No. Case, PRINCETON, N. J. No, Book,^^ _. I SERMONS, DOCTllINAL AND TEACTICAL. Rev. WILLIAM ARCHER BUTLER, M.A. LATE PaOFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UMIVERSITY OF DUBLIN. FIRST SERIES. EDITED, l^itll It Jtitnwit nf \\)t autlint's Xift, BY The Very Rev. THOMAS WOODWARD, M.A. PEAN OF DOWN. FIRST AMERICAN FROM THE THIRD CAMBRIDGE EDITION. PHILADELPHIA: PARRY AND MCMILLAN. 1856. Entered aecording to tlie Act of Congress, in the year 1856, "by PARRY AND McMILLAN in the Office of the Clerk of the District Conrt of the United States in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. PHILADELPUIA : T. K. AND P. O. COLLINS, PRINTERS. NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHERS, In presenting this work to the American pubh'c, the publishers desire to intimate that it is printed verbatim from the edition which has been issued from the Cambridge press in England, and edited with great care from the manuscripts of the author, with the exception of two sermons, which have been omitted in consequence of their special character. It has long been the practice in Dublin to select some of the most eloquent clergymen of the Irish Establishment to preach the annual sermons on be- half of the different charities of that city. Professor Butler was often called to discharge that duty. Several of the sermons here given will show how it was performed by him. Those omitted refer to the subject of education in Ireland as conducted by the Government, and as they are to a certain extent national or sec- tional, it has been thought unadvisable to enlarge the volume by their reproduction in this country. It is unnecessary here to expatiate on the character of these sermons. For eloquence, beauty of illustration, richness of imagery, intense fervor, deep spiritualit}^, profound piety, and lucid exhibition of the great truths of Revelation, they will be found to take rank with the highest productions of modern theo- logical literature. The North British Review (February 1856), in noticing these sermons, justly says : "From the list now given, we must select for more special notice the name of one destined, if we mistake not, to take the highest place among writers of our English tongue — whose sermons we would recommend to iv Note from the Publishers. ^ our readers, not only for their force and subtilty of thought, brilliance of fancy, and exuberant eloquence of words, but for that spirit of love, that profound and glowing devotion by which they are animated, and with which no one can come into sympa- thizing contact without feeling himself elevated and refined. We know Professor Butler but in part. Too early for us and for his earthly fame and usefulness (he died in 1848, in his 34th year), he was cut oif in early manhood — a manhood rich in promise of the ripest fruits of genius. Few men ever brought to the service of the Christian ministry such a conjunction of needful qualities, and few sermons in our language exhibit the same rare combination of excellencies : imagery almost as rich as Taylor's ; oratory as vigorous often as South's ; judgment as sound as Barrow's ; a style as attractive, but more copious, ori- ginal and forcible than Atterbury's ; piety as elevated as Howe's; and a fervor as intense at times as Baxter's."* ' It is to be lioped that the demand for the volume now given to the public will warrant the speedy appearance of the second series of Sermons, and encourage the publishers in their desire to issue the magnificent "Lectures on Ancient Philosophy." CONTENTS. SERMON I. PRACTICAL USES OF THE UNCERTAINTY OF CHRIST'S COMING. (Preached ia Advent, before the University of Dublin.) PAOE Waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. — 1 Cor. i. 7 . 25 SERMON II. THE MYSTERY OF THE HOLY INCARNATION. (Preached on Christmas-Day.) And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee : therefore also that Holy Thing which shall be horn of thee shall he called the Son of God. — Luke i. 35 . . . 39 SERMON III. THE DAILY SELF-DENIAL OF CHRIST. (A Lenten Sermon.) If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. — Matt. xvi. 24 .... 50 SERMON lY. CRUCIFYING THE SON OF COD AFRESH. (Prcaclied on Good Friday.) Tliey crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh. — IlEn. vi. 6 . G5 1* vi Contents. SERMON y. THE POWER OF THE RESURRECTION. (Preaclied on Easter Day.) PAGE In Clirist shall all be made alive. — 1 Cor. xv. 22 . . . .78 SERMON YI. THE TRINITY DISCLOSED IN THE STRUCTURE OF ST. JOHN'S WRITINGS. (Preached on Trinity Sunday, before tlie University of Dublin.) These are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. — John xx. 31 94 SERMON YII. MEETNESS FOR THE INHERITANCE OF THE SAINTS IN LIGHT. (Epistle, 24tb Sunday after Trinity.) Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. — Col. i. 12 108 SERMON VIII. OCCASIONAL MYSTERIOUSNESS OF CHRIST'S TEACHING. — CHRIST OUR "LIFE." Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death — Joux viii. 51 123 SERMON IX. SELF-DELUSION AS TO OUR REAL STATE BEFORE GOD. (Preached before the University of Dublin.) If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. — 1 Joun i. 8 . 141 SERMON X. THE ETERNAL LIFE OF CHRIST IN HEAVEN. (A festal Sermon, preached in the Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle, on Advent Sunday, 1S42.) Behold, I am alive for evermore. — Rev. i. 8 IGl Conienls. vii SERMON XI. THE CANAANITE MOTHER A TYPE OF THE GENTILE CllUllCir. PAGE Then Jesus answered, and said nnto her, woman, great is tliy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. — Matt. xv. 28 . . 17i SERMON XII. THE FAITH OF MAN AND THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. Faithful is He that calleth you.— 1 Thess. v. 24 . . . . 196 SERMON XIII. THE WEDDING-GARMENT. (Preached on the Second Sunday after Trinitj-.) And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding-garment : And he saith unto him. Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding-garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness ; there shall he weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen. — Matt. xxii. 11 — 14. . 210 SERMON XI Y. CHRIST SOUGHT AND FOUND IN THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES. \ Search the Scriptures ; for in them ye think ye have eternal life : and they are they which testify of me. — John v. 39 . . 229 SERMON XY. HUMAN AFFECTIONS RAISED, NOT DESTROYED, BY THE GOSPEL. (Preached before the University of Dublin.) Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not high- minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy. — 1 Tim. vi. 17 . . 249 viii Contents. SERMON XYI. THE REST OP THE PEOPLE OF GOD. PAG I For Dcavid said, The Lord God of Israel hath given rest unto His people. — 1 Chkon. xxiii. 25 266 SERMON XYII. CHRIST THE TREASURY OF WISDOM AND KNOAVLEDGE. (Preached in tlie Parish Church of Leeds.) In "whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. — ■ Col. ii. 3 278 SERMON XYIII. THE DIVINITY OF OUR PRIEST, PROPHET, AND KING. (Preached on Trinity Sunday, before the University of Dublin.) God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. — 2 Cok. v. 19 292 SERMON XIX. THE EXPEDIENCY OF CHRIST'S INVISIBILITY. (Preaclied before the University of Dublin.) It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you. — John xvi. 7 . . . 310 SERMON XX. THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT OF CHRIST THROUGH HIS SPIRIT. (Preached before the University of Dublin.) It is expedient for you that I go away ; for if I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you. — John xvi. 7 . . . 326 SERMON XXI. CHRIST'S DEPARTURE THE CONDITION OF THE SPIRIT'S ADVENT. (Preached before the University of Dublin.) It is expedient for you that I go away ; for if I go not away tho Comforter will not come unto you. — John xvi. 7 . . . 345 Contents. jx SERMON XXir. THE FAITH THAT COMETH BY HEARING. (Preached for the National Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb Children of the Poor in Ireland.) PAGE How shall they believe in Ilirn of whom they have not licard ? — Rom. X. 14 365 SERMON XXIII. THE CHPJSTIAN'S WALK IN LIGHT AND LOVE. (Preached for the Molyneux Asylum for Blind Females.) If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another. — 1 John i. 7 386 SERMON XXIY. PRIMITIVE CHURCH PRINCIPLES NOT INCONSISTENT WITH UNIVERSAL CHRISTIAN SYMPATHY. (Preached at the Visitation of the United Dioceses of Derry and Eaphoe, September 22, 1842, and published at the request of the Bishop and Clergy.) Who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament ; not of the letter, but of the spirit. — 2 Cok. iii. 3 . . . . 407 [The facts here presented are condensed from the Memoir of Professor Butler, hy the Kev. Thomas Woodward, M. A., the learned and pious Dean of Down.] William Archer Butler was born at Annerville, near Clonmel, of an ancient and highly respectable family. His father was a member of the Established Church ; his mother, for whose memory he entertained the liveliest affection, was a zealous Roman Catholic. By her solicitude, he was baptized and educated in the Romish faith. Owing to the imperfect system of registration which prevailed in the Romish Church, there is no record extant of his birth or baptism, but those who are best ac- quainted with the fact affirm that he was born in the year 1814, and, according to this computation, at the time of his decease he had only reached his thirty-fourth year. In early childhood his residence was removed to Garnavilla, a lovely spot on the banks of the river Suir, about two miles from the town of Cahir. The enchanting scenery of the neighborhood made an ineffaceable impression upon his susceptible tem- perament, and developed almost in infancy his poetic talents. He almost "lisped in rhyme," and some of his boyish compositions would do honor to the maturest efforts of the British muse. At nine years of age he was removed for education to the endowed school of Clonmel, under the care of the celebrated Dr. Bell, who was famed for his success in training a great number of eminent scholars, and who always secured the filial affection of his pupils while under his care, and their love and veneration in mature life. Butler soon became endeared to liis instructor, and a peculiar favorite in the school. He was never a proficient in the noisy games of his coevals, but his playful wit and amiable manners made him universally popular. He was not a hard student in the ordinary courses, but he was a constant and a discursive reader. He was early familiar with the philosophical writings of Lord Bacon (of which he was an enthusiastic admirer), and of the most distinguished of the Scottish metaphysicians. He perused the classics as a poet, rather than a philologist. While still a schoolboy, he xii — Memoir. had penetrated deep into the profundities of metaphysics, his most loved liursuit, and was accomplished in the whole circle of the belles-lettres. It was during his pupilage at Clonmel, and about two years before his entrance into college, that the important change took place in his reli- gious views by which he passed from the straitest sect of Roman Catho- licism into an earnest and decided member of , the Church of England. From infancy he had been deeply impressed with a sense of religion. His moral feelings were extraordinarily sensitive. For long hours in the night-season he would lie prostrate on the ground, filled with remorse for offences which would have produced no anxiety in the minds of other well conducted youths. He had been accustomed to attend to confession, and on one occasion when he hoped to find peace to his wounded spirit, the unsympathizing confessor received the secrets of his soul as if they were but morbid and distempered imaginations, and threw all his poignant emotions back on himself. A shock was given to the moral nature of the ardent and earnest youth. He that day began to doubt. He examined the controversy for himself with intense anxiety, and his powerful mind was, by Divine grace, soon enabled to discover and rest on the truth. On entering Trinity College, his literary powers soon became well known. He displayed little love for mathematical studies, but his productions in prose and verse were so pre-eminently distinguished, that they attracted the attention of the heads of the college, and stamped him as a man of rare and varied genius. During his under-graduate course, he became a copious contributor to the jjeriodical literature of the day. His refined taste and eloquence of diction soon made him one of the most attractive of reviewers. In the Dublin University Magazine alone, there appeared during his college course enough of poetry and of essays on historical, critical and speculative subjects, to fill several volumes. It would be hard to point to compositions which exhibit greater variety of power in a single mind, than the Analysis of the Philosophy of Berkeley, the arti- cles on Sismondi, on Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences, on Oxford and Berlin Theology, and the playful efl'usions entitled Evenings with our Younger Poets. It would be out of place, in a brief Memoir like this, to give such selections from these essays as would serve to display the critical acu- men of Professor Butler ; neither can we afiford to give at adequate length, such specimens of his poetical powers, as would fairly indicate the depth of his emotional feelings, and the capacity of his descriptive powers. The following lines were written by him, shortly after his arri- val in the University. They were afterwards printed in Blackwood^ s Magazine, for June, 1835. They are a fair, though far from the best, spe- cimen of their author's manner. Memoir. xiii TUE EVEN-SONG OF THE STREAMS. Lo ! couch'd within an odorous vale, where May Had smiled the tears of April into flowers, I was alone in thought one sunny even : Mine eye was wandering in the cloudlets gray, Mass'd into wreaths above the golden bowers. Where slept the sun in the far western heaven. I was alone, and watch'd the glittering threads, So deftly woven upon the purple woof By severing clouds, as parting into lines Of slender light, their broken brilliance spreads Thin floating fragments on the blue-arch'd roof, And each, a waving banner, streams and shines. A mountain lay below the sun, its blue Veil'd in a robe of luminous mist, and seeming To melt into the radiant skies above ; A broken turret near, and the rich hue Of faded sunlight through its window gleaming, Fainting to tremulous slumber on a grove. But Evening grew more pale. Her zoneless hair Wound in dim dusky tresses round the skies, And dews like heavenly love, with unseen fall. Came showering. Insect forms swarm on the air, To dazzle with their tangling play mine eyes, That drooped and closed, — and mystery bosomed all ! Unsleeping thus — yet dreaminghj awake — Fancies came wooing me, and gently rose To the soft sistering music of a stream That pilgrimed by ; and, as I list, they take A form, a being — such as deep repose Begets — a reverie, almost a dream. I heard, I read the language of the waters — That low monotonous murmur of sweet sound, Unheard at noon, but creeping out at even ! That language known but to the delicate daughters Of Tethys, the bright Naiads. All around The thrilling tones gush forth to silent heaven. " We come," they sweetly sang, " we come from roving, The long still summer day, 'mid banks of flowers. Through meads of waving emerald, groves, and woods. Ours were delights : the lilies, mild and loving, Bent o'er us their o'erarching bells — those bowers For fays hung floating on our bubbling floods. "We come — and whence ? At early morn we sprung, Like free-born mountaineers, from rugged hills. Where bursts our rock-ribbed fountain. We have sped Through many a quiet vale, and there have sung The murmui-iiig descant of the playful lills, To thank the winds for the sweet scent they shed ! 2 xiv Memoir. " Our sapphire floods were tinctured by the skies With their first burst of blushes, as we broke At morn upon a meadow. Not a voice Rose from the solemn earth as ruby dyes tSwam like a glory round us, and awoke The trance of heaven, and bade the world rejoice. '* Enwreath'd in mists, the perfumed breath of morn, Our infancy of waters freshly bright Cleft the hush'd fields, warbling a matin wild ; While beaming from the kindled heavens, and borne On clouds instinct with many-colored light, The spirit of nature heard the strain, and smiled I " Heaven's flushing East, its western wilds as pale As is the wan cheek of deserted love, Its changeful clouds, its changeless deeps of blue, Lay glass'd within us when that misty veil, Evanid, disenshrouding field and grove, Left us, a mirror of each heavenly hue, " An echo of Heaven's loveliest tints ! But lo ! The spell that bound us broke ; in foaming leap Our sheeted waters rush'd ; our silvery vest Of light o'erhung the cliffs, our gorgeous bow Arch'd them at mid-fall, — till below the steej* The maniac waves sunk murmuring into rest. " Now mourn'd oiir lone stream down a dusky vale. Like passion wearied into dull despair, The sole sad music of that sunless spot;. And prison'd from the sunbeam and the gale By nodding crags above, all wildly bare. We slowly crept where life and light were not. " To greet us from that salvage home there came A Form, — 'twas not the Spirit of the wild. But one more mortal, on whose wasted cheek Sorrow had written death ; a child of Fame, Perchance, yet far less Fame's than Nature's child, He loved the languid lapse of streams to seek. " Some cherish'd woe, some treasur'd fond regret, Lay round his heart, and drew the gentlest tear That ever sanctified a pitying stream. Or crystalliz'd in lucent cells was set By Naiads, in their wavy locks to wear As priceless jewel of celestial beam. " The dirge of Nature is her Streams ! Their song Speaks a soft music to man's grief, and those Most love them who have loved all else in vain : We charmed that lone one as he paced along From the dark thraldom of his dream of woes, — His sadness died before our sadder strain ! Memoir. xv " Once more amid the joyaunce of tlie sun, And light, the life of Nature, we have taught The pensive mourner of our marge to smile In answer to our smile of beams, and won The venom from the poisoned heart, and wrought A spell to bless the wearied brain awhile ! " The imaged sun floats proudly on our breast, Ex'er beside each icanderer, though there be Many to tread our path of turf and flowers : A thousand sparkling orbs for one imprest On us, — for ours is the bright mimicry Of Nature, changing with her changeful hours. " And thus we have a world, a lovely world, A softened picture of the upper sphere, Sunk in our crystal depths and glassy caves ; And every cloud beneath the heavens unfurled. And every shadowy tint they wear, sleeps here, Here in this voiceless kingdom of the waves. " On to the ocean! ever, ever on! Our banded waters, hurrying to the deep. Lift to the winds a song of wilder strife ; And white plumes glittering in to-morrow's sun. Shall crest our waves when starting out of sleep For the glad tumult of their ocean-life. " On to the ocean ! through the midnight chill. Beneath the glowing stars, by woodlands dim, A silvery wreath of beauty shall we twine. Thus may our course — ceaseless — unwearied still — Pure — blessing as it flows — aye shadow him Our sources who unlock'd with hand divine !" The soft and golden Eve had glided through Her portals in the west, and night came round. The glamour ceased, and nothing met mine eye But waters, waters dyed in deepening blue — Nothing mine ear, but a low bubbling sound. Mingled with mine — and the faint night-wind's — sigh. Among the many debts of gratitude which the University of Dublin owes to the memory of Provost Lloyd, not the least is due for his institu- tion of the Ethical Moderatorship at the Degree examination. The in- tellect of Ireland seems peculiarly adapted for logical and ethical specu- lation ; not less so at the present day than ten centuries ago, when the scholastic fame of Scotus Erigena was attracting to Irish Academies the rising talent of Western Europe. In November, 1834, the first examina- tion for the newly instituted prize took place ; and the name of William Archer Butler stands the first upon the roll of Ethical Moderators. As his college course was drawing to a close, his friends became anxious xvi Memoir, that he should decide on a profession, and the Bar was urged on him as the field where his talents would win a sure and ample reward. But the turmoil of the Courts was wholly abhorrent to his tastes ; and he shrunk from the thought of resigning the charms of literature and moral science even for a certain prospect of the ermined robe. His habits in- clined him strongly to a College life ; but his distaste for mathematics had ever prevented him from continuous application to the exact sciences, and without a profound and extensive acquaintance with this department of knowledge it is impossible to attain to a Fellowship in the University. At the expiration of his scholarship, his connection with the University must have ceased but for the intervention of the excellent Provost. The discriminating eye of Dr. Lloyd perceived the extraordinary abilities of the first Ethical Moderator, and the loss which the University would sus- tain by his removal. By his energetic exertions, a Professorship of Moral Philosophy was founded in 1837 ; and immediately, on the expiration of his scholarship, Butler was appointed to this distinguished and arduous post. The young Professor was now upon a field worthy of his endowments. His lectures were as remarkable for their glowing eloquence as for their profound philosophy, and his course soon attracted the thoughtful minds of the University to his class-room, where they were enchanted and de- lighted with the gorgeousness of his diction, the felicity of his illustra- tion, and the depth of his erudition. The " Dublin University Magazine," referring to his Ethical Course in 1842, says: "On resuming our attendance we found him sketching the earlier Grecian schools, a subject to which he contrived to impart an in- terest, we confess, we did not think could be attached to it in any hands. He afterwards proceeded regularly to the Socratic revolution, and so to Plato, to whom three or four laborious courses were devoted. Here he was evidently on congenial ground. We thought his refutation of the common mistakes about Plato, especially his explanation of the ' Idea,' in its various applications, as the fundamental point of the Platonic philosophy, peculiarly impressive and convincing. It is curious enough, and perhaps characteristic of the times, that this ancient system seems at present to be attracting such very general attention in various coun- tries. At the same time when Mr. Butler was minutely unfolding its mysteries in Dublin, his able brother professor at Oxford was, we believe, performing the same task there ; and in France and Germany a similar interest is, perhaps, even more deeply felt. Aristotle, also, received a large measure of consideration ; but we confess it did not appear to us (whether from the lecturer's want of sympatliy with the subject, or from its own inferiority of interest) that this topic was made as attractive as liis disquisitions on Plato. Be this as it may, the entire of these courses struck us as characterized by a large-minded appreciation of every variety Memoir. xvii of excellence — a catholic spirit, that sought to detect good in everything, and never forgot in its defence of truth the indulgence due to any errors that could find an apology in the intellectual and moral elevation of those who held them. In every instance we observed that which is, after all, the true characteristic of the genuine philosophic spirit — a dis- position to separate the germ of truth from any errors that had gathered round it, and, following out the advice we once heard him ably enforce, refute incomplete or partial views, not by rejecting but by completing them. We are more anxious for the publication of these historical lec- tures than of any other part of the Professor's labors. We possess scarcely anything of this description, complete or satisfactory, in the language ; and we certainly cannot conceive any performances more cal- culated to stimulate the general taste for this beautiful, though neglected, department of inquiry." Simultaneously with his appointment to the Chair of Ethics, Mr. Butler was presented by the Board of Trinity College to a Parish in the Diocese of Raphoe, County of Donegal. He ministered to a large and delighted flock except when his College duties demanded his presence in Dublin. In the pulpit he accommodated himself with admirable suc- cess to the comprehension of his people, and finding that his rural audi- tory were more benefited by direct addresses, he soon ceased to write and read his sermons. His wliole faculties were devoted to the ministry he had undertaken. At one time he was found applying his musical skill to the training of a village choir. At another he was found casting aside his loftiest speculations in mental science and his erudite researches into Gre- cian and German philosophy, to obey the call of sufi'ering and of sorrow. His parishioners were widely scattered over an extensive region on the shores of the Atlantic ; and the habitations of many of them were difficult of access even on foot, but they were all known to him, and all visited with constant assiduity. In 1842, he was promoted to another Parish in the same diocese by the Board of Trinity College, in which his duties were less onerous, but his labors were scarcely less abundant. In a life thus made up of parochial ministrations and closet study, interspersed with his College duties, it is hard to find exciting incidents for biographical narrative. It was during these years of his ministerial and pastoral activity that he became so intimately connected as a j)reacher with the charities of Dublin and with other leading institutions of a benevolent character, for whose welfare he was often called on to plead in the pulpit. In the year 1845, the Roman Catholic controversy seems to have largely engaged the attention of Professor Butler. The letters which he produced on this subject have been collected and published in a separate form. In a notice of the work, the North British Review characterizes it as " one of the ablest refutations- of Romanism in its latest and most refined forms," while an English Prelate declares it to be " a work which ought to be in the library of every Student of Divinity." xviii Memoir. The famine of 1846-7, wliicli visited the northern province in general with comparative lightness, was felt with appalling intensity in the neigh- borhood with which Mr. Butler was connected. The value of the Paro- chial system, even in a temporal aspect in districts which could he reached bj no other machinery, was then powerfully impressed on the minds of many not disposed to regard the established Church with friendly eyes. The exertions of Professor Butler were ceaseless and untiring. Literature, philosophy, and divinity were all postponed to the labors of relieving the suffering in his parish. From morning till evening he superintended the distribution of food, often toiling with his own hands in this ministry of love. In the latter part of 1847, and the first six months of the next year, Mr. Butler was employed in preparation for a work on Faith. Never was the great subject undertaken by one more competent to attain the end which he designed. His collections contain a vast mass of materials drawn from the Fathers, the Schoolmen, the Continental Reformers, and the Anglican Divines. No clue, unfortunately, is left to guide us as to the method which he intended, or the system which he prox30sed to construct. While thus employed, that summons came which removed him from the scene of faith to the "fruition of the glorious Godhead." He had been appointed to preach on the occasion of an ordination by the Bishop of Raphoe. Unfortunately, according to his usual custom, the discourse was unwritten. His text was Matt, xxviii. 18-20. One of the clergymen present has given a description of the great impression made by this discourse. Speaking of the doctrine of the Trinity, he says the eloquent preacher went on to show that this tenet, " so far from being merely abstract and sjpeculative, was intensely personal and practical, calculated to form the staple of the teaching of an Apostolic Church. More especially as regarded the Divinity of our Lord, he said it might be proved by internal evidence to any mind which could be brought to feel what sin was, for such a mind could never feel sure of an adequate atone- ment without an infinite sacrifice. This led him to speak of those divines of the Anglican Church, in whose writings would be found an armory against all heretics, as well as the most touching lessons of practical holiness. He took a series of these authors ; he dismissed each with a few sentences, but not before he had characterized his peculiar excel- lencies and made the audience feel his distinguishing merits. His de- scription of Taylor, in particular, was startlingly beautiful, and literallij took away our breath. He recommended us to read some works of a prac- tical character by dissenters. Baxter, Howe, and Edwards, were amongst the number mentioned." On his return from the discharge of this duty his death sickness struck him. He had heated liimself by walking before he took his place in the public conveyance by which he travelled. He became chilled, and on Memoir. xix his arrival at home fever rapidly set in. He was soon aware of the dan- gerous nature of his malady, and expressed a wish, if it were God's will, that he might survive one month, until he had completed his work on Faith. One ejaculation was constantly on his tongue, " Christ my right- eousness!" The Rev. Mr. Ball, a neighboring clergyman who attended him with a brother's tenderness, declares that his very wanderings were full of the most splendid eloquence and exalted devotion. He breathed his last without a struggle, and on the 5th of July, 1848, his spirit departed so softly that those who watched his bed knew not that he was no more on earth. His remains were laid in his own churchyard amid, the tears of several thousands, who, with the Bishop, his brethren in the minis- try, and the gentry of the neighborhood, had attended on the solemn occasion. This brief notice cannot be better concluded than by applying to Pro- fessor Butler the words in which he closes his own masterly sketch of the life of Bishop Berkeley : — " We have written of Berkeley as an Irishman ; but we feel that such a man belongs not to Ireland, but to human nature ; and never did the panegyric of epitaph lay by its customary pomp of falsehood more sin- cerely than when it called upon every lover of religion and of his country to rejoice tliat such a man has lived. So much for his earthly career ; the rest is hidden from our feeble eyes. But if we must leave the Christ- ian, the philosopher, the patriot, at the moment when all human bio- graphy must resign its task, we may well believe that his subsequent life is taken up by the pen of angelic recorders !" The sermons in this volume were, with few exceptions, written without any view to publication. They have been edited from manuscripts often abbreviated, and very difficult to decipher. The rest of the manuscript sermons which Professor Butler left behind him have been carefully edited by the Rev. J. A. Jeremie, D. D., Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge ; while his lectures on the History of An- cient Philosophy have also appeared, with notes, by William Hepworth Thompson, M. A., Fellow of Trinity College, and Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge. The second series of sermons has, perhaps, attracted even more attention than the volume now given to the public ; while the literary world in Britain is fully satisfied that there is no exaggeration in the language of Mr. Thompson when, in speaking of the lectures on An- cient Philosophy, he says : — " Of the dialectics and physics of Plato, they are the only exposition at once full, accurate, and popular, with which I am acquainted, being far more accurate than the French, and incomparably more popular than the German treatise on these departments of the Platonic philosophy." SERMON I. PRACTICAL USES OF THE UNCERTAINTY OF CHRIST's COMING. (Preached, in Advent, before the University of Dublin.) Waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Chi'ist. — 1 Cor. i. 7. The Churcli of God, my brethren, standing midway in Eternity, and finding little in the Present but trial and difficulty, looks for her consolation mainly to the Past and to the Future. These are the inheritance of which Faith and Hope make her the blessed possessor. In the Past she contemplates the origin, in the Future the fulfilment of her joy; in both alike, one unaltered author and channel of mercies. In Him — "in Jesus Christ, the same yesterday and to-day and for ever," — she beholds the sure foundation of her own stability through time and eternity. Nor this alone. Associated with Him in ineffable union, she reads in His history her own; she is identified with all His for- tunes; she pursues His footsteps; she becomes the per- petuated image of His whole existence. As He leads, she humbly follows; — "Christ the first — afterward they that are Christ's " is the rule, not of the resurrection only, but of all things. He came first in lowliness, and His Church began in lowliness ; He was visited with the Holy Ghost in Jordan, and she on the day of Pentecost; He labored in weariness and watchings, and had not where to lay His head till the Cross became His pillow — she, too, was long a houseless wanderer, solemnizing her holy mysteries in 8 26 Practical uses of the [serm. I. sepulchres, and scorned bj the souls she would have shed her blood to rescue; He, after His day of martyrdom, ascended in power to heaven, and she after hers became mighty upon earth. Yet, as His victory is to our qjq^ invisible, so is much of her glory ; and as His triumph is in a manner unfinished because unseen, so is she — and, alas ! in a degree far more — as yet imperfect, ineffectual, incomplete. But he shall once more ascend in visible public supremacy, and then shall her enthronement be public, and her triumph consummate also. Thus, though Christ be divine, and the Church be human, the destinies of both are truly linked by bonds no strength shall ever sunder : to " follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth" is her office, her privilege, and her glory for everlasting. How deep an interest gathers round every great crisis in the history of that mighty Leader, whose deathless life is thus not only the pledge but the model of our own ! If, amid all the errors, infirmities, and failures of the Church, she still can catch in the past story of her immortal Spouse the image she was meant, and in her weakness still strives as she may, to copy; what should be her joy to reflect on the far more glorious series of events in which He is yet to be her forerunner ! If, as at this season, she think at each returning service, with saddened jQi happ}^ heart, of that mystery of unimaginable love that brought Him first "to visit us in great humility;" how ought the eye to kindle and the heart to beat, as the picture flashes on the imagi- nation, of that second coming, in which, through all the terrors of judgment, her saints shall be safe, and when the anger that consumes a Avorld shall be but the minister and precursor of a love that restores it immortally for her ! Yet of this future coming, — of this true Advent-season of eternity, though much is known, much too is hidden. There are secrets the Divine Bridegroom whispers not; that the "Spirit and the Bride" may still say "Come." Between the Church and the Church's head there still subsists, even SERM. I.J Uncertainty of Ohrisfs Coming. 27 in this intimate union, a mysterious separation ; and on tlie period of the separation a lioly reserve. It has ah^eady lasted for ages, and we cannot dare to predict at what epoch it is to close. The veil that hangs before the celes- tial sanctuary is still undrawn ; and it is vain for us to "marvel," as of old the expectants of Zacharias, that the High Priest of our profession "tarrieth so long in the Temple." He has willed it, that, certain of His eventual arrival, we should remain in uncertainty as to its destined moment. "The times and the seasons which the Father hath put in His own power" He would have us desire, and expect, and conjecture, but not dare to define. At this season, then, which the Church has appropriated directly to the first, and indirectly, by the Spirit of her services, to the second coming of her Lord, we can scarcely fall upon a more interesting subject of reflection than the state and form of the Scripture revelations, in special relation to this very uncertainty Avith which He has been pleased to invest the awful hour of His return amons^ us. The numberless schemes of prophetic chronology that abound in the Church, while they worthily fulfil His purpose that our thoughts should be much engaged in this holy theme, as clearly evince, by their mutual differences. His equal pur- pose, that absolute certainty regarding it should as yet be refused to man. Why is it good for us to be thus denied certainty, yet invited to anticipation ? Why has He made us sure of the event and uncertain of the time ? Why is this combination of knowledo-e and icrnorance better for us than a clear and absolute knowledge could be? What are the feelings which, by this arrangement, He would substi- tute in place of the undoubting assurance He withholds ? The variety, the apparent contrariety of the Scripture declarations as to the immediacy or remoteness of the second Advent of Christ is, as you know, a main cause of the perplexity which involves this subject. Of course I do not mean on this occasion to betray j^ou into the labyrinth of 28 Practical uses of the [SERM. T. dissension and speculation in which it is entangled. I re- strict myself to a single, comprehensive, and practical train of thought. I seem to myself to see in this very variety, even in this seeming opposition of predictions, an arrange- ment specially and admirably adapted for the purpose of cherishing that incessant expectation, stimulating that eager inquiry, and enkindling that anxious desire, which together form the homage of intellect and affections that an absent Lord demands and approves in His servants. I find that this blending of light and obscurity leaves us in a state more suitable and more profitable than either absolute ignorance or perfect knowledge ; that it awakens feelings which the former would fail to excite, and the latter would quench as they arose. At the same time, — which is most remarka- ble and important, — I see this diversified language of pro- phecy in no case chargeable with real contradiction ; I see it everywhere so skilfully guarded and compensated, as, on striking the balance of the whole, to be found affirming nothing which any honest inquirer can regard as refuted by the result. In asking you, then, to enter with me a little more deeply into this inquirj^, let me endeavor to show you how carefully the word of God leaves the period uncertain, how carefully it presses it upon us as ever impending, how carefully this is done without real contradiction, and how the whole arrangement tends to produce practical results of the highest value. At one time, then, our Lord seems to speak as if, in the literal and ordinary acceptation of the words, " immediately after" the destruction of Jerusalem, — which "this genera- tion should not pass" till it had witnessed, the standard of His glory should be unfurled in the heavens ; and as if the fall of unhappy Israel should be the signal to His trusting disciples that their "final redemption drew nigh." With the same apparent significance His Apostle Paul speaks of himself and his brethren as " them that are alive and re- SEKM. I.] Uncertainty of Christ's Comiivj. 29 main" to the coming of Christ in glory; and declares that "3'et a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarrj," St James announces that " the coming of the Lord is nigh;"- St Peter, that "the end of all things is at hand;" and Christ himself, reappearing in the revela- tion to St John, closes His warnings with the thrice-repeat- ed assurance, "I come quickly." Those who interpret such declarations in the more obvious sense would, of course, add to them, as confirmations, all those numerous passages in which St Paul exhorts his converts (as in the text) to " wait for the coming of the Lord Jesus," to " wait for the Son from heaven," to "Look for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of Grod the Saviour," to " wait patiently for Christ," — expressions which at first seem to make the certainty of His speedy manifestation a direct practical motive and maxim. It is, of course, not to be wondered at that these phrases have formed a favorite topic of infidel sarcasm. It is, indeed, no more than our Lord's own intimation that His professed servants would be found to "say in their hearts that their Lord delayed His coming;" no more than St Peter's predic- tion, that "in the last days should come scofi:ers saying, Where is the promise of His coming?" Yet nothing can be more demonstrably certain than that these passages, however calculated to stimulate expectation, were never intended to assert the immediate advent of Christ. It is plain that there are two supposable methods of argument by which such a point as this might be estab- lished; either by going into a detailed investigation of the passages adduced, which, however, to do it justice, would probably be too elaborate an undertaking for the present occasion; or by adducing contemporary assertions, in direct negation of the alleged doctrine, from the lips of the very 'authors themselves, a proof which I prefer, as, for our ] 're- sent purpose, simpler and more satisfactory. Now thefcc fall naturally into tiro classes. Some seem to point to a 30 Practical uses of the [SERM. I. remote period, at least as forcibly as the passages formerly cited point to a nearer one; others expressly mention the period as one on which all more definite information was to be purposely withheld. It is plain that both equally negative the supposition of an intention in the inspired authors to limit the period to their own generation. Thus, the same Lord, who seemed just now to announce so speedy an arrival, intimates that the Gospel must be preached to a vast extent before "the end" come; and com- pares His own return to that of the master of servants, who comes "after a long time" to reckon with them. The same St Paul who addressed the Thessalonians in his first Epistle, as if they, yet alive, were to behold the coming of Christ, in his second warns them that his words were meant to justify no such certainty, inasmuch as that the day of Christ was to be preceded by a great and conspicuous apostasy. The same St James who had spoken of the same coming as "drawing nigh," introduces his assertion by exhortations of endurance, and illustrations derived from the "long pa- tience" of the husbandman waiting for the fruit of the earth. The same St Peter, wdio in his first Epistle contemplates the "end of all things as at hand," and bids the Christian hope for the "grace to be brought at the revelation of Christ," in his second obviates objections to the tardy march of the expected Judge, not by denying the fact, but by reminding his reader that " the Lord is not slack as men count slackness, but long-suffering to us-ward," and that the cycles of Ilis providence transcend our feeble grasp, "one day being with Him as a thousand years, and a thou- sand 3^ear3 as one day." The same book of revelation which promises the rapid return of Christ unfolds an ante- cedent series of events probably sufficient to occupy long revolving ages. The other class of passages, which expressly deny us all definite information as to the Advent, are even more con- vincing, because even more distinct. We need not go be- SERM. I.] Uncerialnty of Christ's Coming. 31 yond tlie language of our Lonl, whom we find employing every form of illustration to represent the unexpeetedness, even to Ilis own servants, of an event which surely could not be unexpected if He had taught them to prepare for it as fixed and immediate. " Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the anojels which are in heaven, neither the Son [in His capacity as human prophet], but the Father." "The Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not." "The master of the house" may come "at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morn- ing," But whenever he come, it shall be "as a thief," it shall be as the flood of Noah, it shall be "as a snare on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth." It is, then, palpable, as against the infidel objector, that the expressions wliich seem to predict an immediate arrival cannot have been thus meant hj authors who in the same discourse, — often in the same context, — speak of its period as probably remote, and as wholly unrevealed. You will naturall}'" ask, what then could have been the origin or purport of these ambiguous phrases? Why is the Advent ever said to be " near" if it be certain that those who said so cannot have meant their words to be understood as lite- ral and positive assertions of its speedy approach ? The ordinary solution refers them all to the destruction of Jeru- salem, as being virtually "the coming of Christ," in the manifestation of His divine power, to take vengeance on his enemies, and in the overthrow of the old, as a necessary preliminary to the establishment of His own new. Dispen- sation. But the truth is, that this interpretation, however it seem to apply in some instances, is seldom rigorously necessary. The difficulty undoubtedly arises from the prejudices of our limited capacity, and still more limited compass of experience. Let the language of Scripture be estimated in reference to the mighty system of which it treats, and the apparent contradiction nearly or wholly vanishes. It is plain that that period which is distant in 32 Practical uses of the [serm. i. one scheme of tilings may be near in anotlier, wliere events are on a vaster scale, and moved in a mightier orbit. That which is a whole life to tlie ephemera is but a day to the man; that which in the brief succession of anthentic human history is counted as remote is but a single page in the volume of the heavenly records. The coming of Christ may be distant as measured on the scale of human life, but may be "near," and "at hand," and "at the door," when the interval of the two advents is compared, not merely with the four thousand years which were but its prepara- tion, but with the line of infinite ages which it is itself pre- paring. View the interval that spans the first and second coming, as we do, who are close to the object, because in the midst of it, and it swells to a vast extent ; view it as we shall yet do, from some far height in the measureless eter- nity of the Church triumphant; view it as these holy men were wont to do, the first stage in an infinite progress, and it lessens to a point ! This seems to be sufficient to account for the use of terms importing nearness, rapidity, immediate approach, without supposing them in any respect contra- dicted by the event. The coming of Christ was remote to the Apostles, as the opposite side of this earth is remote to us; it was "near" to the Apostles, as the same breadth of the globe is still but a point in the S3^stem of revolving worlds to which our o-lobe belono's. But of this peculiar choice of language there is something more to be said, in relation to my immediate subject, the practical use and purpose of this complicated arrangement of the predictions about the Lord's coming. It would be the perfection of a revelation designed to operate on the heart, to employ forms of phraseology which shoidd at the same time justify themselves to the reflective inquirer, and yet, to the mass of mankind (for whose use it must ever be mainly meant), tend to suggest thoughts and feelings, such as a more literal statement must in many cases altogether fail to generate. This, which is one of tlie chief excellen- SERM. I.] Uncertainty of Christ's Comiruj. 33 cies of the whole Bible language (though a common ground of the short-sighted cavils of infidelity), is remarkably ex- emplified in the case before us. These forms of phrase, which startle us as with the very presence of Christ, seem specially and exquisitely adapted to keep alive expectation, by bringing emphatically before us the perpetual jJOSsikYzV?/ of an immediate manifestation ; and thus, indirectly second all those express exhortations which make the hope and desire of the coming of Christ a leading motive and impulse in the whole life of the Christian disciple. It is the need and the value of these and similar prac- tical habits, which, as I have intimated, have carried the revelation of the Advent of Christ to a certain point, and at that point have bid it stop ; have left the fact certain, but the time unfixed. The impatient curiosity of man mur- murs at such an arrangement; scepticism scorns a reve- lation whose scope is so limited; and even piety sometimes dares to wish it enlarged. It is well to show to both, in a few words, how much should be sacrificed if their wishes were gratified. It is the confessed object of our blessed Master, in train- ing His disciples for glory, that they should, in the school of this world, learn such divine arts as those of hope, of watchfulness, of fidelity, of humility, of earnest inquiry, of reverential awe. Consider for a moment what effect the definite announcement of His hour of coming would pro- duce upon such attributes as those ; consider what its un- certainty ought to effect in ourselves. If, for example, it be our duty to hope and haste unto this glorious Epiphany, I may ask these precipitate specu- lators, how is the preservation of this hope consistent with a certainty, — and still more a certainty of distance ? Would not the anxious and desiring solicitude that hangs upon the prospect of his appearing be suddenly, for all save the single generation that was to witness it, chilled into indif- ference by knowing it postponed in His own infallible 34 Practical uses of the [serm. I. announcement ? Again, if be would keep us in tliat state of icatclifulness whicli He has himself so often and earnestly impressed, is it not to neutralize His own purpose to re- move the uncertainty which alone can make that vigilaoce necessary ? If, too, it be His declared intention to test our fidelity^ does he not destroy His own avowed test, by ren- dering preparation necessary only to those who are ap- prised of his approaching presence ? He desires to keep us humhle as the sole path of ultimate exaltation. This very limitation, upon the most awful of all points of knowledge, is eminently calculated to cherish such a temper. Yet He would also habituate us to earnest inquiry and a holy curi- osity as to His will and His movements ; to publish them is to supersede it. Finally, He would have us revere and dread, even while we trust and love Him ; and this He accomplishes, as in other ways, so by shrouding His march in mystery, revealing enough to win affection and to guide duty, but reserving His deeper purposes for the council- chamber of the Holy Trinity. Such are some of the grounds Vvdiich we may presume have operated to produce this limitation of the Church's knowledge as to the awful hour of her Lord's Advent ; and such (you will all have anticipated me in observing) are equally forcible grounds for leaving in similar uncertainty that hour of death, which to each individual is practically the coming of his Judge. Such uncertainty is far more valuable than any certainty, for it is essential to our spiri- tual discipline, which that certainty would disturb or sus- pend. But while Christ is thus hidden alike as to person and purposes, He has not left Himself without witnesses on earth. Our own senses and experience are, in some measure, permitted to assist our belief; there is a sense in which we walk not alone "by faith," but "by sight" also. The Christian is not without startling and palpable proofs of the realit}^ of the supernatural government under which he lives. Two mighty monuments, almost coeval, alike SEKM. I.] Uncerlainty of ChrisCs Coming. 35 manifest to our ej^es, alike (save by His Providence) inex- plicable to our reason, bear engraven on their majestic front tbe awful truth of the God of the Christians; two monuments, — of mercy one, of vengeance the other, — that silently arose as He left the world, that shall stand un- shaken till He retui^n to judge it, — the Church Catholic and the Jewish people. His acceptors and His rejectors. His brethren in the spirit and His brethren in the flesh, are alike perpetuated to be His evidence. "I am with you alway till the end of the world," was His promise to the one ; " Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven," His declaration to the other. If our faith is slow to apprehend an invisible King, let our eyes fall upon these His visible attestations. They stand in the world as the unchanging token and warrant of His truth, changeless alone while all around them changes. Already some eighteen centuries have tried their stability. Can we withhold our recognition of a power before which time sinlvs conquered and exhausted? Can we refuse to accept these living and breathing proofs, that though unseen He is not unreal, — that of very truth " all power in heaven and earth is given unto Him," — that therefore, if He who had power to begin and continue have power to finish, the con- summation is as sure as the commencement, the second Advent as certain as the first, — yea, that though now and awhile it be folded in its cloud, yet " as the Ugldning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be" ? But to seek to penetrate more closely into these awful secrets is vain. A sacred obscurity envelopes them ; the cloud that shrouded the actual presence of God on the mercy-seat shrouds still His expected presence on the throne of judgment. It is a purposed obscurity, a most salutary and useful obscurity, a wise and merciful denial of knowledge. In this matter it is His gracious will to be the perpetual subject of watchfulness, expectation, conjee- 86 Practical uses of the [SERM. I. ture, fear, desire, — but no more. To cherish anticipation, He has permitted gleams of light to cross the darkness ; to baffle presumption, He has made them only gleams. He has harmonized with consummate skill, every part of His revelation to produce this general result ; — now speaking as if a few seasons more were to herald the new heaven and the new earth, now as if His days were thousands of years; at one moment whispering into the ear of His disciple, at another retreating into the depth of infinite ages. It is His purpose thus to live in our faith and hope, remote yet near, pledged to no moment, possible at any; worshipped not with the consternation of a near, or the indifference of a distant certainty, but with the anxious vigilance that awaits a contingency ever at hand. This, the deep devo- tion of watchfulness, humility, and awe. He who knows ns best knows to be the fittest posture for our spirits ; there- fore does He preserve the salutary suspense that ensures it, and therefore will He determine His Advent to no definite day in the calendar of eternity. But every provision of divine wisdom is liable to human perversion ; the more admirable they are in merciful ar- rangement, the more easily is their delicate mechanism of motives disordered. The very uncertainty, which was meant as a perpetual stirnulant to watchfulness, is abused to security ; and exactly as the invisibility of the Creator, which is His perfection, produces the miserable creed of the atheist, the obscurity that veils the hour of judgment, though meant in merciful warning, persuades the ungodly heart that none is ever to arrive. But it is not so. Nature, and grace alike proclaim a glo- rified Messiah as indispensable to complete their appointed course. Nature, through all her regions, — uncorrupted Nature, — cries aloud for Him who is to rectify her un- willing disorders, to repair her shattered structures, to re- store her oppressed energies, to vindicate her voice of con- science long despised, her sublime testimony to the Creator SERM. I ] Uncertainty of Christ's Coming. 37 so long questioned or overlooked. But what is even this to the demand of grace for the coming of Him, who is not only "the great God," but "our Saviour"? If the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain for the manifesta- tion of the sons of God, what shall be the desire of the sons of God themselves ? What shall be their ardor to realize that "liberty of the children of God," of which such great things are spoken; to behold their own low- liness glorified in the glory of the Man of JN'azareth ; their humble labors recognized by the approval of a God once more manifest in the flesh, their persevering faith vin- dicated, their hope consummated, their charity brighten- ing into a reward eternal and infinite? They know well the value of that union of which I have spoken, which identifies the triumph of the Saviour and the saved. They rejoice to think that, as a humiliated Kedeemer came first to point us the path of humiliation, so must a glorified Redeemer point us the path of glory ; that the Captain of Salvation, who bore the cross in front of His army of be- lievers, must come to teach them also how to wear the crown. Yes, all proclaims and demands the return of Christ to the world, — all but the unsanctified heart of man I There alone no voice is heard to welcome the mighty Stranger ; there alone the dawn of this eternal orb is con- templated with hatred, horror, and dismay. Hearts that are inured to the world's corruptions, how shall they hail an immortality of meekness, simplicity, and love ? Spirits habituated to seek unholy ends by means yet more unholy, how shall they endure "the bringing in of an everlasting righteousness" ? Those whose whole hopes, prospects, and calculations are bound up with the fortunes of the world as it is, how shall they regard otherwise than with terror this awful revolution in the administration of the universe, when He who now rules behind a mass of permitted evil shall himself personally and visibly assume the reins of universal empire? The prophet has seen and heard their 4 88 Practical uses of the Uncertainty^ &c. [SEKM. I. terrors, wlien he represents even "the kings of the earth, and the great, and the rich, and the mighty," as saying " to the mountain and rocks. Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb." " The wrath of the Lamh /" The word, even in a context of vengeance and of woe, still whispers mercy, grace, and peace. Even on the judgment-throne it is rich with the tender memories of Gethsemane and Calvary; even amid the dread solemnities of omnipotent anger it speaks of a scene more sublimely divine than all their terrors- The chosen title of crucified innocence, of patience unmur- muring, of love self-sacrificing, — I Avill leave its echoes un- disturbed to be the last that occupy your ears. After so much that is fearful and appalling, I will leave the thoughts it suggests to soothe, revive, and animate jour hearts ; to win you to Him who would rather be known in love than in terror, and who still defers the hour of His coming only that He may multiply the hosts of His redeemed ; to re- mind you that there is a blood of the covenant which still appeals from Christ the Judge to Christ the Sacrifice, and renders even divine vengeance itself innocuous, since to reach the repentant sinner, it must brave the meek omnipo- tence of the Lamb of God. Such blessed evidence of love unspeakable are still the weapons He prefers in the con- quest of our affections; it is by the recollection of such marvels of mercy He would attract us to see in His appear- ing the advent of one who, if mighty to avenge, is yet mightier to save, — to rejoice in a power which a love more glorious than even that power shall direct and govern to oiir happiness, — and thence from heart and soul to echo the prayer with which, as if to bind them both for ever in our thoughts, the volume that records the first Advent closes, anticipating, desiring, beseeching the second: "Even so, co'me, Lord Jesus !" SERMON II. THE MYSTERY OF THE HOLY INCAENATION. (Preached on Christmas-Day.) And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee : therefore also that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. — Luke i. 35. There is a very deep and very wouderful connexion be- tween the relations of our Lord Christ to his Father and to us. In heaven, and from all eternity, He has been a Son, "the only begotten of the Father;" on earth He became the Son of the Father again, and by a new title, — ^' therefore^ that Holy Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God," — He being by the same wondrous act the Son also of an earthly parent. By His resurrection from the dead He acquired another, a third title to divine Sonship ; as St Paul seems to explain the matter in the thirteenth chapter of the Acts, applying to the resurrection of Christ the declaration of the second Psalm, — "Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee ;" confirmed by a similar ap- plication in Heb. v. 5. Now in all these three forms and grounds of divine Sonship we are interested. In the first^ because, doubtless, it is the eternal model and type upon which all other spiritual filiations were primarily formed and designed. It is one of the ways in which we are made like to God, imitators of Deity, "partakers of a divine nature," that we should be thus bound to God, even as the Second 40 Tht Mystery of the Holy Incarnalion. [SERM. Ii. Person of the Trinity to the First. Nay, probably, since the family relationship itself is nnquestionably a pure and holy thing, it was originally created as a sensible image of that ineffable relationship of the everlasting Father and Son; a perpetual picture in time of that great fact in eternity. Instead of supposing, as speculators often do, that the words, as applied to the divine persons, are a mere metaphor derived from the earthly relation, why not rather conceive that the earthly relation was itself created to be the counterpart, and symbol, and memorial of the heavenly ? And possibly too, the apostolic polity of the Church, with its paternal, filial, fraternal relations, may have had some similar ground deeper than we can fathom ; may have been intended to reproduce in that "new earth," which is the Church, another perpetuated image and symbol of the same eternal connection; — a supposition which may chance to appear less fanciful when you remember in what peril that great doctrine of the Father and the Son has ever been of corruption or extinction, in almost every religious commu- nity where the apostolic polity has been rejected. With the second^ — the Sonship by Incarnation, — we are yet more deeply concerned, because it laid the foundation (whether as designed from everlasting or at length realized in the fulness of time) of all filial relation between God and man, being itself the conduit that connects deity and its graces with humanity and its weakness; the source, cause, and principle of every divine blessing whatsoever. And with the third^ — the Sonship of Christ by Resurrection, — we are again more intimately connected than even with the last ; for with this wc have a real and direct, though most myste- rious communion, in that twofold regeneration (for to both the same name is instructively given) of which we are made the possessors and the heirs; the regeneration of the soul in this life, and that of the body in the life to come ; both of which are expressly said to make us "the sons of God," because the one only completes and consummates SERM. II.] The Mijstery of the Ilohj Incarnation, 4i the other; and in both of which we are "the children of God, being the children of the resurrection,''^ — of a resurrec- tion Avhicli is now spiritual (risen with Christ), and which shall hereafter combine spirit and body together. And hence it is that St Paul (Eora. viii.) makes that future resurrection "a manifestation of the sons of God," an un- veiling and public recognition of their sonship ; and hence, too, it is that in the one supernatural gift he finds the source of both the blessings. "If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you. He that raised ■up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His spirit that dwelleth in you." The Spirit which gives the adoption here is the germ of the Spirit which gives the resurrection hereafter : and the resurrec- tion itself is but the adoption made visible in glory. You see, then, how deeply, in every form of His divine relationship, we are interested in " the Son of God ;" how in ITis generation we see our regeneration; and how, in this sense no "jealous God," He would make us sharers of all His own unspeakable privileges, and teach us not even to dread the awful glory of reposing in that " bosom of the Father," where He himself from all eternity has dwelt. But of all these ways and titles of Sonship, doubtless the most wondrous is that which made Christ at once the Son of God and the Son of Man ; the Sonship of this great fes- tival. The eternal generation of the Word of God is too wholly beyond our comprehension to be matter' of real amazement. It is a fact in a sphere of being that utterly overpasses our conjectures. All colors are alike to the blind, and all suppositions as to the substantial nature and essence of God are, apart from revelation, equally possible or impossible to us. On the other hand, the resurrection, marvellous as it is, is easily conceivable when once the deity of Him who rose is granted. But the Incarnation of God, the conjunction of divine and human, is just suffi- ciently within our capacity (for we do know one member 4* 42 The Mystery of the Holy Incarnation, [seem. ii. of the connection) to let us feel how infinitely it also tran- scends it. It is tlie ni3^stery of mysteries, the wonder of heaven and earth, each alike astonished at the union of both, the one everlasting miracle of divine power and love. In such a subject as this, what can one say Avhich is not unworthy of it ? It were vain to try amplification or orna- ment of such things as these. This matter is far vaster than our vastest conception, infinitely grander than our loftiest ; yet overpoAveringly awful as it is, how familiarity still reconciles us to hearing of it without awe ! Perhaps even the overpowering greatness of the subject makes us despair of conceiving it at all. All the wonders of God fall deadly on unfitted minds. And thus men learn list- lessly to hear words without even an effort to attach ideas to them ; and this is not least the case with those wbo dis- pute the most bitterly about the lifeless words themselves. In such a case, all that can be done is to endeavor to de- vise some mode of meeting this miserable influence of habit, by forcing the mind to make some faint effort to realize the infinite magnificence of the subject. Let us endeavor, then, to approach it thus. You are wandering (I will suppose) in some of the wretched retreats of poverty, upon some mission of busi- ness or charity. Perplexed and wearied amid its varieties of misery, you chance to come upon an individual whose conversation and mien attract and surprise you. Your attention enkindled by the gracious benevolence of the stranger's manner, you inquire, and the astounding fact reveals itself, that in this lone and miserable scene you have by some strange conjuncture, met with one of the great lights of the age, one belonging to a different and distant sphere, one of the leaders of universal opinion, on whom your thoughts had long been busied, and whom you had for years desired to see. The singular accident of an interview so unexpected fills and agitates your mind. You form a thousand theories as to what strange cause could SERM. II.] The Mystery of the Holy Incarnation. 43 liavc brought him there. You recall how he spoke and looked; you call it an epoch in your life to have witnessed so startling an occurrence, to have beheld one so distin- guished in a scene so much out of all possibility of antici- pation. And this, even though he were in nowise appa- rentl}^ connected with it except as witnessing and compas- sionating its groups of misery. Yet again, something more wonderful than this is easily conceivable. Upon the same stage of wretchedness a loftier personage may be imagined. In the wild revo- lutions of fortune even monarchs have been wanderers. Suppose this, then — improbable indeed, but not impossible surely. And then what feelings of respectful pity, of deep and earnest interest, would thrill your frame, as you con- templated such a one cast down from all that earth can minister of luxury and power, from the head of councils and of armies, to seek a home with the homeless, to share the bread of destitution, and feed on the charity of the scornful. How the depths of human nature are stirred by such events ! how they find an echo in the recesses of our hearts, these terrible espousals of majesty and misery. But this will not suffice. There are beings within the mind's easy conception, that far overpass the glories of the statesman and the monarch of our earth. Men of even no extreme ardor of fancy, when once instructed as to the vastness of our universe, have yearned to know of the life ond intelligence that animate and that guide those distant regions of creation which science has so abundantly and so wonderfully revealed ; and have dared to dream of the communications that might subsist — and that may yet in another state of existence subsist — with the beings of such spheres. Conceive, then, no longer the mighty of our Avorld in this strange union with misery and degradation, but the presiding spirit of one of these orbs ; or multiply his power, and make him the deputed governor, the vice- gerent angel, of a million of those orbs that are spread in 44 The Mystery of the Holy Incarnation. [SERM. ii. tlieir myriads through infinity. Think ^Yhat it would be to be permitted to hold high converse with such a dele- gate of heaven as this ; to find this lord of a million worlds the actual inhabitant of our own ; to see him and yet live ; to learn the secrets of his immense administration, and hear of forms of being of which men can now have no more conception than the insect living on a leaf has of the forest that surrounds him. Still more, to find in this being an interest, a real interest in the affairs of our little corner of the universe; of that earthly cell which in point of fact is absolutely invisible from the nearest fixed star that spar- kles in the heavens above us. Nay, to find him willing to throw aside his glorious toils of empire, in order to meditate our welfare, and dwell among us for a time. This surely would be wondrous, appalling, and yet transporting ; such as that, when it had passed away, life would seem to have nothing more it could offer compared to the being blessed with such an intercourse. And now mark, — behind all the visible scenery of nature; beyond all the systems of all the stars; around this whole universe, and through the infinity of infinite space itself; from all eternitj^ and to all eternity ; there lives a Being, compared to whom that mighty spirit just described, with his empire of a million suns, is infinitely less than to you is the minutest mote that floats in the sunbeam. There is a Being in whose breath lives the whole im- mense of worlds, who with the faintest wish could blot them all from existence, and who, after they had all vanished away like a dream, would remain, filling the whole tre- mendous solitude they left, as unimpaired in all the fulness of His might, as when He first scattered them around Ilim to be the flaming beacons of His glory. With Him, co-in- finite with immensity, coeval with eternity, the universe is a span, its duration a moment. Hear His voice attesting His own eternal sovereignty: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away." But who is SERM. II.] llie Mystery of the Holy Incarnation. 45 He that thus builds the throne of His glory upon the ruins of earth and heaven; who is He that thus triumphs over a perishing universe, Himself alone eternal and impassible? The child of a Jewish woman, brethren ; He who, as on this day, was laid in a manger, because there was no room for him in the inn at Bethlehem ! Such is the Incarnation of the Son of God ; such is the event that astounds the angels who have no part in it; while men, its subjects, can hear it with less interest than the fable of a romance. And consider that in all our previous suppositions there was but outward humiliation, a contact with degradation which still left the internal nature unal- tered. But the Lord of heaven and earth blended our nature with His own; He took the manhood into God. He bound ns up with Himself as one invisible being; He shared not only our state, but our nature and essence ; He took from us a human nature that He might give us a divine. And remember further, that this mystery of the God and Man is a mystery for everlasting. As there ever has been, and ever will be, the eternal Son of God, so will there ever remain the eternal Son of Man. This blessed union is incapable of dissolution; our immortality is sus- pended on its continuance; we could not have life eternal unless God were to be man eternal. The first fruits will re- main with the rest of the harvest in glory. Yes: for ever- more shall the ransomed of Zion behold their own bright model in heaven, and grow more divine as they behold. He will still, as man and God, be the link that connects them with the Father; this poor humanity for which He suffered so bitterly He loves too deeply to part with it. It is said that mothers love with most tenderness the child for whom they have suffered most; the agonies of the Eternal endured in our behalf have attached Him for ever to our world and our nature. That nature He retains for ever. From it, quickened by the divinity, proceed mysterious influences (those which He calls the gift of His body and 4:6 The Mystery of the Holy Incarnation. [SERM. ii. Blood) to His militant Cliurch below; with it He pleads before the Father, when through the Cross He would gain forgiveness for your repented sins and infirmities ; in it He will rule for ever, dispensing the terms of His judgment and treasures of His love. But this is a day upon, which too much remains to be done, and that the most blessed portion of our Christian service, for me to detain you unduly. The Lord Himself, I trust, will be spiritually with you just now in those holy mysteries which He has committed to His servants to dis- pense to His children; and by which, as the Church in- structs you in her exhortation, " eating the flesh of Christ and drinking His blood, you dwell in Christ and Christ in you, you are one with Christ and Christ with you." But to such a service, springing as it does essentially out of the incarnation of the Lord (for none could "eat His flesh and drink His blood," till He had taken upon Him flesh and blood, — to such a service it is most appropriate to ask you, ere you join in it. How feel you towards this great funda- mental truth, that Christ has become a man and a Saviour? Do you habitually realize the fact that your nature occupies this awful position of being borne by the eternal Son of God ? that your human nature is the vesture in which this everlasting Priest is attired, the regal robe of this Almighty King ? How shall men dare to sully a nature thus dignified, or make their own bodies unworthy to share in the flesh and blood of Christ? If He has thought your nature worthy of heaven, will you wilfully degrade it to hell? If He has carried it through all the courts on high, amid the wonder of angels, will you make it the habitation of unclean spirits, — of pride, impurity, envy, sloth ? Oh, it is a mighty honor, but it is a terrible responsibility too, to have a brother who is the eternal Son of God ! Oh, it is a fearful thing to think that we can never more disgrace our own nature without also disgracing His ! — that every sin against ourselves is now an insult to Him who has identified Him- SERM. II.] The Mystery of the Holy Incarnation. 47 self with, us ! When He, who would not take on Him the nature of angels, has taken into Himself our manhood as the pledge and earnest of its total purification, how terrible becomes the guilt of wilfully counterworking His merciful condescension, by debasing what He has designed to honor! Devils themselves are unable to reach this guilt, for they have never had an incarnate Redeemer; the Son of God has never been a Christ for them ! What feelings, too, are those which you bring to this anniversary of all these wonders; to the day and season which alone of all our festivals, is named from Christ Him- self? This is ordinarily held to be a season for feasting and for joy; and there is a sense and degree in which it may well be such. In even a merely temporal view, there are feelings which no wise adviser would teach men wholly to suppress, that gather round this period; that are too closely connected with many of the best and most valuable qualities of man to be rudely censured. The reunion of families and friends, the renewal of old domestic ties, the very recollections of former anniversaries, fraught as they are with warnings, — even the preservation of ancient cus- toms, — a matter of more importance than might at first sight appear, in an age like this, and connected with a tem- per which no Anglican Churchman can ever underrate, — all these are things which have their value, and which (considered in themselves) religion would mistake its office in undertaking indiscriminately to oppose. But remember that nearly all this men might have felt even in that heathen festival which is said to have preceded our Christian feast at this period of the year. There is a higher joy which befits the time as a Christian anniversary; a joy which springs from higher sources, and is maintained by higher prospects. To those who partially live in eternity Christ- mas is indeed a time of solemn rejoicing ; a happy memo- rial to their thoughts of the great work of divine love ; a remembrancer to faith and hope; and, — why should we 48 The Mystery of the Holy Incarnation, [seem. ii. fear to say it ? — to many sucli no unpleasing token, in tlie close of yet another year, of the rapid passing away of that period which still separates the suffering disciple from his glorified Lord. And hence, to the possessors of such spiri- tual consolations, the time is a time of humiliation too ; the Christian, among all his comforts, cannot forget where his Lord was born, and to what life. The highest forms of Christian joy are ever inexpressibly mingled with humili- ation; it is still, to the last, the joy of the Cross. Alas! as if to impress this lesson, the Church has followed the com- memoration of the birth of our Lord with that of the death of His first martyr. Those are no right feelings of joy which can lead you, in the exulting sense of the riches of grace which are celebrated in the festival of the Incarnation, to forget the sorrows to which the Holy One of Grod became incarnate. And as one of the best and simplest particular lessons of the time, — even as Christ has for our sakes be- come poor, so for His should the poor be remembered. This is a time to remember the wants that surround you : to give liberally in imitation of Him who gave all. The Gospel of Christ sanctifies what custom has long sanctioned; that the poor in Christ have special claims at whatever period the humiliation of their Lord is remembered. In them He is present, and, as it were, in emblem still incar- nate. He leaves them in the world to exercise your faith and love. When just now, in the mystic symbols. He shall bestow upon you who have faith to receive it the spiritual gift of his body and blood, giving back to you with new and quickening efi&cacy what He took originally from your nature, — remember this; feel for others as He felt for you; practise the lovely lesson He taught; and though all you can do have no intrinsic merit to purchase heaven, though it be only through that body now incorporated into the person of Christ, and in Him meritorious, jow. can be any- Avise acceptable to God, — yet through Him your Christmas SERM. II.] The Mystery of the Holy Incarnation, 49 gifts of mercy to the poor will find favor with His Father. God will rejoice to see in you the faint but faithful copies of His Son. He will recompense you in that hour when a cup of cold water, given in the name of Christ, shall not be forgotten, or lose its eternal reward. SERMON III. THE DAILY SELF-DENIAL OF CHRIST. (A Lenten Sermon.) If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. — Matthew xvi. 24. "This," brethren, "is an hard saying; who can hear it?" You observe in what terms the Captain of our Sal- vation lays down the laws of His service ; how, having been Himself a man of sorrows, He would attire His Church and people in the same uniform of woe. "Hereunto are ye called," declares the same Peter who, on this occasion, when our text was spoken, would have saved Christ from being the model, as he afterwards, for a while, strove to save himself from being the copyist of shame and suffer- ing; "Hereunto are ye called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that we should follow His steps." In truth it is an " hard saying," but in a different sense from that mysterious saying to which Christ's hearers first applied the expression. The discourse at Capernaum was " hard" to the natural reason ; this is hard to the natu- ral temper and disposition. But so far from opposing the calm verdict of unprejudiced reason, it will, I believe, the more we reflect, be found the more perfectly to correspond to everything we can collect from the notices of reason, and the information of experience. The doctrine, I say, that man must ordinarily be made perfect through suffer- SERM. III.J The Daily Self-Denial of Christ. 51 ing; tliat affliction, in a, greater or less measure of it, is — particular instances of exception apart — tlie great earthly instrument in the hand of God for bringing the spirits of men into subjection to the Father of spirits ; that a course of uninterrupted prosperity is, in its very nature, adverse to the inward principle of religion, and, therefore, requires to be tempered by extraordinary prudence and secret self- denial ; this 1 conceive, to be not only the universal voice of Scripture, but clearly demonstrable to every one who will patiently attend to the lessons of common experience, and the workings of his own heart within him. When, however, we speak thus of affliction, and suffer- ing, and self-denial, as requisite to the formation of the Christian character, it is right, in order to prevent doubts and misconstructions, to say that the terms are employed in a wide sense. I do not mean to assert, that direct per- secution is essential to holiness; the saints can be bred only in sight of the dungeon and the stake; or even that overwhelming earthly reverses are necessary to form the man of God. The thing required is self denial^ and it may be exercised in many, — in all spheres of life. The thing required is not momentary, or the result of anything mo- mentary ; it is a constant and habitual temper, and hence in St Luke's record of this discourse, the taking of the cross is declared to be " daily." The cross is a large and compre- hensive word, but with whatever variety applied to indi- viduals, it cannot lose its essential nature ; it still carries the nails that pierced the body, and the shame that pene- trates the soul. Wherever it rises upon the page of Scrip- ture, it cannot but bring with it the shadow of pain and trouble ; wherever it is planted, whatever be the celestial consolations, surely the daily world can no longer be the pleasant land it was of old. Wherever it is erected, surely as at first there will be " darkness over all the earih^'' even though that darkness may make the stars of heaven shine more brightly. The thing imported in this daily cross is 52 The Daily 8elf-Benial of Christ. [SERM. III. self-denial^ and with self-denial the "aneasy murmurs of the self that is denied, with self-denial more or less of pain ; — of pain that has many alleviations, trouble that may gradu- ally decrease as patience grows to the consummation of her " perfect work," and the stamp of God is deeper impressed upon the soul, but that in few cases can ever be expected wholly to cease, and that no earnest pilgrim of Zion should ever wish to wholly cease. Think of all the fettered but impatient vices, the tolerated imperfections, the residues of old follies, the rash impulses of even the better nature, the self-deceits, the masked and plausible weaknesses — benevo- lence becoming lethargic under the name of retirement, or ambitious under the title of zeal — the self-excusings, the concealed reluctancies, that beset even the holiest among us ; and you will incline to pronounce that, where life is but too short for discipline, we ought not to covet too much repose before the grave. Circumstantially the cross may vary, but its purpose is the same in all ; and that pur- pose our Lord has here, with great precision, assigned. When the Apostles had to exhort and console, they spoke of direct and pressing persecution as the characteristic of the cross which they had themselves to sustain, and to induce others to sustain. Christ, with (as became Him) a master grasp of all the coming ages of the Church, went back upon the universal principle, and spoke of self denial^ — • self-denial that applies with equal force to every age, rank, and position of human life. Thus, to take the ordinary state of Christians, — which always must be the most important practical one, — the law of life here intended will be chiefly evidenced in such characteristics as these (always reserving a readiness for any of the more searching trials of Christian firmness, which few can expect to be very long without, in some form, ex- periencing) ; a subdued, strict, and patient temper, the pro- duce, or the progressive growth of the " overcoming" power of faith, realizing the invisible, and filled with the SERM. III.] The Daily Self -Denial of GhrisL 53 awe of a present God ; a constant and zealous watchfulness over the peculiar occasions of temptation belonging to one's station ; an avoidance of all exaggerated excitements, as being, however seductive, wholly unsuited to the healthy state of the Christian mind, which is eminently " sober :" in short, that tenderness of conscience and habitual hum- bleness of spirit, which seems so touchingly expressed by the Hebrew idiom of " walking softly." It is thus, per- haps, that one would describe the spirit of Gospel self- denial in the average condition of human life. In pros- perity and adversity, new characters of the same spirit emerge. The resolute servant of Christ is marked, in great worldly 'prosiperiiy^ by a deliberate refusal of high earthly enjoyments; by a constant consciousness of that exceeding peril of his position, of which his Master has spoken so awfully (Matt. xix. 24) ; by a purposed counter- action of the cruel kindness of fortune in large charities and earnest internal mortification. In extreme adversity^ it is given to such an one to welcome it as the appointed instrument of discipline, — "the schoolmaster to bring him to Christ ;" to measure love by chastisement, and see the deepest tenderness in the severest trial ; to find, in the cross itself, a sad unearthly joy; and in praying, "thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven," to make earth, by the power of such resignation, in some degree the heaven that he prays it may imitate ! There is one case which I think of importance enough to be specially mentioned, as an exception to the Chris- tian's avoidance of all unusual degrees of excitement ; it is that in which some perilous temptation has required to be met, — as it ever ought, if possible, — by a sudden change of scene and state. In this case, it may be a point of Chris- tian prudence tt> introduce occupations somewhat more stimulant than the usual average, — in the first place, to engage the imagination^ which too often perpetuates old temptations on a new scene, and in a form even more peril- 54 The Daily Self-Denial of Chnst [SERM. III. ously attractive; in the next place, to prevent, after the sadden vacuum of engrossing thoughts, the dangerous col- lapse of melancholy and despair. This is exactly analogous to the use of stimulants in medicine, and is, like that, an exception to the general course of regimen, always pre- supposing a disordered state of the spiritual patient. The few who have wisdom and firmness enough to prosecute through life the great work of self-improvement will value hints of this kind, which indeed are disregarded only be- cause we live from day to day. as it were, by chance ; and forget that human life itself is as much an Art, governed by its own rules and precepts of perfection, as the most complicated profession by which that life is maintained or adorned. But we must consider more specially the substance of the passage before us. The command it contains is based upon the great principle of the imitation of Christ; unlike all other legislators (for who but He could dare it?) His life is the Law of His people. If we would gain the root of the matter, then, we must contemplate suffering as manifested in Christ Himself; and in Him behold the archetype of that sanctified and sancti- fying sorrow, of which His mourning saints attempt to present their scattered images. Let Peter himself and his fellow-saints be seen in their Master. If there be healing in these bitter waters, let us analyze them in the freshness of their fountain ; from it the streams derive every precious quality they possess. On this occasion, then, I shall speak of the Master; the disciples are but His likeness. To-day we shall examine the movements of the Leader in this march of the cross; the followers may see themselves in Him. That you may not forget the relation of the subject to yourselves, I have briefly told you how you are to bear this banner of your profession; but I have told it only briefly, because I would for the present engage you principally with its relation to SERM. III.] The Daily Self-Denial of Christ. 55 Christ. I speak then of the daily self-denial of the Son of God, which is here set forth as the model of ours, for it is only as we understand the model that we can expect to understand the copy. The subject may require a little attention, but none can more abundantly reward it. The everlasting God of heaven and earth was Himself a mourner I The Author of light, life, and happiness has Himself wept real tears ! Amazing fact, — which familiarity alone can deprive of unspeakable wonder! Let us endea- vor to escape the lulling effect of that familiarity by ap- proaching the subject from its principles, and thus gradu- ally gaining some conception of the marvellousness of its nature, when first presented to a mind properly prepared to receive it. The ultimate facts of the Bible and of the Keason (for the Bible is but the perfection of Reason) are the existence in God's universe of Good and Evil, with Happiness and Misery as belonging respectively to each. Under these all- grasping titles we may class everything ; but once arrived at them we can go no further. We can neither explain them in the world, nor can we explain them away from it ; we can neither unravel them nor remove them. There they are, certain but impenetrable ; — " high as heaven ; what canst thou do ? Deeper than hell ; what canst thou know ?" But though we cannot tell all about them, though we cannot " pluck out the heart of their mystery," yet by the light of Scripture and of Reason, we can gather a good deal of their mutual bearings and relations. We can see that while they are utter and irreconcilable antagonists, they are, in a marvellous manner, connected and recipro- cally operative, the darker element of evil and misery min- istering in a wondrous way to the brighter principle of good ; a plain proof, I may observe, against those Mani- chean notions of rival principles of equal dignity, once so prevalent as an admitted heresy, and still, I fear, floating unacknowledged in many an embittered mind, as the prac- 56 The Daily Self- Denial of Christ. [seem. III. tical creed of disappointment and impenitence. The more we reflect, tlie more clearly we come to see that the reins of empire are really held by a single sovereign, who, blessed be His august name ! is assuredly engaged on the side of moral purity and happiness. But being such, no doubt He must hate and reject, from the inmost depths of His ever- lasting nature, that accursed principle, which, by the volun- tary agency of certain of His rebellious creatures (pervert- ing the freedom of action which was given to make their worship worthy of His throne), has been so long intruded upon His fair creation; He must abhor it alike in itself and in that gloomy retinue of misery which, by inevitable necessity, has entered with it, and with it forever dwells. Yet what is the great primary fact upon which all the essential peculiarities of our religion are founded ? That God, — this same being, — became strangely, inconceivably connected with pain ; that this being, whose nature is in- herent happiness, by some mysterious process entered the regions of suffering ; crossed the whole diameter of exist- ence to bind Himself with His own opposite ; bore, though incapable of moral pollution, the dark shadow of pollution^ even anguish unspeakable ; and though unsubdued by the master. Sin, exhibited Himself, to the wonder of the uni- verse, clad in the weeds of the servant. Death. The main reason of this extraordinary fact is, as you all know, to be found in the necessity of atonement. Indeed, if an atonement were necessary, and for that we must trust the express warrant of Scripture, we know not ivhere the vicarious victim was to be sought, without insuperable objections on the score of justice and of goodness, except in the offended Judge Himself. Our atonement appears to demand, from the very nature of the case, a Person not less than divine. And thus, hidden in the depths of justice and mercy, is found the solution of this astonishing coalition of glory and of woe. Essential happiness thus embraces es- sential misery, because the God of happiness is also the SERM. III.] The Daily SeJf-Denial of Christ. '57 God at once of infinite purity and infinite love. We first start aside at the impossibility ; we gaze longer and deeper, and the conviction slowly rises that it could not be other- wise, and God be what He is. The sacrifice, strange as it is, is but the natural growth of this being ; it is but the child of eternal mercy wedded to eternal truth ; and their spousal home is in the heart of God. Hence it is that the Life and Happiness of the universe, in its love at once of justice and of us, comes, through the medium of the infe- rior nature, in direct contact with misery and death. But into this part of the subject I am not now about to enter. It is not with Christ as He is the divine sacrifice of His own divine justice that I am now mainly to engage you. I bring before you this divine person visiting the regions of pain in such a sense as to be our example ; for so the text presents Him. I exhibit Him, as it does, sufifering as He would have us suffer ; suffering, therefore, that He may accomplish a refining and exalting change upon Himself; not then upon Himself simply as God, for as such change and exaltation are alike impossible, but upon Himself as man, and, therefore, susceptible of all the improvement which the original principles of that part of the creation will allow. It is of the fiery trial I would speak, through which He bore our nature, till He had, Himself the suf- ferer, made it fit to be the shrine of a God, the temple in which He has chosen to dwell for everlasting. Christ the Atoner we acknowledge and adore ; but it is before Christ the Purifier we bend to-day. That this purifying purpose in the sufferings of Christ is recognized in the scriptural accounts of His redemption of our race, I suppose I need not remind you. The "refi- ner's fire" was itself refined ; Himself He perfected to perfect us. He is everywhere described as being ever tempted^ just as we are, though ever victorious, as, — alas ! — we are not ; nor can we doubt the disciplinary character of this constant and painful struggle, when we are told that, 58 The Daily Self -Denial of Christ. [seem. III. " tliougli a Son, He learned obedience by the things wbicTi He suffered," that He was "made perfect through suffer- ings," and by that means " became the author of eternal salvation to all of them that obey Him." Everywhere His trial is made accurately to answer to (5ur own ; nor surely can we, with any reason, doubt that its result upon His own humanity must have been similar to that which we know the same processes produce, and are intended to pro- duce, among ourselves. We find Him immersed in the same difficulties, supported by the same faith, acting in view of the same reward, " in all things made like unto His brethren;" and we know that His human nature was capable of the natural course of advancement, that He could " grow in wisdom" and in years, we may well believe that even in Christ Himself those vigils of prayer so often recorded, those weary wanderings, those patient "enduran- ces of contradiction," the agonies of the garden, the final struggle of the cross, had power to raise and refine the human element of His being beyond the simple purity of its original innocence; that, though ever and equally "with- out sin" the dying Christ was something more consummate still than the Christ baptized in Jordan. This proceeds upon the broad principle, that virtue tried and triumphant ranks above innocence : and this once clearly apprehended, you will see, that if Christ was to possess (as, surely, was on every account fitting) the utmost perfection of our nature in the humanity allied to His God- head, it was necessary that He should possess it in the state of victorious trial. It may, indeed, be objected that this state of exaltation could have been wrought by some sud- den and supernatural illapse of grace. We may, it is true, conceive such a thing ; but only because we may conceive anything not positively self-contradictory. In voluntarily assuming the nature of man, Christ was not, surely, to destroy all analogy between Himself and the whole race of man. In coming to exemplify holiness, He was not to SERM. III.] The Daily Self-Denial of Christ. 59 render all resemblance impossible between tbe original and the copy. In becoming " the first-born among many brethren," He was not to annul every real tie of brother- hood between Himself and His family of younger mourners. Sin alone excepted, the Son of man was still to be one with the sons of men. It is not too much to say, that a perfection thus struck out at a beat by the instantaneous omnipotence of miracle, would have formed a sort of man- hood so utterly removed from our own, that it would have neutralized nearly every single discernible purpose of Him who, in the fulness of an all-pervading sympathy with man as such, " took not on Him the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham." A different form of objection may perhaps float through the minds of some of my hearers. It may seem a deroga- tion to the dignity of Christ to suppose Him capable of moral advancement. But you will remember that all these reasonings apply only to the inferior nature, to that nature in which every humiliating characteristic (if this be, indeed, one) is but a new testimony to the boundless love that brouQjht its Creator to assume it. It is no more an im- peachment to the dignity of Christ that as a man He should have been capable of improvement, than that as a man He should not be infinite. But in what respects may this constant struggle against temptation, this daily burden of the cross, this deliberate assumption of poverty and pain, have contributed to exalt the sinless humanity of Christ to a nobler maturity of perfection ? Now, when suffering is considered simply as occurring in the resistance to all urgent temptation, or as affording the materials of a special temptation to discontent and im- patience, you can at once understand its utility as a dis- cipline of the ivill to unreserved obedience. It is thus to us, it was thus assuredly to " the man Christ Jesus." In this sense, as in the more ordinary one, we may say with t0 The Daily Self-Dmial of Christ [serm. hi. truth it was " His meat and drink to do His Father's will ;" because the practice of doing His father's will nourished and fortified His moral nature, — that is, the strength of His holy resolve, — to more consummate vigor. And for such a purpose it might be shown that suffering is naturally indispensable ; insomuch that it is well nigh impossible to conceive the human will educated to high perfection with- out it. This alone, if followed out, would exhibit sufficient reason why the Kestorer of Man should willingly adopt the position of a harassed and af&icted wanderer ; why He, who was to carry to heaven a perfect humanity, should con- descend to derive its perfection through this particular channel. This alone would evince that, even had salvation been possible without sacrifice or atonement, yet " to deny Himself" was requisite on the part of the blessed represent- ative of our race, if He came to present the model of its highest excellence, and if that excellence consist in the intensity of its resolve to work the will of God. It was not wonderful, before the Christian Kevelation, that men should have anticipated nothing of all this ; but it is very wonderful, with the light which that revelation gives, and is by themselves admitted to give, as to the position of man and the purposes of his Eedeemer, that objectors, instead of murmuring at it as an impossibility, should not see it to be inherently necessary that the friend of man should be " a man of sorrows ;" that had He entered the world as heir to the throne of the Caesars, or to raise another to rival it, His whole life, in relation to its pro- fessed object, had been an inexplicable contradiction. This concerns painful self-denial as connected with temp- tation ; and no doubt this is its chief occasion, and the pur- pose I have just stated its principal object. But beyond this necessary exercise of difficult obedience, the self-denial of Christ may be regarded as embracing His entire prefer- ence of an afflicted life. His voluntary assumption of sorrow as such. For I entertain no doubt, that even apart from SERM. III.] The Daily Self-Denial of Christ. 61 the necessity of trial, the life of humiliation was the life of His choice. And the same spirit breathes through the whole of the religion He founded. For I suppose it may be said with truth, that if any man were to be asked, what it is that characterizes Christianity as a practical system distinguishably from all that preceded it, or from all that have followed without imitating it, he might state it correctly enough in two words, — love and sorrow ; the blessedness of mutual affection, and the blessed- ness of suffering. Of course I do not forget that occasional notices, nay, elaborate treatises, upon subjects akin to these, are to be found among heathen writers. I speak of the prominence given them, the peculiar and quite inimitable way in which they are described and enforced, the import- ance assigned to them in the formation of character, the proportion they bear to the rest of the system, so great that I believe nearly two-thirds of the New Testament, and of those parts of the Old which predict and reflect tlie evan- gelical spirit, will be found directly or indirectly concerned with them both, whether considered separately or inter- twined in the exhortation to loving sympathy with the affliction of others. In Christ Himself, who is His own religion alive and in action, they seem, like rainbow colors, evermore blended and lost in each other ; He is the immor- tal image of both; love and pain are the footprints by which we trace Him from page to page. And who shall say luhich was foremost on Calvary ? Love drew the god- head of Christ from its throne ; sorrow, — sanctifying sor- row, — lifted the manhood into meetness to share it ! Must we not, then, think that there is something in this sorrow, thus cordially and perpetually chosen by our Mas- ter, that is eminently adapted to elevate and purify our being? Is it not probable that, not indeed all sorrow, but sorrow borne with resignation, may liavc some more direct effect than the one we have already noticed, upon the entire frame and temper of the human heart? Must there not be 6 62 The Daily Self-Denial of Christ. [seem. hi. something divinely excellent in that which was deliberately chosen by a divine nature as its peculiar tabernacle, out of all the world afforded, — the sad but awful " cloud above the mercy-seat" in which, while among us, His glory was to dwell? This special excellence is not hard to discover. Hum- bleness OF SPIRIT, the most pervading and universal of all graces, is in the Christian code the very essence of perfection; and sorrow borne with resignation has a direct tendency to produce it. Grief, if it can be looked upon as inflicted by the hand of God, forms a perpetual memorial of subjection, a daily, hourly remembrancer of dependency. Nor, though it may fail, and too often does fail to produce this effect, is it easy to conceive what could supply its place. Now be- cause our Redeemer knew, what it is so hard to persuade even his avowed followers, that in this direction lies the true perfection of man, — that a gentle, unmurmuring sub- missiveness is his truest, brightest heroism, — therefore did He, in His own person, adopt the way that leads to it. He voluntarily mourned, because mourning humiliates, and He would be humble; He daily suffered, because suffering sub- dues the pride of human hearts, and He would teach us to accomplish that conquest. It was the humiliation of a God to take our nature at all; it was the humiliation of a man to crucify that nature daily. He knew, what sages had failed to see, that it was loftiest when lowest; that as it sank in humbleness it rose in glory. And thus the model of all He taught. Himself "the first-born from the dead," He soared to heaven with a spirit lowly as the grave he left; thus beats there, at the right hand of the Majesty on high, a human heart, — the heart of an enthroned king, — more softly subdued to mercy, more meekly patient, than ever sorrowed among the loneliest solitudes of earthly af- fliction! And thus the daily cross could discipline the luill, the daily cross could hu7nhle the spirit; these things are the real perfection of man, and therefore in these garments of SERM. III.] The Daily Self- Denial of Christ. 63 woe the liumanity of God was voluntaril}^ shrouded. Such considerations appear to offer some solution of the fact) they help us to gain some conception of its grounds ; and yet, when once more from the reason I turn to the reality, from the supposed causes to the recorded effect, — I own it, — I feel so astonished, so overwhelmed, that it seems as if we had made no progress at all, as if we were far as ever from understanding it, as if it was impiety to dream we could measure our poor faculties with its unfathomable depth! Thus, brethren, the leader bore His daily cross ; we have dared to imagine loh^j ; but even though we never could conjecture His reason, let us delight to copy His act. If through the cross, not justifying alone but sanctifying also, we must be cleansed unto meetness for the kingdom, may we welcome the cross, yea, pray that it may come, and clasp it joyfully when it comes. If by affliction only we can be softened, boldly let us hope that affliction may be ours ; that "our way may be hedged up with thorns," if so we may return ;" that we may be " borne through the fire," if so we may be brought to "call upon His name," and "say the Lord is our God." I said I would speak only of Christ; you see the word was vain ; we cannot speak of Him and not of His, for they are one. He chose the cross; have you as- sumed yours? Tremble for your own state if you have never knoAvn what it is to bear it ! What mockery of the faith is this which gives us all of religion but the trial, which ex- hibits the Master in hourly tribulation, yet would have His people clothed in soft raiment I as if sanctification were vicarious as well as atonement, and in bearing all our sins He bore all our sufferings also ! If God, — severely kind, — has not afflicted you, learn in some Avay to afflict your- selves. If prosperous, tax your prosperity for the poorer members of Christ. Allay the fever of fleshly will by mortification, of ambitious desires by purpose and resolute self-abasement. Exercise your hearts in a loving sympathy 64 The Dally Self-Denial of Christ. [serm. hi. witli sorrow in every form ; soothe it, minister to it, succor it, revere it. It is a relic of Christ in the world, an image of the great Sufferer, a shadow of the cross. It is a holy and a venerable thing. Have ever before you the house- less wanderer of Galilee ; remember that God is richer and mightier than you, and yet that, when he would take your nature, it was in poverty, and pain, and persecution, He chose it ! SEEMON IV. CRUCIFYING THE SON OF GOD AFEESH. (Preached on Good Fridaj'.) They crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh. — Heb, vi. 6. Various as have been God's dealings with the world, brethren, there is, after all, a terrible impartiality in His dispensations to His rational creatures. Wherever men possess reason and conscience, they possess, in some mea- sure, the means of pleasing or displeasing Him ; whenever they can, in the lowest degree, conceive His law, they are bound to obey it. He can hear us all in the same court, and judge us out of the same books. He can see through the intricacies of His own diversified government. He can estimate every district and age of the world by the stand- ards appropriate to each. And as He contemplates the vast prospect. Christian and Heathen, — as He beholds in the one division those to whom Christ was hidden, but who would perhaps have "received him gladly," in the other those to whom Christ was revealed, but who despised and neglected the revelation, — He doubtless can bring men to a level, balancing their opportunities against their actions, to a degree wholly unattainable by our weak and perplexed vision. The whole world is under a moral government, though we alone are in a written covenant ; all live to God, though we alone have professed " the Law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus." The very temptations that dazzle the 6^- 6Q Crucifying the Son of God afresh. L^^^^- ^^' "unevangelized world are, in innumerable instances, the same temptations that are trying ns, — anger, sensuality, ambition, avarice. We are their brethren in all things ex- cept in the revelation of the divine mercy and the gift of the divine Spirit. God grant that, in the day of wrath, too many of us, now luxuriating in our spiritual privileges, may not have reason to wish that our lot had been cast in the Indians' unevangelized wilderness, that the apology of ignorance had been ours, that we never had been cursed with a knowledge which only eventuated to aggravate our condemnation ! And as, notwithstanding all the vantage and prerogative of the Church of Christ, this sort of secret equity is pre- served in God's arrangements of the relation between His Church and the world, so, doubtless, there is something not unlike it in His arrangements of the ages and provinces of the Church itself. While the human nature of the Church is uniform, its trials must be nearly so. As the Lord of the Charch is the same "-yesterday and to-day and for ever," so the probation He enforces is distributed pretty evenly through all ages and classes. We may be well assured that we endure little which our forefathers have not en- dured, that we are spared little which they have suffered. If we are not asked to perish at the stake in one terrific trial of faith and fortitude, we are summoned to a life of hourly self-denial. If we are not nailed to a cross with one Apostle, we are^ with every disciple of Christ, bound to carry a cross daily. Temptation seems to expire in one re- gion of the soul, but it is to start to fresh vitality in another. If licentiousness ceases to be the cherished vice of an age, it retires to make way for hypocrisy. If ferocious revenge becomes discountenanced, it is succeeded by thoughtless and efteminate ease. The enemy of souls is a master of all the resources of his art, the arsenal of Satan is never empty of weapons. Yet in hind^ — such are the necessary limits of human nature, — they cannot admit of much diversity ; the SEEM. I V.J Gnicifying the Son of Qod afresh. 67 wonder is, after all, that man can be destroyed on so small a stock of passions! In onr crimes we arc evermore the copyists of ourselves or of others. The very same frailty is seen to manifest itself in many distinct forms ; — ■ sometimes in religions errors that, superficially different, coincide in their sources; sometimes (which is still more lamentable) in those unhappy follies of Christian people which make religion too often present only an ungraceful caricature of the world. And thus mankind reiterate them- selves from age to age, from country to country ; the heart goes through the same narrow circle of follies in a thousand spheres ; each generation is the poor echo of its predecessor. Alas ! the dear-bought experience of the Church of Christ has not brought its members wisdom ; the story of trial and victory written in the blood of martyrs has not taught us prudence. "With whole libraries of records that tell us how the chosen few among our fathers fought and won the hea- venly conflict, we begin as infants, — inexperienced, feeble, irresolute, — the easy prey of every commonplace illusion, vanquished by the novelty of seductions which were old in the days of Peter, and John, and Paul. Thus temptations may vary outwardly; but while the human nature on which they operate remains unchanged, they must be found in substance much the same. But of all the equalizations of evil in successive ages, of all the repetitions of trial from generation to generation, of all the instances evincing that, in the Church as in the world, "the thing that has been will be," — unquestionably that expressed in the text is the most startling and fearful. The Crucifixion of Christ, in its literal reality, stands alone in the history of man. It was the last and darkest depth of human criminality. The original fall, and the rejection of the Redeemer, are the two saddest pages in the story of our race. But mournful as is the former, it has never, probably, left the impression upon the heart which is at once produced by all those dread accompaniments 68 Cnicifijing the Son of Ood afresh. [seem. IV. that prepared and embittered tlie last sufferings of the meek and merciful friend of man. He had been only known as the dispenser of unpurchasable blessings, as a man patient of suffering beyond the experience of living men, prompt to sacrifice every guiltless comfort to the slightest wish of those around Him, rejoicing with every innocent joy, and weeping with all who wept. His unbounded powers had ever been at the service of humble affliction. No one had ever dared to breathe calumny against the profound purity of His life. None like Him had ever united abhor- rence of the sin with love and pardon for the returning sinner. In claiming to be the Messiah of prophecy He disturbed no temporal throne; in claiming to be the Mes- siah of the heart He but asked, one would think, what no generous spirit could refuse. Such a Being as this was among us to die a death of violence ; men framed like you and me destroyed Him. As if to mark the event as the uttermost point of human crime. Providence seems to have permitted it to gather to itself a tribute from almost every evil passion of our miserable nature. Designed to atone for all guilt, almost all guilt was called out to accomplish it. Injustice, cruelty, false shame, unworthy indolence, covetousness, ambition, hypocrisy, envy, — all were in differ- ent ways exhibited in this tremendous tragedy ; all contri- buted in different ways to fix the catastrophe. No, never, surely, is man, in all the possibilities of futurity, destined again to consummate a wickedness like this. It must be forever solitary in the world, an event placed beyond anticipation, repetition, or parallel; a lonely and terrible monument of unapproachable guilt. Not thus, however, speaks the voice of inspiration. Heaven has not spared us this trial. When Christ Avas about to die He instituted a memorial sacrament of His passion, to show forth His death until He come. It would seem that there is, as it were, a fearful and Satanic sacra- ment too, of that same dread hour, by wliich it is still in SEBM. IV.] Cnicifylng the Son of God afresh. 69 man's power to reiterate and prolong His death until IIo come to judge tlie long succession of His crucifiers. St Paul delivers to us the tremendous truth, that there is in man a continued capacity of " crucifying afresh the Son of God ;" a power to act over again all the scene of his torture, to league with the malignant priests and the scoffing sol- diers, to buffet the unresisting cheek, to bind the crown of thorns. You will be mistaken if you think this matter can be dismissed under the cold and vague criticism which pro- nounces it a merely figurative illustration intended to heighten the coloring of a vivid description. It is not thus that the deep sayings of the Holy Ghost are to be treated. Believe me the Apostles do not descend to the artifices of popular rhetoric. The proposition before us is of too momentous import to have been ever intended for the secondary or accidental purpose here imagined. Such a declaration as this, if it were not in some sense literally true, would have been misplaced and exaggerated to a degree not to be admitted by any reverential interpreter of the word of God. It must, indeed, be conceded, that the crime to which St Paul specially ascribes this fearful character is a peculiar one, and, in its full extent, not ordinarily exemplified. lie speaks of deliberate apostasy from the faith of Jesus. But there is no one characteristic of direct and utter apostasy which does not, in its own degree, belong to those daily desertions of the cause of Jesus which ally the miserable votaries of the God of this world with the avowed enemies of Christ in every age. There are the apostasies of the social table, of the fireside and the market-place, the re- fined apostasies of our own modern and daily life, as real as the imperial treachery of a Julian, or the cold-blooded abandonment of a Demas. To every one of these the same impress belongs; it may be branded more or less deeply, but it is branded on all ; they are all alike rife with the spirit 70 Crucifying the Son of God afresh. [SERM. iv. of Caiapbas's council-chamber, they are all echoes of the voice that cried aloud, " Crucify Him, crucify Him !" Do you doubt this, my brethren? Is it too severe a charge, too oppressive a thought to entertain? You are not pleased with the ruthless allegation, so needlessly, unjustly, intemperately stern. It is scarcely fair that a Christian minister should seize the advantage of his posi- tion to load his fellow-servants with so heavy a denun- ciation. Far from the possibility of such unspeakable dis- loyalty, you have often thought, as you mused over the mournful narrative that precedes the triumphant close of the Gospels, that you would gladly resign the whole world to have had but the opportunity of standing beside that cross with the Virgin Mother and St John ; of raising your voices boldly against the murderers ; of avowing with all the energy of indignant justice, that you would be no part- ners in their wickedness ; of dying, if necessary, under their blows in behalf of the suffering innocence that writhed and bled before them. " What ! crucify Jesus, my Lord and my God ! The rightful sovereign of my heart, the meek and majestic sufferer whom no man need have been com- manded to adore, for no single-hearted rnan could ever have heard or seen Him without the instinctive adoration of devoted love ! Crucify Him F No ; bring me to the trial, place me in the judgment-hall of Pilate, or in front of the accursed tree; let me look but once upon my Saviour's face, and I will tear that wreath of thorns from his dishonored brow, and bend in worship of my insulted Lord before them all !" Alas ! we cannot do this for you. The test, perhaps in mercy, is impracticable. But there is a test we can apply. "Will you honestly abide it ? Pass from imaginary suppo- sitions to attainable facts, from what you might do if you but were as you never can be, to what you are doing in the position where God has placed you. Eeflcct on the frame and temper of mind, on the weakness and the wickedness, SERM. IV.] Crucifying the Son of God afresh. 71 that made the chosen people of God the murderers of Ills Son, and try if you cannot catch some faint image of that treachery in your own hearts. But be true to yourselves if you would indeed detect the lurking evil, and think not that even among the lest of us, in a world of oft-recurring temptation, it is useless to prosecute the scrutiny. Doubt- less the accuracy of the image will vary in degree : here, through progressive sanctification, all but obliterated ; here, through remaining worldliness, vivid and undeniable ; here, through total rejection of Christ, all but complete. To those whom God has taught and guided by His own deep Spirit, these reasonings may be little applicable ; ihey may be enabled to feel themselves truly one with Christ in His humiliation and His sufferings ; they may be given to know, by the blessed experience of an " overcome world," that their faith is indeed competent to stand a fiery trial. Yet, even they, — if any such rare and blessed spirits be before me, — can find it a cause of holy vigilance to be thus urged to examine themselves yet more and more, and a cause of delighted gratitude to feel that, if there be cowardice, and indifference, and treason all around them, their God has reserved them from the miseries and condemnation of sucli a state. Erect then the cross of Christ in the centre of His bap- tized Church, even as it stood of old on Calvary ! The Son of God has borne it. He stands beside it, as on that dark day. A word may save Him the coming ignominy, but will the people speak it ? They gather around him with eager eyes. No topic engages their thoughts or inquiries but Him and His fate. His name is on every lip. While they thus congregate to this new crucifixion, we may stand aside and contemplate the throng. To estimate the resemblance we must turn to the original. When Christ was, in that day of mingled horror and glorj^, sacrificed on Calvary, few things were more remarkable in the accessories of the event than the feelings and motives 72 Crucifying the Son of Ood afresh. [seem. IV. of the 2^'^ople. Christ was iinq-aestionably a favorite with the mass of the people ; the great obstacle to the schemes of the priests was always that " they feared the people." His gracious bearing, and the mysterious anticipation that surrounded and dignified His singular life, had evidently caught and conciliated the popular mind. Nor was it un- qualified malignity that made them His persecutors. Christ Himself had found a palliation for this crime in their igno- rance, He besought forgiveness for them because "they hievj not what they did." Yet, however it came to pass, this people, thus disposed, are found the unanimous destroy- ers of their Prophet, the tumultuous petitioners for His crucifixion, the fierce invokers of His blood on them and on their children ! Strange as this appears, is there indeed nothing that re- sembles it in our own experience ? Is no parallel to be found for it in the Christian world around us ? Can we not, when we go abroad into the highways of daily life, find something in the general mind that reminds us of a people honoring Christ as long as He offers easy blessings, flocking round His standard with enthusiasm so long as He is made the standard-bearer of a party, professing boundless admiration, devotion, and love; yet when the true hour of trial comes, and the question can no longer be escaped, — Shall we surrender our pleasures or our Eedeemer? — give up the favor of earthly superiors or the favor of the King of Heaven? — abandon our cherished sins, or with our sins nail Jesus to the cross once more? — then^ relinquishing their short-lived discipleship, following the instigation of blind and guilty guides, turning with the turning tide, and swell- ing the torrent of the persecutors of the Body of Christ. Turn again to the record. Among the unhappy instru- ments of Satan, on that dread occasion, was one whose name, almost unknown in all else, his relation to this event has miserably immortalized — the wretched, wavering, timo- rous Pilate, AVillino^ to save, but afraid to resist, anxious SERM. IV.] Crucifying the Son of Ood afresh. 73 to do right as long as virtue cost no trouble, — has this crucifier of Christ no image among us? Are there no Pilates among our grave and reputable men of business ? — none who could be models of consummate piety if there were no danger of its disturbing their tenure of wealth and influ- ence? — who would gladly save the Son of God from degra- dation if they were not a little apprehensive of degrading themselves in the task, — and would allow Him supreme authority as long as their own was warranted secure? Compounders between earth and heaven, who would have the best of this life and the life to come, — it is not to such that Christ will intrust the maintenance of His honor on earth. Well He knows that a single pressing trial must infallibly determine the hesitating heart to easy evil ; that the crowd have but to threaten discontent, the powerful to hint impeachment, and the Pilate of daily life will hand over his Lord to the torturers. Not far removed from this is the case of those rulers who struggled against their very faith lest it should hazard their popularity. "Among the chief rulers," says St John, " many believed on Him, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue ; for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God." Alas! these poor dependents on human fame stand not alone in the world; this weapon of the evil one has not been suffered to rust in disuse ! False shame operated against confession, of course, in all ranks, but it was among " the chief rulers" that it is here eminently re- corded to have wrought, and the fact is instructive. It is among the higher orders that the verdict of society becomes of such tremendous moment, — heavy enough to outweigh every other consideration, vague and vast enough to hide God and His judgment altogether from our view. What is peculiarly dangerous about this influence is the insidious- ness of its advances. It is not with open disavowal that the votary of fashionable worldliness disclaims the Lord of 7 74 Gracifying the Son of God afresh, [seem. iv. glory. A peril sucli as this might be met and warded off. But society does its work surely because slowly. Eeligion is not proved to be absurd, but assumed to be so; the world would not harshly ask us to disbelieve in Christ, but merely to forget Him. Principles are lost for ever before we have dreamed they were in danger, and the poor victim of the world's opinion has learned to " crucify afresh the Son of God," without relinquishing one outward character- istic of discipleship ! But these, wretched and criminal as they are, are but the less daring forms of crime. Deeper guilt than this bore the sufiering Lamb of God to His cross, and deeper guilt than this is not confined to His first crucifiers. Can we witness nothing that recalls the rebellious ambition of those who said, " This is the heir ; come, let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours?" The world at large, — yea, the far immense of worlds, — is the inalienable property of God ; the inheritance is entailed upon that only-begotten Son "whom," it is written, "He appointed Heir of all things." And when, refusing to hold as His lessees, spurn- ing His rights of lordship, we would explode His claims for antiquated and fanciful, that we may enjoy His gift as though the fee were ours ; in all this is there none of that spirit which once raged in those who, in angry impatience of His claims, "took counsel against Him for to put Him to death ?" And when a paltry hope of gain or advance- ment can bribe us to forsake a gracious Master, to forget all He has done, and all He has borne ; does he remain then alone in the world who "said unto the chief priests. What will ye give me, and I will deliver Him unto you?" Nay, at such an hour, we are worse than Judas ; for even Judas, the miserable suicide of remorse, we may believe, had an- other option been his, would not have "crucified the Son of God afresh r'' Can we descend yet deeper? Christ was crucified on the imputation of blasphemy. "He hath spoken blasphemy ; SERM. IV.] Crucifying the Son of Ood afresh. 75 behold now ye have heard his blasphemy. What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death." What was the " blasphemy ?" He had called Himself the Son of God, and the Son of Man, and in right of this trans- cendent union, the Judge to come "in the clouds of heaven," and "sitting at the right hand of power." If this was/aZse, his crucifiers were justified; if this was false, in a theocratic government. He deserved His fate. There are those who pronounce that mysterious title false in any sense that could have ever made it "blasphemy" from human lips, who deny the Sonship of the Eternal any significance be- yond what more or less belongs to all the virtuous re- vealers and interpreters of the will of heaven that have ever instructed man. Surely we cannot in justice refuse to such impugners the place they have chosen for themselves in the throng that circled the cross of Jesus! Still we have not sunk to the last level of the Jewish persecutors. Fallen as we are, we could not have borne to prefer Barabbas, the thief and murderer, to our pure and guiltless Redeemer. And who, then, are the darling idols of human applause? Who are the chosen of our race that poetry crowns with its halo of glory, and every young imagination bows to worship? Who, but the laurelled Barabbases of history, the chartered robbers and homicides that stain its pages with blood, and that, after eighteen hun- dred years of Christian discipline, the world has not yet risen to discountenancing? Remove the conventional dis- credit that attaches to the weaker thief, exalt him to the majesty of the military despot, and how many would vote for Barabbas, how many linger with the lowly Jesus ? "Be it so, but our votes would at least be open and un- disguised, we would not stoop to the meanness of hypo- crisy. We would not, with those you are pleased to make our prototypes, 'put on Him the scarlet robe and the crown, and the sceptre,' that we might 'bow the knee and mock Him.' Of this^ at least, we are incapable." Perhaps 76 Crvucifying the Son of God afresh. [SERM. IV. so. I praj God it may be so. And yet, recall but tbe hour that lias just now floated past you into eternity, when you " bowed the knee" to this same Jesus who was cruci- fied, when your lips uttered words of piercing sorrow, and besought His mercy and implored His aid, as erring and straying sheep, as miserable offenders, miserable sinners. Ask yourselves how many knees were bowed in the re- pentance the lips rehearsed, how many hearts were melted in the agony the tongue so readily expressed. And if con- science whisper an accusation, bethink you how differs this from the guilt of those who called Him King and despised the royalty they ascribed ; or was it more a crime to insult Him when He walked the earth in 'poverty and pain, than when he sits, as now, the recognized monarch of the uni- verse ! Such a monarch is He, and in such glory enthroned. And yet, with all the splendor that surrounds Him, doubt- less He does feel in some unimaginable way for our sor- rows, and does lament our sins. Infinitely happy He is indeed ; but we do not know what elements may be mingled without destroying celestial happiness. That He rejoices in our triumphs is certain ; how can this be if He regret not our lapses? And when the Apostle tells us that wilful rejection of Christ can still in some sense per- petuate His shame, who shall dare to set accurate limits to these awfal revelations ? Think, then, were it possible to renew in all its literal horrors the degradation and insult of Calvary, to act the scene of ignominy before assembled heaven, to drag the everlasting King from His throne amid the wondering and weeping angels, — think if each delibe- rate sin were again to disgrace Him as He was disgraced before, — who among us could endure, under any force of temptation, to risk such atrocious guilt ? Yet, if there be truth in Scripture, such guilt, or a guilt like this, is in effect yours, when, taught to approach a covenanted God in Christ, you turn with contempt from Him who loved SERM. IV.] Cmcifyiivj the Son of God afresh, 77 and bouglit jou. You see it, brethren ! tlie tragedy of Golgotha has many actors ; every generation, every land reiterates these multiplied crucifixions. Be assured that the man who rejects Christ now, when He is formally recognized by high and noble, would have been much more certain to have joined in crucifying Him in Judea. The Pharisees boasted, " If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets ;" and having so spoken, they proceeded to murder the Lord and Inspirer of prophets. May God in mercy enable all of us, who have not deeply weighed this most awful matter, at length to lay it to heart. May He fulfil to us what He has promised by His prophet to our unhappy ancestors in crime, the " spirit of grace and of supplication," that we may learn to " look upon Him whom we have pierced." So, and so only, shall we escape being of those "kindreds of the earth" that shall "wail because of Him," when He shall "come with clouds, and every eye shall see Him ; and they also which 'pierced Him^^^ the crucifiers of every age and nation, shall shrink in horror and dread before the blaze of His advent glory! Oh, brethren in Christ ! in that fearful hour how happy, beyond all that thought can conceive or words declare, for those who, familiar with the cross, can look upon it not as the symbol of the sorrow and shame they have willingly inflicted, but as the symbol of sufferings in which they were willingly united with their Master, with Him crucified, that they may be with Him glorified, His blessed associates in the bliss unspeakable of His own immortal kingdom. 7* SERMON V. THE POWER OF THE EESURRECTION. (Preached on Easter Bay.) In Christ shall all be made alive. — 1 CoR. xt. 22. It is one chief advantage of that regular course of festivals by which the Church fosters the piety of her children, that they tend to preserve a due proportion and equilibrium in our religious views. We have all a ten- dency, according to our several constitutions, and the circumstances of our peculiar position in life, to adopt par- tial views of Christian truth ; to insulate certain doctrines from their natural accompaniments ; and to call our favor- ite fragment the Gospel. We hold a few texts so near our eyes that they hide all the rest of the Bible. Whatever we cannot at once refer to our chosen centre seems insig- nificant ; whatever we can, seems important only in that connection. ISTor does it always mend the matter, that it should really be a very cardinal tenet we thus exclusively espouse. It may indeed be better to lose the exterior limbs than the inner and vital organs of the frame. But we know of how little practical use or comfort, — nay, how impossible to preserve, — would be these vital organs with- out limbs to animate, and by which in turn they might be supplied with tributary nourishment and support. Now the Church festival system ministers a perpetual corrective to this tendency ; and hence, not improbably, one cause of SERM. v.] The Power of the Resurrection. 79 its general unpopularity with all those sects that have been so unfortunate as to abandon the primitive balance of doc- trine. It will not let us isolate our chosen facts and favor- ite tenets. It spreads the Gospel history in all its fulness across the whole surface of the sacred year. It is a sort of chronological creed, which forces us, whether we will or no, by the very revolution of times and seasons, to give its proper place and dignity to every separate article. " Day unto day uttereth speech ;" and the tone of each holy anni- versary is distinct and decisive. Thus our festival year is a bulwark of orthodoxy as real as our confessions of faith. It is a perpetual image or moving panorama of the truth " whole and undefiled." It will not allow caprice or per- versity to distort or to suppress. It will not suffer guilty or precipitate men to rob the precious story of one single glorious element ; but sets our whole goodly treasure in due succession before us, that of all which He hath given us we may lose none. Well might the prophet mourn as the darkest indication of divine vengeance upon desolated Judah, — well might we mourn, if the short-sightedness of weak men had ever been permitted to succeed in similarly desolating us; — "The Lord hath taken away His taber- nacle. He hath destroyed His places of the assembly ; the Lord hath caused the solemn feasts and sabbaths to be for- gotten in Zion." — Lam. ii. 6. These thoughts naturally arise when we pass from day to day in this portion of the year, so thronged with solemn commemorations that suggest their respective doctrines. "When one reflects upon the weight and vastness of each, it is indeed no wonder that each should fill the whole horizon of thought ; that frail imperfect men, left to their own speculations, should tend to seize every one his own, and strive to build a Christianity upon it ; that " what God hath joined together" men should thus be prone " to put asunder;" that, in short, nearly all honest error should spring from this infatuation of arbitrary selection where 80 Tlie Power of the Resurrection. [seem. v. all is equally revealed. But surely we ought thence to acknowledge how inestimable becomes any influence that tends, silently and unsuspected ly, to insinuate a remedy, and maintain, in our wavering uncertain thoughts, the integrity of divine truth. Take, for example, the subject of your reflections two days^ since, and the theme of your praises to-day. In some men's scheme of religion, the Crucifixion of Christ seems to absorb every other doctrine into itself; to stand alone, as in its own depths embodying all that men ought or can con- ceive of the Gospel. To others the Kesurrection of Christ from the dead, the visible triumph over the grave, is almost solely worthy of a place among fundamental beliefs ; all beyond that and its consequences is practically subordinate, — secondary, — unimportant. But the Church, by the series of her celebrations, forces these theorists, in despite of them- selves, to come forth from their narrow cells, and walk in the full daylight of consummate truth. She assigns its due honors to each. She does more than this, for she pro- claims that either is shorn of its glory unless seen in the light of the other. The depths of the first day are mea- sured by the heights of the third. She adores the agony because the resurrection proves who He was that agonized; she adores the resurrection because the agony attests how He loved that rose. She may divide them in conception, but she com^bines them in act. They are one atoning work ; inseparable correlatives ; perfect only in union. And hence she will not let us pause too long even at the grave of the Saviour. She will not permit even a holy sorrow to be unchecked. She wills not that we still seek the living among the dead, but startles our dream of grief with that angel's trumpet-tone, — "Ye seek Jesus the crucified. He is not here ; He is risen !" The results of the exclusive views of which I have ' Good Friday. SEEM, v.] The Power of the Resurrection. 81 spoken upon personal piety, are, of course, a partial and imperfect sanctiiication. For the life of the believer in Christ must be the living transcript of his faith. Those who lose all in the Crucifixion are at home in Gethsemane and Calvary, but strangers to Olivet and Tabor. Their hearts, cold and depressed by the undivided subject of their thoughts, find in religion only the everlasting discipline of a loveless penitence ; — " darkness is over the face of the earth," and heaven has but a faint and distant star-light to compensate it. Their very sabbaths are Good Fri- days ; their joy the hope of future delivery, not the bright and cheering sense of present freedom. Others in the same imperfect belief, possessing a nature more cheerful and elastic, are liable to yet deeper perils. They are confident without resolute obedience or active love. Failing to remember that dead with Christ they are also risen with Him, they forget that the very essence of His salvation is salvation into the new obedience of the adopted child of God. Seeing in the death of Christ the full satisfaction for sin, they are tempted almost to pervert the satisfaction into a license, the easy security of worldliness, indifference, and sloth. Such are the dangers of those who habitually dwell on only the for- mer half of the redeeming Avork of Christ. But is it better when we contemplate the exclusive votaries of the other, — those who lose the sorrows in the victory of the Eedeemer ? They rejoice indeed in the proof which the Eesurrection of Christ furnishes, of the similar exaltation of the virtuous and holy. They see in it the title to an inheritance of power and of glory for man. But of the humiliation He demands as requisite for the holiness He gives and the glory He promises, their conceptions are inadequate and feeble. Often they speak of the high perfection of the Saint, his superiority to the world, his enjoyments and his hopes; but they will not see tliat such perfection is only to be attained in the deep and humbling consciousness of sin and weak- ness, — that, to be indeed "risen with Christ," we must have 82 The Power of the Resurrection. [SERM. V. " died witli Christ," and learned the lesson of abasement at the foot of the Cross. You will not accept either of these fragmentary Gospels. You will not rend the seamless garment which was meant to cover in its ample folds every true want and wish of our regenerate nature. You will see in the one mighty event the ground of humiliation, in the other of joy; and, blending that humiliation and joy in one blessed mood, will come to know what is that state, wrought out of faith and hope, yet greater than either, which it is the object of the Gospel to work in Man, — that lowliness which, prostrate in the dust, yet lives in heaven, — which, lost to itself, is found in Christ, — that "love," or utter abandonment of self for God and for the brethren in God, which beareth all, believeth all, hopeth all, endureth all, — which is all graces in one and one grace through all, but which, springing as it essentially does from our union with Christ, rests, in even its loftiest forms, for its whole support, upon the two eternal foundations, — which yet are not two but one, — that He which rose had died, and He that died rose again ! But the mystery of Love and the mystery of Power, though thus inseparable as one redeeming act and thence both for ever blended in one baptism into Christ, may, of course, be thought of successively even as they were wrought successively; and so the Church intends in her yearly image of the story of Christ. It is, I repeat, this very division which insures that no one element of the truth shall be mutilated or forgotten. To-day we would not have you forget the Cross, we know you cannot understand the motives of your own joy without it; but we would more eminently lead you to contemplate the Crown and the Triumph. You are, then, to see in the Resurrection of Christ from the dead the proof of His own power over Death ; you are to see in it the everlasting proof and pledge of your own immortality; you are first to contemplate the Lord Himself SERM. v.] The Power of the Resurrection. 83 as in His own flesh, the personal Conqueror of Death ; and then, — as, even during His earthly humiliation, exhibiting that power as capable of extension to the resurrection of others; and again, — as after His ascension, — quickening the dead world into a living Church by an incessant work of spiritual revival, which is but another and higher form of the same gift and energy ; and finally, as combining both in the universal resurrection of body and spirit at the last day. I. The Resurrection of Christ is the great public mani- festation of His authority over the power of physical decay and death. This it is by being His own personal conquest of that power as it had been exercised upon Himself; a characteristic which separates it from all other instances of similar miraculous restorations. All others, in whatsoever age of the world, had been raised by a power from without ; He alone by Himself The power that revived all stands self-revived. This is indeed to " quicken whom He will ;" this is indeed to "have life in Himself." But the case is even more pre-eminent in another view. In all other in- stances Death had but touched the verge of God's real em- pire, and been at His pleasure repelled ; here the rebel had stormed the citadel, and planted his dark standard in its inmost hold. That which is the very principle of vitality to the whole world had seemed to wither in his grasp upon the Cross; when majestically rose the unvanquished Lord of Life, and hurled him back and for ever to darkness. The resurrection of the dust of a thousand ages to the Judg- ment, wondrous as it shall be, cannot approach to this. The dead who then shall live, shall live by a power exerted in all the fulness of visible and irresistible authority; it will be but the act of a known and recognized Creator, not per- haps as truly wonderful as a thousand natural processes that surround us every hour. But the dead Christ, who lived again, was prostrate under His enemy the hour He overwhelmed him ; the conqueror was chained and bleeding 84 The Power of the Resurrection. [SERM. V. beneath the foe He destroyed. As a man truly dead, He was inextinguishably alive as God. And in this view it may be instructive to notice the strange inconsistency of the Socinian heresy. The views popular with its unhappy followers, it is too well known, are usually materialist ; — that is, they are prone to believe that that which is called the spiritual essence in man is the pure result of bodily organization, and, disappearing out of existence with the dissolution of the body, shall live again only by the re-creation of that body at the Judgment. Now as it is certain that Christ emphatically ascribed to Himself a power of self-resurrection^ it may be asked how this impor- tant fact is to be explained on these principles. What was that which raised Christ from the dead ? It was not the soul; for this being, as they tell us, a bodily attribute, was of course dead with the rest of the body, awaiting, not giv- ing life. It was no diviner principle inherent in Christ, for this they will not admit Him to have ever possessed. Palpably the fact of self-resurrection is inconceivable on such a scheme; plainly, either man has a spirit distinct from the body and surviving it, or Christ was more than man. II. But as the self-resurrection of Christ stands alone as a monument of His inherent power of life, so He has every- where intimated that this is exercised with a view to the beings He came to redeem. That this connection might be clearly apprehended, — that it might never be said that this great reviver of the dead could only pour the stream of life into His own frame, and possessed no energy diffusive through all mankind, — He has, in visible proofs, manifested it both before and after His own resurrection. I do not know that it has been observed, that there seems a sort of progressive scale^ of these resurrections noted in the Gospel * The celebrated Ilomilj of St Augustine, " On tlie three dead Persons raised by Christ" (Horn, xlviii, Luke vii.) which contains a very similar line of thought, could not have been overlooked. St Augustine, however, SEEM, v.] The Power of the Resurrection, 85 history. The daughter of Jairus was "even now dead," but not yet removed from her chamber; "the dead man, the only son of his mother," the widow of Nain, was already " carried out" to burial when the Lord touched the bier ; Lazarus was "four days" dead; the saints who arose after the Eesurrection had long been dust and ashes : — the gene- ral resurrection yet to come is but a step beyond this. It was as if He would gradually prepare His followers for belief in His omnipotence ; teaching them by a progressive discipline of miracles to anticipate the great marvel of all. And there is a remarkable distinction between those which preceded and succeeded the resurrection of Christ Himself. In the former the body still remained ; passing rapidly into dissolution in the latest case (that of Lazarus), but not yet dissolved : in the latter, as if to manifest the fulness of tri- umph now obtained over the whole force of death, the re- turning spirits were those who came from far ages, and whose bodies had long before mouldered into nothingness. And lest we should undervalue the nature of the revival, we are expressly told that on these hoclies it was wrought; — " Many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of their graves after His resurrection." There was here an accession of power to the Mediator ; a supremacy unlimited by time or space was henceforth manifestly His. Here was the plain type of the universal resurrection. They who ad- mit the one cannot doubt the equal possibility of the other. It was the designed token that no outward difficulty, how- ever startling to our limited conceptions, could any longer resist the will of the risen Saviour ; that all the might of Death was now and for ever crushed by that Almighty arm; that every particle of the living frame might be scattered on the winds, or even re-appear in new forms of being, and represents these successive resurrections as typifying three classes of sinners restored from so many various degrees of guilt ; while Mr Butler regards them as progressive developments of ClirisVs power as the resur- rection and the life. — Ed. 86 The Power of the Resurrection. [seem. v. yet a power existed that could recover the plundered spoils of Death, could re-embody the parted spirit, could restore it to all the fulness of its prerogatives as the quickening principle of an immortal frame. Still, — to preserve the progressive development of divine power, — you will per- ceive that something remains for faith. The immortal frame is promised, not exemplified. It has never been formed on earth save in the two great types of the patriarchal and the Mosaic dispensations, Enoch and Elijah, and in their mighty antitype, the Lord Himself. The saints who rose at the Eesurrection disappeared again from earth ; we know not whither. For this last and highest exhibition of power, then, we must rely upon that promise which is surer than reason itself or experience. Thus, then, we have seen that the Lord Jesus Christ, in His own person triumphant over death, diffuses through all His followers the fruits of His victory. His is no solitary glory. He conquered Death, not for Himself, for He is essentially above it, but for us, who are its helpless bonds- men. His victory is ours. " We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us." This, we saw, He carefully exemplified during His whole life by public visible attesta- tions, — growing in force and significance with each succes- sive instance. These, however, are but the types and promises of power ; the power itself, in the fulness of its exercise upon the universal family of man, was yet to come. And it has come. It is even now in its vigor ; it hastens on to its eternal consummation. For even the universal resurrection shall be but the natural develop- ment of that which now works in the children of God. III. The resurrection power has not, then, ceased after the departure of Christ ; on the contrary, not till then was it adequately in action. His whole Church is the monu- ment of its existence and its exercise. That Church is built upon His resurrection; na}^, being mystically "His Body," it must equally be in the same mystical sense Him- SERM. v.] The Power of the Resurrection. 87 self risen and perpetuated among ns. For there is a spirit- ual resurrection and there is a physical resurrection. The latter was wrought by Christ when on earth, as a visible symbol of the other, and a proof of His power to effect it; Ilis own resurrection from the dead mysteriously exempli- fied both ; the general resurrection of the just at the con- summation of all things shall again and for ever combine them. That is to say, the body shall arise from death, and the spirit, already, during this life, "quickened together with Christ," shall carry it into the enjoyment and vision of God. Then, and not till then, shall the double office of Christ be completed. How these two things, — this present internal resurrection of grace, and the past and future resurrection of Christ and of us to glory, — are blended in the records of our faith, I need not tell you ; — how we are said to be " risen with Christ" out of our baptismal burial with Him ; how we are said, in "having the Son," to "have" already the life eternal that we anticipate ; how the work of God " to US-ward who believe" is said to be " according to the working of His mighty power which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead." Being thus already risen, every motion of grace is the struggle of the soul for the final consummation ; the bird is caged, but the wings are free to flutter within their prison. The spirit of Him who believes and loves, already "made to sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus," wearies of its dark and dead companion, that still is " of the earth, earthy." It longs for the period when the spiritual body shall minister to spiritual desires, and the whole man be perfected for God. Meanwhile, if the spiritual resurrection be as yet imperfect, it is not less real. The spiritual Lazarus is raised from the dead, though the fleshly frame, the grave- clothes of this world's charnel-house still encumber him, and the word has not yet been spoken, ^^ Loose him, and let him go !" The resurrection of Christ, once performed in act, is immortal in energy ; He rises again in every new- 88 The Power of the Resurrection. [seem. v. born child of God. Every hour witnesses this incessant work of the new life He inspires ; yea, He is now as active in the miracle of inward resurrection, as He shall yet be in the great day of the universal one. Wondrous as was His own rise from the grave, it is yet more wondrous, if that be possible, in its consequences than in itself. For, if you will believe the Scriptures, it is a work which transcends all limit of time or space. In the union of Christ with His faithful there is, as they tell us, a perpetual reiteration of all He did, even to the end of the world; He is for ever crucified in the self-denying, forever buried in the self- forgetting, for ever risen in the joyous freedman of God. And all this at once ; Himself immutable : — even as the sun fixed in the central heaven, and without losing one beam of its own changeless glory, is at the same moment to one land the dawn, to another the morn, to others the noontide and the evening, as they catch or lose his beams. But as the Eesurrection was the antecedent ground and proof of His power to build the kingdom of God upon earth, so is the continued work of resurrection His main function in building it. He spreads the mighty miracle of His own regeneration from the dead along the whole line of its history; He repeats it in every new member of the city of God ; the Church's is an everlasting Easter ! Brethren, is this too mysterious for your apprehensions, — this truth that Christ should thus be evermore invisibly among us, working us into the transient image of His own sufferings, and unto the perfect image of His own glory ? Oh, woe to those who will have a religion without mystery! Far from us be that miserable theology which would interpret the deep things of God by the standard of our poor and petty experience, and dare to measure His pos- sibilities by what we can see and feel ! — which would care- fully fetter us by the chains of time and sense, when the object of all true faith is to struggle beyond them ! Believe it, there is a bond deep as eternity, that binds you to your SERM. v.] The Power of the Resurrection. 89 God ; and that, if the sole true home of that God is heaven, in heaven even now are ye mystically likewise. Baptized into Christ's death and with Ilim risen, what but the body was thenceforward earthly? "Blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ," ye want but faith to know the celestial world which encompasses you. Surely among you, — unbeheld, but, oh, how clearly and how lovingly beholding ! — moves the same glorified Jesus whom the prophet in Patmos saw as He walked amid the golden lamps. Surely each poor disciple is dear to His heart as He notes the toils and the sorrows of each ; nor can they who have the first fruits of His Spirit long for the redemption of the body more earnestly, than He desires the blessed day when in His light they shall see light, "awaking in His likeness," and " satisfied!" IV. For this, too, we must needs desire; the final con- summation of the resurrection work of Christ ; the restora- tion of an immortal body to an immortal soul. A word or two we must say of this, though briefly as the time demands. This great tenet, — that " in Christ all are to be made alive" by an universal resurrection at the close of all things, — has had two classes of antagonists ; some of whom ex- plain away the first words, and others openly reject the last. The former conceive that we depreciate the natural proofs of the soul's immortality by ascribing the resurrec- tion to the work of Christ; the latter that the resurrection of which we speak is itself absolutely and inherently im- possible. But it must be noted, that in attributing the future resurrection to Christ we in no wise afiirm that the soul is naturally fitted to perish with the body. We do not even deny that in a being gifted with reason and conscience there are strong natural presumptions in favor of a future state. The amount of the argument antecedent to revela- tion is just this, — that no man can prove that the soul must 8^ 90 The Power of the Resurrection. [SERM. V. perish with the body, and that there are strong reasons for anticipating that it may survive it. But it will be remem- bered that the resurrection of the hody^ and, above all, of an immortal body, may still be the exclusive result of the work of Christ, as well as the perpetuation of the soul to immortality ; for it does not readily appear that its mere survival after death would of itself, on any physical or moral ground, necessitate this. But, as a fuller reply, — it is perfectly conceivable (though many seem to have missed so simple a thought) that the soul of man may be naturally capacitated for immortality, and yet the work of Christ be absolutely necessary to bring that capacity into effect. The commonest facts of nature exhibit to us sus- ceptibilities of growth and perfection, which yet are never realized without some further condition. Though the germ of life were in us, something beyond itself might be required to fertilize it. The criminal sentenced to die is capable of prolonged life ; were he not thus capable, he could not live though reprieved ; yet the arrival of the reprieve is, under the established laws, the necessary con- dition of his continued existence. And if any objector go farther, and venture the wild theory of the soul's necessary immortality, we may reply, that the same scheme of creation, which formed souls necessarily immortal, may have required the death and resurrection of Christ as the sole condition of forming them with this property of in- herent and essential eternity. So that still, though exist- ing by absolute necessity, in Christ alone could they thus exist. But I need scarcely remind you that the notion is itself absurd of any created thing existing for a single instant by any title but the will of its Creator ; that all existence must be purely permissive but that of God ; that nothing can be essentially eternal for the future, but that which has been eternal from the past. The other class of objectors are those who pronounce the recovery of the earthly body, or any portion of it, in itself SERM. v.] The Power of the Resurrection, 91 impossible. It assumes, they say, new forms ; it goes to the structure of other beings,— of plants, of animals, of men, — how then shall each frame be gathered back and appropri- ated to its owner? Those who think this difficulty really unanswerable have but to conceive the resurrection body a totally new organiz- ation, and the objection at once disappears. But those who consider this solution an evasion of the Scripture doc- trine, have merely to reflect, that the resurrection of the same body will only require that that small portion of the frame which is essential to existence at any period of our life (for the body, we know, is in incessant change) should be preserved for each individual, and attached to the separated spirit. The whole mass of material necessary for this pur- pose to all the past and future generations of mankind would be but a speck upon the surface of the globe. It would require a secret arrangement of Providence to pre- vent a confusion of the portions intended for each ; but it cannot with any plausibility be pretended that the forma- tion of a field of grass, which requires much the same accur- ate distribution of the particles of matter, is not a diffiiculty to the divine agent as insuperable as this. The simple fact is, that if we admit any intelligent contrivance to govern the minute processes of that physical creation, we must be forced to admit that the very thing we here pro- nounce impossible takes place in every moment's growth of every moss and flower at our feet. If there must be some reason why one particle is preferred to another in form- ing the animated frame of a human being, why may not this be a reason as well as any other conceivable ? I mention such objections as these, brethren, not that I suppose yon to have been really disturbed by such cavils, but that I am too well aware that imagination, wayward on all subjects, is peculiarly intrusive and dangerous in everything that regards this. I trust and believe that your own hopes are fixed upon too firm a ground to be unset- 92 The Power of the Resurrection. [seem. v. tied by any of these impatient questionings; that in a matter such as this you feel that if He alone can assure us, yet His word is assurance ample and sufficient, who came from the bosom of God to tell us the wondrous secret of our spiritual and bodily immortality. But this once be- lieved, who can believe it, and not acknowledge that it alters the whole complexion of his existence ; that he has sprung with one bound from dust to angels ; that he stands on the great platform of immortal natures, can see below him the whole universe, above him nothing but his God ? Shall we not then awake, and know ourselves the immortals that we are? This world is but the womb of eternity. The Father, who has regenerated, has regenerated that He may immortalize. Sooner shall he yield His heavenly throne than hold it and forsake us ; sooner shall God be no longer God, than " the children of God" fail to be " the children of the resurrection." Behold ! we stand alone in creation ; earth, sea, and sky, can show nothing so awful as ive are! The rooted hills shall flee before the fiery glance of the Almighty Judge ; the mountains shall become dust, the ocean a vapor ; the very stars of heaven shall fade and fall as the fig-tree casts her untimely fruit ! yea, "heaven and earth shall pass away:" but the humblest, poorest, lowliest among us is born for undying life. Amid all the terrors of dissolving nature, the band of immortals shall stand before their Judge. He has made you to be sharers of His own eternity ; the most incomprehensible of His attributes is permitted in its measure to be yours. Alone in a world of weak and fading forms, — with all perishable, even to the inmost folds of the fleshly garment that invests you, — with the very beauty of nature dependent on its revolutions, its order the order of successive evanescence, its constancy the constancy of change, — amid all this mournful scenery of death you alone are deathless. In the lapse of millions of ages hence, for aught we can tell, it may be the purpose of God that all this outward visible universe SERM. v.] The Power of the Resurrection. 93 shall gradually give place to some new creation ; that other planets shall circle other suns ; that unheard-of forms of animated existence shall crowd all the chambers of the sensitive universe with forms of life unlike all that we can dream ; that in slow progression the immense cycle of our present system of nature shall at length expire : — but even then no decay shall dare to touch the universe of souls. Even then there shall be memories in heaven that shall speak of their little speck of earthly existence as a well- remembered history ; yea, that shall anticipate millions of even such cycles as this, as not consuming even the first glorious minute of the everlasting day ! For these thi-ngs ye are born ; unto this heritage are ye redeemed. Live, then, as citizens of the immortal empire. Let the impress of the eternal country be on your foreheads. Let the angels see that you know yourselves their fellows. Speak, think, and act, as beseems your high ancestry; for your Father is in heaven, and the First-born of your brethren is on the throne of God. Oh ! as you read and hear of these things, strain your eyes beyond the walls of this dim prison, and catch the unearthly light of that spiritual world where the perfected Just are already awaiting your arrival. You go now to celebrate that on earth which is nearest heaven ; to receive the memorial and quickening presence of " Him who was dead, and behold He liveth evermore." You go, as it were, to kneel around the gate of Paradise, longing for the time when the portals shall unclose, yet humbly joyous that you are permitted even thus to wait. Oh! may the Father feed you with the bread of heaven, which whoso eateth shall live for ever ; giving you life in giving you Him who is the true life ; and sowing in you that seed invisible and incorruptible, whose flower is the beauty of present holiness, whose fruit is immortal glory I SERMON VI. THE TRINITY DISCLOSED IN" THE STRUCTURE OF ST JOHN'S WRITINGS. (Preached on Trinity Sunday.) These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. — John xx. 31. In these words the Apostle John declares the main ob- ject of his Gospel. His first and principal Epistle is stated to have been written with the same view, expressed in nearly the same words : " These things have I written nnto you . . . that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God'''' (1 John V. 13). And in his other chief contribution to the volume of inspiration, his Book of Prophecy, where that Son of God liimself stands forward in his own awful personality, the similar purpose of the whole is scarcely less distinctly impressed. The one solemn proclamation begins in the first and ends in the last chapter, as though it were the key-note of the entire, — "I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last I" — marking the sameness of His eternal being and agency through the long succession of revolutions the book records, and in this brief expres- sion of the divine omnipotence of the Messiah, drawing, as it were, the moral of it all. The Son of God, then, His everlasting existence. His inherent dignity. His unbounded power, — the Son of God, implying in the term a nature which was one with God (for Christ Himself and the Jews, SEEM. VI.] The Trinity disclosed, etc. 95 uncontradicted by Christ, identified the claim of a divine Sonship with the claim of a divine nature^), — the Son of God, in His high and peculiar relation as such, is the special subject which, in the dispensation of the Spirit, seems to have been eminently committed to the Evangelist St John. Through the other Gospels the Saviour moves in the mournful majesty of Ilis humiliation; here, though there is much of humiliation, there is more of power: they love to enlarge on His blessed relations to earth; this -Apostle, to proclaim his mightier relations to heaven. As we read St Matthew or St Luke we might at times forget that in the humble Teacher of Galilee we listen to the awful sharer of the divine eternity: with St John the manhood seems almost lost in the fulness of the God. While the Christ of his pages " speaks as never man spake," we feel as if the words alone were human that clothe these divine thoughts, as if the veil of our adopted nature were all too feeble to hide the Deity that kindles into glory behind it. Jesus of Kazareth is the speaker, but the voice is charged with the echoes of eternity. The ear may catch the accents of a man, but the awed and fearful heart is listening to "the Word of God," who is "with God" and " is God;" to " the only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father ;" to " the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end- ing, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty!" In this remarkable arrangement, which has made the last of the Evangelists the most explicit unfolder of the whole mystery of Christ's essential Godhead, we seem to see one of the instances of that law of progressive revelation which so strikingly marks the entire construction of the Bible. It was, perhaps, expedient that the Church at large should be trained by simple faith and the practice of His pure and beautiful morality into fitness for the more trans- ' John X. 33, 36. 96 The Trinity disclosed in the [SERM. vi. cendent truths which His higher discourses involved. She was first to be taught habits of dependence, humility, sin- cerity, and love ; all presupposing, of course, a general knowledge of the facts of Christ's divine nature and earthly career, but resting, as yet, for their ordinary motive and habitual meditation, less upon the former than the latter division of this great mystery ; and when thus practically versed in the life of faith, she was to rise into the more awful region of spiritual truth, to learn a profounder lesson in the story of that Being with whom we are so wondrously connected ; to be taught the nature and depth of the com- munion we are entitled to hold through Him with the very source of life, to see at length the foundations of the Christian temple as they lie deep in the very nature of God, and to find every ordinary rule and maxim of the Faith assume a yet sublimer character when viewed as all springing from the tremendous truth, that He with whom we are one is yet more deeply one with God. And even though this master-truth had been taught as frequently as it is taught really and unequivocally by St Paul, we can easily conceive what new illumination must have brightened round it, when, in addition to the affirmations of His dis- ciples, the discourses of the divine personage Himself were given to the Church ; when his own claims were heard transcribed from His own lips, and introduced by the decla- ration, — the clear, simple, undeniable message of the Holy Ghost, — that the Word made flesh was no other than the very and eternal God. But in thus revealing, in all its fulness, the twofold nature of Christ — in displaying Him (in the words of the text), as at once Jesus in His manhood, the Son of God in His deity, and Christ in his office which is the result of both, — other and wider truths are necessarily involved. The nature of Christ is a point from which a far-stretching view opens into the whole nature of God. This divine Son comes from heaven to reveal the will of a divine Father; and He SEKM. VI.] Structure of St Jvkn's Writings. 97 comes empowered and qualified by a divine Spirit. And thus St John, in being the preacher of the deity of the Son, becomes inclusively the preacher of the deity of the Father and the Holy Ghost. It will now be ray object to exhibit to you the manner in which this great doctrine of the threefold God, with its practical relation to ourselves, forms the substance of the writings of St John ; how they seem all framed in it as in a mould ; how they perpetually suppose it, not alone directly (which to some minds would, perhaps, be less impressive), but silently, in their inmost structure, and in a way which could not be interpolated unless his whole writings be an interpolation ; and thus to manifest the profound truth of the text, that '' these things were" indeed " written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ;" the Son of God, and thence Himself divine ; the Christ, and thence the anointed of a divine Spirit. We open, then, the Gospel of St John. It commences (as you all remember) with a solemn exposition of the divinity of the Word and Son of God, considered in His immediate relation to the deity of the Father^ and as com- missioned to represent His unapproachable glory in the world of time and sense. It is " the glory as of the only- begotten of the Father ;" He is " the only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, and hath declared Him." Here, then, are two persons of this mysterious con- junction ; their distinct agency, their mutual relation. But in the influences of the second a new power is discovered, which all Scripture assigns to a third agent; "He hath given power to become the sons of God to them which are born of God ;" the same gift which this Apostle elsewhere terms being " born of the Spirit," and another describes as involving " the Spirit of adoption." And thus, in this brief preface, the Father, the Word made flesh, the inwork- ing Spirit proceeding from both, are shadowed before us ; 9 98 The Trinity disclosed in the [serm. vi. the opening prologue presents a summary of the whole majestic drama which follows. For, this being solemnly premised, the record itself begins. Now, the point I wish you to observe is, the dis- tribution of the doctrine imparted through the rest of this Gospel ; the very divisions of the subject recognizing the great fundamental truth on which we rest this day ; and naturally arising in a mind previously impressed with this presiding idea. The divine sovereignty of the Father being everywhere understood, Christ presents himself to enforce His own claims as the Son of God, through nearly the entire of twelve or thirteen successive chapters. lie is now the prominent figure; His connection with the Father; His mysterious prerogatives thence arising; the power and glory of the kingship He inherently possesses as God, and' has won to Himself as man; — these are the topics, with scarcely an exception (such as a few verses of the discourse with Nicodemus, where the alteration is plainly incidental), that engage the recording pen of the Evangelist. In the fifth and sixth chapters, more especially, Christ speaks in a tone of dignity which seems to centre in Himself the whole power of the Godhead. All seems (in comparison) to dis- appear from the scene except the Second Person, and His claims to unbounded fealty as the sole dispenser of every blessing from His Father to man. He alone is visible between us and heaven ; in Him light, and life, and salva- tion ; beyond Him clouds, and desolation, and darkness. At length the hour arrives when He must leave the scene He had so long almost exclusively occupied. Accord- ingly, His prominence as the main object of the record gradually lessens ; but exactly in proportion as it lessens, a new occupant fills the field of view. Christ, simply as Christ, is, in His turn, almost lost in the glory of "another Paraclete" who is "to abide" with the Church of God " for ever." Thenceforth to the close of His teaching, it SEEM. VI.] Structure of St John^s Writings. 99 is this Being wlio is the principal object disclosed to the spiritual anticipation. It is now not Christ who is " the truth," but "the Spirit of truth;" it is not Christ now who teacheth, but " the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, He shall teach you all things ;" it is not Christ now who testifieth, but "the Comforter shall testify of me;" it is not Christ now who reproveth the world, but " the Com- forter," who " will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment." In this portion of the book, exactly where the harmony of the doctrine would lead us to expect it, everything contributes to impress that this Being, working conjointly with tlie Father and the Son, is also to take rank with them as a distinct object of Christian knowledge and Christian devotion. And thus the threefold agency of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — of the Father made known in the Son, and with the Son ope- rative in the Holy Spirit, — forms the common plan and directs the successive topics of the whole. We saw how the opening verses presented all this, as it were, in miniature; let us contemplate it once more reproduced at the close. The entire exhibition of divine love, as wrought by the Father, Son, and Spirit, concludes with that sublime series of petitions which occupies the seventeenth chapter, and which, in the very objects for which it supplicates, paints the Church as its founder would have it in doctrine and in life. Now observe how this also recognizes in its internal structure, the same threefold division of operations. It opens — ^^Fatlier^ glo- rify thy Son^ that thy Son also may glorify thee !" — and continues to represent before the throne of the Father the work of the Son as manifesting Him in the world to those whom the Father had given to be the subjects of this won- drous disclosure. Still the prayer is incomplete without another agency working for its own peculiar end; and hence, as the petition advances, the transition exactly par- allel to that in the body of the Gospel, ^^ sanctify them 100 The Trinity disclosed in the [seem. VI. througli thy trutli". . ."for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth :" — a form of expression which I need not tell you is (and in the original' much more emphatically) appropriated with almost technical regularity to the Spirit of holiness or sanctification. But it is fitting that this diversity of opera- tions, which thus forms the subject of this Gospel, should be re-united before its succession of discourses is closed. And this, too, is done. Our Lord is engaged in prayer, in prayer for His Church ; and, therefore, having to speak of the mystical bond that unites Him with His Father, He contemplates its image in the Church, and prays that that image may be clear, and vivid, and complete. (We, on the other hand, in beholding the image, rise to the divine ori- ginal.) " That they all" (doubtless through " the fellowship of the Holy Ghost") " may be one, as thou. Father, art in me, and I in thee ; that they also may be one in us : ... . that they may be one even as we are one : I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." This, the transcendent oneness of the Father and Son above, in the unity of the same Spirit, with the implored oneness of the Church below, its earthly counterpart, and wrought by the same power, this forms the natural termination and summary of the entire. Now I do not mean to affirm that such a distribution of the subject as this, though I think it undeniable as a fact, is of itself an unanswerable proof, or even a direct proof in any degree, that St John held the doctrine of the triple Godhead as we hold and preach it. But those who know the value of any addition to a cumulation of proba- bilities will not be inclined to dismiss it on that account ; they will consider it only the more forcible in proportion as it is more indirect and circuitous. The question is, supposing St John to have held the doctrine, and to have SERM. VT.] Structure of Si John's Writings. 101 written, as the text affirms lie did, to prove Christ the Son of God, whether this is not the very disposition of doctrine the subject would naturally have assumed under his hand ; whether there is not discernible proof, even in what has been here offered, to show that some governing idea, which, whether he would have expressed it as we do or not, was substantially the same as ours, really presided over the whole scope and arrangement of his divine com- position. Any doubt as to the reality of the foct alleged will probably be removed by an appeal to the next of his writings in the order of the Canon, his first or Catholic Epistle. Here, again, the Word of life and His manifestation of the invisible Father opens the treatise ; and, as usual, the practical correlative of the doctrine follows, that " our fellowship is with the Father and the Son." The second and third chapters, so far as they are at all doctrinal, continue the thenjc. It is still, " Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist that denieth the Father and the Son ; whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father." It is still, in practical application, as before in the opening of his Gospel, that we in Christ " are called the sons of God." It is still that "this is His commandment, that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ." But in a manner altogether remarkable, at the end of the third chapter a sudden transition is made, which is, more or less, preserved to the end : " hereby we know that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He hath given us." "Beloved," he continues, " try the spirits whether they are of God." " Hereby know ye the Spirit of God." " We dwell in Him and He in us, because He hath given ns of His Spirit." The former subject is never suspended, indeed ; but the leading topic, palpably, becomes the blessings and the evidences of this other agent, the work of Christ being 9^ 102 The Trinity disclosed in the [seem. VI. now regarded chiefly as it is the subject of the Spirit's teaching. For "it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth." If the text of the three witnesses in heaven be genuine (and it certainly ought to receive its measure of. probability), I need scarcely observe with what admirable fitness it seems to recapitulate and embody the whole; but whether it be received or not, the main point is secured in the closing admonition of St John, where, expressly warning his "little children" to "keep themselves from idols," he yet unequivocally declares that this Jesus is " the true God and eternal life." In this Epistle, then, it seems quite manifest (and I be- lieve the more minutely you examine, the more clearly you will perceive the reality of this reniarkable structure) that the order of the subject does by natural inward sequence proceed on the very distinction we recognize ; that the sig- nature of the threefold God is not merely wrought into spots and corners of the texture, but broadly impressed upon the whole web ; in other words, that this Epistle and this Gospel are alike moulded as they would have been by an inspired Athanasius or Basil, in whose minds the body of Christian doctrine was habitually viewed under a Trini- tarian distribution. Of the other great work of St John, the Book of the Kevelation, I conceive that this same understood truth forms the framework, in a manner which not only discovers the doctrine of a triplicity of Persons, but does unanswer- ably demonstrate the author's belief that the Three are equally divine, mysteriously blended in the same unfathom- able unity. I say, then, that this Book of Revelation is in its main features nothing less than a history, a symbolical history of the Trinity in its relation to the Church of Christ. The mysterious darkness of the prophecy cannot hide the order and disposition of the book, to which alone I appeal. Whatever in this wondrous record is obscure, this at least SERM. VL] Structure of StJohn's Writings. 103 is clear enoiigli ; tliis at least, humbly and patiently medi- tated, may win the blessing its last chapter promises to him " who keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book." I shall be brief and summary as the time demands. At the very opening, and forming the significant intro- duction of the whole, the usual apostolic prayer of grace and peace is solemnly uttered in the name of the three divine Persons (i. 4, 5) ; and with a vision of the Three (as I shall presently observe) it closes. Omitting the second and third chapters, which detach from the main subject, the heavenly scenery opens in the fourth chapter, which you heard read this day, and which is one unbroken picture of the pure Deity; the eternal Father made manifest in the eternal World, and operating (ver. 5) by the energies of the Holy Spirit. Hence the three adoring " holies" of the eighth verse ; and the declaration that the Being enthroned is one who " was, and is, and is to come" [the eternal Fa- ther, the abiding Spirit, the future Son of man in judgment.] In the next chapter (the fifth) a form altogether distinct in aspect is unveiled to adoration ; the throne is not, however, yet styled " His ;" He is " in the midst of the throne," and His appearance is " a Lamb as it had been slain ;" while the Holy Ghost (or " seven spirits" of the former vision) is now represented as the "seven eyes" of the Lamb; thereby being shadowed the immediate re-issuing of this divine essence from the incarnate Son. This, then (as all will admit), is Christ Jesus after His sacrifice; and in that capacity (ver. 8) the same beings who adored the pure Godhead in the preceding chapter are now in the very same words represented as adoring the Lamb ; before, — God for creation, now Christ for redemption, — the number of the worshippers being even increased (ver. 11), and the hymn loftier and more impassioned (ver. 12). At this point of the history " the Lamb" becomes alone the divine hero of the narrative ; and in order to particularize His achievements as such. He is purposely, through the body 104 Tlie Trinity disclosed in the [SERM. VI. of the record, detached from the pure Godhead : it is " salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb ;" it is a Lamb alone " upon Mount Sion." The human and mediatorial character is specially presented all through ; because it is in that character specially that Christ's wonders in the Church are wrought. At length, after a long series of marvels, in the nineteenth chapter, as the closing fulfilment approaches its crisis, He meets us (ver. 13) as the " Word of God," the exclusive title of His divinity ; as if to mark that the Godhead was again gaining the pre-eminence. In the twentieth, after having been for a while known as " Christ" (the blessed title which unites Him, through the mystery of mercy, in His double nature, to man), the grand consummation arrives, — the final judg- ment. One sits upon a great white throne, " from whose face the earth and heaven flee away ;" Christ himself shall tell us who this is: "the Father hath committed all judg- ment unto the Son^ After this event, in the world of purity and perfection that follows, a remarkable change of phrase is observable. There being no longer any need of separa- tion between the characters of the pure Godhead and of the incarnate Christ, they are in every sentence united ; they are given the same office, the same dignity, the same efiicacy in sending the blessed influences of the Spirit. The throne is now " the throne of God and of the Lamb ;" God and the Lamb are equally the light of heaven ; God and the Lamb are equally its temple. But, which is pecu- liarly observable, before the majestic close of all in the unfathomable depths of eternity, an identification more absolute still is insinuated. To catch the force of this I must direct you to the beginning of the twenty-second chapter, and to the four verses that immediately follow it. In the first, God and the Lamb are enthroned in one dig- nity ; and the efiicacy of the Spirit, symbolized by the water of life that proceeds out of the throne, issues from a common tlirone to nourish and fertilize the tree of immor- SERM. VI.] Structure of St Johii's Writmgs. 105 tality. In the third verse they are both again mentioned, but both identified; for the expressions, "His servants shall serve Jlim,^^ " they shall see His face," &c., are mani- festly referable to both as one. And in the fifth verse (which ends the entire, for the rest of the chapter is a mere epigraph of general exhortations and promises), " the Lamb," who had preserved His position all through, is omitted ; He vanishes, — not realhj, for " He must reign for ever and ever," — but He vanishes out of the vision, in order to represent Him as in a manner merged in the Godhead ; " the Lord Grod" being now declared to effect alone that very blessing which "the Lord God and the Lamb" were to effect a few verses above (xxi. 23). And in this state the whole won- drous vision disappears into eternity ! What shall we say, brethren ? Is all this without a purport ? Was all this arranged without any intended significance ? Is not the whole series, and especially this most remarkable conclu- sion, an accurate representation of the entire awful mystery of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in those very charac- ters which the Church presents to your adoring faith ? First, alone in the eternal solitude of incommunicable glory; then separated, for the Son's incarnate w^ork of redemption, a work of many ages ; then, as it were, recom- bining after the mighty task has been completed, when God, as St Paul reveals, becomes once more " all in all," the mediator, subject, and the kingdom delivered up ; God, as God, effusing a light neither of the sun nor of the moon, but of His own vitalizing Spirit, into the millions of wor- shipping saints around Him ; " for the Lord God giveth them lirfht, and they shall reign for ever and ever." We have now reviewed the three chief writings of the Apostle John. We have seen how the great article of faith which the Church commemorates this day pervades his works, not only as a separate truth, but as a presiding principle ; not only in the phraseology of the parts, but in the structure of the whole. We sec that to him the three- 106 The Trmitij disclosed in the [SERM. VI. fold activity of Father, Son, and Spirit, was indeed the abstract of theology ; that, therefore, this Trinity of powers, or principles, or persons, or whatever other name be em- ployed to denote what no human language can fully express, was not (as some worthy men represent it) the justifiable induction of later times, but the very and original form in which the doctrine itself reposed in the intellect and heart of the Evangelist. We see it here, not in the minuteness of special passages only, but in the magnitude of universal effects also. It is a plastic power working the whole mass of the composition to its own peculiar type ; somewhat as the vital principle of an organized frame silently gathers the entire aggregate of particles into the definite form appropriate to itself. The Bible is a kind of shrine or temple in which the Spirit of God dwells among us. Now,- let us suppose a stranger from some Pagan land to enter an old Christian cathedral, and to behold, among other things, the figure of a cross constantly recurring in the sculptured work of the building. His conclusion would naturally be that this figure had some remarkable relation to the peculiar religious system to which the edifice was appropriated. But how much stronger would be this con- clusion if in addition he discovered, on standing at a height and distance such as should allow the ivhole to be seen at a glance, that the entire magnificent structure was itself built in the form of a cross ; and not one structure alone, but several of those which he had the opportunity of examining. The design of the builder, he could say, might in the one case, however unlikely the supposition, be counterworked by the unauthorized insertions of subsequent architects; but no such intrusion, however audacious or extensive, could reach to changing the whole plan of the fabric ; and if the proof be indeed unquestionable, that the main walls and their foundations are the authentic work of antiquity, in that antiquity the idea that directed their plan must share. If, then, these edifices of immortal truth, this Gos- SEEM. VI.] Stmchcre of St John's Wriimjs. 107 pel, this Epistle, this Book of Prophecy, be indeed ancient and inspired ; the great predominating thought that fixed their plan and distribution must be ancient and inspired too. I shall but add, that in thus making this threefold dis- tinction the basis of his whole scheme of instruction, St John has taught you not only its absolute truth but its relative importance. Learning from him " the proportion of the faith," we will safely value that most, which he thought most precious. If, under those brief but wondrous words, — Father, Son, and Spirit, — he was accustomed to classify all the bright treasures of his inspiration; if into this mould every narrative, every exhortation naturally flowed ; if he was wont to see, in the adoration that bowed before this mysterious Triad of eternal powers, the last and loftiest act of religion, the sum and abstract of all the rest; we cannot be wrong in preserving the equilibrium that he has fixed. And if, too, to him this great belief was more than belief, this "light" was also "life;" if he could feel it blessed to acknowledge a Father who is our Father, a Son in whom we also " are called the sons of God," a Holy Spirit who " dwelleth with us and shall be in us ;" may we also find in the Tkinity the ground of practical devotion, pure and deep, till, quickened by the power of this faith, the Three that bear record in heaven shall bear their witness in our hearts ; and the trinity shall have become, not the cold conclusion of the intellect, but the priceless treasure of the affections, the blessed foundation and the perpetual strength of the new and spiritual life I SEEMON VII. MEETNESS FOR THE INHERITANCE OF THE SAINTS IN LIGHT. (Epistle, 24th Sunday after Trinity.) Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. — Colossians i. 12. It is the special glory of the Gospel, the foundation or the perfection of all the rest, that it first truly and dis- tinctly, in language beyond the uncertainties of conjecture, the refinements of allegory, or even the bright coloring of hope, enlarged the prospects of men into the depths of eternity. It first clearly and authoritatively taught us that the present existence is the least and meanest portion of our inheritance, and death to the undying spirit only the birth-day of immortal life. From the hour that this awful and glorious secret was revealed to the sons of men, the whole science of life was for ever changed ; a new element entered into calculation that transformed all the rest. Had revelation never taught us so, surely this must be still self- evident. From the very nature of the case, a dying and a deathless being must move in different orbits, must revolve on different centres, must obey different attractions. A dying body is adapted to the world of sense and time, a deathless spirit is meant and made for a world immortal as itself. Created eternal, it is intended, from the instant of its birth to breathe the air of eternity. It is at home only SERM. VII.] Meetnessfor the Inheniance of Sainis, etc. 109 in its own high sphere of being ; connected by a visible frame with the present Avorld, it is itself invisible, and lives by the Invisible. Through its own proper organs, — through Faith, and Hope, and Love divine, — it already commerces with that eternal scene, and the God of that eternal scene, where hereafter, disburdened of its earthly fetters, it is to dwell and to rejoice for everlasting. This, then, is the great truth implied in the text, implied more or less directly in every part of the teaching of the Kew Testament. This — that the life for eternity is alreadij begun ; that we are at, and from the very hour of our regeneration, introduced into the spiritual world — a world which, though mysterious and invisible, is as real as the world of sense around us; that the Christian's life of heavenliness is the first stage of heaven itself! "The Father," saith the Apostle, " hath (already supernaturally) made us meet for the inheritance of the saints." The doctrine of the New Testament is not that men, now wholly mortal, wholly perishable, shall hereafter, in reward of fidelity, be miraculously raised to die no more, but that Christian men are already in a true, though most mysteri- ous sense, raised with Christ Jesus and set in heavenly places in Him ; that they are now virtually in the very presence and kingdom of God ; that they already possess the seed of immortality; that "he that hath the Son hath life ;" that that life is now " hid with Christ in God," to be, — not created as out of nothing, but, — manifested, when He "shall be manifested" in glory. Hear again the same Apostle : " If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead [now] dwell in you, He that raised up Christ shall also quicken your mortal bodies hij His [iioiv] indicelling SpiritP In other words, there is a power now within you in the germ, of which your celestial immortality shall be the proper fruit. The dawn of heaven hath already begun in all who are yet to rejoice in its noontide glory. No thought surely can be more awakening than this; 10 110 Meetnessfor the Inheritance [serm. vii. none of more urgent and immediate practical importance. Christianity is but half unfolded to us without this doctrine of the present indwelling of the powers of the world to come. That men shall, on the last day, be judged by divine justice, accepted by divine mercy, according to the deeds of their earthly life, is itself a great and impressive truth. But that this judgment should itself be blended with another equally certain principle of qualification; that the heaven which is to come must have already spiritually arisen within us, and the future glory be thus enclosed in the present grace; — that, therefore, men must not only win heaven as a reward, but be suited for heaven as a life; that the divine principle now within them must have fitted them for the avocations of that better world, moulded them to the tempers of angels, exercised them in the rudiments of that high profession of joyful obedience and adoring homage which is to make the occupation of their eternity, — this is ♦yet more impressive and alarming, — because, whatever delusion may be possible in the former case, it is scarcely conceivable in this. Men may forget their past sins, but they can hardly be ignorant of their present disposition. They may reckon on easy pardon, but they cannot suppress horror and dismay, if they be but once brought to reflect, — that pardon itself, were it possible, would be vain as long as the pardoned sinner were unfit for the society of heaven ; that God's own love were fruitless, could the object of it continue to hate his God I Such a pardon could but aggra- vate the keen sense of hopeless, irremediable misery. "What would it avail that the man should be accepted to justification, as long as the miserable object of pardon shrank cowering from the circles of angels, unable to sympathize in their fervors, or find in his heart one echo to their celestial anthems? No: what we are to be in heaven we must be on earth; this is a test that cannot be mistaken or evaded. We are saved that we may for eternity serve God; salvation itself would be misery if SEEM. VII.] of the Saints in Li(jht. Ill unaccompanied by a love for tliat service. All aspirations for salvation, tlien, are vain in whicb. that love forms no element ; all desire for pardon is self-contradictory if it do not include an earnest present desire for that enjoyment and that service of God which are to form the sequel and the value of the pardon. Let me now hope that you have fully entered into the force of the memorable passage before us. We are under a course of education for heaven ; the life of heaven must then be practised on earth, if the child of God will learn his profession for eternity. The ordinary process must, therefore, be reversed. Instead of estimating heaven by earth, we are bound to estimate and govern earth by heaven. There is the pattern in the mount of God; there is the mighty model on which we are to reconstruct our nature ; there dwells that central form of moral and spirit- ual beauty, of which our life is to be the transcript. New- born to heaven, heaven must become our test and standard of every motive, word, and work. The life for which we prepare, the inheritance for which we are made meet, is to determine and regulate the whole course of our present existence. But here arises a difficulty. Heaven is our pattern ; but of heaven we surely can know little. We are taught that the heart of man cannot reach the conception of that abode of blessedness. How then shall we regulate our life by an unknown model ? How shall we see by a light which is itself invisible ? An obvious distinction solves this difficulty, and, at the same time, opens the way for that very simple and practi- cal view of the subject with which I desire to engage you. The details of the celestial life we cannot indeed know. The abode in which we are to dwell, the companions with Avhom we shall rejoice, the bodies, — bright similitudes of Christ, — which we are to wear, — all these, and the like, are matters beyond our limited conjecture. But then it is not 112 Meetnessfor iJie Inheritance [SERM. VII. in these tilings that we are bound to practise the celestial life on eartli ; for no man is bound to the impossible. The principles of that life, — the great general laws of heart and spirit that govern it, — these it is that are to be the princi- ples and laws of this, and these are clear and indisputable. So clear, indeed, and so indisputable, that the slightest ex- ercise of reflection will show you how there is nothing . overstrained or romantic in thus, with St Paul, making the future life of heaven the object and the model of the pre- sent heavenly life. And the more completely to disentan- gle the subject of all complication, I shall confine myself to a single and most simple aspect of it. The business and the beatitude of heaven must consist in conformity of the will to the will of God. From the very nature of the case it cannot be otherwise. Here He is the real, in heaven He must be also the acknowledged sovereign. The office of his creatures must there be to do His work, and that office can be happiness only in so far as His work is to them delightful. The love of God, the willino; submission of the whole nature to Him, which is here a duty, is there an essential of existence. To be there and not possess it would be to be locally present in heaven, spiritually absent from it, — to live visibly with angels, to abide invisibly with fiends in torment. By our principle, then, if this be the great characteristic of heaven, it must be equally the law of earth. Mark, therefore, the specific nature of the motive on which we insist, and distinguish it carefully from all other principles that may counterfeit it, or in their operation accidentally coincide with it. The habit must be ours, not merely of acting from higher principles than self-interest or grosser passion, but of acting simply, directly, and exclusively from obedience to the known appointment of God. No other motive can be tolerated as the leading principle in heaven ; no other, then, can be admitted to a share in the heavenly life that prepares for it. All others, however at- SERM. VII.] of the Saints in Light. 113 tractive, however amiable, however useful, are "of the earth, earthy." They may vary in beauty or in value, from the most repulsive forms of moral depravity to the fairest impulses of social aftection ; but they are all equally remote from the preparatory life of heaven, in so far as they are felt apart from God, in so far as they would equally exist, were God conceived to exist no more. Here then is the ground and substance of the charge which religion brings against the world. It is not that the world does not abound with manifestations of moral as well as of physical beauty. It is not that many fair and admirable impulses and principles of action are not every day witnessed by men ; that the family relation, that the larger social relations, have not their virtues respected and honored among us. This is not what the Gospel asserts (and it is right we should remember that this is not what it asserts) when it speaks of the heart of man as utterly depraved, of the world as a moral ruin. What it does assert is this, — that all which is excellent in the natural man is excellent irrespectively of his God ; that he loves, hates, prefers, rejects, — and often rightly too, — but without any thought of God's laws of preference and rejection ; that thus all — and there is much — that is beautiful in his best impulses, is beautiful only as the flower or the landscape is beautiful ; his heart as little moving through its circle of social kindness from a desire to approve itself to the God who has commanded them, as the flower expands its petals and sheds its fragrance in voluntary obedience to Ilim who created it, — the one beauty being as much and as little religious as the other. But as we have argued, if every motive must be comparatively worthless for the activities of eternity, but that which connects us directly with our God ; if with the earthly framework the earthly impulses shall in death be dissipated, and the immortal spirit be left to those alone which can stand the fiery test of God's tre- mendous presence ; — then do we press it upon vou, that 10^ 114 Meetness for the Inheritance [seem. VII. that wliicli is worthless for heaven must be foreign to the heavenly life on earth ; then do we bring all the weight of the immortal world to bear on the perishable ; then do we argue from the future to the present, from what shall be yet to what ought to be now ; and beseech you to reflect, that no virtue but godliness, no excellence but that which springs from God, no affection but that which tends to God, no rule of life but that which God has sanctioned and which trains for God, can ever be the virtue, or the excellence, or the affection, or the rule, which is fitted for a creature travelling hourly on through Time to God's own Eternity. You now perceive that our argument has gained another step in advance. We are under education for " the inheri- tance of the saints in light;'' heaven must then fix the character of the life that is to qualify for it. But the bless- edness of heaven is the joyful conformity of the will to God ; this, then, this alone can be the rule and the perfection of human life. Such is the principle, in itself surely so clear as to require little illustration, but in its application liable to some evasion from the degree (already hinted) in which men fail to apprehend the simplicity and purity of the motive here noted, and to separate it from all other springs of action. Permit me, then, — for on this everything hinges, — to contrast this one sole abiding principle of eternal hap- piness, this true and only discipline for heaven, this earnest and perpetual conformity of man's will to God's which will yet be the glory of " the saints in light," and must now be the preparation for their " inheritance," with the actual and visible life we all behold around us. I desire to be brief, and one large class may be dismissed without a comment. I deal not with open and avowed vice. My object is to prevent misconception, obscurity, sef-deceit ; and no subtlety of self-hypocrisy can reconcile with the law and love of God, vices which the world itself professes to discountenance. I come among the amiabili- ties, the noblenesses, the stern and lofty virtues of our SERM. VII.] of the Saints in Light. 115 social life. It is there that tlic warfare against man's fancied perfection must be prosecuted, and the true nature of that one principle of Christian excellence which is yet to be the light and blessedness of heaven, vindicated against all its counterfeits. It is these virtues which the man of the world and the philosopher equally declare themselves unable to conciliate with the uncompromising denunciations of the Gospel. It is these in which I find them most amply justified. The depravity of the world is just its forgetful- ness, impatience, contempt of its God ; the godless eoccel- lencies, the unsanctified noblenesses of man, are the truest, the most awful proofs of the fact. That the murderer, the adulterer, the thief, should disclaim subjection to his God is sad, but scarcely surprising; the depth, the universality of the rebellion, is seen in the independence of our very virtues upon God ; in the vast sphere of human excellence into which God never once enters ; in the amiability that loves all but God, in the self-devotion that never surren- dered one gatification for the sake of God ; in the indomitable energy that never wrought one persevering work for God ; in the enduring patience that faints under no weight of toil except the labor of adoring and praising God. This it is which really demonstrates the alienation of the world from its Maker, that its best affections should thus be affections to all but Him ; that not the worst alone or the most de- graded, but the best and loftiest natures among us should be banded in this conspiracy to exile Him from the world He has made ; that when He thus " comes to His own," " His own" should " receive Him not ;" that He should have to behold the fairest things He has formed, — kindness, and gratitude, and love, — embracing every object but Himself; the loveliest feeling He has implanted taking root, and growing and blossoming through the world, to bear fruit for all but Him ! That you may the more clearly perceive this momentous, this ever-neglected distinction between mere impulsive 116 Meetness for the Inherilance [SERM. VIT. amiability and that one principle of voluntary surrender to God which alone fits for God's eternal world, — let me pro- pose to you a single prominent case. What in our nature is more beautiful than the family affection ; or what would more readily be alleged as an instance to countervail the Scripture accounts of our fundamental depravity and per- version ? The young mother for weeks will hang over the couch of her babe, with a depth of self-abandonment, as if the life she had given were still undivided from her own, and the same vital tide still circulated through both. The excitements of youth and society suddenly lose all their charm. The enjoyments, the comforts, the very necessaries of life are forgotten in the total absorption of this affection : life itself is willingly sacrificed in behalf of this yet more precious existence, an existence as yet undeveloped, that can know nothing of the pains it gives, can return nothing for all this lavish devotion but tears, and waywardness, and cries. Beautiful indeed is this; the coldest nature must acknowledge its loveliness, must recognize its value. But where is its relation to God? Or how much less of it would exist were God's existence conceived to cease for ever ? It is not surely because God commands the mother's care that it is ordinarily given, but because God has framed her nature to bestow it. It is not duty but affection that binds her to her infant's cot. She does what is right, but not simply because it is right. Or if you doubt it, reflect whether her affection, after all, exeeds that of the inferior animals, willingly dying in defence of their offspring, yet wholly incapable of the very conception of duty or of God. In this, then, we need see (except incidentally) no recogni- tion of a divine command ; we only see the power and intensity of those affections which the human heart, prodigal to bestow them upon all earthly objects, never dreams of tendering to its God. And, therefore, while we praise and love such beauteous exhibitions of affection (God forbid we should say ought that might appear to slight them !) we are SERM. VII.] of the Saints in Light. 117 forced to maintain that in themselves they may form no discipline whatever for heaven, no practice of the diviner life ; because felt apart from God, and, however coincident with His law, yet wrought without any intended relation, or willing subjection, to the law they obey. I have suggested to you a single instance of the distinction which I would impress, — the distinction between acting from amiable impulse and acting from obedience to God ; but you will see how deeply it cuts into the boasted excellencies of our nature. Where shall we look for the high and heavenly in that nature, if not in such a case as this ? Yet this, it is clear, has little or no relation to God, and must, therefore, be nearly worthless as an element in that training of the will for God's eternal world Avhich forms the object of our text. What more can be said for friendship, for honor, for patriot- ism, for all in which man ordinarily exults; so far as these human virtues manifest no direct recognition of God or sub- jection to God? Admirable for their own temporary pur- pose, and in their own limited sphere, they can be of little or no value in a world where their objects will have disap- peared; where nothing can fully avail but those graces which have learned to embrace as their object but that one all-sufficient Object whose glory and whose power fill the amplitude of heaven and of eternity. Need I say more to make you clearly understand that the reputed virtues of human society are no education for God ; inasmuch as they all more or less lack that one essential character without which all virtue is profitless for heaven, and would be useless in heaven, — the habit of acting from the love, and in obedience to the will of God. Clearly apprehend this momentous distinction; and on confidence in personal virtue, no blindness to personal depravity, can stand against it. Joyful obedience must be the happiness of heaven ; joyful obedience must, therefore, be the holiness of earth. No vaunted virtue, wrought out of God, amiability of manner, gentleness of temper, fidelity of friendship, honor, 118 Meetnessfor the Inheritance [SEHM. VII. integrity, decorum, — no virtue that leaves tlie heart a rebel to its Maker, or forgetful of Him, can dispose for heaven, or " make meet for the inheritance of the saints in light." How, then, shall the work be wrought? How shall we produce the heavenly mind which fits for a heavenly world ? Clearly and solely, by cultivating affections that rest in heaven itself and its God; and by devoting our earthly affections not merely as their own instinctive impulses lead, but also, as far as may be, in felt and constant conformity to His appointment. Keligion", as distinct from the virtues of society, the graceful amenities of ordinary life,— Ee- LiGio^, which fixes the heart wholly and permanently on God Himself, — it is no enthusiam, no idle speculative illu- sion, to affirm that this alone can meet the requirements of a creature formed for God and His eternity. Faith, and hope, and love, which are the great organs or exercises of religion, are the instruments which, gradually uniting the heart to the spiritual world and its Lord, separate it from earth, predispose it for heaven, win the will to His service, spiritually disembody the soul before its time, and train it for the fellowship and the heritage of the saints. Through these the pathway lies to heaven, and through these alone. These are the habits that must be attained, or heaven is plainly hopeless. Truly understand what heaven is^ and you will see that salvation is impossible, unless by these divine affections the spirit is first moved to know, and to desire, and to love Him, whom to know is eternal life. What, then, are the specific functions of each of these great preparatory graces ? How does each minister to the common work of discipline for the world of "the saints in light"? Faith is the realizing power. Its office in this work of preparation is to make us see the unseen, to be the visual sense of the Spirit. Beholding God even now around us, it prepares for heaven by already habituating to the pre- SERM. VII.] of the Saints in Light. 119 sence of heaven's eternal Master. Even tliis existing world is a scene of deep awe to the spirit of faith ; it is pervaded by the providence of God, it is haunted by His angels. The spiritual system that encompasses us as Christians is still more wondrous; and this is the constant sphere of faith. And beyond them both stretches out into infinity that everlasting world which faith accepts with equal certainty ; which receiving, with trembling joy, the message of divine mercy, she recognizes for her own ; and which, confiding in the excellence of a glory she cannot yet ade- quately conceive, she delivers over to the bright visions of Christian hope. Hope is the consoling and fortifying power. She pre- pares for heaven by maintaining the constant desire and expectation of its promised enjoyments. As faith dwells on the testimony of the glory to come, hope reposes on the glory itself. In hours of sorrow and trial the magnificent vision still brightens through all their clouds ; until, as it were, wrought into the substance of the soul, it becomes a part of its better nature, and, coloring it with its antici- pated heaven, fits it, by the very earnestness of desire, for the glory it desires. But love is the uniting power, the consummation and the perfection of all. In its highest degrees this is not so much a preparation for heaven as heaven already begun ; for we know of nothing more perfect in heaven than the fulness of loving union with God. And hence (as you will all remember) St Paul, declaring that it " never faileth," distinguishes this grace as one which, though born on earth, lives prolonged into eternity. But even in its lower de- grees, — for its degrees are infinite, — we can easily under- stand how that love of God which makes His command- ments "not grievous" here, must prepare for a state when their fulfilment shall be intense delight hereafter; how the habit of dwelling on His perfections now must fitly increase the faculty and the enjoyment of beholding and 120 Meetnessfor the Inheritance [SERM. VII. adoring tlaem hereafter ; how the spirit, awaking in the likeness of God, whatever new and wondrous prerogatives it may then acquire, shall nevertheless recognize an identity, not only of itself but of its affections, surviving death, and shall glory to resume, in the immediate light of the divine countenance, those contemplations of His infinite righteous- ness, wisdom, and truth, which death suspended for a while, but which are equally fitted to be the happiness of both worlds. And thus on earth the love of God fits the spirit for its own development and perfection in heaven. And thus doth the Father, implanting in us initiatory graces, faith, and hope, and love, qualify His children for the blessedness that awaits them; not more anxiously prepar- ing His Paradise for them, than preparing them for Para- dise. So, then, brethren, heaven is our destined profession for everlasting; and earthly life, — let the expressive phrase, though homely, be pardoned, — is our professional education. We are pupils in the art of eternally serving the divine Master; the Church of Christ is the infant school of the children of God. " Boys ought most to learn," said the ancient sage, "what most they shall need when they be- come men ;" men, by the same principle, are bound to learn what most they shall need as immortals. We are pilgrims to a dwelling-place of blessedness ; and the light that streams through its open portals ought to suffuse us as we approach them. An anticipated beatitude, a sancti- ty that even now breathes of Paradise, a grace which is already tinged with the richer hues of glory — these should mark the Christian disciple ; and these, as he advances in years, should brighten and deepen upon and around him, until the distinction of earth and heaven is almost lost, and the spirit, in its placid and unearthly repose, is gone, as it were, before the body, and at rest already with its God. This may seem but an ideal ; and too sad it is that it should too commonly be only such ; for once adequately conceive SERM. VIL] of the Saints in Light. 121 the Christian's gift and privilege, and what have I described which ought not naturally to characterize him ? A being already invested with a deathless life, already adopted into the immediate family of God, already enrolled in the brotherhood of angels, yea, of the Lord of Angels; a being who, amid all the revolutions of earth and skies, feels and knows himself indestructible, capacitated to outlast the universe, a sharer in the immortality of God; — what is there that can be said of such an one which falls not below the awful glory of his position ? Oh, misery, that with such a calling man should be the grovelling thing he is I — that, summoned but to pause for a while in the vestibule of the eternal temple, ere he be introduced into its sanctua- ries, he should forget in the dreams of his lethargy, or learn, poor scoffer! to despise the eternity that awaits him. Oh, wretchedness beyond words, that, surrounded by love and invited by glory, he should have no heart for happi- ness ; but should still love to cower in the dark while light ineffable solicits him to behold and to enjoy it ! Oh, horror yet more terrific, that him whom love and joy cannot attract, even vengeance and torment cannot alarm; that, unwilling to receive God as merciful, he cannot be taught to remember Him as just; or to reflect that he who refuses to prepare for the inheritance of the saints in light, is by that very refusal hardening his own heart to the temper of the inheritors of darkness ! Finally, brethren, professing, as even by your very attendance in this house of God you now profess, to aim at heaven, essay to live in the spirit of heaven ! Cultivate its dispositions ! its love for a loving God, its tenderness for even unloving man! Live, as millions of spiritual creatures even now living, who differ from you in this, indeed, that they see what you believe, that they possess what you inherit, but who, in all their aogelic ecstasies, can point to no such attestation of infinite affection as God has mani- 11 122 Meetnessfor the Inheritance of Saints^ etc. [seem. vil. fested to you^ and who might well be the pupils in divine love of those for whom God Himself became man, and poor, and crucified, in order that, having purchased us by His blood, He might purify us by His Spirit, and, refining His creatures of the dust into His own likeness, to prepare them for His own kingdom, might " make them meet to be" at last " partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light." SEEMON VIII. OCCASIONAL MYSTERIOUSNESS OF CHRIST'S TEACHING- Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death. — John viii. 61. The Scriptures of God, my brethren, are not to be prac- tically interpreted without the Spirit of God. It is per- fectly true that much may be done in the field of critical argument and exposition without any supernatural aid. It is quite certain that a vast and elaborate commentary upon these Scriptures may be written, and read, and understood, without the influence of the Holy Spirit. It is supposable that a man may declaim with an overwhelming energy, and a force of genius altogether astonishing, upon the majestic mysteries of God's providence and grace ; that he may have power to arouse feelings, whether of tenderness or terror, that long lay slumbering in the lowest depths of the natural human heart, and, with a potency like the fabled miracles of magic, to call them out at his bidding ; and yet that neither he, nor any one of his audience, have ever known, in any sense that shall tell to their eventual salvation, one breath of the effectual Spirit of God, one pulsation of the genuine spiritual life ! There is absolutely nothing to prevent the intellect from exercising itself upon the Christian revelation, more than upon the contents of any other printed book ; or the reason from estimating it, or the imagination from building on it, or even the gentler 124 Occasional Mysieriousness of [SERM. vill. affections from softening at its details. It is thrown in the midst of the world exactly like any other volume around it, printed with the same types, read with the same eyes ; heard Avith the same ears ; and the faculties and feelings of man will of course act upon it as they do upon any other history. But (if the Book itself may be allowed to declare its own claims and prerogatives) all this external similarity is accompanied with a total internal difference; and this book differs from every other, in requiring, so to speak, an organ specially prepared to receive its real purport. These things are ^'■spiritually discerned." And yet, while we uphold this awful distinction, we must balance the account by another principle, which seems intimated with equal clearness, and which, I believe, it would be fatal to all right views of religion to overlook. The change which takes place in each individual soul ■under the mysterious agency of the Spirit is vast, but it is not unlimited. Whatever real fanaticism (in some ages of the Church), or unintentional but injudicious exaggeration, may have urged, — it does not appear that the of&ce of the Spirit of God is to supply us with affections in themselves substantially new, — to bestow a something which is neither love nor fear, nor hope, nor desire, — but simply to direct the old affections to higher objects, to employ the former mechanism for more exalted purposes. The whole array of the human affections, under their old names and in their old characters, are brought out in strong relief in every page of Scripture; the object of the apostolic preaching, and teaching, and warning, and example, is manifestly not to annihilate, but to " direct, sanctify, and govern them," upon better principles and under higher guidance. But we have spoken of a great and necessary change: with these elements preserved unaltered, where, then, is the scene of the work of the Spirit? where, is the field on which this mighty revolution is wrought ? Unquestion- ably, in the olject revealed, and in the corresponding attrac- SERM. VIII.] Christ's Teachinj — Christ our ^^LifeP 125 tion of the heart to that object. He who is supernaturally gifted sees not with other eyes, but he sees what other eyes cannot see, and loves what other hearts cannot love I When the first martyr, " full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven," his visual organ was itself, doubt- less, unchanged : but while others looked upon the common skies, and saw but clouds or sunshine, he alone " saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God." Head and heart, the regenerate is still the same man ; but in a new world of bright and eternal realities : and though " every thought," his whole intellectual organ, remains unmutilated, yet every thought is " brought cap- tive to the obedience of Christ." Thus God conciliates His worlds of nature and grace, and evinces that nothing was made in vain. Sin itself is an element in discipline ; and as for the affections enthralled by its despotism, they are sinful not in themselves as affections, but in their depra- vation ; they are meant to be not the bond-slaves of evil, but the liberated " servants of righteousness ;" they are born for eternity and for God ! Let us then, ever maintain for the Spirit of Truth, — and more than ever in these days, in which we are wont to hear the gravest truths of revelation questioned or diluted, or overlooked, — His own unparticipated right to illumine man ; not indeed by making man no longer man, but by feeding the affections with holy food, by inviting them to holy objects. In this work He is alone. "It is the Spirit that quickeneth." The old and the new creation are alike exclusively divine. The revelation of God itself, as de- livered in books, dare not dispute this honor with the Everlasting Spirit. That revelation is written in a lan- guage familiar to our daily thoughts and converse; it speaks of life, and death, and faith, and hope, and love, — all household words, which in their earthly acceptation every man can speak of and define ; but to pass from the earthly term to the heavenly purport, from the natural 11* 126 Occasional Mysteriousness of [sERM. Vlil. object to the supernatural, from the life of the flesh to the life of the spirit, from the faith which trusts in the brother- man to the faith which trusts in the " first-born among many brethren," from the love and hope that are entangled among creatures of clay to the love and hope that are busy amons: the immortal realities of heaven, — this is an art which the Spirit that inspired the Scriptures alone can teach to the man who reads them I Keflections of this kind, my beloved brethren, are natu- rally prompted by the passage before us, taken in connec- tion with the singular dialogue of which it is a part. They are among the first which will occur to meditative students of our Lord's habitual teaching (in which there was at all times a striking similarity of style and method) ; but per- haps on no occasion does this profound lesson of the neces- sity of spiritual enlightenment meet us more forcibly than upon the perusal of this remarkable discussion, recorded in the eighth chapter of St John. The divine instructor is in the midst of His Jewish audi- ence. They surround Him, half awed by His dignity, half provoked by his calmness. Undisturbed, and as if He felt himself more truly addressing ages to come, — as if He stood in the presence, riot of a few contentious disputants, but of the Church He was to found and to redeem, — yea, as if He spoke in the presence of "an innumerable company of angels" and the "spirits of the just", whom He was to " perfect," — in such a tone as this He replies to their cavils. His words, while they sufficiently answer the objections of His adversaries, yet answer them upon lorinciples ivhich they cannot yet comiwehend ; and though these weighty sentences seem at first sight designed for present and immediate use, they are now known to be really pregnant with the deepest mysteries of the spiritual life, and only to be understood by those who have had experience in that life. Christ spoke to futurity, and pre supposed a spiritual illumination not yet bestowed. He would evince the necessity of a divine inter- SERM. Yili.] Christ's Teaching— Christ our ^^LifeP 127 preter to unfold and explain His own words ; and therefore He speaks, — truths indeed, but truths whose deep purport He knew those whom He addressed were wholly unable to penetrate. What are the topics of this solemn discourse ? " Truth "— " freedom "— " life "— " death, "—all intelligible terms, surely, but, in their spiritual import, to the unspi- ritualized mind, dark as the counsels of God, fathomless as eternity ! Two important uses can be made of this peculiarity in our Lord's method of address, combined with this view of its object. The first we have in some measure seen. Such a discourse as that to which I am calling your attention shows us Christ Himself proceeding on the necessity of the supernatural illumination He was afterwards to bestow. He speaks, as it were, in cypher ; the Spirit of God is to furnish the solution. He teaches, then, by exam2')le no less than precept, that that Spirit alone can unfold the things of the Spirit ; His very obscurity to the audience who heard Him is a perpetual assumption of the principle. To the Christian believer, therefore, the adoring contemplation of such a discourse suggests something over and above the purport of each separate passage. It • urges him to pray for a lamp of heavenly light to read it -by ! It bids him not be content, in this or any other portion of Scripture, with words, but to covet earnestly to be familiar with things^ — truths, — realities. It impresses the lesson so per- petually forgotten, that as in all subjects we can understand language only as far as we have some experience of the things it imports ; so in religion (by the very same princi- ple) the spiritual heart alone can understand the language of the Spirit. Think of it for a moment, and you will find that, in every book whatever, it is the mind of the reader that puts meaning in the words ; the language of the new covenant is a celestial language, and they who will give their fulness to its blessed words must have caught their secret from heaven ! But again: 128 Occasional Mysteriousness of [seem. viii. To the infidel impugner of Christianity, this view of the special design of the apparent obscurity of discourses such as this, and the refusal of our Lord to descend from His own lofty strain in order to meet on a lower ground the ignorance of His assailants, — obviously resists a popular objection to His method of instruction. But it does more than this. Let us but suppose that St John has truly re- ported the discussion before us. What then are the facts? Language is here employed unintelligible to the unen- lightened Jew, in effect unprofitable, as far as we can see, for any immediate purpose; certainly little calculated to con- ciliate temporary popularity : yet this very language, which then dropped from those divine lips, neglected or despised, except by a few humble followers, becomes afterwards trea- sured, published, known universally, and, even by those who partially disregard it, admitted to be stamped with the impress of a great and exalted mind. TFAo, then, was this Being, that thus, wandering among the suburbs of Jerusa- lem, could afford to lose the present in the future ? and not this only, but to count upon a future which so perfectly realized His calculation ? Does not the whole strain of the discourse evince the calm prescience of one who was fami- liar with the secrets of time to come, who knew that He would be, though He was not yet^ appreciated ; and is not, therefore, the very obscurity, and the very reserve, which the assailant of the divine mission of Christ offers as an ob- jection, itself, as facts and history have now established, an inward indication of a knowledge supernatural and divine ? So far, brethren, we have spoken of the general character of this momentous discourse, which, as the most prominent instance of our Lord's mode of meeting His adversaries, deserves deep and patient study. We have seen that He speaks a mysterious language of which He declines to offer any immediate explanation. We have seen a strong reason for His adoption of this course, — to impress the paramount necessity of spiritual enlightenment; and we have seen how SERM. VIIT.] Christ's Teaching— Christ our ^'LifeT 129 forcibly this seeming neglect of the perverted and petulant Jew that heard Him, for the higher interests of the Church that was to succeed His ascension, demonstrated His inward knowledge of futurity. II. Let us now, for a while, rest upon one of those many mysterious phrases of the discourse, the expression recorded in the text, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see deathr You cannot fail to remember how fatally the Jews misunderstood this mighty declaration, in imagining that our Lord promised to His followers the doubtful blessing of an earthly immortality ; and how they objected to Him the death of their greatest ancestor, as a sufficient evidence of the supposed arrogance of Him who offered to give that which Abraham could not keep. We know that He spoke of a deeper mystery of holiness ; I have said that the Spirit alone can convey the idea by conveying the experience ; but the Spirit is ever most willing to visit those who await Him in the word of God, and who, by earnest and patient application of the natural faculties (knowing that to the possession of these, no less, yea more, than to any other trust from heaven, is, on grounds of even uninspired reason, attached a deep responsibility), labor after celestial wisdom, and thus, as far as man may, bring themselves into the blessed sphere of higher supernatural influences. It is no insult to the Spirit of God to affirm, that He has His own sphere. His own laws, His own conditions of operation ; and that we must meet Him in subordination to these if we would meet Him at all. Jordan may far exceed Abana and Pharpar ; but what avails the excellence of the waters of healing, if the unbelief of the spiritual leper prevent him from seeking them ; or if his still more culpable presump- tion betray him into expecting that the miracle which gra- ciously makes them a bath of life, will of course be ex- tended either to conveying the unwilling recusant to their banks, or to diffusing the mysterious influence through 130 Occasional Mysteiiousness of [SERM. VIII. every breatli of air he draws, in order to suit his indolent convenience. That there is an inseparable connection between " Christ" and "life" no student of the New Testament can overlook. *' The life was manifested," says St John, in his First Epis- tle, "and we have seen it." The life thus "manifested" was, doubtless, Christ Himself, conformably to the same Evangelist's record of his divine Master's proclamation, that He was " the resurrection and the life^'^ " the way, the truth, and the Ife^ Christ is " the life," plainly because, — by what process I do not now inquire, — the cause of life, as He is said to be, our " peace" and our " sanctification," because He is the source of these blessings ; or, as dying Simeon in his parting hymn designates Him, the " Salva- tion," of which He was the author and securer. The purport of the expression (as attributing to Christ the pro- duction of life) is more directly given in that title which St Peter employed in the third of Acts, " Ye killed the Prince [author, leader] of life," — a form of phrase evidently intended to heighten the atrocity of the act by the force of the contrast. So far there can be little doubt or difference of opinion. Bat when, from the mere fact of the intimate connection of the Lord of life and the life He bestows, we advance to estimate more precisely the nature or extent of this " life," we find among those who undertake to speak of these matters much uncertainty and variance. (1) Some will tell you that the phrase ascribes to Christ the power of im- mortalizing human souls ; (2) others, in a higher and truer strain, that it attributes to Him the spiritiial resurrection from the death of sin, which takes place in every regene- rated soul ; (3) others, again, that it pronounces Him the author and bestower of an eternity, not merely of existence, but of hapj^iness in heaven. These are indeed mighty gifts; they all alike presuppose a power nothing below divine ; for {^creation be divine, the recreation, whether to existence. SERM. VIII.] Christ's Teaching — Christ our '•'■Lifer 131 to righteousness^ or to hliss^ of God's noblest earthly crea- tures, surely partakes of the same supreme character of power. But nobler still it is to look upon them all as issuing from the same eternal fountain. Here, then, is the solution of the difQculty. These opinions are separately true, but separately imperfect ; the Messiah unites in Him- self all these offices, offices themselves essentially connected with Him and with each other! 1. "In Christ all shall be made alive;" but that the depth and extent of the scriptural term "life" can never be limited to the mere revival of the soul from death or un- consciousness, seems obvious on the most cursory inspec- tion of the sacred volume. So far is mere immortality from answering to this gift of life, that there is a species of immortality to which the title of death^ — " eternal death," and "the second death," — is scripturally given. Accord- ingly Christ Himself expressly terms the passage to the future state of glory, the " resurrection of /z/e," in contrast to " the resurrection of damnation^^ (John v. 20) ; and he is said to have brought not merely " immortality," but " life and immortality," to light. The same St Paul, who assigns Him this high office, declares that the Gospel promises to those who seek "honor, and glory, and immortality, eternal life," evidently considering that this eternal life involves them all; for surely the prize (in a land whose blessedness " the heart of man" is declared unable to conceive) will not be inferior to the aim which its votaries can here propose to their conceptions. It appears hence that this " life," as well as the " death" spoken of in the text, is essentially a moral^ not a merely physical state or notion ; that it is a blessed and spiritual vitality. To express His highest spiritual bestowments no term is more frequently employed by our blessed Lord than " light ;" now this light is itself perpetually connected with His descriptions or intimations of the life He was to bestow, and that in a manner which indissolubly combines the two. My followers shall have 132 Occasional Mysteriousness of [SERM. viii. " the light of life^'^ He declares to the Pharisees (John viii. 12) ; while " the shadow of death" is, as you know, the constant type of a state of hopeless spiritual ruin. It was to those who " lay in the shadow of death^^'' that " the day- spring from on high came to give lightP And surely this use of " life," to express " blessedness" was, in the mouth of our Eedeemer, perfectly natural. His very existence was one long impulse of holiness ; to Him to live was to live Id holiness ; and He naturally and habitually spoke of that eternal life with which alone He was familiar, as identical with eternal holiness. He borrowed His language from that celestial dialect, where there is but one term for existence, and that term is " glory I" When He promised life He promised all that was unchangeably associated with it in His own divine experience. Nothing short of a trans- cendent and abiding exaltation of nature deserved the title of that life which he was to communicate to His followers. The " life," then of which the New Testament reveals to us the story, is beyond and above the mere consciousness of existence, or its indefinite prolongation ; " the water of life" which, as we are told, flows so liberally in the Paradise of God, is more than a physical elixir ; the " fruit of the tree of life" is more than a physical sustenance. And in like manner, he who (as in the text) is promised security from " death for ever," is rescued from a fate far more ter- rible than annihilation ; he is rescued from the miseries of death protracted into eternity ! 2, 3. We cannot, then, have much embarrassment in setting aside this undue limitation of the "eternal life," which Christ has purchased for His followers. But greater difficulty has sometimes been found in appropriating to their respective passages the other significations which I have mentioned : the spiritual life of holiness in the soul, and the eternal life of happiness hereafter. Of both these Christ is equally the author ; and while we know that St Paul found it necessary (2 Tim. ii. 18) to repress a notion SERM. VIII.] Christ's Teaching— Christ our ^'LifeP 133 which, even in his days, had gained votaries, that the resurrection to life, of which the Redeemer had spoken, was a purely spiritual exaltation of the soul, and, as such, ac- complished in this world ; perhaps wc may sometimes be in danger of falling into the opposite extreme. The truth is, that these things are essentially and forever united^ and this is the reason why the same phrase is employed to characterize them both. Let me ask you to consider this a little more deeply. We know that even in the ordinary exercise of the moral faculty in men, there is usually included a consciousness of desert^ and thence, in minds at all trained to carry out their own conceptions, a strong anticipation of some yet unrealized attestation of the ineffaceable distinctions of good and evil, in the form of recompense. We are not, therefore, to wonder that, through almost every region of heathenism, human nature bore and bears witness, — faintly, indeed, but truly, — to this mighty connection of the present with the future ; and that some were even found among the unbaptized world who could boldly tell the servant of virtue, that though the reason of man had no hand to un- weave the tangled web of Providence, it had an eye to look through it, and a voice to pronounce with infallible certainty, that the power that rules the universe rules Himself and it by the immutable law of right. Now Christianity is the law of right in its fullest action ; and with a clear and constant apprehension of the true charac- ter of God, as proclaimed in revelation, such anticipations of the future development of his government cannot but brighten into a belief that becomes indissolubly associated luith a course of earnest virtue, — cannot but, by the in- evitable operation of habitual reflection, be so bound up with it as to become a part of its very idea ; so that the service here and the glory hereafter become perpetual companions in the thoughts, each supposing and demanding the other. And if this be so, which all experience confirms, 12 134 Occasional Mysteriousness of [SERM. viil. surely it is not difficult to conceive that the child of God may so feel his future inheritance realized in his present graces as at length to identify them in conception and in name ; the preparatory life of this world, and the con- summate life of the next, being the two inseparable elements mutually inclusive, of the office of the quickening Spirit in relation to the soul of man. But this identification becomes infinitely more natural, when we reflect on the substantial sameness of the inward state in both the stages of being, a sameness of which this phraseology is at once the consequence and the proof. If that ineffable gift, Christ received into heart of man by faithi, be indeed a principle whose developments are to make the history of immortality, why should we disjoin the princi- ple from its results ? If it be indeed " a well of water spring- ing up into everlasting Zz/e," why should we seek a separate title for the fountain and the river, that, issuing from its silent depths, flows away into eternity? If it be a "seed" whose bloom is to be an amaranth, the immortal flower, shall we not name it from its period of perfection, and love to lose the feeble present in the glories of the unfading future ? And, surely, could we look upon death as Christ- ians should look, could we see in it a mysterious baptism, an infant baptism of the " little children" of God, from the Church suffering into the Church triumphant, far less start- ling than that baptism of old which was our mystic transit from the world into the suffering Church ; it is with feelings and language such as I have described, that we would feel and speak of that " Holy Spirit of promise which is the earnest of our inheritance ;" of that Spirit which already "bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, and if children, then heirs .•" in short, of the substan- tial oneness of the spiritual life, from the first hour of the incorporation into Christ, wheresoever wrought on, unto very eternity ! Nay, I know not if even yet we have reached the deep SERM. VIII.] Christ's Teaching— Christ our ''Lifer 135 truth of this matter. We all know how the spiritual and the vitally eternal are united in Scripture phraseology, whenever it has occasion to speak of the " law of the Spirit oflife^^'' of that "Spirit" which "is LIFE because of righteous- ness," of that " spiritual-mindedness" which " IS life" as well as " peace." The more you rest upon these profound sayings, the more you will feel that they speak of some mystic intimacy of inward connexion, which answers to all that we can conceive of an absolute unitij of nature ; and that, had we faculties to see these things, we might perceive that a deathless permanence belongs to the spiritual thing inherent in the regenerate mind, if it indeed evidence its genuineness by there through earthly life abiding and fruc- tifying, in virtue of a natural necessity as real as that which perpetuates any of the unalterable laws and relations which reason apprehends in the universe of God. The spiritual is essentially eternal. In the theory of Christian- ity (if I may use that formal name for the glimpses which we gain in the New Testament of the mighty mysteries of God) they are not two ideas, but two aspects of one and the same idea ; and they are thence used so as to imply each other. "Whoso drinketh my blood and eateth my flesh hath eternal life, and I," who thus abide in him, " will raise him up ;" he hath within him the principle which will after- wards manifest itself (as in a natural re-appearance) in glory. " He that believeth in me hath passed from death unto life;" "he that hath the Son hath lifer Christ, then, and His sacred interpreters, seem to have intimated that in sanctity there is essentially comprised a germ of immor- tality; that holiness is so far necessarily connected with that universal scheme of perfection of which it is a part, as to partake of its inherent eternity and inherent happiness, of nature. Feeling thus, they could regard the indwelling of Christ's eternal Spirit now to be not so much (one might say) the condition, as the first stage of glory ; and thence, to speak of the " life" bestowed by Christ in inward holiness 136 Occasional Mystei-iousness of [serm. viii. in time, and the " life" bestowed by Cbrist in perfect happi- ness in eternity, was not to speak of two lives, but of two forms of one incorruptible, uninterrupted, unchangeable gift of everlasting life. Such views as these, then (which, if I were not afraid of taxing your attention unduly, might be carried much far- ther), seem to show how closely connected are the three forms of life, physical, spiritual, and eternal, of which *' Christ, who is our life," is the Almighty Author. The more you reflect upon this mighty theme, the more you will see that His office, instead of being limited to any, grasps them all ; that He must raise the dead as Judge and Saviour, that he may punish and that he may save ; that He bestows a quickening principle of spiritual life upon the soul, which must pass the grave, for nothing holy can perish; it "partakes of the divine nature," it is "incorrup- tible seed," and must flower in Paradise: finally, that of this last consummate state He is also Lord and Donor, and in love shall rejoice as He beholds the same light which once was dawn, hereafter settling in that noon which knows no sunset! Of this life divine it is but to be said, that it is traceable to an unfathomable fountain in the infinite essence of God the Father: "the Father hath life in Himself J' From Him it is declared to be received by His Son, yet received with a certain mystic independency ; " Even so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself f^ and from Him it flows abroad upon mankind, according to the inscrutable laws of the divine purpose : " Even so the Son maketh alive whom He will;" "as I live by the Father, so he that eateth me shall live hy me ;" " because I live ye shall live also ;" — a purpose of which we only know that it directs itself by the practical belief of the receiver, for " he that belie veth" it is who " hath everlasting life," or, as the text expresses it, " he that keepeth my saying shall never see death." Thus is every believing child of God, no matter in what earthly SERM. VIII.] Christ's Teaching— Christ our ^' Lifer 137 bondage groaning, in what earthly misery sunk, bound by a chain of adamant to the very throne of the ever-blessed Trinity. There is that in him which hath its birthplace in the bosom of the " High and lofty One that inhabiteth eter- nity;" the life of Him who bids the universe live is enshrined in his inmost spirit ! " He shall never see death," for he is one with Him who cannot die ; He has entered within the portals of glory; he has laid his hand upon the ark of God. Dungeon may confine him, death may threaten him; but the dungeon-bolt cannot exclude the risen Saviour, and death itself is but the seal and pass- port of his immortality. Brethren ! how is it that we awake not to these transcendent claims? How is- it that, with such an image and superscription upon us, we can bear to mingle with the dull alloy of earth? How is it that, with all these awful assurances of the mighty thing the spirit of a man indeed is, when bound in everlasting unity with the spirit of Christ, we can live unthoughtful of such an heri- tage, as if this world, with its melancholy mockery of hope and happiness, were meant to fill the heart that a God has once deigned to visit and sanctify; or as if the curtain that hung upon the grave had never been indeed withdrawn by the triumphant Conqueror of sin and death! "He that keepeth my saying shall never see death!" Many a dark century has passed away since the walls of the temple echoed these glorious words; words, one would deem, that, uttered from God to man, might well change the face of the world, might arouse from one end of earth to the other a high and holy ambition to join the bright band of immortals thus summoned to the courts of God's own palace by God's own voice ! O sad reverse of reality ! The people of God, the keepers of the sayings of Christ, far from filling all lands, and glorifying every clime, are a scattered race, often a destitute and persecuted race! Doubtless, our faith is yet to hold the earth in fee; ulti- 12* 138 Occasional Mysteriousness of [serm. viil. mately it shall take in the whole wide family of man ; but at the present period, and ever since its foundation, it is vain to deny that if " without holiness no man shall see the Lord," it has been as truly partial in its actual results upon the eternal state of mankind, as Judaism itself upon their temporal condition. Age after age, a few hundreds or thousands of contemporary believers are collected into the treasure cities of immortal happiness, gathered from various spots in the wide Christian world ; and there the operation ceases! "Many are called," but it is still too melancholy a certainty that "few are chosen." It is as if mankind formed a vast garden of diversified plants, out of which the great florist selects here and there a few promising shoots upon which to exhaust all the resources of divine art, to show how holy a thing human nature may be made, and to fit for transplanting into His own special conservatory. Into this awful mystery, the most tremendous in all the divine government, I dare not intrude. I tremble at my own insignificance when I stand before this cloud that covers the mercy-seat of God ! A voice from the sanctuary declares that " God is Zoz-e," and it is enough ; I believe the voice. I leave it to the secret alchemy of divine wisdom to convert evil into good, and (as even in our own limited experience) out of destruction to bring forth life. But while I leave, and would bid yoit leave, in faith, to the eternal Father, the dispositions of His own boundless empire, I cannot abandon the right, and high privilege of the minister, to summon all who hear me to ponder the practical instruction that this appalling mystery impresses. When the disciples once inquired, " who then can be saved?" the answer was consolator}^, that "with God all things are possible." When, on another occasion, a similar question was proposed, — " are there few that be saved ?" the answer was severe, practical, and imperative : " Strive to enter in at the narrow gate!" And such should be the mingled web of our conclusions on the subject ; a comhina- SERM. VIII.] Christ's Teaching — Christ our ''LifeP 139 tion of confidence in the absolute goodness of God, and of earnest resolution to be warned by the terrors of his threats. " He that keepeth my saying shall never see death !" Mark, brethren ! it is no momentary adoption of the faith and law of Christ to which eternal life is the promised recompense. It is no transient emotion of passionate grief, no occasional sympathy with martyred virtue, no evanes- cent enthusiasm in the cause of the Gospel, that forms in the heart of man the germ of future glory ; it is " to Iceep the saying of Christ." Our Christianity is momentary, because its principle is momentary; we turn to religion to diversify our life, not to le our life. But oh ! as you would indeed be the sealed and reserved inheritors of glory, remember this — that God will not condescend to take His place among the fashions of the day! Kemember, that Christianity is not a new system of theological reasoning, nor a new assortment of phraseology, nor a new circle of acquaintance, nor even a new line of meditation, — but a new life. Its very being and essence is inward and prac- tical ; it is not the likeness or the history of a living thing, it is itself alive! And therefore to examine its evidence is not to try Christianity ; to admire its martyrs is not to try Christianity; to compare and estimate its teachers is not to try Christianity; to attend its rites and services with more than Mahometan punctuality is not to try or know Christi- anity. But for one week, for one day, to have lived in the pure atmosphere of faith and love to God, of tenderness to man : to rejoice in the felt and realized presence of Him who is described as " coming up from the wilderness," sup- porting his beloved ; to have beheld earth annihilated and heaven opened to the prophetic gaze of hope ; to have seen evermore revealed behind the complicated troubles of this strange, mysterious life, the unchanged smile of an eternal Friend, and everything that is difficult to reason solved by that reposing trust which is higher and better than reason: 140 Mysteriousness of Christ's Teaching^ etc. [SERM. VIII. to have known and felt this, I will not say for a life^ but for a single blessed hour, that^ indeed, is to have made experiment of Christianity, — that is to know the imperish- able work of the Spirit in preparing souls for eternity, — that is to " keep the saying" which shall keep from death, — that is to have a glimpse of the meaning of those mystic words which I will not dare to paraphrase or amplify, but which are in themselves all, and more than all, I have attempted to express, — that " OUR life is hid with Christ in God." SERMON IX. SELF-DELUSION AS TO OUR STATE BEFORE GOD. (Preached before the University of Dublin.) If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves. — 1 John i. 8. When our parents in Paradise had broken the command of God, we are told that, among the earliest tokens of their corrupted nature (thenceforward the unhappy inheritance of their race), they " hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden ;" but we may be assured, that that guilty impulse of concealment had been preceded by another which was a no less fatal token and accompaniment of guilt, — and that, as after their crime they strove to hide from God, so during, and before it, they had too successfully learned to hide from themselves ! It is among the most potent of the energies of sin, that it leads astray by blinding, and blinds by leading astray ; that the soul of man, like the strong champion of Israel, must have its " eyes put out" when it would be " bound with fetters of brass," — and condemned " to grind in the prison- house." — Judges xvi. 21. Our divine Instructor has taught us, that men " love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil ;" and the force of the reason, the power of the " because," is not merely from such extrinsic influences as shame, and the dread of detection, and the impatience of reproof, and the jealous dislike of an exellence that per- petually condemns them, but, doubtless, besides all these 142 Self-Delusim as to [serm. ix. and similar motives, from tlie very necessity of the case, from the inherent and inevitable efficacy of sin to diffuse darkness, and to make us in love with the darkness it dif- fuses. The heathen, according to St Paul, " had the under- standing darkened," and " were alienated from the life of God through ignorance f and he traces this melancholy " lack of knowledge through which the people were de- stroyed" to its fountain in the "blindness of their hearth — Eph. iv. 18. And they who perish under the spells of that lying prophet whose coming is " with all deceivableness of unrighteousness," perish "because they received not the love of the truth, thsit they might be saved," being "for that cause sent strong delusions that they should believe a lie." — 2 Thess. ii. 10, 11. Thus is Grod's mysterious judgment to be justified when He shall arraign the guilt of that unhelief which at first appears so utterly removed from the sphere of voluntary and wilful sin ; thus in every similar case, however apparently excusable, is He to stand ap- proved of men and angels when he shall unravel all the tangled mesh of our excuses, and flash upon us the tremen- dous conviction, that we are lost only because we would be lost, that in every several instance of temptation the sin lay with us as the situation with God; — pursuing the trembling conscience into its loneliest retreats, crushing all its unhappy devices of self-deception, and forcing it (last, worst form of judgment !) to set its own seal upon its own condemnation. Brethren! as you would escape that judgment, anticipate it ! As you would stand clear with God, stand manifest to yourself! Shrink not from earnestly contemplating the ravages of the disease, if you would sincerely estimate the value of the remedy ! 1 know it is no soothing theme of which I have to speak ; but religion cannot for ever speak only of her rewards, and never of her conditions. If she promise eventually to lead to the " green pastures and the still waters" of holiness, present and eternal, the pathway SERM. IX.] our Slate before God. 143 must sometimes lie through no pleasant land. There are times when it is the duty of the minister of Christ to lead men through the gloomy wards of the hospital of the heart, to unwind the bandage, and to expose the corruption it covers. It is but to forestall the judgment, which must accomplish the same office, if we neglect it. Is it not better, then, to do that in serenity, resolution, and sober hope, which else were assuredly done in hopeless, helpless, profit- less remorse ? And though I speak of the theme as gloomy, it is, after all, if rightly apprehended, but a temporary gloom ; nor does the Apostle in the text represent it other- wise. He pauses not in the valley of the shadow; he passes onward to the region of light and peace beyond it. It is but the frowning form and the flaming sword that guards " the way of the tree of life^ "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves ; but if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." But though glorious prospects may open in the distance, for the present we must be con- tent in these our reflections to linger together among the shadows. I. The Apostle declares, then, that the imagination of our own sinlessness is an inward lie. It has been much disputed, but I do not now delay minutely to inquire, whether he included in this affirmation the highest degrees of Christian attainment : a question of far more importance in systems of theology, than in the living art of practical godliness. The excellent person who, in the last century, principally insisted on this point, with the usual tendency of sectarian leaders (and assuredly, of all who ever bore that unhappy character, none should be named with gentler rebuke), — but with the inevitable tendency of all sepa- ratists to lose "the proportion of the faith," and to view the whole mystery of God in the heart of man in subservience to some special and favorite dogma, — really made the theological question of Christian perfectibility of far more 144 Self-Delusion as to [SERM. ix. ^practical importance than it ever deserved. To believe or to deny the possibility of Christian " perfection" is to leave the motives of the spiritual life almost wholly unchanged, as long as each man believes (and who on any side doubts this?) that it is the unceasing duty of each to be as perfect as he can^ and, in the holy ambition of yet completer conquest, to "think nothiag gained while aught remains to gain." And surely, whatever may be the measure of sanctification which God bestows upon His children in this world, we can scarcely conceive its highest state un- accompanied with a longing for a state yet higher, clearly conceived, and sought with a personal consciousness (so far) of imperfection, and an ardent desire to still escape that remainder of earthliness that embarrasses the ascent. In fact, the belief of Christian perfectibility seems in- applicable to individual practice from the very nature of Christian holiness. Were a perfect man to exist, he himself would be the last to know it ; for the highest stage of advancement is the lowest descent in humility. As long as this humility is necessary to the fulness of the Christian character, it would seem that it is of the essence of the constant growth in grace (however encouraged by holy joy and inward testimonies) to see itself lowlier as God exalts it higher. It is as one who stands by the margin of a lake, and gazes on his own image clofee beneath him ; conceive this contemplator of himself borne gradually aloft towards the heavens, and the image which he still beholds as he soars will deepen in proportion as he rises! Besides this operation of humility, it must be remembered that the spiritual life, if it be a progressive life, involves a progressively increasing knowledge of God. Now, though the spirit of man assuredly must brighten in purity as thus in faith and love it approaches the great source of all holiness, it must also appreciate far more accurately the force of the contrast between itself and its mighty model; nay, its very adoration, apprehending, as SEEM. IX.] our State before God. 145 nil affection docs, more profoundly tlie excellencies of its object, must impress upon it its own comparative nothing- ness : and thus, as it becomes relatively more perfect, it may be said to feel itself absolutely less so. In truth, it is only piety, and piety fervent and exalted, that can really feel how immeasurably far it is from perfect holiness. There are distances so great that all calculation of distance is neglected or impossible. We cannot tell how far is the nearest fixed star, and we know that the mass of mankind would conjecture it a few miles at most ; could we approach nearer, we should, for the first time, learn how far ^YQ were! Surely it is so with our religious estimates of approxima- tion to the light and glory of God ; the earth-born crowd afar, if they think at all of the matter, never dream them- selves so darkl}^, so remotely exiled ; it is only he who struggles nearer, and much nearer, that begins at length to perceive the true amount of the distance. And thus, what- ever be the doctrine of Christian perfectibility collected out of this epistle of St John, it certainly can have but little relation to the earthly saint's estimate of Ms oivn piety ; his ejaculation will still be with David, — " I will run the way of thy commandments, iclien thou shalt enlarge my heart ;" " My soul cleaveth unto the dust ; quichen thou me accord- ing to thy word ;" — his highest offerings, as he contemplates those exceeding broad commandments that involve the whole sacrifice of the man to God, still appearing to him- self all unworthy of the altar on which they are laid. He will scarcely dare to sa}^, wtih the Iloly One of God, — " I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do." — John xvii. 4. Nay, I doubt not but it is the very genius of that divine love which is the bond of perfectness, to be lovingly dissatisfied with its own inadequacy : and such a worshipper in his best hours will feel that, though " love" le, indeed, as these divines so earnestly insist, " i\iQ fulfilling of the Law," his love is itself imperfect, deficient in degree, and deficient in constancy; and that in this life it can, at 13 146 Self-DelusLwi as to [serm. ix. best, be only the germ of tliat charity which, " never- failing," is to form the moving principle of the life of eter- nity. And though he shed tears of humble gratitude to think that his -Heavenly Master is pleased to accept such love as this, and even to call it, in a modified sense, a fulfil- ment of His Gospel Law, it does not appear that the believer's consciousness of this fulfilment (were it ever so absolute and complete) could itself form a practical motive of much importance in the Christian life. Let him be but assured, that the aspirations of his heart and the labors of his hand are a duty, and acceptable to God, and I cannot conceive that his aspirations will be less ardent or his labors less efficient, though he should hesitate to believe himself arrived at the fulness of evangelical perfection, and though he should still continue to appropriate the warning words of the text, — "If I say that I have no sin^ I deceive myself," and still joyfully reiterate the blessed sequel, — "but if I confess. He is faithful and just to forgive!" Bat it is not of those, whom some would not only pro- nounce "perfect," but enjoin to feel and know themselves such ; it is not of those, who (as I w^ould rather represent it) doubt all in themselves Avhile they doubt nothing in Christ, that I have now to speak ; it is not of those peaceful pilgrims of whom "the world," that perhaps their presence preserves from ruin, " is not worthy," — who find in their Lord the supplement of all their own infirmities, and as they rise to God love to lose themselves in his light ; it is not of those whom " the law of the Spirit of life hath made free from the law of sin and death," that I have this day to speak. Alas! the state of the Christian world does not suffer us long to dwell among these homes of holiness, — by that " river whose streams" still " make glad the city of God, the holy place of His tabernacles." We must speak of those whose cold hearts and neglectful lives utter the bold denial of a sinlessness which the lips dare not deny ; who " cry out of the dejjths,''^ indeed, but not for rescue or SERM. IX.] OUT Slate lefore Ood. 147 redemption ; wlio caniiot know God as a Eedeemer, for they cannot feel from ichat lie is to redeem! Adequately to enumerate the causes of tliis lamentable blindness to pressing and palpable evil, would be, of course, impossible. Being largely produced by mere indifference to the inquiry, — for men cannot know what they will not examine, — it must be increased by everything which tends to prolong that indifference, that is, by every worldly occu- pation whatsoever. And thus the particular cause of this delusion will vary with every variety of individual cha- racter. Every temptation that occupies, and by occupying excludes all other occupants, may claim its share in the perpetuation of this melancholy ignorance. The whole host of Satan are engaged to drug this opiate. All their enchantments are accessory to this, and result in this. And as this tumult of occupation is itself one of the most usual means by which the remonstrances of conscience are over- borne, and scope thereby given to self-love to repose in the security of its own fictitious innocence, we may affirm that, under the incessant influence of this latter principle, these occupations are made the means of even the more delibe- rate presumption which the text supposes ; — that they all equally, though indirectly, help the sinner on to feel, if he dare not say, — that he may (in the terrible words of the Lawgiver of Israel) "hear the words of the curse, and bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace^ though I walk in the imagination of mine heart!" (Deut. xxix. 19); or with the guilty Israelites in the Prophet (Hos. xii. 8), "I am become rich, I have found me out substance ; in all my labors they shall find none iniquity in me that were sin !" " I counsel thee," said the warning Spirit to such boasters in a later day, "to anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see." — Rev. iii. 18. It was the early impulse of the sinners of Eden to know their naked- ness and flee to hide it; but it would seem that, in this spiritual destitution, men may cry "that they have need of 148 Self-Delusion as to [SERM. IX. nothing, and hiow not that they are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked!" — Eev. v. 17. It would be vain, therefore, to think of specifying the particular causes of the evil ; we can only speak of some of the general principles on which it rests. II. In attempting, then, some such brief exposure of the sources of this lamentable ignorance of our personal state with God, of the power of that deluding voice that evermore whispers us " we have no sin," — it will, of course, be unnecessary to enforce at any length, that the whole mystery of deceit must be primarily referred to the govern- ing agency of Satan, — in this sense, as in every other, " the ruler of the darkness of this world." That that tremendous antagonist of human happiness stands concealed behind the entire machinery of evil, no one can doubt, who is not dis- posed to question the whole revealed account of the per- sonages of the spiritual world. It is a living spirit with whom we have to contend, as it is a "living God" whom Ave have to aid us. It is no abstract law or ideal con- ception of evil, as some have dared to theorize ; but a Being personal, and conscious, and distinctively active, as our- selves, though with faculties immeasurably beyond us ; — a Being profound in purpose, subtle in arrangement, bold in enterprise, undaunted in execution ; a Being who knows us far better than we know ourselves, and hates us far more intensely than even his worst inspirations have instigated us to hate one another ; a Being whose compass of possible activity, extending through every region where tempta- tion can extend, seems for a time permitted to span the universe, and even (if we may dare to interpret certain mys- terious intimations of Iloly Writ) to darken, by his occa- sional presence, for some unfathomable purpose, the council- chamber of the Omnipotent Himself. Satan, then, is the prime efficient cause of this lethargy ; he who deceives that he may destroy, stupefies that he may deceive ; the cunning of the Serpent alone can reach the master-subtlety of making SERM. IX.] our State lefore God. 149 the soul of man do his work by being its own unpitying enemy, and traitor, and cheat; it is only the "father of lies" that thus can make the wretched heart a liar to itself. But, then, it is certain, that as God is pleased to work b}^ means, and to approach circuitously to Ilis ends, so, still more, is His enemy bound to the same law ; and that, therefore, as the Creator's path of light, through provi- dence and grace, is occasionally discoverable by experi- ence, and directed on principles already prepared to His almighty purposes, so also may the crooked ways of the Evil One, similarly adjusted, be similarly sought and known. Miracles for evil, any more than miracles for good, are not to be anticipated in the ordinary ways of human life; instantaneous strokes of spiritual ruin are as unusual as instantaneous gifts of spiritual perfection. It is not more Satan who destroys us, than we who destroy ourselves at his bidding. Even in his boldest achieve- ments, he still does not create but pervert; he is to the last a subordinate and permissive agent in the territory of God. It is not to infuse new powers that he labors, but by every art to corrupt and poison the old to ruin ! 1. The first and darkest of his works on earth is also the first and deepest fountain of the misfortune we are now lamentinsr, — the orio^inal and inherited coreuption of the HUMAN SOUL ITSELF. It is ignorant of sin, just because it is naturally sinful. There is a sense in which it may be said that " the heart knoweth" not " its own bitterness." Faint, frail, and disordered from the first, how should it easily suspect its own disease ? inexperienced in the better, how should it dream that a better exists ? Though, as some have imagined in fanciful theories of education, you could preserve it from every tincture of outward evil, you cannot stanch the bitter fountain of the heart itself, the well of water springing up unto everlasting death ; though you could banish every temptation to actual guilt from 13* 150 Self-Delusion as to [seem. ix. abroad, and should sedulously leave it to its own workings, in precluding positive crime, you would have left unsup- plied a positive deficiency. One chief object of the Gospel history, as applied by the Spirit of God, is to humble and yet animate us by a portraiture of moral excellence, which, as observation cannot furnish, so assuredly Nature will never spontaneously imagine. We cannot know our degra- dation, we cannot struggle, or even wish, to rise, if we have never been led to conceive the possibility of a state higher than our own. How, then, is man's spirit, of its own ac- cord, to devise that bright ideal of purity which is to con- vince it by contrast that it "hath sin," and sin's feebleness, within it, indisposing it for strenuous effort, and dissuading it from holy thought ? Will it learn, untaught, its own immortal destinies, wake to the mystic voices that call ever- more upon the fallen child of heaven, and anticipate eter- nity ? Will it know itself under foreign tyranny, and groan for deliverance, and imagine a Saviour? Ask Nature what she has done for the lonely child of the forest and the prairie ; has she ever taught him to recognize the true im- mensity of his heritage, or to feel that, degraded as it is, he Avears a nature that a God need not refuse to wear ? Or does not he, — as all, — turn from the heavens above him to his kindred earth, and (though few may be his outward solicitiugs to guilt) "say to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm. Thou art my mother and ray sister I" — Job xvii. 14. Nature can teach discontent with this world, but there her lesson well nigh closes ; she talks but vaguely, and feebly, and falsely of another! Now, if this be so, have we not for this mournful unconsciousness of our per- sonal depravity a powerful cause in that depravity itself? AYill you not learn that it is idle to argue, " we cannot be the guilty things that preachers would make us, or we should inevitably feel the discord intolerable," when you remember that the heart was originally pitched for no other music? Will you not know that a violent effort alone can SERM. IX.] our Slate he/ore God. 151 suffice to wake, when the whole bent of nature weighs us down to slumber ? 2. So far, then, it appears that Nature, herself prone to sin, may be expected, in virtue of that very tendency, to tell us "we have no sin," and that, therefore, her evidence is to be received with suspicion ; but it must next be re- membered that, properly speaking, no human being can be seen in this state of nature alone. Could we address our commissioned message to mankind as they come from the hand of " Nature," we should feel indeed that we had to discharge no easy task; to tell them of unsuspected evil, of the implanted seeds of that upas tree of the heart, which, unless cast out in the seed, must yet spread and poison so widely in the leaf, — of efforts unthought of that must be made: — but yet we could address them with hope and cheerfulness. But it is not thus we meet man. He is far advanced upon his way before his steps are arrested. Re- peated acts are become principles of action, and every man is the creature of his own past life. If Nature alone, — treacherous and deoradcd nature, — is silent in denouncino- sin, — if she has no instinctive power to arouse herself, what shall she be when doubly and trebly indurated by habit; when the malformed limb becomes ossified; when that faculty which was destined to be, under divine guidance, the antagonist of nature, " a second nature," as it is truly called, to reform, and resist, and overlay the first, — is per- verted into the traitorous auxiliary of its corruption ? We know not ourselves sinners, because from infancy we have breathed the atmosphere of sin ; and we now breathe it, as we do the outward air, unceasingly, yet with scarcely a consciousness of the act ! A man lives in the frigid form- alism of external religion, or in the habitual neglect of God (itself a sin, and the parent of all sin), until it seems almost impossible to separate the habit from life itself; to live at all is to live llms ; and he as little dreams of asking himself, can it indeed be true that he is a sinner calmly travelling 152 Self -Delusion as to [seem. IX. the pathway to ruin, as lie does of seriously inquiring whether his heart beats, or whether his hair turns grey with years. The process has been so constant as to be for- gotten, and has at length become almost equally indepen- dent of voluntary effort. He sins, so to speak, mechani- call}^. The terrible power of irreligion, become thus habitual, to blind men to the momentous peril of their daily state, is above all evinced in this, — that every form of exhortation or appeal is weak to break the lethargy ; yet not at all from any unbelief of the facts or doctrines stated, but from an obstinate refusal or inability to imagine that they can have the remotest reference to the hearer himself. Here, indeed, is a state which Grod alone can pronounce not hopeless. Such a man (do I not speak to your ordinary experience ?) will listen to the declaration of the terrors and the promises of the Gospel ; he will applaud the faith- fulness of the preacher's unqualified delivery of his mes- sage; he will bring home to his listening family or friends the views and arguments he has heard, and even reflect laboriously and comment acutely upon their cogency, and pronounce himself gravely satisfied on all which has been established regarding the immutable requisitions of God, and the terrors of impending judgment, and the moment of time into which the fates of eternity are crowded ; and yet, through the entire, never once entertain a shadow of suspicion that one sentence, one threat, one terror, was ap- plicable to himself. Nay, he will himself be a preacher, an instructor of his fellow-men ; he will admit that the very blindness of which we speak is an universal characteristic of human nature, yet suspect it not to be his own; he will declaim, in bitter severity, of public evil, yet never dream of private sin ; he will own and lament the state of man in general, but never remember the state of one man in par- ticular. His own sin is his own habit, but the sins of his fellow-creatures are not his habits ; they, therefore, may become prominent objects of thought, while his personal SERM. IX.] our State before God. 153 guilt (greater, it may be, in frequency and intensity), is an inseparable part of his very existence, and thence passes unnoticed into the mass of his ordinary life. The profes- sional man, for example, who may become habituated to the use of falsehood or duplicity, as little knows how to disentangle this, even in conception^ from the bulk and sub- stance of his customary business, — to regard it as some- thing separately and distinctively wrong, — as men think of mentally decomposing into their chemical constituents the common water or air, every time they imbibe them. The mass of men know these, as they know their own hearts, only in the gross and the compound. Is it not thus that constant habit persuades us " we have no sin" by making us unceasingly sin ; and increases our self-content in direct proportion as it makes it more and more perilous ? Now, I have to entreat you to remember, that this operation of habit is an universal law ; it belongs not to one man, nor to two men, but to mankind ; nay, as far as experience or conjecture can reach, it belongs to the whole animated creation ; and, therefore, you may be individually assured, that if you have never seriously estimated, or at least distrusted, its influence in disguising your hearts from themselves, you are yet utterly ignorant of the extent of your own personal need of mercy and forgiveness ! 3. "We have seen that sinful nature hides her own sin • we have seen that long and unbroken hahit tells us " we have no sin" in the very work of multiplying and strength- ening it ; inquire if there be not something further about us, in the frame and condition of the world, that is fitted to assist this melancholy work of deception. The blind man does not conceive of light, neither does the godless spirit conceive of God. But even supposing the organ to be restored, were he placed in a world of darhiess, he would be as far as ever from imagining the true nature of the light he could not witness ; and when he heard of it, — let us sup- pose, — in certain periodic assemblies, as a thing which high 154 Self- Delusion as to [SERM. IX. autliority had declared to be glorious in itself and in its results; it might engage a moment's careless fancy; it might serve to talk of, as something very excellent, no doubt, but which no sensible man could ever waste his thoughts in expecting to experience ; it might serve to add emphasis to an imprecation, or solemnity to an oath ; but it is obvious that the wanderer of that dark world could entertain no true, or, however, no permanent conception of the extent of a deprivation which no one around him thought of lamenting, and scarcely one around him could describe. No one arrests that evil in himself which his eyes have never ceased to contemplate in others. Even follies that at first are odious lose their oppressiveness when we are surrounded with nothing else; as the enormous weight of the air becomes imperceptible by its pressure being universal. When we do judge of our own state, we test ourselves by the worst around us ; when we judge of the state of others, we take care to compare it with the best qualities of ourselves. But in truth, most of us find little time for either comparison ; society moulds us, and we (in our measure) mould society, with perfect unconsciousness on both sides. As men copy themselves by force of hahifj they copy others by force of example; and both almost equally foster ignorance of the virulence of the evil they familiarize, and perpetually reconcile the sinner to himself. Mankind in crowds and communities tend to uniformity ; as the torrents of a thousand hills, from as many different heights, meet to blend in one unbroken level. And in that union, the source of so much happiness and of so much guilt, each countenances the other to console himself; we are mutual flatterers only that the flattery may soothingly revert to our own corruptions. And if, at any moment, conscience should be stung to energy, its efl'ort is short- lived ; we faint and are crushed under the weight of a whole world of opposing example ; the madness of a world assumes almost the authority of a law of nature; and it SEEM. IX.] our Slate before God. 155 seems. as vain to resist the uniform pressure of all society, as it would be to lift a hand to arrest the revolution of the globe, — ourselves a portion of the mass we would arrest. Every seductive tendency to ease and self-content comes in to complete the charm ; and as, before, we dreamed " we had no sin" because we had been sinning from our infancy, so now we cherish and confirm the dream, because all the world is as sinful as ourselves. 4. How the power of this universality of sin around us to paralyze the sensibility of conscience, is augmented by the influence of fashion and of bank, — not merely to silence its voice, but to bestow grace, and attraction, and authority upon deadly sin, — I need not now insist. I need not tell you that, so susceptible is man of this species of influence, so servile a copyist of evil, that vice, the darkest and the most degrading, seems to lose its name and nature when thus authenticated by the passport of rank. It would not be too much to say, that there is scarcely a crime con- ceivable which might not be thus transformed, or refined into a tolerated weakness, by the united effort of the upper orders of any country. Oh ! that those who possess such a power would indeed awake to the responsibility it in- volves ; that they would see that as all sin is reproductive, and none can end in itself, so their sin multiplies a thou- sandfold, till it work out its own likeness in every descend- ing level of society ! Philosophers tell us that the least oscillation in the system of the material universe propagates a secret thrill to its extremity ; it is so in every act of social man ; but the disorders of the upper classes are publicly and manifestly influential, — theij are as if the central mass itself of the system were shaken loose, and all its retinue of dependent worlds hurled in confusion around it. How shall the poor man understand us, when we tell him of the slumbering demon of his own evil nature, if all that he has learned to revere unite to call that evil good ? How shall we endeavor to disenshroud the darkness of the heart of 156 Self- Delusion as to [serm. ix. such an one, to force our way tlirougli all the obstacles that ignorance, and dulness, and thoughtlessness (the too certain characteristics of poverty) oppose, to rouse him to a sense of those high destinies for which it is our duty to train the humblest as laboriously as the loftiest, — if a voice that finds its echo in every crevice of the heart reiterate, that we speak of terrors that need not affright, and sins that are no sin ? If the light that is in the earth be darkness, how great is that darkness ! Surely it is among the most striking of the many evidences of the utter godlessness of the world which God has made, that we still grasp at power, when power is thus appallingly attended with responsibility; that we covet the very materials of our condemnation; that we strive after a position in the world's eye, which can only expose to a more terrible scrutiny from the eye of God ; and are not contented, until we are cursed with a weight of obligation, that an angel could scarcely carry and be guiltless ! 5. But to example and authority, thus enlisted in the ranks of evil, and thus fortifying the false security of our imaginary innocence, must be added such considerations as the tendency of pleasure itself, or of indolence, to prolong this deception, and our natural impatience of the PAIN of self-disapproval. That which is pleasing to soul or sense detaches from all but itself; it fixes and fascinates, and en- feebles as it fascinates. Still more effective is the other influence. Our Creator has given us the pain of self-con- demnation to counterbalance the temptation to evil. A man will love the sin, yet shudder at the remorse that fol- lows it. But there are no provisions in our nature which may not be wilfully impaired; and it would even seem that they are delicate in proportion to their excellence. The structure of the moral feelings is as tender as the struc- ture of an eye or ear, and both are in a great measure put into our own keeping. Now you know there are two ways of casing an aching joint, — by healing its disease or by SERM. IX.] our Slate before God. 157 paralyzing tlic limb. And there are two ways of escaping an angry conscience, — by ceasing from the evil that pro- vokes it, or by resolutely refusing to hear its voice, which soon amounts to silencing it for ever. I am not to tell you which is the usual resource of guilty and neglectful hearts ; I need not insist how powerful a persuasive to the belief that "we have no sin" must be this perpetual impulse to avoid the pain of thinking that we have; how natural the tendency is to turn away our weak and trembling eyes from that which we secretly feel we cannot steadily con- template without sorrow, and perplexity, and dismay. Let this go on for a while, and gradually, but surely, the gloomy work is done ; the troublesome censurer is mute ; the light is put out, and the Evil One finds his proper home in the darkness ! And all this proceeds in mysterious silence ! There are no immediate visible attestations of God's displeasure to startle or affright. Among His judgments, as among His mercies, men are to walk for the most part, " by faith, and not by sight ;" Ave must believe, not see our doom. And thus we wrest His very patience into a motive for con- temning His majesty ; "/or my nameh sake will I defer mine anger, and for my praise will I refrain" (Isa. xlviii. 9) ; but we cannot understand a glory thus founded in compassion- ate endurance. "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily^ therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil." — Eccles. viii. 11. All our customary conceptions of the justice of heaven are taken from the tribunals of earth, and on earth punishment ordi- narily dogs the heels of crime. Hence, where the punish- ment is not direct, we forget that the guilt can have existed. "These things hast thou done, and I kept silence;" and that silence is the ground of the corrupt and insulting in- ference that forms the sinner's security ; "thou thoughtest that I teas altogether such an one as thyself^ — Ps. 1. 21. " Have I not held my peace even of old, and thoufearest me U 158 Self-Delusion as to [SERM. IX. notf — (Isa. Ivii. 11) ; the merciful reluctance of our God to avenge, becoming itself the perpetual encouragement to despise or to forget the vengeance He delays. " Let favor," cries the Prophet, " be shown to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness ;" the " favor" being itself too cer- tainly the reason, or the confirmation, of his thankless obstinacy ! — Isa. xxvi. 10. The very immutability of the laws of visible nature, the ceaseless recurrence of those vast revolutions that make the annals of the physical universe, and the confidence that we instinctively entertain of the stability of the whole material system around us, while they are the ground of all our earthly blessings, and while they are, to the reason, a strong proof of divine super- intendence, are as certainly, to the imagination, a constant means of deadening our impressions of the possibility or probability of divine interposition. Stricken, and it may be, perplexed or abashed for a moment, by the threats or the heart-searchings of the pulpit, men go forth beneath the open canopy of heaven, but all is peaceful there ! They breathe freely! The nightmare of religious terror releases them. Oh ! no, it cannot be that these hideous imaginings are real, while every object looks tranquillity, and every countenance is smiling. There is no " handwriting upon the wall" of Nature's Temple to countersign this tale of terrors. No voice from heaven authenticates the preacher's message ; no consuming fire descends upon the guilty head ; the volup- tuary, the idolater of gain, the prosperous God-despiser, is not stricken in our streets ; and the scoffing sceptic cries, of Jehovah (as the Prophet, of the idol god), " He is talking, or He is pursuing, or He is on a journey, or perad venture He sleepeth and must be awaked." — 1 Kings xviii. 27. Awaked ! He luill awake ! Surely the God will break forth at length from His hidden sanctuary, and break forth, as of old upoQ the Mount, " in fire and the smoke of a furnace." — Exod. xix. 18. The invisible shall once more be the visible, nor shall Moses alone have " seen the Lord face to face ;" the SERM. IX.] our State hefore God. 159 words and sentences of the immortal Book shall no longer be the breath of a man's voice, to which men listen from decency, and drop to slumber as they listen, but, them- selves, shall breathe and live, realized in a divine world with a divine economy : " The Lord hath prepared His throne for judgment: and lie shall judge the world in righteousness." — Ps. ix. 7, 8. And when that cycle that ends in judgment, — long, it may be, for the first act of an eternity may well be no dream of the morning, — shall have indeed come round, what, amid all the terrors of the day of wrath, shall move a deeper awe than that fatal frailty of our nature to which your thoughts have been this day directed ? What more appalling to conceive than that "unravelliDg of the subtlest intricacies of the heart's inward hypocrisy, man's shame uncovered to himself, his imaginary innocence exposed to the scoff of the tempter that suggested it, his darling^ deceits drao^sfed forth and disgjraced before his eyes? A search close, and deep, and penetrating as this, is the perpetual intimation of Scripture. " God shall judge the secrets of men." — Eom ii. "Every man's work shall be made manifest^^'' — (1 Cor. iii. 13), " tried by fire^ "God will bring to light the hidden things of darkness." — 1 Cor. iv. 5. The dead are "judged out of those things which are written in the hooks, according to their works." — Eev. xx. 12. Does not this speak of inquiry too keen to be baffled, too authentic to be deceived, too minute to be evaded? " All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes, hut God vjeifjheth the spirits ^ — Pro v. xvi. 2. The wretch who was cast into outer darkness, for lack of the wedding-garment, evidently came in not dreaming of rejection. Again and again our Lord represents this perpetuation of self-ignor- ance to the very period of judgment, as one of the most terrible characteristics of that hour of terrors. Brethren ! if I have this day, under God's blessing, prompted one of you to suspect the wiles of his own guilty nature, — if I have to any purpose impressed on you the certaiuty that " if you 160 Self- Delusion as to our State hefore God. [SERM. ix. saj," or imagine, " jou have no sin, yon deceive yourselves," will you not, when you leave this house of prayer, leave it only to pray yet more earnestly in private to that God who can see what you cannot see, and urge the humble avowal and petition of the Psalmist: "Who can understand his errors ? cleanse thou me from secret faults ! for thou hast set our iniquities before thee ; our secret sins in the light of thy countenance." — Ps. xix. 12 ; xc. 8. SERMON X. THE ETERNAL LIFE OF CHRIST IN HEAVEN/ (Preached in the Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle, on Advent Sunday, 1842.) Behold, I am alive for evermore. — Revelation i. 18. It is Christ the Son of God who speaks these words. It is He who is " the Faithful Witness and the First Begotten of the Dead," that thus declares His own triumph, and ours in His, after that, passing the grave and gate of death. He has reached his destined world of immortality. From thence, looking back once more with pitying love into the scene of His trials. He utters a voice strange and mysteri- ous, a voice already solemnized to the tone of that invisible world upon which he has entered, a voice deep with the echoes of eternity, hard to catch or comprehend, as though it were a fragment of that " new song which no man can learn but they that are redeemed from the earth." This, indeed, is one of the characteristics that confer a peculiar interest on the Book of the Eevelation. Christ speaks, it is true, by His Spirit in all Scripture ; but here, for the first time after his ascension to glory, if we set aside those brief addresses to St Paul, we have Him speaking in His own j'^erson to the mortal followers He left ' This sermon was first printed in " Sermons for Sundays, Festivals and Fasts, and other Liturgical Occasions." Edited by tlie Rev. Alexander Watson, Curate of St. John's, Cheltenham. Masters : London. 14- 162 The Eternal Life of [seem. X. behind Him. The veil of heaven is undrawn ; He is alone with His beloved as of old. But a change has passed over Him since the times of Capernaum and Bethany. He has selected for the interview that dear associate who was wont to recline in His bosom; but now "the disciple whom Jesus loved," trembling and overpow^ered, " falls at his feet as dead." The Man of Sorrows now flashes insufferable brightness from eyes which are "as aflame of fire," — "His feet are like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and His voice as the sound of many waters. He hath in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth goeth a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance is as the sun shineth in his strength." The change of language is not less wonderful than the change of appearance. St John, in his Gospel record, loves to transcribe the tenderest expres- sions and actions of his Lord ; St John, in his Apocalypse, is all majesty, ecstasy, reverence, and awe. It was once, " little children ! yet a little time and I am w^ith you ;" it is now, " I am the First and the Last, — He that liveth and was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore!" Yet notwithstanding all this pomp of celestial grandeur, how remarkable is the minuteness of anxiety which the messages of this wonderful Being manifest; how little is forgotten or overlooked in His vigilant and capacious survey ! He is represented as walking in the midst of seven golden lamps, which are Churches, to typify His in- dwelling presence and pervading care ; and each Church is warned with a precision and particularity, that evince how impossible it is to evade His scrutiny, or defeat His pur- poses of retribution. The joys of the heavenly world have not distracted His attention from His earthly charge. Special heresies, false and unauthorized teachers, laclc of discipline, growing neglect, — all are noted and admonished ; even as we cannot doubt that, at this hour, yea, in this very house of prayer, the same invisible Censor is awfully present amongst us, noting our state as a Church, and our deeds as SEEM. X.] Christ in Heaven. 163 its individual members. What His present relations may be to other worlds, — to the vast "universe of worlds that spreads around us through the infinitude of spaee, — we know not, nor can conjecture; but we do know that Ilis relation to us is as intimate and incessant as if no other object existed to occupy His thoughts. In His highest glory we are all personally interested ; for it is the repre- sentative and champion of our race that is thus glorified ; in Him we are virtually enthroned, — "kings and priests ■unto Grod and His Father." Yea, even now the more the parties sever, the closer the knot is bound. In the passage before us, the very majesty of His celestial state, far from forming a ground of separation, seems made the ground of consolation and confidence to His poor disciples ; when St John sank in lifeless terror before the apparition of His glorified Master, the divine visitant did not abridge the splendors of His presence, but gave the disciple strength to endure them : to allay the shrinking Apostle's fears, He did not (as we might, perhaps, expect) speak of past humiliation, but of present glory. He did not diminish, but assert^ the full magnificence of His claims, and fixed them as the basis of a high and holy trust: — ^'^ Fear not! I am the First and the Last!" But all His powers and privileges of being our eternal governor, guide, and friend, are founded in the great decla- ration of the text : " I am He that liveth and was dead ; and behold, I am alive for evermore P'' At this holy season we profess more specially to dis- cipline our hearts and minds for His coming. Is it not well, then, that we consider the purposes of His present glorious life in Heaven, no less than of His former lowly life on earth; is it not well that, "in the Spirit on the Lord's Hay," we should endeavor to rise to the grandeur of His actual authority in Heaven, in order that we may, how- ever feebly, learn to estimate what is indeed that state from which He is to come among us, and of which He is, by 164 The Eternal Life of [SERM. X. that last triumpliaut Advent, to make us the everlasting partakers ? You will not think it prolix or uninteresting, if I go back to the ideas that lie at the foundation of the subject, in order to bring you gradually to conceive it. The great features of the Christian Eevelation are familiar to us all. Facts are delivered to us in the New Testament, and their reasons sufficiently assigned to enable us to collect from the page of Scripture these mysterious truths : that whereas a Being exists through eternity as the sole Cause and Author of all, it became necessary, in order to His purposes, that this Being should in some inconceivable way descend into the limitations of the world of time, that He should unite Himself specially with humanity, should thenceforward be inseparably associated with it, and should, in virtue of that association, be empowered to carry a portion of its possessors, by Him duly gifted for the purpose, through all the glorious fortunes of His own human immortality. Now if any man ask me to account for these facts, to re- duce them to any known principles, to show how they are necessarily bound up with the facts and principles of our own daily experience, I candidly confess that I can go but little way in any such speculation. Gleams of light may here and there be caught by persevering reason, but they are only gleams ; " since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was horn blind ;" and till natural reason expands into supernatural vision, we must still be content to " walk by faith, and not by sight." These facts of the Scripture story concern death and life, misery and blessedness; and perhaps if we knew the fall nature of these^ — in what it is they consist, — wo might be able to see how Christ's marvellous interference is necessarily connected with them ; but of these, though we see much, we know little or nothing. The course of nature, and of that better nature which vvc term grace, — being the SERM. X.] Christ in Heaven. 165 outward manifestation of the secret laws of God, revolves around us like some vast and various panorama ; we can see the mutual relations of the objects, mark their positions and their recurrences ; but the grounds and reasons of the whole, the mind of the artist, the disposition of the me- chanism, this passes the eye, this lies deeper than the visi- ble surface, and to those who cannot move from their ap- pointed post, who can only see, not touch or handle, it is, and it must remain, inscrutable. However, the case is less hopeless, when, instead of at- tempting to scrutinize the last reasons of these sublime dispensations, w^e endeavor to observe and methodize what Kevelation has declared concerning them. In this point of view, we can perceive that Christ, who "liveth for evermore," is set forth in two great characters, in both of which His eternal life in glory is momentous to our in- terests. In every theology the world has ever known or imagined, it has been in some form or other acknowledged, that there is carried on in this world a conflict between opposite prin- ciples of good and evil. To all who admit that the visible world is under any invisible control, this truth is so mani- fest that it has forced- itself upon every observer, and become embodied in every religious system. The most general, though figurative, enunciation of this truth is to be found in those theories, spread through nearly all ori- ental countries, which speak of a warfare between light and darkness ; a phraseology employed in inspired Scripture, and thence, probably, in ancient times, borrowed, exagge- rated, and travestied by pagan and heretical teachers. However represented, however distorted, the fact is cer- tain ; we feel it within us, around us, above us, beneath us ; every department of nature, by turns, is seen or felt to be a part of the vast battle-field, on which incessantly rages a contest, to which reason is perplexed in attempting to assign either beginning or termination. 166 The Eternal Life of [serm. x. Now, wlien througTi tlie intricacy of the engagement we endeavor to penetrate to tlie parties engaged, we cannot hesitate to perceive that the powers of evil consist of two great detachments, which speculative men have called physical and moral evil, which plain people are familiar with under the titles of pain and guilt, — pain, which seems naturally to tend to weakness and death ; and guilt, which by a process as natural, descends into habitual and irreme- diable sin. Distinct as are these two forms of evil, even in our own experience we detect traces of a connection between them ; but it is to Eevelation that we are indebted for the clearest intimation of their secret but indissoluble associa- tion ; to Kevelation, which announces that jfliysical in- firmity and death entered our human creation in the foot- steps of wilful 5m, that wilful sin is the forerunner o^ pains eternal. To these powers, then, the two great engines of the Adversary, Christ is revealed as the counteracting agent. He came to triumph over both ; His work is respectively directed to each. In relation to sm, He is a mediator of justification and holiness ; in relation to death and imin,, He is the author of endless life and glory. In relation to both, it is our security and our blessedness, that He is " alive for evermore." My immediate business, then, is to assist you to reflect how the immortality of Christ in heaven bears upon both these particulars. I. As regards the conflict with sin, He justifies and sanc- tifies. Both are based upon the redemption through Uood; it is the sacrifice that gives our Mediator the right, either to vindicate or to purify His faithful. And of both the dispensation is secured by a " life for evermore." 1. How then is the perpetuity of Christ in heaven con- nected with the work o^ o\xt justification? The Apostle in the Epistle to the Hebrews shows us, at great length, the immeasurable superiority of the dispensa- SERM. X.] Christ in Heaven, 167 tion of Christ to the typical dispensation of Aaron and his descendants. lie shows us that the covenant of Christ is better, for it is a covenant of grace ; the consecration of Christ better, for it was attested with the solemnity of a divine oath ; the tabernacle of Christ better, for it is the eternal heaven ; the sacrifice of Christ better, for it alone can truly take away sins ; the priesthood of Christ better, for it is everlasting, after the order of Melchisedek. In the Apostle's discussion of these last two particulars, there emerges, however, an apparent difiiculty. He establishes the pre-eminence of the sacrifice and the priesthood, by in- sisting on the singleness of the sacrifice, and the ^eripetuity of the priesthood. On the one hand he declares, that " Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many," that ^'•hy one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified," that " there is no more offering for sin." On the other hand he affirms, that the divine priest of this sacrifice is constituted priest " after the power of an endless life^'' in distinction from the perishing descendants of Aaron ; that He is a " priest /orez;er;" that He hath an " in- transmissihle priesthood," because He ^^ continueth ever ;" that He is, in this priestly office, " able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them." This priesthood of Christ, then, being ^jerpe^Jwa?, yet employing but a single sacrificial act, it must consist in a constant reference to that sacrifice, of which His own blessed person stands in heaven as the und3dng memorial. Our first free remission in bap- tism, our subsequent pardon of daily transgression by re- pentant faith, our felicity for eternity (so far as it results on acquittal of guilt), all are issued from the treasury of celestial grace, in virtue of this repeated exhibition of the justifying presence of Christ. It is thus that He was ^^ raised for our justification;" thus that He is a "priest upon His throne f thus that "we are saved by His lifef — this constant manifestation in heaven exactly correspond- 168 The Eternal Life of [SERM. X. ing to the memorial wliicli we offer in tlie earthly kingdom of Christ, in that most solemn act of religion, which, in the symbols of the body and blood of Christ, represents His sacrifice to the sight of God. He became hnman that he might save ; His perpetuated humanity is, then, in heaven, the token and warrant of salvation, the vestment of the divine priesthood ; that we should be there recognized as blessed, it is enough that the Son of God be there recog- nized a man. In this view how deeply interesting is it to contemplate those mystical pictures which the New Testa- ment now and then gives us of His occupations in that wondrous abode ! The interests of the universe are dependent on His fiat, yet amid all those complicated in- terests. He is still a man, and busy for men. At those majestic levees, where He, "by whom the worlds were made," surrounds His throne with the directing powers of the innumerable orbs He first summoned into being, amid the glittering millions that encompass Him, the marvellous tale is whispered that the Sovereign of all that infinity of glory has yet a bond of special and thrilling tenderness, that links Him with one little province in creation. Our names are spoken of with awe. The human heir of eternal life is regarded as something altogether peculiar and con- secrated. Angels look forward with eager interest to the hour when they who by so singular a connection are now "one with Christ," shall enter into the visible unity of His eternal kingdom ! 2. But in relation to His overthrow of sin, the eternal life of Christ in heaven is yet more directly the fountain of blessing to us, in being the immediate source, not only of justification, but of holiness ; not only of gracious accept- ance into the favor of God, but of all the bright train of inward graces, by which that favor effectuates itself in us. It is the perpetual lesson of Scripture, that we should fix our hearts in entire dependence on Christ Jesus. SERM. X.] Christ in Heaven, 169 " Without me ye can do nothing," is the warning of Christ to His followers in every age as well as the Apostolic. He suspends us on Himself for our whole spiritual exist- ence ; He will have us trace every emotion of faith, hope, and love, to His bounty. We know the force of ordinary human attachments, how self seems annihilated, the whole being merged and lost in the being of another ; but what an attachment is this, where not only the object is given us, but the feelings that are to meet and embrace the object. This He effects by that wondrous indwelling with which He has promised to purify our nature into kindred, into sameness with His own ; it is the Christ within the heart that seeks and covets the Christ beyond it ! Now this communication is no less necessary in heaven than on earth. He must, therefore, be alive not only now, but " evermore ;" because He is to preserve us in this state for evermore. If the holiness be everlasting, the source that supplies it must be everlasting too. You must not look upon these affections as temporary ; as though the feelings of the Christian towards his Eedeemer were but elements of the present preparatory state, and unnecessary or superseded in the world of glory. We have no reason to suppose that the dependence on Christ shall ever cease ; our very exaltation shall be but to feel that dependence more nearly, to lean on that arm more trustingly, to look up to those divine eyes with more affectionate confidence. ISTot only in the dreary desert, but " coming iq:) from the wilderness," the bride in the mystical song is supported by her beloved. The Lamb who on earth was declared to be " the Light of the world," is in heaven equally declared to be " the Light thereof r In the infinite progression of holi- ness that belongs to an infinite existeuce of glory, we shall be but drawing more and more freely from an infinite source ; the Holy One that " inhabiteth eternity" is inex- haustible as the eternity He inhabits. Christ is as necessary to the heavenliness of heaven, as He is to the holiness of 15 170 The Eternal Life of [SERM. X. earth. In the very height and rapture of the sanctity of heaven, when every thought of all its radiant mnlktudes is captive to the obedience of Christ, and knows its happi- ness only in that blessed bondage, were the horrid concep- tion possible that Christ Himself should suddenly cease to exist, that instant every ray of its holiness would expire ; not merely the heart would seek in vain its resting-place, it would no longer possess the desire to seek it : not merely the light would be vjasted in the void abyss, it would be quenched utterly and forever ! He, then, that is " alive for evermore," is thus alive that He may be to us the everlasting fouTitain of holiness. The abiding sanctity of His nature is the condition of ours. In the eternal laws of the divine reason, it is decreed that Christ shall be the authorized dispenser of spiritual blessed- ness to His redeemed ; that every grace shall flow through this channel, or cease to flow ; and to this law, universal in the world of time and sense, eternity can bring no termina- tion, heaven present no exception. The memorable declara- tion of St Paul may, indeed, occur to you, where He tells us how the Son, having Himself subdued all things, shall " become subject to Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all." But if there come a period when as Mediatorial Governor the Son shall " deliver up the Idngdom to the Father," and as human shall be to Him " subject," it is also as certainly declared that He and His shall ^^ reign for ever and ever," His divinity still perpetu- ating His essential sovereignty to Himself and indirectly to them : nor, though the functions of Christ as the regal guide and guardian of His Church in its corporate capacity shall terminate when the need of that guardianship expires in the great consummation which St Paul designates " the end," does this give us reason to doubt that even in that blessed period when " God shall be all in all," the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Man Christ Jesus, shall still continue to us, as individuals, the immediate conveyor SERM. X.] Christ in Heaven. 171 of spiritual strengtli and peace. He may resign His office, no longer needed, of delegated administrator of the empire of God ; but our deeper spiritual union with Him shall never be dissolved or weakened. Once His, we are His for ever. Thus we have seen how it is that the eternal life of Christ Himself in heaven is the warrant of the eternal over- throw of sin, — alike of sin in its condemnation, and of sin in its inherency. On His life is suspended the prostration of moral evil in the universe. It shall continue to exist, but only as the dark monument of His triumph ; it shall exist, but in chains, and feebleness, and defeat. II. And now you must permit me to direct jomv view to the other aspect of this great subject, to that which regards ^jA?/s2ca? evil^ — pain and death, the result of sin, but from sin distinct; and to invite you to behold Him who is *' alive for evermore," alive as the eternal antagonist and conqueror of these gloomy powers. It is a blessed thing to worship Him as the Source of acceptance and holiness; it is not less a privilege to see in Him the radiant centre of life itself and happiness, to all that truly lives. When the Lord appeared in this ecstatic vision to St John, and announced His own immortality, he declared it the prerogative of that immortality, that He held " the keys of death and of Hades ;" that is, that He possessed the power of liberating from the bonds of death those who were, or were to be, confined in that intermediate state, — or " guard- house," as St Peter calls it, — which, as we may collect from Rev. XX. 13, extends its privilege of restriction over all human spirits, from the mortal hour to the day of the great white throne and the final judgment. In Scripture we know that human death is declared to be the result of hum^an sin ; the result in each instance of a curse perpetuated from Adam. We are told that " sin hath reigned unto death," that "sin entered into the world, and death hy sin," that the condemning law is " the law of sin, 172 The Eternal Life of [SERM. X. and deatli," that the author of sin is "he that had the poiver of death." That eternal overthrow, then, of sin, by the eternal life of Christ, of which we have already spoken, naturally involves the overthrow of that which is but a con- sequence of sin ; and the conquest of death, again, is the conquest of all, — pain, disquietude, disease, — that disposes to it, and in it ultimately terminates. But the Scriptures are more direct in their intimations. They set before us " death" as manifested in two forms ; and Christ as the destroyer of one, the ruler and restrictor of the other. These are mysteriously entitled " the first" and the " second" death ; both, as we may infer from the sameness of the name, successive developments, first on a less, afterwards on a vaster and more terrible scale, of that common prin- ciple, whatever it be, of death which is the original and stated " wages of sin." The first form of death results on the sin of nature, and is therefore universal as it is ; the second form, which perhaps is naturally the sequal or ma- turity of the former, is, by the mercy of God, restricted to unpardoned guilt. To both, Christ, " who is our life," is the appointed adversary, and over both He triumphs, though in different ways; over \hQ first by raising all man- kind, over the second by conducting His faithful to glory. And in every stage of the fortunes of these His ransomed followers, He is Himself their forerunner; asserting His supremacy through every form of existence by entering it, and carrying the principle of life which was within Him victoriously through them all. Having been born as we are. He died as we must die, entered the region of departed souls as we must, rose from that state as we are to rise, ascended to heaven as His servants shall yet ascend. Through every stage before the last, mankind, in the mere changes of existence, accompany Him; in the last, He and His stand separate and alone. An awful balance tlien remains, a terrible residue to be placed to the account of the principle and power of evil ; a residue so terrible as to SERM. X.] Christ in Heaven. 173 urge us to exclaim, is "Death," indeed, "swallowed up iu victory" with such a tribute as this, of miserable spirits, paid into the gloomy treasury of " the second death" ? And we can only answer, that the boundless power of Christ being sufficiently manifested in the salvation of the blessed, His mysterious justice waives the prosecution of His conquest ; while Death and Hades being (in the strong expression of inspiration) ^^cast into the lake of fire," merged in their own horrible consummation, they are thereby de- clared to be limited for all eternity to that dark realm. Thus the eternity of torment, mysterious and terrible as it doubtless is, in nowise affects the universality of Christ's victory over the powers of evil. Christ, Himself exalted to glory, fixes the barriers to the energies of pain and death ; annihilates not the foe, but imprisons him ; makes him the accursed minister of His own dread vengeance; and publicly manifests to the universe, that if misery exist, it exists only as a permitted agent in the awful administration of God. He, the source of life, is still predominant over all, and known to be so ; known yet more deeply to be so as the life He gives is mantling around Him into intenser glory. Life and happiness again are one ; for happiness is bound up in the very essence and nature of the life that Christ bestows; they are inseparable as substance and quality, as the surface and its color ! In truth, there is an eternal alliance, in the primitive counsel of Cod, between life and happiness, of which faint shadowings are sometimes caught on earth, but which i^i fully solemnized in heaven, — in the marriage of the Lamb, — alone. For even in earth beings are made alive in order to be happy ; this is the original law and the general rule ; the opposing instances, manifold as they be, are all excep- tions, the clear results of supervening evil. The weakest eye (so it be " single") can detect that these miseries are no part of the original Divine Ideal, but intrusions of some darker foreign element : unforbidden of God, they 15^ 174 The Eternal Life of [SERM. X. are yet not from God. There is no instance producible, — setting aside manifest disease and displacement, — of a living creature expressly organized by our Creator for a life of agony. He, — a Father to the children of His love, — He meant that life should be blessedness ; if it be other- wise, "an enemy hath done this." Would you apprehend how even our lost world retains dim traces of His purpose that Life and Happiness should be for ever one ? Go forth into that world, though it is a sad world ; gaze on that age which Christ Himself made the living symbol of His kingdom, to perpetuate a lovely tradition of heaven to every generation ; behold the child when such as childhood should be, in the joyousness of that freedom he never again on earth must know ; mark the delight of his young activities, the bliss of growing energies, the bright un- sullied fancy, the cheerful confidence, the boundless hope ; behold him — the little type of heaven— alone with nature in her summer noon, and asking nothing more of earth or sky than that the one should thus blossom, the other thus beam, for ever ; and you will be able, in some faint way, to conceive how the mere consciousness of existence may be happiness. And thus Scripture, as if instinctively, uses the word "life" to imply felicity, and "eternal life" to imply eternal felicity ; for in the first draft of creation to live was to be blest. Glorious alliance I it was bound on earth, when God saw that all here "was good;" it shall again be bound eternally in heaven, when He who is " alive for ever- more" shall, in the power and diffusion of that life, spread around him happiness with it co-extensive and commingled ; when the Sun of the celestial world, gathering round it all the revolving orbs of blessedness, shall shed from its inex- haustible depths not heat alone nor light alone, but heat and light inseparably blended, the heat that quickens all it touches into life, the light that irradiates that life to glory I Oh! brethren, if this be indeed the power and the SERM. X.] Christ in Heaven. 175 purpose of Christ towards His elect; if be has willed thus to find His highest happiness ia making us happy, and lives eternally that we may live; if such prospects as these be our covenanted inheritance, — everlasting communion with the very Lord of glory, immersion in the very fountain-head of life and light, capacities of knowledge and happiness increased, and still filled and satisfied as they increase, earthly sorrows forgotten, or remembered only that we may feel how they are consumed and lost in the bliss of His immediate presence, — if you, and I, and all of us are called, — still called to this, entreated by its very Author, besought by Christ Himself, as of old from the Cross, so now from the throne, to share it, and besought upon the one condition of turning to Him in simplicity and obedient love, that is, besought to be happy hereafter on the sole condition of being, in the purest and deepest sense, happy now, — what words can describe the folly, the fatuity, the madness of those who, professing to believe this truth, will not turn this truth to account, — will resolve, — and to delay is to resolve, — rather to cling to nothingness, emptiness, uncertainty, — to moments of ease, hours of nnquiet, a cloudy day at best for their life, an everlasting midnight for their eternity, — than to seek the substance of immutable happiness in God, to bid boldly for this mighty prize, to attempt at last the diviner life, and, through good report and evil report, — for what matters the scorn of him whom God shall yet scorn ? — through trial and danger, — for what is dangerous in competition with death eternal? — to seek the one sole aim of reasonable man, — the "inherit- ance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for them who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation !" So then, brethren, we have now seen, — as far as Scripture deigns to guide our feeble steps, — the mighty purposes of the eternity of Christ in heaven. We have learned to adore in that celestial life of His the source of pardon, of 176 The Eternal Life of [SERM. X. holiness, and of bliss, immortal as itself. Every blessing that belongs to our inheritance centres in this great truth, that He "who was dead" is now "alive for evermore." In Him newly born, we in Him die, rise, and ascend ; our life is the reflection of His ; if spiritually quickened by Him, we too, like Him, are even now, and hereafter are destined 3^et more gloriously to be, "alive for evermore!" "For evermore!" Words easily uttered, but in compre- hension vaster than human thought can grasp, till man, entering upon eternity, shall rise to faculties fitted for the scene! "For evermore:" for an existence to which the age of the earth, of the starry heavens, of the whole vast universe, is less than a morning dream ; for a life which, after the reiteration of millions of centuries, shall begin the endless race with the freshness of infancy, and all the eagerness that welcomes enjoyments ever new. The blight of all our earthly pleasures is decay; our suns have scarcely risen when they set; we have but just persuaded ourselves that we are happy when the happiness is vanished. Pining after something that will endure, we are not to be for ever disappointed; born for eternity, eternity shall surely be ours. But oh ! — horrible thought ! — if all this tendency to the eternal, this longing for everlasting mansions, be to any of us but the prophetic twilight, the forecast shadow of unending darkness! Oh! agony insufferable, if the eternal life of Christ, — the Christian's warrant of justifica- tion, of sanctity, of happiness, — be but the guarantee of a death as everlasting as His everlasting life; if the pro- longation of His divine existence be but the seal and surety of that never-dying death which, by a dread union of opposites, seems described as protracting dissolution itself into immortality ! Invoke not Christ in such an hour ! All-merciful now, He cannot pity then ; an inconceivable change shall have passed over His nature ; and perhaps he is declared to resign "the kingdom" to the pure Godhead after the final judgment, for this very reason, that we may SERM. X.] Christ in Heaven. 177 know Ilirn no longer able, as a man and brother, to com- passionate and intercede. The love for sinners that fixed Ilim on the cross expires in the hour of judgment. Turn not away from these dread thoughts ! The things are true whether we will receive them or not ; our doubts or dis- belief cannot shake the foundations of the throne of God. The time shall come, — we know not ivhen^ we know not how^ — but come it shall, when every deathless spirit within these walls shall awake to the world of retribution, and each shall be enabled to utter for himself the words of Christ: '"Behold / am alive for evermore;' the hour at length is come, and I too am immortal! This is, — this is the light of eternity that glares around me ; these are the anthems of angels 1" Hoio such words shall be uttered, whether with the anguish of anticipated woe, with the remembrance of years misspent, warnings despised, oppor- tunities neglected; or with the blessed recollection of faith unwavering amid a hostile world, of tempers meek and loving in despite of all its bitterness, of temptations met and vanquished, of services that, never indeed sufficient, were still sincere, — those humble but rapturous recollec- tions that in their fearful joy are bright already with the glory they herald; — ivhich^ I say, shall be your destiny when that long-promised morn shall have dawned, as under God it lies with yourselves, may God in His mercy enable you this day to resolve ! SERMON XI THE CANAANITE MOTHER A TYPE OF THE GENTILE CHURCH. Then Jesus answered and said unto her, woman, great is thy faith ; be unto thee even as thou wilt I — Matthew xv. 28. These are the last words of Christ to one who had per- severed to trust in nis mercy, through silence, and exclu- sion, and reproach; who had beheld the flow of His boundless benevolence checked, and its glory clouded ; — yet had penetration enough to detect the divine reality concealed under these harsh appearances, to read a willing heart throusrh the veil of unwillinoj words, to believe in Ilim in spite of Himself, and, amid every assumption of coldness and severity, to see in Him the one unaltered in- carnation of divine love. The woman of Canaan comes forth out of the depths of a dark and degrading idolatry, to be an example, forever, to the world of light, and privilege, and profession. A rescued heathen is chosen to be the model and instructress of the Church of the living Grod. He who, of old, went to " Ur of the Chaldees" to find a father for believers, has chosen his fairest and fullest ex- ample of Gospel faith from the worshippers of Baal and of Dagon. It is indeed deserving of remark, that the most eminent instances of faith in Christ's claims and powers recorded in the Gospel history, should have been found among the Gentile world ; that of the centurion (of whom, even after the call of the Apostles, our Lord declares that SERM. XL] The Canaanite Mother a Type^ etc. 179 He had " not found so great faith, no not in Israel,") and the still more interesting case which the text brings before ns. Everything in the life and actions of Christ is profound in purpose, and pregnant with meaning ; and surely we can discover in this an ordinance of the most perfect pro- priety. If it be through the special virtue and dignity of the grace of faith that the new dispensation is enabled to make itself commensurate with the world, it seems pecu- liarly appropriate, that the chief examples of that grace, which was thus to equalize the claims of all the races of mankind, should have been selected from among those who Avere to gain the advantage in this equalization. This farther typical purport seems to have been present to our Lord's mind, when, after commenting on the Centurion's faith, he rose to that extension of it which was yet to em- brace the world : " I say unto you. That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven ; but the children of the kingdom shall be cast out." Nor, perhaps, is it altogether unworthy of notice in this point of view, that when the Church was indeed to be declared a Church of Gentile no less than Jew, the first believer, — the common ancestor of the world of evangelized heathen,' — was a man holding the same office, and, it would appear, similarly connected in habits and disposition with the Jews ; for as it is said of the Centurion of the Acts, that he was " one that feared God, and gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway," — so is it likewise said of the Cen- turion of the Gospel, that " he loved their nation^ and had built them a synagogue." And I may add that this re- spectful attachment to the ancient people of Jehovah is very discernible in the language of our immediate subject, the believing Canaanite ; for she not only addressed her Eedeemer in her supplication as "the Son oi David^ (a title which could appear honorable only to one who sympathized with the feelings and prepossessions of a Jew), but even 180 The Canaanite Mother [SERM. XI. acceded to the justness of our Lord's strong expressions wlien He classed her nation as "dogs" in comparison with the long-adopted "children" of God. If this remark be well founded (that the prominent examples of the first heathen elect were purposely such as had some connection with Israel), it may, perhaps, be properly considered as a continuation of that wonderful dispensation of heaven, so observable through all ancient history, which made the prosperity or adversity of heathen nations depend largely on' their treatment of the Jewish people, a dispensation which has rendered the Israelite prophets the anticipative historians of the chief empires of antiquity ; a dispensation which, as the Jews are undoubtedly reserved for a mys- terious future, may not, perhaps, have ceased so completely as we are apt to imagine. " Behold, I will bring again the captivity of Jacob's tents, and have mercy on his dwelling- places. Their children also shall be as aforetime, and their congregation shall be established before me, and I will punish all that oppress ihemr — Jer. xxx. 18, 20. "Assem- ble yourselves, and come!" cries the Spirit of God by the Prophet Ezekiel (xxxix. 17) ; " gather j^ourselves on every side to my sacrifice that I do sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice upon the mountains of Israel, that ye may eat flesh and drink blood. Ye shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth And I will set my glory among the heathen, and all the heathen shall see my judgment that I have executed, and r)%y hand that I have laid upon themP If these predictions refer to times and events not yet elapsed (as seems most probable), they would seem to show that the eye of God is not yet closed upon the oppressors of Judah (a crime of which nearly all European nations have at various times been flagrantly guilty), and that, like their own Ark wandering among the Philistines of old, they are a people Avhose indestructible consecration to heaven makes their presence among the nations of the earth even yet a mysterious element of trial SERM. XI.] a Tyi^QofiliQ Gentile Church. 181 and perplexity. However tliis may be, tlie clioice of the previous friends and reverers of Israel, as tbe special in- stances of Gentile faith in Christ, may be considered in a view beyond this ; not merely as a striking exemplification of that law of gradual transition which seems to pervade all the works of God, spiritual no less than physical, — the heathen being partially Judaized before he becomes wholly enlightened, but also as manifestly rendering these in- stances more appropriate types of the entire work of Gen- tile conversion : — externally, of the preaching of the Gospel to the heathen in all ages, which in all ages must include so large a Jewish element, must build itself upon Jewish history, authenticate itself by Jewish prophecy, and pro- claim its great subject the fulfilment of Jewish types ; in- ternally of the parallel story of the Gospel life in the soul, which, perhaps, finds every man more or less a Jew in heart, in pride, self-reliance, spiritual ignorance, and form- ality, — before it conducts him into the humility, the faith, the illumination, and the liberty of the Gospel. And thus, enlarging upon the subject, we might not, perhaps, refine overmuch, if we ventured to say that these two remarkable cases (the Centurion and the Canaanite), considered as re- corded fruits of the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles in and adjacent to the immediate scene of His labors, may stand as fitting types of the two great divisions of the Gen- tile world, as designated from the sons of [N'oah : — the Eoman Centurion, a child of Japhet ; the Canaanite mother, a daughter of Ham ; while the Jews themselves, the Lord's direct subjects, " the lost sheep of the house of Israel" to whom he was " sent," the seed of Abraham in whom the whole earth was to be blest, form ample representatives of that race of Shem, who only are wanting to complete the universal supremacy of Him to whom it was promised, " that all the ends of the world should turn unto him, and that all the kindreds of the nations should worship before him." Thus, even during the cartblv life and pilgrimage 16 182 The Canaanile Mother [serm. XI. of Christ, had the great branches, African, and eastern, and western, of His Catholic Church, their seminal representa- tives ; single, and isolated, and obscure, it may be, — but the more answerable in this feebleness of their infancy to that " kingdom of heaven" which is like a grain of mustard- seed, " which is less than all the seeds that be in the earth ; but when it is sown, it groweth up and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches, so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the shadow of it." Such a generalization as this, of simple Gospel incidents (whicli can scarcely be estimated, I beg leave to say, with- out patient and thoughtful comparison), seems to me per- fectly warrantable. But as many prejudices, from various sources, lie against every attempt to see in Scripture more than Scripture expressly speaks, I will occupy the second division of this discourse with some brief considerations on the subject, which may prepare the way for an attempt, — simpler, perhaps, and plainer, — to penetrate the providential mystery of this Canaanite's gift of faith. I confess, then, that where so little is recorded of the most wondrous life in all history, I cannot forbear expect- ing depths of undeveloped mysteries in each of the few incidents selected for special memorial. And in this as in every other study, though men may indeed transgress by exaggeration, I fear the liability will always be much stronger to err b}^ indolence, oversight, and neglect. It must, indeed, be evident to every one that the life of Christ is not given to us in the fashion, or for the purposes, of ordinary life-writing. The detached memoranda of the Evangelists answer to no such idea. We have no regular diary (though who can blame the curiosity that sometimes covets it?) of His sayings and His wanderings; far less have we the methodical elaborateness of a finished memoir. His story is cast less in the mould of a formal biography than as the successive, but separate, scenes of a majestic monodrama. A mystic shroud still envelopes the daily SERM. XI.] a Type of the Q entile Church. 183 walk of the Son of God. The Spirit speaks of Him with a holy and reverent reserve. So truly was this reserve de- creed in the councils of heaven, that (wonderful as it surely is !) there is scarcely a fragment, beyond the Gospel narra- tives, preserved of the express words or deeds of Jesus ; a fact unparalleled in all its circumstances. And when Satan (according to the usual law of imitation observable in his operations) prompted his nnhappy agents among the early heretics, to overlay the true with false narratives, — an at- tempt renewed not long since by an English infidel, so that, like the shields in the Koman temple, the divine gift might be undisting^uishable amons^ its human imitations, — the watchful providence of God gradually discredited the whole of these forgeries, and left the four authentic records as the sole written inheritance of the Church, the spiritual aliment of every race and nation of man, — while it imprisoned their rivals among the dusty tomes of the learned, to magnify, by the contrast of their extravagancies, the inimitable workmanship of heaven. All has vanished of Him who "spake as never man spake," but that which God expressly excepted ; but this again supplies another wonder, from which I cannot pass without a moment's notice. Mahomet was accustomed to appeal to the sublimity of his Koran (itself a pompous plagiary from our Scriptures, as indeed his whole religion is a Christian lieresij)^ in jiroof of the divinity of his mission; but lofty imagery is not very dif- ficult to borrow or invent. Our Gospels (which surely are themselves of the highest order of the truest sublime) con- tain a characteristic far rarer than any sublimity of imagi- native decoration. The hand only of a master can achieve the greatest " effect" in the fewest strokes ; and is it not astonishing that a few scenes and a few discourses should convey an impression of the Actor and the Speaker more distinct and perfect, perhaps, than has ever been conveyed of any man eminent in the world's history, by the most voluminous biography ? — so that every one (as far as natu- 184 The Canaanite Mother [SERM. XI. ral apprehensions can reacli) understands " the mind that Avas in Christ Jesus," — knows how that blessed Personage would feel and act in any ordinary conjuncture of life, — would be prepared to meet His daily habits and to enter into His line of conversation, — more securely and com- pletely (and this from a calm perusal of the Gospels alone) than he could engage to do with any subject of the most copious historical record, — nay (such is the irresistible con- viction of His unrivalled singleness and sincerity !) than he could, perhaps, attempt with his most intimate and trusted friend. And this (you will remember) such a character as, in all its blended ingredients, — so new, yet so harmonious, — the world had never seen before, and has seen in but rare and feeble imitations since. And hence, though the records are so few and brief, they are (by a marvellous con- ciliation of difiiculties) abundant for the great purpose of example. But to follow this topic would lead me too far ; and I am now speaking not so much of what we can copy as of what we can only contemplate. If, then, in this limited history which the Gospel supplies, we find the miracles of Christ related in very different forms, — sometimes aggre- gated in a constellation of mercies (" they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto Him, and He laid His hands on every one of them, and healed them ; and devils also came out of many''^ (Luke iv. 40, 41) : or, " a great mul- titude of people came to hear Him, and to be healed of their diseases, and they were healed. And the whole multitude sought to touch Him, for there went virtue out of Him, and healed them air (vi. 17-19, &c. &c.) ), sometimes set forth with a minute speciality of place, and time, and manner, — we cannot but suspect that the presiding Spirit that go- verned the composition of the four great records of the life of Christ must have had His reasons for the difference. AVe cannot but feel ourselves justified in seeking for those reasons below the surface, nor are we to be deterred by the opposition of some and the extravagancies of others, from SERM. XI.] a Type of the Gentile Church. 185 expecting that, in many instances, it may be permitted to patient industry to seize tliem ; tliough it be very possible (indeed I believe it altogether certain) that the full intelli- gence of these reasons may not be given until some future crisis of events — perhaps until the completion of the whole mystery of God — shall itself explain them. Many parts of the Holy Volume (as the temple of Ezekiel, and others not professedly prophetical) may then be found, though now re- garded of so little relative importance, to be charged with the weightiest and most momentous practical truth. Doubt- less we are, in some measure, as the Jews so long were, the conservators of treasures whose real force and scope we have never entirely mastered. That language of actions and events in which the Spirit of God loves to speak seems to be inexhaustible in meaning. The same event, that ful- iils an ancient prophecy, often becomes itself a type that silently prophesies a series of future wonders. And thus, in a manner, God makes the history of the whole world His Scripture; and monarchs and empires, in their rise and their revolutions, the letters of His mystic page. But, of course, such considerations of the profound purport of reve- lation apply mainly to the written word of God, and chiefly encourage us in every honest effort to sound its depths. And I may add, that these considerations alone are an abundant answer to the objector, who smiles or sneers at the anxiety which the modern societies for the circulation of the Scriptures manifest, for the preservation of the ivhole volume in its unbroken integrity, so that all must be re- ceived or none ; and who asks, what would public morals suffer though the book of Leviticus, and the Genealogies of the Chronicles, and the Song of Solomon, and the perplex- ing visions of Ezekiel or Zechariah, were lost forever to the public eye? The answer, I repeat, is simple and decisive. We are the pledged depositories of a treasure, the trustees for future ages; and as we have received, so must we trans- mit. We dare not measure the depth of God's purposes 16'^ 186 The Canaanite Mother [seem. xi. bj our penetration of them. The Church is the sworn executor of God's solemn bequest; and the honest executor dares not curtail the legacy because he fears that a part may be abused, and a part may bear no interest. If the Scriptures are to be preserved at all, and not left to the pro- vidential recovery of some future Hilkiah, it can only be (under God) by the multiplication of copies, and the stern principle of rescinding nothing which heaven has thought fit to perpetuate. Had the Jews acted on the short-sighted calculations of the objector, we should at this day have been without many of the most decisive prophetical authen- tications of Christ; for who would have dreamed that Ze- chariah's thirty pieces of silver^ or his King lowly, and riding on an ass, were ever meant to find their minute fulfilments? Or who would have thought that Jeremiah's "Kachel weep- ing for her children," or Hosea's "out of Egypt I have called my Son," were (though realized in a lower sense at or near the times of these prophets) in truth but the dim reflections of mightier events not yet, nor for ages, to rise upon the dark horizon of time ? And would not such pas- sages have been (on the principle I am opposing) among the first condemned to inferiority, removed from popular inspection, and thus exposed to gradual neglect and ulti- mate disappearance ? From these suggestions in confirmation of the truth, more and more to be evinced by circumstances and events, — that ^^all Scripture is profitable for doctrine, and reproof, and correction, and instruction," and, more especially, of the value and depth of every line, which tells us of the doings of our Lord, at once the giver and falfiller of the whole, "the Author and the Finisher of the Faith," — we return once more to our immediate subject, and endeavor to resume the consideration of the important instance the text brings before us, — itself an emblem or symbol for all ages of the expansion of Jewish privilege into Gentile adoption, of the steps by which the Lord is pleased to SERM. XT.] a Tijioe of the Gentile Church. 187 work this merciful providence, and the grounds and con- ditions which He requires in those who obtain its benefits. Let us, then, omitting all comparisons of other miracles, or other interviews, with this, confine ourselves to it alone. We shall find it abundantly adequate to represent the whole mystery of heathen salvation ; to picture the Church (already in mysterious prospect co-extensive with every clime and family of man) approaching humbly and believ- ingly the Lord of all, and soliciting from Him who cannot refuse the prayer of faith, the permission, on behalf of en- slaved thousands, to become His emancipated servants. I call your attention, in the first place, to the race and country of the believing mother in the narrative. This is expressed, with some variety of phrase, though substantial sameness, in the two Gospels of Matthew and Mark, in which the event is recorded (with great propriety if Mat- thew's Gospel was, as learned men conclude, mainly in- tended for the Jews^ and Mark's for the Gentiles^ both of whom were equally concerned in the incident). The vari- ety, however, is most instructive in relation to our present purpose. Christ is said to have " departed to the coasts" or "borders of Tyre and Sidon^^^ and the woman to have " come out of the same coasts." St Matthew adds that she was "a woman of Canaan^ And St Mark tells us that she was to be considered " a Greeh^^ (that is in religion and habits), " a Syro- Phoenician by nation." Now, I request you to sum up these brief notes of country and origin ; and I mistake, or you will find them to embrace every great division of the then known Gentile world, considered as to position relatively to Israel ; and, still more, regarded (as the Old Testament Prophets always regard them) with a view to their open hostility, or hollow and treacherous alliances, — on which heaven always frowned, — with the original people of God, for whom these idolatrous enemies were now to be substituted. Tyre and Sidon, which lay to the north of the sacred territory (though in remote anti- 188 The Canaanite Mother [serm. XI. quitj on terms of alliance), had long become tlie persecu- tors of the chosen people ; as you discover in the triumphant denunciations of Isaiah and Ezekiel, mingled now and then with a singular strain of promise. It was the old prediction of the Psalmist that the "daughter of Jz/re" should be present with a gift at the nuptials of the Mes- siah's spouse; and Isaiah, though he bids "the ships of Tarshish howl" for wasted Tyre (ch. xxiii.), yet promises that a time would come when " her merchandise and her hire should be holiness to the Lord." But the woman in the story is farther declared to be of Canaan ; a child at once of that accursed race in whose room the chosen people (now to be forsaken) had of old been planted, and in Canaan of that " Ham, the father of Canaan," who stands in the prophets as the representative of Egypt, and, more or less, of the entire south. But she is also " a Syro-Phoe- niciau," not merely of Phoenicia in its Canaanitish, but of Phoenicia in its Syrian aspect ; — of that Syria, then, which not only had so often, in its limited acceptation, been the foe of Israel, and thence bears in Isaiah the bitter " burden of Damascus," but which, some 300 years before Christ's coming, had merged in itself, as one empire, the old glories of Assijria, — the Assyria of Shalmaneser, Sennacherib, I^ebuchadnezzar, — and which thus involves in its associa- tions and connexions the whole body of the eastern enemies of the Jewish people. And then, adds St Mark, she was "a Greek;" she inherited (from the Greek colonists or traders of her country, doubtless) and she symbolized, when she fell at the feet of Christ, the image- worship of the icest, and, bound as that was with all its habits and manners, might sufficiently represent the entire mass of its degrading sensualities and its profitless wisdom. Now let us turn from the suppliant to her divine Accept- or. Christ was, at the moment she met Him, purposely a wanderer from the land of Israel, displeased, we may con- clude, with the result of an interview He had just held with SERM. XI.] a Type of the Gentile Church. 189 the chiefs of the unhappy people His favor was so soon to abandon. And what was the nature, what the subject of that interview? What, in the practical Judaism of the age of Christ, would you pronounce to have been most unworthy of a perpetual religion, most requiring the sub- stitution of a system more comprehensive, most amenable to the divine judgments ? You would reply, its bigoted attachment to spiritless ceremony, its multiplication and enforcement of unauthorized traditions, its complicated hypocrisy, and perhaps, above all, if you were to select an instance, that eminently atrocious device of hypocrisy, by which its teachers instructed their pupils to desert a parent under pretext of honoring God. Such precisely are the subjects upon which Christ has just met and refuted these miserable guides. " Scribes and Pharisees which were of Jerusalem^^^ thus representing, though in Galilee, the very heart of the corrupted people. Just such are the guilty perversions upon which he has cited a prophecy of Isaiah (xxix. 17), which in the original is followed by an express annunciation of some most mysterious change, a " marvel- lous work and wonder among the people," at which " the wisdom of the wise is to perish, and the understanding of the prudent to be hid," but which is to " make Lebanon" (the very country of our Syrian suppliant) " a fruitful field, while the fruitful field becomes a forest." Just such are the accursed doctrines, of which He has but now said to His disciples, telling Him on His way of the offended Pharisees, that "every plant that His Father had not planted should be rooted up,^^ and that the blind and their followers "should both /a/? into the pit.'" Just such is the loathsome, the corrupted, the decaying Judaism from which the Lord of Glory, grieved yet resolute, turns to meet the woman of Canaan, the worshipping heathen ; to meet the mystical Church of the Gentiles, as she comes up from the wilderness, with the stamp and credentials upon her of all nations, and people, and tongues ; as she comes to find Him 190 The Canaanite Mother [serm. XI. out in His loneliness, though (how appropriate is the pa- rallel !) "He would have no man know it." Blessed Ee- deemer! — the thoughtful guides of the Church of old assigned to Thee " a double will." I had rather bow to the mystery than discuss it; but here at least we may dis- cern in Thee a will beyond that purpose of concealment ! Well do we know that thy kind heart was already yearn- ing for the humble believer before she came to Thee ; that by Thee was given the faith that brought her ; that " Thou couldst not be hid," because Thou gavest her a heart to see and follow Thee through thousands! The hour icas at length come, that Jeremiah saw through his tears of old, when "the Gentiles should come unto Thee from the ends of the earth, and should say. Surely our fathers have in- herited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit I" — Jer. xvi. 19. Now for a brief summary of the interview. It is the second Adam, and the Church the second Eve ! Humble, repentant, and believing, she comes from the long slavery of her idols. She speaks for one she hath left at home among the tombs, harassed and torn by the tyranny of Satan. Her words are few ; she strives not to be " heard for her much speaking," but quantity is compensated by intensity of feeling, and truth of conviction. Tears and cries, not words and periods, for Him who hears not with human ears ; who regards not the tongue, but listens to the beating of the heart. Her words are few, but what a body of theology is here ! She " cried unto Him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David ; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil." "!Mercy," for every thought and purpose of thine is compassion; " mercy," for art not thou the long-expected Messiah, at once the Lord of all and the Son of David, true God and true Israelite? "Mercy on ?7ie," for mercy to her wretched off- spring is one with mercy to the Church; for "the daugh- ter of my people" groans and weeps beneath the crushing SERM. XI.] a Type of the Gentile Church. 191 bondage of tlie Evil one. " Slie besought Him," says St Mark, " that He would cast forth the devil out of her daughter." She acknowledged that the true solution of the physical and moral curse of this world was the su- premacy of him whom the Son of David, and He alone, was empowered to overthrow. And how much more can we add to her creed ? But the reception is as remarkable as the appeal. "He answered her not a word." A course so unlike His ordi- nary one, so unlike that prodigality of merc}^ when crowds were healed as they came, marks the absolute peculiarity of the occasion, and points to a wider purpose, and a more expansive interpretation. The religion of Christ had at first " no word" for the Gentile ; and its subsequent ex- tension was only an instance of that triumphant wisdom of heaven which (strange to say) wrought the greatest good out of the greatest evil, and enlightened the world by Jewish blindness. To deepen and enforce the contrast, He instantly answers the interposing disciples, and answers only to fortify exclusion: " I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Here, then, is the trial of a faith, which is to believe His character in spite of His words, and to know Him merciful even when His mercy is shrouded. Did she falter ? We know not what moment- ary misgiving may have crossed her spirit as she heard the solemn words : " I cannot, must not pity thee, though I would !" But courage, poor suppliant ! There is hope in the very nature of the limitation. Eemember the agonies of the sufferer, the Satan-doomed, whom you have left behind you dependent on the success of the appeal you make! Eemember that on the strength of your faith she hangs more truly, than ever gasping disease depended on the energies of medicine; that in your firmness her health returns, with your despair her case is indeed des- perate. But the woman of Canaan, the outcast of haughty Israel, requires no reminding. — "She came," — undaunted, 192 The Carmanite Mother [seem. xr. unrepelled, slie came, — "and worshipped Him, saying, Lord, help me I" You will observe that the pressure of the trial, in this great example, lies peculiarly in this, that it augments as it advances, and only ceases when it has reached its acme. When the thunder-cloud has swelled and darkened to the utmost^ it bursts in a shower of blessings. The objections of the Lord are twofold; one taken from the limits of His commission, and one from the degradation of the object, manifestly the bitterer and sterner rebuke. And I need not remind you how perfectly the luider parallel corresponds ; how answerably the body of the Gentiles, the oppressed of Satan, were excluded from divine favor, partly by the mysterious limitations of Providence, and partly by the enormity of their own pollutions. On this I cannot now insist at length ; our time allows little more than to sur- vey the rejoinders of the Canaanite, and in her of the weep- ing and long-deserted Church of the heathen ; to note their simple brevity ; and yet their exquisite pertinence. It is plain that there were two ways to meet the tvv^o objections respectively. One was to appeal to the merciful powei', and the other to the merciful equity of the Messiah. The Spirit of God instructed our poor Canaanite in both. " I am not sent but to Israel," said Jesus. " She came," not with an argument, but a prayer that involved an argu- ment, "and worshipped Him, saying. Lord, help me I" She no longer calls Him Son of David, for her object was to rise from the Son of David to the Son of God, from the Messiah of the Jew to the Messiah of the world, — to " the ZortZ" in the simple majesty of the name, yea, to " the mighty God, the Father of the everlasting age, the Prince of peace." She, therefore, designates Him by the vaster and ampler title, and adds to her designation " worship." She insinu- ated that " the Lord" had power above His commission; that this plenipotentiary of heaven could at will transcend the terms of His instructions ; and by that omnipotence which SERM. XI.] a Type of the Gentile Church. 193 ruled the world it had created, she invoked Him, "Lord help me !" But even this is ineffective. Faith must see more than power ; and the Canaanite must pay a price for being the model of the Church to come. Like Him she implored, she must be " made perfect through sufferings." For, — alas I — omnipotence acts by mysterious and often ex- clusive law ; though the agent be almighty, the object may be unfit for its operation ; the same power that bade Carmel blossom left Sinai a desert. " It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs f^ "Let the children (St Mark adds) first be filled!" But now for a bolder flight of the eagle- wing, and a keener glance of the eagle- eye of faith. She springs from the supreme control to the benevolent equity of Providence. She rises above the clouds of the divine power, often, to us who can only see them from below, dark, disturbed, and stormy, into the holy serenity beyond them. She sees the calm Sovereign of the universe, partial, yet impartial too, preferring some, yet forgetting none. She knows that " His care is over all His works," and, — deepest wonder of her heaven-sent en- lightenment ! — she can see that He loves her, and yet accord His unquestionable right to love, if He please it, others more ; allows she can ask but little, yet believingly dares to pronounce that little certain ! She will permit (would to God we could always follow her in our speculations !) no m3^stery of dispensation to contradict the truth of the divine character. " Truth, Lord," is her retort, for the calmness of her settled convictions left her power to 2^oint her reply : "Truth, Lord! yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master's table." Everything is here. All Chris- tianity is concentrated in one happy sentence. She believes in her own lowliness; she believes in God's absolute supre- macy; she believes in the secret propriety of the apparent inequalities of His providence ; she believes that those in- equalities can never affect the true universality of His love. God is all, yet she is something too, for she is God's crea- 17 194 The Ganaaniie Mother [serm. XI. ture. Men from deep places can see the stars at noon-day ; and from the utter depths of her self-abasement she catches the Yv^hole blessed mystery of heaven : like St Paul's Chris- tian, "in having nothing, she possesses all things." No humility is perfect and proportioned, but that which makes us hate ourselves as corrupt, but respect ourselves as im- mortal ; the humility that kneels in the dust, but gazes on the skies ! Oh ! with what joy did the blessed Teacher see himself foiled in that high argument ! — how gladly did He yield the victory to that invincible faith !— how did He joy to see the grace thus budding Avhich He himself had planted. He who gave Jacob the strength to wrestle with Him of old, gave the Gentile mother the power to vanquish Him now ! " woman, great is thy faith : be it unto thee even as thou wilt!... For this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter !"— Matt. xv. 28; Mark vii. 29. Yes, the devil has departed from that emancipated frame. "Her daughter was made whole from that very hour." The color is returned to those pallid cheeks, the blood no longer streams from those lacerated limbs. The sepulchre and the desert are no more the haunts of the rescued maniac ; the mother's love is triumphant through faith. Satan is dethroned from brain and heart, the faculties are free for God. And say, shall not we assume a louder strain, and swell the burden of the song till heaven shall ring, while we^ — the saved from Satan, the mystic antitype of that lone victim, — echo, across the chasm of ages, the praises of the merey, that crushed for ever the earthly omnipotence of Satan, that hurled the fiend, "like lightning," from the heaven of his power, and raised on the ruins of sin and sin's slavish law the everlasting monarchy of grace 1" " O woman, great is thy faith I" Church of the living God, great was thy endurance in the days of old: "We have heard, and our fathers have declared unto us the noble things of their day, and of the old time before them !" High and holy is the inheritance, thy faith, through fire SERM. xr.] a T>jj)e of the Gentile Church. 195 and blood, liath transmitted! And oli! — people of the living God!— Gentiles "grafted into the olive tree" of Christ! — heathens who are blest, while "the children of the kingdom are cast out," whom grace, itself unbought, hath bought from hell, buried in baptism and therein risen again!— shall any wile of the seducer delude you back to the ruin from which you have been saved? Shall this august heritage of glory have been offered and bestowed in vain ? — that heritage of mercy, no smaller though thou- sands share it ! " The devil is gone out" of the Gentile daughter, but shall he return with the seven darker spirits, and the last end be worse than the first ? God grant you light to see, and strength to avoid this fearful doom ; and, knowing that graces abused are far worse than graces never given, may He by faith and godly fear enable you to reach that holy country, where the Canaanite mother has ere now, it may be, learned to glory in a celestial Canaan, and the demoniac daughter, whom Jesus freed on earth, has found a voice to speak her gratitude in heaven ! SERMON XII. THE FAITH OF MAN AND THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD. Faithful is he that calleth you. — 1 Thessalonians v. 24. The highest object of man's existence is undoubtedly to hold communion with his God. For this his nature was originally framed, and in this alone will his nature ever find contentment or repose. God is, as it were, the coun- terpart to his being ; the divine and human elements are fitted to each other; and humanity, without the corre- sponding principle of Deity, is a thing imperfect, insuffi- cient, incomplete. This it is that makes human life such an enigma ; this it is that has perplexed the speculative, and maddened the misanthropic, and clouded the calcula- tions of even the amiable among mankind. The vital tie that connected us with heaven is broken. We are as a limb of the body separated (by paralysis or any other internal cause) from the benefits of the general circulation. God is, so to speak, the great centre of life and motion, the heart of the universal frame. We have insulated our- selves from God ; we have deadened the nerve that conducted his influences, and what remains but a mass, with perhaps the outward appearance of life, some wild convulsive struggles that look like life, but in reality, and for all purposes of regulated strength, or useful effort, or graceful motion, a cold, unprofitable, unanimated mass ! And this is just the condition of man so long as he continues exiled from the communion of his God ; all the appearances of SEEM. XII.] The Faith of Man and Faithfulness of God. 197 power and vitality, none of the truth; faculties prepared for action, but no energy to set them in play ; like that Church of the Apocalypse to which the Spirit writes, " lie hath a name that he liveth, and is dead !" Were man wholly and hopelessly, and from the begin- ning, this lost, debased thing, such expressions as I have used would indeed be preposterous. No one, I suppose, ever lamented that the brute creation was shut out from the converse of angels. Now why should this be so ? What is it which would convict of gross extravagance the man who should waste his days in lamenting, that the beasts of the field were condemned to perpetual exclusion from the glories of that angelic community which encompasses the throne of God ? Plainly, because there are no organs, or faculties, or attributes of any kind in the brute that point to a brighter destiny. There are no traces of a fall from original brightness; there is nothing about him which makes it a practical contradiction that he should be as he is, and yet be what he is ; nothing which evermore cries out that, though corruption be around and within him, there is a voice also which condemns the corruption, and desires that seek for better satisfactions than this miserable world can ever bestow ! The t^-ue, clear, unequivocal per- ception of his own destitution, and of the necessity of a reunion with the source of all excellence, is indeed the exclusive gift of the enlightening Spirit of God ; but even in the natural man there are faint, occasional gleams of a something over and above his present state, even though he knows not what it is. There is, at all events, in his own perpetual unhappiness^ a tacit, but pressing and perpetual proof, that, whatever be the nature of the state for which he was originally intended, this world, most assuredly, from its incapability of answering the call of his whole being for happiness, can never have been that state. It is most true that the man may never once have declared^ in so many words, that he feels himself not in his native element ; but 17* 198 The Faith of Man and [serm. XTI. Avliat avails that ; Ilis sorrows, his tears, his whole nature, are everlastingly proclaiming it. This is a confession, not made with lips, but written in blood, and registered in all the woes of all mankind. Every domestic bereavement, every public calamity, every groan for himself or for others, that ever was uttered by man, all alike are a con- fession (more mighty than language can devise) that man was never ultimately designed by the great Creator of all for a scene like this ; that, by some cause or other, he has been excluded from his own appropriate sphere; that, made for God, he has deserted his Maker, and for a time, in terrible retribution, has been deserted by Him ! I say, then, that everything in nature, but, above all, our own melancholy conviction, attests the reality and the con- sequences of our separation from God ; and the reason why I have dwelt upon the point is this, — that without some notion of the extent of the loss, you can never arrive at an estimate of- the value or the nature of the restoration. It is by the length of the dark shadow you are to compute the height of the elevation beyond it. It is by summing up in your own minds the long catalogue of woe, which, even within our own ordinary experience, sin has intro- duced, that you will be enabled to conceive (as far as man can yet conceive) the enormous importance of that mani- festation of mercy, whose object is, by the descent of God Himself among mankind, to bind once more the broken links of communion between man and God! Yes, if there be among us, — and what assembly of human beings is without such auditors ? — if there be here one soul that has ever mourned in solitude over hopes deceived and prospects dimmed, and a life at times without motive or consolation, to that person I would say, " You are yourself among the most powerful proofs of the deep truth of Christ's eternal Gospel!" It was not to a world perfect in all its elements, that He came upon His mission of salvation. It is the perpetual mark of all fiilse systems, that they begin by SERM. XII.] the Faillifulness of Ood. 199 flattering men and end by debasing tlicm. Christ alone began by teaching (what you now feel) the bitter lesson of man's degradation, feebleness, and uncertainty, in order that, upon the deep foundation of human depravity, he might build the immortal structure of human sanctifica- tion. The gospel oi faith is not the gospel of a consum- mate paradise, but of a weak, and shivering, and wretched world. All your sorrows were present to Christ Jesus when He framed His own glorious remedy ; and it is to such as you that he speaks, when, early in His blessed work. He proclaims, that through Him the mourners shall be comforted, and " the weary and heavy-laden" receive "rest." Now ivliat is the nature of the restoration provided for man, whom we have thus seen in all the shame and misery of a banishment from God? We have dwelt upon the wretched characteristics of his unredeemed condition. We have dwelt upon the evident tokens in his nature, of powers formed for a mightier grasp and a vaster theatre. We have seen him, along with the rest of " the whole creation," " groaning and travailing ;" unable to content himself with darkness, at the very time that he is "loving darkness rather than light." If you believe that I have over-stated one item in the list of human debasement, I am content with the remainder. But well do I know that there is scarce one among us (would we all but make the examina- tion) whose recollection cannot summon as sad an assort- ment of weaknesses permitted yet condemned; of follies unavailingly regretted ; of promises to God (for I speak to baptized Christians), repeated, and reiterated, and broken ; of purposes of amendment deliberately rejected or care- lessly forgotten, — I say there are few indeed among us, who have made any attempt to realize the spiritual life, and whose memory is not charged with as sad a catalogue of self-abasement as any I could devise! Kecall it, then! Kecall the cause^ — separation from God ! and ask your- 200 The Faith of Man and [seem. xil. selves, what must be the nature of the remedy provided for man? The answer is simple : the remedy (whatever its specific nature may be) must, in some form, be a restoration of the communion of man icith God. And this is the most general character of the Christian religion, — the simplest definition of its nature and object. Man is separated from God as a criminal ; the communion is restored, by free pardon on God's part, and the acceptance of that pardon upon man's. Man is separated from God, as unholy; the communion is restored by accepting the sacrifice of Christ instead of the absolute sinlessness of Man, and by that perpetual and progressive process of sanctification, which makes a lost and ruiued soul at length "meet for the inheritance of the saints." Christ, the great conduit of mercy between God and mau, arrayed in all the attributes of the two natures lie came to reconcile, in His own single person effects the whole; justifying, as we are in Christ, sanctifying, as Christ is in us. And thus it is that Christianity restores the race of man, by restoring the communion with God. Thus it is that all those perplexities of which I spoke are solved,— that humanity once more meets its counterpart in Deity, — and the harmony of the universe becomes complete ! Kow, of this union with God^ which is the great problem of the world, and which, as we have seen, Christianity alone seriously ventures to attempt, if you were called upon to state the first great characteristic^ — reflect, — what answer would you make ? Would you reply that " peace" attends it ? True, — and yet peace only " attends" it. It is a con- sequence rather than an element. Shall we say "joy"? The same objection will lie ; joy is less a part of the union itself than a bright and heavenly light which perpetually fldls upon it. "Gratitude"? This does indeed mingle deeply in the intercourse with God; yet the intercourse itself must be first effected. Suppose then we call it "love"? What tongue can duly celebrate that cousum- SERM. XII.] the Faithfulness of Qod. 201 mate grace ? And yet love is rather the highest point of the communion with God, than its first and necessary step. Where, then, shall we discover that first step, and by what name shall we designate it, which brings the renovated soul into the spiritual presence of God ; that state which contains within itself the essence of the connection, and of which all other religious afi'ections are, in some measure, the consequences only? If the sacred writers have ever spoken of such a state, by what single term have they been accustomed to denote it ? To discover this, consider what must be the nature of such a state, — of the state which first actually establishes the soul's conscious connection with its God ? It must concern the intellect, and it must concern the heart, for the soul is both. In the former view it must behold and recognize God in all the fulness of His attri- butes, — holiness, justice, and mercy ; in the latter it must love the holiness, dread the justice, desire the mercy. Eightly to BELIEVE in Christ is to know and to feel all three. Before this state of the soul arrives, the communion with God cannot be said to be to our own experience actually established; and after it, the communion is (for this world) complete. This state, then, contains in it the vital spirit of Christianity as a practical thing ; it is on our part the grand passage from a world of wickedness into the conscious presence of Christ ; it is the internal change on which eternity is suspended. Whatever be the details of the process, the process itself (if really the genuine work of the Holy Spirit) must, from the very nature of the case, comprise in it the seeds of immortal glory. I need not repeat to you, that this complex act of knowledge and affection is, in the Scriptures, denominated the act or grace of Faith. You will now perceive why it is that in this manner I have approached the great truth proposed in the text. That truth is the ground and warrant of the intimate com- munion, which, I have already declared to you, it is the 202 The Faith of Man and [SERM. Xll. great object of Christianity to establish. Christianity is a "ministry of reconciliation," the restoration of a broken bond. ISTow in every perfect union there must be mutual confidence, and a strict fulfilment of engagements on both sides. If man be trustful, God must be "faithful." In this great contract there must be in God a something that will answer to the faith that is in his humble follower. And in affirmation of this, — to show that there is indeed a perfection in the Deity, correspondent to the grace He gives, to make the union complete, to leave nothing imper- fect, — the Apostle, at the very time that he declares that man is "justified by faith," also reiterates (as if to show that God also, in another sense, shall one day be "justified" by His preservation of faith to man) that " the Lord is faithful," that " God is faithful," or, as in the text, that " faithful is He that calleth you." Thus faith in man and faithfulness in God are the two members of one spiritual harmony. Neither is to be conceived without the other. Man, without God, would be fatherless; and God has almost permitted us to say that, without His people (the " little children" whom He wills not " to perish"). He would himself be, as it were, childless in His own celestial family ! Having, then, seen how the faith of the believer and the faithfulness of God work out that blessed communion, which Christ came upon earth to establish, let us for a moment dwell upon that element of the two, which in the text is brought more directly before us, — even the faithfulness of that " Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." The instance of God's inflexible fidelity, which the Apostle notes in the text, is gloriously characteristic of the spiritual system to which we belong. What I mean may be illustrated in this way. Ko words can go beyond the confidence of David in the faithfulness of God. " Thy faithfulness reacheth to the clouds." " The heavens shall praise thy wonders, Lord ! thy faithfulness also in the SERM. XII.] the Faithfulness of God. 203 congregation of the saints." " Thy faithfulness shalt thou establish in the very heavens." " His truth endurcth to all generations." To all these expressions (and hundreds o^ such expressions), no doubt, high and spiritual meanings belong. Yet, even so understood, they refer, more usually, to the mighty works which God was to perform, in exalting His divine supremacy over the kingdoms of the earth. The outward and visible glories of God's holy monarchy appear to have been those which stood most prominently in the royal Prophet's vision. Holiness was indeed to be the foundation of all; but yet a holiness triumphant in visible majesty and regal pomp. But what is that faithful- ness of God to which St Paul invites attention ? The kingdom of God was to him evidently an inward and spiritual kingdom, even at the time that he looked forward to " the presence of the Lord and the glory of His power, when He shall come to be glorified in His saints." How profound are the words with which he introduces his declaration of the truthfulness of God ! "The very God of peace sanctify you wholly ; and I pray God your whole spirit, and soul, and body, be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it!" It was no relief from temporal evils that the Apostle promised, no security from adversity, that was to manifest the omnipotence of God exerted on behalf of his people. No : the mercy of God might send them to the stake or the lions ; it was still His mercy, if it but "kept them "unspotted from the world." It might expose them to insult, calumny, and wrong; they received it still as mercy, if it " established them in every good word and work." Oh, brethren ! how many of yoit are content with such faithfulness as this on the part of your heavenly Father ? Is this, indeed, the tone and tenor of your prayers ? When, in the solitude of your closets, you address yourselves to the great work of supplication, is your heart, — (I ask not what the lips are uttering), — is 204 The Faith of Man and [SEiiM. xil. your heart busy in pleading with God His own eternal faithfulness in behalf of your sanctification and spiritual safety ? Is it for a more resolute faith, and a higher reach in holiness, that you remind Him of His pledge to hear 3^ou ? Or are not your affections too often still crouching among the hopes and fears of this world, even at the very moments assigned to solitude and prayer ? Nay, at this hour, when within the sacred precincts of His own temples, the brotherhood of the Christian family meet to hold com- munion with their common Father, are no such miserable visions presented to Him instead of prayer ? And such supplicants speak of the " faithfulness of God !" Yes, God is faithful even to such ! " When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you ; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear !" This is the promise to such as insult, with a mockery of devotion, the long-suffer- ing of God ; and to such promises God can be awfully "faithful!" The faithfulness of God is represented by the Apostle, in the context, as extending to the whole man, to " body," to "soul," and to "spirit," which are all said to be "pre- served blameless." The entire of our feeble humanity is sheltered under this canopy of divine protection. The " body" is subdued into its place as humble minister to the soul; the "soul" is guarded from its own special corrup- tions; and the "spirit," — the element that, given from heaven, is still nearest to heaven, — is preserved undecayed amid a hostile world. Here is a defence for this triple nature of man. And, of a surety, the mystic Trinity that occupies the throne of heaven will not forget this humble image of their ineffable mystery (for so the divines of old time were wont to regard it), which the Apostle has thus assigned to our inferior being ! Surely the " soul" will be preserved by that creative Deity, who first infused it into the frame ; the " body," by that eternal Son who was pleased to assume it; and the "spirit," by that over-blessed Spirit SERM. XII.] the Faithfulness of God. 205 who Himself bestows it, and well may guard His own ines- timable gift ! It is also said of tliis faithfulness, that it is the faithful- ness of Him " that calleth you." This is not the least won- drous circumstance in the unalterable faithfulness of God, that it is a fidelity to Ilis own gracious engagement. He calls, and He is faithful to His own merciful calling ; He summons the heart to Himself, and He adheres to His own voluntary summons ; He, without destroying human free- dom or human responsibility, of His free grace, commences, continues, and ends the whole Christian work. Yet, ao "faithful" is this His profound compassion, that He repre- sents Himself as bound and tied to the impulses of His own unconstrained mercy. There is no bond but His own love, yet that bond is stronger than iron ; and He, Avhom the universe cannot compel, commands Himself! With such a God, such promises, such faithfulness, such calls, must the question be evermore asked from Christian pulpits. Why is there a delay in seeking to appropriate " so great salvation" ? If we believe that these things are true, that the baptismal vow is no mockery, and the Scriptures no delusion, where is the earnest, active faith, and where the life, that answer to it ? Why are our prayers so often a superstitious form, our communion with God a name, our Christian profession forgotten or disgraced ? Shall it, indeed, be, that God has bowed the heavens to make offers of mercy, that every soul is invited to partake of His inex- haustible favor, that the message of His " faithfulness" is perpetually proclaimed and universally known; and yet, that year after year passes away, and, except for a few happy and devoted children of light, scattered among the tribes of mankind, the world is, in efi'ect, still in darkness, and the message of an infinite love known indeed, but only known that the knowledge may bring with it the additional guilt of deliberate rejection ! I began with appealing to our common experience ; let V6 206 The Faith of Man and [s_erm. xii. me return to it before I close. I would ask you to what the whole efforts of human life are directed ? What is that which all pursue, — the same, though sought in a thousand jDaths ? Is it not a something fixed and stable, something on which hope can rest, and towards which the eye of the soul can turn, as to an object of settled security? It is not for me to conjecture the special desire, pursuit, solici- tude, of each I address. The countenances of men are not more diversified than their hearts ; in both instances there is, out of a few elements, a variety almost infinite. But this at least can, assuredly, be said of all, — that hope is perpetu- ally pointing to some future object, real or shadowy, and that no agony could surpass his, whose life was wholly without motive, or expectation, or aim. Now, is there one among us who can guarantee his lot from bitter disappointment ? Is there one here who does not know that, whatever be his special pursuit, let it be once attained, and half its value vanishes? Is there one among us who does not know, that the attainment itself is miserably precarious, and that, in most of the prizes of this world, the momentary pleasure of the winner is counterbalanced by the prolonged disappointrnxcnt of hundreds? And can you feel contentment while in- volved in so wretched a scene as this ? I ask, are we to have no ambition to escape this wearisome round of labors that bring no profit, of pleasures that have no continuance, of enmities without cause, and friendships without perma- nence? Desiring something fixed above the reach of change, can we really expect to find it in a world where the principle of change is the only thing unchangeable, and over which the gloomy shadow of death evermore impends, disturbing every calculation, and clouding every prospect of the future? These are simple questions, they are ad- dressed to your daily experience ; the youngest person here is old enough to answer them, the oldest can give them hut one answer! Now observe, the prominent character of God, put for- SERM. XIL] the Faithfulness of God. 207 ward in tlic text before us, is unshakeyi slalilUi/. " Faithful is IIq that callcth you." In opi)osition to all the uncertain- tics of tliis world, lie purposely sets Himself forth as the single object beyond and above change. " I ara the Lord ; I change not." — Mai. iii. G. Having given to man a desire for some object, in which all his powers might repose, He has made Himself alone that object. God is the true object, but we seek our God everywhere but where He is to be found. We seek the God, who is to satisfy our hearts, in riches, in pleasure, in power; we find Him only "in the face of Jesus Christ." There He discloses His own un- changeable glory, as the one adorable object in which man is ultimately made to rest. There is the sufficiency for every affection, the satisfier of every want, and in this sense, as in every other, " the desire of all nations." Brethren, if you have not made trial of this great source of relief, I put it to you, have you treated your own case fairly? If, in the midst of your perplexities and disappointments, you hear constant mention of an infallible remedy, are you doing yourself justice when you neglect to adopt it ? How, oh ! how is it, that the prudence, which would so certainly direct us in the management of bodily health, utterly fails, when the spiritual life or death of the eternal soul is the tremendous question at issue ? But remember, however you may waver, or hesitate, or procrastinate, " God is faithful," faithful to His warnings as He is to His promises! A few years more (to many here far fewer years than they have already passed), and the crisis shall at last arrive, which shall determine, by terrible proofs, the awful faithfulness of God. A day shall come when every wavering half believer shall learn, how truly it was " the god of this world" that "blinded" him in that half belief! At that hour, that inflexible faithfulness, which forms the rock of his salvation to the redeemed one's heart, shall assume, to the God-despiser, the terrible form of an inflexi- ble curse. The permanence of God's character is the very 208 The Faith of Man and [seem. XII. warrant of his doom, and the seal of its eternity. It is a profound and impressive remark of Bishop Butler that the most formidable of all God's attributes to the wicked is His goodness ; "malice," observes the sage, " may be wearied or satiated; caprice may change; but goodness is a steady, inflexible principle of action." The very same attributes which (like the pillar in the wilderness) present to the saved, a side of light and protection, shall present (them- selves unchanged) to the lost, a gloomy apparition of clouds and darkness. The justice that acquits the believer, in the blood of the sacrifice, shall condemn the despiser of that blood. The goodness that shelters the beloved children in the bowers of Paradise, shall (to us mysteriously but truly) abandon to his punishment the guilty, for the benefit of the universe. The wisdom that is shown in contriving sal- vation shall be "justified of her children" in condemnation also. The power that framed a heaven for the blessed shall be revealed more awfully still in the structure of the abodes of misery ! Oh, brethren ! what is to be gained by a contest with such a being as this? Can you expect to sway His eternal purpose, or bend to your caprices His eternal laws ? Think you that he will waver because we hesitate ; that He will forget His faithfulness because we forget our faith! Never, never ! You must alter, for Ood will not. We be- seech you, then, " be ye reconciled !" The ransom has long been paid, heaven is open, and Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. Everything is ready but the heart of man ! Do you in anywise feel, under the impulses of God's grace, that it were high time this matter were settled between you and your Judge ? Pause not one hour in setting cordially about it! Those who love God will be your examples and instructors. Be with them in prayer and watching. Seek for the light where God has bade you expect it ; seek it with an earnest, humble, persevering heart; and God Him- self will raise up in your minds the lamp of His own im- mortal truth. With His own Spirit He will teach you, SERM. XII.] the Faithfidness of God. 209 and with His own love surround you, and with Ilis own power protect you, and with His own joy refresh you. The whole host of heaven will be your spectators and applauders. You may have to bear the coldness of earthly friends (for such things must sometimes be), but you will do it only to enter into a holier intimacy with " the generally assembly and church of the first-born which are written in heaven." You may perhaps have to resign some of the distinctions of earth, but the everlasting home prepared for you in heaven will more than compensate the paltry loss. You will give np " this world," but yon will receive in return the God of the universe ! " Faithful is He that calleth you, who also will do it." 18* SERMON XIII. THE WEDDING GAEMENT. (Preached on the Second Sunday after Trinity.) And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment : And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither, not having a wed- ding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the king to the servants. Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness ; there shall be weeping and gnash- ing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen. — Matt. xxii. 11-14. These verses, tliough taken from a different Evangelist, form the second part, — the closing scene and consumma- tion of the impressive parable of the festival and guests, which you heard read as the Gospel of this day. They have always seemed to me to derive a peculiar awfulness from the connexion in which they occur. I do not merely mean that that connexion puts the tremendous m^or^ of these verses beyond doubt, that is too obvious to require much confirmation ; but that the connexion with the earlier part of the parable gives the prediction now before us, — the prediction of eternal judgment, — all the terrible sim- plicity of a plain matter of historical fact. For this parable, — the series of events symbolized in the parable, — stretches across all time, from the first call of the Jews to the final judgment of mankind. Part is past, part is to come; we are in the midst. The part that is past, — the repeated in- vitations, the perverse refusals, the fearful punishment of SERM. XIII.] The Wedding Garment, 211 the Jewish people, is certain, for it is fulfilled ; certain, not in the expectation of faith, but in the ordinary belief of historical record; certain, exactly. as we are certain of any unquestionable event of times gone by, of the leading cir- cumstances of any national history whatever, — of the fall of the Koman Empire, or the reign of Charlemagne, or the Norman Conquest, or the Eeformation of the sixteenth century. Nothing is of such felt reality as what we know to be past. It has made sure of existence. No power can ever make that to be in itself doubtful, or barely possible, which has already occurred. Not Omnipotence itself could now make that not have been which has been. But part of the parable, — that which we are about to be engaged on, — is yet to come ; and what I desire to impress is this, that ihQfelt reality which belongs to the one communicates itself, with a most awful power, to the other ; that it makes the future event as much a matter of downright historical certainty as the past event. They are both equally included in the one simple sketch, and when that sketch was drawn, both were alike future. The great event of the divine vengeance on the Jews, in the seventh verse, was just as much a thing to come^ as the universal judgment in the verses before us, at the time the Lord spoke the parable that proclaims both. Both were then to come ; both were predicted in the self-same prophecy ; one has notoriously taken place ; who can doubt that the other is certain ? He who was so fearfully right when He predicted the one, was surely not mistaken in predicting the other. The one was the judgment of the Church Jewish ; the other the strictly analogous judgment of the Church universal. Events have made the one a fact, and we look back upon it as such ; events as surely will make the other a fact too ; and the time will as surely come, when, from a point in the eternal ages yet to be, men will look back upon what we now call the Last Day, and see in it, too, the first day of a further 212 The Wedding Garment. [SERM. XIII. and mightier dispensation, the dawn of a new celestial development of the one everlasting kingdom of God. This awful certainty of the judgment prophecy, arising out of its being but one of a chain of predicted events, of which some are now undoubtedly certain, because already past, seems to me so very important, as a matter of prac- tical impression, that I may be pardoned attempting a further illustration of it. Take for this purpose some suc- cession of events familiar to us all, the more familiar the better. Let ns suppose that, at the time when Britain was peopled by half-savage tribes, before the period of the Eoman sway, some gifted seer among the Druid's had en- graven upon a rock a minute prediction of a portion of the future history of the island. Suppose he had declared, that it should ere long be conquered by a warrior people from the south ; that he should nam_e the Caesar himself, describe his eagle standard, and all the circumstances of the conquest. Suppose he should portray the Saxon inva- sion centuries after, — the sevenfold division of the mon- archy, the Danish inroad, the arrival and victory of the Normans. Our imagined prophet pauses here, or at what- ever other precise period you please to suppose ; and his next prediction, overleaping a vast undescribed interval, suddenly represents the England of the present day. Now conceive the forefathers of existing England to have studied this wondrous record, and to find to their amazement that every one of its predictions was accurately verified ; that as their generations succeeded, they but walked in the traces assigned for them by the prophetic inscription, and all it spoke progressively became fact. Can we suppose that, however far away in futurity was the one remaining event, and however impossible to tliem^ at their early stage, to conceive the means by which all the present wonders of this mighty empire could ever be realized, they would per- mit themselves to doubt its absolute certainty, after such overwhelming proofs of the supernatural powers of the seer SEEM. XIIT.] The Weddmg Qarment. 213 who guaranteed it ? Would they not shape their course as confidently in view of the unquestionable future, as in reference to the unquestionable past? In short, would not that future be already considered, in a manner, historical, — already a fixed, integral portion of the story of the nation? It is just thus we call on you to regard the great prophet's announcement of the judgment to come. That too is pre- dicted, but as one event among many, — among many that are now undeniably certain, for they are now actually past. An event, future, when the Lord spoke, is now an old his- torical epoch ; and that very event is here bound up with the revelation of the judgment. I ask you, does not this connexion give a terrible reality to our expectation of that judgment? That the sun shall rise to-morrow is not as certain as the judgment to come; for that sunrise, sure as it may be, can hardly be called as sure as what we know to be past ; and the past is not more certain than the judg- ment, since the same unerring voice, long before either, has declared them both. Awful surely is it, thus to feel our- selves surrounded on all sides with these authentic testimo- nies of the great consummation to come ; these plain, unde- niable proofs that we are moving onward, and events on all sides converging to a point already fixed in the counsels of the Most High. Doubt that the knowledge was super- natural, and the utterance, too, when in a time of profound peace, and sitting with His few poor followers. He calmly declared that superb Jerusalem should, within that genera- tion, be a ruin, and these poor followers go forth to revolu- tionize the earth ; — then may you doubt that same voice when it spake, in that self-same hour, of the judgment, not of Jerusalem, but of the world, and the establishment of a Church no longer militant, but triumphant and in glory ! It is this great coming event, then, of which, — itself unseen, — the awful shadow has, in the fate of Jerusalem, already fallen across the history of the world, that the Lord here describes. This marriage feast, of which the 21i The Wedding Garment. [SERM. XIII. parable speaks, is to take place in the courts of heaven ; it is the future everlasting espousal of Christ to His Church, at last by Himself to Himself presented, " not having spot or wrinkle," "holj and without blemish ;" the same majestic ceremonial which is elsewhere, by the very same prophetic figure entitled " the marriage supper of the Lamb," when '' His bride shall have made herself ready ;" that eternal union of Christ and the blessed, of which St Paul instructs us that all earthly marriages are types, — of which above all, that first marriage in Eden was a type ; for from the body of this second Adam also is His Eve, — "the mother of all" that be spiritually " living," — formed. The scene, then, is in heaven ; but it is preceded by a long and moment- ous process upon earth ; it is a festival with guests ; these guests must be invited ere they can present themselves to be received. And now is the time, and this world the scene, of the invitation. Of this invitation, therefore, we must first speak, and then of the qualification, — the appropriate " wedding garment," — of the guests ; and lastly, of the awful consummation in the text, — the lack of the qualifica- tion of this spiritual apparel of the soul, and its conse- quence. I. To us, then, how and when is this invitation actually addressed ? 1. It is delivered to us, first of all, in our Baptism^ when taken out of the mass of Adam, we are translated into the kingdom of Christ; when "buried by Baptism into His death," " buried with Him in Baptism," we are thence " risen with Him through faith of the operation of God who raised Him ;" when solemnly, by that most holy rite, introduced into the spiritual sphere, even the outer chamber of " the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," we are thenceforth (oh ! most awful privilege, profession, and responsibility, our inefi'able blessing or our tenfold condemnation !) enrolled as the children of God, members of the crucified and ascended Christ, expectant SERM. XIII.] The Wedding Garment. 215 inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. And thus, too, in reference to the subsequent mystery of the parable, in Baptism is the holy garment said to be bestowed; for "as many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ," 2. But in the delivery of that "unspeakable gift," we have most of us been unconscious recipients, blessed, and unknowing of our blessings. Therefore it is wisely pro- vided that, with our own free and deliberate assent, we should adopt and publicly testify to the grace of God. And thus through the ministration of Christ's chief ministers among us, is the delivery and the acceptance of the invitation reiterated and established in our Confirmation. And there^ as on the one hand we solemnly proclaim that the vows of our Baptism are indeed upon us, — that by the covenant of our Baptism we refuse not to stand or fall ; so, on the other, may we trust that, in answer to the prayer, the gifts of the Spirit to illumine and to fortify are not withheld; and (once more in reference to the garment of the parable) that, as in our Baptism we have " put on Christ," so now we are enabled, as well as exhorted, to "put on the ivhoJe armor of God," therewith to "stand against the wiles of the devil," to "Avithstand in the evil day," and " having done all, to stand." 3. Again is this invitation delivered to us, and the whole imagery of this very parable vividly exhibited, when, after the ministerial proclamation of divine forgiveness to " all that with hearty repentance and true faith turn to God," we are admitted to share, in a mystery, the spiritual sustenance of the Lord's holy table. It is in the sense of this close and obvious application, that our own Church warns her communicants to " come holy and clean to such a heavenly feast, in the marriage garment required of God in Holy Scripture." Every such occasion is indeed a shadow, — rich, no doubt, with substantial blessings, but yet in its prospective character a shadow, of the eternal festival, com6«ie(Z zf/Z/i the eternal judgment to come. Hence it is 216 The Wedding Garment. [SERM. xill. that, with its character of inestimable blessedness, St Paul so awfully mingles (exactly as in our parable) the notion of an accompanying judgment: — " Let a man examine himself? and so let him eat;" "he that eateth and drinketh un- worthily, eateth and drinketh damnation," or "judgment," " to himself." And so should each Christian make every such periodical approach to God an occasion of earnest and thoughtful self-inquiry; an anticipation of the last awful scrutiny; a prelibation of judgment; an inward realizing of that tremendous hour when sight shall behold, — in horror or in transport, — the Christ, who is now spiritually and sacramentally received by faith. 4. But not alone in those holy offices of the house of God (two of them the express provision of Christ Himself, and channels of His mysterious graces, the third an ancient and holy observance in which God's presence, if not directly covenanted, may be confidingly hoped); not alone in these is the merciful invitation of our God to His high festival given and received. His own words forbid any such limi- tation: "All day long have I stretched out mine hands." " Wisdom uttereth her voice in the streets ; she crieth in the chief place of concourse" (the highways of our parable), "in the opening of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words." Every urgent appeal of the ministers of Christ to their charges, — every new proclamation of " the good- ness and severity of God," — every exhortation that, sinners themselves, they yet feel constrained to make to fellow- sinners, — all alike are reiterated utterances of the one per- petual invitation of the Lord of this everlasting festival, eager to crowd His banquet with happy and rejoicing guests. The desire to return to Him is itself a proof of His willingness to receive; for it was He who gave, and therefore gave the desire. At this hour, though weak are the lips that deliver to you His message, yet it is His message still. He it is who Himself solicits you who listen, by me who speak, and prays you from His own omnipo- SERM. XIII.] TJlc Wedding Garment. 217 tent throne to hear and to believe. He forces not your obedience ; He beseeches you to obey. It is the mystery of the parable that God is suppliant to Ilis creature. He who agonized beneath created hands, still in the perpetu- ated spirit of that miraculous love, as it were, protracts His own humiliation, and beseeches the beings He has made to make Him happy by making themselves blessed. He could compel, but He will not ; for He understands His own glory. It is His highest glory to conciliate divine omnipotence with the unimpaired freedom of man, that " His people" should be " ivilling in the day of His poiverP Through all the creation below man His will is the law of their operations. In man alone, — free, self conscious man, — His will would risk the dishonor of disobedience, that it might enjoy the glory of voluntary subjection. Served by the powers of the inanimate universe, the King of all that wondrous array wearies of an obedience that proves but His power and His wisdom. He demands a higher and holier bond than the laws of brute nature can supply, — unconscious, mechanical ministers of His will. The orbs of heaven, " the moon and the stars which he hath ordained," revolve in obedience to a command they know not. But He would be obeyed by the nobler attrac- tions of the heart ; the willing service, in which love is the all-sufiicing law that preserves the spirits of His blessed ones revolving, in changeless harmony, around the divine centre of their regenerate life. 5. And yet there is a force, an indirect and most gracious constraint, whereby He would sometimes remind the care- less of His invitation. The " chasiisemenis''' of God speak His summons with an eloquence of their own. Earthly tribulations are His Apostles. It is in the depths of mourning hearts His call meets its surest, its profoundest echo. " Blessed are they that mourn," to whom mourning has taught the need of this higher consolation; happy the tempest that casts its wrecks upon the shores of Paradise. 19 218 The Wedding Garment. [SERM. XIII. The object which preachers have vainly essayed for years, one stroke of affliction may achieve. It is when, alone and comfortless, amid his crushed and shattered hopes, the victim slowly awakes to the treachery of the "god of this world," that we may trust the rebel heart will at length bethink itself of returning to its abandoned God. Thus at all seasons, and in all forms, goes forth the incessant proclamation of a God who still waiteth to be gracious, the invitation of the ever-merciful King to the whole multitude of His subjects. In sacraments He solemnly delivers it ; in exhortations He renews and "un- folds it ; in all the dispensations of His high providence, by pressing contrasts. He emphatically enforces its need. His offer is universal^ for He would be absolved before heaven and earth when that offer is despised. Man's own reason shall have to acknowledge that man, if condemned, was not unwarned ; that if he did not come to God, it was not that God did not come to him. Conscience, overpowered on earth, shall assume a terrible activity in the world of pun- ishment, it shall retain a fearful energy to condemn ; and in the abode of ruin itself, the miserable attestation shall be uttered, of the long-suffering of God, of neglected mercies whose remembrance shall then constitute the deepest bitter- ness of its despair. II. So much for the divine invitation. Suppose it now delivered and accepted; the attire that suits the festival must yet be provided ; the " wedding garment" for this heavenly banquet has still to be sought and gained. For it is quite plain, from the parable itself, that the invitation may be given, that man may really receive it, and really avail himself of the privilege it bestows, and yet be desti- tute of this further necessary qualification. Nor must any artificial system of theology be allowed to obscure so mani- fest and undeniable a truth as this. Clear, however, as is the great lesson of the whole (the happy instrument, we may trust, of warning to thousands SERM. XIII.] The Wedding Garment. 219 who have been content to receive it in its general purport), the precise significancy of this wedding garment has been made matter of uncertainty, and even (from its connection with another and larger question) of bitter controversy. I have no intention now of conducting you into these laby- rinths. One consideration I shall hazard, because it seems to me to be very commonly overlooked. The garment must, surely, from the very nature of the image, have been intended to signify something public and visible, in whicli each wearer harmonizes with all, and all with the spirit of the peculiar scene into which they are introduced, and to which the dress is appropriate. I would say, then, that by this remarkable symbol our Lord did not intend, merely the inward principle of faith exclusively considered, nor yet merely the mysterious imputation of righteousness, through indentification with Christ (though these are, no doubt, necessary conditions and first steps to its possession) ; for apparel is, of all things, the most manifest and visible, and the wedding apparel is specially the apparel of joy. This festal garment of heaven, then, which each man must bring with him into the high presence of God, seems to be no other than that celestial temper which manifests itself by the infallible indications of a holy joy, — that spiritual sympathy with the things of the spiritual world, whicli exhibits itself in cordial, irrepressible demonstrations of the blessedness within ; holy happiness, public and expressed ; the "joy in the Holy Ghost" — no longer a secret, timid, half-uttered delight, but sparkling in the eye, and fearless in the voice ; the " life" no longer " hid with Christ in God," but " apparent with Him in glory." I repeat it, inward spiritual happiness, developed by the presence of God, and the consciousness of heaven, into visible manifestation^ — this is the " wedding garment" which Christ beholds and approves in the saved. Thus viewed, this blessed possession — this glorious visi- ble vesture of the spirit — is not merely that " putting on of 220 The Wedding Garment. [seem. XITI. Christ" which accompanies the Christian's justification, it is rather that first blessedness seen in its ultimate consumma- tion. The Christ, who first covers us to shield and protect, is, in the day of His power, represented as covering us to adorn and to glorify. The cloak that shelters from the tempest becomes, as it were, gradually transfigured into the garment that decorates for the bridal. " Gradually," I say, for here is the profound importance of the lesson taught us in the parable. The garment is the gradual attainment of a life of progressive sanctification. The guest is re- proved for having entered the banquet-hall without it. He should, it seems, have sought it before he came. He should have brought it with him from that earthly scene which is but the antechamber of heaven ; it is not, " How, after thou hadst reached my presence, soughtest thou not the fitting vestment for my feast?" but "How earnest thou in hither, not having a wedding garment?" The wedding garment, then, must be woven and fashioned on earth. It must be brought from thence with each happy spirit to heaven. And if that garment be such as I have suggested, what does this import but that on earth must be formed the temper suitable to heaven, the disposition fitted for that blessed abode ; and more specifically, as here more directly intended, — the temper of a cheerful and animated sympathy with holiness, — of a high and celestial joy ? A moment to each of these particulars. That the temper suitable to a heavenly existence mast be, in substance, acquired beforehand on earth; in other words, that in those who are forgiven and accepted at the last day, there will not (as perhaps men sometimes dream) be a sudden change of the spiritual nature to fit it for heaven, but rather a continuance of the previous temper of the soul on earth, with new accessions of supernatural assistance, and the abolition of all hinderances to its perfect growth ; this, as it is a most indubitable scriptural truth, so is it nearly the most important of all religious truths in SERM. XIII.] The Wedding Garment. 221 its practical results. There is but one great change spoken of in Scripture, as takhig place in the whole lifetime of the spirit of man, and that is a change on earth. Such as are our hopes and joys on earth, such shall they be for everlasting. It is surely unnecessary that I should insist on the j^ractical bearing of this great truth, the preservation of men's inward moral nature from this world into the next. The source of much indifference in religion is the vague hope of ultimate 2^^'>'don, But can you not now perceive that pardon itself would be worthless without an entire change of disposition; that this, therefore, is the great object to be perse veringly sought after ? A few sighs and tears in the evening of life, we fondly deem, will gain our pardon; but who that has ever yet reflected, by the lights of common experience, upon the constitution of the human heart, will say that a few sighs and tears will change the nature? Plainly, then, you are omitting the chief element of this great revolution in the relations between you and God; infatuated to calculate at all upon a barely possible future, you are doubly infatuated when you leave out of your calculation the principal item in the reckoning. The pardon will open the gates of the King's palace to the guest; but those gates are equallj^ open for his rejection, if he lack the wedding garment. But this, the solemn, the mysterious phrase in question, recalls us from the general principle to the particular case. A heavenly vesture of the spirit must be borne with us from life to the death-bed, from the death-bed. to the grave, from the grave, across the whole unknown world of spirits, to the glory; a vesture woven on earth, but even there woven of undecaying texture, and fitted for the wear of immortality. But we have seen there is something more distinct and definite here. Not evenj garment of holiness is designated in the mystic story ; but the garment of a wedding, the garment of festivity, the garment then of joy. I must not pause to remind you, — ^^ou cannot need to 19^^ 222 The Wedding Oarment. [SEKM. Xlil. be reminded, — how essential an element is this grace in the complex of the Christian life; how, if Scripture may be trusted, the whole spiritual life, amid all its trials and distresses, is, in some mysterious way, involved in an atmosphere of joy. I am not now about to investigate the causes, or the nature of this happy state; I must for the present assume as a mere fact that it is a real characteristic of the holiness of earth, and (still more undeniably) of the happiness of heaven ; and I now only desire to press it as a simple test of your own fitness for that world to which it is eminently appropriate. I do so, because it seems to be a matter upon which no amount of self-delusion can blind us. A man may persuade himself of much that is imagi- nary, but he can hardly believe that he derives joy from a field of thought which never yields it. The feeling of joy is too distinct and characteristic for any counterfeit. And if a man can scarcely mistake indifference for joy, how yet more decisive is the test when indifference is exchanged for positive distaste and repugnance; when, so far from forming the constant spring of happiness, the topic of re- ligion is barely endured for two or three tedious hours each seventh day; and the very mention of its grounds of hope and consolation, in the ordinary intercourse of society, seems something strange, unexpected, indecorous, intrusive; when religious themes, under the honorable exile of an affected reverence, are, in substance, banished from each social reunion, and friends can meet and pour into friendly ears every detail of sorrow or joy, but that which is to make the sorrow or joy, and can alone constitute the friendships, of an eternity. When religion is thus dis- tasteful and thus evaded, need I say how decisive and terrible a test, in such a case, becomes the startling question, — what amount of our hcqjpiness truly arises from this source? — what is the ardor of our joy, the rapture of our hope, in the contemplation of heaven and of God? Our life is decorous, — yes, but is it spiritually joyful? Our SERM. XIIT.] Tlie Wedding Garment. 223 religious observances arc regular, — yes, but are they tlie deliglited utterance of gratitude and praise? We violate no plain precept among tlie Commandments, — grant it, alas! liow unmerited liberality of concession! — but, even so, do you rejoice in keeping them? We exhibit the de- portment of Christians, we wear the outward costume and apparel of moral propriety ; — yes, but where shall we look for the brighter apparel of the soul, the brilliance and beauty of the festive robes of rejoicing saintliness, the glory of the "wedding garment?" Such is the test I propose to you, as simple and irresisti- ble ; God grant to us all earnestness and sincerity to apply it! But this is the work of the life that now is, — of the world of time and of trial. The parable stretches beyond it. We follow the great Eevealer; He withdraws the curtain, and the scenery of eternity is before us. III. The hour is at last arrived, the burden of so many prophecies, — the hour to which all other hours are but preparatory, — the hour of the everlasting union and the everlasting separation. "The marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife hath made herself ready." " Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb ;" yea, blessed are they which are " called," for of the called are the "chosen." And now the courts of heaven are peopled with the crowding guests of God, the multitude of those to whom mercy and acceptance has been proffered, and who. hence, in whatever spirit, professed to obey the call. Manifold, no doubt, and complicated, are the feelings in all that myriad host of candidates for glory. But Scripture ever takes large and general distinctions. They have, or they have not, the temper of heaven, the heart trained to the love, and fitted for the eternal service, of God. They have, or they have not (for the single guest of the parable is, of course, but the representative of a multitude like him) the spirit of a holy sympathy with the ways and works of God, the 224 The Wedding Garment. [SERM. xill. rejoicing anticipation that exults in the new scene of duty before it; for the happiness of heaven is the happiness of everkstingij serving God, and is intelligible only to those who love that service. They possess, or not, the hope, the joy, suitable to this mighty spousal of earth and heaven, in short, the "wedding garment" of the soul ! Of this indispensable requisite, the need (which is, as we shall see, altogether unfelt by the wretched defaulter him- self) is at once visible to the penetrating glance of God. " When the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment." " A man," — he is represented as single, to impress more perfectly the accurate scrutiny of the divine eye, detecting the individual amid the multitude ; and also in order that each of us may more distinctly appropriate to himself the individual lesson. The eternal Judge, now about to purify his long defiled Church, beholds the culprit who dares to claim glory while nnattired for glory. The awful eye, rapidly traversing the ranks of the blessed, pauses darkly upon him. You re- member the memorable moment when " the Lord looked upon Peter," and the Lord looks upon the guilty now again. But, oh, difference dread and unspeakable ! It is the same God that gazes, yet that look was of grace, this of judgment,— that to melt, this to scorch and to consume. Uneasy, fearful misgivings glide into the heart of the wretched man ; for the first time conscience is aroused, and her late awaking is terrible ; for the first time he feels the hopeless distance of his own state from the purity of a world of holiness. Dim recollections return, of warnings despised in that long-vanished earthly life, now so dream- like and so distant. Words that once seemed meaningless, the cant of superstition or weakness, come back upon him fraught with terrible truth. Even before the Judge has spoken he feels his ruin sealed. And yet the words are calm and untroubled : — " Friend^ how earnest thou in hither, not having a wedding garment?" "Follower of mine! SERM. XIII.J The Wedding Garment. 225 how is it thou hast thought to bring the defilements of the world, the ' garment spotted with the flesh' into this home of holiness? A servant of mine, — where is the livery of thy service ? A soldier of mine, — where is the uniform of thy mystical warfare ? Baptismally consecrated to be a priest of spiritual sacrifices, where is the vestment of thy priesthood? Called to be a king, — a sharer of the very throne of Christ, — where are thy royal robes?" "And he was speechless." "Speechless!" It is the terrible silence of conviction. Hardly the most thoughtless have ever read this parable, and failed to be struck with the force and significancy of this part of the representation. Of all that multitude of excuses, that now pass current to justify the world's forget- fulness of its Maker, not one rises to his lips. Perhaps they have wholly vanished from his thoughts, in the un- imaginable terror of that hour. Or he may remember them, but feels them too glaringly worthless to hazard now. He dares not address to the visible God those easy apolo- gies for worldliness, on which he was willing of old to venture his salvation. He dares not avow to God in person those excuses for sin, which are themselves a worse sin than that which they are brought to justify; for the sin may be of sudden passion, but the excuse is of deliberate corruption. He dares not say, — dare we now to say, — we who shall yet stand beneath the same awful eye that froze his speech within him, — that, forsooth, the engagements of society, the necessities, however artificial, yet the neces- sities of station, the urgency of business, the more attractive urgencies of pleasure, — that these things detained him from the life to God. From one of our own hired servants should we tolerate such excuses as these for a neglected task? And is the Master of us all to endure them? " Business ?" What business can compete with the security of an immortal inheritance? " Station?" What claims of social position can rival the claims of that eternal King, 226 The Wedding Garment [SERM. xiii. wlio summons us to be tlie honored officials of His celestial administration ? " Pleasure ?" — but this is too futile. Alas ! it is our deepest guilt tliat we find no pleasure in the true "ways of pleasantness," and look forward to none from Him at whose " right hand are pleasures for evermore." But " he was speechless." He saw at last into the awful reality of things. Eeligion,— the phantom of this world, — substantiated in all its terrific truth, and the solid-seem- ing world the phantom in its stead. The ghastly reality so long evaded would be put by no longer. Conscience was to sleep no more. The vastness of the loss, the hope- lessness of the doom, the infatuation of the delusion, — all burst upon him. His heart withered within, and " he was speechless." But through all the horrible silence of the time, while all heaven was mute to hear, his ear could catch the awful voice that spoke, never to be again heard, but to leave its dread echo, for all eternity, within the heart : "Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness ; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Into that abode of misery we cannot pursue him. It is " outer darkness," and in darkness be its horrors veiled. Not for us is it to sound those depths of despair, that flame unquenchable, that worm undying, that wall impassable, those mournings unpitied, those blasphemies unutterable, those remembrances of agony, that future without hope and without end. The faculties of man must be enlarged for even the conception of such misery as this. If there be a glory too bright for human eye to gaze on, there is an anguish too dark for human eye as yet to penetrate. Oh, brethren ! if these things be indeed so, and the Lord, who shall yet judge us, hath truly thus drawn the portraiture of His own last awful sitting, at once the Court of His regal presence and the Court of His tremendous justice ; — if, indeed, this high qualification of which I have spoken must be acquired, or heaven can never be ours, — if we SERM. XIII.] The Wedding Garment 227 must either bring witli us this robe of habitual righteous- ness, " walking in white" as those who are " worthy," or endure to be " clothed with curses as with a garment" for everlasting ; — if this life, this little, dreamlike life, slipping so rapidly away through our hands, can never again be repeated, but all we do must now be done, and all we arc to be for ever we now must learn to be ; — if all the glory of this world, its triumphs and its distinctions, useful though they be for this temporary scene, fold up and fade as the eye darkens in death, and nothing crosses the grave with any man but the garb of the soul that he bears with him to the Court of the heavenly King ; — if God gives us ample opportunity for making our calling and election sure, so that, if among the " many called" few be " chosen," no man can blame God that he was not among those few, and every excuse shall then be vain, and every culprit speech- less ; — I ask you, can any infatuation equal the infatuation of those, who, knowing all this to be certain, can yet defer tliis mighty work, or can be content with the feeble im- posture of religion that passes current with the world for the religion of Christ ? Nothing of man's mind survives the grave but that which is central and inmost in his nature; and if his religion be not there, he has left it be- hind him with the world, of which it was a part : it goes not with him to the judgment, and he is condemned. The religion of the world is no more a thing permanent and immortal than any other element of the world. More, surely more, than this there needs to be, or Christ has taught us the mighty lesson of this day in vain. This deep and vital union of heart and soul with the will and pur- poses of God, — this harmonizing of the tone and temper of our thoughts with the eternal world that awaits us, — this joj'ous sympathy with heaven and things heavenly which I have spoken of, as more especially the garment of the spirit that befits the marriage festival to come, — this is the abiding clement over which the grave has no power, which, 228 The Wedding Garment. [seem. xiii. disappearing from tliis life with the departing soul, shall re-appear with the soul itself in heaven, and receive the approving smile of God. This, and nothing short of this, is His demand in those who will be meet for His inherit- ance ; and till this be yours, you deceive your own souls if you relax. If at this hour you feel one faint impulse to seek the blessing, cherish that impulse as His gift, welcome it as His call. He would thus arouse you to aspire after the glory He offers. He would, thus even now raise your thoughts above this world, only that He may fix them permanently upon Himself. He knows that man yearns after enduring happiness, and He would not disappoint that inborn thirst of the heart. He would direct those desires, that now go astray among the glittering phantoms of time, till they fix upon a nobler and more enduring mark, — the immutable realities of eternity. Terrible as we have seen Him in His mysterious wrath. He is more divinely abundant, more Himself, in acts of mercy. A God who "is love" would willingly cast no man "into outer darkness." Therefore by His written word, and by the incessant voice of His ministers, doth He this day, and every day, reiterate these offers of unbounded acceptance to the " many that be called." May the same grace that speaks in the call, by a yet deeper and more abiding ope- ration, enable you, joyfully receiving the call, to place yourselves at last among the blessed " few that be chosen." SERMON XIV. CHRIST SOUGHT AND FOUND IN THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES. Search the Scriptures ; for in them ye think ye have eternal life : and they are they which testify of me. — John y. 39. In tbe remarkable address, of which these words form a part, oar Lord is engaged in proclaiming and enforcing His dignity, personal and official; and it is in order to confirm His assertions that He makes the appeal they contain. He had been challenged, by the cold-hearted hypocrisy of the Pharisaic Jews, for the crime of working a miracle of mercy on the sabbath-day. The act, it might be supposed, not only as merciful but as miraculous, was its own justifica- tion; for He, who could perform it, must have had a com- mission from on high competent to the suspension, or even the abolition, of any ceremonial enactment. On this our Lord insists ; but not on this at first. The structure of His address is indeed very observable. He commences with a proposition of the utmost height and universality, and He gradually descends to the lower topics and sources of proof. He begins (ver. 17) with an assertion of His co-equality with His Father. " Up to this moment" (sabbath-day and all days) "my Father worketh and I work;" an answer whose force and pertinency can rest only on the unex- pressed assumption of a natural and inherent equality of privilege ; the argument manifestly being, that, if the Father could be justified in His incessant activity, the Son must 20 230 Christ sought and found in the [SERM. XIV. share in the same justification, as sharing in the same rights and dignities. So the Jews unquestionably understood it ; their persecution was built on the assumption ; Christ was the daily martyr of His claims to divinity. And so, I am inclined to think, the very form of St John's comment (ver. 18) proves him to have interpreted Jesus also ; for it seems to me highly probable that the words "making Himself equal with God," are meant by the Evangelist, not only as the Jewish charge, but as St John's own comment upon the claim of sonship; the accusation of assuming equality with God being not denied^ but justified; and the Evangelist in that clause intending willingly to allow that, in claiming God as "His own Father" {Ihtov Ttatipa), Christ had implicitly claimed a community of nature, and thence an equality of dignity. Our Lord, however, hastens, as usual, to prevent the unity of nature from absorbing the distinctness of per- son, and hiding the speciality of the personal functions in this divine economy. Accordingly He descends, — if it be a descent, — (vv. 19, 20) to declare, that such is the unani- mity of purpose, and the mysterious co-operation, of the Father and Son, that " the Son can do nothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do ;" that it is the Father's to give the initiative, but that ^^ whatsoever the Father doeth the Son doeth likewise." In this, or after this, He passes (vv. 21-30) into His mediatorial subordination, and pro- nounces that the bestowal of life, and the dispensation of judgment, are committed to His administration. And now, having published these lofty characteristics of His nature and office, He comes at once upon the question of credentials. "If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true." But He had a manifold evidence, distinct from His own. He had the evidence of his father, speaking from heaven, and speaking in the awful language of miracles; He had the evidence of St John the Baptist, till then the greatest born of woman ; and, finally, he had the evidence of the text, the evidence of the Scriptures. The transition SERM. XIV.] Old Testament Scriptures. 231 to this topic is ejected in tlic preceding verse : " Ye have not His iwrd abiding in you, for whom lie hath sent, Him ye believe not. . . . Search the Scriptures, for they testify of me." The voice of the Father from heaven, and the voice of God in His word, He classes as two forms of the same general attestation : "Ye have neither heard His voice at any time nor seen His shape, and ye have not His luord abiding in you." You have neither witnessed Him speak- ing immediately, nor understood Him speaking mediately. And if you prefer to regard the miracles as another conjoint department of the Father's evidence, which is perhaps the simpler way of analyzing the import of this profound passage, from ver. 31 to 40, you may (slightly altering your point of view) regard our Lord as, for the present, ivaiving the testimony of John, as belonging to an inferior class of evidences ("I receive not testimony from man.... I have greater witness than that of John,"— vv. 33, 36), and mainly engaged in setting forth (agreeably to his preceding state- me°ntl of a commission from the Father) the threefold at- testation which the Father had furnished to this great truth, >- the voice from heaven, the miracles on earth, and the Scriptures echoing from all past ages. God spoke in them all, and in them all he accredited Jesus as His Messiah. . "Ye search," declares Christ,— for the word may be rendered either as a command or an assertion, and the latter seems both more natural and more pointed,—" Ye search the Scriptures because in them ye think ye have eternal life; now these very Scriptures testify of me ; and, nevertheless, ye will not come to me that ye may liave the life ye seek." " Of late you have learned to scrutinize the Scriptures, to compare, to balance, to infer. You have been taught to seek in them satisfactory and solid proofs of an eternal happiness beyond the grave ; you think you have the treasure securely laid np in them ; and it is true, but only true as they testify of me. Your unhappy incon- sistency is this, that believing life to be in your Scriptures, 232 Christ sougld and found in the [SERM. XIV. you will not believe it to be where those Scriptures have placed it. You contend with 3^011 r Sadducean opponents that the promise is indeed there ; but you agree with them in rejecting Ilim on whom the promise is suspended. Surprisingly clear-sighted to a certain point, from that point you are blind." This seems to me to be the simplest mode of connecting the sense of the thirty-ninth and fortieth verses. With the remainder of the discourse (which is partly a corroboration of this topic) we have at present no concern. In this passage, then, thus understood (and it will not make any material difference, as to the substance of the argument, whether you render the first word in the impera- tive or indicative), our Lord may be considered as advanc- ing two assertions ; that the Scriptures of the Old Testa- ment testify of Him^ and that they testify of Him in the special character of a source or dispenser of eternal life. I will endeavor to engage you with both these topics; not in the way of minute discussion of separate passages, which would be the work of days and volumes, but in the way perhaps more calculated for pulpit utility, by large and general comment, which may subsequently serve to animate or direct your own private studies or reflections. I am about to regard the Hebrew Scriptures simply as a collec- tion of written records, a body of writings of various dates, bearing manifestly on the same general subjects; and, for my present purpose, it would be of no importance if we received them for the first time into our hands, and knew little or nothing beyond what the collection itself informs us. There were certain records accounted authentic and venerable among the people, and to these, simply as written documents, and to their internal evidences, our Lord in the text referred. Let as take those Scriptures in the onass, and ask if their whole aspect is not essentially jorcdictive, and predictive of Jesus. I. The Hebrew Scriptures, then, themselves, and the SEHM. XIV.] Old Testament ScnjHiires. 233 people and polity which form this singular subject, intimate a wonderful future, and point altogether to it, and are wholly inexplicable unless on the supposition of it. This at once distinguishes it from every other ancient writing of the same kind ; among all national literatures this makes the Jewish unique. And what is peculiarly observable, this characteristic is neither the growth of the people them- selves, nor in any respect required by their national consti- tution. The people, taken in the gross, appear to have, according to the record itself, acted on temporal promises; little or nothing more was exhibited to them by their guides and instructors : the " days long in the land," the "children visited to the third or fourth generation," — these are the stimulants to endurance and obedience. And yet, though this, and only this, be discoverable on the surface, never, surely, existed writings which in themselves seem to stretch so vastly beyond any temporary scope; and which, in their very excellency, seem so perpetually and power- fully to evince, that the fate of a single nation of mankind, could never cover their whole design and significancy. This is the irresistible internal argument for the genuine- ness and authority of the Old Testament Scriptures ; the more forcible because it turns not on detached passages, — these might be called interpolations, — but on the spirit, style, and bearing of the whole. In this, however, you must not so much reason as feel; taste and imagination (the powers that are busied in the higher departments of criticism) must be called into action to appreciate the force of the argument; but thus appreciated it is irresistible. The law commands, but in a tone that speaks more than its own limited commands. The prophets promise and threa- ten : but their threats and promises swell beyond the mea- sure of the occasion. The voice of both law and prophets is too hud for that little region ; it is made to fill a universe. Infidels have felt this, and (as Voltaire) have ridiculed the pomp of language, with which the fortunes arc predicted 20^^ / 234 Christ songht and /mind in the [serm. XIV. of a people, whose narrow strip of counky, from end to end, did not reach two hundred miles ; as if this very inconsis- tency was not itself an internal indication of boundless prophetic purport, increasing, moreover, as it perpetually appears to do, in direct proportion to the misfortunes and degradation of the people ; insomuch that the voice of pro- phecy is never more commanding or confident, than when the nation is all but annihilated. How short-sighted is the objection ; how narrow-minded the prejudice it betrays ! For if a platform is to be, indeed, songht, adequate to be the stage on which a God shall act, shall the world itself suffice ? Is Palestine more a speck in the map of the earth than the earth itself is in the chart of the visible universe ? — or the visible universe in the vast array of worlds beyond our ken ? — or all these together, compared with the concep- tions and the dignity of the God who made them ? The mote in the sunbeam, and the sun itself, are equal as regards the eternal Spirit, for both are alike incommensurate with Him ! Palestine was chosen to be the temporary scene of divine agency; but every movement of that agency, as recorded in this volume, indicates that the scene was to be hut temporary, and that this race of Jacob held in trust for the world. A double voice was given to their law ; Israel might suffice to hear and to obey the one ; every child of Adam was concerned to hear the other. A double voice was given to their prophets ; the enemies of the chosen line mioht tremble at the one, but the whole earth is weak to support or echo the other. Nay, is there not something significant in the very choice oi iwophecy for the instruction of the people ; of that beyond all other forms of miracu- lous interference ? Was it not that the mind of this people, even when it thought but of national prosperities and national overthrows, might at least be disciplined to the attitude of expectation ; that they, who were emphatically the people of the future, might have every motive resolved into hope and fear, and, carnal and confined as they mani- SERM. XIV.] Old Testament Scrii^tures. 2o5 fcstly were, might evermore be habituated to forget the thing present in the thing to come? Could I be permitted for a moment to turn from the probabilities of my argu- ment to the facts of lii story, how sad a commentary do these facts, as so many centuries have witnessed them, furnish to this remark ! The truth perverted becomes worse than the truth unknown, the disappointed affection turns, like tlie scorpion, to sting itself; and the longings that once brightly pointed Judah to her coming Messiah, their legitimate pur- pose past, have darkened and embittered into feverish, fruitless, visionary discontent! Expectation^ then, is the inward spirit of the Old Testa- ment, as Fulfilment of the New. Wonderful itself, its function clearly is to testify wonders more august to come. From Moses to Malachi, these Hebrew Scriptures are, as it were, one long-drawn sigh o^ sorrowful hope; while, to make the purposed lesson of imperfection more complete, the same testimony is uttered from every rank and state of humanity ; for of what variety of human fortune will you not find an example there? ISTot from Jeremiah in his dungeon alone, but from the gorgeous palace of their mightiest king, at the most consummate hour they record of earthly prosperity, comes forth the mournful strain (it is the voice not of Jewish, but of human nature) : " Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. ... I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit !" Do we deny, then, that, considered in themselves, these records of the Old Testament are imperfect, incomplete, inconsistent? Nay, we admit it, and we glory in the ad- mission. We know that they speak to Judah in language too mighty for her narrow fortunes, in language too exalted for her unenlightened corruption. We know that they promise more than they perform, that they begin what they cannot end. They "cry out of the depths;" but they cannot do more than cry. Their voice is still, " Bow thy 236 Christ sougld and found in tlie [SERM. XIV. heavenSj.O Lord, and come down. . . . Send thine hand/rom above /" A mightier element than any they contain must indeed come down, to raise them from their prostration ; a new power must be infused into the human heart, even the Spirit of God, bound up with the spirit of man by the resurrection of a God incarnate; this heavenly element must have combined with the earthly before the Law and the Prophets shall have become righteousness and fulfil- ment. Not from insulated predictions alone, not from separate types alone, not from occasional allusions alone, but from the whole spirit, and tendency, and bearing of the Hebrew Scriptures, was the Lord Jesus Christ justified when He declared, that "they are they which testify of Him;" that, disjointed from Him, they were a fair and elaborate structure, doubtless, but shadowy, nevertheless, and unsubstantial ; while, seen in the light that His coming flashed back upon that strange story of four thousand years, every page sparkled with illumination, every sentence quickened with meaning ; the whole vast mass, in all its members, the awful law, the wonder-laden history, the Psalm, of hope or penitence, the solemn proverb, the mystic prophecy, — all become instinct with new vitality, invested with the hues of the better life ; yea, that body of the Law and Prophets rose, as it were, and ascended with its inspirer, Jesus, and, unchanged yet wholly changed, was with Him glorified! All, then, in the Old Testament testified of restoration to come, and in the individuality of its types, — things definite all of them, and personal the most, — it is testified of a single personal restorer ; that is, as distinguished from a general revolution, or, as added to it, it pointed to an indi- vidual revolutionizer. But of this we are to speak presently ; suffice it now to say that the Old Testament, overladen by one sect of Jews, curtailed by another, candidly studied by none, witnessed internally to a mighty future. I pass not beyond its own pages, 1 ask not whence it came, nor how ; SERM. XIV.] Old Testament Scriptures. 237 I ask no external confirmations from contemporary history, I interrogate tlie Book alone, and its answer is unequivocal. Nay, in this view, its answer is often most direct when its language is most obscure. That mysterious volume, so large, so various, whose remotest authors are a thousand years asunder, had a single character, and that character was promissory. That still follows it through all its many styles and all its mazy windings ; that still is found, — yea, more distinctly caught, — in the dim recesses of those half revealings, where it whispers more than it speaks aloud. It is, in truth, as some vast forest, — its own Lebanon or Carmel, — dusky and shadowy, yet with wondrous breaks and glimpses of sudden light, strange shapes and spectres in the gloom, and sometimes darkness thick as midnight ; but a majestic spirit haunts the obscure immense, — the spirit of the future. Its presence startles us when we least expect it; and we Avalk with reverence and godly fear, feeling that all we see is holy, and all we see not holier still. II. But we have said that our Lord's words imply not this alone, but more than this ; that they affirm of the elder Scriptures (and in them of the dispensation which they profess to record), that these Scriptures speak of a future, which was to be illustrated by the gift of "eternal life," — in words more distinct, that they point to death conquered by sacrifice, life won by resurrection ; the " life of the spirit," in holiness here, in immortal glory hereafter. Of this, then, we should now speak as before, not with detailed reference to special passages, but in a general view of the entire. Let us stand in front of the huge edifice, not to criticize its plinths and capitals, but to take in the eflect of the whole. We are not asking the shape or dimensions of the features, but the expression of the face. Ecgarding, then, successively, the general corroboration furnished by the Old Testament to the doctrines of atonement, of sancti- fication, and of immortality, we inquire, first : — 238 Christ sought and found in the [SERM. xiv. 1. Did the volume of tlie Old Testament witness to an atonement as tlie foundation of an eternal life? There are those who boast themselves followers of Christ, and yet deny this characteristic. The impatience of mystery^ which is so strangely short-sighted when men have to deal with the substance of a communication from heaven^ has disabled them from discovering a propitiatory sacrifice in the New Testament; and the same spirit has usually advanced (on grounds of perfect consistency) either to waive the Old Testament altogether, as antiquated, local, and irrelevant to modern purposes, or to deny, by natural explications, every thing miraculous, and every thing typical in its pages. Now the object here is to get rid of mystery, — an object false and futile in itself, when we argue of the interferences of God with man ; but let all that is claimed be conceded, and is the object yet attained ? Suppose it a contest of opposite improbabilities: let every burden of miracle be thrown overboard by our adversaries, and shall they yet have lightened their vessel of mystery? shall they have presented an intelligible solution of the problem of the Old Testament? Though, in the spirit of a miserable criticism, ministering to a still more miserable philosophy, you were to evacuate that Old Testament of every express miracle it records, though you were to convert the prophets into jugglers and the people into fools, and make of our Elijahs and Isaiahs pretenders to power and conjecturers in knowledge, — that is, though you were substantially to justify the Jews for that "blood of the prophets" which Christ charged as their crime, — could you even so clear the Old Testament of wonders ? You may deny the story of miracles, but can you destroy the miracle of the story ? You may discredit this volume of miracles, — for the Spirit of God does not now descend to silence its gainsayers, — but can you unmirade the obstinate fact of the volume itself? Can you resolve the enormous difficulty of this history, these recorded habits, and above all, this recorded SERM. XIV.] Old Testament Scriptures. 239 religion ? You deny, or, in confessing, you neutralize any typical purport, any prospective atonement: mark, then, the mysteries that emerge upon your OAvn supposition. The whole spiritual system of the Ilebrew Scriptures is made up of two elements, entwined with the most intricate closeness, yet absolutely opposite in character. You are then to answer satisfactorily, how it was, that every par- ticular of a long and laborious system of minute, and often very repulsive, sacrificial observances, is found united in the same volume with conceptions of God that surpass, in their profound and internal spirituality, all that unassisted man has ever elsewhere imagined, nay, that all our modern refinement is unable to emulate ? What miraculous mind was it that combined these singular contradictions ? "Where is there a real parallel to this mysterious inconsistency? Who is this strange instructor, or series of instructors, that now portrays the form of the one everlasting essence hid in the veil of attributes that are themselves unfathomable, and now issues the most minute and elaborate directions as to the proper mode and the tremendous obligation of slaughtering a yearling lamb, and this as the duty required of him who would approach that eternal Spirit f Who is he that, at one moment, enounces the simplest, sublimest code of human duties in existence, — for even Christ abridged, not altered it ; — at another, nay, in the same page, the same sentence, exhorts, with equal earnestness, to the equal necessity of drenching the earth \vith animal blood as the appointed path of human purification? Here then is, in the very texture of the Old Testament and its poUty, a mystery greater than any you can escape by denying its predictive import. It is altogether insoluble on any sup- position but the one, the supposition which alone can elevate ceremonies to the dignity of moral obligations. Judaism with a typified atonement may be a miracle or a chain of miracles, but Judaism without it is a greater miracle still ! 2-iO Christ sought and found in the [SERM. XI v. Impressed, if tie is impressed, mtli sucli considerations as these, the opponent of " mystery" has, however, a sub- terfuge in reserve. An excuse for suspense is quite as wel- come as an excuse for disbelief. He contents himself with observing, that the Atonement is a mystery, and that these difficulties about the Jewish ritualism are certainly some- what mysterious also: "Let us, then," he argues, " neutralize them by each other, and leave the question as indetermin- able." Certainly, if we can pronounce the improbabilities equal on both sides. But can \yq ? The improbabilities of the Jewish system, considered apart from its fulfilment in the Christian sacrifice, are improbabilities of which we can all judge. They are in the field of our own human nature, which (whether we think it or not) is the daily study of every man that lives. On such a question we are adequate and authorized judges. When we call such things im- probable, we know what we say. But the great Atone- ment, — who shall dare to say that he knows enough of the counsels of heaven, the requisitions of God, and His rela- tion to man, — to pronounce it i'mjiro'bahlef Who is he that comes among us in the high character of confidential secre- tary to the divine administration, that he can venture to affirm that God requires no suffering mediator ? Where is the man or angel who has irresistibly demonstrated to the creatures of earth his accurate acquaintance with all the moral systems of all the spheres, and who, enriched with this immensity of knowledge (for nothing short of this will suffice), has at length expressly revealed it as cer- tain, or even probable, that tlie nature of God cannot require a sacrifice as the basis of redemption? Give us the evi- dence of such an one, and we will consent that an atone- ment is "improbable." But until such testimony be ex- hibited, I shall be content to " search the Scriptures," and to find them, in characters of blood, "testifying" to "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world." Until such a " friend of God" and partner of His counsel SERM. XIV.] Old Testame^it Scriptures. 241 be fortlicoming, I shall be content with that "friend of God" who, in covenant and sacrifice of blood, "saw the day of Christ," and rejoiced to see it. Until such a visitant of heaven is among ns, I shall ask but the testimony of Him who hath said, that " no man hath ascended up to heaven but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven ;" and who in the might and fulness of that familiarity with all the recesses of the heavenly counsels, hath Himself declared that He " came to give His life a ransom for many," — that " His blood was shed for many for the remission of sins." And, viewed in this aspect, there are few considerations more startling or impressive than our Lord's constant ^;ar- ticipation in the significant rites of the Jewish religion, during the days of his humiliation in the flesh. Of how wonderful a sight were the Jewish bystanders the ancon- scious witnesses, when they beheld, at each returning assembly, Him meekly hearing the prophecies in whom all prophecy was to be falfilled ! " The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy ;" and lo ! the Inspirer is sitting at the feet of His messengers and learning the lesson He taught them! But in the calm, unmoved aspect of the Son of God, no trace can be discovered of the mighty interest He alone can take in those mysterious anticipations of Himself. One among a crowded synagogue, seldom called upon to bear an office or utter an opinion, rebuked, it may be, to the lowest place, overlooked as a poor man among his betters, and deemed altogether disqualified, by narrowness of educa- tion or capacity, for sounding the depths of the page which, but for Plim — at once inspirer and object — had never ex- isted ! " This people that know not the law are cursed," and the humble artisan of Nazareth was one of "this people I" But pass from prophecy to the more vivid lan- guage of type, and contemplate Him as He comes, in meek obedience to the law, "fulfilling all righteousness," to cele- brate or to witness those bloody sacrifices that portrayed 21 242 Christ sought and found in the [SERM. XIV. His own death, of blood ! Thrice a year he entered Jeru- salem to act, more or less directly, the story of His coming sufferings. If He were present (and on one occasion we find Him in Jerusalem at the Feast of Tabernacles just after it) at the great Festival of Expiation, how profoundly must He have entered into the purport of all that solemn scene. The bleeding sacrifice at the door of the tabernacle, the guiltless animal dismissed with the imputed guilt of Israel, the blood borne by the priest into the holy of holies, — image of that celestial sanctuary He was so soon to enter with a similar offering; how must all this dumb show have addressed the Saviour's soul, — a soul in which exquisite tenderness of affection was doubtless united with intense capacities of suffering ? Or consider that more domestic sacrifice in which the Jewish layman was more directly concerned, that Passover which so accurately typified the divine oblation of Christ. In this each Israelite was his own sacrificer ; and often must He have beheld His brethren slay the lamb which was to represent that better "Lamb without blemish and without spot," " slain from the founda- tion of the world." How must the human heart of Jesus have shrunk, in such an hour, from the terrible picture of His sufferings to come! And when the bleeding knife was drawn from the quivering flesh, and the blood sprinkled at the altar-base, with what feelings did the Man of Sorrows return to share in the feast that followed ? Oh ! how much more than the cross was borne by the crucified Redeemer ! Or rather, how daily and hourly was the cross He bore I Abundantly, then, in all their structure and bearing, do the Scriptures and their Jewish subject attest the Atonement that was to found our redemption ; attest it by virtue of their composition and character, and though their historical narration were nothing beyond an ideal allegory. Bat this witness stretches farther still. They testify not only to the cause of life, but to the life itself, — the spiritual quickening, present and eternal. Here, too, I seek not to SEEM. XIV.] Old Testament Scriptures. 243 detain you with the separate manifestations of the blessed future, the special types that visibly embodied the invisible gift of sanctification to come, — the anointings, the washings, the solemn seclusion of the entire people from the common family of nations. I observe only the force and direction of the whole current of the scriptural records themselves, and I find it all pressing on, and gathering as it advances, to the holiness won and dispensed by Jesus. 2. It is not an easy, and it is in some sense an invidious, task, to attempt a distinction between the charaderistic holi- ness of the Old and New Testaments. Any such distinc- tion must, of course, be taken, not as above all possible exception strictly and literally universal, but as a general contrast, marking the genius and spirit of each. And, understood in this liberal construction, perhaps it might be said that the habitual sanctity of the Old Testament was a life to God united with a life to the world also, the loyalty of the subject to his prince, which does not interfere with a strong development of other tendencies too ; while that of the Christian institute is peculiarly a death to the icorld, in order that man may enter upon a life, intimate and undi- vided, with God alone. How vividly this is represented in the initiatory rite of the Christian life, I need not ob- serve. But (to avoid all misconceptions upon a matter of such moment) I will digress to say, that this great charac- teristic of the covenant of the Spirit docs not impair the obligation or the energy of a single earthly duty, — of even a single legitimate affection ; it simply destroys for ever the independent sovereignty of those principles, superadds an affection of such strength as to overcome them when they interfere, or to pervade them when they harmonize with it ; subdues them to itself or subdues them altogether, and (it may be granted) disposes the mind to avoid as much as possible multiplying them, without discernible spiritual advantage. The Christian's " death to the world" amounts to simply this, — that no principle not traceable to heaven 244 Christ sought and found in the [SERM, xiv. shall be, for even an instant, recognized as the sovereign director of the soul; not merely that God shall ordinarily hold the first place in his deliberate calculations of oppos- ing courses of conduct (for this the pious of all ages have admitted), but that everything else, — habits, affections, situa- tions, events, — shall be connected with Ilim, imbued and pervaded with His light, and, as it were, seen and known by it alone. This total separation of every earthly bond, con- sidered as earthly^ and assumption of a new life at the hand of God, so that man, while on earth, practically lives in heaven, was not within the scheme of the Old Testament revelation, however it may appear by glimpses in the in- spired writers themselves. If they possessed it, it was not for the public. Nor, indeed, with God eminently represented as a national God, and, instead of the ample expanse of heaven and of eternity, with this earth regarded as the great scene of His rewarding dispensations, is it easy to see how these views of unworldly purity could possibly have been proposed. But what is mainly to be considered at present is, that, though not directly proposed, they seem evermore to be seen in dim and distant vision, in vision that grows nearer and brighter constantly as the day of Christ approaches. David himself, the great type of Israel- itish holiness, and whose language in our, — perhaps often in his own, — spiritual applications, embraces all the pro- foundest feelings and hopes of the Christian, — David per- petually rises above his state, beseeches a power which he can conceive but cannot compass, and seems struggling to get beyond his place in the progressive order of revela- tion. " Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wonders ....I will run the way of thy commandments ichen thou shalt enlarge my heart. ...I have longed after thy precepts: quicken me in thy righteousness. Let thy tender mercies come unto me, that I may live. My soul fainteth for thy salvation. Thy commandment is exceeding broad. Let my cry come before thee, O Lord: give me understanding!" SERM. XIV.] Old Testament Scnptures. 245 And as the sacrifice of Christ, after He had republished the Law as His own, was to be the necessary condition, and so prior to His power, of dispensing the Spirit^ — so do we ob- serve the very same order in the preparatory disposition of the Old Testament. There, too, the law is first solemnly enacted at Sinai, the complicated observances of sacrifice are then ordained, and the farther work of sanctification comes out in gradual prominence of prediction, and at length attains its highest splendor of promise in the pages of the Prophets. You will at once perceive, how this ob- vious analogy between the two Testaments silences the ob- jection of Socinians and Deists, against the additions to the Gospel, which they profess to discover in the apostolic Epis- tles. And in the hallowed raptures of Isaiah and his pro- phetic brethren, along with the promise of sanctification under the second covenant, it is impossible not to observe, in dim outline, those traits accompanying it, which accom- pany the possession of the gift in the preaching and the Epistles of Peter, and Paul, and John. The precepts of the Law are in the Law delivered with sternness and brevity, its penalties denounced with unmitigated severity ; in the Prophets, a code substantially the same is presented, by transitions almost insensible, in colors softer, and richer, and more attractive. Hues from some distant glory, itself unrevealed, have fallen upon those gioomy features, and illumined them into its own likeness. Judaism in Moses and Isaiah is still, indeed, Judaism, but it is like the one landscape seen in different lights, and we can scarcely recognize it for the same ! " The law of the Spirit of life'' has already begun to supplant the " law of sin and death." Whether the misfortunes of the people, knowing, as we do, how largely affliction is employed as an instrument in the hand of God, might have been concerned in fitting them to receive this higher tone of spiritual promise, it is not easy to say with certainty ; but it is remarkable that it is from the depths of captivity, in the hour of bitterest bondage, 21* 246 CJirist soiirjld and found in the [SERM. XIV. that Jeremiah and Ezekiel have reached the culminating point of the promise of holiness to come, — that great an- nouncement of the covenant, the peculiar charter of our religion, — which you will find cited in that character by St. Paul in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Hebrews. " Behold, the days come that I will make a new covenant with the house of Judah; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers : for this is the covenant that I will make. I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts; and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people." If these anticipations of spiritual vitality, of life from the death of sin, be thus the constant character of the Old Tes- tament (itself unpossessed of the gift), we may repeat that in this sense also was the Lord of glor}?- justified, when He appealed to those Scriptures in the mass, for their testimony to Him as the Author and Giver of life. 3. It remains that we speak of the last subject of attesta- tion, the testimony of the Scriptures to Christ, as the source of an immortality of glory to Sis followers. Few minutes are left us for this: but it need not detain us lons^. It seems, in relation to our subject, the topic most prominent of all ; but, in truth, it is, in a great measure, contained 'm. the former. Christ's atonement, Christ's gift of the Spirit, Christ's gift of glory, follow in necessary internal connection ; and wherever the two former are proclaimed, the last is sub- stantially involved. But, according to the universal law of progressive development, the Old Testament predictions become less and less vivid as we advance through the three: the earliest, the atonement, is presignified the most distinctly of all ; the sanctification by the Spirit, less and more lately ; the final glorification faintly, and more often by implication than assertion. Nor indeed could either the present or the eternal life of the Spirit have been ade- quately manifested in type or prophecy without the other ; and it is remarkable that the prediction of the spiritual SERM. XIV.]