; in a word, if we are perfectly insphered in his society, so as to be of it, then we shall grow pure. The assimilating power of Christ, when faithfully adhered to as the soul’s divine brother, and lived with and lived upon, will infallibly renovate, transform, and purify us. The result is just as certain as our oneness or society with him. We shall grow pure because he is. The glorious power of his character and life will so invest our nature, that we shall be in it and live it. It is only they that talk much of faith, meaning by it the faith of notions and opinions, and not the faith of Jesus as a personal revelation,—these only it is who can not be purified by their faith. Sometimes they even have it as their merit, judging from their confessions, that they are growing more and more corrupt. Having that faith to which Jesus is personally revealed, you can be conscious of a growing purity of soul, and I know not any other way. God forbid that you should think of making purity for yourself, or by any operation on yourself. It must flow into you from above. It must be the new man that is created in Christ Jesus,—created by your faith, as receiving of him and of his fullness, grace for grace. And O, the dignity, the conscious blessedness of a life of faith, when it knows in itself, or distinctly sees, the divine purity forming its own chaste image of love and truth within;—beholds the fine linen, clean and white, which is the righteousness of the saints investing the soul, as a robe of life from God! In such a life there is consciously something going on, which answers to the great errand of life and gives it the seal of blessing.

Again, passing over many other particulars, I will simply draw your minds a little closer to the text by observing, as included in the general idea of living in Christ, a looking forward to him in his exalted state, and an habitual converse with him there. He that hath this hope in him, says the text;—understanding that the hope of being with Christ, and seeing him as he is, does of itself draw the soul toward his purity. I say not that we are to be looking away to heaven, as being disgusted with the world; much less to be praising heaven’s adorable purity in high words of contrast, as if to excuse or atone for the lack of all purity here. I only say that we are to be much in the meditation of Christ as glorified, surrounded with the glorified; to let our mind be hallowed by its pure converse and the themes in which it dwells; to live in the anticipation of what is most pure in the universe, as being what we most love and long for in the universe; and so we are to be raised by our longings, and purified with Christ by the hopes we rest upon his person. This hope, this reaching upward of soul to Christ, is exactly what Paul means, when he speaks of living a life that is hid with Christ in God. When a soul is there infolded, hid with Christ in the recesses of God’s pure majesty, O, what airs of health breathe upon it and through it! how vital does it become, and how rapidly do the mixed causes of sin settle into the transparent flow of order and peace!

It only remains to just name—

IV. Some of the signs by which our growth in purity may be known. This I will do in the briefest manner possible, and conclude.

Fastidiousness then, I will first of all caution you, is not any evidence of purity, but the contrary. A fastidious character is one that shows, by excess of delicacy, a real defect and loss of it. It is too delicate to be practical, simply because it is practically indelicate and corrupt Hence, in religion, it is a great principle that, to the pure all things are pure. When any disciple, therefore, calls it purity to be shocked or repelled by the scripture names of sins, or the practical works of mercy needed in a world of shame and defilement, he reveals therein a bad imagination and a mind that is itself defiled. No, the true signs of purity are these:—

That we abide in the conscious light of God, while living in a world of defilement, and know him as a presence manifested in the soul. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Purity sees God.

A good conscience signifies the same; for the conscience, like the eye, is troubled by any speck of defilement and wrong that falls into it.

A growing sensibility to sin signifies the same; for, if the conscience grows peaceful and clear, it will also grow tender and delicate.

If you are more able to be singular and think less of the opinions of men, not in a scornful way but in love, that again shows that the world’s law is losing its power over you, and your devotion to God is growing more single and true.

Do you find that passion is submitting itself to the gentle reign of God within you, losing its heat and fierceness, and becoming tamed under the sweet dominion of christian love? That again is the growth of purity.

The discovery that your imagination ceases to revel in images of wrong, revenge, and lust, becoming at once more quiet and more clear, conceiving God and Christ and unseen worlds of purity, with greater distinctness and sublimity, and roving, as by a divine instinct, among the eternal verities and transcendent glories of a perfect state, asking there to be employed and nowhere else with so great zest,—this also shows that a high and sacred affinity for what is pure is growing stronger and more clear within you.

So, again, if your feeling reaches after heaven, and your longings are thitherward, if you love and long for it because chiefly of its purity; loosened from this world not by your wearinesses and disgusts, which all men suffer, but by the positive affinities of your heart for what is best and purest above,—this also is a powerful token of growing purification.

Do you also find that your thoughts, when freest and most unrestrained, are yet growing simple, orderly, right, and true, interrupted less and less frequently by bad or wicked suggestion?—then you have in this a most convincing and conclusive proof, that you are being delivered of the mixtures and defilements of a corrupted nature.

XV.

LIVING TO GOD IN SMALL THINGS.

Luke xvi. 10.—“He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in the least, is unjust also in much.”

A READINESS to do some great thing is not peculiar to Naaman the Syrian. There are many Christians who can never find a place large enough to do their duty. They must needs strain after great changes, and their works must utter themselves by a loud report. Any reform in society, short of a revolution, any improvement in character, less radical than that of conversion, is too faint a work, in their view, to be much valued. Nor is it merely ambition, but often it is a truly christian zeal, guarded by no sufficient views of the less imposing matters of life, which betrays men into such impressions. If there be any thing, in fact, wherein the views of God and the impressions of men are apt to be at total variance, it is in respect to the solemnity and importance of ordinary duties. The hurtfulness of mistake here, is of course very great. Trying always to do great things, to have extraordinary occasions every day, or to produce extraordinary changes, when small ones are quite as much needed, ends, of course, in defeat and dissipation. It produces a sort of religion in the gross, which is no religion in particular. My text leads me to speak—

XVI.

THE POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE.

Heb. vii. 16.—Who is made, not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life.

THIS word after is a word of correspondence, and im. plies two subjects brought in comparison. That Christ has the power of an endless life in his own person is certainly true; but to say that he is made a priest after this power subjective in himself, is awkward even to a degree that violates the natural grammar of speech. The suggestion is different; viz., that the priesthood of Christ is graduated by the wants and measures of the human soul as the priesthood of the law was not; that the endless life in which he comes, matches and measures the endless life in mankind whose fall he is to restore; providing a salvation as strong as their sin, and as long or lasting as the run of their immortality. He is able thus to save unto the utter most. Powers of endless life though we be, falling principalities, wandering stars shooting downward in the precipitation of evil, he is able to bring us off, re-establish our dismantled eternities, and set us in the peace and confidence of an eternal righteousness.

I propose to exhibit the work of Christ in this high relation, which will lead me to consider—

I. The power of an endless life in man, what it is, and, as being under sin, requires.

II. What Christ, in his eternal priesthood, does to restore it.

XVII.

RESPECTABLE SIN.

John viii. 9.—“And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out, one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last, and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.”

IT is with sins as with men or families, some have pedigree and some have not; for there are kinds and modes of sin that have, in all ages, been held in respect and embalmed with all the honors of history; and there are others that never were and never can be raised above the level even of disgust. The noble sins will, of course, be judged in a very different manner from the humble, baseborn sins. The sins of fame, honor, place, power, bravery, genius, always in good repute, will not seldom be admired and applauded. But the low-blooded sins of felony, and vice, and base depravity are associated with brutality, and are universally held in contempt. Whether the real demerit of the two classes of sin is measured by such distinctions is more questionable. Such distinctions certainly had little weight with Christ. He was even more severe upon the sins of learning, wealth, station, and religious sanctimony, than upon the more plebeian, or more despised class of sins. Indeed, he seems to look directly through all the fair conventionalities, and to bring his judgment down upon come point more interior and deeper. He appears, in general, to be thoroughly disgusted with all the mere respectabilities, whether men or sins. The hypocrisies of religion, the impostures of learning, the gilded shows of wealth gotten by extortion, the proud airs of authority and power employed in acts of oppression, provoke his indignation, and he deals with them in such terms of emphasis as indicate the profoundest possible abhorrence.

Hence the jealousy with which he was watched by the elders, and priests, and rulers; for every few days some Rabbi, Scribe, lawyer, or committee of such, was sent out to observe him, or question him, or draw him, if possible, into some kind of treason in his doctrine; because they feared his influence with the people, lest he might put himself at their head and raise a great revolution that would even subvert the present social order.

The cunning plot his enemies are working, in my text, is instigated by this kind of fear. He is teaching, it appears, a great multitude of people in the temple, when suddenly a company of Scribes and Pharisees are seen hustling in through the crowd, leading up a woman, to set her before him. She has been guilty, they say, of a base crime which the law of Moses punishes with public stoning and death, and they demand of him what shall be done with her? hoping that, out of the same perverse favor he is wont to show to low people, he will take the woman’s part, and so give them the desired opportunity to throw contempt on his character, and exasperate the popular superstition against him.

Christ, perceiving apparently their design, determines to put them to confusion. He remains a long time silent, making no answer, and of course none that can be taken hold of. They press him for a reply; still no reply is given. They wait, and still it is not given. There they stand in the center of the great concourse, all looking at them, and, as they soon begin to fancy, looking directly into them. It is a most uncomfortable position for them. To give still greater pungency to their thoughts, Christ withdraws his eyes from them, and, as if waiting for their complete confusion, writes abstractedly on the pavement At length they grow perplexed, and begin to ask themselves how they shall get out of their very awkward predicament. They press him still more vehemently, but he refuses to speak, save simply to say,—Let the man of you that is without sin throw the first stone at the woman, if she is guilty; and immediately falls to writing abstractedly on the ground again. The arrow sticks, and the suspense of silence makes them more and more conscious of the pain; till finally they can bear it no longer. Convicted thus by their own conscience, they went out, as the text has it, one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last, and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

Look upon them now, as they withdraw, and follow them with your eye, as probably Christ and the whole assembly did. Observe the mannerly order of their shame,—beginning at the eldest, even unto the last! See how carefully they keep the sacred rules of good breeding and deference to age, even in their sniveling defeat, and the chagrin of their baffled conspiracy, and you will begin to find how base a thing may take on airs of dignity, and how contemptible, in fact, these airs of dignity may be.

The subject thus presented is respectable sin, sin that takes on the semblance of goodness and judges itself by the dignity of its manner and appearance. Almost all the really great or sublime sins of the world are of this class, and I shall undertake to show that this more respectable type of sin is often, if not generally, deepest in the spirit of sin, and, in the sight of God, most guilty.

Just this, I think, has been the impression of you all, in the remarkable scene referred to in my text. These plausible accusers, pressing in with their victim in such airs of dignity, and retiring in such careful deference to age as not to allow even a year’s difference to be disregarded, have yet been virtually detected and foiled in a thoroughly wicked conspiracy. Had they been a gang of thieves, their transaction would have been more base only in the name; for it was, in fact, a kind of dramatic lie, deliberately planned, to snare an artless, worthy, and visibly holy man. Accordingly, now that they are gone, driven out by the recoil of their own base trick, the Saviour, without using any word of reproach, quietly proceeds to bring out the scene just where their real character will be most impressively displayed. He says to the woman, “Where are thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?” “No man, Lord.” “Neither do I; go, sin no more.” Sinner that she was, not even these sanctimonious conspirators could stand the challenge of their own sins long enough to accuse her. And the result is, that we are left by Christ in the impression, and that designedly, that on the whole, the woman, in her most shameful sin, was really less of a sinner than they. Her, therefore, we pity. Them we denounce and despise. How many things are we ready to imagine, that might soften our judgment of her fall, if we only knew the secret of her sad history. Our judgment of their stratagem, on the other hand, permits no softening, but we approve ourselves only the more confidently, the more heartily we despise and the more unrestrainedly we detest their hypocrisy in it. In pursuing now this very serious subject, we need,—

First of all, to clear the influence of a false or defective impression, growing out of the fact, that we ourselves are persons that live so entirely in the atmosphere of character and decency. Our range of life is so walled in by the respectability of our associations, that what is on the other side of the wall is very much a world unknown. Hence we have no such opinion or impression of sin, anywhere, as we ought to have. It is with us all our life long and in all our associations; much as it is with us here in our assembly for worship. The offensive and repulsive forms of sin are almost never here, by so much as any one sign, or symptom. The sin is here, and sin that wants salvation; but it is sin so thoroughly respectable as to make it very nearly impossible to produce any just impression of its deformity. Sitting here in this atmosphere of decency and order, how can you suffer any just impression of the dreadful nature of that evil which, after all, wears a look so plausible. If there came in with you, to mingle in your audience, a fair representation only of the town; if you heard, in the porch, the profane oaths of the cellars and hells of gambling; if you looked about with a cautious feeling, right and left, in the seat, lest some one might rifle your dress, or pick your pocket; if the victims of drink were seen reeling into the seats, here and there, and their hungry, shivering children were crying at the door, for bread; if the diseased and loathsome relics of vice, recognized sometimes as the sons and daughters of families once living in respect and affluence, were sprinkled about you, tainting the air you breathe; in a word, if actual life were here, in correct representation, how different a matter would it be for me to speak of sin, how different for you to hear! And the same holds true of the associations of your life generally. Sin, in its really revolting, shocking forms, seldom gets near enough to you to meet your eye. What you know of it is mostly gotten from the newspapers, and is scarcely more of a reality to you, many times, than the volcanoes you hear of in the moon.

Secondly, we need also to clear another false or defective impression, growing out of the general tendency in mankind to identify sin with vice; and, of course, to judge that whatever is clear of vice is clear also of sin; which, in fact, is the same as to judge that whatever sin is respectable is no sin at all. Or, sometimes, we identify sin with acts of wrong, or personal injury, such as deeds of robbery, fraud, seduction, slander, and the like. In this view, again, whatever sin is respectable enough to be clear of all such deeds of wrong is, of course, no sin. Whereas, there may be great sin where there is no vice, bitter and deep guiltiness before God where there is never one act of personal wrong or injury committed. All vice, all wrong, presupposes sin, but sin may be the reigning principle of the life, from childhood to the grave, and never produce one scar of vice, or blamable injury to a fellow-being. Indeed we must go further, we must definitely say that even virtue itself, as the term is commonly used, classes under sin, or has its root in sin. Virtue, as men speak, is conduct approved irrespectively of any good principle of conduct; and it is, for the most part, a goodness wholly negative, consisting in the not doing, the abstaining, and keeping off from whatever is confessedly base and vicious. Sin, on the other hand, is the negation of good as respects the principle of good. Any thing is sin, as God judges, which is not in the positive, all-dominating power of universal love. Any thing called virtue, therefore, which consists in barely not doing, is sin of course; because it is not in any positive principle of love, or duty to God. Half the sin of mankind, therefore, consists, or is made up of virtue; that is, of what is generally called virtue, and passes for a virtuous character in the common speech of men. It is, in fact, respectable sin, nothing more; and has exactly the same root with all sin, even the worst; viz., the not being in God’s love and a state of positive allegiance to God.

Consider now, thirdly, and make due account of the fact, that respectable sin is not less guilty because it has a less revolting aspect. A feeling is very generally indulged, even by such as are confessedly blamable for not being in the christian life, that their blame or guilt is a thing of higher and finer quality than it would be under the excesses and degrading vices many practice. They measure their sin by their outward standing and conduct, whereas all sin is of the same principle. The sin of one class is, in fact, the sin of the other, as respects every thing but manner and degree. There are different kinds of vice, but only one kind of sin; viz., the state of being without God, or cut of allegiance to God. All evil and sin, as we just now saw, are of this same negative root; the want of any holy principle; the state set off from God, and disempowered and degraded by the separation. The respectable sin, therefore, shades into the unrespectable, not as being different in kind, but only as twilight shades into the night. The evil spirit, called sin, may be trained up to politeness, and made to be genteel sin; it may be elegant, cultivated sih; it may be very exclusive and fashionable sin; it may be industrious, thrifty sin; it may be a great political manager, a great commercial operator, a great inventor; it may be learned, scientific, eloquent, highly poetic sin; still it is sin, and, being that, has in fact the same radical or fundamental quality that, in its ranker and less restrained conditions, produce all the most hideous and revolting crimes of the world.

There is a very great difference, I admit, between a courteous man and one who is ill-natured and insulting, between a generous man and a niggard, a pure and a lewd, a man who lives in thought and a man who lives in appetite, a great and wise operator in the market and a thief; and yet, taken as apart from all accidental modifications, or degrees, the sin-quality or principle is exactly the same in all. As in water face answereth to face, so one class of hearts to the other. The respectable and the disgusting are twin brothers; only you see in one how well he can be made to look, and in the other how both would look, if that which is in both were allowed to have its bent and work its own results unrestrained.

Again, fourthly, it is often true that what is looked upon as respectable sin is really more base in spirit, or internal quality, than that which is more and more universally despised. And yet this is not the judgment of those who are most apt to rule the judgments of the world. The lies of high life, for example, are the liberties asserted by power and respectable audacity. The lies of commoners and humble persons are a fatal, irredeemable dishonor. The fashionable, who spurns the obligation of an honest debt, is only asserting the right and title of fashion; but the merchant, or the tradesman, who avoids the payment of his bond, loses his honor and becomes a knave. The conqueror, who overruns and desolates a kingdom, will be named with respect or admiration by history, wh1en, probably enough, God will look upon him with as much greater abhorrence, than if he had robbed a hen-roost, as his crime is bloodier and more afflictive to the good of the world, How very respectable those learned impostors the Scribes, and those sanctimonious extortioners the Pharisees! How base those knavish tax-gatherers and sinners in low life! But Christ, who respected not the appearance, but judged righteous judgment, had a different opinion. It is not the show of a sin, my friends, which makes it base, but it is its interior quality,—what it is in motive, feeling, thought. It is the gloat of inward passion, the stringent pinch of meanness, the foulness of inward desire and conception, the fire of inward malignity, the rot of lust and hypocrisy. It is not for me, as public inspector of sins, to pass on their relative quality, or fix the brand of their degree. I will only say that the outwardly respectable look of them is no good test of their quality; leaving it, as a question between you and your God, whether, if all the inward shapes of your thought, motive, feeling, desire, and passion were brought out into the open sight of this community, and all the false and factitious rules of judgment accepted by us were swept away, it might not possibly appear that there are characters here, in this very respectable assembly, as base in real demerit as many that are classed among the outcasts of the town.

It is obvious, fifthly, that what I am calling respectable sin is commonly more inexcusable,—not always, but commonly. Sometimes the most depraved and abandoned characters are those who have cast themselves down, bv their perversity, from the highest standing of privilege. But, however this may be, it can not be denied that the depraved and abject classes of society have, to a great extent, been trained up to the very life they lead; to be idle and beg, to be cunning, sharp, predatory, in one way or another, thieves; to look upon the base pleasures of self-indulgence and appetite as the highest rewards of existence. They are ignorant by right of their origin, brutal in manners and feeling, accustomed only to what is lowest in the possible range of human character. Sometimes, alas I the real want of bread has made them desperate. I will not become the sponsor of their crime; enough that they are criminal, and consciously so. But who is there of you that does not pity their hard lot; who of you that, considering their most sad history, is not often more ready to weep over than to judge them. Is it incredible to you that, in your own respectable aid decent life of sin, taken as related to your high advantages, there may even be a degree of criminality, which, as God estimates crime, is far more inexcusable than that for which many are doomed to suffer the severest and most ignominious penalties of public law?

I add a single consideration further; viz., that respectable sin is more injurious, or a greater mischief, than the baser and more disgusting forms of vicious abandonment. The latter create for us greater public burdens, in the way of charity and taxation for the poor, and of judicial proceedings and punishments for public malefactors. They annoy us more too by their miseries and the crimes by which they disturb the security and peace of society. And vet it is really a fair subject of doubt, whether, in a moral point of view, they have not a wholesome influence and are not a social benefit. They tempt no one. Contrary to this, they repel and warn away from vice every one that looks upon them. They hang out a flag of distress upon every shoal of temptation. They show us the last results of all sin, and the colors in which they exhibit sin are always disgusting, never attractive. In this view they are really one of the moral wants of the world. We should never conceive the inherent baseness of sin, if it were not shown by their experiment; revealed in their delirium, their rags, their bloated faces, and bleared eyes, and tottering bodies, and, more than all, in the extinction of their human feeling, and the substitution of a habit or type of being so essentially brutal. We look down into this hell that vice opens, and with a shudder turn away! Meantime, respectable sin,—how attractive, how fascinating its pleasures. Its gay hours, its shows and equipages, its courteous society, its entertainments, its surroundings of courtly form and incident,—how delicious to the inspection of fancy. Even its excesses seem to be only a name for spirit. The places of temptation too are not the hells and brothels, but the saloons of pleasure and elegant dissipation. Vice is the daughter of pleasure; all unrespectable sin the daughter of respectable. Nay, if we go to the bottom, church-going sin is the most plausible form of sin that was ever invented, and, in that view, the most dangerous. For, if a man never goes to the place of worship, we take his sin with a warning, or at least with some little sense of caution; but, if he is regular at church, a respectful hearer of the word, a sober, correct, thoughtful man, still, (though never a Christian,) a safe, successful, always respected, never-faltering character,—then how many will be ready to imagine that there is one form of sin that is about as good as piety itself, and possibly even better than piety. And so this church-going sin gives countenance and courage to all other,—all the better and more effective countenance because no such thing is intended. There is, in short, no such thing as taking away the evil of sin by making it respectable. Make it even virtuous, as men speak, and it will only be the worse in its power, as regards the enticements it offers to evil. It will not shock any one by deeds of robbery and murder, it will not revolt any one by its disgusting spectacles of shame and misery, but how many will it encourage and shield, in just that rejection of God, which is to be their bitter fall and their eternal overthrow.

It is scarcely possible, in closing this very serious subject, to name and duly set forth all the applications of which it is capable, or which it even presses on our attention.

With how little reason, for example, are Christian people, and indeed all others, cowed by the mere name and standing of men, who are living still under the power of sin, and resisting or neglecting still the grace of their salvation. Doubtless it is well enough to look on them with respect, and treat them with a just deference; but however high they may seem, allow them never to overtop your pity. For what is the fair show they make, but a most sorrowful appeal to your compassions and your prayers? How can a true Christian, one who is consciously ennobled by the glorious heirship in which he is set, ever be intimidated, or awed, or kept back in his approaches or his prayers, by respect to that which is only respectable sin? If he goes to God, entering even into the holiest with boldness, how much more will he be able to stand before these princes of name and title and power, and speak to them of Christ and his great salvation. To falter in this boldness, brethren, is even a great wrong to our Master’s gospel, which puts us, even the humblest of us, in a higher plane of dignity; far far above any most honored sinner of mankind.

Again, it is impossible in such a subject as this, no, to raise the question of morality, what it is, and is worth, and where it will land us in the great allotments of eternity. Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency in sin. It is just that negative species of virtue, which consists in not doing what is scandalously depraved or wicked. But there is no heart of holy principle in it, any more than there is in the worst of felonies. It is the very same thing, as respects the denial of God, or the state of personal separation from God, that distinguishes all the most reprobate forms of character. A correct, outwardly virtuous man is the principle of sin well-dressed and respectably kept—nothing more. And will that save you? You can, I am sure, be in no great danger of believing that. A far greater danger is that the decent, outwardly respectable manner of your sin will keep you from the discovery of its real nature, as a root of character in you. If we undertake to set forth the inherent weakness and baseness of sin, to open up the vile and disgustful qualities which make it, as the scriptures declare, abominable and hateful to God, if we speak of its poisonous and bitter effects within, and the inevitable and awful bondage it works in all the powers of choice and character, who of you can believe what we say? Such representations, you will think if you do not openly say, partake of extravagance. What can you know of sin, what can you feel of your deep spiritual need, when you are living so respectably and maintain, in the outward life, a show of so great integrity, and even so much of refinement often in what is called virtue. True conviction of sin—how difficult is it, when its appearances and modes of life are so fair, when it twines itself so cunningly about, or creeps so insidiously into, our amiable qualities, and sets off its internal disorders by so many outward charms and attractions!

If then we are right in this estimate of morality and the very great dangers involved in it, how necessary is it, for a similar reason, that every man out of Christ, not living in any vicious practice, should set himself to the deliberate canvassing of his own moral state. Make a study of this subtle, cunningly veiled character, the state of reputable sin, and study it long enough to fathom its real import. Look into the secret motives and springs of your character; inspect and study long enough to really perceive the strange, wild current of your thoughts; detect the subtle canker in your feeling; comprehend the deep ferment of your lusts, enmities, and passions; hunt down the selfish principle which instigates and misdirects and turns off your whole life from God, setting all your aims on issues that reject Him; ask, in a word, how this respectable sin appears, when viewed inwardly; how, if unrestrained by pride, and the conventional rules of decency and character, it would appear outwardly. Fathom the deep hunger of your soul, and listen to its inward wail of bondage, its mournful, unuttered cry of want after God. Ask it of the enlightening Spirit of God, that he will open to your view yourself, and make you to know all that is inmost, deepest, most hidden in the habitually veiled deformity of your sin. Make it your prayer even to God—Search me, O God, and try me!

You have a motive also in making this inquest, that is even more pressing than many of you will suspect. For no matter how respectable your sin is, you never can tell where it will carry you—how long it will be respectable, or where it will end. Enough to know that it is sin, and. that the principle of all sin is one and the same. In its very germ you have, potentially, whatever is abhorrent, abominable, disgusting; and when the fruit is ripe, no man can guess into what shape of debasement and moral infamy, or public crime, it may finally bring him. If he hears of a murder, like that of Webster, for example, he may be very confident that, in his particular and particularly virtuous case of unreligious living, there is no liability to any such result. And perhaps there is not. Perhaps the danger is different. Avoiding what is bloody, he may fall into what is false or low—some damning dishonesty or fraud, some violation of trust, some falsification of accounts, some debauchery of lust or appetite, some brutality which makes his very name and person a disgust. Sin works by no set methods. It has a way of ruin for every man, that is original and proper only to himself. Suffice it to say that, as long as you are in it and under its power, you can never tell what you are in danger of. This one thing you may have as a truth eternally fixed, that respectable sin is, in principle, the mother of all basest crime. Follow it on to the bitter end, and there is ignominy eternal. There is a law of retribution that keeps it company, and is never parted from it; by which law the end is being shaped and the hideous result prepared. If the delicate, pretentious, always correct sinner keeps to his decency here, the proper end will show itself hereafter, and then it will be seen how dark, after all, how deep in criminality, how bronzed in guilty thought, is every soul becoming under even the fairest shows of virtue, coupled with neglect of God, and separated from his personal love.

Advancing now a stage, observe again that it is on just this view of the world and of human character under sin, chat the whole superstructure of Christianity is based Christ comes forth to the world as a lost world. He makes no distinction of respectable and unrespectable as regards the common want of salvation. Nay, it is plain from his searching rebukes laid on the heads of the priests, the rulers, and others in high life, that he is sometimes moved with greatest abhorrence by the sin of those who are most respectable and even sanctimonious. Hence the solemn universality of his terms of salvation. Hence the declared impossibility of eternal life to any, save by the same great radical change of character; a fact which he testifies directly to Nicodemus, the conscientious inquirer after truth, the sober and just senator, one of the very highest, noblest men in the nation,—Except a man be born, again, he can not see the kingdom of God. He asks not how you appear, but whether you are human. Nay, if you come to him, like the young ruler, clothed in all such comely virtues that he is constrained to look on you ingenuous, conscientious character with love, he will tell you, when you ask him what you are to do to have eternal life, that you must forsake all and come and follow him. Decency, correctness, praise—all these are but the guise of your sin, which guise he will tell you must be forever abandoned as a ground of confidence before God, and the sin, which now it only adorns and covers, must be itself removed and forever taken away by the blood of the Lamb.

Have I now in my audience any forlorn one, like the woman of my text, any youth, or older person, who is consciously sinking into the toils of vice and beginning to taste its bitter humiliations; any that has consciously lost or begun to lose the condition of respect and reputable living; any that begins to scorn himself, or seems to be sinking under the pitiless scorn of the world’s judgments? To such an one I rejoice to say, in the name of Jesus Christ, that there is no scorn with him. He does not measure sin by our conventional and often false rules of judgment. The basest sin he was even wont to find, in many cases, under the finest covering of respect. He will judge you rightly, not harshly. If you have fallen, or begun to fall, he wants to raise you. He offers you his free sympathy and support, and, if others lay their look of contempt upon your soul, he invites you kindly, whispers love and courage, and if you are ready to receive him, waits also to say—Thou art mine, go, son; go, daughter; sin no more!

Brethren professed in the name and gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is him I follow, and not any want of charity I indulge, when I remind you that a still more mournful application of this subject is possibly required. What, alas! and apart from all severity of judgment, is the profession of many disciples but a state of serious and repeatable sin? They are virtuous persons, as that term is commonly used, good always on the negative side of prudence and caution. They have no vices. They bring no scandal on the cause of Christ by their walk. But to what does all this amount, if there be nothing farther and more positive to go with it? Does the mere keeping out of vice and scandalous misdoing, does the exactest possible life, in fact, if we speak only of its correctness, constitute a living and true piety? What is it, even at the best, but a reputable, or possibly a somewhat christian-looking state of sin? The Pharisees and other religious persons of the Saviour’s time were abundantly and even sanctimoniously exact persons. And yet the Saviour discovered in them. if we can judge from the tone of his rebukes; the worst and most incurable type of moral abandonment. They had so little sense of holiness, and so little sympathy with it, that they were his bitterest enemies, and even became his betrayers and murderers. He saw all this beforehand, wrapped up in their character;—their washings, sacrifices, long prayers, and scrupulous tithings did not conceal it. You certainly have no such ceremonies; you do not believe in them, but you have covenants, communions, baptisms, family altars. Have you, in company with these, and answering to these, the new man of love, created anew in Christ Jesus unto good works? If you have not, if you live a dumb, unpositive life, under the power of the world, selfish still as before, and self-pursuing; if the old man is not crucified, and the new man, Christ, is certainly not being formed within you, then your profession signifies nothing but the mere respectability of your sin What is your supposed piety but this, if it have no spiritual and inwardly transforming power? Christ is redemption only as he actually redeems and delivers our nature from sin. If he is not the law and spring of a new spirit of life, he is nothing. Beware, let me say to you in Christ’s name,—beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. The true principle, my brethren, is this, and if this will yield us no just title to the Christian name, what we call our piety is in honest truth nothing more or better than a decent shape of sin;—For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God—as many, no more. Are we so led, do we so live?

To dismiss this subject without some prospective reference, or glance of forecast on the future, is impossible, however painful and appalling the contemplations it will raise. When you go to stand before God, my friends, it will not be your dress, or your house, or your titles, or your wealth, no, nor even your virtues, however much commended here, that will give you a title of entrance among the glorified. Respectable sin will not pass then and there as here., The honor, the nobility of it is now gone by. The degrees, indeed, of sin are many, but the kind is one, and that a poor, dejected, emptied form of shame and sorrow. How appalling such a thought to any one who is capable of thought, and not absolutely brutalized by his guilt. Furthermore, as sin is sin, everywhere and in all forms, the respectable and the unrespectable, the same in principle, and when the appearances are different, the same often in criminality, the world of future retribution must, of course, be a world of strange companionships. We are expressly told, and it seems a matter of reason also to suppose, that the spirits of guilty men will not be assorted there by their tastes, but by their character and demerits. Death is the limit and end of all mere conventionalities. The fictitious assortments of the earthly state never pass that limit. Rank, caste, fashion, disgust, fastidiousness, delicacy of sin—these are able to draw their social lines no longer. Proximity now is held to the stern, impartial principle of inward demerit;—That all may receive according to the deeds done in the body. This is the level of adjustment, and there appears to be no other. The standing of the high priests, the Scribes. and Pharisees, and the forlorn woman of my text, may be inverted now, or they may all take rank together. And so also many of you, that are now pleasing yourselves in the dignity of your virtues, and the honors of your social standing, may fall there into group and gradation, with such as now you even look away from with profoundest distaste or revulsion. The subject is painful; I will not pursue it. I will only remind you that where the lines of justice lead, there you must yourselves follow; and if that just award of respectable sin yields you only the promise of a scale of companionships from which your soul recoils with disgust, there is no wisdom for you but to be as disgustful of the sin as of the companionships, and draw yourself, at once, to Him who is Purity, and Peace, and Glory, and, in all, Eternal Life.

XVIII.

THE POWER OF GOD IN SELF-SACRIFICE.

1 Cor. i. 24.—“Christ the power of God.”

THE cross and Christ crucified are the subject here in hand. Accordingly, when Christ is called the power of God, we are to understand Christ crucified; and then the problem is to conceive how Christ, dying in the weakness of mortality and exhibiting, just there, if we take him as the incarnate manifestation of God, the humblest tokens of passibility and frailty, is yet and there, as being the crucified, the power of God.

At our present point and without some preparation of thought, we can hardly state intelligibly, or with due force of assertion, the answer to such a question. The two elements appear to be incompatible, and we can only say that the power spoken of is, not the efficient, or physical, but the moral power of God; that namely of his feeling and character But as this will be no statement sufficiently clear to stand as the ruling proposition of a discourse, I will risk a departure from our custom and, instead of drawing my subject formally from my text, I will begin at a point external and draw, by stages, toward it; paying it, as I conceive, the greater honor, that I suppose it to be so rich and deep in its meaning, as to require and to reward the labor of a discourse, if simply we may apprehend the lesson it teaches.

XIX.

DUTY NOT MEASURED BY OUR OWN ABILITY.

Luke ix 13.—“But he said unto them, Give ye them to eat.”

WHEN Christ lays it thus upon his disciples, in that solitary and desert place, to feed five thousand men, he can not be ignorant of the utter impossibility that they should do it. And when they reply that they have only five loaves and two fishes, though the answer is plainly sufficient, he is nowise diverted from his course by it, but presses directly on in the new order that they make the people sit down by fifties in a company, and be ready for the proposed repast. Debating in themselves, probably, what can be the use of such a proceeding, when really there is no supply of food to be distributed, they still execute his order. And then when all is made ready, he calls for the five loaves and two fishes, and, having blessed them, begins to break, and says to them—Distribute. Marvelous loaves! broken, they are not diminished! distributed, they still remain! And so returning, again and again, to replenish their baskets, they continue the distribution, till the hungry multitude are all satisfied as in a full supply. In this manner the original command—Give ye them to eat—is executed to the letter. They have made the people sit down, they have brought the loaves, they have distributed, and he at every step has justified his order, by making their scanty stool as good as a full supply.

XX.

HE THAT KNOWS GOD WILL CONFESS HIM.

Psalm xl. 10.—“I have not hid thy righteousness within my heart; I have declared thy faithfulness and thy salvation: I have not concealed thy loving-kindness and thy truth from the great congregation.”

WHAT any true poet will say is commonly most natural to be said and deepest in the truth; for his art is to be unrestrained by art, and to let the inspiration of his inmost, deepest life vent itself in song. And this exactly is the manner of our great Psalmist. We are not to understand that, in using the indicative form, he is merely reciting a historic fact, and telling us that he has not hic. God’s righteousness in his heart. His meaning is deeper; viz., to say that he could not do it, but must needs testify of the goodness, and sing of the sweetness, and exult in the joy, he had found in the salvation of God and the secret witness of his Spirit. Nay, he must even send his song into the temple, and call on all the great congregation of Israel to sing it with him, and raise it as a chorus of praise to the great Jehovah. What I propose, accordingly, at the present time, is to speak of—

The necessary openness of a holy experience; or, in other words, of the impossibility that the inward revelation of God in the soul should be shut up in it, and remain hid, or unacknowledged.

XXI.

THE EFFICIENCY OF THE PASSIVE VIRTUES.

Revelations i. 9.—“The kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ.”

KINGDOM and patience! a very singular conjunction of terms to say the least; as if, in Jesus Christ, were made compatible, authority and suffering, the impassive throne of a monarch and the meek subjection of a cross, the reigning power of a prince and the mild endurance of a lamb. What more striking paradox. And yet in this you have exactly that which is the prime distinction of Christianity. It is a kingdom erected by patience. It reigns in virtue of submission. Its victory and dominion are the fruits of a most peculiar and singular endurance. I say the fruits of endurance, and by this I mean, not the reward, but the proper results or effects of endurance Christ reigns over human souls and in them, erecting there his spiritual kingdom, not by force of will exerted in any way, but through his most sublime passivity in yielding himself to the wrongs and the malice of his adversaries. And with him, in this most remarkable peculiarity; all disciples are called to be partakers; even as the apostle in his exile at Patmos writes,—I John, who also am your brother and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus. I offer it accordingly to your consideration, as a kind of first principle in a good life, which it will be the object of my discourse to illustrate—

XXII.

SPIRITUAL DISLODGEMENTS.

Jeremiah xlviii. 8.—“Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel, neither hath he gone into captivity; therefore his taste remained in him, and his scent is not changed.”

THERE is a reference here, it will be seen, to wine, or to the process by which it is prepared and finished. It is first expressed from the grape, when it is a thick, discolored fluid or juice. It is then fermented, passing through a process that separates the impurities, and settles them as lees at the bottom. Standing thus upon its lees or dregs in some large tun or vat, it is not further improved. A gross and coarse flavor remains, and the scent of the feculent matter stays by and becomes fastened, as it were, in tne body of the wine itself. To separate this, and so to soften or refine the quality, it is now decanted or drawn off into separate jars or skins. After a while it is done again, and then again; and so, being emptied from vessel to vessel, the last remains of the lees or sediment are finally cleared, the crude flavors are reduced, the scent itself is refined by ventilation, and the perfect character is finished.

So it has not been, the prophet says, with Moab. He hath been at ease from the first, shaken by no great overturnings or defeats, humbled and broken by no captivities, ventilated by no surprising changes or adversities. He has lived on, from age to age, in comparative security, settled on his lees; and therefore he has made no improvement. What he was, he still is; his taste remains in him, and the scent of his old idolatries and barbarities of custom is not changed. Accordingly the prophet goes on to declare, in the verses that follow, that God will now deal with him in a manner better adapted to his want; that he will cause him to wander, empty his vessels, break his bottles, give him all the agitation he needs, and so will make him to be ashamed of the idolatries of Chemosh, even as Israel was made ashamed of Bethel, their confidence.

There has all along been a kind of mental reference, it will be seen, in his language, to the singular contrast between Moab and Israel, which here in these last words comes out. Israel, the covenanted people, have had no such easy and quiet sort of history. They have been wanderers, in a sense, all the while; shaken loose or unsettled every few years by some great change or adversity; by a state of slavery in Egypt, by a fifty years’ roving and fighting in the wilderness, by a time of dreadful anarchy under the Judges, by overthrows and judgments under the Kings, by a revolt and separation of the kingdom, then by a captivity, then by another; and so, while Moab, heaved and loosened by no such changes, has retained the scent of its old customs and abominations, Israel has become quite another people. The calves of Bethel were long ago renounced; the low superstitions, the coarse and sensual habit, all the idolatrous fashions and affinities which corrupted their religion, have been gradually fined away.

Similar contrasts might be instanced among the states and nations of our own time; in China, for example, and England; one standing motionless for long ages, and be. coming an effoete civilization, absolutely hopeless as regards the promise of a regenerated future; the other emptied from vessel to vessel, four times conquered, three times deluged with civil war, converted, reformed and re-reformed in religion, and finally emerging, after more than one change of dynasty, into a state of law, liberty, intelligence, and genuinely Christian manhood, to be one of the foremost and mightiest nations of the world.

But my object is personal, not political or social, and the principle that underlies the text is one that may be universalized in its applications. It is this:

That we require to be unsettled in life by many changes and interruptions of adversity, in order to be most effectually loosened from our own evils, and prepared to the will and work of God.

We need, in other words, to be shaken out of our places and plans, agitated, emptied from vessel to vessel, else the flavors of our grossness and impurity remain. We can not be refined on our lees, or in any course of life that is uniformly prosperous and secure. My object will be to exhibit this truth and bring it into a just application to our own personal experience. Observe, then—

1. How God manages, on a large scale, in the common matters of life, to keep us in a process of change and pre vent our lapsing into a state of security such as we desire, No sooner do we begin to settle, as we fancy, and become fixed, than some new turn arrives by which we are shaken loose and sorely tossed. When the prophet declares that He will overturn, overturn, overturn, he gives in that single word a general account of God’s polity in all human affairs. The world is scarcely turned on its axle more certainly than it is overturned by the revolutions of Providence. It seems even to be a law, in every sort of business or trade, that nothing shall stand on its lees. Credit is a bubble bursting every hour at some gust of change, What we call securities are as well called insecurities. Titles themselves give way, and even real estate becomes unreal under our feet. Nor is it only we ourselves tiat unsettle the security of things. Nature herself conspires to loosen all our calculations, meeting us with her frosts, her blastings, her droughts, her storms, her fevers, and forbidding us ever to be sure of that for which we labor. Markets and market prices faithfully represent the unsteadiness of our objects. We look upon them as we might upon the sea, and it even makes one’s head swim, only to note the fluctuations of all human goods and values represented there. Nothing in the world of business is allowed to have a base of calculable certainty. Unforeseen disasters wait on our plans, in so many forms and combinations, that we are sure of nothing, and commonly bring out nothing exactly as we expected to do.

The very scheme of life appears to be itself a grand decanting process, where change follows change, and all are emptied from vessel to vessel. Here and there a man, like Moab, stands upon his lees, and commonly with the same effect. Fire, flood, famine, sickness in all forms and guises, wait upon us, seen or unseen, and we run the gauntlet through them, calling it life. And the design appears to be to turn us hither and thither, allowing us no chance to stagnate in any sort of benefit or security, Even the most successful, who seem, in one view, to go straight on to their mark, get on after all, rather by a dexterous and continual shifting, so as to keep their balance and exactly meet the changing conditions that befall them. Nor is there any thing to sentimentalize over in this ever shifting, overturning process, which must be encountered in all the works of life; no place for sighing—vanity of vanities. There is no vanity in it, more than in the mill that winnows and separates the grain.

But we must hasten to points more immediately religious, carrying with us, as we may, a lesson derived from these analogies. Observe, then—

2. That the radical evil of human character, as being under sin, consists in a determination to have our own way, which determination must be somehow reduced and extirpated. Hence the necessity that our experience be so appointed as to shake us loose continually from our purpose, or from all security and rest in it. Sin is but another name for self-direction. We cast off the will of God in it, and set up for a way and for objects of our own. We lay off plans to serve ourselves, and we mean to carry them straight through to their result. Whatever crosses us, or turns us aside, or in any way forbids us to do or succeed just as we like, becomes our annoyance. And these kinds of annoyance are so many and subtle and various, that the very world seems to be contrived to baffle us. In one view it is. It would not do for us, having east off the will of God, and set up our own will, to let us get on smoothly and never feel any friction or collision with the will cast off. Therefore God manages to turn us about, beat us back, empty us from vessel to vessel, and make us feel that our bad will is hedged about, after all, by his Almighty purposes. Sometimes we seem to bend, sometimes to break. Be it one or the other, we lose a part of our stiffness. By and by, to avoid breaking, me consent to bend, and so at last become more flexible to God, falling into a mood of letting go, then of consent, then of contrition. The coarse and bitter flavor of our self-will is reduced in this manner, and gradually fined away. If we could stand on our lees, in continual peace and serenity, if success were made secure, subject to no change or surprise, what, on the other hand, should we do more certainly than stay by our evil mind and take it as a matter of course that our will is to be done; the very thing above all others of which we most need to be cured.

It would not answer even for the Christian, who has meant to surrender his will, and really wants to be perfected in the will of God, to be made safe in his plans and kept in a continual train of successes. He wants a reminder every hour; some defeat, surprise, adversity, peril; to be agitated, mortified, beaten out of his courses, so that all remains of self-will in him may be sifted out of him, and the very scent of his old perversity cleared. O, if we could be excused from all these changes and somersets, and go on securely in our projects, it would ruin the best of us. Life needs to be an element of danger and agitation,—perilous, changeful, eventful; we need to have our evil will met by the stronger will of God, in order to be kept advised, by our experience, of the impossibility of that which our sin has undertaken. It would not even do for us to be uniformly successful in our best meant and holiest works, our prayers, our acts of sacrifice, our sacred enjoyments; for we should very soon fall back into the subtle power of our self-will, and begin to imagine, in our vanity, that we are doing something ourselves Even here we need to be defeated and baffled, now and then, that we may be shaken out of our self-reliance and sufficiency, else the taste of our evil habit remains in us, and our scent is not changed.

3. Consider the fact that our evils are generally hidden from us till they are discovered to us by some kind of trial or adversity. This is less true of vicious and really iniquitous men; they see every hour with their eyes what is in them, or at least they may, by the acts they do. Their profanities, frauds, and lies, their deeds of impurity and violence, all that comes out of them shows them to be defiled. Not so with a generally correct man, still less so with a genuine, faithful Christian, endeavoring after greater sanctification and a closer conformity to the will of God. Every such man, living a life outwardly blameless, and desiring earnestly to grow in all true holiness, is, by the supposition, correct outwardly, and therefore the evils that remain in his spirit are to a great extent latent from himself. Sometimes, in a frame of high communion with God, he imagines that he is much more nearly purified than he is. And when he knows, from his poverty and spiritual dullness, that something is certainly wrong in him, he will have great difficulty in detecting the precise point of his infirmity. It is in him like some scent in the air, the source of which is hidden and can not be traced. Perhaps he will never definitely trace it so as to have it as a discovery, and yet God will manage, by the gusts of adversity and change, to winnow it away, even though it be undiscovered. More commonly, however, every such turn of adversity will bring out some particular fault in him, which before was hid, and which he greatly needed to have discovered, and he will be able to set himself to the very work of purification by a direct endeavor. What good man ever fell into a time of deep chastening, who did not find some cunning infatuation, by which he was holden, broken up, and some new discovery made of himself. The veils of pride are rent, the rock of self-opinion is shattered, and he is reduced to a point of gentleness and tenderness that allows him to suffer a true conviction concerning what was hidden from his sight. Nor is any thing so effectual in this way as to meet some great overthrow that interrupts the whole course of life; all the better if it dislodges him even in his Christian works and appointments. What was I doing, he now asks, that I must needs be thrown out of my holiest engagements; for what fault was I brought under this discipline? He has every motive now to be ingenuous, for the hand of God is upon him, and what God declares to him he is ready to hear. And ah! how many things that weie hidden from him start up now into view! How could he be allowed to go on prosperously, when there was so much in him and his engagements that required rectification, and ought, if it be not removed, to forever exclude him from these engagements. Perhaps he will be thrown out of them entirely, and turned to something else, that he may there discover, in a second overthrow, other evils that are still hidden from his knowledge. O, it is a great thing with us that our God is faithful and will not spare to set us in order before our own eyes. If he should let us be as Moab from our youth, then should we be as Moab in the loss of all valuable improvement. Better is it, far better that he empties us about on this side and on that, and passes us through all sorts of captivities; for then we are, at least, learning something which is valuable to be known.

XXIII.

CHRIST AS SEPARATE FROM THE WORLD.

Hebrews vii. 26.—“Separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens.”

WITH us of to-day, it is the commendation of Jesus that he is so profoundly humbled, identified so affectingly with our human state. But the power he had with the men of his time moved in exactly the opposite direction, being the impression he made of his remoteness and separateness from men, when he was, in fact, only a man, as they supposed, under all human conditions. With us, it is the wonder that he is brought so low. With them, that he could seem to rise so high; for they knew nothing, as yet, of his person considered as the incarnate Word of the Father. This contrast, however, between their position and ours is not as complete as may, at first, seem to us; for that which makes their impression, makes, after all, a good part of ours. For when we appeal thus to his humiliations under the flesh, and as a man of sorrows, M really do not count on the flesh and the sorrows, as being the Christly power, but only on what he brought into the world from above the world, by the flesh and the sorrows,—he holiness, the deific love, the self-sacrificing greatness, the everlasting beauty; in a word, all that most distinguishes him above mankind and shows him most transcendently separate from sinners. Here is the great power of Christianity—the immense importation it makes from worlds of glory outside. Hence the intimation of the text, that it became our Lord, as the priest of our salvation, to be not only holy, harmless, and undefiled, but separate also from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; that so he may be duly qualified for his transcendent work and office.

What I propose, then, for my present subject, is,—The separateness of Jesus from men; the immense power it had and must ever have on their feeling and character.

I do not mean by this that Christ was separated as being at all withdrawn, but only that in drawing himself most closely to them, he was felt by them never as being an their level of life and character, but as being parted from them by an immense chasm of distance. He was born of a woman, grew up in the trade of a mechanic, was known as a Nazarene, stood a man before the eye, and yet he early began to raise impressions that separated him, and set him asunder inexplicably from the world he was in.

These impressions were not due, as I have said, to any distinct conceptions they had of him as being a higher nature incarnate; for not even his disciples took up any such definite conceptions of his nature, till after his death and ascension. It was guessed, indeed, that he might be Elias, or some one of the old prophets, but we are only v see, in such struggles of conjecture, how powerfully he has already impressed the sense of his distinction, or separateness of character; for such guesses or conjectures were even absurd, unless they were instigated by previous impressions of something very peculiar in his unearthly manner, requiring to be accounted for.

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