ie 
 a shan nw ee ean te tego nm Seen the e omae me ette Paes 
 
 — Tata eesti => Vara te fine shee 
 iin ae mcs a Powe am Daten Pn em Terao 
 
 sane ranh wanes 
 te i i a on 
 
 sa Lindl anita 
 a ogee nc tt anc asila toile 
 
 Ht tah we 
 etm apetat set elle re 
 
 toate gneve sats 
 p Fasip Phin — me har ten al He peer tat btn eo 
 ore Lee Ra teat 
 ee iieened - - : 
 = tana pm The Sorlicsidlee aston 
 
 oo ge age nar mi fit ose nk 
 cogenbinte lenient 
 aad serial el ne mile Paton « end 
 oe a meetin Neto a a it ee tte ae =e 
 
 ke ahetiat tell Pe ae 
 Fev iineiea Puen i Vans wc Saas: 
 
 ete a ene ol 
 es sarisar Deira ena NE 
 
 ee ee 
 Yen arin ee arto bach ipetelntnguiet 
 
 sa Seine oe Sen ia at mate ae 
 Pow Sateen a ne ae ine Tae ‘ 
 Hing 9 Tene ese ete ha. pm on 
 
 Ne arte tae te atte got RE 
 
 ae Re wT 
 
 nt ncie nema ot 
 ; “ab ine it! tone Mtoe a al sr 
 Seen des ne am eels co eeige” oS Say nee Fm 
 
 Ped retin, tase aay 
 
 Vem ern wets elt cab eatimt 
 eciicenast rm el Amelie ifn 
 
 a aE the Erb ra thi Ho ie 
 
 ition te aon tis wil Pee Toni omit 4 
 ae a a Sota ne bois 
 
 fe Lan etn stir 
 Sabine Paetiingy mm Sept ne anf ae Fatt finan tendon eens) emi 
 
 eat ee el ne ee 
 
 Hat ee feb em 
 pov pat har Re Sot 
 
 get 
 
 si aalagenen en ea mn a tn 
 
 ecTeccion eat hee ebiess Paiete 
 
 patna nin! inh mee ve 
 ert edie nmin 
 
 apie a te re ages te 
 
 tee ete eee TAS ge teen ee 
 
 ae ante ns Rm te Fae 
 
 tee ten taf me a 
 sjnainetianl trie eyeeome ot 
 pie ae etme rte ire at yates om 
 $89 a ee a oe aan a ae ae 
 
 eae ln ened ae Te eh 
 
Library of The Theological Seminary 
 
 PRINCETON - NEW JERSEY 
 
 DI KE 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Library 
 of 
 John A. Mackay 
 
 BP ee ye PS ASE 
 Phelps, Austin, 1820-1890 
 Man's renewal; or 
 
4 Vo (iy 
 
 Tae YE 
 eas 
 
 roy oh 
 
 wrt iy 
 
 ae poe 
 wih es ys 
 ms a 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
MAN’S. RENEWAL. 
 
ES We will trust God. The blank interstices 
 
 Men take for Ruins, He will build into.” 
 —Mrs BROWNING ~ 
 
MAN'S REN 
 
 @r, Che Work of the Poly Spirit 
 
 Vv 
 By AUSTIN PHEEPS 
 
 AUTHOR OF ‘‘ THE STILL HOUR” 
 
 ee 
 = 
 “a! 
 | Se ‘ 
 =~ 
 & % 
 yi 3 AY 
 eR 
 Th PB 4 
 Oy Sy 
 ais 
 i ) 
 f 
 
 ALEXANDER STRAHAN, PUBLISHER 
 | 56 LUDGATE HILL, LONDON 
 1867 
 
¥ é os” 
 .’ , a1 4 
 4} ?, ay? Le } 
 
CON FEN TS: 
 
 CHAPTER; I. 
 
 CONVERSION—ITS NATURE, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I, Faith of Common Sense in the Necessity of Con- 
 version, : : : A rae 
 If, Biblical Emblems of Conversion, : ers 
 III, Conversion not a Ritual Change, : ~ 10 
 IV. Conversion not a Constitutional Change, ae: 
 
 Conversion more tha Miracle—Conversion a Fact in Expe- 
 
 _ rience—Conversion a Reasonable Change—Constitu- 
 
 tional Conversion not a Duty. 
 
 V. Conversion not a Mystical Change, : ine2s 
 VI. Conversion a Radical Change, . AS ED eiL 
 
 Counterfeits of Conversion—A Converted Man, a New Man 
 —Character under a Law of Perpetuity—Conversion 
 the Supreme Change. 
 
vi CONTENTS, 
 
 CLAP AICR gia, 
 
 REGENERATION THE WORK OF GOD. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. What do we mean by Divine Sovereignty in Re- 
 generation? . : : - eed. 
 II. Regeneration a Solitary Disclosure of God, AT 
 
 III. Biblical View of the Supernatural in the New 
 Birth, : A ; baat 
 
 IV. Experience of the New Birth suggestive of a 
 Supernatural Cause, . ° : on 5 
 
 God suggested by the Manner of Conversion—God suggested 
 by the Magnitude of Conversion—God suggested by 
 
 we 
 
 the Phenomena of Revivals—God suggested by Uncon- 
 scious Conversion. 
 V. Moral Uses of the Doctrine of Supernatural Re- 
 
 generation, . : 2 3 Aye: 
 
 The Profound Nature of Depravity—The Harmony of Truth 
 with Mind—Man’s Renewal a Work worthy of God— 
 The Lowliness of God—The Holy Spirit a Personal 
 Friend—The Law of Dependence. 
 
 CHAPITERSET. 
 TRYTH THE INSTRUMENT OF REGENERATION, 
 
 I. Biblical View of Truth as a Power, : pace! 
 
 II. The Instrumentality of Truth a Fact in Regen- 
 
 eration, : : . “ - 88 
 
 The Instrumentality of Truth Invariable—The Regenera- 
 tion of Infants, 
 
 et 
 
 i 
 
CONTENTS. Vil 
 
 PAGE 
 
 III. The Mode in which Truth acts in Regeneration, 97 
 IV. The Simplicity of Regeneration, ; 1102 
 
 V. The Evidences of Conversion intelligible to Com- 
 
 mon Sense, . ; A ¢ . 106 
 
 /I. Creed Essential to Character, . : . 109 
 VII. Christianity Independent of Fine Art, . seg i? 
 VIIT. - The True Ideal of the Pulpit, -. ; biG 
 
 ‘Great Sermons”—Affectations of the Pulpit—Popular , 
 Criticism of the Pulpit—Repose in Truth. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 RESPONSIBILITY AS RELATED TO SOVEREIGNTY IN THE 
 NEW BIRTH. 
 
 I. Difficulties of the Subject Practical, ; » 135 
 II. The Sense of Responsibility an Intuition, MESS 
 III. Responsibility not Destroyed by Depravity, SEALE 
 IV. Biblical Theory of Responsibility, , . 145 
 
 V. Ability the Measure of Obligation, : . 149 
 
 “I Can, because I Ought”—Ability the Teaching of Com- 
 mon Sense. 
 
 VI. Responsibility and Sovereignty Harmonious, . 157 
 
 VII. How to Answer the Inquiry, ‘‘ What must I do 
 to be saved ?” , : é . 160 
 
 Repentance and Faith Practicable like other Duties—The 
 Dependence of Guilt more Absolute than the Depend- 
 ence of Necessity—Grace not Justice—Encouragement 
 to Immediate Repentance—The Ruin of a Soul its own 
 work, 
 
Vill CONTENTS. 
 
 Se a NO rat SNR REY REGS FETS SS DRS Wn 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE INDWELLING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 I. The Sacredness of a Christian’s Being, . : 
 
 The Indwelling of the Spirit not an Incarnation, 
 
 Il. The Restoration of Lost Self-respect, . . 
 
 The Tyranny of Remorse—Discoveriess of a Pure Consci- 
 ence—Courage in the Day of Judgment. 
 
 III. The Intensity of Regenerate Life, <i Pe 
 
 Latent Piety Unnatural—Is Regenerate Experience Fanati- 
 cal? 
 
 IV. The Working of the Spirit by Discoverable 
 Laws, ; : P . 
 
 The Law of Harmony with other Revelations of God—The 
 Law of Harmony with the Nature of Mind—The Law 
 of Co-operation—The Law of Sanctification by Prayer 
 —The Law of Trust in a Divine Plan, 
 
 PAGE 
 183 
 
 188 
 
 195 
 
 . 202 
 
CHAPTER If. 
 
 CONVERSION—ITS NATURE. 
 
 I. 
 
 FAITH OF COMMON SENSE IN THE NECESSITY OF 
 CONVERSION. 
 
 T was an sensei yet one which contained 
 more of truth than of hyperbole, in which a 
 late writer affirmed that the most characteristic 
 thing this world has to show to other worlds is 
 a_sc scaffold. on the morning of an execution. It. 
 is true that to a holy mind the distinctive idea in 
 the condition of this world is that of gwz/¢. It is 
 not dignity ; it is not beauty ; it is not wisdom ; it 
 is not power ; it is guz/¢. It isnot weakness ; it is 
 not misfortune ; it is not suffering ; it is not death ; 
 it is gudlt. 
 Any thoughtful observer, therefore, must believe 
 
 that this world needs to be changed, in order to 
 A 
 
4 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 become the dwelling-place of God. No historian, 
 with any just conception of man as he has been 
 and is on the theatre of nations, doubts this. 
 No philosopher with any knowledge of God as he 
 is, doubts this. No man, with any honest insight 
 into his own heart, doubts this necessity of change, 
 to fit man for the presence of God. A seraph 
 hovering over the field of Solferino could scarcely 
 feel a more appalling conviction of this necessity 
 than any individual sinner feels, when his own 
 heart and the idea of God are revealed to his con- 
 science side by side. 
 
 Such has been the general belief of the race. 
 They are the few maniacs who have denied it. 
 The great religious systems of the world have been 
 founded upon the conviction that man must be 
 changed. Be the gods what they may, man must 
 be changed, to be at peace with any deity. Our 
 blinded and sickened race has sought to change 
 itself by most laborious and cunning devices. 
 Remorse has been the equivalent of genius in 
 its inventions. By baptismal rites, by holy 
 anointings, by branding with mysterious symbols, 
 by incantations of magic, by sacred amulets, by 
 ablutions in consecrated rivers ; by vigils and ab- 
 stinences and flagellations, and the purgative of 
 fire ; by distortions of conscience in rites of which 
 
CONVERSION A NECESSITY. 3 
 
 it is a shame to speak ; and by that saddest of all 
 human beliefs, which would doom a human spirit 
 to migrate for millions of years through metamor- 
 phoses of bestial and reptile existence,—man_ has 
 struggled to change himself, that he might be pre- 
 pared to dwell at last under the pure eye of God. 
 Even those fools who have said in their heart, 
 ‘here is no personal God, have drifted uncon- 
 sciously in their speculations upon a caricature in- 
 deed, and yet a resemblance of this very faith in 
 man’s need of a change to make him worthy of the 
 divinity which is within him. 
 
 It is impressive to observe how Pantheism, in 
 its wildest freaks, is dragged towards a doctrine 
 of regeneration. “The idea haunts it. It speaks 
 in language which a Christian. preacher need not 
 refuse in describing the phenomenon of conversion. 
 Its apostles tell us of a certain stage in individual 
 history at which the soul must awake and “ bestir 
 itself, and struggle as if in the throes of birth;” 
 that it must “wrestle with doubt, or cower trem- 
 bling under the wings of mystery ;” that it must 
 ‘search heaven and earth for answers to its ques- 
 tions ;” that it must “turn in loathing from the 
 pleasures of sense,” under its “irrepressible long- 
 ings after the good, the true, the beautiful ; after 
 freedom, immortality.” They tell us of the tumult 
 
RN ee 
 
 4 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 and torment of this “crisis of internal life.” 
 They profess to inform us how the soul may make 
 its way out of this chaos of distress into a “ noble, 
 perfect manhood ;” how, as one has expressed it, 
 the soul may “once more feel around it the fresh 
 breath of the open sky, and over it the clear smile 
 of heaven ; how the streams of thought may again 
 flow on in harmony; how content is to be re- 
 gained with one’s position in the system of things ; 
 how all fear and torment are to give place to 
 blessedness; how love is again to suffuse the 
 world, and over every cloud of mystery, to be cast 
 a bow of peace.” 
 
 Thus, I repeat, the idea of regeneration haunts 
 philosophy in its most impious departures from 
 God. With a God, or without a God, philosophy 
 cannot get away from the sense of the necessity of 
 a change in man to fit him for something to which 
 he is predestined. Put into the language of any 
 philosophy on this subject the two ideas of the 
 Holy Spirit and of sin, and a Christian preacher 
 may adopt the whole of it in his delineation of 
 conversion. 
 
 This necessity, therefore, of some great, critical, 
 formative change in man, may be assumed as a 
 truth on which the mind of the race is substan- 
 tially a unit. On this theme, as on many of the 
 
BIBLICAL EMBLEMS OF CONVERSION. 5 
 
 first principles of religion, the wanderings of the 
 human mind from God are for ever checked by 
 Oceanic currents which draw it inward, and com- 
 pel it to sail along the coast of truth, never far or 
 long out of sight of the mainland. 
 
 What, then, ts the nature of that change which 
 man needs to render him an object of divine com- 
 placency ? Our dependence upon the word of 
 God for the answer is immediate and absolute. 
 Philosophy, independently of the Scriptures, has 
 taught the world almost nothing with regard to 
 it. Even theological standards, uninspired, have 
 added nothing to the wisdom of an awakened 
 conscience in a child, except as they have trans- 
 lated the declarations of the Word of God. We 
 all wish to know, on a subject like this, not so 
 much what philosophers or theologians have be- 
 lieved as what God has said. 
 
 II. 
 
 BIBLICAL EMBLEMS OF CONVERSION. 
 
 It will be instructive, then, to recall briefly 
 certain of the representative passages of the Bible 
 which set forth the nature of conversion. 
 
 The most familiar of these represent religious 
 conversion by the change which occurs in natural 
 
 ATOR eps, 
 
6 MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 birth. One can almost feel the fascination of 
 the calm, subdued authority with which our Lord 
 taught to his timid pupil the paradox of regen- 
 eration: “ Except a man be dorn of water and of 
 the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of 
 God.” “Except a man be Jorn again, he cannot 
 see the kingdom of God.” “That which is born 
 of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the 
 Spirit is spirit.” Birth of body—birth of soul! 
 The one stands over against the other, as if for 
 the sake of reflecting each by its resemblance to 
 the other. ‘Then, to check the astonishment ex- 
 cited by the seeming extravagance of his speech, 
 he adds: “ Marvel not that I said, Ye must be 
 born again.” ‘‘ Marvel not”—this is no cause for 
 dumb amazement ; it is but one of the rudiments of 
 truth. Art thou a master in Israel, and knowest 
 not this thing? 
 
 A similar boldness of imagery is manifest in) , | 
 that class of passages which represent religious 
 conversion under the figure of a change from 
 death to life. As if birth from non-existence 
 were too natural an emblem to express the whole 
 truth of the anomalous change effected by regen- 
 eration, we hear an apostle exclaiming: “ Awake 
 thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead.” “You 
 hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses 
 
BIBLICAL EMBLEMS OF CONVERSION. 7) 
 
 and sins.” Another, in the assurance of a re- 
 generate experience, declares: “‘We know that 
 we have passed from death unto Ze.” Conceive 
 what intensity of significance this metaphor must 
 have had to those of the apostolic age, in which the 
 miracle of resurrection from the tomb was a reality 
 in current history, a fact of common fame! 
 
 A similar vividness of contrast is preserved by 
 a third class of passages, which express con- 
 to “ight. What is the force of such language as 
 this? “Ye are a chosen generation ;” he “hath 
 called you out of darkness into his marvellous 
 light.” ‘Ye were sometimes darkness.” Not zz 
 darkness only, but darkness itself. Night was the 
 symbol of your very souls.’ “But_now are ye 
 light in the Lord.” Not zm light merely, but light 
 itself : 
 
 ** Holy Light—offspring of heaven, first-born.” 
 
 The noonday is the emblem of your being. Among 
 the most beautiful of the scriptural titles of the 
 regenerate, are these: “children of the light,” 
 “children of the day,” “saints in light.” Some of 
 he most stirring exhortations to renewed men are 
 founded upon this contrast in nature. “ Cast off 
 the works of darkness, put on light ”—“we are not 
 
8 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 of the night ”—“ have no fellowship with the works 
 of darkness”—“what communion hath light with 
 darkness ?” 
 
 The force of such language is not diminished 
 by a fourth class of passages, which speak of 
 conversion under the figure of a change in the 
 most central organ of physical vitality. “A \ new 
 heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will 
 1 put within you.” “T will take away the stony 
 heart.” “TI will give you a-heart of flesh.” “Make 
 to you a new heart.”. A new heart! To this day, 
 what words of wisdom have we learned by which 
 to express a regenerate state more intelligibly or 
 more vividly than by these, which we breathe into 
 the prayers of our children ? 
 
 But perhaps the climax of the daring imagery 
 of the Scriptures on this subject is exceeded in a 
 fifth class of passages, of a literal force, which re- 
 present God and Satan as the sovereigns of hostile 
 empires; and the change which man undergoes 
 
 in conversion as a transfer from the one dominion 
 tothe other. Paul did not scruple to affirm his 
 commission to preach a gospel which should “turn 
 men from the power of Satan unto God.” “The 
 power of Satan!” This was no fiction of a dis- 
 tempered brain, in an age when demoniacal pos- 
 session was a common and an acknowledged form 
 
 L-\ 
 
BIBLICAL EMBLEMS OF CONVERSION. 9 
 
 of bodily affliction. “The Father hath delivered 
 us from the power of darkness, and hath translated 
 us into the kingdom of his dear Son.” ‘“ The 
 power of darkness!” This was no feeble image 
 to the thought of an Oriental people, whose faith 
 had filled the night air with demoniac spirits. “In 
 time past ye walked according to the prince of the 
 power of the air. But God, rich in mercy, hath 
 quickened us, hath raised us up, hath made us sit 
 in heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.” ‘ Walking 
 according to the prince of the power of the air !” 
 This was no mysticism and no hyperbole to the 
 ancient faith, whose angelology peopled the ele- 
 ments with spiritual intelligences, some of whom 
 swayed the atmosphere malignantly. “ The king- 
 dom of Christ ”’—“ the kingdom of the dear Son” 
 — ‘heavenly places in Christ Jesus!” These 
 were conceptions of unutterable meaning to minds 
 whose only ideal of government was that of ab- 
 solute empire, and whose thought of obedience 
 was wrapped up in that eternal idea of /oyalty, in_ 
 which self is forgotten, and the sovereign_of the 
 realm is all in all. 
 
 These passages may suffice as a specimen of the 
 methods by which religious conversion is described 
 in the style of inspiration. Yet no possible selec- 
 tion of proof-texts could be the strongest evidence 
 
Io MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 of the scriptural doctrine of regeneration. The 
 climax of proof of such a doctrine is that it per- 
 vades the system of biblical teaching. It is one | 
 of the constructive ideas of inspiration which are 
 not so much here or there, as everywhere. It is 
 pervasive, like the life-blood in the body. It is 
 like caloric in the globe. If a tortuous exegesis 
 evades .it in one passage, it is inevitable in the 
 next. Expel it from a thousand texts, and it re- 
 mains in secret implications all along the interval 
 pages between them. Wrench it away from every 
 text in which theologians have found it, and its 
 echo still reverberates from one end of the Bible 
 to the other. We can get rid of it only by fling- 
 ing away the system of revelation in which it 
 breathes—everywhere present, everywhere needed 
 ‘to complete the symmetry of truth, and everywhere 
 imperative as an oracle of God. , 
 
 Our chief inquiry, therefore, should be: What 
 does this language mean in which we are taught 
 man’s need of a change to render him a friend of 
 God? 
 
 III. 
 CONVERSION NOT A RITUAL CHANGE, 
 
 The scriptural emblems of conversion represent 
 a change of character, as distinct from any-variety 
 
CONVERSION NOT A RITUAL CHANGE. II 
 
 of change by ritual observances. No single con- 
 ception of religious conversion is more forcibly 
 suggested by the Bible than this—that it is a reality 
 and not a form. If the sole object of the Scrip- 
 tures in their teaching of this doctrine had been to 
 prevent mistake on this point, and to reprove the 
 proneness of the human mind to degrade religious 
 experience in a religious form, their language could 
 scarcely have been more happily adjusted to its 
 object. With this volume in our hands, we do not 
 know how to reason with men who exalt cere- 
 monial ordinances or formule as substitutes for a 
 change of heart. We must rank among the tokens 
 of intellectual disease, we must regard as a degra- 
 dation in a civilised mind, that taste which leads 
 one to protrude a Christian baptism, or the imposi- 
 tion of consecrated hands, or the profession of a 
 Christian creed, or communion with a Christian 
 church, or the reception of the Lord’s Supper, in 
 adwance of that work of God’s Spirit by which a 
 sinner is born again. It seems like solemn trifling 
 to debate on sucha faith. “ How readest thou?” is 
 the only query by which we can suggest the remedy 
 for the sickliness of such a mind. To the law and 
 to the testimony! If the scriptural idea of regen- 
 eration be definable in any particular of its versa- 
 tile exhibition here, it surely is so in this, that the 
 
12 MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 change it portrays is independent of external form 
 or symbol. It is an event in spiritual experience. 
 It isa change in the man. The man—the vital, 
 the immortal part of him—feels the change. He 
 lives it. When we pass from this substance of the 
 thing, to consider forms, ordinances, creeds, pro- 
 fessions, as distinct from the thing, as its substitutes 
 or its superiors or its constituents, we descend from 
 realities to mimic playthings. ‘These incidents to 
 a religious life, lose their significance as symbols 
 even. ‘They are symbols of nothing. ‘They area 
 forgery and a mummery. 
 
 In the nature of conversion there is nothing that 
 we know of which should forbid its occurrence in a 
 disembodied state. If we could know that proba- 
 tion encloses the intermediate state of the departed, 
 we might conceive of regeneration in all its majesty 
 as experienced in that land of pure spirits. With- 
 out a form to signalise it, without a whisper to pro- 
 claim it, there would be joy in heaven. When, 
 therefore, men degrade the dignity of this change 
 to that of an appendage to a ritual; when they 
 overlay its simplicity by imposing upon it burden- 
 some and intricate ordinances; when they over- 
 shadow its delicate spirituality by building around 
 and above it even the scriptural symbols which ex- 
 press it, we only speak the uniform language of the 
 
NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE. 13 
 
 Scriptures and of common sense, when we catch 
 the tone of an apostle and say— We do not know 
 whether we have baptized—Christ sent us not for 
 this—lest the cross of Christ should be of no 
 effect.” 
 
 , 
 
 sy 4 x a4 be é 
 ie #34 ore 
 
 CONVERSION NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE. 
 
 * fps -_ 
 2% Net ot oe 
 3 ¥ Pee peiyine 
 
 John Randolph, in a letter to a friend, written 
 at a time when his mind was agitated by religious 
 inquiry, speaks of a volume which he had then 
 before him, and in which it was affirmed, he says, 
 ‘that no man is converted without the experience 
 of a miracle.” ‘ Such,” he continues, ‘is the sub- 
 stance” of the author’s faith, A man ‘must be 
 sensible of the working of a miracle in his own 
 person. Now, my good friend, I have never ex- 
 perienced anything like this. I have been sensible, 
 and am always, of the proneness to sin in my 
 nature. I have grieved unfeignedly for my mani- 
 fold transgressions. I have thrown myself upon 
 the mercy of my Redeemer. But I have felt no- 
 thing like what this writer requires.” “It appears 
 incredible that one so contrite as I sometimes know 
 myself to be should be rejected entirely by infinite 
 mercy.” Yet “I fear that I presume upon God’s 
 mercy. I sometimes dread that I am in a far 
 
14 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 worse condition than if I had never heard God’s 
 Word.” 
 
 This extract illustrates the method in which 
 minds not accustomed to the technicalities of a 
 theological dialect will often interpret and misin- 
 terpret unguarded or confused speech respecting 
 the doctrine of regeneration. It is the legitimate 
 interpretation of any language which degrades con- 
 version from the level of a moral change to that of 
 a change in the constitution of a soul. I say “ de- 
 grades conversion ;” for, what do we mean by a 
 constitutional change? As applied to a spiritual 
 intelligence, a constitutional change is a change 
 either in its essence, or in its susceptibilities, or in 
 its executive powers. But a change in either or all 
 of these is, in respect of the ends of moral govern- 
 ment, of less profound significance than a change 
 of character. 
 
 The world has been very slow in learning that 
 miracles are not the grandest disclosure of Ommnipo- 
 tence. | 
 
 The material world contains more sublime dis- 
 plays of power than those of miraculous dignity. 
 The sidereal universe, swayed by the forces of law, 
 is a nobler work of God than that in which he said : 
 “Sun stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou 
 moon, in the valley of Ajalon.” In the animal 
 
ae ne REEL EES eee ee 
 | NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE, 15 
 ea a Te 
 creation there is a grandeur of divine working 
 which no miracle has stamped upon it. The 
 government of animal nature by laws which make 
 It as true to God’s will as the line of a bee in its 
 flight, or the swoop of an eagle from its eyrie, is a 
 more illustrious expression of the divine mind than 
 the piling up of the quails in the wilderness two 
 cubits deep. 
 
 So, in the world of mind, law is itself a more 
 majestic thought than that of the suspension of 
 law. The government of an intelligent universe 
 under the law of moral freedom, exhibits a more 
 imperial reach of God’s power than the govern- 
 ment of such a universe outside of that law. 
 The government of finite mind, speaking anthro- 
 pologically, is a more august achievement than 
 the creation of that mind. The idea of character 
 is an advance upon the idea of mature. Charac- 
 ter in a soul, conceived of as an effect of God’s 
 working, is a more sublime product than the 
 make of that soul. Do you conceive of moral 
 character as a something in the constitution of a 
 soul like the grain of a piece of wood? By such 
 a conception you abase the soul itself, for the 
 purpose of moral government, to a level with a 
 piece of wood. Do you define to yourself de- 
 pravity as a viciousness ingrained in the very build 
 
i 
 
 16 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 of a spirit, like the gnarl of an oak? By sucha 
 definition you precipitate the spirit itself, for the 
 ends of moral government, to a level with the 
 gnarl of an oak. Do you imagine gracious affec- 
 tions as inserted into the very nature of a man, as 
 one would infuse a new gas into the atmosphere ? 
 By such a fancy you degrade the man himself, for 
 the intents of moral government, to a level with a 
 gas in the atmosphere. Do you describe regenera- 
 tion as an act which impregnates a sinner’s being 
 with a new power, as you would magnetise a piece 
 of steel? By such a description you drag down a 
 sinner’s being, for the objects of moral government, 
 to a level with a piece of steel. Ommnipotence can 
 no more rule the one than the other by a moral 
 system. 
 
 Conversion more than Miracle. 
 
 Is it, then, to be supposed that such conceptions 
 as these underlie the scriptural emblems of that 
 change which a sinner needs to render him an 
 object of God’s complacency? ‘There is in these 
 emblems a height and a depth, a length and a 
 breadth, of significance, which such thoughts of 
 regeneration and its surroundings in the system of 
 truth do not fill up, and fill out, and fathom to the 
 bottom. By the side of such emblems these 
 
NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE, 17 
 SSS SS ee ee 
 
 thoughts appear sensuous and materialistic. No- 
 
 thing but a literal interpretation of the language of | 
 
 these emblems can bind them to the sphere of con- 
 stitutional phenomena. The instant we leave their 
 literal force,—that is, the moment we conceive of 
 them as emblems of truth—truth is buoyant within 
 them. It springs up above the sphere of merely 
 creative power, into that of moral empire, where 
 God makes flexible to his will the immense popu- 
 lations of intelligence and of liberty which fill the 
 universe with his own image. There, man is a 
 man, and not a manikin. A sinner is a sinner, 
 and not a wretch only. He is responsible, self. 
 acting, free; responsible Jecause self-acting ; self- 
 acting because free; and free because otherwise 
 moral government over him is a fiction. Con- 
 version being thus a change in the character of a 
 free sinner, regeneration, in respect of its moral 
 solemnity, is something other and more than 7z- 
 creation, It belongs to another and a loftier plane 
 of Omnipotence. : 
 
 If anything more than the natural interpretation 
 of the Scriptures were needed to establish this 
 view,—that conversion is a change of character, 
 as distinct from constitutional changes,—two very 
 simple facts would corroborate this as the NECESSATY 
 
 interpretation, 
 B 
 
 | 
 | 
 
18 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 Conversion—a Fact in Experience. 
 
 One is, that Christian experience proves no other 
 than a change of character in conversion. Con- 
 version is an experience... It is one of the most 
 ancient and one of the most modern facts in the 
 mental history of this world. Consciousness has 
 taken’ cognisance of it in unnumbered hearts. 
 Real life has proved it by innumerable tests. Yet 
 no regenerate man knows anything of a re-creation 
 of his nature, or a multiplication of his powers. 
 No Christian is conscious of new faculties. None 
 exhibits such in common life. A converted man 
 thinks, reasons, remembers, imagines now; and he | 
 did all these before conversion. A regenerate 
 ‘heart feels, desires, loves, hates now; and it did 
 all these before. A new-born soul chooses, re- 
 solves, plans, executes ; and it did all these before. 
 The chief subjects of thought are changed—they 
 are revolutionised. The prime objects of love and 
 hatred are changed—they are transposed. The 
 supreme inclination of the affections is changed— 
 it is reversed. The character of the purposes is 
 changed—it is transformed. In these respects, 
 indeed, old things are passed away, and all things 
 are new. But beyond this, neither consciousness 
 nor observation testifies to any other change. No 
 
al 
 
 a ee 
 
 NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE, ce) 
 = a a ee La 
 
 other could add to this any weight of moral signi- 
 ficance. The man could have been, so far as we 
 know, no more a Christian, no move an object of 
 complacency to God, no more at peace with his 
 own conscience, if regenerating grace had been a 
 solvent of his nature, and had reduced it to its 
 elements, and reconstructed the man by an im- 
 proved process of creation. 
 
 Conversion—a Reasonable Change. 
 
 The other fact is, that the unregenerate man 
 cannot be made intelligently to feel the reason- 
 ableness of God in making salvation dependent 
 on any other change in a sinner than a change of 
 
 character. The way of salvation is urged upon 
 
 the acceptance of men, in the Bible, as a reason- 
 able way. God lays open the whole subject, as 
 our Lord did to Nieodemus, as one which is sus. 
 ceptible of reasonable defence. It is to be pre- 
 sumed to be capable of seeming reasonable to an 
 unregenerate mind. The revelation of the mind 
 of God on the subject is addressed to an unre- 
 generate world. Its appeal is to the good sense 
 of men—that sum total of the intellectual virtues 
 
  equipoised and symmetrical. “Marvel. not?— 
 
 “Come, let us reason together”—“ Are not my 
 ways equal? saith the Lord ”»—“ What more could 
 
20 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 . 
 
 I do to my vineyard that I have not done in it?” 
 —“O fools, and slow of heart to believe.” Such 
 is the tone of inspiration in exposing its great or- 
 ganic truths to the test of reason. 
 
 But the theory of the necessity of any other 
 change in a sinner than a change of character, as 
 the condition of salvation, does not bear this 
 scrutiny of the good sense of men. A sinner’s 
 conscience does not respond to it reasonably ; 
 his reason does not respond to it conscientiously. 
 . Therefore it does not deepen his conviction of 
 ‘guilt intelligently. If he reasons consistently 
 upon it,—and some minds will reason consist- 
 ently here, to their own hurt,—if he reasons con- 
 sistently upon it, the inevitable inference from it 
 seems to be that he has no responsibility respect- 
 | ing his soul’s salvation until regeneration has been 
 ‘performed upon him. I cannot rid myself of a 
 sense of sin; guilt seems to burn within me, like 
 an unearthly fire; yet in 7eason, with this view of 
 _ conversion, I cannot see myself to be any more re- 
 \ sponsible for sin than for my shadow. I feed guilt 
 to be my character, and the whole of it; but in 
 reason, upon this theory, it seems to be my organ- 
 ism only. I feel the burden of sin as if J were its 
 creator, and yet in veason, with this conception of 
 it, it seems to have been born with me by no act 
 
NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE, 21 
 
 of mine. Then by whose act? I /ee/ the unwor- 
 thiness of my depravity ; Iam speechless as if I de- 
 served to be damned for it, and yet in reason, with 
 this view of it, the very marrow of my bones seems 
 to be as much responsible for it as the immortal 
 part of me. Then, when by veason I pursue the 
 phantom which yet I /ee/ to be no phantom, where 
 do I find its last refuge? Where is the crime 
 lodged of originating the thing for which I am 
 damned? Yet shall not the Judge of all the earth 
 do right ? 
 
 That is an awful antagonism—it seems irrev- 
 erent to conceive of it—in which a sinner’s con- 
 science and reason are thus arrayed in conflict, the 
 one condemning him, the other accusing God. 
 It is more than a “conflict of ages.” Under the 
 theory before us, it would be the conflict of eter- 
 nity. Unregenerate mind in the agitations of 
 such unnatural warfare, with unregenerate pas- 
 sions boiling over under the inevitable sense of 
 injustice, cannot be reasoned with. You might as 
 well reason with Vesuvius. That soul can be 
 made to feel helpless, hopeless, reckless ; but in 
 reason, that will be the helplessness, the hopeless-— 
 ness, the recklessness of a victim, not a sinner. 
 We may silence the victim. We may overwhelm 
 him with arguments which he cannot answer. We 
 
22 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 may overawe him with learned and abstruse conjec- 
 tures. We may teach him what the wise men have 
 recorded of the pre-existence of souls; and és soul 
 may be troubled because he cannot disprove it. 
 We may discourse to him of his personality in 
 Adam, his participation in the Fall, his taste of the 
 forbidden tree ; and he may be speechless because 
 he cannot conceive of it, and because, if he should 
 speak, he could only say: “This is my infirmity, 
 that I cannot remember Eden ; it is not so much 
 to me even as a dream when one awaketh.” We 
 may expound to him the “ federal representation,” 
 and the “imputation of sin;” and, for a moment, 
 he may impute it as a sin to his soul that he cannot 
 help shuddering at the shock which that concep- 
 tion gives to the conscience with which Adam has 
 endued him! We may weigh him down with 
 theologic definitions and qualifications and dis- 
 tinctions, and may back these up with authorities 
 and catechisms, till, through his sheer bewilder- 
 ment at our prodigious learning, his faith may 
 be held bound by our dogma, like mercury com- 
 pressed in a globe. But the instant the theologic 
 weights are taken off, the globe flies open, and 
 the prisoner springs out into the free air. Once 
 more in his right mind, his faith falls back to the 
 logic of common sense, and he feels as John Ran- 
 
NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL -CHANGE, 23 
 
 dolph did, that, on such a theory of depravity, 
 if regeneration means anything, it means that 
 conversion is a miracle. We has no more to do 
 with it than he had with his birth. Then the 
 eternal conflict in his nature—conscience on this 
 side, and reason on that side—breaks out with 
 redoubled rage. Conscience thunders, “ There is 
 no peace, saith my God, to the wacked.” Reason 
 flings back in defiant answer, “ There is no peace, 
 saith my God, to the victim.” 
 
 Constitutional Conversion not a Duty. 
 
 The doctrine of a constitutional change in con- 
 version is seldom, if ever, consistently preached. 
 It cannot be thus preached by a man who is intent 
 on results in real life. I may hold it as a theorem, 
 but I cannot preachit. I may defend it as a thesis 
 among theologians, but I cannot press it home 
 upon men from the pulpit. I cannot preach it to 
 careless sinners. I cannot preach it to awakened 
 inquirers. No man can preach it to an audience 
 of anxious men who are seeking after God. No 
 man can preach it in a revival of religion. There 
 is something which stifles it in the very atmosphere 
 of the place in which earnest men have come 
 together, to ask what ¢Zey must do to be saved. 
 
 One preacher of distinction in our own country, 
 
Se ee ee ae eo ee 
 24 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 during the early part of the present century, who 
 thought that he held this view 6f regeneration, very 
 consistently acknowledged that he could not preach 
 ‘to impenitent men in a revival of religion. He 
 could preach, and, as some of his published dis- _ 
 courses prove, with great power to professing 
 Christians on themes of Christian experience, but . 
 he could not preach to unregenerate hearers at a 
 time when they felt salvation to be a present busi- 
 ness, and the business of an emergency. On one 
 occasion, when invited to preach at such a time 
 by Professor Stuart, then a pastor in New Haven, 
 he declined the service, and, with tearful eyes, 
 assigned as his reason that his preaching was not 
 adapted to the demands of such scenes as he had 
 witnessed there. He could not adjust to them 
 his views of the nature of a change of heart. A 
 revival was an emergency for which no provision 
 was found in his theory of the way in which the 
 gospel should be preached to unregenerate men. 
 Was not such a confession the strongest possible 
 corroborative evidence that he had mistaken the 
 doctrine of the Scriptures 2 
 We cannot err, then, in adopting as one of the 
 first principles of revelation on the subject of the 
 new birth, that it is a change of character, as dis- 
 _ tinct from constitutional changes in the soul. It 
 
nr  . 
 
 NOT AUMYSTICAL CHANGE, 25 
 
 is a change in that, and only that, for which con- 
 science amd reason, reason avd conscience, hold a 
 man responsible, as for a thing of his own originat- 
 ing and his own nurturing. 
 
 Vv. 
 
 CONVERSION—NOT A MYSTICAL CHANGE, 
 
 Some doctrines of the Scriptures are so clear that 
 their very perspicuity is their vindication. A state- 
 ment of them amounts to proof. Other doctrines 
 are so mysterious that statement and testimony are 
 all the evidence we can have of their truthfulness. 
 We can reason upon them no further than to ob- 
 serve that their statement is not internally a con- , 
 tradiction, and that the testimony which supports’ 
 them is authoritative. But there are other truths , 
 in which the mysterious and the intelligible are so | 
 interwoven that to an unpractised eye they may 
 seem inseparable. Such a truth is that of regen- 
 eration. 
 
 On the one hand, what God’s working in the 
 change of a sinner’s heart is, as distinct from the 
 effect of that working, in other words, what regen- 
 eration is, as distinct from conversion, who can tell ? 
 We know scarcely more of the interior of the work 
 of God in regenerating a soul than we do of the 
 
26 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 mechanic power in creating a soul. The dynam- 
 ics of the phenomenon elude all our philosophy. 
 When Coleridge said, “By what manner of work- 
 ing God changes a soul from evil to good, how He 
 impregnates the barren rock with gems and gold, 
 is to the human mind an impenetrable mystery in 
 all cases alike,” he uttered only what every thought- 
 ful mind feels. Thus our Lord taught to Nico- 
 demus, The wind bloweth where it listeth, but the 
 whence and the whither ye cannot tell ; so is every 
 one that is born of the Spirit. But this is very far 
 . from affirming that the change itself, the result of 
 God’s working, is an enigma. A change of char- 
 acter, in itself considered, is one of the most 
 intelligible of historic facts. It is like a transpar- 
 ency in the sun. It has the simplicity of contrast. 
 It is like a change from “yes” to “no,” from “‘no” 
 tO siyes.s 
 
 Yet an inquiring mind sometimes suffers con- 
 fusion from permitting the mysteriousness of the 
 methods of regeneration to overspread the crystal- 
 line character of the fact of conversion. ‘The idea 
 seems Often to be entertained that this change 
 itself is the great secret of Christian experience. 
 An unregenerate mind cannot know what it is, 
 any more than Aow it is. It appears, in the view 
 of some minds, to bar the entrance to the church, 
 
NOT A MYSTICAL CHANGE, 27 
 
 like the watchword of a brotherhood, to which, 
 from the outside, none can be initiated. Said 
 one, in deep anguish, to a pastor, “I do not 
 understand it. I do not comprehend what I must 
 do, or what I must be. I seem to myself to be 
 doing all I can do. I am not conscious of hos- 
 tility to God. I long to accept Christ and Him 
 only as my Saviour. What more is requisite to 
 give me the peace which others feel, I do not know. 
 The mystery of the thing shuts me in. Yet guilt 
 weighs upon me like the hills. I feel as if I were 
 buried alive.” 
 
 The state of mind expressed in this language is, 
 in more respects than one, unnatural and unscrip- 
 tural, It is not an experience to which men are 
 ever exhorted, or invited, or intimidated, in the 
 Bible. But the point of its erroneousness which 
 demands notice here is that of its confounding a 
 change of heart with the divine methods which 
 induce the change, and conceiving the one to be 
 as enigmatical as the other. This is like confound- 
 ing light with the voice which said, “Let there be 
 light.” An inquiring sinner wrongs his own soul, 
 and distrusts the Saviour’s heart towards him, when 
 he lingers in dumb anguish before the cross, hop- 
 ing that he shall by and by understand the subject 
 of conversion, and thus be exabled to become a 
 
28 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 Christian. To a sinner in the condition which I 
 here imagine, there is nothing further to be under- 
 stood in order to his salvation. There is no abyss 
 of mystery to be fathomed. He has the truth, and 
 the whole of it. How does our Lord address 
 Nicodemus in this condition of purblind anxiety ? 
 He chides him, as one would a child whose know- 
 ledge was needlessly beneath his years. Art 
 thou a master in Israel, and knowest not these 
 things ? 
 
 These emblems of conversion, too—what bold- 
 ness of contrast pervades them all! When we 
 mean to express an idea with indubitable clear- 
 ness, we seek the aid of contrasted images. We 
 have no difficulty in distinguishing ice and fire. 
 We never mistake the fall of thistle-down for the 
 tread of an elephant. Nothing else reveals mid- 
 night like a flash of lightning. So the inspired 
 mind paints the reality of a change of heart by de- 
 picting the two states of character between which 
 the change occurs. It is from non-existence to. 
 being ; from a heart of stone to a heart of flesh ; 
 from darkness to light; from death to life; from 
 the empire of fiends to the kingdom of Christ. 
 There is a meaning in such intense symbols of the 
 truth which is meant to be as intensely understood. 
 An unregenerate mind can understand them. No 
 
NOT A MYSTICAL CHANGE, 29 
 
 other difference exists between regenerate and un- 
 regenerate perception of the truth in them than 
 that which divides the knowledge of experience 
 and the knowledge of theory on all other subjects. | 
 A sinner—an unregenerate sinner—a sinner who 
 feels his own desert of hell—the chief of sinners 
 —may come before God with none but reasonable 
 fears, none but intelligent convictions, none but 
 manly yearnings after peace, and in conscious 
 helplessness may ask of God, “ What shall I do to 
 be saved?” It is areasonable inquiry. God will 
 not mock him in the answer. God will not say to 
 him, “It is a mystery: it is the great secret of the 
 universe. ‘Thy destiny is unsearchable by thy dim 
 eye. Be still, and know that I am God. Go thy 
 way for this time; when I have a convenient 
 season I will call thee with an effectual calling. 
 Go—go thy way.” Sinners often treat the Saviour 
 thus ; he is never so merciless to them. 
 
 Certain couplets in a very precious hymn, ex- 
 pressive of the sinner’s last resolve, though they 
 - are true to a sinner’s desponding experience, still 
 are not worthy, because that experience is not 
 worthy, of the riches and the freedom of God's 
 grace. ‘I'll go to Jesus:” 
 
 ‘¢T’ll to the gracious King approach 
 Whose sceptre pardon gives ; 
 
30 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 Ferhaps he will command my touch, 
 And then the suppliant lives, 
 
 ‘¢ Perhaps he will admit my plea, 
 Perhaps will hear my prayer!” 
 
 There is no “perhaps” in God’s promises. 
 There is no stammering speech in God's invita- 
 tions to an inquiring sinner. There is no hesitancy 
 of love in God’s offers of regenerating grace. More 
 honourable to the truth as it is in Jesus is the lan- 
 guage of adoring trust : 
 
 ‘¢Just as I am—without one plea, 
 But that thy blood was shed for me. 
 Just as I am—and waiting not. 
 
 Just as I am—though tossed about 
 With many a conflict. 
 
 Just as I am—poor, wretched, blind. 
 
 Just as I am—thou wi/¢ receive, 
 Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve. 
 Because thy promise I believe ; 
 
 O Lamb of God, I come.” 
 
 VI. 
 
 CONVERSION—A RADICAL CHANGE, 
 
 The most characteristic feature in the scriptural 
 view of the nature of conversion is, that, in dis- 
 tinction from every variety of secondary change, 
 it is the most radical change of which human 
 
A RADICAL CHANGE. 0 
 i eeeeSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSsSSss 
 
 character is susceptible. This conception of the 
 radical nature of conversion is involved in all the 
 scriptural statements of its necessity, and specially 
 in the scriptural metaphors by which it is symbol- 
 ised. Indeed, the conception with which the in- 
 spired mind appears to have struggled most sturdily 
 under the poverty of language, was this of the 
 greatness of the change. What else is signified by 
 the frequency with which the inspired thought for- 
 sakes literal speech, and falls back upon such 
 startling and unqualified metaphors as the creation 
 of light; the resurrection from the dead; the 
 mysterious and unknown change of birth; and 
 translation from the realms of the prince of the 
 power of the air? Sane minds do not employ 
 such emblems of thought recklessly. We cannot 
 suppose inspiration to prompt extravagant speech. 
 This is but the sobriety of human dialect, crowded 
 with and struggling to encompass the magnitude 
 of divine thought. Scriptural utterances on. this 
 subject exhibit the same evidence of the conflict 
 of truth with the feebleness of language—I had 
 almost said the impatience of truth at the im- 
 becility of language—which we find in the scrip- 
 tural modes of representing the being and majesty 
 of God. ‘Truth, in the one case as in the other, 
 seems to weigh down the most elastic tongue, and 
 
32 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 to exhaust the most voluminous vocabulary, and 
 to search through the inventions of the most crea- 
 tive imagination, and to pass from one emblem to 
 another, from one kingdom of resemblances to a 
 second, till, by the mysteriousness of its drapery, 
 we are compelled to feel that the naked truth, as 
 appreciated by the mind of God, surpasses our 
 reach of expression. We can only exclaim, “ Eye 
 hath not seen, nor ear heard it.” We cannot de- 
 fine the greatness of the change in literal speech, 
 otherwise than by pronouncing it the most pro- 
 found, so far as we can know, that human nature 
 can experience. 
 
 What the birth of the body is to the conscious- 
 ness of the mind that inhabits it we do not know, 
 but, for its significance to the moral government 
 of God over the mind, it cannot be so momentous 
 a change as that mind’s conversion. What dis- 
 embodiment at death is to the experience of the 
 spirit which thus goes out into an unexplored 
 eternity we cannot conceive; but, in respect of 
 the solemnity of moral government, it cannot be 
 of such magnitude as the regeneration of that 
 spirit. What the resurrection of the body is 
 to the history of the soul which has been again 
 enrobed in it we cannot conjecture; but, in its 
 relation to the moral government of that soul, 
 
A RADICAL CHANGE. 33 
 
 it cannot be so elemental a change as that soul’s 
 conversion. Such physical transformations and 
 transitions can be hints only, and feeble hints, of 
 the spiritual phenomenon which transcends them. 
 
 Counterfeits of Conversion. 
 
 Let us then, for our practical instruction, observe 
 several mental and moral changes with which con- 
 version is often confounded. Observe, briefly, that 
 a change of external deportment is not the chief 
 result of regeneration. No matter how pervasive 
 that change may be, it can Dear no comparison 
 with religious conversion. When a man who has 
 been addicted to sensual vice becomes a sober 
 man, a chaste man, an industrious man, a good 
 citizen, a kind father, brother, son, there is a 
 notable change. It is a real change in char- 
 acter. It is a change for which a man deserves 
 to be respected. But that is not a change which | 
 fills up the language of the Scriptures in designat- 
 ing the translation of a man into the kingdom of 
 God. In other words, conversion and reformation 
 are not synonymous. L 
 
 Again, no increase of seriousness of mental habit 
 is synonymous with religious conversion. A young 
 man often experiences, as the natural result of 
 
 expanding intellect, an increase of thoughtful- 
 c 
 
34 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 ness. When he was a child he thought asa child; 
 now he has put away childish things. Manly 
 thought awakens manly sensibility. He acquires 
 some sense of the reality of life as a conflict. A 
 certain dignity of character is formed, which is as 
 natural a growth of manhood upon the stock of 
 youth as the addition of a cubit to the stature of 
 an infant. It is indeed a valuable change, a 
 change necessary to success in life, a change 
 which will command respect, as it deserves re- 
 spect; but it is not conversion. No growth of 
 eamestness is synonymous with that new birth 
 which a soul experiences under the regenerating 
 act of God. 
 
 Further, the abandonment of any single passion 
 does not constitute conversion. Such a change 
 as this often occurs as the fruit of increasing years. 
 * Often the effect is to mellow a man’s character, 
 by substituting for a turbulent vice one more mild 
 and comely, and yet a vice as deeply seated, as 
 odious to God. Warren Hastings, after his am- 
 bition had burnt itself out in India, realised the 
 favourite dream of his youth, by returning to spend 
 his old age in the homestead where his ancestors 
 had lived.in luxury. Here was a change, in- 
 deed. It must have involved in some sort a 
 change in character. It was an abandonment of 
 
A RADICAL CHANGE. 35 
 
 a fiery passion for a harmless indulgence of an 
 aged man’s love of repose. But this obviously 
 is no such change as the Word of God portrays 
 by the emblem of the dawn of light on a benighted 
 wanderer. 
 
 Once more, conversion is not the develop- 
 ment of character by natural germination in the 
 heart. Character often undergoes a change by 
 which qualities long concealed spring to light 
 under a change of circumstance. ‘Traits of gen- 
 erous manhood, the germs of which have been 
 repressed, shoot up thriftily under improved dis- 
 cipline. Energies which have slumbered are 
 roused by emergencies. No man knows the com- 
 pass of his own nature till it has been distended 
 by some great sorrow or great opportunity for 
 achievement. Such facts in life tempt us to self- 
 conceit respecting the hidden nobleness of man, 
 Much of the religion of literature is founded upon 
 the idea of concealed virtue. A divinity is im- 
 agined to dwell within us, and to be awaiting 
 only the incitement of occasion or the felicity 
 of circumstance to develop itself in all that man 
 should desire or respect in character. Yet no 
 such change as this can be the complement of the 
 scriptural conception of that revulsion of character 
 which is no Zss than resurrection from the dead, 
 
36 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 What a satire on developed goodness in man is 
 expressed in the tone of the Scriptures towards the 
 best embodiment of the natural virtues! Breathe 
 into Nature’s good man the most comely of her 
 graces; educate in him the most refined of her 
 sensibilities; develop in him the most magnani- 
 mous of her impulses; fashion in him the most 
 docile obedience to her teachings ; nurture in him 
 the most elegant and placid of her tastes, so that to 
 the silken judgment of the world his character shall 
 seem to be a paragon of beauty, “fair as a star 
 when only one is shining in the sky;” yet, if that 
 fascinating being—that young man of whom it 
 shall be said that Jesus, beholding him, loved him 
 —has not been changed by the washing of re- 
 generation and the renewing of the Holy Ghost, 
 the honest eye of God sees him as a naked soul 
 in bondage to the prince of the power of the 
 air. 
 
 A Converted Man—a New Man. 
 
 If the scriptural dialect on this subject means 
 anything, it must indicate that conversion is a 
 change which brings into existence a character 
 which had no being before. Does not birth intro- 
 duce to a new existence? Is life only a develop- 
 ment of nonentity? Is vitality a germination of 
 
a as eer er ae cee aE eR Teel 
 
 A RADICAL CHANGE. 37 
 
 the life of a corpse? Is light a growth of the mid- 
 night? Is the kingdom of God a superstructure 
 upon the kingdom of Satan? If development, 
 growth, germination, are the things in which re- 
 generation exhibits itself, we need no such emblems 
 as these to express it. They are out of character 
 and out of place. ‘They are untruthful. The 
 Scriptures are full of puerile extravagances and 
 grimaces of diction. There is no propriety in 
 recognising two classes of mankind, such as the 
 Scriptures separate by a gulf of fire. ‘There are no 
 such beings as sinners and saints, enemies of God 
 and friends of God,—natural men and spiritual 
 men,—men who are in darkness and men who are 
 in light,—men who are dead and men who are 
 alive,—men who are in God’s kingdom and men 
 who are in Satan’s kingdom. ‘These are unreal 
 and unjust distinctions. Men are all of one 
 class. ‘They differ not in kind, but in degree of 
 character. Here, then, we have a large and varied 
 class of descriptions, uttered by the Spirit of God 
 of men and to men, to which among men we find 
 no counterpart in reality. But one half of the 
 Bible is apposite to this world. Is this credible ? 
 , The development, then, of an existing germ of 
 holiness is not the scriptural idea of a change of 
 ‘heart. In other words, no process of self-culture 
 
; 
 38 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 ok i tne epoch I ad RA tA ya ved SL 
 
 can be equivalent in its fruits to the divine act of 
 regeneration. 
 
 Character under a Law of Perpetuity. 
 
 The radical nature of conversion may be still 
 further illustrated, by observing for a moment a 
 principle which we often lose sight of in medita- 
 tion upon this theme, but which lies at the bottom 
 of all genuine notions of man as a subject of gov- 
 ernment. It is that character itself ‘has fixedness. 
 In the profound and ultimate sense in which we 
 employ the term to indicate what a soul is as a 
 subject of moral government, character has an 
 element which approaches immutability. Charac- 
 ter, good or bad, once formed, tends to perpetuate 
 itself. Once 27 it, a soul grows # it, and rises or 
 sinks with it. ‘The necessity of creating a charac- 
 ter is the most transcendent privilege, and at the 
 same time the most appalling peril, of a moral 
 being. ‘The law of perpetuity is deep-laid in its 
 very nature. By this law a moral being tends to 
 be always what it has been and is. It is this 
 which renders guilt so fearful. The law of guilt is 
 to perpetuate guilt “Once a sinner, akvays a 
 sinner,” expresses the tendency of fallen mind. 
 
 A truth is enveloped in those forms of expression 
 
ret 
 
 A RADICAL CHANGE. 39 
 
 rn 
 
 which eminent and holy men have often used to 
 express depravity, when they have spoken of “a 
 sinful nature ;” of ‘a depraved constitution ;” of 
 a “helpless corruption ;” of “inability to repent.” 
 Much as these modes of expression are miscon- 
 strued, and much as they need qualification, there 
 is still a truth in them. The use of them often in- 
 dicates the struggle of a pious heart to express 
 that truth. They are not without resemblance to 
 some of the forms of scriptural phraseology. ‘They 
 have their counterpart in the common usage of 
 men in figurative speech. ‘The truth they express 
 is that of the natural fixedness of character in a |/ 
 sinner’s heart. On the principle of the tendency 
 of all character to perpetuate itself, a sinner’s char- 
 acter is fixed. What he has once made it, its ten- 
 dency is to be for ever. That it will be for ever, un; 
 less the power of God be interposed to reverse ith. 
 
 True, we do not conceive of this as an invincible 
 tendency. It exists by no compulsory law. It 
 asserts, therefore, no fatal authority. It is not a 
 destiny. We do not reason upon the laws of char- 
 acter as we reason upon the laws of matter, or 
 even as we reason upon laws of intellect, as in- 
 tellect only. Character, in the ultimate concep- 
 tion of it as a moral phenomenon, is unique. It 
 
a 
 
 40 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 ES SN ht re 
 
 is not a metal; it is not a mind. It has laws of 
 its own. Its laws are but the expression of the 
 human mind which creates it, as the laws of light 
 are an expression of the divine mind which created 
 that ; as the laws of intellect are an expression of 
 the infinite Intelligence in whose image it is made. 
 When, therefore, we apply the term “nature” to 
 character we cannot mean by it the same thing as 
 when we speak of the “nature” of silver or the 
 “nature” of memory. We must not confound the 
 laws of character with the emblems of these laws, 
 which we sometimes seek for in the laws of matter 
 and in the organic laws of mind. Matter and mind 
 are God’s creation.’ Human character is man’s 
 creation. The creative power is as absolute in 
 the one case as in the other. God rules finite 
 character not by creation, but by government. 
 He governs it as character, not as the wind or as 
 the springs of the sea. 
 
 Yet, after all, such is this imperial will of man, 
 by which it is his privilege and his peril to be what 
 he will, that a pressure towards immutability grows 
 out of its nature and accumulates with time. Once 
 bent one way, the spring coils itself that way for 
 ever. Once set in the chosen mould, the com- 
 pound indurates into granite. Such is character in 
 
A RADICAL CHANGE. 4I 
 
 2 ee 
 
 the ultimate notion of it. A creation by man’s 
 own act—a free creation—a creation which caz 
 be reversed—yet once in being, it ends to death- 
 less being like that of God. It is a start on a 
 journey into eternity, in a direction from which, 
 but by God’s interposition, no traveller returns. 
 It is in the light of such a conception of the awful 
 immortality of character that we must judge of 
 the radical nature of its change in conversion. 
 
 The Supreme Change. 
 
 It remains, then, to observe, that there is but 
 one change of character conceivable which shall 
 meet all the peculiarities affirmed of religious con- 
 version. It is the change from sin to holiness. It 
 is a change from absolute sin to the first dawn of 
 holiness in the soul. It is that unique change 
 which has no parallel and no adequate similitude, 
 in which an intelligent mind, a free mind, a self- 
 acting mind, a mind which has intelligently, freely, 
 of its own will, abandoned God, is led for the first 
 time in its moral history by Almighty grace to re- 
 turn, and give itself to God. For the first time 
 then a sinner appreciates God. For the first time 
 he loves God. For the first time he chooses God. 
 For the first time he enjoys God. For the first 
 
2 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 4 
 
 time he is born of God. For the first time his life 
 is hid with Christ in God. God, God, Gon, is the 
 one being to whom his soul mounts up, and in 
 whom he enters into rest. He may be flooded 
 with joy unspeakable, because he is engulfed in 
 the blessedness of Gop. 
 
CHAPTER IL 
 
 REGENERATION-—THE WORK OF GOD. 
 
 N unperverted mind will approach reverently 
 any revelation of God in the destiny of man. 
 The conception of an invisible Power has itself a 
 fascination for a finite mind. It is not strange that 
 the Wind should have been deified in Pagan theo- 
 logy. Little as a human mind can know of a 
 power which the eye has never seen, yet when 
 dependence upon such a power reaches out to 
 cover everything in the future which renders im- 
 mortality attractive, a sense of mingled grandeur 
 and suspense is awakened, which holds the mind 
 fast, in the attitude of a subdued and anxious 
 learner. Metaphysical relations of truth in such 
 connexions are often unwelcome. Sometimes, in- 
 deed, they seem unnatural. The instinct of a 
 docile spirit is to approach such truths as objects 
 of faith, rather than as subjects of analysis. 
 
44 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 To no theme is such a spirit more becoming than 
 to the revealed fact that the change of a human 
 heart is the work of God. 
 
 I. 
 
 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY IN 
 REGENERATION 2? 
 
 We shall reach the most vital aspects of this 
 subject most directly by first defining to ourselves, 
 briefly, what we mean when we ascribe the change 
 of a man’s heart to Divine Power. ‘This doc- 
 trine may be considered as affirming several 
 truths. 
 
 In the first place, it affirms that a human soul 
 never changes its own character from sin to holi- 
 ness through the involuntary development of its 
 own sensibilities. Holiness cannot so exist in 
 emotive forms as to spring up impulsively in a 
 heart which is unconscious of will to produce it. 
  Holines$ is not an instinct. It does not grow 
 automatically out of the make of the soul, as, with 
 proper incitements, compassion, gratitude, rever- 
 ence, may do. The heart of man, in relation to 
 the causes of rectitude within it, is not like a 
 harp, which to utter its voices needs only to be 
 hung in the wind. 
 
 The doctrine we are to consider further affirms 
 
0 a a aS 
 
 SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD. 45 
 
 —_—_— 
 
 that man never turns from sin to holiness by an 
 effort of his own will, independent of supernatural 
 Power. This is something more than the asser- 
 tion often made, “that man cannot change his own 
 affections by direct volition.” The inability in- 
 volved in this latter assertion is not the fruit of 
 depravity. The grace of God does not remove it. 
 It lies in the constitution of mind, regenerate or 
 unregenerate. A saint cannot, more than a sinner, 
 love God by resolving : “I will love God.” Either 
 might as reasonably resolve: “I will see this 
 symphony of Beethoven ; I will hear the beauty of 
 Loch Lomond.” The blind man had more of reason 
 in his philosophy when he pronounced the colour 
 of scarlet to be ke the sound of a trumpet. 
 
 The doctrine of man’s dependence upon God 
 for regeneration affirms nothing respecting such 
 psychological possibilities of change. It affirms 
 that man never turns from sin to holiness by any 
 effort, direct or indirect, of his own will, unin- 
 fluenced by supernatural power. We do not 
 affirm that he cannot do this, except in the figu- 
 rative sense in which a mother cannot hate her 
 infant ; a compassionate man cannot bear the sight 
 of a victim on the rack ; a miser cannot part with 
 his gold ; Joseph’s brethren could not speak peace- 
 ably unto him; God cannot lie. In the literal 
 
————————S— a Ss SP ns Ssh: 
 
 46 MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 sense of both scientific and popular speech, a 
 sinner can, but will not, cease to be a sinner with- 
 out the intervention of Divine Power. 
 
 Consistently with this view, the doctrine of 
 Divine agency in regeneration also affirms that 
 the unaided force of truth does not suffice to per- 
 suade the human soul from sin to holiness. Here 
 also we affirm only the fact of experience. The 
 doctrine does not degrade the dignity of truth. 
 It does not deny the intrinsic power of truth over 
 mind as mind, regenerate or unregenerate. It 
 does not refuse to discern in truth a tendency to 
 convert a soul, and in the soul a tendency to yield 
 to truth. It only affirms the fact of real life, that 
 these tendencies are overborne. The suasive 
 working of truth, when not energised by the grace 
 of God, is a failure. 
 
 In this view is involved a subsidiary fact,— 
 that all human instrumentalities and expedients 
 _ by which truth is intensified, and so made appre- 
 ciable by human sensibilities, are powerless to 
 change the heart. ‘Authority, sympathy, reason- 
 ing, eloquence, the magnetism of person, and 
 whatever else enters into the mystery of persua- 
 sion, in which mind impels mind by the enginery 
 of speech, may change well-nigh everything in 
 man except his character. That, these auxilia- 
 
REGENERATION UNIQUE, 47 
 
 ries to truth all fall short of, in their profoundest 
 reach. 
 
 Let. it be observed, then, once more, that when 
 _ we ascribe to God the change which takes place 
 in regeneration, we mean that, over and above ail 
 natural tendencies and finite agencies, God per- 
 forms an act of sovereign power in every change 
 of character from sin to holiness. What that act 
 is, what that power is, other than as characterised 
 by their effects, the Scriptures do not teach, and 
 we need not affirm. ‘The psychological process of 
 which moral conversion is the consequence is at 
 best a theme of philosophical conjecture. Belief 
 respecting it is no necessary part of faith in the 
 biblical doctrine of regeneration. Beyond a de- 
 claration of the fact, we are not called upon to 
 affirm or deny. 
 
 II. 
 REGENERATION—A SOLITARY DISCLOSURE OF GOD. 
 
 Our conception of the fact of divine agency in 
 regeneration may be sharpened, however, and we 
 may be protected against some confusion of faith, 
 if we observe that, so far as we know, the act of 
 renewing the human heart is an entirely unique 
 disclosure of God. We know of nothing else like 
 it in the history of the universe. We call it “ crea- 
 
48 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 tion.” We pray with the Psalmist, “ Create in me 
 !” Yet it is not an act of physical 
 omnipotence, like-that which creates an oak. We 
 
 a clean heart 
 
 denominate this mysterious transformation “a new 
 birth.” Yet we should deserve the rebuke which 
 our Lord gave to Nicodemus, if we should discern 
 in the act such an expression of omnipotence as 
 that which creates a soul. We picture this divine 
 renewal as a “change of heart.” We pray that 
 the stony heart may be taken and the heart of 
 flesh given. But ours would be a childish dream 
 of heaven, if we should look for such a miracle of 
 power as God wrought in the creation of the first 
 woman. God cannot create a human character as 
 He creates the being who sustains that character. 
 God could not have created Adam’s character as 
 He created Adam. We speak loosely when we 
 say in our creeds “man was created holy.” So, 
 infinite sovereignty could not have originated the 
 piety of the beloved disciple as it summoned into 
 being the fisherman of Galilee. We portray this 
 unspeakable change as a “‘resurrection.” We cry 
 out in our despair, “ Who shall deliver us from 
 the body of this death?” But our despair must be 
 eternal, if we have no other hope than szch an act 
 of Deity as the raising of Lazarus. The dry bones 
 which Ezekiel saw were in vision only. So far as 
 
REGENERATION UNIQUE. 49 
 
 we know the history of God’s working, regenera- 
 tion stands alone. Divine forces in nature—even 
 divine forces above nature, yet acting upon things 
 material—present no parallels to it. 
 
 Consequently the emblems which we derive from 
 the material and the sentient world to express the 
 phenomenon of regeneration are only emblems. 
 They are not kindred facts.. They do not belong 
 to the same plane of divine efficiency. ‘They are 
 not definitions, they are pictorial descriptions, of the 
 new birth. The new birth transcends them, as 
 matter sentient transcends matter inert; as intelli- 
 gence transcends both ; and as character transcends 
 all organism of matter or mind. We shall often 
 conceive most truthfully of such a phenomenon by 
 throwing our minds back of the symbols devised 
 for its expression. As a disclosure of God, it is at 
 once original, solitary, and ultimate. Nothing like 
 it, so far as our knowledge extends, has preceded, 
 or will follow, the earthly history of man. Nothing 
 like it in the universe, so far as revealed to us, lies 
 outside of the moral experience of the human soul. 
 Such a phenomenon, and the primary Cause of it, 
 cannot be exhaustively expressed by any similitude. 
 They must be described by results, rather than 
 defined by analysis. To whom will ye liken 
 
 God} 
 D 
 
50 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 It may aid us further to conceive of the regen- 
 erating act as a unique disclosure of God’s power, 
 if we recall the fact that in like manner we con- 
 ceive of the atonement as a solitary device of his 
 moral government. Thus, also, we look upon the 
 incarnation as an unparalleled expression of the 
 personality of Godhead. It would be as truthful 
 to confound these with the emblems by which we 
 struggle with our poverty of speech to express 
 them, as it is to confound the regenerating power, 
 as is sometimes done, with creative power, or pre- 
 serving power, or the power of miracle, or any 
 other variety of executive energy emanating from 
 the Will of God. 
 
 Yet if we observe faithfully the actual working 
 of God in regeneration, and judge the cause by its 
 effects, we are not left without some practical hints 
 of its nature. 
 
 Thus we approximate a radical idea of it when 
 we discover it to be a moral, as distinct from a 
 
 | physical, power. We have a valuable notion of 
 
 it when we term it persuasive, as distinct from 
 compulsory, in its operation. We derive fearful 
 admonition from the fact that it is resistible, not 
 invincible, by the subjects of it. Yet we rest in 
 hope when we know that it is certain in its work- 
 ing, and sure of its end; not capricious, not 
 
BIBLICAL PROOF, 51 
 
 chimerical. And do we not revere the super- 
 natural majesty of it when we look up to the 
 height of the solitude in which it works, without 
 equal and without adequate symbol among all the 
 revelations made to us of Infinite Mind? 
 
 IIl. 
 
 BIBLICAL VIEW OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN THE NEW 
 BIRTH. 
 
 The proof of the fact of Divine Agency in re- 
 generation is derived chiefly from the Word of 
 God. An analysis of a single text may serve as a 
 specimen of the declarative passages in which this 
 truth is taught. 
 
 “To as many as received him, to them gave he 
 power to become the sons of God; which were 
 born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, 
 nor of the will of man, but of God.” We can- 
 not press to the quick the significance of the word 
 “power” here. Yet we need not shrink from it 
 through fear of its implication against human free- 
 dom. We must concede, however, to an objector 
 against the whole conception of a new birth, that 
 there is here an infelicity, though not necessarily 
 an inaccuracy, in our English version. “ Prero- ,, 
 gative” is the idea which the word in its con-— 
 
52 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 nexion requires, rather than “ability.” “ Privilege” 
 it is rendered in the margin of our larger Bibles. 
 “To them assigned he the privilege of being the 
 sons of God.” But this is not the vital part of the 
 passage in respect to the truth before us. That 
 appears in the sequel: ‘ Which were born not 
 of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the 
 will of man, but of God.” That is, this new 
 birth, which entitles men the sons of God, is not 
 the fruit of ancestral dignity. It is not conse- 
 quent upon the laws of natural generation. It 
 is not the product of human influence. It is 
 a work of God. Language could not be more 
 explicit. 
 
 A most interesting feature of the scriptural 
 method of teaching this truth is seen in the 
 fact that no timidity is exhibited by inspired 
 minds in their guardianship of it. They do not 
 seem to fear that a change of heart will not be 
 ascribed to God by those who experience that 
 change. ‘The passages are not numerous in which 
 the central point of significance is a contrast of 
 Divine with human power. Occasionally, indeed, 
 we read of such monitory words as these: “By 
 grace ye are saved, through faith, and that not of 
 yourselves—it is the gift of God;” and such as 
 these: ‘I have planted and Apollos watered, 
 
BIBLICAL PROOF. 53 
 
 but God gave the increase; so then neither is he 
 that planteth anything, nor he that watereth, but 
 God.” 
 
 Such, however, is not the general mood of in- 
 spiration on this subject. More frequently than 
 otherwise the fact of the divinity of regeneration 
 is znserted, as if by the by; not as intrinsically in- 
 ferior, yet as relatively subordinate, in the structure 
 of the inspired thought. Thus we are told that 
 “God hath quickened us together with Christ ;” 
 the dignity of association with Christ being the 
 gleaming point in the language. We are taught 
 that ‘as many as are led by the Spint of God, 
 they are the sons of God;” with emphasis not 
 chiefly on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but 
 upon the dignity of the adoption. We are admon- 
 ished, “God hath, from the beginning, chosen you 
 to salvation, through the sanctification of the Holy 
 Ghost ;” in which not so much the divinity of the 
 power as the eternity of the election is the focal 
 thought. We are reminded, “Ye are washed, ye 
 are sanctified by the Spirit of our God;” and not 
 so much the agency of the change, as the contrast 
 it has created with “thieves and drunkards and 
 extortioners,” marks the climax of impression. We 
 hear Paul exclaiming, “What is the exceeding 
 greatness of the power of God to usward who 
 
54 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 believe ;” not the bald fact that it zs the power of 
 God, but the unutterable magnitude of that power 
 is the point of concentration. 
 
 Thus the inspired mind speaks at its ease of the 
 fact of Divine working in regeneration, as if it 
 were a truth which an experience of the change, 
 or even an admission of the necessity of the 
 change, would draw after it as an inevitable corol- 
 lary. Inspiration does not pet the doctrine, nor 
 prop the doctrine, nor seem to tremble for the 
 honour of the doctrine. It treats the doctrine 
 more regally. By collateral mention of it, by 
 calm assumption of it, by cool implications of it, 
 by unpremeditated allusions to it, and by delicate 
 hints of it, the inspired mind treats it as if it 
 were a truth of which an intimation is equivalent 
 to a demonstration ; a truth which, once insinu- 
 ated into the mind through crevices of thought, 
 will be like light to the universe. It will assert 
 itself, It will prove itself. It will vindicate its 
 own dignity, and flood all things else with its 
 superabounding radiance. Such is the temper 
 of the faith in this doctrine which the inspired 
 writers would create in a believing soul. Theirs 
 is a placid faith, an intrepid faith, an unsuspicious 
 faith ; a faith never wavering in itself, never tremu- 
 lous over the treasure it guards; a faith which 
 
EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 55 
 
 sees God so intensely in the wonders of His grace, 
 that to its clear, calm eye this world seems like 
 a ‘drop of water resting in the hollow of Jehovah’s 
 hand.” 
 
 IV. 
 
 EXPERIENCE OF THE NEW BIRTH SUGGESTIVE OF A 
 SUPERNATURAL CAUSE. 
 
 We see in the material world much which is 
 immediately suggestive to us of the presence of 
 God. We obtain our first vivid conceptions of 
 Divine power from the evidences of that power 
 in natural phenomena, over which we do not con- 
 sciously pause to elaborate the conviction of God’s 
 working. We do not educe it from a nice balanc- 
 ing of probabilities. We see it; it forces itself 
 upon us. We know it; it overpowers our con- 
 sciousness of all speculative processes. We can 
 only look on in silent awe while the wonderful 
 - perfections of God unfold themselves. Do we not 
 thus see God in a cataract, in a tempest, in the ; 
 lightning, in the ocean? Do we not thus. discern 
 His hand in the heavens, which are the work of 
 His fingers? Do we not thus behold the light of 
 His countenance in the dawn of morning? Do we 
 not thus hear the sound of His footfall when night 
 settles on the world? To a believing spirit these 
 
56 . MAN’S ‘RENEWAL. 
 
 phenomena are all Lau) suggestive of 
 God. 
 
 Our present inquiry, then, is: Do we discover 
 in the developments of the human soul in that 
 process of experience of which conversion is the 
 exponent any similar tokens of God’s agency ? 
 Do we perceive anything which impels us to feel, 
 as by intuition, that we are witnessing an act of 
 God? ! 
 
 That every instance ‘of conversion is of this 
 electric character, we cannot affirm. Not every 
 work of God in the natural world is such. God 
 acts in the formation of a vein of anthracite as 
 efficiently as in the creation of the Himalayas. 
 Science teaches us that the forces antecedent in 
 the one case were as elemental and convulsive as 
 those in the other. So in the spiritual world, the 
 change of a soul in regeneration may be wrought 
 _ by processes which conceal themselves from all 
 _ eyes but, that of Him who sees where is the in 
 for silver and the place for gold. Yet to the wis- 
 dom of a later world those‘ processes shall be seen - 
 to have been as formative and as revolutionary as 
 , any that have racked other natures with tumultuous 
 ~ conversion. 
 
 But some phenomena are observable in the 
 experience of some minds which, assuming the 
 
EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 57 
 
 scriptural theory of regeneration as a possible 
 fact, are zmmediate tokens of the presence and 
 the power of God. To some of these let us direct 
 our thoughts, 
 
 God is sometimes suggested by the Manner of Conversion. 
 
 Of this, illustration will be more convincing than 
 abstract proof. ‘Take, for example, the coaversion 
 of the apostle Paul. Look at it asa fact in the 
 history of mind. Set aside as irrelevant to the 
 object before us whatever was miraculous in the 
 events of that journey to Damascus. Make no 
 account of the supernatural light, the voice from 
 heaven, the shock of blindness. Consider not the 
 means, but the manner, of that change in the man. 
 Mark its impetuosity. Note the instantaneousness 
 of that arrest of passion. It is like a torrent | 
 frozen in mid-air. Observe the revulsion of feel- 
 ing. Threatening and slaughter give place to 
 convictions of sin. Malignity is supplanted by 
 prayer. Perceive the revolution of character in 
 that instant of trembling and astonishment. Call 
 it regeneration, conversion, new birth, or by titles 
 more comely to philosophic taste ; call it what you 
 will, it is a change of character. The Pharisee 
 becomes a penitent. The persecutor becomes a 
 Christian. The murderer becomes a saint. For 
 
58 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 aught that appears in the narrative, the change is 
 almost like a flash of lightning. How brief the 
 colloquy which proclaims the whole of it! “Who 
 art thou, Lord?” “I am Jesus.” ‘Lord, what 
 wilt thou have me to do?” We do not know that 
 mind can move more rapidly than this in sucha 
 juncture of its history, and yet move intelligently. 
 Then put together the two lives of the man—his 
 life before, and his life after, this convulsive crisis. 
 Saul and Paul join hands over this invisible gulf, 
 as over the river of death—the same being, yet 
 two different men. His character has experienced 
 a change like the transmutation of metals. Take 
 these as facts of sober mental history, and do they 
 not seem to speak the presence of a supernatural 
 Power? If the world could come to that ninth 
 chapter of the Acts as to a modern discovery in 
 psychology, philosophic systems would grow out 
 of it; all futile in explanation of the process, but 
 all confessing the reality and the divinity of the 
 thing. 
 
 Yet this passage in the life of one soul is a re- 
 presentatiye of a class of changes of religious 
 character, in which it is unphilosophical not to see 
 the working of Divine power within the enclosure 
 of finite being. Such a passage in the life of a 
 soul was the conversion of Luther. Such also was 
 
EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 59 
 
 that of John Bunyan and of Gilbert Tennent. 
 Such was that of the late Rev. Dr Wilson of Phila- 
 delphia, who was suddenly prostrated under con- 
 viction of sin, through a sense of the Divine good- 
 ness in the failure of his pistol to fell his antagonist 
 in an assault. ‘The mental experiences of such 
 men, considered merely as data of mental science, 
 deserve a consideration which they do not often 
 receive. The world, from the beginning until now, 
 has inferred the presence of supernal agencies in 
 the mental changes of men, from less conclusive 
 evidences than those furnished:by such conversions 
 as these. Socrates believed—and philosophy has 
 revered him for the faith—that an invisible Spirit 
 swayed his thought, and he believed it on less 
 evidence than this. Napoleon believed —and 
 poetry has discovered piety in the faith—that 
 supernatural power intervened in his destiny ; 
 and he believed it on less evidence than this, 
 It has passed into the cant of literature to ascribe 
 inspiration, even divinity, to great minds on in- 
 finitely less evidence than this. 
 
 So have we seen and heard in our own day, and 
 among men and women whose names will never 
 be heralded in biographies, evidences of a power 
 working in their souls, which suggests to us irre- 
 sistibly the presence of God. We have seen great 
 
60 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 suddenness of conviction,—a blasphemer has been 
 struck down by a sense of guilt, as if by a bolt of 
 fire, like that which fell at Luther’s feet. We have 
 known a velocity of movement from conviction to 
 penitence which has seemed like the speed of light. 
 We have learned that such processes of convic- 
 tion and conversion have tallied with the pleadings 
 of intercessory prayer. Prayer has seemed to be 
 prescient of history. We must abandon the laws 
 of natural association if, with the scriptural doctrine 
 of regeneration in the background, we do not see 
 in such changes a work of God. It is not seldom 
 that unbelief is awed into silence by them, even 
 when they are still distasteful to its culture. The 
 belief is thrust upon the incredulous observer,— 
 he cannot resist it :—“This is not the work of 
 man ; this is not hypocrisy ; it is not enthusiasm ; 
 it is no fiction of a mind fuming with effervescent 
 sympathy ; it is no nightmare of one frantic through 
 fear of death: this is a work of God; I can no 
 more question it than I can question the power of 
 a Creator, if I see the solid globe quivering and 
 gaping in the throes of an earthquake.” 
 
 God is sometimes suggested by the Magnitude of Conversion. 
 
 John Foster has observed the evidence of Al- 
 mighty Power in the awakening of intellect in 
 
EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 61 
 
 those who are converted in gross ignorance. He 
 says: ‘‘It is striking to observe how the rigid soul 
 seems to soften and grow warm, and expand and 
 quiver with life. With the new energy infused, it 
 struggles to work itself into freedom from the 
 wretched contortion in which it has so long been 
 fixed, as by the spell of some infernal magic. It 
 is filled with a distressed and indignant emotion 
 at its own ignorance; actuated with a restless 
 earnestness to be informed; acquiring an un- 
 wonted pliancy of its faculties to thought. We 
 have known instances in which the intellectual 
 change has been so conspicuous, that even an 
 infidel observer must have forfeited all claim to 
 be a man of sense if he would not acknowledge: 
 ‘This, which you call divine grace, whatever it 
 really be, is the strangest awakener of faculties, 
 atictalle2 
 
 But what is such intellectual Pane in com- 
 parison with the moral regeneration which under- 
 lies it! When a man who has spent half a lifetime 
 in the dens of vice comes forth to sit as a meek 
 disciple at the Lord’s table; when it is said of a 
 scoffer, ‘Behold he prayeth;” when we hear a 
 thief crying, ‘Lord, remember me;” when a man 
 whose name has been the synonym of vileness, 
 and whose brutality cities have borne as a curse 
 
62 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 —_—_ -———_ 
 
 upon their youth, becomes a preacher of. Christ ; 
 when one whom the moral sense of the world has 
 doomed as an outcast, “lost” as no other sinner 
 on earth can be, from whom the virtuous have 
 turned aside in the street lest they should but 
 touch the hem of her garment,—when such a one 
 is seen coming to Jesus, and standing behind Him 
 at His feet, weeping, and bathing them with her 
 tears and wiping them with the hair of her head, 
 till He who knew no sin turns and says, “ Her sins, 
 which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much,” 
 —how is it possible zo¢ to discern that God who 
 doeth wonders ? 
 
 Those early Christians of Rome and Corinth,— 
 had they no evidence of God’s power in regener- 
 ation, when an apostle enumerated to them the 
 loathsome catalogue of crimes by which paganism 
 had degraded humanity, and then added, “such 
 also were some of you?” Had such a man as 
 Augustine no reason for the faith which was in 
 him, that his “evil and abominable youth,” as he 
 _ affirms, was transformed by “Thy grace only, O 
 Lord, Thy grace only?” Was this a visionary 
 faith to such a man as Colonel James Gardiner ? 
 Who shall say that John Newton took the name 
 of God in vain, in ascribing to Divine power that 
 change in his heart which took him from the helm 
 
 —— eo 
 
EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 63 
 
 of a slave-ship, and taught him to compose, for 
 all succeeding ages, such’a hymn as that commen- 
 cing “One there is above all others?” Had a 
 man with such a history no right to speak from 
 his own experience of God’s power in his soul, 
 when he taught us to sing, 
 
 ‘* Sweet was the time when first I fe/¢ 
 The Saviour’s pardoning blood” ? 
 
 Had fe no right to sing as he did :— 
 
 *¢ Amazing grace,—how sweet the sound !— 
 That saved a wretch like me!” 
 
 God ts suggested by the Phenomena of Revivals. 
 
 Still another form of this illustrative evidence 
 of Divine agency in regeneration appears in its 
 diffusiveness to large numbers simultaneously. 
 Scarcely can a more memorable exhibition of 
 God be found than that presented by a revival 
 of religion. Historians seldom take note of so 
 obscure an event; yet if the secret connexions 
 of revivals with the destiny of nations could be 
 disclosed, they would appear to be more critical 
 evolutions of history than the Gothic invasions. 
 A volume has been compiled, narrating the de- 
 cisive battles of the world. But more signifi- 
 cant than this, and probing deeper the Divine 
 
C—O 
 
 64 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 government of the world, would be the history 
 of revivals. 
 
 Our sense of the reality of revivals as revela- 
 tions of God is apt to be impaired by several 
 causes. In certain periods their frequency so 
 familiarises our minds with them that they im- 
 press us as little as the tides. At other times 
 the very vastness of their extent overpowers our . 
 ability to associate them with definite thoughts 
 of God. It is our weakness, that in spiritual 
 things our vision is. often more intense in the 
 specific and the minute, than in the multifarious 
 and the immeasurable, disclosures of his working. 
 Does not a single star in the sky sometimes move 
 us more sensibly than the whole spangled heavens, 
 roofing the world over? So the conversion of one 
 soul may seem to bring us nearer to the Infinite 
 Mind than days of Pentecost. Perhaps, more 
 than all else, the pathological infirmities and the 
 moral’ perversions, with which human nature de- 
 faces God’s work in widespread revivals, fascinate 
 our gaze as we look on. Our vision grows dis- 
 torted. We cease to discern between good and 
 evil. We become like men who are colour-blind. 
 We are unconscious that it is our own disease 
 which dims our eye. 
 
 But to any sane mind whose vision faith has 
 
ere 
 
 EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 65 
 
 sharpened, so that it can see truth luminous 
 through murky surroundings, a revival of religion 
 will appear to be one of the most godlike events 
 in history. Regarded as an achievement of power 
 only, to be made the theme of philosophical in- 
 quiry, it can be traced to no human forces. 
 Viewed as an index of prophecy, it is often one 
 of the night-signals of this world’s march heaven- 
 ward. 
 
 That swaying of a nation to and fro by secret 
 agency,—by a Power which no man sees, and 
 no man hears, and no man can explain; of 
 which no man can tell whence it comes or whither 
 it goes, yet a Power which every man feels; and 
 which singles out from the innumerable throng 
 this one and that one, by laws of selection which 
 no man can define, till scores grow to hundreds, 
 and hundreds to thousands, and an army of the 
 elect gathers at the bidding of this voiceless One, 
 —what mystery of faith could invite such incre- 
 dulity as that involved in denying to such a pheno- 
 menon the will of God? If men would but apply 
 to the history of revivals the same laws of cause 
 and effect which they adopt in reasoning upon the 
 origin of the Crusades, no man, with the scriptural 
 idea of regeneration as an hypothesis in his mind, 
 
 could withstand the evidence of Almighty Power 
 E 
 
a  —— — 
 
 66 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 in any revival which has commanded the faith of 
 the church as a work of the Holy Ghost. We 
 may sum up the testimony of such revivals, taken 
 in the mass with all their perversions, in the con- 
 fession made by many irreligious men of the last 
 century, who had lived through the “Great 
 Awakening” of that period, and by many also 
 who have recently watched the phenomena of the 
 “Vear of Grace” in Ireland, that the events of 
 which they had been eye-witnesses were inexplic- 
 able by any psychological laws which should not 
 recognise the presence and the direct working of 
 God in the souls of men. 
 
 God is suggested by Unconscious Conversion. 
 
 A certain class of facts, which indeed are ex- 
 ceptional in their character, are yet among the 
 signal exhibitions of God in Christian experience. 
 I allude to certain abnormal growths of Christian 
 life which are unproductive of Christian joy. To 
 those who are familiar, to any large extent, with 
 unwritten Christian biography, this will suggest a 
 distinct and most instructive class of examples of 
 regenerate experience. They utter unconscious 
 testimony to the working of Him whose glory it is 
 to conceal a thing. 
 
 When certain varieties of temperament come 
 
es 
 EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 67 
 
 under the sway of regenerating grace they shrink 
 instinctively from faith, even from hope, that the 
 life of God may have been imparted to such as 
 they. The credibility of experience in these 
 cases is marred by no overweening self-confi- 
 dence. ‘The most fastidious sceptic is not here 
 repelled by the assumptions of haughty sanctity. 
 No honest lip can curl in contempt of the incon- 
 sistency of character with profession. These 
 Christians make no professions. They express no 
 assurance. ‘They enjoy little or no hope for them- 
 selves. ‘The inner life of some of them is as the 
 valley of the shadow of death. Yet who that 
 knows anything of unrecorded Christian history 
 does not recall some from this group of crushed 
 spirits, who have exhibited to all spectators an 
 overwhelming testimony to the working within 
 them of Infinite Power? Théy have seemed to 
 exhale the evidence of God’s indwelling. They 
 have commanded from others a confidence which 
 they dared not whisper to themselves. They have 
 been as unconscious as infancy of the beauty of 
 the Divine life they expressed. They wist not 
 that their faces shone. Men stand in awe of such 
 characters, and gather around them to make 
 obeisance to them. God hath indeed chosen 
 these weak things to confound the wise. Sceptics 
 
 : 
 
———————————————————————————————— 
 
 68 MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 are dumb in their presence ; rude men are mel- 
 lowed ; and strong men bow themselves at the 
 glance of their meek eye. They make us weep 
 when they speak of God’s dealings with them. 
 Their silence is more eloquent than speech. “I 
 saw under the altar the souls of them that were 
 slain for the word of God, and for the testimony 
 which they held.” In emergencies of our mental 
 life do we not sometimes turn to these voiceless 
 witnesses for refuge? Does not our coarser 
 faith lean upon them with a firmer trust than upon 
 strong men armed, and mighty men of valour? 
 We are not careful at such times to inquire whe- 
 ther the emotions which overwhelm us can be 
 justified by this world’s wisdom. We do not care 
 whether they can be accounted for by a syllogism. 
 Something within us assures us that in communing 
 with such beings we hold converse with Him 
 whose temple they are. We bid kings and coun- 
 sellors of the earth to fall back to the right and 
 the left, and let these few choice spirits go up 
 before us. We follow those who have been 
 chosen kings and priests unto God. 
 
 This unconscious testimony to the Divine in- 
 dwelling occasionally exhibits itself in strange 
 —yes, in fearful—forms; for it is contrasted 
 with strange and fearful forms of suffering. I 
 
EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 69 
 
 EEE 
 
 can never listen to the singing of some of the 
 hymns of Cowper, without a thrill of reverence 
 for the grace of God which could work so 
 mightily in a diseased soul. Some of Cowper’s 
 most affecting lyrics, to which millions of Chris- 
 tian hearts have turned lovingly, as to the 
 most truthful expression of their own experi- 
 ence which they have ever found, except in the 
 Psalms of David, were composed during those 
 eleven years in which, as he tells us, not a soli- \ 
 tary moment of hope of his own salvation ever 
 cheered his soul. By those rivers of Babylon 
 he sat down and wept; and his wailings are 
 heard in thousands of the sanctuaries of Zion to 
 this day.. Oh, mystery of grace,—that regen- 
 erating love should thus gleam out, and make 
 radiant the path of sympathising beholders, when 
 not a ray of it could find ingress to the bleared and | 
 swollen eye of the unconscious believer! 
 
 May we venture to probe the mystery? Can 
 it be the object of such a phenomenon to give 
 to the universe a monument of God’s triumph 
 over Satan, in a conflict the severity of which 
 submerges weak human nature to depths which 
 light cannot pierce? In the shock and struggle 
 of that warfare, in which the supremacy over 
 man’s soul is contested by unseen belligerents, 
 
70 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 may it not be that God sometimes suspends the 
 hiding of His power, and lays out the forces of 
 His will in majesty which the human conscious- 
 ness cannot bear to look upon? Shall man see 
 God in such conflicts and live? But the reflex 
 influence of such experience upon the usefulness 
 of the believer is more intelligible. I have heard 
 it said by one, the fragrance of whose memory 
 yet fills our New England churches, that “no 
 man could be qualified to write a commentary 
 on the Psalms of David who had not known 
 some great sorrow.” So, when God regenerates 
 a chosen one who is to become dear to the hearts 
 of many generations, the secret method of grace 
 sometimes is to work out the change by -pro- 
 cesses which shall disclose its reality to all minds 
 but his. To him the volume is sealed until the 
 time of the end. Yet his tremulous fingers have 
 written it that the Scriptures might be fulfilled: 
 “TY wili'lead the blind by a way they knew not; 
 I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known 
 me.” 
 
 Even upon the insane experience of such a soul 
 we may reasonably found our faith in the divinity 
 of the Power which dwells in it. We turn from 
 the testimony of such a one in his despair, to his 
 
ES 
 
 EXPERIENCE SUGGESTIVE OF GOD. 71 
 & 
 
 ———— 
 
 testimony as we doubt not he rehearses it to awe- 
 struck angels. ‘‘ Poor Cowper,” as thy friends used 
 to call thee, —“ our guide, our teacher, our brother,” 
 rather would we name thee,—what thinkest thou 
 now of God’s dealings with thy soul? Dost 
 thou not now understand those mysterious eleven 
 years? Was it not worth eleven years of sor- 
 row to be thus enabled to express some of the 
 experiences of God’s people in all coming time? 
 Was it not worth eleven years of conflict to be 
 thus disciplined as the witness of God to unborn 
 millions among whom this shall be told as a 
 memorial of thee? Was it not worth eleven 
 years Of bondage to the powers of darkness to 
 be thus led to the composition of one such song 
 of Zion as that in which thou hast taught us that 
 ‘God moves in a mysterious way?” Was it not 
 worth eleven years of despair to be thus moved 
 by the throes of thine own anguish to assure all 
 other believers, as thou hast done, that ‘There 
 zs a fountain filled with blood?” Dost thou not 
 now see that when thou didst say for our com- 
 fort,— 
 ‘¢Then, ina nobler, sweeter song, 
 
 I’ll sing thy power to save,” 
 
 thou didst speak words of unconscious prophecy 4 
 
72 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 Vv. 
 
 MORAL USES OF THE DOCTRINE OF SUPERNATURAL 
 REGENERATION. 
 
 The doctrine of Divine agency in regeneration 
 is fruitful of practical results. 
 
 Of these one of the most obvious is a disclosure 
 of 
 
 The Profound Nature of Depravity. 
 
 Evil is radically crafty. ‘The serpent was more 
 subtle than any beast of the field. We get 
 even from an experience of sin no such profound 
 notion of it, as we derive from the means and 
 powers necessary to eradicate it. So we approxi- 
 mate the radical idea of depravity most nearly, 
 through this revelation of God’s work in the new 
 birth. 
 
 To discern the vital truth here, unconfounded 
 by fictitious alleviations, we need to guard our 
 thoughts against the conception of a depravity 
 which is not guilt. In the subject of a moral 
 government guilt and depravity are equivalents. 
 Depravity, as has been shown in a previous chap- 
 ter, In any sense of it which makes it an object 
 of moral displeasure, is character ; nothing - less, 
 nothing more. And depraved character is guilt. 
 
MORAL USES OF THE DOCTRINE. 73 
 
 The need of a work of God to change the heart 
 suggests, therefore, the depth of this depravity of 
 character which the common sense of men recog- 
 nises, and the common conscience condemns as 
 guilt, The necessity in question is proof of the 
 exceeding sinfulness of sin. It denounces no in- 
 voluntary corruption; it permits no such burial of 
 our sense of personality. It demands no convic- 
 tion of sin for constitutional degeneracy ; it in- 
 flicts no such suffocation upon conscience. ‘The 
 soul that sinneth, z# shall die. ‘The son shall zot 
 bear the iniquity of the father. 
 
 The necessity of creating extinguished faculties 
 would be a light matter in comparison with that 
 which actually presses upon an unregenerate soul. 
 The real emergency of the case probes deeper. 
 It reaches down, down, to the lowest depths of 
 conscience, where such ideas as right, wrong, guilt, 
 remorse, punishment, pardon, are the elements; 
 down below theories of the make of the soul as a 
 creature of power, below the s¢ock it comes from 
 as a prisoner of the body; down to what the soul 
 is in its own chosen being. And there, in that 
 underground of conscious character, regenerating 
 love finds faculties not one of which is defunct, 
 sensibilities which are all quivering with life, a will 
 which baffles death in its tenacity ; an unshattered 
 
74, MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 soul, which in its wholeness can obey God, and 
 , will not. The sinner can give to God a there is 
 _o& him—and will give nothing. The depravity 
 therefore which his dependence proves, I repeat, 
 is the depravity of guilt. Such depravity is an 
 incomparably more fearful thing, for it is more 
 profound and more hateful, than degeneracy of 
 stock or taint in the blood. The difference is the 
 measureless one between misfortune and crime. 
 Morally estimated, the misfortune is nothing—the 
 crime infinite. The degeneracy of blood is only 
 a condition of probation—the depravity of guilt is 
 a chosen doom. 
 
 What, then, must such depravity be, if it be so 
 profound as to need the intervention of Omni- 
 potence to root it out? Divest the thought for a 
 moment of technical dialect. Conceive what must 
 be the character of that intelligent soul, that sane 
 mind, that free being, that responsible man, whose 
 sheer guilt constitutes his helplessness, and creates 
 his need of the interposition of a power such as 
 has no parallel that we know of in God’s working 
 elsewhere. Who shall gauge that moral abyss in 
 which a soul lies, when, with its godlike endow- 
 ments of intelligence, conscience, and freedom 
 intact, it is fallen because it would plunge down ; 
 prostrate, because it will not rise; guilty, because 
 
MORAL USES OF THE DOCTRINE. 75 
 
 the unmitigated and unrelenting forces of its will 
 are concentrated in the choice to be so; and 
 therefore its salvation is thrown back—an anomaly 
 in the history of the universe—upon the resources 
 of Infinite Mind? By what similitude shall we 
 paint such a being’s unlikeness to God? What 
 shall we call him? Yet such is man as the gospel 
 finds him.’ Such is man lost, the world over. Such 
 is man unregenerate in schools of science and in 
 homes of refinement, as well as in the abodes of 
 poverty and the lairs of vice. To the dispassionate © 
 thoughts of God this ruin of soul is a reality, 
 whatever we may think of it. His calm eye looks 
 down on the stream of busy life that flows through 
 our streets, and singles out this lost one and that 
 lost one—how many, who dares to conjecture !— 
 “Lord, is it 1?” To him this desolation of god- 
 like being is a reality as vivid as the great white 
 throne. 
 
 The moral uses of this doctrine of the New 
 Birth disclose also with singular. beauty 
 
 The Harmony of Truth with the Nature of Mind. 
 
 No other theory of human nature prostrates 
 man so low before God; yet no other uses so 
 honestly for the purpose of that abasement man’s 
 own intelligence, the workings of his own reason, 
 
76 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 the longings of his own heart, the convictions of 
 his own conscience. Confronted with the Word 
 of God on this subject, a man is made to see 
 with his own eyes, to hear with his own ears, to 
 understand with his own intellect, to interpret his 
 own nature, to feel in his own consciousness, and, 
 if regenerated, to yield in his own personality. 
 Thus the whole man is humbled. No one part 
 of him gives the lie to another. God’s work 
 within him does not falsify his necessary beliefs. 
 He is not made a maniac or a fanatic or a mystic. 
 Nor is he left for one moment to the reasonable 
 indulgence of a conception which jars the integ- 
 rity of his conscience, or taints with suspicion his 
 thoughts of God. Truth here, as in all other revela- 
 tions of itself, hints at a system of congruities. 
 
 Through this opening we have also an impres- 
 sive outlook upon 
 
 _ Man’s Renewal as a work worthy of God. 
 
 One of the most suggestive thoughts in our 
 modern literature is the title of a sermon by one 
 of our own preachers: “The Dignity of Human 
 Nature shown from its Ruins.” So we might dis- 
 course of the ‘‘ Majesty of God as shown in the 
 Reconstruction of the Ruins of the Fall.” In this 
 work God does but reclaim His own. He rebuilds 
 
MORAL USES OF THE DOCTRINE, sit 
 
 the fragments of His own image. His work is the 
 more godlike, the more loftily we exalt the human 
 constitution within which He operates. In this 
 we indulge no self-assertion: we only assert God. 
 For the more godlike the man in his endowments 
 as regenerating grace jimds him, the more awful 
 has been the shock of his fall, the more profound 
 is the depth of his ruin, and the more superhuman, 
 therefore, are the attributes exhibited in his re- 
 covery. We have no pinions with which to wing 
 our flight to the altitude of such an achievement. 
 We can only look on speechlessly at a work so 
 much like God in its conception, and so honour- 
 able to Him in its consummation. 
 
 The Lowliness of God. 
 
 Yet we change our position by a step only, 
 and we see not so much the sovereignty as the 
 condescension of God in the New Birth. 
 
 It is characteristic of those aspects of truth 
 which from one angle of vision display the Divine 
 dignity most impressively, that from another they 
 exhibit the Divine lowliness inexplicably. So it is 
 with the work of God in man’s renewal. Viewed 
 from above as a work of dominion, nothing appears 
 more like a sovereign God ; yet, viewed from with- 
 
78 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 in, nothing seems its equal as a disclosure of a 
 condescending and self-forgetful friend. 
 
 Said Whitefield, on one occasion when over- 
 come by a sense of his personal election by the 
 Divine mercy: “Why me, Lord? why me?” So 
 might we inquire respecting every renewed child 
 of Adam: Why has God chosen this one? Why 
 that one? Why is a fallen one singled out from 
 this boundless universe of souls? Why should 
 God stoop and reach down so low? Why expend 
 | His wisdom, His power, His patience, His love, 
 _His complicated and costly beneficence, on pas- 
 sions so odious and hearts so obdurate? We can 
 have no adequate conception how odious they are 
 to him. We, through mere refinement of taste, 
 revolt from contact with guilt in its grosser forms. 
 When a sensitive woman encounters savage vices 
 to save the souls of men, we look on with awe. 
 But few understand the sacrifice. We call it a 
 heroism which is not of this world. Yet what, 
 in the comparison, must every unrenewed heart 
 be to the mind of God,—a Mind infinite in its 
 sensibilities as well as in its perceptions ; a Mind, 
 therefore, whose recoil from sin is an unrevealed 
 experience, because no other mind is capable ot 
 conceiving such a revelation? It should not have 
 surprised us if God had deemed it beneath His 
 
MORAL USES OF THE DOCTRINE, 79 
 
 dignity to regenerate a depraved soul. So man 
 would have reasoned. We should have said that 
 Divine magnanimity ought not to ‘be thus humili- 
 ated. Omniscient thought ought not to be abased, 
 immaculate purity ought not to be contaminated, 
 infinite love ought not to be shocked, the eternal 
 choice ought not to be degraded by such inglorious 
 association. Why did not God reason so? Why , 
 did He not simply doom the ruin to its desolation?’ 
 Why did He not bury its ghastliness from the sight | 
 of the universe, and—leave it there ? 
 
 The Holy Spirit a Personal Friend. 
 
 This subject also individualises the Holy Spirit 
 as a personal Friend. That is not an unmeaning 
 peculiarity of the plan of salvation which assigns 
 to the distinctions in the Godhead diverse rela- 
 tions to this work. A mature Christian experience 
 finds no unnaturalness in a concentration of itself 
 at times upon one or another of these manifesta- 
 tions of Godin redemption. That is an imperfect 
 acquaintance with God which has not led the 
 heart to embrace, in its distinct consciousness of 
 affection, the Holy Ghost. Our Saviour knew the 
 cravings of the regenerate heart when He gave to 
 the Holy Spirit a sympathetic rather than a rever- 
 endtitle: ‘The Comforter, He dwelleth with you.” 
 
BPS a spent onto ane bn 
 
 80 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 glee er ee ae 
 
 Christian life expresses one of its most profound 
 realities in that language of affectionate praise in 
 which psalmists have taught us to address the third 
 person of the Trinity. 
 
 “ Lord, am I precious in Thy sight ? 
 Lord, wouldst Thou have me Thine ? 
 May it be given me to delight 
 The Ree divine ? 
 
 “ O Holy Spirit ! dost thou mourn 
 When I from Thee depart? 
 Dost Thou rejoice when I return, 
 
 And give Thee back my heart? 
 
 “O happy Heaven! where Thine embrace 
 I never more shall leave, 
 Nor ever cast away Thy grace, 
 Nor once Thy Spirit grieve.” 
 
 The Law of Dependence. 
 
 We may learn, finally, from this theme one 
 element of the spirit with which men should seek 
 their own salvation. No sinner can seek eternal 
 life aright, none will seek it in earnest, whose soul 
 is not pervaded with the conviction of his need of 
 | a change which must be wrought by the power of 
 the Holy Ghost. ‘The soul must again stand face 
 to face with God, as in the hour of its creation. 
 This conviction cannot legitimately lead to help- 
 less inactivity. It cannot tempt to impenitent 
 
MORAL USES OF THE DOCTRINE. 81 
 
 delay of duty. The sense of moral helplessness is, 
 never to be sought as an end; it is to be used as } 
 ameans. Its proper drift is to deepen more pro- 
 foundly the sense of guilt, until the sense of guilt 
 shall impel the sinner to Him who only can redeem. 
 This, then, is the conviction which should be im- 
 pressed upon an unregenerate sinner. He should 
 feel that he is so overloaded by his own sins, he is 
 so obstinate in his own perverseness, he is so pro- 
 strate in the helplessness of his own guilt and in. 
 the guilt of his own helplessness, that nothing but 
 Almighty Grace will save him. This is the mea- 
 sure of his guilt,—that he needs Omnipotence to 
 change his heart. No other view than this meets 
 the facts of a sinner’scondition. He is thus in the 
 hands of God. He is thus dependent on God’s 
 will for his conversion. He is made thus depen- 
 dent by his own wilfulness in sin; by nothing else. 
 This is dependence in the supreme degree. It is 
 ultimate, as no other dependence can be. 
 
 The question of a sinner’s salvation, therefore, 
 must be suspended upon God’s own good pleasure. 
 It is no anomaly that the result is locked up in the 
 recesses of an eternal purpose. It is no merciless 
 decree that He hath mercy on whom He will have 
 mercy. It is in love that the sinner is permitted 
 
 to stand in this emergency alone with God. It is 
 F 
 
$2 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 the joy of Christian faith to leave him there. 
 The solicitude of friends must leave him there. 
 All human appliances and means of grace must 
 leave him there,—in the hands ofGod. We enter- 
 tain no views of truth which would remove him 
 from those everlasting arms. We teach no such 
 theology as would relieve him from this depend- 
 ence of guilt upon Almighty Grace. We can 
 gather around him, with our solicitudes, instruc- 
 tions, persuasions, entreaties, warnings. We can 
 go with him to the throne of mercy, and there 
 plead for him. But there our work ceases. We 
 must, and we rejoice that we may, leave him there, 
 —each one, shut in to his own solitude with Gop. 
 
GYAN Eee hit) 
 TRUTH, THE INSTRUMENT OF REGENERATION. 
 
 T is the misfortune of some of the doctrines of 
 our religion that theological inquiry has often 
 
 confounded their speculative with their practical 
 elements. Questions respecting them which never 
 can be answered in this world have stood side by 
 side, as if of equal moment, with those which must ; 
 be answered if an earnest mind would find peace. | 
 The views of truth which are commended to the 
 faith of an inquirer often exhibit, therefore, a singu- 
 lar medley of knowledge and conjecture. . Volumes 
 have been compiled of the Curiosities of Literature. 
 A good service would be rendered to practical re- 
 ligion if the curiosities of theology could be de- 
 tached from its essential facts, yet without abridg- 
 ment of legitimate theological inquiry. 
 
 The necessity of such a distinction becomes the 
 _.more obvious the nearer we approach to any one 
 of those centres of theological thought which re- 
 
es Se eS ee 
 
 84 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 SS ee 
 
 present an intermingling of agencies in human 
 destiny. Such a centre of truth is the doctrine of 
 The New Birth. In the spirit of these remarks, 
 let us now consider che Justrumentality of Truth in 
 
 Regeneration. 
 y 
 BIBLICAL VIEW OF TRUTH AS A POWER. 
 
 The scriptural representations on this subject 
 are not recondite ; yet they cover all those points 
 of inquiry on which we need instruction, that we 
 may form a consistent theory of the working of 
 Divine Grace. They may be cited, not so much 
 for their force as proof-texts, as for their pertinence 
 in giving us the inspired doctrine in inspired ex- 
 pression. Fortunately, the most salient of the 
 passages declarative of this doctrine need no com- 
 ment. To utter them is to explain them. It is 
 difficult to mistake the import of the text: “Of 
 His own will begat He us with the word of truth.” 
 To the same effect is the Psalmist’s declaration : 
 “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the 
 soul.” ‘The entire burden of the one hundred and 
 nineteenth Psalm is a tribute of adoration to Truth 
 as an instrument of Divine purposes. Why was 
 Paul “not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ?” 
 Because “if is the power of God unto salvation.” 
 
TRUTH AS A POWER. 85 
 
 —EEE, 
 
 Dogmatic statements of doctrine, however, are 
 not the favourite forms of inspiration. The most 
 emphatic representations of doctrine in the Scrip- 
 tures are pictures. Their forces of expression 
 depend on the significance of figurative language. 
 Scriptural style is thus hieroglyphic. “I have 
 heard of Thee,” one might say, in comparing the 
 biblical revelation of God with uninspired theology, 
 —‘“JT have heard of Thee by the hearing of the 
 ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee... We must 
 therefore often interpret calm and literal declara- 
 tions by the light of other texts, in which the same 
 truths are more intensely expressed or implied in 
 metaphor. We must gain vividness of impression 
 at the expense of literal accuracy of formula. 
 
 Thus Truth, as an instrument of God’s will, is 
 at one time a lamp to the feet of a wanderer ; it 
 is a light shining in a dark place. ‘Then it is a 
 voice from heaven ; it crieth at the gates of cities ; 
 it is more, it is the rod of God’s mouth ; yet it is 
 songs in a pilgrimage. Again, it is an incorrup- 
 tible seed; seed sown in good ground; it is an 
 engrafted word. Martial images and mechanic 
 powers and the elements of nature are laid under 
 tribute to express it. It is a sword, the sword of 
 the Spirit, sharper than any two-edged sword ; it is 
 a bow made naked ; the wicked are slain by it. 
 
86 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 It is a helmet, a shield, a buckler ; it is exceeding 
 broad ; it cannot be broken. Goads, nails, fire, a 
 hammer, are its symbols. It breaketh the flinty 
 rock ; it is mighty to the pulling down of strong- 
 holds. Opposite and contrasted emblems are 
 tasked to portray its many-sided excellence. It 
 is a fountain; it runneth very swiftly; yet it 
 standeth for ever ; it is settled in heaven; it can- 
 not be moved till heaven and earth pass away. 
 It is of ancient birth; before the mountains were 
 -settled, it was brought forth ; when there were no 
 fountains it was there. The choicest and most 
 fascinating objects of man’s desire are the imagery 
 of its magnificence. It is a revenue, better than 
 choice silver; men shall buy and sell not again ; 
 happy is the man that findeth it. It is pearl of 
 great price; better than rubies; like apples of 
 gold; yet to him that thirsteth, it is wine and 
 milk, which, in the affluence of the supply, shall 
 be given away without money and without price. 
 The senses of the body and its most necessary 
 functions are made to set forth the efficacy of 
 truth. Men taste it as a luscious food; it is sweet 
 to the taste ; sweeter than the honeycomb. Their 
 hands have handled it, as a work of rarest art. 
 They have walked in it, as in a path at noonday. 
 Yet they have hidden it in their hearts ; and there 
 
TRUTH AS A POWER. 87 
 
 it quickeneth, it strengtheneth ; it hath made men 
 free; it giveth life; men are born again by the 
 Word. Even the most daring mysteries of speech 
 are resorted to, to intensify truth as a power in the 
 universe. It dwelt with God. Before the hills, 
 and when there were no depths, then was it by 
 Him, as one brought up with Him; it rejoiced 
 always before Him. And more, it zs God: “I am 
 the Truth; again, it 2s God: “the. Spirit. is 
 rath? 
 
 By such versatility and boldness of imagery do 
 the sacred writers pour out in profusion their con- 
 ceptions of truth as an instrument in the execution 
 of God’s will. And it is by the aid of these 
 picturesque scriptures that we must vivify our 
 interpretation of those declarative passages which 
 express logically the instrumentality of truth in 
 regeneration. | 
 
 It is very obvious that the inspired writers have 
 not thought it essential to the objects of their 
 mission to measure and weigh their words, to 
 meet exigencies suggested by metaphysical in- 
 quiry. They have spoken as freely, as boldly, 
 with as spontaneous and unguarded speech, on 
 this subject, as on that of the holiness or the love 
 of God. Theirs is the dialect of song, rather 
 than of diplomacy. ‘They have spoken as if they 
 
83 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 were not thinking of any philosophy to be de- 
 fended or destroyed, or of any polemic strategy 
 to be executed or evaded, by the doctrine they 
 should teach. They have spoken like plain men 
 talking to plain men. They have uttered truth 
 vividly rather than warily. They evidently trusted 
 much for the correct interpretation of their lan- 
 guage to the common sense of their readers. They 
 have assumed many things, they have omitted to 
 guard against many misconstructions, because of 
 their confidence in common sense. The neces- 
 sary beliefs of the race, of which common. sense 
 is the exponent, lie back of inspired language, as 
 of all language. 
 
 We must bear this in mind in any attempt to 
 reduce the scriptural declarations to the formulary 
 of a creed. With this precaution, we may safely 
 infer from them all that we need to know respect- 
 ing both the fact and the mode of the action of 
 truth in regeneration. 
 
 II. 
 THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF TRUTH A FACT IN 
 REGENERATION, 
 It is scarcely possible to reverent inquiry to err 
 on this point. This is an elemental fact in scrip- 
 tural theology, which no necessities of philosophy 
 
GELS POW er ReaO He Due Usdin Are hy ACT. 89 
 
 should tempt us to fritter away. Specifications 
 of it may be concisely stated in the following 
 form :— 
 
 First, That God employs in regeneration Truth 
 as distinct from instruments of physical power. 
 God is wisely studious of congruities. He adapts 
 the instrument to the effect. He selects that which 
 in its nature is fitted to act upon mind, not upon 
 matter. He chooses that which is pre-adjusted 
 to the regeneration of mind, not to its creation. 
 He calls to His service that which intelligence 
 can perceive, heart can feel, will can choose: that 
 which, therefore, the whole man can accept, trust, 
 love, obey. 
 
 _ Again, God employs in regeneration Truth as 
 distinct from falsehood. Not a shadow of evi- 
 dence appears in the Scriptures that a human 
 heart was ever changed from sin to holiness by 
 the force of error. No man was ever moved aright 
 by wrong. No soul ever thrived upon lies. Pro- 
 found and honest belief of the false can never, in 
 its own proper drift, save a man. If it seems to 
 save, there is a way that seemeth right, but the 
 end thereof are the ways of death. If the man 
 7s saved in his error, he is not saved by it, but 
 by truth lodged somewhere in it. Pure error 
 tends to destruction as inevitably as fire. An 
 
90 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 echo comes down the ages of inspiration, “ that 
 they all might be damned who believe not the 
 truth.” 
 
 Furthermore, God employs in regeneration reli- 
 gious Truth as distinct from all other truth. Not 
 the axioms of mathematics, which appeal only to 
 man’s sense of the true; not truths which address 
 only man’s sense of the beautiful ; not truths which 
 move only man’s sense of grandeur; not truths 
 which gratify only man’s love of mystery; not 
 truths which quicken only man’s sense of hon- 
 our; not truths which take possession only ot 
 man’s social affections; not these are the causal 
 instrument of the new birth. Right, holiness, law, 
 _ love, God,—such are the rudimental ideas of truth 
 in this divine renewal. Primarily and ultimately 
 they appeal to conscience. Through this regal 
 faculty they command the whole soul. 
 
 foreover, in the regeneration of those to whom 
 the Christian revelation is given, God employs 
 as His chosen and final instrument, Truth as it 
 radiates from the person and the work of Christ: 
 “T am the-Truth; I am the Life ;” “The Gos- 
 pel of Christ is the power of God unto salva- 
 tion;” ‘Nothing save Jesus Christ, and him 
 crucified,” 
 
 SRS A ee 
 
LAP OW ERODE RUM HerA RAC T. OI 
 
 The Instrumentality of Truth Invariable, 
 
 Yet once more, so far as we can know, God . 
 never dispenses with the agency of Truth in re- 
 newing the hearts of men. Ifa question be raised 
 here, it should concern, not the power of God, 
 but the facts of His working. So far as any essen- 
 tial doctrine of theology is concerned, it may or 
 may not be true that infinite power caz regenerate 
 a soul by other instrumentalities, or without the 
 intervention of instrument. For the purposes of 
 a practical faith, it may or may not be true that, 
 in the nature of things, regeneration is an act which, 
 apart from the instrumentality of truth, sustains no 
 relation even to omnipotence. Be it so, or be it 
 not, that to the Divine Mind ¢ruth and regenera- 
 tion—the instrument and the effect—stand in re- 
 lations of necessity immutable and eternal, like the 
 laws of numbers or of diagrams, we need not affirm 
 or deny. The theological question, if any exists, 
 is a simple question of fact. Does God in the 
 renewal of a human soul ever dispense with truth 
 as the instrument of the change? 
 
 The answer to this question is not wholly unim- 
 portant to consistency of faith, It can be given 
 in few words. It is comprised in two positions, 
 which a moment’s reflection will establish. 
 
92 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 One is, that if God does in any instance dis- 
 
 pense with truth as His moral instrument in the — 
 
 new birth, the evidence of this fact must be a sub- 
 ject of pure revelation. Experience, from the 
 nature of the case, cannot prove it. No man can 
 intelligently affrm himself to be conscious of a 
 divine fiat thrilling his nature, making a new man 
 _ of him, with no instrumental agency, or with other 
 instrumentality than that of truth. The only 
 evidence any man can have from experience that 
 his heart is changed is the evidence of actual exer- 
 cises of heart in view of truth. Divine power in 
 the change is, to all consciousness, so blended 
 with the force of truth, in other words, the efficient 
 cause so interpenetrates the instrumental cause, 
 
 that no mind can intelligently separate them. In- — 
 
 \ deed, consciousness gives us no hint of the Divine 
 Cause, except through the success of theinstrument. 
 I cannot go back of my own conscious exercises 
 in view of truth, and affirm that God has changed 
 my heart by sheer will, independently of truth. 
 It is plainly impossible ; as absolutely so as that 
 my eye should detect the undulations of sound, 
 
 or my ear those of light. Regeneration, the divine — 
 
 act, is evidenced to consciousness only by con- 
 version, the human change; and this, again, dis- 
 
| 
 
 | 
 
 THE POWER OF TRUTH A FACT. 93 
 
 closes itself only in responses of the soul to truth. 
 Experience can go no further back than this; and 
 if experience cannot, observation cannot. If, 
 then, God has ever wrought the renewal of a 
 soul in such anomalous manner as that implied 
 in the inquiry before us, the evidence of the 
 fact must be a subject of direct and supernatural 
 revelation ; we can vow it only from the Scrip- 
 tures. 
 
 The second position, then, in answer to this 
 inquiry, is, that the Scriptures are silent as to the 
 occurrence of any such instance in the history of 
 redemption. They do not explicitly deny, but 
 neither do they affirm. They inform us of many 
 instances of regeneration by means of truth; and 
 of not one without the truth. They proclaim 
 indubitably the /aw of divine working in this 
 phenomenon of human experience; and they 
 neither by assertion nor hint point us to a solitary 
 exception. They record none in the world’s 
 history ; they predict none in its future. Here, 
 therefore, argument on this topic may legitimately 
 end. In all our positive reasonings upon it we 
 ‘must assume that. no such exception exists. In 
 our practical uses of the doctrine we must 
 ‘assume that none will exist to the end of time. 
 
94 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 We cannot logically found any article of our 
 faith on the hypothetical possibility that the 
 fact is otherwise. 
 
 The Regeneration of Infants. 
 
 But if conjecture, wiser than truth, must still 
 press inquiry and ask: ‘‘ How are infants regen- 
 erated who die before moral responsibility com- 
 mences?” we respond by inquiries which are at 
 least as wise; though for ourselves we do not 
 revere them, nor are our dreams troubled if we 
 cannot answer them. We respond by asking: 
 How do you know that they are regenerated? 
 How do you know that irresponsible beings are © 
 proper subjects of ‘regeneration ” in the sense in 
 which the Scriptures apply the word to adult 
 sinners? Who has told you that the new birth 
 has any relation to irresponsible infancy more 
 than to iresponsible idiocy? Is a change of 
 heart conceivable in a being who has no heart? 
 What zs regeneration in an irresponsible soul? 
 What authority have we for believing anything of — 
 such a nondescript? Shall the whole drift of the 
 Scriptures be held in check by conjectural philo- 
 sophy ? 
 
 But, again, how do you know that there are any 
 such infants? Where is it revealed that a soul 
 
es 
 THE POWER OF TRUTH A FACT, 95 
 
 << TS rneseaeeeremeeee reer 
 
 has ever left this world, or ever will, with moral 
 nature absolutely undeveloped? Who can assure 
 you that moral birth and physical birth are not 
 simultaneous? Who can prove that because a 
 being cannot discern between its right and and 
 its left, therefore it cannot in any respect or in any 
 degree distinguish right ¢hought from wrong?) How 
 much do we know of the possibilities of infantile 
 intuitions? Besides, who knows what the process 
 of-dying is, as a means of moral development? 
 Have we never seen an aged infant in its coffin ? 
 Moreover, is not the death of an infant, itself an 
 abnormal event? May it not then be one of a 
 group of anomalies which involve an anomalous 
 probation and an anomalous qualification for 
 heaven ? 
 
 Yet once more: If infants ave proper subjects 
 of the same change which adults undergo in regen- 
 eration, then are they not sinners? If sinners, 
 have they not sinned? If they have sinned, can 
 they not repent? If they can either sin or 
 repent, can they not know right and Wrong ; 
 therefore may not they too, in a future world, 
 declare gratefully: “Of His own will begat He 
 us with the word of ¢ruth?” Have ye not read: 
 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings Thou 
 hast ferfected praise?” Who shall dare to limit 
 
En 
 
 96 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 ne 
 
 God’s power of converse with the tiniest image of 
 His own being? Are not the whole heavens 
 mirrored in the retina of a single eyeball? How 
 much greater is the distance—and what matters 
 it to His resources—between God and a speech- 
 less babe than between God and you or me? 
 How do we know that in the world of infantile 
 seclusion, before speech has broken the eternal 
 silence from which that world has sprung, God has 
 not ordained a system of moral correspondences 
 with heaven, on which he administers a govern- 
 ment of freedom, of law, and of grace, as perfect 
 in its kind as that of Eden; a system which He 
 guards as lovingly as ours; and a system before 
 the mysteries.of which angelic wisdom bends reve- 
 rently, as we stand in awe around the marvels of 
 the microscope? Is such a system any more in- 
 comprehensible or incredible than the laws of com- 
 munication by instinct in humming-birds? Is it~ 
 any more marvellous than the autocracy of a bee- 
 hive ? 
 
 We confess to an esthetic sympathy with Words- 
 worth’s fancy in the lines,— 
 
 ‘¢ Thou who didst wrap the cloud 
 Of infancy around us, that Thyself 
 Therein with our simplicity awhile 
 - Might’st hold on earth communion undisturbed.” _ 
 
ns 
 PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. 97 
 a 
 
 Theologically, we see no absurdity in the hope 
 
 ‘that this may be more than poetry. Yet we 
 
 cannot fortify the hope by revelation or by reason. 
 The proof-texts—where are they? The logic of 
 the facts—to whom has infantile experience dis- 
 closed it? Our memory is vety reticent; our 
 observation ¥s very ignorant. To our reason, 
 “the cloud of infancy” is very dense. To our 
 faith, the Bible is very still. What moral mys- 
 teries are latent in infantile mind we therefore do 
 not affirm or deny. We do not know. If revela- 
 tion had been addressed to infants it might have 
 made us more knowing than we are; but, alas! we 
 cannot be wise above that which is written for ow; 
 admonition. Yet, if the Scriptures had answered 
 the “obstinate questionings” of wise men on this 
 theme, could the world have contained the books 
 which should be written 2 
 
 IIT. 
 
 THE MODE IN WHICH TRUTH ACTS IN REGENERATION. 
 
 Assuming, then, the fact of the invariable 
 instrumentality of Truth in regeneration so far 
 as we know, we are prepared to observe further 
 such intimations as the Scriptures give us re- 
 specting the mode in which Truth operates in the 
 change. 
 
 G 
 
nd 
 
 98 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 ‘Here, again, the Bible can scarcely be said to 
 affirm anything except by implied assumption. 
 One vital principle is thus affirmed. It is that 
 of the coincidence of the operation of truth with 
 the laws of the human mind. Truth is every- 
 where wsed in the Bible precisely as men are 
 wont to use it in persuasive speech. There is 
 a freedom in its use; there is a skill in its use ‘ 
 there is a mingling of boldness and adroitness 
 in its use; there is a studious care to adjust 
 it to its use; there is a wise control of it, now 
 by utterance, now by reserve, in its use by in- 
 spired minds; and there is a confidence, yes, 
 a triumph, in their assertions of its power, 
 which appear to assume that truth has intrinsic 
 fitness to move a human mind; and if to move 
 it, to move it aright; and if to move it aright, 
 to move it in genial consistency with its own 
 laws. , 
 
 Where do we find in the Scriptures disparage- 
 ment of truth as a power over unregenerated 
 mind? Where is the proof that the Divine choice 
 of it as an instrument was arbitrary? Where is 
 a hint given of its being a fictitious ora factitious 
 means to the end it is used for? Why should we 
 search for it as for hidden treasure, if intrinsically 
 it has no worth, or if any other instrument divinely 
 
a 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. 99 
 
 chosen could be as worthy? That is nota salutary 
 
 faith which depreciates the inherent potency of | 
 truth. Divine sovereignty gains no honour, and, 
 needs none, from the reproach of its instrument. 
 
 Are God and Truth rivals in our esteem? That 
 is not a rational fear, then, which shrinks from 
 “means” of regeneration, and especially from 
 “natural means.” Not so do we read the Word 
 of God. The change from sin to holiness as por- 
 trayed in biblical speech strikes us as 4 restorative, 
 not a destructive process. It may be tumultuous, 
 but it is not therefore discordant with the laws of 
 mind. ‘Truth energised by the Holy Spirit may 
 take possession of a man impetuously, so that 
 whether he is in the body or out of the body he 
 cannot tell; but his experience is not therefore 
 unnatural, or even extra-natural. 
 
 The usages of scriptural appeal are conclusive 
 in their implications on this topic. How do in- 
 spired men preach? They reason with men; they 
 
 invite men; they instruct men; they urge men 3 | 
 
 they entreat men; they warn men; they rebuke 
 _ men; they accumulate and reiterate all the legiti- 
 mate arts of persuasion in addressing men; as if 
 men, regenerate or unregenerate, elect or non- 
 elect, were proper subjects of persuasion ; as if 
 they were complete mez in their endowments ; and 
 
100 MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 , therefore as if it were the normal action of their 
 being to obey the truth. The Bible assumes that 
 man everywhere, under all conditions of probation, 
 _ has intellect which can receive truth, sensibilities 
 _which can respond to truth, a will which can act 
 in view of truth, and act aright. So far as the 
 philosophy of the operation of truth is concerned, 
 we cannot see that the Scriptures make any distinc- 
 tion between fallen and unfallen mind. We can- 
 not discover that the methods of speech chosen 
 by Isaiah, Paul, John, are not precisely the same 
 in addressing men before regeneration as after. 
 What is the difference? Where is the proof. of 
 it 2 
 Nothing but the necessities of a philosophical 
 theory can extract from the Scriptures the dogma 
 that truth is an instrument arbitrarily chosen by 
 Divine wisdom, or chosen for unknown reasons, or 
 chosen for no_ perceptible fitness to move, and 
 move aright, the most guilty and hopeless speci- 
 men of depraved mind. ‘True, inspiration pre- 
 serves a wise silence, in direct instruction, on the 
 whole subject of the philosophy of regeneration ; 
 but its assumptions of the correspondence between 
 ‘truth and mind are as unqualified as the boldest 
 assertions could be. So versatile is its use ot 
 truth, so many-sided does truth appear in inspired 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION. Io! 
 
 forms, so affluent in its resources, so intricate in its 
 evolutions, yet so direct in its aim, and so exultant 
 in its consciousness of power, that we cannot but 
 infer the existence of versatile and profound sus- 
 ceptibilities to that power in the soul to which it 
 is addressed. So exquisite is the mutual adjust- 
 ment of mind and truth as represented in the 
 biblical forms of speech, that the entire science 
 of persuasion might be illustrated by those forms ; 
 even by such as are addressed to fallen, depraved, 
 unregenerate, non-elect souls. ‘The theory of all 
 that the world has felt to be eloquent is realised in 
 them. 
 
 From the scriptural uses of truth, therefore, we 
 cannot but infer that in regeneration its action is 
 perfectly normal to the soul. Truth and mind, in 
 this Divine change, come together not as metals 
 held in a vice and riveted ; they come as light and 
 the optic nerve. Like seeks its like. Truth acts 
 thus not by contravention, not even by suspension, 
 of the laws of fallen mind. It acts in harmony 
 with those laws, in obedience to those laws, by 
 means of those laws. They are laws which no 
 fall can dislocate. No degree of guilt can suspend 
 them. ‘Truth is thus God’s instrument in effecting 
 a change which it never could of itself effect ; but 
 the soul on which it operates is never in more 
 
 ‘“ 
 
 \ 
 \ 
 
 ( 
 
102 MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 healthy concord with its own being than when it 
 yields itself to truth, and becomes a child of God. 
 God thus wisely honours the laws which His wisdom 
 ordained. 
 
 IV. 
 THE SIMPLICITY OF REGENERATION. 
 
 In the views thus far presented certain collat- 
 -eral principles are involved, which are of practical 
 importance to the preaching and the hearing of the 
 gospel. 
 
 Of these may be named, first, the simplicity of 
 the work of God in the change of the human heart. 
 We see in this mysterious act the same unosten- 
 tatious blending of divine efficiency with instru- 
 mental agency that we see, the world over, in 
 other departments of God’s working. For the 
 purposes essential to faith in the doctrine of the 
 new birth, the change is as intelligible as vegeta- 
 tion. It is as comprehensible as the phenomenon 
 of sleep. The change from sleep to waking is no 
 less mysterious. The beating of your heart is no 
 less incredible. The laws of mind are as benevo- 
 lently guarded in the one case as those of vege- 
 table and animal life in the others. 
 
 This view should specially commend itself as a 
 corrective of certain prejudices which may be fatal 
 
 A 
 
SIMPLICITY OF REGENERATION. 103 
 
 to religious life. Is there not a class of solidly 
 built minds which are constitutionally incredulous 
 of a supernatural regeneration, because they have 
 no conception of it as anything else than the effect 
 of a shock inflicted upon: the spiritual nature? 
 They imagine it as involving a suspense of con- 
 scious personality. They have heard believers 
 affirm that it may be imparted to a man in sleep. 
 The creation of Eve seems to them not an inapt 
 symbol of it. Hence they rank faith in it with 
 other eccentricities of dreams. Their good sense 
 revolts from the whole thing. Have we not 
 known certain timid minds which have believed, 
 indeed, but only to shrink from their faith as a 
 practical experience, because their faith also is 
 steeped in materialism? Regenerating grace as 
 they conceive of it is spiritualised electricity. 
 They recoil from a religious life, for a reason 
 analogous to that which leads them to draw back 
 from a voltaic battery. | Contortions, . spiritual 
 or muscular, are alike repulsive... Some, too, 
 believe only to despair of salvation ; others, only 
 to live in sullen impenitence, because they are 
 not conscious of the infusion of new vitality into 
 their moral being. Do not pastors often encounter 
 sad inquirers, whose minds are saturated with con- 
 ceptions of the new birth scarcely more spiritual 
 
104 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 than those of Nicodemus? Are not these con- 
 ceptions in part the result of accepting literally 
 , the symbolic language of the pulpit in the en- 
 forcement of this doctrine? I have known a man 
 to watch and pray for palpable concussion with 
 the regenerating Power, as he would spread his 
 sails to catch the winds if he were becalmed at 
 sea. Such unfortunate experiences are the legiti- 
 mate fruit of any theory of regeneration which 
 , reduces a change of heart to an infraction of 
 nature. . 
 
 But viewed as the normal effect of truth ener- 
 gised by the will of God, this Divine renewal falls 
 into the same plane with other phenomena in which 
 cause and instrument work blended to one end. 
 The greatness of the change is not violence of 
 change. Supernaturalness of cause is not un- 
 naturalness in effect. Deity in the power is not 
 miracle in the result. In material nature are not 
 the most. profound phenomena the most simple? 
 The very mystery of their causation enhances by 
 contrast their lucidness as facts. What is the most 
 sublime change the physical world ever undergoes ? 
 Is it an earthquake? Is it not rather the noise- 
 less change from night to day? The mightiest 
 forces in the universe are silent forces. Who ever 
 heard the budding of an oak? Who was ever 
 
SIMPLICITY OF REGENERATION, 105 
 
 deafened by the falling of the dew? Who was 
 ever stunned by a solar eclipse? So is it with the 
 august phenomenon of a change of heart. So far 
 as we know, it is the most radical change a human 
 spirit can experience. It is a revolutionary change. 
 Disembodiment by death, morally estimated, is 
 not so profound. Still, a change of heart is not 
 an unnatural change. It is never miraculous. It 
 is not necessarily convulsive. It is not necessarily 
 even destructive of self-possession. God employs 
 in it an instrument exquisitely adjusted to the 
 mind of man as an intelligent and free being. 
 Truth may act in it with an equipoise of forces as 
 tranquil as that of gravitation in the orbits of the 
 stars. 
 
 No, it is not of necessity a tumultuous experience 
 to which God calls us when He invites us to be 
 saved. By what emblem have the Scriptures ex- 
 pressed the person of the Holy Ghost? Is it an 
 eagle? ‘And John bare record, saying, I saw 
 the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove.” 
 “Come,” is the select language of inspiration, 
 “come, and ye shall find”—what ? struggle, terror, 
 torture? No; “ye shall find—peace.” “Come 
 ye,’—come who? Come, ye strong, ye men of 
 valour, ye mighty men armed, ye heroes? No; 
 “Come, ye that labour and are heavy laden ; come, 
 
 — 
 
 ———w 
 
 ad 
 
pe ac er ee 
 106 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 OO OC rll 
 
 ye bruised reeds ; come, ye broken-hearted ; come, 
 ye whose whole heart is faint; come, ye poor in 
 spirit; come, ye blessed ones who hunger, who 
 thirst, who mourn, who weep; come, ye old men 
 whose strength faileth ; come, ye youths who are 
 as when a standard-bearer. fainteth ; come, ye 
 daughters of my people who are girded with sack- 
 cloth ; forbid not little children to come.” 
 
 v. 
 EVIDENCES OF CONVERSION INTELLIGIBLE TO 
 COMMON SENSE. 
 Another principle involved in the doctrine of 
 the Instrumentality of Truth in regeneration, is 
 
 that of the rational nature of all trustworthy evi- — 
 
 dences of religious character. A change of heart, 
 from the nature of the case, must manifest itself. 
 Regenerate character, like all other character, will 
 act itself out. Like all other character, its evi- 
 dences will be intelligible and forceful to the 
 common sense of men. 
 
 Christianity, in this respect, vindicates its supe- 
 
 riority to other systems of religion. In its tests 
 of character, as in its doctrines, it makes less de- 
 mand on the credulity of men than is made by 
 any other religion which this world has known— 
 less even than is made by atheism. Monstrosities 
 
 5 
 j 
 1 
 { 
 
COMMON SENSE IN CONVERSION. 107 
 
 of life, as of belief, have been the invariable char- 
 acteristic of infidelity whenever it has existed on 
 a large scale. It appears to be growing more 
 inane and senile as the world grows older. The 
 early paganism had scarcely so wild a develop- 
 ment of lunacy in religion as that which our age 
 witnesses in Mormonism, in Spiritualism, and in 
 philosophic Pantheism. Beside everything that 
 man has originated in religion, Christianity is 
 alone in the fidelity with which it stands by the 
 convictions of the human conscience, and in the 
 
 severity with which it applies the laws of good | 
 
 sense to the judgment of character. 
 
 The vital test of what a man zs, in the divine 
 judgment of him, is truth acting by the common 
 laws of mind, and therefore working out effects 
 intelligible to common sense.  Presentiments, 
 irrational impressions, apocryphal revelations, ridi- 
 culous prodigies, and outrages upon the moral 
 sense of mankind, find no place in the Christian 
 groundwork of experience. Marvellous excite- 
 ments, as such, have no significance in the Chris- 
 tian philosophy of conversion. Incontrollable or 
 unreasonable excitements in religious life are no 
 more commendable than any other form of frenzy. 
 The pathological phenomena sometimes witnessed 
 in revivals are a misfortune, perhaps a satanic in- 
 
 omen 
 
108 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 fliction. The divine ideal of regeneration pro- 
 vides no place for them, except as it tolerates 
 
 compassionately the infirmities of our nature. He ~ 
 
 remembereth that we are but flesh. . 
 
 So Christianity 1s silent when an adulterous | 
 
 generation seeketh after signs from heaven. When 
 men hear voices in the air, and stare at visions in 
 the night, and read handwritings on the walls, and 
 “seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and 
 unto wizards that peep and mutter,” and frame 
 creeds out of the antics of “household gods ;” 
 the spint of Christian faith looks down calmly, 
 and says: “The prophet that hath a dream, let 
 
 ao 
 
 him tell a dream ;” and then goes on its way. If — 
 
 a Christian believer lingers, trusting in prophets of 
 lies, who say, “I have dreamed, I have dreamed ;” 
 it turns and looks upon him as our Lord looked 
 
 on Peter. The tests by which it would try the — 
 spirit of a man all assume that God works with — 
 
 natural means, by natural laws, and for results 
 ‘signalised by their purity and their dignity. In- 
 telligent faith in God; an honest discovery of 
 sin ; spiritual craving of holiness; the trust of 
 penitence in the blood of Christ; the depend- 
 \ ence of guilt upon the Holy Ghost; and a giving 
 
 2 See ree eet 
 
 of the whole soul in eternal consecration to God’s — 
 service, and acceptance of God’s love, and joy in 
 
CREED AND CHARACTER. 109g 
 
 God’s being—these are pre-eminent among the 
 responses which a regenerate heart makes to truth 
 as the instrument of the Divine change within. 
 They are intelligible responses. ‘They are reason- 
 able, natural, honourable responses. They con- 
 stitute a new life in the soul, which honest men 
 cannot help trusting, and wise men cannot help 
 revering. ‘And God saw that it was good.” 
 
 VI. 
 
 CREED ESSENTIAL TO CHARACTER. 
 
 A third principle inferable from the doctrine 
 before us, is that of the importance of truthfulness 
 in theological opinion. ‘The new birth, as repre- 
 sented in the Scriptures, gives no support to the 
 theory, so natural to superficial thought, that 
 
 belief, as such, is of little moment in religion ; , 
 
 that God will judge characters, and not creeds; | 
 
 that we shall not be held responsible for obeying 
 
 another man’s faith in preference to our own. On, 
 
 the contrary, in regeneration character and creed | 
 
 are indissolubly united. God’s instrument in 
 effecting the change is truth. Falsehood finds no 
 place there. Truth in caricature finds none. The 
 less a man believes of truth, the more distant is he 
 from the probable range of regenerating grace. 
 The more distorted a man’s opinions are, the more 
 
aed 
 
 110 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 fearful are his perils. The more negative his con- — 
 victions become, the more faint becomes all rea- 
 
 sonable hope that he will be saved. In terrific | 
 consistency with this principle is the scriptural re- 
 
 presentation of the most hopeless depth of sin, as 
 that of those to whom God sends delusion, that 
 they may believe a lie. God acts in regeneration 
 where truth can act; not elsewhere. The mind 
 that withholds itself from truth is withholding itself 
 
 ' from God. 
 
 There is reason to believe respecting many con- — 
 stant listeners to the preaching of the gospel, that 
 here is the exact point at which lies the chief ob- 
 stacle in their way toheaven.. They will not assent 
 to certain truths, the force of which is essential to 
 draw them within the range of God’s regenerating 
 decree. ‘They are repelled by one truth ; they are 
 heedlessly confused by another ; they are uninter- 
 ested in a third; perhaps in part persuaded of — 
 many, they are advancing in consolidation of char- 
 acter with hearty opinions upon none. The Holy 
 Spirit passes them by, because they will not credit 
 His truth. They thrust the instrument of His 
 grace from them, and He leaves them in their sins. — 
 
 _ He does not there His mighty works, because of © 
 their unbelief. That is in reality a delicate and 
 
 perilous work which a man performs when he > 
 
CREED AND CHARACTER, IIt 
 
 adopts his religious opinions. In that process 
 often occurs the very crisis of his destiny. At 
 that point in -his experience may the contending 
 forces for good and evil meet in fearful equipoise. 
 
 In this view, also, the varieties of opinion in 
 evangelical theology are not unimportant. That 
 theology which is most truthful, other things being 
 equal, will be most successful in the salvation ot 
 souls, Every distortion of theological faith is 
 perilous, we may be assured, somewhere in the 
 progress of its history. False combinations of 
 doctrines which isolated are true, or false isolations 
 of doctrines which in combination are true, are 
 obstructions to the work of God at some point in 
 the development of their sequences. A dispro- 
 portioned shading of a single doctrine will surely 
 attract some mind, whose way to heaven it will 
 darken. The foreshortening of a single group in 
 the representation of scriptural theology may so 
 impair its truthfulness of perspective, that to some 
 soul, somewhere, at some time, in some juncture 
 of probationary discipline, that shall seem to be a 
 distorted theology, a caricature of theology, a hide- 
 ous theology, and therefore a false theology—a 
 theology which no amount of evidence can prove 
 to a sane mind, and no authority can enforce upon 
 a sound heart. That soul, such a theology—no 
 
 — 
 
a a aN 
 
 112 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 ee eT ncn URRnAsnPSASENIEEEESSRRERSRSEMREDETLRNNNE Se. 
 
 matter what extreme of opinion it represents— 
 may consign to perdition ; yet it may be a gospel 
 which angels have seemed to preach. 
 
 VII. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY INDEPENDENT OF FINE ART, 
 
 A fourth principle collateral to the doctrine we 
 have considered is, that the life of Christian insti- 
 tutions is in great degree independent of the auxil- 
 iaries of Fine Art. Two theories respecting the 
 relations of Christianity to art are affecting the 
 taste and the practice of the Protestant Christian 
 world. The one theory assumes that religion and 
 art go hand in hand, and are equally interdependent. 
 Certain imaginative minds even conceive of them 
 as substantially identical. ‘They are at least so far 
 interchangeable that enthusiasm in the one slides 
 naturally. into enthusiasm in the other. Taste 
 and conscience are indistinguishable. Beauty and 
 God are one. Accordingly, it is believed that to 
 secure to Christianity any high development in 
 the life of a people, pre-eminence must be given 
 to music, architecture, painting, and statuary. 
 These, again, must be seconded by scenic forms 
 of service and by priestly attire. A preacher must 
 become as a lovely song and one that playeth well 
 upon an instrument. The simple meeting-house 
 
RELIGION AND ART, 113 
 
 of the fathers “should be turned end for end;” 
 the organ should be the cynosure of attraction, | 
 and “the pulpit nothing but an organ.” This 
 theory, with variations, lies at the foundation of 
 the popular taste of our own day for the revival of 
 certain forms of medizeval architecture in the con- 
 struction of churches. 
 
 The other theory, without condemning one 
 variety of art or another, as such, and as in 
 some sense a handmaid of religion, still assumes 
 that in the very nature of Christianity there lies 
 a certain independence of all forms of art. The 
 vital resources of religious power are not in them. 
 Christian truth is sovereign over them. It uses 
 them in their grand and spiritual dignity, but re- 
 fuses to subject itself to their scenic and sensuous 
 frivolities. This view is obviously sustained by 
 the doctrine of Divine instrumentality in regenera- 
 tion. The gospel presents itself to men by that 
 noble title: “The Truth as it is in Jesus.” Its, 
 power lies in the clear, calm conceptions which | 
 mind forms of truth. Through truth thus received 
 by a human spirit, God breathes regenerating effi- “ 
 cacy, and man becomes a living soul. 
 
 We need not, therefore, throw back the support 
 of Christianity upon the appendages of fine art. 
 
 We care not to clothe our clergy in classic or 
 H 
 
II4 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 sacerdotal robes. We must not burden our wor- 
 ship with responsive liturgies. We will not em- 
 ploy, or vie with, operatic troupes in our service of 
 song. We dare not crowd our sanctuaries with the 
 master-pieces of the studio. We cannot enjoy a 
 dim religious light. We tire of the gorgeousness 
 of medizval ornament and the cumbrousness of 
 Gothic columns in the structure of our churches. 
 The kaleidoscope of memorial windows does not 
 quicken in us a devout spirit. Why should we 
 struggle to reproduce, in place of our plain meet- 
 ing-houses, the temples of Greece, or the basilicas 
 of Rome, or the cathedrals of Central Europe? 
 
 We will not abjure these resuscitations of art, ex- 
 | cept as they become substitutes of truth. - But as 
 such they minister to an imaginative, and there- 
 fore an effeminate, and at length a corrupt, reli- 
 gionism. We must say of them, “Let the dead 
 bury their dead.” We prefer, indeed, that art 
 should await the bidding of Christian truth to 
 originate new forms more becoming than these to 
 Christian maturity. Has Christian art no resources 
 in reserve for a millennial future. Even in this 
 work, let it be but a modest handmaid of the 
 Christian conscience. Let it follow in the train of 
 instrumentalities auxiliary to the gospel, as Miriam 
 followed the ark of bulrushes in the flags by the 
 
 ~ mi ear a, 
 
>a apa Seon eee ee eee 
 
 RELIGION AND ART. It5 
 —eeeeeeeeeSSSSSSSSSSFSFSFSSSSSSeSeSeee 
 
 river-side—afar off, to see what would be done 
 unto the child; and, like the Hebrew maiden, let 
 it be content to do humble and zycidental service. 
 Then that service shall work in with laws of in- 
 visible and eternal Providence. 
 
 We must not, we cannot, make the gospel de- 
 pendent on any of these subordinate aids. Its 
 great strength lies in God’s independence of them. 
 It leans to severity of tastes, and to simplicity of 
 usages, and to forms of worship uncomplicated 
 and unimposing to the senses. This it does 
 through its awestruck sympathy with the spirit- 
 uality of God. The glory of its work on earth 
 is that, as the Truth of God, it can go anywhere | 
 in the strength of God. In Grecian temples, in 
 Indian pagodas, in barbarian amphitheatres, in 
 Turkish mosques, in medizval cathedrals; in 
 Puritan conventicles, in Quaker meeting-houses, 
 in floating bethels, in barns, in lumber-rooms, in 
 log-huts ; in the forests, at the sea-side, on the 
 prairie ; everywhere, it can be itself the power of 
 God and the wisdom of God. Its preachers need 
 not be learned in the millinery of churchly ‘cos- 
 tume ; nor careful to know whether vaulted roofs, 
 or painted panels, or plain ceiling, or unhewn 
 rafters, or green leaves, or the stars of heaven, 
 are over their heads. If they can but speak 
 
116 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 God’s truth as God bids them, it will do God’s 
 work. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE TRUE IDEAL OF THE PULPIT. 
 
 In sympathy with this view, the instrumentality 
 of Truth in regeneration suggests the scriptural » 
 theory of preaching. In the light of this doctrine, 
 preaching is a perfectly natural work, successful 
 through supernatural power. Its object is to in- 
 struct men in the knowledge of truth, to impress 
 truth on the conscience and the heart, and to win 
 to obedience of truth the estranged human will. 
 To these ends it is a perfectly philosophical 
 means. Its action is normal to the constitution 
 of the soul. Its aims and its methods commend 
 themselves to the good sense of all candid minds, 
 They are not philosophically different from those 
 of honest speech in other'forms. But, unlike 
 
 those, preaching is overshadowed, in the very 
 
 ~ conception of it, by the Divine Presence. There 
 
 _ lies the sole hope of its success. Finite instru- 
 ‘ment in the hand of Infinite Power; Nature used 
 ‘by Him who made it: such is the true ideal of the 
 
 pulpit. ’ 
 Preaching, then, is no idle play for the amuse- 
 ment of idle minds. Its design is not to fasci- 
 
THE IDEAL PREACHER. Es) 
 
 — 
 
 nate men by euphony of speech, to startle by 
 oddity of conceit, or quaintness of imagery, or 
 boisterous declamation. It is not to work upon 
 the magnetic organism which unites body and 
 mind, so as to excite sensibility not sustained by 
 thought. Still less is it to soothe the religious 
 instinct of men, while evading or stupifying those 
 cravings which forecast eternity. A genuine 
 preacher will engage in his work with intense in- 
 telligence of purpose. He will preach truth to the 
 
 calm, sober judgment of men. He will lead men F 
 to a right life by implanting within them right con- | 
 
 victions of truth. He will kindle their sensibilities . 
 
 by so presenting truth as to set their minds to | 
 
 thinking. Vividness of belief, depth of feeling, 
 holiness of will, all borne up and ruled by truth,— 
 these will be the object of a wise preacher’s aim. 
 These he will strive to weave into the homeliness 
 of real life. He will preach to men’s wants rather 
 than their wishes. The z/oleness of his soul in its 
 co-working with God will revolt from making the 
 pulpit anything less than a regenerating power. 
 He may, indeed he must, employ varied and 
 skilful methods of address. Things new and old 
 he will bring from his treasure. Acceptable words 
 even he will seek out diligently. No art of orator 
 or poet or moral painter is unworthy of him. But 
 
ao ee eee 
 118 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 = EE eee 
 the crowning feature of his work is, that it breathes 
 with the singleness and the intensity of his desire 
 to make truth reach and sway the whole being of 
 his hearers, through time and in eternity ; and with 
 the courage of his faith that, in God's strength, 
 and in that only, it will do this. This ardour of 
 devotion to Truth, and to God in Truth, palpi- 
 tates all through the structure of a Christian ser- 
 mon. This makes preaching seem intensely alive 
 and concrete. This sanctifies all art in the work 
 of the pulpit. It subordinates art, and conceals 
 it from obtrusion. The hearer sees no art ; the 
 preacher is conscious of none. Only God in 
 Truth is felt in living presence. Such is the 
 theory of preaching as implied in the divine in- 
 strumentality of the new birth. 
 
 This theory is specially opposed to a certain 
 construction of discourses, some varieties of which, 
 we have reason to fear, are craved by the popular 
 taste of our own day, and are sometimes given 
 from the pulpit, 
 
 ** Great Sermons.” 
 
 Here let us distinguish precisely the evil; for I 
 must believe that undeserved censure has been 
 broadcast upon both the pulpit and the popular 
 taste by indiscriminate rebuke. That is not a 
 
THE IDEAL PREACHER. Tig 
 
 nnn nnn LEE EEEEEEEEEEENEEEEET 
 ——— 
 
 healthful caution, for it is neither reasonable nor 
 scriptural, nor true to the teachings of history, 
 which decries the careful, the studied, the elab- 
 orate, the anxious use of what are ambiguously 
 called “natural means” in preaching. God re- 
 cognises no other than natural means. Super- } 
 
 natural power, acting through natural means, is 
 the divine ideal of successful preaching. So far 
 
 — aa 
 
 as we have anything to do with it, the means are 
 as essential as the power. Philosophically speak- , 
 ing, indeed, we have nothing to do with anything 
 but the means. Prayer is but a means auxiliary | 
 to truth. 
 
 That is a perfectly legitimate taste, therefore, 
 which demands ¢hought in the pulpit, as every- 
 where else where mind attempts to influence 
 mind. That would be a criminal weakness in 
 the pulpit which should fail to meet such demand. 
 We must commend the alertness of the popular 
 mind which requires penetrative and suggestive 
 preaching. Men always require this when they 
 are in earnest. They have a right to it. We 
 should not be fearful of “great sermons.” We 
 are in no peril of greatness above measure, It 
 would be more becoming to our modesty to stir 
 up each other’s minds in remambrance of the evil 
 wrought by small sermons. But the truth is that, 
 
rte ee ee 
 120 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 cE ne dn a BO 
 in this work of preaching Christ, “ great” and 
 “small” are impertinent adjuncts. In such a 
 ) work nothing is great but God; nothing small in 
 His service. That is not only a hopeless, it is a 
 positively false policy, which, in its fear of an 
 excess of stimulus in the pulpit, would put down 
 the popular craving for thought, by inundating the 
 | pulpit with commonplaces whose only claim to 
 attention is that they are true. Even that which 
 is so severely and justly censured as “sensational 
 preaching” is not so unworthy of respect as that 
 preaching which popular impatience describes by 
 the use of an old word in our English vocabulary, 
 and calls it “humdrum.” 
 
 The policy of frowning upon the raciness of the 
 pulpit as an unholy thing is not the policy com- 
 mended in the Scriptures; nor is it the policy 
 which historically God has blessed. Apostles 
 charge us: Be strong; quit you like men. The 
 Bible itself is the most thrillingly living volume in 
 all literature. Why do philosophers turn to it 
 when all other wisdom is exhausted? Yet savages 
 have wept, entranced by it, when they would play 
 with their plumes under the reading of “ Pilgrim’s 
 Progress” or “ Robinson Crusoe.” The testimony 
 of history is that in @very period of religious awaken- 
 ing in the world the pulpit has been intellectually 
 
 ——— eee | 
 
i 
 THE IDEAL PREACHER, I2I 
 
 awake. Preaching has been thoughtful, weighty, 
 pungent, startling, and timely ; so broad awake as 
 to impress the world as a novelty. At such times 
 there is very little of conservative tranquillity in it, 
 It seems rather to be turning the world upside 
 down. It has always been thus; it always will be. 
 Cannot the depth of revivals of religion be gene- 
 rally measured by the weight of the discussions in 
 which the pulpit has pressed down truth into the 
 popular heart ? 
 
 The principle, in brief, which should decide all 
 questions respecting the intellectuality of preach- 
 ing is this: that the popular mind will always 
 demand, and ought always to receive, so much ot 
 weighty, racy, penetrative, original thought as the 
 popular conscience is sufficiently educated to 
 appropriate ; and it should receive no more. 
 
 A ffectations of the Pulpit. 
 
 But there is a style of preaching which is regard- 
 less of this principle, and of’all others that con- 
 cern the necessities of souls. I refer to that 
 structure of discourse, in which the sacredness of 
 truth as the divine instrument of salvation is buried 
 beneath the display of artistic skill. There is a 
 mode of preaching in which a sermon becomes 
 purely a work of art, and nothing more. This 
 
122 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 $e 
 
 error exists in a variety of forrms. Sometimes it is 
 the art of constructing authoritative formule of 
 theology. Doctrines are defined and defended 
 with reference to nothing but their orthodoxy of 
 statement, and their place in a catechism or a 
 creed. Again, it is the art of scholastic reasoning. 
 Argument is constructed with care for nothing but 
 its logical rigidity—and, we may blandly add, its 
 aridity. In other cases it is the art of transmuta- 
 tion of truth from the dialect of experience to the 
 dialect of philosophy. Sermons are framed in 
 | morbid fear of cant and commonplace. Without 
 one new thought, or new shading of an old thought, 
 the preacher would fain lift up his weary and be- © 
 wildered hearers from the language of life, that is, 
 the language he has ved and therefore knows, to 
 the language of the “ higher thinking,” whatever 
 that may be. He preaches as if the chief end of 
 man in the pulpit were to evade the peculiarities 
 of Christian speech. In its best interpretation, his 
 discourse is only an exchange of the cant of the 
 church for the cant of the school. 
 
 In a still different form, this clerical affectation 
 becomes the art of elegant literature. The graces 
 of composition are elaborated with solicitude for 
 nothing but its literary finish. They are drawn, 
 like the lines of an engraving on a plate of steel, 
 
THE, IDEAL PREACHER, 123 
 
 with fastidious and mincing art, studious only of 
 their effect in a scene which is to be set in a gilded 
 frame, and exhibited to connoisseurs. Application 
 of truth is made, if it be made, to an imaginary 
 audience or to an abstract man. It is clothed 
 in archaic speech, which no man, woman, or child 
 of a living audience will take to heart. An exhor- 
 tation to repentance even may be so framed and 
 uttered as to be nothing but the closing scene of a 
 drama. 
 
 Perhaps the most vapid variety of these affec- 
 tations of the pulpit is that which, for the want of 
 a more significant name, may be termed the art of 
 churchly etiquette. This is an inheritance from a 
 dead age. Its chief aim is to chain the pulpit fast 
 to its traditional dignity, to protect it from plebeian 
 excitements, and specially to seclude it from the 
 vulgarity of participation in the conflict of living 
 opinions. With this ambition, the clergy assume 
 the style of reverend fathers in God, and ¢alk down 
 to their hearers. Their dialect is that of affection- 
 ate patronage. ‘They preach as an order of supe- 
 rior beings. At a sublime altitude above living 
 humanity, they speak benignly to the condition 
 of buried centuries. They discuss extinct species 
 of thought. They exhort to untimely forms of 
 virtue. ‘They prop up decaying usages and obso- 
 
124 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 lescent rites of worship. They are absorbed in 
 the romance of priesthood. It may happen as an 
 incident to their ministry that they tread delicately 
 through the thoroughfare of a bloody revolution, 
 affecting to ignore the forces which are embattled 
 in the popular heart, and counting their mission 
 / successful if they keep the pulpit intact from the 
 great agonies which are seething around it. 
 
 In a word, under such theories of preaching a 
 sermon becomes a catechism, or a disquisition, or 
 an essay, or an allegory, or a poem, or a paint- 
 ing, or a reverie, or an “encyclical letter,” or a 
 nondescript beneath all these, and nothing more. 
 Preaching is literally reduced to an art, and re- 
 ligion is degraded to a science—reduced and de- 
 graded, not because of science and art, but because 
 they are made nothing else than a science and an 
 art, or are even made caricatures of both. The 
 intense sacredness of truth as God’s instrument in 
 the quickening of dead souls, and in satisfying the 
 cravings of their awakening, is lost out of sight in 
 , the preacher’s solicitude for certain accuracies, or 
  prettinesses, or dignities, or oddities, or distortions 
 of artistic form. 
 
THE IDEAL PREACHER. 125 
 
 Popular Criticism of the Pulpit. 
 
 We are accustomed to condemn such preaching 
 as defective in religious spirit. Itisso, We say, 
 in that most expressive dialect of Christian experi- 
 ence, that it wants “unction.” It does so. We 
 whisper that it betrays a moral delinquency in the \ 
 preacher. We are right in this. But are we not 
 often guilty of a fallacy in the commendations 
 bestowed upon the very thing against which our 
 religious instinct has hurled the heaviest anathema 
 that can be uttered in criticism of the pulpit? 
 Such preaching is often approved for its ortho- 
 doxy, for its science, for its literature, for its 
 churchly dignity. You hear it commended as 
 good doctrine, good philosophy, good logic, good 
 rhetoric, good poetry, good painting, good acting, 
 good manners, good art in all its forms, and yet 
 you cannot feel it to be good preaching. It 1s \ 
 of doing good. The intellect, it is affirmed, ap- 
 proves it, imagination delights in it, sensibility 
 revels in it, taste courts it, culture craves it, every- 
 thing in man that is worthy of respect makes 
 obeisance to one form or another of it, except his 
 conscience ; and this stands by as a disconsolate 
 monarch, lamenting his impotence to put down as 
 
a 
 
 mio pee ME se 
 126 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 pete eee NTS A EY ee ee 
 a sin that which by the consent of all allied powers 
 is exalted as an accomplishment. Confusion fol- 
 lows, therefore, in clerical practice. False art 
 comes to be recognised as the legitimate fruit of a 
 sound faith, or a scholarly training, or a churchly 
 taste in the pulpit. Yet the obstinate conviction 
 is underlying all the while, that this does not meet 
 the responsibilities of the pulpit, nor do its work. 
 Thus a divorce at length comes about, in the very 
 theory of what the pulpit should be, between the 
 moral usefulness of preaching and all its other ex- 
 cellences. 
 
 To illustrate the truth of this in but a single 
 phase of it: have we not learned to speak of a 
 certain class of ministers in tones of compassionate 
 criticism, in which our culture and our conscience 
 give the lie to each other? We say of one of 
 these brethren in Christ: “ Heisa useful preacher, 
 but he is not eloquent. He is a good man ; he is 
 an earnest man; he is a devout man; but—he is 
 not eloquent. He is a faithful pastor; he is a 
 laborious pastor ; he is a successful pastor ; but— 
 he is not eloquent. ‘He is a truthful preacher; he 
 is a sound preacher; he is a solemn preacher : 
 flippant men are awed by the earnestness of his 
 discourse ; thinking men are strengthened by his 
 faithful words ; proud men sit as children at his 
 
 a 
 2 
 
 "s aia 
 
THE IDEAL PREACHER. I27 
 SS 
 
 feet ; scoffers rage at his plain speech; men who 
 rail at him are held, year after year, beneath his 
 pulpit, as by an invisible hand ; but—he is not 
 eloquent. Souls are converted under his timely 
 ministration ; somehow—you cannot tell how, the 
 wind bloweth where it listeth, but somehow—he 
 hath the tongue of the learned ; he knoweth how 
 to speak a word in season to him that is weary ; 
 the common people hear him gladly ; woman dis- 
 cerns of what spirit he is, and follows him, as she 
 went early to the sepulchre; and little children 
 come running unto him and praying that he will 
 take them in his arms and bless them; but this 
 
 man, so honoured of God; this man, so revered 
 
 by ministering angels; this man, so much like 
 Christ ; this man, we cannot, oh no, we dare not, 
 pronounce—an eloquent preacher !” 
 
 Never was’ a more egregious error committed | 
 ¥ 
 
 than in this whole style of criticism, in judgment 
 of the pulpit. If nothing is beautiful but truth, 
 neither is anything respectable which is not true 
 to God’s thought. A sermon which is only a 
 model of orthodoxy, or of science, or of literature, 
 
 or of churchly conservatism, and which shoots by | 
 
 or vaults over the plain, living applications of truth 
 as God’s instrument in meeting the actual condi- 
 tion of souls, has no qualities which should win 
 
 ane, 
 
— 
 
 128 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 for it the respect of an earnest man. For the 
 great uses of the pulpit it is an abortion. The 
 falseness of it to the mission of a preacher vitiates 
 its very virtues. Good taste condemns it as vio- 
 lently as conscience. All noble culture cries out 
 against it as sternly as the Word of God. No 
 tribunal is more fatal to its claims than that 
 of Christian scholarship. No voice is more in- 
 dignant in the rebuke of it than that of the most 
 accomplished manhood. Such preaching is not 
 only not good preaching, but it is not anything 
 else which a symmetrical and earnest soul can 
 approve. Demosthenes, Chatham, John Adams, 
 had they been preachers of the gospel, would 
 never have preached thus, any more than Paul. 
 They would not have listened to such preaching 
 any more complacently than John Knox. 
 
 Let us bring the pulpit to its true test, though 
 the human work be bummed, and though the 
 preacher be saved as by fire. Lay it open to 
 the light, as it appears by the side of the sim- 
 plicity, the directness, the timeliness, the sacred- 
 _ ness, and the intensity of truth as used by the 
 ‘ Holy Spirit in the salvation of souls. There lies 
 
 the proof of a living pulpit. Confronted with such | 
 
 an ideal, the affectations I have described shrivel 
 into nothingness. Vanity of vanity, saith the 
 
 oS soe 
 
 <i Sapaagapeans 
 
THE IDEAL PREACHER, 129 
 
 preacher ; all is vanity! They are false to the 
 very titles in which their praise is so often vaunted. 
 They are not “sound ;” they are not “ scholarly ;” 
 they are not “ eloquent ;” they are not “churchly ;” 
 they are not “beautiful ;” they are not “ finished ;” 
 they are not “in good taste ;” for—they are not 
 good sense. And they are not good sense because 
 they are not subdued by awe of truth, as God’s in- 
 strument, put into the preacher’s hand for ends 
 _which it is impiety to neglect. No matter how 
 much truth may be wrapped up in these false arts, 
 souls never feel it; the preacher does not feel 
 it. Neither can be quickened by it, any more 
 than corpses in arctic seas can feel the latent 
 caloric of the ice-fields which have congealed their 
 life-blood. | 
 
 Repose in Truth, 
 
 When one of those useful pastors, who are “not 
 eloquent,” encounters ungenial criticism, it is his 
 
 right to rest calmly upon his calling of God to the | 
 preaching of truth. No secret distrust should im- | 
 
 pair the joy of such a preacher in his work. There 
 is a certain trust in God’s word that truth shall do 
 its work in the hearts of men, which every preacher 
 needs to make him a man of power. It is an 
 
 equable and joyous trust. It isa spirit of repose — 
 
 I 
 
130 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 oe —_—_——_——_—— 
 
 in the destiny of the instrument which God has 
 chosen. Once possessed of it, and possessed by 
 
 it, a preacher feels that he can afford to preach 
 
 truth truthfully. He need not exaggerate truth. 
 He need not distort it. He need not deck it with 
 meretricious ornament. He need not surround it 
 with eccentric illustration. He need not swathe 
 it in transcendental speech. He need not be- 
 labour it with theatrical declamation. He need 
 not mince it, nor trim it, nor inflate it, nor paint 
 it. He has only to preach it, thoughtfully, vividly, 
 variously, and with the singleness of an intense 
 soul hving in communion with God, and then let 
 it do its own work. It will do its work. He may 
 
 have faith in it. In the midst of exhausting toils, » 
 
 when wearied with that stern suppression of fitful 
 hopes and apprehensions which must enter largely 
 into every intense life, he may find this spirit of 
 repose in truth falling upon him like the mantle of 
 a prophet. He may &zow then that his words are 
 the wisdom of God and the power of God. He 
 will often speak with the consciousness of that 
 which is a pledge of his success. He will speak 
 with a daring neglect of false expedients and con- 
 ventionalities, which will astonish men who do not 
 know where is the hiding of his power. 
 
 We are told that Napoleon in battle used to be 
 
 Eee 
 
2 a ia =, le ree ee elt A, 
 THE IDEAL (PREACHER. 130 
 a ee ee a 
 
 restless, anxious, irritable, and taciturn, till a cer- 
 tain critical point was reached in the execution of 
 his orders ; but that after that crisis was past,—a 
 crisis invisible to all eyes but his,—and long before 
 any prospect of victory appeared to his subordi- 
 
 nates, he suddenly became calm, bland in his. 
 
 manners, apparently careless in his manceuvres, 
 even jovial in his conversation; and at the battle 
 of Eylau, at the risk of defeat, as others judged, 
 he lay down to sleep on a hillock, which the 
 enemy's grape-shot grazed without wakening him. 
 In explanation of his hardihood, he said that there 
 was a turning-point in all his plans of battle be- 
 yond which, if it were safely reached, he deemed 
 
 victory secure. He knew then that he could not || 
 
 lose the day. His work was done. 
 
 The repose of genius in the assurance of re- 
 sults which are invisible to inferior minds, can 
 bear no comparison with that rest in the power of 
 truth which a preacher may feel, and which, if he 
 does feel it reasonably, will go far towards realising 
 his expectations of success. The secret of his 
 power will be simply that he is proclaiming God’s 
 truth, at God’s bidding, and in God’s methods. 
 He gives to men that which God has given to him. 
 
 ae 
 
 The cloud of the Divine Presence envelops him, | 
 
 Within that august protection he performs his 
 
—— 
 
 132 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 life’s work. He cannot but achieve results which 
 God will own. He may labour trustfully, for he 
 must succeed. No man ever failed who preached 
 
 ' thus. The world may never know his power ; but 
 
 He shall know it ; and God shall one day proclaim 
 it, at that tribunal at which shall be fulfilled those 
 words so pregnant with the decisions of eternity 
 upon the history of the pulpit: “There are last 
 which shall be first, and there are first which shall 
 be last.” 
 
f, 
 
 CHA RGR RLY. 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY AS RELATED TO SOVEREIGNTY IN 
 THE NEW BIRTH. 
 
 HE most serious difficulties of religion cluster 
 around Se points of amon of doctrines 
 tem of truth. ‘They stand over against each other 
 for a double purpose: by their differences each 
 defines the outline and reflects the excellence ot 
 the other, and by their harmony both magnify the 
 honour of the Author of truth, as neither could do 
 alone. 
 
 Such correlative truths are numerous around 
 the point of junction of Divine with human 
 agencies. The difficulties of our faith therefore 
 grow dense around the doctrines of Providence, 
 of Prayer, of Predestination, and perhaps most 
 of all around that of Regeneration. The power 
 of such difficulties depends very much upon the 
 spirit with which they are approached. ‘Three 
 
MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 i 
 i>) 
 ass 
 
 principles, especially, should govern inquiry on 
 such a theme. | 
 
 First, that inquiry should be conducted with 
 reverence for the prerogatives of God. It is as 
 much the dictate of sober judgment as of a pure 
 conscience to preserve that jealousy in behalf of 
 the Divine honour which the apostle expressed 
 when he said: “ Let God be true, though every 
 man a liar.” Again, in such an inquiry we should 
 expect to come upon insoluble mystery; not 
 absurdity, but mystery; not contradictions, but 
 mystery. Who knoweth the spirit of aman? A 
 child propounds questions concerning it which no 
 man can answer. To whom then will ye liken 
 God? Canst thou by searching find the Almighty 
 out unto perfection? When therefore from two 
 such fountains the streams emanate which are 
 commingled in human destiny, shall we expect to 
 find nothing that appeals to faith? In the conflu- 
 ence of two such powers, is it marvellous that to 
 our vision the waters are troubled ? 
 
 Furthermore, in such an inquiry we should be 
 content with the removal of practical difficulties. 
 It is a principle which the wisest of men have 
 acknowledged in respect to other things than reli- 
 gion, that perplexities which start out of meta- 
 physical science should never be allowed to con- 
 
PRACTICAL DIFEICULTIES. 135 
 
 fuse us in the practical affairs of life. Men who 
 have believed in the non-existence of matter have 
 yet eaten and drunk and slept and walked like 
 their neighbours. Men who have been unable to 
 see the evidence of their existence have yet been | 
 very sensitive if other men were as ignorant. Yet, 
 in religious inquiry the human mind exhibits a 
 proneness to disregard this principle of the com- 
 mon sense, by wandering away from plain matters 
 _ of fact, and, as Isaac Taylor has expressed it, “ to 
 beat up and down through regions of night, from 
 which their only escape must be, by a buoyant effort 
 of good sense, to spring up from the abyss to the 
 trodden and familiar surface of things.” 
 
 With these principles in mind, let us consider 
 the responsibility of man as related to the agency 
 of God in conversion, 
 
 I. 
 
 DIFFICULTIES OF THE SUBJECT PRACTICAL. 
 
 Let us, in the first place, discern clearly the 
 reality of the difficulty which an inquiring sinner 
 often feels respecting his own responsibility for a 
 result which is still dependent on Almighty power. 
 The difficulty is practical. It is felt by minds 
 which know little, and care less, about philoso- 
 
136 .MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 phical abstractions. Every pastor is familiar with 
 it in the popular experience. No inquiry is pressed 
 with deeper solicitude by a certain class of minds 
 than this: How can these things be? “You tell 
 
 ” is often the language of their hearts, “you 
 
 me, 
 tell me that I must be born again. I must have 
 a new heart and a new spirit. To produce this 
 change is the work of God. You portray this 
 change to me in language which is itself an ap- 
 palling expression of my dependence upon invisible 
 and almighty will for its achievement. My puny 
 faculties are affrighted at the conception of a 
 change from darkness to light, from death to life, 
 and from the power of Satan to that of God. Why, 
 then, do you summon me to any duty in this 
 emergency? What have I to do but to await the 
 revelation of that eternal decree on which my 
 destiny hangs in suspense, like that of a mote 
 upon the law of gravitation? How can I re- 
 pent? How can I believe? Am I not shut up 
 to this one resource: to stand in dumb agony 
 before the W7//, as one of your own most ven- 
 erable theologians has termed it, the arbitrary 
 Will of God? He hath mercy on whom He wii 
 have mercy.” An oppressive significance is some- 
 times crowded into the words: What must I do 
 to be saved? They are often the outburst of a 
 
ee 
 
 PRACTICAL DIFFICULTIES, mh 
 cacy RS ol ae lt cl ep ce 
 hopeless intellect, as well as of a burdened con- 
 science. 
 
 That this is not an extravagant statement of the 
 practical character of the difficulties which many 
 feel on this subject, will be obvious to any one 
 who is familiar with the unrecorded experience of 
 inquirers, when they are made to stand face to face 
 with the doctrine of the sovereignty of God in their 
 salvation. 
 
 In confirmation and in illustration of this 
 statement, I may be permitted to refer to the 
 experience of one who subsequently became a 
 preacher. In an unpublished communication to 
 a friend, some years after his conversion, he wrote 
 respecting this theme as follows: “Few subjects 
 open to me a deeper abyss than this. The at- 
 tempt to speak of it recalls to me a period of my 
 life when I can truly say: ‘The pains of hell gat 
 hold upon me.’ I think I know the difficulties 
 of a sinner burdened by his dependence upon a 
 power out of himself for salvation. I have been 
 all over that land of darkness and of the shadow 
 of death. I have seen those difficulties piled up 
 like Alps on Alps. I recall seven months of my 
 life in which my mind beat about that thought 
 of dependence upon the grace of God without a 
 ray of light or of hope. I searched the Scrip- 
 
 — 
 
138 ‘MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 tures. JI read books of devotion. I conversed 
 with theologians. JI ransacked their libraries for 
 some explanation of the mystery which appeared 
 to me then to be a contradiction to my natural 
 ideas of justice. The gloom: it created reached 
 at last every part of God’s word: I could read 
 no hope there. It covered all Nature: I could 
 see no justice there. Sleep became more desir- 
 able to me than waking. The morning only 
 woke me to a consciousness of misery ; and the 
 feeling excited in me by the sight of the busy world 
 around me was a kind of bitter compassion that so 
 many of them must soon end their little dream of 
 life, and then awake to a wretchedness as complete 
 as mine.” 
 
 II. 
 THE SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY AN INTUITION. 
 
 Conceding, then, the practical character of the 
 perplexities which often surround the conjunction 
 of these two ideas of responsibility and of depen- 
 dence in the way of salvation, let us observe that 
 Responsibility, in any development of it, must rest 
 primarily upon a species of independent evidence 
 which a sound mind cannot resist. A man’s own 
 consciousness is the root of the matter. God has 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS OF RESPONSIBILITY. 139 
 
 so constituted accountable being, that wat it is 
 is wrought into the consciousness ¢haté it is. No- 
 thing can go below this ; nothing can outrun this. 
 Reasoning here can add nothing to knowledge. 
 Analysis of free-agency can furnish no additional 
 evidence of the fact. Dissection of the body dis- 
 covers no evidence of vitality. No man can thus 
 demonstrate his own responsibility; yet no man 
 can rid himself of the conviction that he is re-| 
 sponsible. This is the primal conviction of our. 
 moral being. It is to moral existence what the 
 optic nerve is to the eye. It is one of those “high 
 instincts ” 
 
 ** Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day ; 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing : 
 
 Truths that wake 
 To perish never, 
 Which neither listlessness nor mad endeavour 
 
 Can utterly abolish or destroy.” 
 
 It stays by us when we would fling it from us. It 
 follows hard after us when we would flee from the 
 sight of it. Something holds us to it more vigorous 
 than logic. We cannot escape it; it is part of 
 us. It is wrought into the structure of every lan- 
 guage. Philosophers have reasoned it down ; they 
 
140 “MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 have voted it out of the world by sage majorities ; 
 
 » but the world will not let it go, nor will it let the 
 
 world go, so long as the word “ ought” is intelligible 
 
 to a sane mind. 
 
 On this basis of £vow/edge, then, rests the re- 
 sponsibility of any man, regarded as the general 
 condition of his being. But on the very same 
 basis rests the responsibility of an awakened sinner 
 for instant, absolute, and entire obedience to 
 God’s commands ; and this at the very hour of 
 
 \ his perplexities on the subject of a change of 
 
 heart. No mind can possess more convincing 
 evidences of its responsibility than that mind 
 which is aroused to ask: “ What must I do to be 
 saved?” Such a one knows his responsibility for 
 everything that God requires of him, as with open 
 eye he knows light. Every pang of conviction 
 
 - proves this ; every fear proves this. Hes conscious . 
 
 of guilt in having been a sinner: he 1s conscious of 
 
 | guilt in being a sinner ; he is conscious of guilt in 
 continuing to be a sinner. His want of penitence 
 
 ‘is asin to him. His want of love to God isa sin 
 
 tohim. The guilt is his own ; he fee/s it rankling 
 in his own soul. God could not affirm to him His 
 responsibility more distinctly than by the voice 
 
 ‘of that angered conscience. If that truth were 
 written in the heavens it could be no more 
 
GUILT OF INFATUATION. I4I 
 
 authoritative. A revelation of it by one risen 
 from the dead could make it no more sacred. He 
 never has a more imperative disclosure of it to his 
 soul than when his convictions of sin are most 
 homefelt, and his fear of eternity most intolerable. 
 Black as may be the abyss in which the philosophy 
 of regeneration seems to leave him, he cannot 
 
 doubt the fact of his responsibility for being there, 
 
 and for ceasing to be there at God’s bidding. If © 
 
 he seems to himself to doubt this, he is like an in- 
 sane man who questions his own existence, and 
 recounts to you the narrative of his own death and 
 burial. The remark of Dr Johnson upon the 
 philosophical question of freedom is as truthful 
 respecting the facts of a sinner’s responsibility for 
 
 all that God requires of him in salvation: “ A man | 
 
 knows it, sir, and that is the whole of it.” 
 
 Iil. 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY NOT DESTROYED BY DEPRAVITY. 
 
 It is instructive to observe the confidence 
 which the human mind reposes in its knowledge 
 of its own responsibility as this confidence is ex- 
 hibited in the fact, that the common sense of men 
 never attributes to sin, however passionate or ob- 
 durate, the power to destroy responsibility. The 
 
142 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 infatuation of guilt never even impairs, in a healthy 
 mind, the sense of the enormity of guilt. How- 
 ever rooted crime becomes, as if in the very nature 
 of the criminal, until we say of him in loose 
 dialect : It zs his nature to lie, to steal, to murder ; 
 he does not know how to do otherwise ; evil has 
 possession of him ; he hath a devil: yet we never 
 in such modes of speech hold a sinner guiltless ; 
 _ we never loosen the gripe of responsibility upon 
 “his being. We still say, with the wise man: “ His 
 own iniquities shall take the wicked himself; and 
 he shall be holden with the cords of Azs sins.” 
 - Penal jurisprudence in civilised law is built upon 
 ‘ this principle. It laughs at the fiction of moral 
 ' insanity as a product of guilt. 
 
 Let this principle be illustrated in an occurrence 
 which is yet fresh in our national history. We 
 were told, a few years ago, of a man who sat in 
 the councils of the country, the representative, as 
 he said,’ of a gallant people; we were told that, 
 under the impulse of revenge, he violated the laws 
 of justice, of honour, of courage, and of civilised 
 humanity, of all that a gallant people should re- 
 spect. We heard—and did not our ears tingle at 
 the story ?—we heard that he crept stealthily, and 
 armed to the teeth, into the highest legislative 
 sanctuary of the land, and there, awaiting his time 
 
———$—$—$——— 
 
 GUILT OF INFATUATION, 143 
 eee 
 
 like an assassin, he felled to the floor a solitary, 
 unarmed, and pinioned man; a man his superior 
 in age, in official rank, in refinement of taste, in 
 classic learning, in patriotism, in integrity of con- 
 science, in all that can dignify a gentleman and a 
 statesman. 
 
 Yet the gallant assassin told us: “I meant no 
 wrong ; I was conscious of no crime; I purposed 
 only to inflict the chastisement which I would 
 give to a servant or a dog.” But what was our 
 answer? We said by the mouth of one of our re- 
 presentatives, as you may remember: “ That was 
 a brutal and cowardly and murderous deed.” Yet 
 the noble assassin condescended to say to us: 
 “No, oh no; you do me wrong; I did not know 
 the force of the blows I struck ; it was but a reed 
 that I held in my hand: and that first blow 
 aroused the demon in my heart; after thats 
 knew not what I did; and it was well for him, yes, 
 it was well for him, that he did not resist my 
 fury.” But again, what was our answer? We 
 compressed it with indignant lips ; we said of the 
 august assassin: “ He smote his victim as Cain » 
 did his brother.” 
 
 Did we not believe those words?’ Did we not 
 hold the man to é¢ a man, and therefore respon- , 
 sible for his blindfold conscience, and his infuriated 
 
— 
 
 144 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 -. 
 
 passion, and for all the consequences t Did we 
 not hold him guilty for not knowing what he did? 
 Did we not believe it to have been his own spirit 
 that was the demon in his heart? Was it not a 
 
 | free demon? Was it not a voluntary demon? 
 
 Was it not a responsible demon? Who believes 
 that he was unable to resist the impulses of that 
 demoniacal possession? When the eyes of twenty 
 millions flashed fire, and their lips execrated the 
 
 — deed, was it in rebuke of a poor lunatic who had 
 
 ' strayed from the tombs? When the echo of those 
 
 blows came back to us from the other side of 
 the Atlantic, in the outcry of the civilised world, 
 from Gibraltar to Siberia, against the barbarism of 
 American institutions, was it a mistaken cruelty 
 towards one whose dweliing was with the beasts 
 
 -of the field, and who did eat grass like oxen? Oh 
 
 no, no! The common conscience of the world 
 answers, No. The common sense of the world 
 responds, No. The reverberation of cannon and 
 the tramp of a million armed men have protested, 
 No. Impartial history will confirm the verdict, 
 No. Thoughtful men, but a few months after, 
 stood around an open grave. ‘They shut their 
 mouths in awe-struck silence. That which had 
 not been told them, they saw; that which they 
 had not heard, did they consider. They thought 
 
THE BIBLICAL THEORY. 145 
 
 within themselves: Here lies a poor, deluded, 
 blinded, infatuated sinner, but still a deluded 
 sinner, a blinded sznner, an infatuated szzner. 
 They thought of the verdict sometimes rendered 
 at an inquest to which death has not given up its 
 secret : “ Died by the visitation of God.” Christian 
 minds, the world over, when they heard of that 
 untimely end, remembered God’s own decree: 
 ‘Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half 
 ‘their days.” And all the people said “ Amen.” 
 So impossible is it to stultify the moral convictions 
 of the world, by the figment of a moral responsi- 
 bility destroyed by the obduracy or the passionate- 
 ness of guilt. 
 
 IV. 
 BIBLICAL THEORY OF RESPONSIBILITY, 
 
 The authority of revelation is added to that of 
 conscience in testimony | to the truth before us. 
 nie Scriptures hold man responsible for a compli- 
 
 ance with the conditions of salvation. They hold | 
 
 him to account for the entire character which | 
 
 renders salvation a fact. This has’ never been in- 
 telligently questioned. It is one of the points of 
 indubitable and unbroken alliance between revela- 
 tion and conscience. The word of God is here 
 
 but the echo of His work. ‘The Scriptures hold a 
 K 
 
146 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 sinner, an unregenerate sinner, responsible for 
 | repentance of sin and for faith in Christ, and 
 | for everything else which is a constituent of a re- 
 \ generate character. No hint is given that this 
 responsibility is at all dependent on the gift of 
 regenerating grace. Duties and graces are urged 
 upon the natural consciences of men, with no 
 qualification whatever. To an unsophisticated 
 reader, men seem to be exhorted to repent and 
 believe, to love, to trust, to obey, to adore, to 
 praise, to be perfect as God is perfect, with the 
 same freedom with which they are commanded to 
 refrain from lying, from stealing, from murder. 
 The inspired writers treat the whole subject with 
 a boldness which is often startling, and yet re- 
 freshing, by the side of some of the wary and 
 diplomatic methods of catechetical theology. They 
 ,do not seem to have been embarrassed by their 
 own equally bold conceptions of the sovereignty 
 of God. 
 
 One whose mind has wandered over the im- 
 mensity of these themes, with no practical object 
 by which to test its convictions, and on which to 
 concentrate them, may be astonished at the daring 
 with which the inspired writers use the truths at 
 which philosophy has stood aghast. It is the 
 usual method of inspiration to assume the respon- 
 
Fee ae ee es ET ek 
 THE BIBLICAL THEORY. 147 
 csc oe ine 8 aia Saale el als Is CL 
 sibility of a sinner, and to urge upon him the 
 duties of repentance, of faith, of ‘submission, of 
 perfect obedience, unqualified by any mention 
 whatever of his dependence upon God. Duty is 
 urged as if a sinner had no concern with anything 
 else than duty. Yet turn a leaf, and we see ab- 
 solute dependence and eternal-decree unrolled 
 like the scroll of fate, with no proviso to save the 
 freedom of a man; as if decree and dependence 
 were the only pillars of God’s government. If we 
 are timid lest our theological formulz should be 
 unravelled in the process, we tremble when we 
 read: “Wash you, make you clean;” “ Without 
 me ye can do nothing:” ‘Make to yourselves a 
 new heart;” “Our sufficiency is of God:” “Re- 
 pent and be converted ;” “He hath mercy on 
 whom He will have mercy :” ‘Submit yourselves 
 unto God;” “And whom He will He hardeneth ;” 
 “Work out your own salvation ;” “It is God that 
 worketh in you:” “Awake, thou that sleepest ;” 
 “The Lord hath poured upon you the spirit of a 
 deep sleep:” “ Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ ;” 
 “God shall send them delusion, that they should 
 believe a lie ;” “Turn ye, turn ye, for why will ye 
 die!” “That they all might be damned which be- 
 lieve not the truth.” 
 Pages of these paradoxical responses might be 
 
148 MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 compiled from the Scriptures. Are we prompt to 
 exclaim: This is more than paradox; it is con- 
 tradiction? It is such contradiction as Paul 
 indulges when he says: ‘We are deceivers, yet 
 true; unknown, yet well known; dying, yet we 
 live ; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing ; poor, yet 
 making many rich; having nothing, yet possessing 
 all things.” Such verbal contradictions are the 
 profoundest harmonies. ‘They are the index of a 
 masculine grasp of truth. It is not the way of 
 great souls, moved by great truths, to be content 
 with conceptions which can be sifted clean of 
 paradox, and their residuum measured with alge- 
 braic exactness. Great truths have caverns of 
 thought. which lie below scientific language ; and 
 great minds are ever exploring those recesses. 
 Thus it is with inspiration, which is only the 
 greatness of Divine thought. Inspired conception 
 _ holds these opposites of truth with no sense of 
 contradiction. A serenity of faith pervades the 
 inspired thought upon them, like the tranquillity 
 which no tempest breaks at the bottom of the 
 Atlantic. When such thought comes to be ex- 
 pressed in speech, it refuses qualifications and 
 provisoes. It takes on bold and craggy forms. 
 It loves the mind that dares to speak it outright, 
 and then leave it in the majesty of its singleness. 
 
cS 
 
 OBLIGATION AND ABILITY. 149 
 
 Such is the celestial calmness with which inspired 
 minds have dealt with the responsibility of man. 
 They betray no sense of shame at their heedless- 
 ness of the Divine honour in urging the claims of 
 duty with an importunity which seems to forget 
 all else than duty. A doubt of the completeness , 
 of man’s responsibility for the discharge of his 
 duty, and of the whole of it, is never tolerated by 
 them. Those difficulties of inquiry which, if they 
 mean anything, signify an implication of injustice 
 in holding man accountable under the law of 
 sovereignty, are met with rebuke rather than with 
 reasoning: “Who art thou, O man, that repliest 
 against God ?” 
 
 Vv. 
 ABILITY THE MEASURE OF OBLIGATION. 
 
 From the authoritative tone with which both 
 the consciousness of men and the word of God 
 thus teach the responsibility of unregenerate mind, 
 we are led to infer the ability of an unregenerate 
 sinner to obey all the Divine commands which are 
 laid upon him. 
 
 What precisely do we mean by this? That an 
 unregenerate mind, remaining unregenerate, can 
 obey God? No; we do not so trifle with con- 
 tradiction in terms. The carnal mind is not sub- 
 
150 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 ject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. 
 A man with closed eyes does not see a precipice 
 at mid-day, neither indeed can he see it; one 
 step therefore may plunge him to the bottom. 
 But he can open his eyes; what then? Is there 
 no difference between a man with voluntarily 
 closed eyes and a blind man? Is there none 
 between a man who will not see and a man Jorn 
 blind? So, we do not deny the truism that a_ 
 sinner remaining impenitent cannot repent; he 
 cannot be and not be at the same moment. But 
 he can choose not to remain impenitent ; what 
 then? Is there no difference between a sinner 
 who cannot because he will not repent, and a 
 sinner who cannot because he is “disabled” to 
 will otherwise? Is there none between one who 
 cannot because he will not and one who is Jorn 
 disabled? We use language, then, in the strict 
 and proper sense of it, as the common mind in- 
 terprets it, when we affirm the inevitable inference 
 from human consciousness and the word of God, 
 that an unregenerate sinner can obey all the com- 
 mands of God. 
 
 “*7 Can, Because I Ought.” 
 
 A child’s book exists in our Sabbath-school 
 literature, with the simple yet profoundly phiio- 
 
OBLIGATION AND ABILITY. I51 
 
 sophic title: “I can, because I ought.” The 
 fresh mind of childhood never denied the truth 
 expressed in those words. The conscience of a 
 child must be awed down by authority into un- 
 natural contortions, before it will create the feel- 
 ing or the belief of guilt in that child’s heart for 
 that which he did not originate and cannot con- 
 trol. 
 
 “IT can, because I ought:” Ability—the neces 
 ‘sary inference from obligation; obligation—the 
 measure of ability. The central truth which gives 
 value to the tomes of theological lore on this sub- 
 ject is compressed into those words. It is impos- 
 sible that reasoning should go below it or around 
 it with the purpose of évasion. It is ultimate ; 
 thought can go no farther. We reason around 
 and around the immensity of the theme, and an 
 invisible thread conducts us through the labyrinth 
 back to the point at which we started, and at 
 which every child can see as far as the keenest 
 of us. 
 
 “‘T can, because I ought :” 
 
 we struggle to go by 
 this truth ; we traverse the universe in our philo- 
 sophic search for something beyond it ; but at the 
 circumference of our journey we have not outrun 
 it, any more than we can outrun the evening star 
 in search for the horizon. We plunge into the 
 
152 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 depths of our own being in quest of something 
 which consciousness may have treasured up be- 
 neath it, but at the bottom of all things we find it 
 awaiting us, “a gem of purest ray serene.” 
 
 ”? 
 
 “T can, because I ought:” it is one of those 
 truths which we carry with us because it is a part 
 of us. We cannot look into any mirror of truth 
 without seeing the reflection of it. It is like an 
 omnipresent Deity. It is indeed the voice of God 
 within us. We may say of it: “Thou hast beset 
 me behind and before ; thou hast laid thy hand 
 upon me. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? 
 whither shall I flee from thy. presence? If I 
 ascend up into heaven, thou art there ; if I make 
 my bed in hell, behold thou art there ; if I take 
 the wings of the morning and dwell in the utter- 
 most parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand 
 lead me : yea, the darkness and the light are both 
 alike to thee. Thou hast possessed my reins: I 
 am fearfully and wonderfully made.” 
 
 ““T can, because I ought.” This, then, is the 
 conviction with which an inquiring sinner must 
 meet the question of his own salvation. I can 
 obey, because God requires me to obey. I can 
 repent, because I feel guilty for not repenting. 
 God would not demand of me to do what I can- 
 not do, God would never have so constituted my 
 
er es Aol ET Pk A eee 
 OBLIGATION AN DF ABILITY, 153 
 
 being that I must feel guilty for not doing what I 
 cannot do. 
 
 Ability, the Teaching of Common Sense. 
 
 This is the irresistible reasoning of any un- 
 sophisticated mind. The common sense of the 
 world reasons so without hesitation and without 
 exception. Teach your child that he has lied to 
 you because he could not help it, and will he 
 justify your rod? Teach a thief that he stole be- 
 cause the necessity of his avaricious nature was 
 upon him, and will he look up self-condemned to 
 your barred windows and bolted doors and armed 
 sentinels? ‘Teach a murderer that he shed the 
 blood of his victim because Ze was the victim of 
 an insane malignity over which he had no power, 
 and will he confess the awful excellence of justice 
 on your scaffold! If he doés, it will be simply 
 because he knows better than your teachings. 
 
 So, proclaim to an inquiring sinner that he is a 
 sinner because he cannot be anything else; that 
 he hates God because it is his nature to hate God; 
 that he is a depraved being and a child of wrath 
 because he was born such; that he does not 
 repent because he is impotent to repent ; that he 
 does not obey God because the power is not in 
 him to obey God; that therefore, if he is not 
 
154 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 saved it is because God has not elected him to 
 salvation; and will he feel the damning guilt of 
 his condition, the equity of his doom, the awful 
 righteousness of the coming judgment? If he 
 does so, it will be because conscience and the 
 Holy Ghost are mightier than your theology. 
 Never, never does reason draw such conclusion 
 from such premises. ‘The common sense of the 
 world never reasons so. 
 
 The common sense, moreover, refuses to be 
 mystified in its reasonings by any distinction be- 
 tween power in character and power in act; be- 
 tween power to be and power to do. To the 
 popular mind, if a man cannot he cannot; and 
 that is the end of it. Obligation, guilt, just con- 
 demnation, remorse, punishment honourable to law 
 —not one of these can co-exist with impotence in 
 the being of whom they are affirmed. No matter 
 whether the sinfulness in question be innate de- 
 pravity or that of an act of murder ; the reasoning 
 of the common sense is the same. Inability to de 
 all that God requires is a bar to the justice of re- 
 quirement, as absolute as inability to withhold the 
 stroke of a dagger is to the justice of the gibbet. 
 An “insane murderer” is no more an impossible 
 contradiction in any civilised court of law than a 
 “disabled sinner” is at the bar of God. We 
 
OBLIGATION AND ABILITY. 155 
 count it to the honour of our humane civilisation 
 that our asylums, more sacred than “cities of re- 
 fuge” from the avenger of blood, are thrown open 
 to the insane homicide, and he is reverently cared 
 for as a brother, on whom the hand of God rests. 
 If then it be conceivable that, anywhere in the 
 universe, there are moral beings who are “ dis- 
 abled unto all good,” shall not He whose ways 
 are equal and whose name is Love find, some- 
 where among the still planets, a retreat where 
 those afflicted spirits may hide themselves till 
 their tangled and broken faculties shall be allured 
 back again into symmetry and wholeness? Shall 
 such beings be left to call on the rocks and moun- 
 tains to hide them from the face of Him that sit- 
 teth on the throne? Whose reason would not 
 reel if this were true? . 
 
 Thus, be it repeated, thus reasons the common 
 sense of men. ‘There is no sense in seasoning 
 otherwise. If the opposite conviction is estab- 
 lished, it must be by authority, not by- reason- 
 ing. But it is unsafe to question, on any autho- 
 rity, such a primal conviction of the soul. It is 
 hazardous to the integrity of mind in all its 
 operations. It hoodwinks perception of right 
 and wrong. It blunts sensibility to good and 
 evil. It deadens, therefore, the soul’s response 
 
156 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 to the nature of God as a God of equity and of 
 judgment. 
 
 Moreover, such a denial of the mind’s necessary 
 belief is unphilosophical. So to use any con- 
 ceivable authority as to array it by sheer power 
 against a first principle of belief, is to defeat 
 that very authority in the very act of its assertion ; 
 for the foundation of all authority over intelligent 
 belief is inundated and swept away in the pro- 
 cess. Faith has then no more bottom to stand 
 on than reason. Both go to wreck together. 
 If I cannot trust. one necessary belief, I cannot 
 another. I have nothing left, on which to build 
 faith in a revelation. My soul then sinks in 
 unbelief to depths immeasurable, in which all 
 that it knows is, that it knows nothing, believes 
 nothing, hopes nothing. To borrow a simili- 
 tude, such denial of ability to obey a com- 
 mand of God is, to the whole structure of a 
 moral being, like the magnetic mountain to the 
 navigator in the Arabian story. As he sailed 
 alongside of it, it drew out the clamping-irons of 
 his vessel, and the timbers fell asunder, and the 
 ship was wrecked, though in still waters on a 
 summer’s day. | 
 
 Once more, ‘‘I can, because I onght.” We 
 cast reflection upon God’s honour if we deny this 
 
RESPONSIBILITY AND SOVEREIGNTY. 157 
 
 in respect of obedience to His commands in the 
 way of salvation. We implicate the word of 
 God in a coliision with His works; and we in- 
 volve His work, in the structure of a soul, in a 
 more awful conflict with itself We should be 
 jealous for the Divine prerogative in this thing. 
 Shall the thing formed have reason to say unto 
 Him that formed it: “Why hast thou made me 
 thus?” 
 
 VI. 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY AND SOVEREIGNTY HARMONIOUS. 
 
 We are prepared, then, to observe that in this 
 view of responsibility there is no conflict with the 
 truth of a sinners dependence upon the Holy 
 Spirit. Reason affirms no conflict here any more 
 than revelation. Ifa sinner is not dependent on 
 regenerating grace for ability to do his duty, he is 
 not dependent on regenerating grace for anything 
 that is essential to responsibility for the perform- 
 ance of his duty. If dependence is not for the 
 power but for the will to obey, reason has no 
 more difficulty than faith in determining responsi- 
 bility. Not only is no contradiction proved, but 
 none is suggested between responsibility and de- 
 pendence. We cannot properly speak of recon- 
 ciling these truths; we can discern no variance 
 
153 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 between them to be removed. Our conceptions 
 of them fall into the same ease- and harmony of 
 thought in which they seem to have lain in inspired 
 minds. 
 
 The dependence of a being who is responsible 
 because able to do all that God requires of him, 
 is no more the dependence of necessity, but the 
 dependence of sheer guilt. It is not the depend- 
 ence of a diseased man upon the herb that shall 
 restore him. It is not the dependence of a dis- 
 abled man upon the surgeon who shall set the 
 broken limb. It is not the dependence of the 
 man with a withered hand upon the miracle that 
 shall make it whole like the other. It is the de- 
 pendence of a perverse man, who of himself will 
 not be other than a perverse man, upon the power 
 that shall incline him to obedience. It is the 
 dependence of a liar, who of himself will not 
 be other than a har, upon the influences that 
 induce him to be truthful. It is the depend- 
 ence of a murderer, who of himself will not be 
 other than a murderer, upon the friend who shall 
 persuade him to put up his dagger into its 
 sheath. This, which in kind, and when applied 
 
 , to elemental changes of character, is the most 
 | profound and terrific dependence under which 
 ' amoral being can exist, stands side by side with 
 
RESPONSIBILITY AND SOVEREIGNTY. 159 
 
 responsible being, with no collision, with not 
 a breath of discord between them.’ The two 
 thoughts are like angels locked hand in hand, in 
 ministering to God’s will and vindicating His ways 
 to men. 
 
 Is it still said that mystery hangs over the 
 whole conception of a being who can but will 
 not be other than a sinner until God constrains 
 him? True; it is the great marvel of the uni- 
 verse that any being w7/7 not obey God. Is it 
 said that mystery covers the junction of Divine 
 
 influence with human power in the change of a | 
 
 sinner’s heart? True; and the savage fled in 
 terror from the artist’s studio when he first saw 
 his own portrait, because he could not under- 
 stand the mystery of the artist’s pencil, which 
 
 could so represent him on the canvas without | 
 
 abstracting a part of him. Is it said that mys- 
 tery buries in darkness the turning-point of 
 character at which a sinner becomes a changed 
 being; a sinner who now, without God, will 
 not be other than a sinner, yet ‘then, through 
 -God, is a believer; who now will not but be a 
 child of wrath, yet then is an heir of glory; 
 that we cannot penetrate to the heart of this? 
 True; great is the mystery of godliness. And 
 not unlike this mystery is the fact that a man 
 
 eal 
 
160 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 , cannot see the power of his own vision ; cannot 
 ' look at the nerve which les back of his own 
 eyeball; cannot take in his hand the filament 
 which connects that nerve with the spiritual seer 
 who is behind it. But mystery is not contra- 
 _ diction. It is not even a seeming contradiction. 
 An apparent absurdity zs an absurdity to us 
 until we believe, and have reason to believe, it 
 to be only apparent. Mystery is not this; it is 
 only a hint of magnitude. We must fall back, 
 therefore, upon the conviction of responsibility 
 for guilt, and of the dependence of guilt, as upon 
 two of the elemental truths on which rests the 
 government of God over our world. We may 
 think and speak of them at our ease, without 
 the most secret suspicion of their inconsistency, 
 or fear of a collision. We may preach them as 
 inspired men have preached them, with intensity 
 of conception, with boldness of speech, with single- 
 ness of aim. ‘These are the only methods in 
 which they can be preached by men who are in 
 earnest. 
 VII. 
 HOW TO ANSWER THE INQUIRY, “WHAT MUST I DO TO 
 BE SAVED?” 
 
 Some of the results of this discussion bear 
 
 specifically upon the methods of the pulpit and 
 
— 
 
 ea ee el 
 HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS, 161 
 
 —_ 
 
 of Christian teachers in addressing inquirers after 
 the way of salvation. 
 
 The answer to the inquiry, “What must I do to 
 be saved?” would appear to be very simple in 
 view of the /zsfory of the inquiry in the Scriptures. 
 There, it is the inquiry of unsophisticated minds, 
 and the outburst of burdened hearts. No phil- 
 osophic theories of conversion, venerated as the 
 growth of ages, lay back of it. It came forth, 
 fresh from souls which were in downright earnest 
 to do something for their salvation, if they might | 
 but know what to do. They were satisfied, there- ’ 
 fore, and the inspired teacher assumed that they 
 ought to be satisfied, with an answer which was as 
 direct, as earnest, and as free from mysticism as 
 their question was. 
 
 It needs hardly to be said, that modern inquir- 
 ers after the way of salvation, in Christian lands 
 at least, come to the subject in a very different 
 way. They approach it through the avenue ofa 
 different mental history. The novelty of Chris- 
 tian thought is commonly worn away before they 
 reach that crisis in which the question of religious 
 destiny is to be decided. They bring to it a 
 multitude of preconceptions. Inherited beliefs, 
 the mental deposits of education, and the relics of 
 
 former religious awakenings, are mingled with the 
 L 
 
162 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 ———. 
 
 mental habits of impenitence. ‘The true and the 
 false are intertwined intricately. Inquiry itself, 
 under such conditions, is not free from sophistry. 
 The stereotyped language in which it expresses 
 itself may be more largely an imitation than an 
 experience. It may not mean all that it seems to 
 mean. 
 
 The work of a religious teacher, therefore, in 
 the instruction of religious inquirers, is often one 
 of delicate complications. Simple as it is in its 
 results, it has no swch simplicity in its methods as 
 if we were at liberty to inundate the whole past 
 of the inquirer’s mind and sweep it away by teach- 
 ing the rudiments of a new religion. We must 
 _ Save to him much that is true and salutary in 
 his experience. Yet we must often extricate him 
 from mental confusion, by clearing his way back 
 to certain first principles of truth, which his ex- 
 perience has obscured. Several of these princi- 
 ples are very clearly established by the present 
 ‘liscussion. 
 
 Repentance and Faith Practicable, like other Duties. 
 
 One such principle is, that we should urge upon 
 men the performance of the conditions of salva- 
 tion, with the same unrestricted freedom of speech 
 
ST TRS OS a ae a am a 
 HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS. 163 
 —_—e———_—ee——e———eeeee—eeaeaeseees ss eee eee 
 
 with which we would press the discharge of any 
 other duty. 
 
 Men should be invited, persuaded, entreated, 
 commanded to repent and believe, with the same 
 unqualified boldness with which we should teach 
 them to speak the truth, to pay an honest debt, to 
 befriend the widow and the fatherless. Respon- 
 sibility is as perfect in the one class of duties as 
 in the other. Duty is as‘absolute. The responsi- 
 bility in both cases rests upon the same immutable 
 basis—the intrinsic justice of a Divine command, 
 and the indestructible ability of man to obey. The 
 sinner is responsible for repentance and faith to 
 the full extent of Divine requirement, simply be- 
 cause God requires them, and because the sinner is 
 able to render them. 
 
 We should seek to penetrate with this convic- | 
 tion the soul of every man who would know what 
 he must do to be saved. We owe it to the sim- 
 plicity of the truth to clear it of contradictions in 
 the troubled thoughts of an inquirer. We should 
 strip it of factitious mystery. We should let the 
 absolute sacredness of Duty, backed by the sanc- 
 tions of Eternity, come home to the conscience in 
 words simple and few, without qualification or 
 proviso. 
 
 The fiction of inability to obey a command of 
 
 @ 
 As. i 4 PY eyed 
 iL J ¥ BY § Mah yi! ail AT; ah. 
 
164 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 God, with which an inquiring mind is often blinded, 
 should be commonly treated as a Satanic sugges- 
 tion. That conviction of inability does not exist 
 often in such a mind in the forms of metaphysic 
 
 _and theologic statement, in which technical defini- 
 ' tion makes the fiction a truth. A mind oppressed 
 
 by fear of hell is in no mood, commonly, to 
 appreciate our philosophical distinction between 
 
 “natural” and. “moral” inability. ‘The plea of 
 
 inability by which a convicted sinner parries duty, 
 
 -exists in the plain, homely sense of words which. 
 
 mean to the distracted soul just what they seem to 
 mean in literal speech. ‘‘ Cannot,” is ‘ cannot ;” 
 nothing more, nothing less. It conveys but one 
 idea. That idea has to him no metaphysical 
 double sense. It is intensely literal, and as in- 
 tensely false. It arrays Conscience and Fact, God 
 and Truth, in defiant hostility to each other. The 
 sinner says to his soul: “God commands me to 
 do this thing—I cannot; God commands me to 
 repent—I cannot ; God commands me to be- 
 
 ‘lieve—I cannot. He commands, knowing that 
 
 | I cannot obey. It is as if He commanded me 
 
 —_— 
 
 to restore the lost Pleiad.” This conviction, we 
 repeat, in this unscientific form in which it holds 
 
 ‘inquiring souls in bondage, should be treated as 
 
 a stupendous delusion. The inquirer should be 
 
HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS. 165 
 
 thrown back upon the imperative teachings of the 
 Scriptures and of the common sense. He should 
 be made to feel that in cherishing such.a sense of 
 impotence he is clinging to the refuge of a false- 
 hood. He is stultifying his own reason, defying 
 his own conscience, and charging God with crime. | 
 We have no right, my brethren, we have no right 
 as teachers of truth, to suffer a sinner to go from 
 our instructions to the bar of God, in the dilemma 
 of either falsifying his reason or repudiating his 
 conscience, and therefore with all the forces of 
 truth thrown into panic in his soul, through the 
 contradiction of his necessary beliefs to our de- 
 livery of God’s commands. 
 
 It is unphilosophical and unsafe, as well as 
 unscriptural, to teach the duty of repentance less | 
 imperatively than inspired men have taught it. 
 We have no authority to lengthen or to soften the 
 peremptory words of the Holy Ghost. We should 
 not so far yield to the fiction of inability as to say 
 to the inquiring sinner: ‘‘ Repent if you can; try 
 to repent ; repent of such sins as you can repent 
 of; use the means of repentance ; pray that you 
 may be enabled to repent ;” and to say no more. 
 It is neither reasonable nor scriptural to entice a 
 sinner up thus to a side-look upon his duty, and 
 leave him there. He-should be led around to the 
 
cena ee ee Fee 
 
 166 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 eS Eee 
 
 front, and urged to face the truth in its impera- 
 tive singleness—“ Repent ;” and this with the full 
 force of the implication, and if need be the state- 
 ment, that he caz repent. With Divine grace or 
 without it, regenerate or unregenerate, elect or 
 _non-elect, his responsibility is as perfect as God 
 ‘can make it. Radically, it does not depend on 
 Divine grace. Temptation does not fundamen-— 
 tally affect it. “God doth not suffer you to be 
 tempted above that ye are able.” The unregen- 
 erate sinner should be taught that Ze has the power 
 _ 40 do anything which God has the will to command. 
 We never get the unbroken force of Conscience 
 over to the side of truth otherwise. 
 
 Lhe Dependence of Guilt more Absolute than the 
 Dependence of Necessity. 
 
 But is not the teaching of an unqualified re- 
 sponsibility perilous ? Will not a sinner be tempted - 
 to revel in his freedom? al he not say within 
 himself: “ My soul is my own ; ; Salvation is in my 
 own power ; I have but to will it, and Heaven is 
 at my bidding; Soul, thou hast much goods laid 
 up for many years in this power to repent at thy 
 pleasure ; take thine ease” 2 Perhaps so ; what 
 distortion will not sin prompt in evasion or in 
 caricature of truth? Yet God does not therefore 
 
HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS. 167 
 
 abolish the perils of probation. It were sufficient 
 to say that He who spake as never man spake 
 thus preached repentance in bold and unguarded 
 words. But here, as elsewhere, truth carries its 
 own safeguards. - For— 
 
 A second consequence of the principles we 
 have considered is, that we should proclaim the 
 dependence of a sinner upon the Holy Ghost for 
 the will to repent, as being a more profound | 
 reality than if it were dependence for the power 
 to repent. ie 
 
 Two methods are here suggested regarding the 
 doctrine of Divine Sovereignty. ‘They may have 
 the same end in view, may be adopted with equal 
 conscientiousness, and may be prompted by the 
 same devout desire to honour God. Yet they are 
 very unequal in the depth to which they penetrate 
 truth, and the force with which they use it. They 
 are very dissimilar also in the skill with which they 
 avoid perversions of the truth in the result. The 
 one method is, to exalt the sovereignty of God in 
 salvation as a work of mere Power. ‘The other is, 
 to exalt the sovereignty of God in salvation as a 
 work of Moral Government. In the one case, 
 God is made to appear sovereign of a sinner’s 
 destiny, as He is of the elements in a tempest. 
 He can say to the passions of guilt, Be still; and 
 
168 MAN’S RENEWAL. . 
 
 FE eR Reeser) Ae 
 they shall obey Him. His sway of the soul is 
 like His sway of the sea. Both are exhibitions of 
 power—grand, magnificent, overwhelming it may 
 be, but still power, and that only. The final im- 
 pression of the beholder is that of the glory of 
 Omnipotence. : 
 
 In the other case, God is represented as sove- 
 reign in the work of salvation under the con- 
 ditions of a moral system. He ordained those 
 conditions from eternity. | They. are sacred to 
 Him. His own integrity is pledged to them. 
 He cannot violate them with impunity to His own 
 consciousness of rectitude. They were planned 
 in the counsels of eternity for the display of His 
 moral glory as supreme ovér His natural perfec- 
 tions. His sway of a soul, therefore, is unique, 
 It is like nothing else in the heavens above, or in 
 the earth beneath, or in the waters; under the 
 earth. It is not an exercise of power only. The 
 final impression upon a beholder is not that of 
 omnipotence supremely, but of omnipotence in 
 ‘the service of justice, holiness, truth, love. It is 
 that of infinite power regulated by infinite integ- 
 rity. The perspective of the ‘system is so ad- 
 justed that the spectator shall look through the 
 natural to the moral disclosures of the Divine 
 glory. He sees, not unlimited ' Force driving. 
 
HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS. 169 
 
 before it an insensate thing, but infinite Holiness 
 swaying a free mind, through all the sinuosities of 
 its ‘choice, by the delicate, intricate, and balanced 
 working of moral laws. 
 
 Now, the difference between these two methods 
 of representing the sovereignty of God in salvation 
 is vital. It corresponds to the difference between 
 Might and Right. It is just the difference between 
 appeal to the sense of weakness, and appeal to the 
 sense of sin. It is vitally significant to religious | 
 teaching in several respects. In the first place, we | 
 can much more easily impress upon men a sense 
 of the sovereignty of might than that of the sove- 
 reignty of right. A fallen mind takes in the idea 
 of a God of power more spontaneously than that 
 of a God of rectitude. Again, an awakened soul, 
 agitated by fear, is specially receptive of the truth 
 of Divine Power ; yet that soul goaded by remorse, 
 and quick to spring to anything that shall help it 
 to fling elsewhere the load of its guilt, is specially 
 impervious to the truth of Divine integrity. A 
 God sovereign by might is less uncongenial with 
 the bitterness of its spirit than a God sovereign by 
 right. Still further, the drift of a tempted soul is 
 to accept the conviction of God’s power at the 
 expense of His justice. The leanings of guilt are 
 all one way. Subjection to an infinite tyranny is 
 
a rear creee 
 170 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 less revolting to it than submission to infinite 
 equity. i 
 
 Is there, then, no peril indicated here to our 
 conceptions of Divine Sovereignty? Is there no 
 danger that the scriptural proportions of truth may 
 become distorted in the portraiture we draw of the 
 Divine government? What if, in our solicitude to 
 exalt the power of God, we so depict it that we un- 
 wittingly elevate it above His holiness? Is there 
 no danger then? What, if we so imperiously pro- 
 claim His omnipotence over a guilty soul that the 
 practical impression upon that soul obscures all 
 sense of His equity, His sincerity, His honour, 
 His love? Is there no risk then? What if we so 
 speak as God’s vicegerents, that, though uncon- 
 scious of any such design, we throw out discordant 
 fragments of the truth, this way and that, and they 
 happen to fall in with the cavils of a tempted 
 spirit, and seem to consolidate its sense of sheer 
 dominion at the expense of all the holy and ami- 
 able attributes of God in His moral government ? 
 Is there no hazard there? What if, to make sure 
 that the Divine authority shall not be understated, 
 we seem—though we should be shocked by the im- 
 putation of any such purpose, yet we seem—to the 
 common sense of our hearers to build God’s go- 
 vernment upon principles which would doom any 
 
HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS. I7I 
 
 human government on earth to execration? Is 
 there no peril in that ? 
 
 Yet, from these two methods of regarding Divine 
 sovereignty arise corresponding methods of repre- 
 senting the dependence of a sinner upon the Holy 
 Spirit for salvation. By the one method, it is the 
 dependence of necessity; by the other, the de- 
 pendence of guilt. The dependence is absolute 
 in either case. No interest of truth is served by 
 ignoring or retrenching that. So long asa sinner . 
 will not repent without Divine grace, his depend- 
 ence upon that grace is as perfect in degree, 
 though not the same in kind, as if he could not 
 repent. But because it is not the same in kind, the 
 moral significance of it is unspeakably the more 
 intense. As necessity knows no law, so the de- 
 pendence of necessity knows no guilt. It has no 
 moral significance. Not so the dependence which 
 our subject teaches. The very groundwork of this 
 is guilt, and guilt only. ‘Thus we should proclaim 
 it. We should so sketch a sinner’s dependence 
 upon the Holy Ghost as to keep the moral recti- 
 tude of God in the foreground of His power. 
 The helplessness of which we seek to make the 
 sinner conscious should be, not the helplessness of 
 disease, but the helplessness of sin. We should 
 picture him to his own conscience, not primarily 
 
a ee 
 i spe) MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 I eee 
 as infirmity leaning upon infinite strength, but as 
 guilt resting against infinite holiness. We should 
 _ portray a dependence which can give him no 
 ‘peace so long as he remains impenitent. It should 
 be a dependence which brings together all the 
 elements of God’s moral government to intensify 
 the holiness of God on the one hand, and on the 
 other the sinfulness of sin. It should heap the 
 whole burden of sin upon the sinner’s own will. 
 Our teaching, then, should be clear and bold in 
 its implications, and if need be in its assertions, 
 of this dependence of guilt, and of guilt only, while 
 impenitence holds out. Our exhortations to an 
 impenitent sinner should imply, and if needful say 
 to him: ‘You can repent ; you can turn to God ; 
 you ought to do it; by every principle of equity 
 and of honour, He holds you responsible for doing 
 it; but this is the very head and front of your 
 offending, that you will not do it till His grace 
 constrains you. It depends, therefore, upon His 
 sovereign will whether you shall be saved or lost. 
 The more profound your guilt, the more absolute 
 is your dependence; and the more absolute your 
 _dependence the more aggravated is your guilt. 
 Each is the gauge of the other. Time consoli- 
 dates both. Left to yourself, therefore, you must 
 more surely perish, and more hopelessly, than if you 
 
HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS. 178 
 
 could not repent. The climax of your peril is in 
 resistance to the Holy Ghost. Years In ease are 
 years of defiance to infinite holiness. ‘The one sin 
 which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world 
 nor in the world to come, is sin against the Holy 
 Ghost. ‘There is a sin unto death; I do not say 
 that ye should pray for it.” 
 
 Grace not Fustice. 
 
 But are not such conceptions of dependence 
 ‘and guilt repellant? Do they not shock hope? 
 Does not such teaching therefore invite despair? 
 Yes, if impenitence be incorrigible. Truth and 
 sin are implacable foes. It is one of the perils 
 ‘of their contact that it may hasten the catas- 
 trophe of a soul’s ruin. Yet here, again, truth 
 provides its own defences by suggesting all the 
 alleviation of its terrors which can be beneficent 
 to a sinner in his impenitence. Not only are 
 ‘his cavils against the rectitude of God’s govern- 
 ment silenced, but, 
 
 A third result from the principles we have re- 
 viewed is, that we are at liberty to proclaim the 
 offer of the Holy Spirit to the- sinner as being in 
 unqualified language the gift of God’s mercy. We 
 present it not as the gift of justice to necessity ; 
 not even as the gift of pity to misfortune; but as | 
 
174 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 the gift of mercy to guilt. Were man’s depend- 
 
 _ ence upon God in regeneration a dependence for 
 \ power to repent, regeneration could be only an 
 , act of justice—nothing more. Grace should be 
 
 no more grace. If we must say to an awakened 
 sinner: “True, you cannot obey God, but the 
 Holy Spirit can enable you to obey ; you have no 
 power to repent, but the Holy Spirit can give you 
 repentance ; you have no ability to believe, but 
 the Holy Spirit can give you faith;” the reply is 
 inevitable : ‘‘Then the gift of the Holy Spirit is 
 my right in equity: I have a claim in eternal 
 justice to regeneration, if commands are laid upon 
 me which I cannot obey without it. Impossible 
 duties are the demand of tyranny.” To inquiring 
 minds this reasoning is as resistless as lightning. 
 They are astonished that it does not strike the 
 pulpit dumb. 
 
 But we preach the gospel of salvation with no 
 such lurid logic in the back-ground. We are free 
 to proclaim the work of the Holy Ghost as the 
 
 ' gift of Mercy to Guilt. Behold what manner of 
 love the Father hath bestowed! While we are yet 
 
 ‘sinners, grace comes to our deliverance. The 
 
 sinner in the very act of sin, at the very height of 
 rebellion, able to yield, but persistent in treason, 
 with power calling upon guilt, and guilt responding 
 
SSS 
 HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS, 175 
 
 to power, is overtaken, enclosed, and subdued by 
 regenerating love. Such is the reach of infinite 
 mercy. Let us be jubilant in proclaiming the gift 
 of the Holy Ghost as a token, superadded to the 
 gift of Christ, of the sincerity of God in His desire 
 to save lost men. Let us exult in the strains of 
 Biblical invitation, promise, expostulation. The 
 gift of the Holy Spirit is proof in act that they 
 mean just what they seem to mean: “Ho, every 
 one that thirsteth ; The Spirit and the Bride say 
 come ; Whosoever will, let him come; I have no 
 pleasure in the death of the wicked ; Why will ye 
 die?” 
 
 Lincouragement to Immediate Repentance. 
 
 But after all, will not such teaching fail through 
 want of individuality in a sinner’s faith in it? 
 Will he not say: “True, God is infinitely holy 
 and infinitely merciful ; but what is that to me? 
 How do I know that He purposes to regenerate me ? 
 Must I not await His time for my salvation? Is 
 not the dependence of guilt just as hopeless as the 
 dependence of necessity? Is not the certainty ot 
 
 sin the certainty of damnation?” Yes, if a sinner \ 
 will have it so. But truth benignly pursues him — 
 even to his selfish isolation in his guilt. For, 
 
 A fourth result of the principles we have dis- 
 
ree 
 
 179 ‘ MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 8 
 
 cussed is, that we are free to assure men that they 
 have every encouragement to immediate repentance 
 which is possible to a state of sin. Holy encour- 
 agement is not possible to hope in incorrigible 
 guilt. But a sinner, once convinced of sin, has all 
 the encouragement that he caz have to immediate 
 action in the duty of repentance. He has the 
 assurance of the benignity of God’s command to 
 repent; of his own ability to obey ; of the com- 
 placency of God in every desire he cherishes to 
 obey ; of the co-working of the Holy Spirit even 
 in every conviction he feels that he ought to obey; 
 of the sincerity of the Spirit in the very pressure 
 of witich he is conscious of the motives to obey; 
 and of the possibility that even now the Spirit 
 may overpower his guilt, and make him willing to 
 obey. 
 
 Beyond this, holy encouragement cannot ex- 
 tend.» No honest soul will ask for more than 
 this. If a sinner accepts other cheer than this, 
 it is because his is not an honest soul. Anything 
 less or more than this simple urgency of immediate 
 duty in reliance upon the Holy Ghost, would only 
 deepen the hopelessness of a sinner in his guilt. 
 No other exhortation comes right home to his 
 emergency as this does: “ Work, for God worketh 
 in thee.” This is no mockery. It is intensely 
 
I1OW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS. LPs 
 
 real, as expressing both God’s sincerity and the 
 sinner’s duty. The practical force of that much- 
 abused exhortation is simply this: Be in earnest | 
 to save yourself, because God is in earnest to 
 save you. Salvation, then, is sure, in the act of 
 instant repentance. This is what the sinner must 
 do to be saved. | 
 But is the inquiry still pressed: Will the Holy 
 Spirit certainly bless my endeavours? We answer: 
 What endeavours? ‘The endeavours of guilt to 
 evade the consciousness of guilt? No. When 
 He the Spirit of truth is come, he will reprove 
 the world of sin. But again, what endeavours? 
 Endeavours to be saved. in the indulgence 
 ofisin?, No: the fruit of the Spirit is in alk 
 goodness and righteousness and truth. But 
 again, what endeavours? Endeavours to fasten 
 the responsibility of sin and its fruits upon the 
 sovereignty of God’s decrees? Nay, but who art 
 thou, O man, that repliest. against God? Yet 
 again, what endeavours? ‘The endeavours of an 
 earnest spirit to believe and love and obey? 
 “Thus saith the high and lofty One who inha- 
 biteth eternity, whose name is Holy ; I dwe/ with 
 him that is of a contrite and humble spirit.” | 
 But does a sinner say: “ Mine is not a contrite 
 
 spirit ; can I then be assured that God will give 
 M 
 
Pie ee ane ee ee eee 
 
 178 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 me repentance? Is that irreversible decree, 
 formed before the world was, anywhere re- 
 vealed to me that, taking me just as I am, God 
 | will change my heart?” We answer, No. God 
 gives no such assurance. He reveals no such de- 
 crees. He has no answer to give to such inquiry. 
 We listen, as that cry goes up to the throne of 
 mercy, and there is silence in heaven. We hear 
 no responses in the air; we see no handwriting 
 in the clouds. He hath mercy on whom he will 
 have mercy : 
 ‘‘ Not Gabriel asks the reason why, 
 Nor God the reason gives.” 
 
 This is the point precisely to which the whole 
 bearing of our instructions should conduct men 
 in their search for peace to their souls—that they 
 stand face to face with God dependent for eternal 
 life upon His good pleasure, with every possible 
 _ encouragement, even to the assurance of salva- 
 tion, in instant obedience to His commands, 
 and with nothing but despair in disobedience or 
 
 in delay. What God purposes to do respecting 
 the regeneration of any soul he has not revealed 
 to any mortal ear. He does not ask our attention 
 nor invite our inquiries to that secret of his own 
 will. He urges ‘upon our thoughts our own doing ; 
 what we have done, what we must do. There is 
 
op a eae 
 
 HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS. 179 
 
 —————— ee 
 
 no secret about that ; it is open and clear as the 
 morning. 
 The Ruin of a Soul its own work. 
 
 But what if such proclamation of the gospel fails? 
 What if its only fruit is to awaken the lamentation: 
 “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” Even 
 then, truth is its own vindication, and the ways of 
 God are equal. For, 
 
 The final consequence from the principles we 
 have contemplated is, that we should represent a 
 sinner’s destruction to be always his own doing. | 
 We may be called to portray the history of the 
 Holy Spirit's work on many souls in the words 
 once dropped in tears over Jerusalem: “How 
 often would I, . . . . but ye would not!” Our 
 teaching should be, that it does not extenuate a 
 lost sinner’s guilt that God never decreed to regen- 
 erate him. Where is the sinner’s claim to that 
 decree? Not in defect of responsibility ; that has 
 been without fracture from the first to the last. 
 Not in default of knowledge; his knowledge and 
 his duty have but measured each other. Not in. 
 bondage of probation ; his probation never rose 
 above the level of his freedom. Not in severity 
 of temptation ; temptation at its floodtide was but 
 opportunity for more blessed achievement. His 
 liberty to obey God’s commands was infinitely 
 
180 - MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 more sacred in God’s sight thari in his own. 
 Never was its awful sanctity suspended or over- 
 borne for one moment. God has guarded it as 
 the apple of His eye. To no being in the universe, 
 'then, is the perdition of a sinner to be primarily 
 ascribed but to himself. 
 
 But this is not all. We must proclaim the his- 
 tory of a lost soul in words of more intense 'signifi- 
 cance. That is nota history of negative probation. 
 God has never thrust a sinner upon trial in the 
 sheer strength of his freedom, and 4¢ Aim alone. 
 God has been more than just to him. By the 
 very conditions of his being, the sinner has been 
 the object of all the amiable affections of the 
 Divine nature. He has been placed upon an in- 
 finitely beneficent system of trial. He has been 
 instructed in all that God has held him account- 
 able for ; his own intuitions have taught him ; the 
 works of God have enlightened him; his own con- 
 science has been the foreshadow of the judgment 
 to him; there has never been an hour of his mora] 
 being when he did not know enough for his salva- 
 tion. Everything that he has known of God has 
 assumed also the benign form of a dissuasive from 
 sin; his experience has generated countless mo- 
 ‘tives to obedience ; his steps have been thronged 
 by them as by pleading spirits ; but for his guilt, 
 
HOW TO ANSWER INQUIRERS. 181 
 
 his conscience alone would have been an ever- 
 present song of God’s love to him ; if he has had 
 Christian training, the disclosures of redemption 
 have opened upon him the most intense system of 
 allurements to holiness known to the universe ; the 
 teachings of wise men, the prayers of good men, 
 the visions of inspired men, and the ministrations 
 of angels, have stretched a cordon of holy sym- 
 pathies around him; the cross of Christ has 
 blocked his way to destruction more impassably 
 than by a flaming sword; intercession in heaven 
 has been made for him with hands uplifted in 
 which were the prints of the nails ; the Holy Spirit 
 has striven with him to turn him back, by all the 
 devices which infinite ingenuity could frame at the 
 bidding of infinite compassion; his history has 
 been one long struggle against obstacles to the 
 suicide of his soul ; silently, darkly, often with con- 
 scious and wilful repugnance to holy restraints, yet 
 as often with that adroit suspense of conscience with 
 which a sinner may serenely, even joyously, frater- 
 nise with sin, he has sought out, and discovered, 
 and selected, and seized upon, and made sure of, 
 his ow way over and around and through those 
 obstacles, to the world of despair. He has done 
 it—/e, and not another. Such is every lost life. 
 Is it any marvel that a lost soul is speechless ? 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 THE INDWELLING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 
 
 T is one of the perils of probation that the 
 most stupendous truths may become the least 
 impressive. In religious thought such are the 
 truths with which we become most familiar ; and 
 through our familiarity with them, our intellects 
 may grow drowsy over them; and through the 
 dulness of our conceptions our hearts may become 
 torpid in response to them. Bya subtle law ot 
 language the words which express such truths may 
 become tame. Intense words, once the utterance 
 of an intense experience, may lose their heat; 
 figurative words, originated to express vivid ideas 
 which could not otherwise be pressed into lan- 
 guage, may die out in literal commonplace. We 
 may read and speak and pray, therefore, as we 
 may think, of some of the grandest ideas of our 
 faith, without emotion, because without a lifelike 
 
CONSECRATED BEING, 183 
 
 sense of their reality. They may become . that 
 which we so significantly describe as “a dead 
 letter.” An apostolic earnestness, admonishing us 
 of such a truth, may startle us into a momentary 
 vision of it, by addressing us as if we had lost our 
 faith in it ; as if we had sunk into ignorance of its 
 existence. ‘‘ Know ye not?” may be the query 
 which hints at the deadness of our sensibility. 
 
 Let us seek to quicken our thoughts of one of 
 these well-known elements of Christian truth, by 
 observing some of the lessons suggested by the 
 Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in regenerate souls, 
 “ Know ye not that ye are the Temple of God, and 
 that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” 
 
 The work of the Holy Ghost in regeneration 
 suggests with singular impressiveness— 
 
 I. 
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF A CHRISTIAN’S BEING. 
 
 A renewed mind is a consecrated thing. It is 
 sacred as the abode of God. In all history, a 
 temple has been an object of reverence as the 
 dwelling-place of Deity. Men close its doors 
 against profane intrusion. They put off their 
 shoes and approach it with prostrations. The 
 ground on which it has stood has been deemed 
 
184 MAN’S: RENEWAL. 
 
 holy. The very soil within its courts has been 
 carried over seas as a memorial of divine virtues. 
 By human law, crime has been sometimes so 
 gauged as to reacn its climax in an act of sacri- 
 lege. The avenger of blood, in hot pursuit of 
 the murderer, has stopped short on the threshold 
 of a sanctuary, lest by entering with revengeful 
 purpose he should commit a more damning crime 
 than that which he sought to punish. 
 
 Such a Temple of God is a regenerate soul. 
 The thoughts of such a soul may be the radiation 
 of the thoughts of God. Its emotions may be 
 tremulous with the sensibility of God. Its pur- 
 poses may be decrees of the Will of God. Its 
 entire character may be a similitude of the holi- 
 ness of God. Its life, therefore, may be the life 
 of God, and its joy the peace of God. A man 
 may have reason to stand in awe of himself. He 
 may be an object of reverence to an- observant 
 universe, as a being who is filled with the fulness 
 of God. ‘This is Christian privilege. Realised in 
 | experience or not, the Christian prerogative towers 
 to this height. 
 
 So inspired men measured a regenerate life by 
 the very name by which they distinguished one 
 who had experienced the new birth. . Why should 
 our modern speech have dropped the title of 
 
CONSECRATED BEING. 185 
 
 “saint,” in designating a converted man? Why 
 should it sound eccentric to our ears that a quaint 
 Christian like George Miiller should speak of mini- 
 stering to the “saints of Bristol?” That concep- 
 tion of a holy thing, of a sacred being, of a soul 
 set apart by a Godlike initiation to Godlike uses, 
 is the scriptural idea of the humblest friend of 
 Christ. . 
 
 No fear of an affected sanctimony should repel 
 us from this ideal of a soul’s hallowed affinity with 
 God. No deference to an earthly dialect should 
 forbid us to honour this ideal as a reality in our 
 speech. The dignity of a soul culminates in this 
 conception. ‘The diction of the Scriptures is full 
 of it. Weare kings; we are priests; we are the 
 elect of God ; we are saints of the Most High; 
 we are judges of angels ; we are joint-heirs with 
 Christ. These homelike verities of our Christian 
 vows are not a farce; because we are the Temple 
 of God. In His view of us, the light of His own 
 mind irradiates, and the benignity of His own heart 
 enkindles our being. Therefore it is that the . 
 meanest of us all are precious to Him. Whoso 
 toucheth us, toucheth the apple of His eye. He 
 that offendeth one of us, it were better for him 
 that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and 
 he were cast into the sea, 
 
186 “MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 The Indwelling of the Spirit not an Incarnation. 
 
 We do not hold a mystical interpretation of 
 God’s indwelling. That is not necessary; nor 
 indeed does it help us to reduce to an experience 
 our conception of the enshrinement of God ina 
 human soul. We must not part with nor confound 
 the sense of our own individuality. We need not 
 struggle to assimilate our union with God to that 
 
 -of the union of Deity with the man Jesus. The 
 
 residence of God in a contrite heart is not an 
 incarnation of Divinity. We need not strain the 
 figurative speech of inspiration, so as to derive 
 from it the notion of some sort of essential union 
 of which we can form no definite idea. We neither 
 dignify nor intensify our thought of the abiding of 
 God with us by any such struggle. We materialise 
 it rather, and so degrade it. 
 
 The : expression of God by the act of personal 
 Deity is all that we can know of His presence 
 anywhere. What more than this can we know 
 of His omnipresence in the material creation ? 
 
 | Wherever a Divine thought is, there is the mind 
 
 of God. Wherever an outgoing of Divine love 
 
 occurs, there is the heart of God. Wherever a 
 
 _ Divine energy works, there is the will of God. 
 
 We know nothing of effluences of the Divine 
 
 F 
 . 
 
CONSECRATED BEING. 187 
 
 Essence. Be it -in a star or in a soul, God zs, 
 wherever there is an expression of His perfec-. 
 tions. Differing in glory, indeed, as one star from 
 another, and as a spirit in God’s image transcends 
 both, yet the Divine emanations are from one 
 Being, whose expression of Himself in any form, 
 and in minutest degree, is sufficient to hallow a 
 locality or to consecrate a soul. 
 
 The sacredness of an expression of God exists, 
 also, only to the mind which thinks it. The 
 Shekinah was no hallowed thing to the bullock | 
 which stood up for sacrifice; but a ladder in a 
 man’s dream could transform a field of almond- 
 trees into a Bethel, and a pillow of stones into 
 an altar, at which the dreamer should say, trem- 
 bling: “ How dreadful is this place! The Lord 
 is here, and I knewit not!” So, one flower in the 
 desert of Sahara, blooming forth its expression of/ 
 the benevolence of Him who from eternity had 
 purposed that it should there and then be a me- 
 morial of that benevolence to Mungo Park, could 
 render that spot like the gate of heaven. 
 
 In like manner, then, a regenerate soul, as the ~ 
 habitation of a sanctifying influence, becomes a 
 temple of the Holy Ghost no less really than if 
 the very essence of the Deity were incarnate in 
 the body which encloses that soul. We speak the 
 
a es ee a 
 
 188 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 CS 
 
 wisdom of God in a mystery. Such a soul is 
 sacred to holy uses. It may be contracted in its 
 range of intellect; but to the eye of God it isa 
 chosen shrine. It may be low in the scale of 
 human birth; yet it is more than the kindred of 
 angels. A slave it may be by human law, and 
 yet a son of the King of kings. That scarred body 
 in which it dwells is a consecrated thing; the 
 death of it is precious in the Lord’s sight. Whoso 
 defiles that temple of God, him will God destroy. 
 
 II. 
 THE RESTORATION OF LOST SELF-RESPECT. 
 
 The residence of the Holy Spirit in a renewed 
 heart discloses, furthermore, the only method by 
 which a sinner may honestly recover a sense of 
 personal dignity. 
 
 The Tyranny of Remorse. 
 
 It is one of the evil incidents of guilt that a man 
 loses himself by it. Confidence in his own in- 
 tegrity, complacency in his own history, esteem 
 for his own worth, trust in his own honour, assur- 
 ance of his own dignity, joy in his own conscience, 
 —all the chivalrous emotions by which a pure 
 being is permitted to exult in the very conscious- 
 
THE RESTORATION OF SELF-RESPECT. 189 
 
 ness of existence,—are swept away by the first 
 breath of sin felt to be sin. An unholy man, as 
 such, can no more honour himself than Satan can. 
 Guilt must be painted before it can look its own 
 image in the eye. It must be bedizened with 
 disguises before it can hold up its head and walk 
 loftily. A guilty man must cheat himself before | 
 he can respect himself. This he cannot do under — 
 the espionage of a remorseful conscience. Re- 
 morse is hawk-eyed and savagely honest. It 
 searches everywhere, sees everything, keeps no- 
 thing back. It is more pitiless than death. A 
 
 sinner enthralled by it can neither bear it nor 
 
 brave it. He must be crushed by the conscious- 
 ness of degradation. He must live in self-abhor- 
 
 rence. 
 
 If this were not so, extreme'guilt might be saved 
 from the extreme of punishment. A man, how- 
 
 ever depraved, might bear the brunt of a world’s 
 loathing, if he could be raised above self- loathing. 
 
 Is it not conceivable that Judas Iscariot might be 
 calm under the execrations of the universe, if he 
 could stupefy the consciousness of deserving them? 
 We cannot be assured that Omnipotence can crush 
 incorrigible guilt otherwise than by forms of retri- 
 bution which shall compel it to know itself. 
 
 From this “lower deep” underneath the “low- 
 
190 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 est,” in which a sinner feels, as Milton’s Satan 
 did, “ Myself am hell,” a sinner needs deliverance. 
 We all need it. If we have never felt by anticipa- 
 tion this tyranny of Remorse, so surely as we are 
 sinners unforgiven, it is lurking for us in the 
 future, like an assassin in the dark, and we need 
 a rescue. Howshallwe obtain it? How shall we 
 get back a consciousness of something in us which 
 we shall dare to honour? Without such a con- 
 sciousness, immortality, which we crave so thirstily, 
 must become an intolerable burden, and nowhere 
 of more leaden weight than in heaven.. How shall 
 we recover a self-knowledge which can endure 
 eternity ? 
 
 Can pride restore it? The pride of Satan does 
 not hope for so much as that. The first honest 
 hour we have when we are brought face to face 
 with God, will disclose to us that pride is one of 
 the meanest of the mental vices; the most con- 
 tracted, the most selfish, and the most false-hearted ; 
 and therefore the first to betray a man to despair, 
 and the most eager and relentless in heaping upon 
 him shame and everlasting contempt. The facts 
 of life discover a subtle affinity between pride and 
 suicide. 
 
oe ee ee ee 
 THE RESTORATION OF SELF-RESPECT. of 
 
 Sanna SURE eres srrecearemeseeeee ce Pe 
 
 The Discoveries of a Pure Conscience. 
 
 But what is the working of the soul in its intro- 
 spection, when once opened to the ingress of the 
 Holy Spirit ? 
 
 Is there no reawakening of self-respect, when 
 the evidence of that Divine presence first becomes 
 clear to consciousness? The cleansing blood of 
 Christ, once made a reality to faith by the illumin- 
 ing grace of God,—can one get no buoyancy of 
 heart from that? The dropping off of the soul’s 
 corruptions, the fading away of its “ guilty stains,” 
 under the discipline of the Sanctifier,—cannot one 
 derive from that process, however gradual, some 
 new sense of dignity? The blotting out of the 
 past from the record of conscience; the opening 
 of a fresh, clean page for the future reckoning ; 
 the first throbbing life, however infantile, of that 
 which the Scriptures call a “pure conscience,”— 
 can one find in these no ground of hope that 
 one may yet become an object of one’s own 
 esteem ? | | 
 
 In that awful and yet precious alliance with 
 Godhead, we are raised to think the thoughts of 
 God. We are invited to share in the benign sym- 
 pathies of God. We are welcomed to execute 
 in our own intensified individuality, and yet in 
 
nS TTS 
 
 192 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 ee 
 
 | dear subjection to His bidding, the purposes of 
 ' God. We are assured that He does not deem 
 | Himself degraded by His union with us. From 
 eternity He has chosen us to this. Before the 
 geologic cycles began, He had us in His thoughts 
 for this. With clear foresight of our disgusting 
 guilt, He did not waver in the choice. When He 
 _ repented that He had made man upon the earth, 
 our names were engraven upon the palm of His 
 / hand. ‘Through all the ages that have come and 
 ' gone, He has held us faithfully in mind. His 
 experience of our waywardness has never turned 
 His loving eye from us. _ His royal decree towards 
 us has run in this one groove, without variable- 
 ness or shadow of turning. And now, in the ful- 
 ness of time, when that decree approaches its con- 
 summation, He condescends to think it honour- 
 able to that glory which the heaven of heavens 
 cannot contain, to abide with us, even with us, 
 with the meanest and most guilty of us, to dwell 
 within us, to work in us His own good pleasure, 
 to the iatent that,even by us should be made 
 known His wisdom unto principalities and powers, 
 In all this, is not some foundation laid for the 
 rebuilding of that consciousness of zworth which 
 we have lost? Shall we not dare at length to 
 respect that which God has thus ennobled? 
 
THE RESTORATION OF SELF-RESPECT. 193 
 = eSSSSSSSSSSSSSSsSSSSSSSsS— 
 Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s 
 elect ? ‘ 
 
 True, it requires great faith to appropriate this 
 
 dignity to ourselves. Self-abasement may often , 
 struggle with the assurance’ of this Divine in- | 
 
 dwelling. Said a dying Christian to a friend, “I 
 sent for you to tell you how happy Iam. I did 
 not think it possible for a man to enjoy so much 
 of God on earth. I never asked for joy; I always 
 thought myself unworthy of it; but He has given 
 me more than I asked. It seems as if it cannot 
 be for me; as if it must be for somebody else ; 
 I do not deserve it. I am filled with God. I 
 know that He is in me, and Iin Him. I shall see 
 Him as Heis. I delight in knowing that.” Thus, 
 even in a saint whose vision is a foresight of heaven, 
 faith may have to struggle into consciousness of his 
 
 own grandeur; but the grandeur is none the less | 
 
 real for that, 
 
 What shall we then say to these things? If God 
 be for us, who can be against us? We are more 
 than conquerors through Him that loved us. Here 
 is ground for self-esteem which has no root’ of 
 arrogance. We only honour that which God has 
 honoured. Self-abasement and selfcomplacency 
 here go hand in hand. “Not unto us, not unto 
 
 us!” we say, yet in the same breath we add: 
 N 
 
i ae 
 
 194 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 ce ee a eet 
 
 “ Now are we the sons of God, and what we shall 
 be doth not yet appear.” 
 
 Courage in the Day of Fudgment. 
 
 Have we not often imagined that redeemed 
 souls must have a strange meeting at the judg- 
 ment, when the secrets of hearts shall be re- 
 vealed? Is the prospect of it altogether welcome 
 
 to us? It has been said that, if in this world 
 
 every man’s heart could be open to the gaze of 
 every other man, no two could ever again be 
 . friends, for no two could look each other in the 
 eye. How, then, will our self-respect bear the 
 ‘last ordeal? The beloved apostle gives us the 
 answer. ‘God dwelleth in us. Hereby know we 
 that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he 
 hath given us of his Spirit. We know that when 
 he shall appear, we shall be like him. Herein is 
 our love made perfect, that we may have do/dness 
 in the day of judgment, because as he is so are 
 
 ” 
 
 we.” If we indeed &now this, why should we not 
 be bold? 
 
 In that day, we shall revere in others the clear 
 | image of God, wrought by God’s own hand. They 
 will revere the same in us. We shall meet each 
 other without a blush. Some of our departed 
 kindred have been glorified so long before us, that 
 
THE RESTORATION OF SELF-RESPECT. 195 
 
 we are apt to think of them as vastly our superiors. 
 Their distance from us, which years are lengthen- 
 ing, disheartens us. But we shall overtake them, 
 and that will be no crestfallen meeting. We shall 
 receive their welcome without confusion. We 
 shall not fear their secret contempt when they 
 take us by the hand. Their greetings will have 
 no hollow sound. The salutations of angels will 
 not abash us. The morning stars, which exult in 
 a sinless history of thousands of years, will not 
 look chillingly upon us. Gabriel, Michael, the 
 seven spirits before the throne, will not recognise 
 us haughtily. Even the eye of the Infinite One 
 will not close itself in disgust at our appearing. 
 It shall search us,—He that formed the eye, shall 
 not He see?%—it shall search us indeed, but as 
 light searches a prism. It shall find only itself 
 reflected at every angle, and in a radiance of 
 beauty which nothing but itself could evoke. 
 
 III. 
 
 INTENSITY OF REGENERATE LIFE. 
 
 If such be the dignity to which a regenerate 
 soul attains through the presence and working of 
 God within it, it is further obvious that the ten- 
 dency of renewed character must be to manifest | 
 itself in intense forms of experience. 
 
eee 
 
 196 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 a 
 
 It is a law of all nature, that vigorous forces 
 shall act themselves out. We look for results 
 proportioned to the power which produces them. 
 Do we not expect that fire will burn, that light 
 will be visible, that thunder will be audible, and 
 that lightning will leave a mark where it strikes? 
 The most latent elements lead to a disclosure 
 of themselves. Any great energy in nature, how- 
 ever breathless in its operation, must sooner or 
 later be discovered. Electricity could not for ever 
 hide itself from detection by some one of the 
 human senses. Even whilé undetected in itself, 
 the electric force must work, and its working be 
 visible in results. So much power, so much 
 product, is the law. 
 
 Why should not the same law hold good in the 
 spiritual world? Shall infinite perfection express 
 itself, and seem to find the blessedness of its being 
 in self-expression, in all things elsewhere, and yet 
 find no egress through the human spirit which is 
 so like it? It surely must be the law of God's 
 working in a soul, to become manifest to observers. 
 Such a power must act itself out in unequivocal 
 effects. 
 
 Latent Piety Unnatural, 
 
 The tendencies of regenerate beings, then, must 
 
 be averse to concealment. Christian character 
 
ee 
 
 INTENSITY OF HOLY LIFE. 197 
 
 absolutely latent in a soul would be an anomaly / 
 
 among the works of God. It must tend to not 
 only self-expression, but to great positiveness of 
 evidence. The law of its being is to be self-evident. 
 
 A renewed mind is naturally a transparent being , 
 through whom the holiness of God reflects itself in | 
 human graces. If such positive evidence of piety | 
 
 do not appear, a presumption is established that 
 the piety itself does not exist. True, God will 
 not quench the smoking flax, but He will enkindle 
 it. It is not the nature of anything that is on 
 fire to smoulder for ever; if it is a living fire 
 ‘it will burn into a flame. So the life of God 
 in the soul must tend to intensity of develop- 
 ment. 
 
 The most intense life ever lived on this earth ,, 
 should naturally be a life energised by the Holy | 
 
 Ghost. In such a life the intellect may experi- 
 ence a marvellous awakening. The tendency of 
 its working is to the positiveness of knowledge. 
 Probabilities grow to certainties in the convictions 
 of such a mind. Belief becomes assurance. The 
 range of intellectual vision expands as the soul 
 ascends the mount of its transfiguration. Dr 
 Chalmers was an accomplished astronomer when 
 
 he was the unconverted pastor of Kilmany ; but ¥ 
 the world did not know it. Why? Because the “ 
 
198 MAN’S RENEWAL, 
 
 power of the ‘‘ Astronomical Discourses” was not 
 in him then. 
 
 Even an inferior intellect becomes, through the 
 quickening of profound sensibilities by the in- 
 dwelling of God, susceptible of exertions which 
 make men honourable among men. ‘There is 
 »a wonderful educating force in the working of 
 grace upon the most unpromising natures. John 
 Howard was not constitutionally a man of com- 
 manding intellect. ‘The universities of England 
 despised him, for he was not of them. . It was his 
 life-long affliction that he could not write a letter 
 of considerable length with an assurance of its 
 grammatical accuracy. But when the indwelling 
 of God had wrought in him, the world found him 
 out and now is proud of him. 
 
 Ls Regenerate Experience Fanatical ? 
 
 In this view, there is nothing singular in the 
 charge of fanaticism upon a regenerated man. 
 Such a man, acting out obediently the power 
 which is within him, will never escape that charge, 
 in one form or another, till the world is filled with 
 such fanatics. It was not much learning, it was 
 ) much grace, that made “Paul seem a madman to 
 Festus. ‘As for Chalmers, he is mad ”—so said 
 
 the noble ones of Scotland when that voice, as of 
 
INTENSITY OF HOLY LIFE, 199 
 
 one crying in the wilderness, began to be heard 
 from the solitude of Kilmany. It has been said 
 “of all great workers and thinkers of the world,” 
 that their power is a ‘‘ force as of madness, in the © 
 hands of reason.” Vastly more significant is this 
 of the “power of an endless life,” awakened and 
 girded through the union of a soul with the Infinite 
 Mind. 
 
 We may test, therefore, by this criterion, diverse 
 types of professedly Christian experience. Many 
 such offer themselves to our observation in real 
 life ; which of them exhibits, by its intensity, the 
 keenest sympathy with the working of an infinite 
 power in the soul? One ideal of Christian char- |, 
 acter invites to a life of self-indulgence. Surely 
 the indwelling of God never originated that. An- 
 other conception of the Christian faith degrades 
 it to a gauge of respectability in society, or of re- 
 finement in culture. Is it possible that the witness 
 of the Holy Ghost has ever testified to that? 
 
 A certain model of Christian profession is re- 
 markable for its effeminacy. It represents one 
 who is ashamed to speak, and who cannot labour, 
 and dare not suffer, for Christ. He assumes the 
 reality of a latent godliness, His reticent speech 
 proclaims only the secresy of religion as an affair 
 between the soul and God. His theory of life, his 
 
200 MAN’S ‘RENEWAL. 
 
 social habits, the companionship he seeks, the 
 ' amusements he approves, his uses of property, of 
 time, of culture, and of mental gifts, all tend to 
 obliterate the distinction between the church and 
 the world, between ‘‘ saint” and “sinner.” In all 
 those things which would make godliness visible 
 to observers, he approaches as near to a “world 
 lying in wickedness” as he cam approach without 
 arousing that world’s contempt for him as a hypo- 
 crite. Is it conceivable that such a model of a 
 Christ-like life was ever wrought by the ‘ exceed- 
 ing greatness of God’s power?” Did the Spirit 
 ever help our infirmities with groanings which can- 
 not be uttered, to evoke such an ideal from the 
 depths of our souls? Has it ever cost a man 
 - strong crying and tears to execute it ? 
 
 From such a type of Christianity it is but a 
 step to that represented by one who can ridicule 
 Christian missions in their inception, admire the 
 romance of them in their progress, and pour 
 unctuous adulations upon their success; who is 
 always in sympathy with the world in its carica- 
 tures of Christian doctrine ; who can amuse him- 
 self alike with nicknames of Christian revivals, 
 with jeers at Christian reforms, and with bur- 
 lesques of Christian men. Can it be that an 
 Infinite Mind is dwelling, thinking, feeling, work- 
 
 7 
 : 
 ; 
 : 
 4 
 ; 
 
LAWS. OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 201 
 
 ing in that little soul? We can discern the handi- 
 work of God in the brain of a butterfly ; His work 
 there is opposite to the thing He works upon. 
 But who can discover any traces of God in such a 
 model of Christian character ? 
 
 When God works in a-human spirit He works as 
 He did when He created that spirit. He produces | 
 something which is like Himself. He quickens 
 into being a thing which expresses itself in a 
 Godlike way. He inspires a character which is 
 built on intense convictions, which take posses- 
 sion of a man, and which claim and use the whole | 
 of him. Such convictions, wielded by such a 
 Power, make life earnest, because they make 
 Eternity real and God absolute. Nothing else 
 grates so harshly against the grain of a regener- 
 ate nature as to be either a. hypocrite or but halt 
 a man in religious life. The germ of a martyr 
 is in every soul which God has chosen.as His 
 abode. Humble and contrite indeed is the spirit 
 with which He dwells, but under His reviving lofty 
 and jubilant as the morning; weak, faint, cast 
 down, ready to perish, it may be, but in His 
 strength a conqueror. Sensitive to suffering, 
 timid in peril, a woman in delicacy of nerve, a 
 child in resolution, it has often been; but through 
 communion with an infinite Friend, it has become 
 
202 MAN’S RENEWAL 
 
 so possessed with the consciousness of spiritual 
 life, and the assurance of a blessed immortality, 
 that it has seen no terrors in death, none in 
 
 torture. Such souls have reserved their fears for 
 
 a 
 
 “something more appalling than these. This in- 
 
 tensity of regenerate life has made martrys of 
 Christian children. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE WORKING OF THE SPIRIT BY DISCOVERABLE 
 LAWS. 
 
 Such paradoxes of holy experience as we have 
 just observed are not contradictions. They are 
 not even anomalies. Marvellous as they seem to 
 observers, inexplicable as they appear to minds 
 which are oblivious of the Divine energy in them, 
 they are but the normal results of the dwelling of 
 God in tried souls. We should therefore observe 
 
 _ further, the dependence of the growth of regenerate 
 
 character upon conformity to the laws of the Holy 
 Spirit's working 
 
 In ascribing laws to the process by which a soul 
 is sanctified, we only affirm the oneness of God. 
 We only assume that in spiritual operations He 
 works, in this respect, as He does in nature. In 
 the one as in the other, Law is the expression of 
 the very mind of God. Caprice can find no lodg- 
 
INTENSITY OF HOLY LIFE: 203 
 
 ment in an infinite Will. An arbitrary act can 
 surely find no more place in the redemption of a 
 soul than in the creation of light. 
 
 But are the laws of spiritual agency in a regen- 
 erate mind discoverable? Certainly, so far as their 
 discovery can be serviceable to their success. True, 
 Divine energy in the new birth is likened to the 
 wind ; but even the wind, in the very phenomenon 
 ofits blowing where it listeth and hiding the whence 
 and the whither, yields up to wise observation some 
 of the laws which govern its apparent vagaries. So 
 is every one that is born of the Spirit. Some ot 
 the laws of the Holy Ghost reveal themselves among 
 the first lessons of a regenerate life. They lie open 
 for inspection, also, in certain injunctions of the 
 Scriptures. 
 
 The Law of Harmony with other Revelations of God. 
 
 It surely may be accepted as a law of the work- , 
 ing of the Spirit in the soul, that its teachings will 
 harmonise with other revelations of God. God 
 cannot contradict God. God in Creation, God in 
 Providence, God in His revealed Word, will con- 
 firm the witness of the Spirit in the heart which He 
 has hallowed as His Temple. To a docile mind 
 which is watching for a disclosure of the Divine 
 Will, thex@ is often an overpowering reciprocity of 
 
204 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 Awe eee pew ase ee 
 
 evidence which leaves no room for a doubt. One 
 stands as in the focus of an amphitheatre of moun- 
 
 tains, in which one hears from all sides the rever- 
 
 _berations of a single voice. It is as if, by some 
 
 mysterious law of infinite being, the Divine mind 
 held communion with itself through the medium 
 of the faculties of aman. That voice seems to be 
 his own—it zs his own, and yet another's. 
 
 Hence it is that those Christians who give 
 evidence of being most profoundly moved by 
 
 the Spirit of God, are those who most reverently 
 
 study the word and the providences of God. ‘They 
 expect one revelation of the Infinite Mind to give 
 answer to another. ‘They interpret the one by the 
 response of the other. ‘They tread softly, listening 
 
 ‘for the echo from without to the intimation within. 
 
 et 
 
 Such Christians do not become wrong-headed nor 
 drivelling believers. They are not suffered often 
 to mistake a wayward fancy or a whiff of self- 
 conceit for a divine impulse in their souls. They 
 do not see visions nor dream dreams. Their 
 
 faith and their good sense grow abreast with each 
 
 ~ other. 
 
 The Law of Harmony with the Nature of Mind. 
 
 Is it not an equally positive law of the Holy 
 Spirit’s working, that it moves in and through the 
 
LAWS.OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 205 
 
 natural laws of the soul itself? It creates no new 
 elements of mind. It introduces no new principles 
 of mental action. It is simply one work of God | 
 within another. It is a Spirit energising a spirit. . 
 Divine influence transfuses itself through the 
 natural operations of human intellect, of human 
 sensibilities, and of human will, so delicately in 
 the process, and so evenly in the result, that the — 
 mind is unconscious of any other efficiency than |) 
 its own. Divine indwelling does not disclose it- 
 self as such to the consciousness of the believer, 
 as electricity does not display its presence as such 
 in the sensations of the healthy body which it 
 pervades. The kingdom of God in the soul 
 cometh not with observation. 
 
 Sanctification is not to be looked for, therefore, 
 in shocks of spasmodic piety. It is not to be dis- 
 covered by dissecting one’s own being in search of 
 Him who is past finding out. It is not to be 
 augmented by stimulating devotional fervour into 
 turbulence. _ From fasszona¢e prayer the soul, by a 
 necessity of its nature, must sink back into apathy. 
 
 Such vibration between extremes is a very 
 different phenomenon from that which is so 
 generally witnessed in profound Christian expe 
 rience, and which expresses itself in the sense 
 of conflict. Probationary discipline necessarily 
 
RT * 
 
 206 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 ES 
 
 involves struggle. Besides conflicts with sin, 
 known and felt to be sin, a renewed soul may 
 have struggles with infirmity, through which a 
 holy life may sometimes become a life of strong 
 crying and tears. Then it is, especially, that the 
 Spirit helps us. Yet even this, if it becomes 
 habitual, evinces disproportion in the growth of 
 regenerate experience. ‘T'wo very similar distor- 
 tions may induce it. One is a disproportion of 
 intellect ; the other a disproportion of sensibility. 
 Let intellectual conceptions of God gain a large 
 overgrowth upon the outgoings of the heart to 
 Him in love; or let sensibility to the Divine pre- 
 sence outgrow intelligence of the Divine charac- 
 ter; in either case, the being of the man becomes 
 disjointed. It works unequally and inconstantly. 
 His progress is full of breaks and delays, in which 
 his struggle is not with sin consciously indulged, 
 but ‘simply with the obliquity of his mental habits. 
 His soul yearns to recover its lost equipoise. An 
 old legend reads that a saint once longed and 
 fasted and prayed for a vision of God which should 
 equal his seraphic ardour. But when the arch- 
 angel took him and carried him swiftly up through 
 the immensity of space, he began to tremble, and 
 cried out for relief from the intolerable sense of 
 God’s infinity. 
 
—_——_— TT eSNG 
 
 LAW SOP TEE sao LYS PIR IT, 207 
 
 The Holy Spirit is more kindly considerate of , 
 our infirmities than we ourselves sometimes are. 
 He does not call them sins. And yet the most 
 finished experience of the Divine indwelling 
 balances, and at length rectifies them. It quiets 
 painful vibrations. It acts as a sedative to spasms 
 of godliness. It is emphatically the very life of 
 God in the soul. It tends to make a man “he God; 
 and “zs being is not made up ot alternations 
 between ecstasy and despair. Such an equable 
 force of vitality will evince itself in an experience 
 which resembles the throb of a calm, strong, 
 healthy heart. The Scriptures symbolise it by a 
 well of water—the most refreshing thing in nature; 
 a perennial thing ; not stagnant yet not boisterous ; 
 transparent and spontaneous ; springing up in the 
 morning and at noon and at eventide and in the 
 night watches. 
 
 It should be remembered, therefore, that in re- 
 ligious life, as in other developments of character, 
 the most intense minds are not the most turbulent, 
 God’s presence is their natural atmosphere, in 
 which they live and move and have their being 
 tranquilly, because with an intensity which acts 
 through the natural forces of character, and per- 
 vades them all alike. Hence it is that the noblest 
 of renewed men have been men of the most 
 
—— 
 
 208 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 generous range of graces. The manly and the 
 feminine virtues, the contemplative and the active, 
 the massive and the minute, the impulsive and the 
 circumspect, have been intertwined in symmetry. 
 The beauty of the Lord our God has been upon them. 
 ' Christ had no eccentricities. He had not even those 
 of genius, of which the world is so tolerant. Yet 
 what other life has been so intense as His? 
 
 The Law of Co-operation. 
 
 We cannot mistake in recognising as another 
 law of the Holy Spirit, that His work shall be con- 
 current with the will of the regenerate soul it- 
 self. Sanctification is a co-operative process. It 
 may be suspended by resistance, and accelerated 
 by obedience to the Divine impulses. The Spirit 
 may be “grieved” by the desecration of the 
 temple He has chosen. There is a reason in the 
 nature of His work for that fearful admonition : 
 “Quench not the Spirit.” What more affecting 
 exhibition is conceivable of the condescension of 
 God, than this mystery of forbearance, in which 
 the Holy Ghost stands as if in waiting upon the 
 choices of the poor, guilty sufferer whom He 
 yearns to save? What a glimpse, too, of the 
 reach of the responsibility of a regenerate soul, 
 of its dignities and its perils, is here! Not by 
 the breadth of a hair will the sovereignty of God 
 
 ee eee 
 
LAWS OF THE:-HOLY SPIRIT, 209 
 
 invade the enclosure of that soul’s freedom. ‘The 
 soul itself, in its own individuality, is the thing He 
 would save. Its own love is the thing He craves. 
 Its own submission is the right He claims. Its own 
 chosen obedience is the service He requires. Its 
 own heart is the gift He.stoops to ask for. 
 
 For aught that we know, God could translate 
 that lost soul up to the group of the presence- 
 angels and make a Gabriel of it. But this would 
 not be, in the Divine estimate of things, so noble 
 an achievement of Power, as to win that soul just 
 as it. is, in. its feebleness, in its diminutive, 
 human, fallen being, — to allure it by the in- 
 finite ingenuity of love to give itself away to Him 
 willingly. Nothing less than this will satisfy 
 the generosity of Christ. This, therefore, is 
 adopted as a principle governing the operations 
 of the Spirit—that holiness shall be a man’s own 
 choice. He shall have all that he wills to have. 
 Blessed is he if he hungers and thirsts for it, for he 
 shall be filled. 
 
 Hence the Scriptures teach just what Christian 
 experience proves—that Christian development 
 advances in the line of Christian duties. He 
 
 shall have it in most affluent increase who uses | 
 
 most diligently what he has. To him that hath 
 0) 
 
 — 
 ~~ 
 
eee ae eae 
 
 210 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 nn eon raneare nasal to mieninananDaR Te 
 
 shall be given. ‘The power of a life hid with 
 Christ is not to be hoped for in either an indol- 
 ent or a despondent waiting for a Divine afflatus. 
 Supernatural influence coming to a man in such 
 conditions of soul is more likely to be from 
 below than from above. Graces come in groups 
 to the soul that is open and receptive of Divine 
 suggestions. They throng around Him who is 
 watching for them in the way of duty. A 
 wise man’s eagerness to be like God will expend 
 itself in doing for God. So much obedience—so 
 | much growth; this is the law. God worketh in 
 - you—therefore work ye; this is the charge. 
 
 The Law of Sanctification by Prayer. 
 
 In the same line of thought, is it not equally 
 certain that a law of gracious energy in the soul 
 makes its growth dependent on the expression 
 of its desires in trustful prayer? ‘True, the desire 
 itself must be inspired by the very Being who is 
 its object ; yet this is the method of an unsearch- 
 able wisdom. The interchanges of fellowship 
 between a renewed mind and its Divine Guest 
 are very wonderful. Herein is the mystery of 
 communion with God. We talk of it glibly, but 
 how little do we know of it! He quickens 
 desire in his regenerate friend, that he may 
 
LAW SPO Gir Beit Ol Yous PIR ITT. 211 
 
 gratify it; and he gratifies the desire that he may 
 augment it by indulgence; so that it may ex- 
 press itself again, to be gratified anew. Prayer, 
 and response prompting again to prayer, to be 
 again responded to—thus the life that is hid 
 with Christ in God unfolds itself in the conscious- 
 ness of the believer. It_is a sublime antiphony 
 between heaven and earth, to which He is the only) 
 listener. | 
 
 The Scriptures speak in terms of awful famili- 
 arity of the inter-communion of God and godly 
 men. Enoch walked with God, and was not, for 
 God took him. Abraham was the friend of God, 
 What is the meaning of that soliloquy over the 
 plains of Sodom? ‘Shall I hide from Abraham 
 that thing which Ido?” It is as if Jehovah con- 
 descends to say: “Abraham is my friend ; he has 
 given me his confidence; I have admitted him 
 into affectionate fellowship ; and now, is it hon- 
 ourable to conceal from him my purpose towards 
 his kindred?” Who, again, was the nameless 
 friend of Jacob? We are told that “there wres- 
 tled a man with him till the breaking of the day.” 
 Could any symbol express the intimacy of equals 
 more forcibly than that old story of the Athletes 
 in the field of Peniel? Yet, when the sun rose, 
 Jacob said: “I have seen God, face t6 face.” Go 
 up with Moses into the thick darkness where God 
 
212 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 dwells, and hear God speaking to him as a man’ 
 
 speaketh to his friend. Who is He that says of 
 David, as one of us would speak of the friend 
 dearest to us: “‘ He is a man after my own heart ?” 
 
 What indeed is the significance of the Incarna- 
 tion, in this respect, but that of an expression of 
 God’s desire to come down into the homes and 
 hearts of men, to restore to them the holy freedom 
 of Eden, in which His voice was heard in the cool 
 of the day? Listen to the benediction which is 
 
 wafted over the whole world of believers: “I call. 
 
 you not servants, but friends ; I have chosen you ; 
 I will send the Comforter unto you; He shall 
 abide with you; Ask and ye shall receive, that 
 your joy may be full.” 
 
 Here then we reach the culmination of the 
 history of man’s communion with the Godhead. 
 It is in this gift of the Holy Spirit, who descends 
 to dwell with men on terms of holy and yet 
 familiar friendship. No law of Christian growth, 
 therefore, is more pertinent than that of its de- 
 pendence on the expression of Christian desire 
 in trustful prayer. As prayer is, so is the con- 
 dition of the soul’s union with God. <A growing 
 piety will be sensible of this instinctively. A re- 
 generate soul in which the work of grace is not 
 _ suspended will pray, simply because it may pray. 
 Prayer will be to such a one a homelike, childlike 
 
LAWS: OFTHE HOLY. SPFRIT. 213 
 
 intercourse of friend with friend. The indwelling 
 of God invites to this kind of prayer, and renders 
 all ideas of prayer which are incongruous with this 
 absurd. 
 
 Regenerate experience exhibits in this respect 
 an impressive divergence from that of impenitence. 
 Nothing else discloses as prayer does that ex- 
 treme guilt and eminent godliness are at opposite 
 poles of spiritual life. There is a degree of guilt 
 in which a man can conceive of nothing else so 
 appalling to him as the thought of asking a bless- 
 ing from God. That thought brings God too 
 near. Men in despair, on deathbeds, have 
 writhed with redoubled anguish when urged to 
 beg for Divine mercy. “Do not name prayer to 
 me,” said Thomas Paine, in his last hours. By a 
 terrible law of retribution, a soul abandoned by 
 the Holy Spirit starts back, shuddering, from the 
 idea of the lost possibility of his friendship. It is 
 like one in a frightful dream, who cannot shout 
 for help, and who is in the more frantic agony be- | 
 cause he cannot. 
 
 But to one in whom the indwelling of God is 
 deepening and expanding, so that he at length 
 becomes, like Stephen, full of the Holy Ghost, 
 prayer becomes an habitual joy, like any other 
 habit of sacred friendship. Only to such a man 
 is the poetic ideal of prayer life-like—that it is a 
 
214 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 “ Christian’s vital breath,” his “native air.” John 
 Foster, on his deathbed, observing that his strength 
 was fast leaving him, said: ‘But I can pray, and 
 that is a glorious thing.” The glory of the thing 
 is very apt to loom up in the soul’s vision as it ap- 
 proaches heaven. 
 
 The Law of Trust in a Divine Plan. 
 
 Once more, is it not also a law of the Holy 
 Spirit which is vital to Christian growth, that His 
 , work in the renewed soul is carried on by a plan 
 which will surely be consummated? It has no 
 contingencies unknown to God or not  pro- 
 vided for in His purposes. The entire process is 
 part of a system of decrees. It is enclosed and 
 embedded in a plan of which no eye has ever 
 seen the beginning, and none will ever see the 
 end. 
 
 For ‘the most symmetrical Christian growth, 
 therefore, our hopes and methods of Christian 
 culture need to be constructed upon faith in 
 sanctification as being, not only a practicable 
 achievement, but a result which is fixed by ever- 
 lasting purposes. It should be a reality to us that 
 we have been, and are, and shall be in the thoughts 
 and in the heart of God for ever.and for ever. We 
 may conceive of this as “election,” “decree,” 
 
 “eternal purpose ;” whatever we name it in our 
 
 . 
 
rr 
 
 AW SiO Hari Ol Vase t Rol i, 215 
 
 theology, it is. simply the execution of a flan 
 which was never a novelty and will never be ob- 
 solete in the Divine Mind. God has no caprices 
 about it, and no after-thoughts. 
 
 We need to individualise this faith by appropriat- 
 ing the object of it, each soul to itself. We need 
 this for the comfort of it. We need it more for 
 the courage it gives, and the equanimity of effort 
 which it inspires. Doubt weakens, fear disarms, 
 in a spiritual conflict, as in any other. Why 
 should it not be so? But an experience which is 
 built upon faith in the eternal fidelity of God’s 
 friendship promotes a buoyant piety. It stimulates 
 Christian character to a rapid and even expansion. 
 It awakens exultation in the individuality of the 
 soul’s union with God. A living psalmist has feel- 
 ingly expressed this phase of Christian life in 
 song :— 
 
 ‘* Yes, for me, for me He careth 
 With a brother’s tender care ; 
 
 Yes, with me, with me He shareth 
 Every burden, every fear, 
 
 *¢ Ves, o’er me, o’er me He watcheth, 
 Ceaseless watcheth, night and day ; 
 Yes, even me, even me He snatcheth 
 From the perils of the way. 
 
 ‘* Yes, in me, in me He dwelleth; 
 I in Him and He in me! 
 And my empty soul He filleth, 
 Here and through eternity. 
 
216 MAN’S RENEWAL. 
 
 ‘*Thus I wait for His returning, 
 Singing all the way to Heaven: 
 Such the joyful song of morning, 
 Such the tranquil song of even.” 
 
 It requires great faith, indeed, to appropriate 
 thus to ourselves the liberty of Christian joy. But 
 surely that is not a Christlike humility which 
 esteems piety in proportion to the distrust it 
 cherishes of one’s own salvation. One who can 
 say honestly with the apostle: I “£zow that He is 
 able to keep that which I “ave committed unto 
 Him,” will have much of the Pauline vigour of 
 character in other respects. The mind of such a 
 man will have strong affinities with Light. Joy 
 will be his native element. Genial and cheering 
 .views of truth will be the spontaneous expression 
 of his strength. He can hold such views close to 
 his own conscience, a sinner though he be, because 
 he has a history of reverent familiarity with God, 
 in which his soul has learned the secret of sym- 
 pathy with the blessedness of God. 
 
 Ballantyne and Company, Printers, Edinburgh. 
 
 <-f- 
 
4 
 #) 
 fh 
 i 
 
 | 
 ; 
 
Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 MANO 
 
 1 1012 01032 1893 
 
a Nabe 
 
Cea ae 
 
 Naranjo ye onder ane tae NT ee 
 
 PR EL RN ey ne ee nt 
 
 SL eat 
 
 es 
 
 ee re eT 
 Ng eee Ne ee ae ee SS UNE OES 
 
 prep enere sa 
 
 Stes nme are 
 
 wpe iamla ssn art 
 On al ate a ae eC ae ea an EERIE SP halal ade " 
 a apne dey ieee sea UE 
 FoF. ene ee ae 
 er LET ES Ua ea a STR TE 
 Aen eta a ea 
 A. ee il ee ek reid 
 J a he tal ed La kee ea 
 te ka 
 
 ed ater oa i 
 ss 
 
 athe eye 
 i 
 Sa ss on te ari 
 
 Fs 
 
 Ti ee ae er re tae ta 
 
 aa e 
 
 eel eked 
 
 Ue 
 
 Shia tee bs 
 San at ae io 
 er ah 
 
 Sree har he tet bt ak A oda ea 
 arrears ae 
 
 a I ne 
 
 amd at 
 
 De al pikes 
 ye egret 
 2 age eee ee ee 
 
 Toda le rar eee ee 
 
 Spa ie ee a 2 edd elie 
 jeer en, 
 
 ihe 
 
 sawed Sern Sy Baw le SateyS 
 
 Ue 
 
 mt we ht 
 
 Hey 
 
 Paras 
 
 feos aiiad estab a eC Ieee ure 
 haope ean teas hes 
 
 pene eerie a 
 
 rt at ant a kgs ied 
 Oe ee pr ort ek et oe TS 
 ere 
 
 oe oe en 
 
 esate <b whee se ete Te 
 (ene Wg 
 
 me ETS 
 
 Se bee ie 
 
 PA Sr OAS 
 ae os ett a ah hte Kalle 
 ae ure en a eerie 
 bean be ie ad 
 ener ee 
 Sy ex Ta Ee akties 
 nS Te ar at het a ake Rael, Bed tl 
 Se oa. ot Be te Tae ene 
 
 rg tan RL 
 
 i Na on va i on te ae 
 geet cod Mae TE Ee SW STINT 
 
 say Tee . 
 
 Sea et usenet te 
 
 rahe daieinaraasem oe SS 
 
 Fe ere at 
 Sed ee 
 
 yk eee itied 
 a tae eee 
 
 <i an 
 
 ee et a el ore nn a Te 
 i rie ae bel oe ee ee EI 
 
 Tr Sd ee Oa be ete RIS Sete hah oa a 
 
 pe ee te babe pint ed Sate ial Grielh 
 
 Sy eT SS ETE 
 
 SAS 
 Fe Tittint he aE —picind 
 Sead ieee 
 
 a Eid Se ne > 
 : oa peat es 
 a nL aa me ot om Rien el 
 
 a Ne Se ES Fa RET 
 
 ERT 
 : See noe a a ae a 
 
 phi ae 
 
 rt tan ee Dak OR gia enced la OS 
 a ok ie 
 
 are TE er 
 See ae TEEN TE OTE 
 et cot bean a et noel ot he a Sa ee area te ae oe ea 
 
 ae ee STS BE 
 eee raat a La ee, hone detalles Sete hs ee 
 
 ; SRE ee ba ox pe Dhue eta alae? elanke 
 ee aS rere ET ae ED St ae ae ae 
 Se ey em oh nh Fh eee eel Reed haa oe ta roe ee 
 leas eed eee ee oe 
 ease Pe Ltt handel Pe hh i a) rs 
 
 Aone 
 
 a! aren 
 deme tepals er ae 
 ee ee LSE ETE ES ES 
 
 oie 
 
 Samak ed 
 
 LASTS 
 Cee te eee eee eh ee Oe 
 Stn be reek oan i pee aE Sere ee 
 ee ree 
 Eira Tee Ae eS 
 Fig ENN a SEN 
 ENTE US EE 
 ae t Ee ae ET - 
 Sete UNE T TATEaee 
 
 Sy a Ne Es Ty 3 Pediat ns at 
 ye eam at athe era ans so eh apaeh eal 
 nes Oba ba ns oe dad ak tale Taal ed Mii oll Me Og “ > “ey e Ns ag Td TG ST TTI 
 A Ae He UN ETE TU ghee ETS UE rT SH ree NIE 
 » coud wont ong at Sing Sg hl eR Gs MA ee Padi ab 
 intel ined stone Samoa 
 
 ers et Reres 
 ste ee 
 
 - Lede area Tek 
 Re ee ber a oe iat Sheek aol Sted toll ileal Teal tial bal 
 Pd are aS TS eS 
 
 ae te ee ae lead : 
 a ede ee eT RTT