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'Y^LI^WJMirv/IEIgSflW0 • ILHIBB&&IRir •

POSTHUMOUS SEKMONS.

BY THE
REV. HENRY BLUNT, A.M.,
LATE RECTOR OF 8TREATHAM ;
AND FORMERLY FELLOW OT PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION.

PHILADELPHIA:
HERMAN HOOKER, 178 CHESTNUT STREET.
1844.

PREFACE.

Ix is in compliance with the wish of the loved and
lamented author of these Sermons, that they have been sub
mitted to me for my inspection ; and that the oversight of
them, as they passed through the press, was intrusted to my
care. It is hardly necessary to say, that, with the exception
of one or two trifling verbal alterations, they are printed just
as they were preached. This statement is made at the desire
of his family and friends ; otherwise, greatly as I value the
privilege of being associated with one so dear to myself, and
so universally esteemed, I should have refrained from the
intrusion of my name. It may appear superfluous, and even
presumptuous in me, to add any observations of my own on
the character of these Sermons ; but I cannot resist saying,
that the perusal of them has confirmed the opinion formed
from his preceding volume ; namely, that, eminently useful,
and singularly attractive, as are the series of his well-known
Historical Lectures, and his practical Commentary on the
Pentateuch, they are even surpassed by his Sermons. The

Jv PREFACE..

value of these had been so long and so fully attested by the
effect of his ministry, that it always seemed a matter of regret
that a larger proportion of them was not presented to the
public during his lifetime ; though, perhaps, they may now
come to many invested with a deeper interest, as the echo of
that loved voice, whose impressive sounds will long live in
their remembrance. In all the sterling and more important
qualities of addresses from the pulpit — in the full exhibition
of the whole of Divine truth in its various bearings and pro
portions — in the intimate connexion maintained between
Christian privilege and Christian practice — in the unfolding
of the secret workings of the human heart, and in the deep
searching of the conscience, they are unrivalled ; while they
are equally distinguished for the rich but simple eloquence,
the brilliant but chastened imagination which pervades them ;
combined with a plain perspicuity of language that com
mends them to persons of all ranks and of all ages. I would
only add, that the Sermons are a transcript of the man —
eminent for his clear and accurate discrimination, his sound
and solid and comprehensive judgment — whose life exempli
fied the sanctifying influence of the truths which he enforced,
while his death sealed the sufficiency of those promises
which he delighted to proclaim. Though his bodily weak
ness was great to the utmost limit of endurance, his mind
remained in full vigour to the last, and his faith and hope
continued bright and unclouded even to the end. In the few
last days he frequently repeated, in the full perception of
their preciousness, those blessed words, " This is a faithful
saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came
into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief." And
during the last day and night of suffering, this was his tes.ti-

PREFACE. y
mony, that the dependence which he had realized in life, did
not fail him in the hour of death : " Much bodily suffering,
but no doubt, and perfect peace; and I know I shall enjoy it
throughout eternity for the alone merits of my Saviour."
JOHN BROWNE,
Trinity Church, Cheltenham.
January 13, 1844.

]#

CONTENTS.

SERMON I.
THE MUTABILITY OF MAN, THE IMMUTABILITY OP GOD.
Zecharuh i. 5, 6. Your fathers, where are they ? And the pro
phets, do they live for ever? But my words and my statutes
which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not
take hold of your fathers? And they returned and said, Like
as the Lord of Hosts thought to do unto us, according to our
ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us.
Page 11
SERMON II.
CHRIST THE BELJE VEr's REFUGE.
Isaiah xxxu. 2. A man shall be as an hiding-place from the
wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a
dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. 22
SERMON III.
CHRIST THE FULNESS OF THE BELIEVER.
Ephesians i. 22, 23. The Head over all things to the Church,
which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all. 33
SERMON IV.
THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN.
Acts xxvi. 28. Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian. 45
(7)

viii contents.
SERMON V.
the believer's assured inheritance.
1 Peter i. 4, 5. An inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and
that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you who are kept
by the power of God through faith unto salvation. 58
SERMON VI.
THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
2 Cor. ii. 11. We are not ignorant of his devices. 71
SERMON VII.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 84
SERMON VIII.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONCLUDED. 96
SERMON IX.
THE SOLEMN SEARCH.
Zephaniah i. 12. And il shall come to pass at that lime, that 1
will search Jerusalem with candles, and punish the men that
are setded on their lees : that say in their heart, The Lord will
not do Jgood, neither will he do evil. 108
SERMON X.
THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Jeremiah xxiii. 6. This is his name by which be shall be called,
The Lord our Righteousness. 121

CONTENTS. j^.
SERMON XI.
CONFESSING CHRIST.
Matthew x. 32, 33. Whosoever, therefore, shall confess me
before men, him will I confess before my Father which is in
heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will
I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. 131
SERMON XIL
GO FORWARD.
Exodus xiv. 15. Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go
forward. 144
SERMON XIII.
SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS.
2 Cor. iv. 17, 18. For our light affliction, which is but for a
moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal
weight of glory ; while we look not at the things which are
seen, but at the things which are not seen, for the things
which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not
6een are eternal. 157
SERMON XIV.
REDEEMING THE TIME.
Ephesians v. 16. Redeeming the time, because the days are
evil. 169

SERMON XV.

THE JUDGMENT.

Acts xvii. 31. He hath appointed a day, in the which he will
judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom he hath
ordained ; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in
that he hath raised him from the dead. 178

SERMONS.

SERMON I.
THE MUTABILITY OF MAN, THE IMMU
TABILITY OP GOD.

Zechariah i. 5, 6.
Your fathers, where are they1? and the prophets, do they live for
ever? but my words and my statutes, which I commanded my ser
vants the prophets, did they not take hold of your fathers'? and
they returned and said, like as the Lord of hosts thought to do
unto us, according to our ways, and according to our doings, so
hath he dealt with us.
The mutability of man, and the immutability of God !
How awful a subject, how solemnly impressed upon us
by every revolving year, yet how little inclined are we
to dwell upon it, how much indisposed to suffer the con
sideration of it to interfere with any of our plans of
worldly enjoyment, or to quicken us, as it ought to do,
in the immediate, the earnest, anxious pursuit of spiritual
good. May our God, even Jehovah, who spake these
words in time past unto his people by the prophets, in this
latter day speak them unto our hearts by the Spirit of
his Son ; that if they have never yet, in the language of
the text, " taken hold" of us, they may this day so take
11

X2 the mutability of1 man,
hold of our attention, of our memory, and of our hearts,
as to sanctify to us this first sabbath of the opening
year, and to fix upon our souls the warning, the precepts,
the promises and the threatenings of our God, that they
may not merely influence us for a passing hour, but
abide with us for ever.
We shall commence by stating briefly the original in
tention of the passage, as it occurs in the prophecy from
which it is taken.
The Almighty had sent his prophet Zechariah, as we
find by the beginning of the chapter, to call his people to
repentance, with the promise that their repentance should
be accepted. To urge them the more strongly to this,
the Lord reminds them that he had " been sore dis
pleased with their fathers," and cautions them very
expressly not to imitate their obduracy and sin, but to
turn at the voice of the Lord. He then condescends
to reason with them in the words of the text, upon
the obvious wisdom and advantage of so doing,
grounding this appeal upon the following affecting
considerations ; that their fathers, who in old time had
been warned, as they were now, and had rejected the
warning, had been cut off by the predicted judgments
which they despised, and were, as the Psalmist expresses
it, " clean gone for ever ;" that the prophets who had
carried these warnings, and urged them upon the atten
tion of their fathers, could no longer benefit them, for
that they also were removed ; that the teachers and the
taught, the disciples and the masters, in fact the whole
generation, had been swept away ; thus reminding them,
in a very convincing manner, of the mutability of man.
The Almighty then proceeds to remind them as strikingly
of the immutability of God. He says, in effect, Did the
Almighty change because your fathers would not hear

THE IMMUTABILITY OF GOD. J 3
and would not turn? Did God alter his message because
they refused to receive it? Is not the warning which
you hear at this hour, the identical warning which your
fathers heard and scoffed at, and were destroyed ; and
though generation after generation has passed away, has
one jot or one tittle of God's Word ever passed away?
So far from it that I leave you to pronounce whether one
syllable was changed, whether one syllable ever fell to
the ground of all that the Lord had spoken. Did not
the judgments which he long had threatened, at the last
overtake your fathers? Were they not themselves com
pelled to declare that God never thought to bring one
judgment upon them, and brought it not? How con
vincing an argument, how striking a conclusion to tlie
present message of the Almighty, thus to refer to the
neglect and to the fulfilment of all that had preceded it.
My intention then, brethren, this morning, is to en
deavour to impress upon you the importance and the ne
cessity of your laying earnestly to heart all those messages
from God, all the warnings, all the precepts, all the pro
mises, which you have heard from this place during the
last twelvemonth, by the same considerations, the immu
tability of God, and the mutability of his people, the un-
changeableness of God and of his Word, and the transito-
riness of you who hear, and of us who proclaim it.
First, from the immutability of God, and the un-
changeableness of his Word. If we who are the minis
ters of. the Most High, were commissioned to bring you
message after message from the great God of heaven and
earth, and if these messages all were different the one from
the other ; if the warning of to-day were less solemn and
less awakening than the warning of yesterday, or the pro
mises of to-morrow more abundant than those of to-day,
we can easily imagine you waiting in suspense, Sabbath
2

14 THE MUTABILITY OF MAN,
after Sabbath, and year after year, watching for the most
favourable opportunity, carefully preparing for the hour
when you could make the most profitable terms with
God, and turn to him in penitence and faith. But,
Diethren, you well know that this is not the fact, that
there is one message, and but one, which the ministers
of God have for more than eighteen centuries been com
missioned to sound in the ears of his people : that this
message no man, no angel can ever alter ; for did not the
chief apostle to the Gentiles distinctly say, " There be
some that would pervert the Gospel of Christ. But
though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other
Gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto
you, let him be accursed !" The counsel and the word
of the Most High are therefore as immutable as his
person ; for does he not again expressly say by the pro
phet Ezekiel, "I am the Lord : I will speak, and the
word that I shall speak shall come to pass." "I am the
Lord, I change not." Can you then, brethren, justify
yourselves in this, that knowing as you well know, and as
we all know, that this is the truth ; that the word which
has once passed from the lips of the Almighty, can never
alter ; that the straight way will not be made broader, or
the narrow gate wider, even though a world of sinners
were struggling for admittance; can you justify your
selves in this, that after the way of salvation has been
once fairly proposed to you, after the Lamb of God, who
alone taketh away the sins of the world, has been plainly
presented to you, and the value of your soul, and the
heinousness of sin, and the necessity of repentance, and
the unutterable import of eternity, have been all distinctly
set before you, you should yet be found slumbering at
your post, deaf to warning, and callous to entreaties?
Did you ever seriously think for one quarter of an hour,

THE IMMUTABILITY OF GOD. J5
of the value of your soul ? Did you ever reflect that
after these little periods of time, year after year, have run
away, that you possess what cannot die, that you carry
within you that which, when unnumbered ages shall
have run their course, will not be one day nearer to the
termination of its existence than it is this morning? and
that the fate of this immortal portion of you depends
upon these few, brief, unthought of periods, another of
which has, since yesterday, joined its brethren beyond
the flood ? O how earnestly would we desire to plead
with you, if any are now present, careless and indifferent,
at this commencement of another year, upon your blind
ness and infatuation.
Look only at the words of the text, and observe from
them, what has been the confession of the thoughtless
sinner ; the man who lives and dies inattentive to the
voice of warning, and of mercy, in every age that has
passed over us ; and be assured that his experience must
one day be your own. You may for a time escape the
danger of which God has warned you; you may find
pleasure, even though it be a transitory pleasure, in the
follies and the sins of the world ; still a day must come
when God will seal the truth of every warning and
every threatening you have heard in characters of fire
upon your souls: a day must arrive, when the heartfelt
confession will be wrung from you, which was there
wrung from the impenitent Jews, " Like as the Lord of
hosts thought to do unto us, according to our ways, and
according to our doings, so hath he dealt with us."
Yes, brethren, depend upon it, what God thinks he
shall do, that he will do, although earth and hell en
deavour to arrest his progress. Has it not been always
thus from the very foundation of the world? What
would be the testimony of our first parents? God

J g THE MUTABILITY OF MAN,
thought to punish their disobedience, and they hid
themselves from God among the trees of the garden;
did they escape? What would be the testimony of the
antediluvian world ? God thought to destroy them with
a flood, which should overwhelm both man and beast,
young and old; did they escape? No; though a whole
world was in arms against God, their numbers found no
protection, — " like as he thought to do unto them, ac
cording to their ways, and according to their doings, so
did he deal with them." So was it amidst the fires of
Sodom ; so was it at the destruction of Jerusalem ; so
shall it be on that day, when time gives place to eternity.
Not an individual ever passes out of this world in that
enmity to God in which he was born, and in which he
lived, who, if he were obliged to confess the truth, would
not be compelled to speak as these have spoken. Many,
no doubt, depart in stupid ignorance of all that shall
come after, as the ox goeth to the slaughter ; but this is
only postponing the confession, not denying it. Of the
great majority, we scruple not to say, that the feelings
of their closing hours are of this nature, — "What God
has threatened he will perform; would that I might re
trace my steps ; would that I might live over again fhe
wasted hours, the mispent days, the sinning years, that
are now gone — and gone for ever." Then it is that the
words of God, neglected in health, forgotten in prosperity,
" take hold," or as the marginal reading still more em
phatically expresses it, "overtake" the sinner's soul, and
extort from him the humiliating confession.
But the expression of the text is peculiarly striking,
"They returned and said." It is as if they were on the
very brink of destruction, as if with one foot in the grave;
nay more, as if the hand of God already pressed upon
them in his wrath, when they turned back, and acknow

THE IMMUTABILITY OF GOD JJ
ledged, God has indeed been too strong for us, we have
sown to the wind, and we must reap the whirlwind.
Brethren, how fearful would be the testimony if all who
have experienced, who are experiencing, this immutable
truth, could return but for one hour, and bear their evi
dence to its fulfilment. What a scene of anguish and of
misery would be laid bare before our eyes, if every im
penitent sinner, every individual who commenced the
last year in health and carelessness and defiance of God,
and heard unmoved these threatenings and these warn
ings, and has since been called away in the same state
of impenitency and sin, could now rise up before us and
return to say, " Like as the Lord of hosts thought to do
unto me, according to my ways, and according to my
doings, so hath he dealt," so is he dealing, so shall he
deal with me throughout eternity !
Who could hear unmoved such an attestation to the
unchangeableness of God ? Who can bear to think that
there is a living soul who could make it ? Yet, can we
question, can we for a moment doubt, if God and his
Word be thus immutable, that if the prison-house of
eternity were unbarred, and its guilty inhabitants driven.
forth, if the floor of this church were for a moment
occupied by the "spirits now in prison," enveloped in
their chains of fire, they would all — all as with one voice,
one yell of self-condemnation and "despair, proclaim the
dreadful truth. " For God is not a man that he should
lie, neither the son of man that he should repent : hath
he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and
shall he not make it good?" O, be assured, brethren,
that as every promise to the believer is, " Yea, and
amen, in Christ Jesus;" so every threatening to the im
penitent sinner's soul is fixed as immovably as the
foundations of the throne of God.
2*

JQ THE MUTABILITY OF MAN,
But we must pass from these strong motives offered
you for immediate repentance, by this view of the im
mutability of God and of his Word, to the no less strik
ing, no less affecting motive we may derive from the
mutability of you who hear, and of us who present them.
" Your fathers, where are they?"
What a touching inquiry, when made by God him
self, as in the text, to his poor, perishing, wandering
people. If you examine the preceding verses, you will
see that it was spoken more in sorrow than in anger. It
was not the language of scorn, or of insult, for he who
asked the question has just before said, " Be ye not as
your fathers." "Turn ye unto me, and I will turn unto
you, saith the Lord of hosts." There were love and
mercy, therefore, still in store for them ; but nevertheless,
for all this " God would be inquired of by them." And
it was therefore to excite this feeling in their breast, by
awakening again the sorrows which were slumbering
there, that the Almighty thus referred to those who
Were gone.
Surely he who made the human heart, well knew
how best to touch the springs by which its sympathies
are opened, when he asked the affecting question, " Your
fathers, where are they?" Has not the grave even now
closed over them? Are they so early called away, and
have you no desire, when God shall take you hence, to
follow them? If the Word of God can awaken no
spiritual feeling within your breast, can it also touch no
natural chord that lies responsive there? Have you
never so loved one earthly being, whom God has taken
to himself before you, that you would rejoice in the
thought of seeing that object of your affection at God's
right hand? Here, then, is a motive, and comparatively
low and selfish though it be, we would leave untried no

THE IMMUTABILITY OF GOD.

19

motive which may win you to your own eternal happi
ness, which may plant you as a jewel in your Redeemer's
crown. If there be those to whom you would desire to
be reunited^ in the realms of bliss, O delay not, trifle
not, with this great salvation. " The time past of your
life may suffice to have wrought the will of the Gentiles;"
now, even to-day, " put off the works of darkness, and
put upon you the armour of light; come, all sinful
though you be ; come, but in penitence and faith, to the
Saviour of your soul ; he invites you, he urges you, he
intreats you,. by every hope of present pardon and of
future blessedness, to come unto him, that your soul
may live.
But the mutability of man is impressed upon you by
another example, in the words of the text, " The pro
phets, do they live for ever?" Do not they who bear
my messages to you pass away like a shadow that de-
parteth? And ought not this reflection to induce you to
improve the opportunity while it lasts; to hear them
while they are permitted to speak unto you ? There
are few of us, perhaps, who have not at this moment
within our veins the seeds of those diseases which in
God's good time (always the best time) will finish our
work, and carry us before his judgment-seat, who shall
" try every man's work, of what sort it is." This cannot
but remind us that our opportunities of warning, inviting,
urging you, may be but few; that another opening year
may find our labours finished, our lips for ever closed.
As one, then, who is not ignorant that he may shortly
put off this tabernacle, we would always desire to speak
as dying unto dying men, and urge you, if you have
never yet " taken hold of the word of life," if you have
never yet realized its tremendous truths, that you would
this day cease from trifling with God and with your souls ;
for it is trifling, trifling of the most alarming kind, year

20 THE MUTABILITY OF MAN,
after year to listen to the fullest revelations of the Gospel
of peace, and year after year to live as if convinced of
their utter fallacy. We urge you, then, beloved brethren,
by the certainty that the time is short, and that the
fashion of this world passeth away ; by the memory of
those who have gone before, and to whom you wish to
be re-united ; by the probability that our opportunities
of setting these things home upon your conscience may
be but few ; by the blessedness of heaven ; by the ter
rors of hell — that you fly to the great propitiation, to the
Lord Jesus Christ, and give yourselves up to him from
this day even for ever.
Referring once more, for the last time, to the words of
the text, suppose for a moment that they to whom they
were addressed had been compelled to answer those
solemn queries, how fearful would have been the reply !
" Your fathers, where are they ?" Gone, gone for ever,
to give an account of their stubbornness, their disobe
dience, their ingratitude, and their sins, and to suffer the
due reward of their deeds. " The prophets," where are
they ? Gone also ; gone to stand face to face, to con
front our fathers at the judgment-seat of God; gone to
stand face to face with them at that bar, and to pro
nounce, "We did not shun to declare unto you the
whole counsel of God;" we warned you, we threatened
you, we invited you, whether you would hear, or whe
ther you would forbear ; we altered not the message of
our God ; and all of which we have forewarned you has
this day come to pass. And think you, brethren, that it
will be a less fearful thing when Christian ministers and
Christian congregations shall meet before that dread
tribunal, than thus for Jewish hearers and Jewish pro
phets? How, then, are we, as ministers, prepared for
that approaching scene? Can we, your ministers, de
clare that we have left no effort untried, no means ne-

THE IMMUTABILITY OF GOD.

21

glected, no entreaties unemployed, which might have
won you from your worldliness and forgetfulness of God,
and awakened you from your sleep of death ? Alas !
God knows that we cannot, that we have not only, as
the apostle declared of his own ministry, been " with
you in weakness and in fear, and in much trembling,"
but in coldness, and in inefficiency, and in much un
faithfulness ; but thanks be to God for his unspeakable
gift; thanks be to God that the blood of Jesus Christ
cleanses from all sin, ministerial as well as personal;
for looking back upon the cross, we do find peace and
comfort there, or fearfully should we dread that coming
hour. And you, brethren, how are you prepared to
meet us, " your servants for Christ's sake," in the pre
sence and before the throne of our Master? Remember,
" if our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost."
Has our Gospel, then, been unto you " the savour of
life unto life, or of death unto death ?" Recollect that
the same sun which softens the wax hardens the clay.
Has the preaching of the Gospel, with all its precious
promises, its unbounded offers, its overwhelming great
and glorious anticipations, softened or hardened you?
And shall we on that day rejoice in the presence of our
Lord over your complete and full salvation, hailing your
entrance into everlasting blessedness ; or shall we weep,
" if souls can weep in bliss," that those who have once
united with us in the prayers and praises of these earthly
temples, shall unite with us again no more for ever?
May these inquiries be fixed upon your consciences;
may they return to you in the silence of your chambers,
in hours of thoughtfulness, and hours of sleeplessness;
and may they never leave you until they have, led you
from reflection to prayer, and from prayer to Christ, and
from Christ to God, and from God to heaven !

SEEMON II.
THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE.

Isaiah xxxii. 2.
A man shall be a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from
the tempest ; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of
a great rock in a weary land.
This is a very remarkable prophecy and promise, and
at first sight most strikingly at variance with almost every
other declaration of the Word of God. For let us dwell
for a moment upon some of the statements of that in
spired volume. Hear the declaration of this same prophet
Isaiah in his second chapter, " Cease ye from man,
whose breath is in his nostrils." Listen again to the
words of David, " Trust in the Lord at all times, ye
people." Hear also the words of Jeremiah, " Cursed be
the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm."
These and many other testimonies might be adduced, to
prove that the whole tenor of Divine writ runs counter
to the passage of the text, " A man shall be as a hiding
place from the wind." A poor, weak, helpless mortal,
unable to protect himself from the wind and tempest,
and shall he bejpur refuge? Shall God's own word com
mand us to leave the living fountain, and betake our
selves, in our necessities, to the broken cisterns of earth ?
Strange inconsistency, strange contradiction to every other
portion of God's Word ! But, perhaps, there is a meaning
22

THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE. 23
in the passage which does not appear upon the surface ;
perhaps there is some peculiarity in the man there men
tioned, different from all the other children of men that
ever lived; and so different, so widely different, that
while they are all the creatures of a day, of whom the
unerring Word of God has said, " Put not your trust in
princes, nor in any child of man, for there is no help in
them." Of this Man it shall be declared that, " At his
name every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, and
things in earth, and things under the earth; and every
tongue shall confess that he is Lord, to the glory of God
the Father;" that " all power is given unto him in
heaven and in earth," that " he upholdeth all things by
the word of his power," and that " whoso trusteth in him
shall never be confounded."
Blessed be God, his own Word assures us that it is so;
he who has declared in the text that, " a man shall be as
a hiding-place from the wind," has declared by the
mouth of the prophet Zechariah, who that man is, when
he says, " Awake, O sword, against the man that is my
fellow, saith the Lord of hosts." My equal, not merely
near to God, but one who should " think it no robbery
to be equal with God," even " the Man Christ Jesus;"
equal to the Father as touching his Godhead, though
inferior to the Father as touching his manhood; who,
although born of a woman, and made after the like?iess
of sinful flesh, is yet declared to have been throughout
all eternity in the bosom of the Father, " God, of the
substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds;"
and who is thus spoken of by the Spirit of God himself,
when predicting the event of this day, " Unto us a child
is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall
be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called
Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the everlasting

24

THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE.

Father, tbe Prince of peace." It is then of this Man,
David's son, according to the flesh, but David's Lord, by
an eternal generation ; " perfect God, and perfect man,
of a reasonable soul, and human flesh subsisting," that
we are to speak, taking the words of the text as a remark
able and beautiful metaphor of what he is able and will
ing to be and to do for his people.
The Lord Jesus Christ, then, reveals himself in the
words before us under two striking similitudes ; the first
of which regards his people's safety, and the second (heir
consolations. I. As regards their safety.
" A man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind,
and a covert from the tempest." If you desire to under
stand the full force of the image, picture to yourself one
of those scenes which eastern travellers paint, when they
describe the passage of a caravan across some dreary and
uninhabited desert, where, throughout the long day's
journey, there is no house, no rock, no tree, to offer a
moment's shade or a moment's shelter. In the midst of
such a scene the wind suddenly rises, and the lightning
glares around, and in the distance are beheld gigantic
columns of sand, raised and kept together in such vast
masses by the whirlwind as to exclude even the rays of
the sun from passing through them, and as these fearful
phenomena approach, every thing is overwhelmed before
them ; the poor bewildered travellers behold in them at
once their destruction and their grave. In vain do they
attempt to fly ; their gigantic enemies are coming upon
the wings of the wind, and nothing mortal can outstrip
them ; in vain do they attempt to face them ; for who
can wage equal war against the elements? all hope is at
an end, all efforts vain; the wind slackens not, the tem
pest does not cease, and before the shortest prayer is

THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE. 25
finished, that multitude, that was but now replete with
life and animation, is hushed in silence ; every mouth is
stopped, every heart has ceased to beat; the simoon of
the desert has passed over them, and the place they
occupied is scarcely to be distinguished from the sur
rounding plain.
Now imagine in such a scene, and at such a season
(and this is no flight of imagination, but a simple though
appalling fact) the feelings with which these alarmed
and flying travellers would greet a " hiding-place," and
" a covert." Imagine that while they were looking with
an apprehension which we can scarcely conceive at those
advancing pillars of sand in which they were so shortly
to be entombed, they should on a sudden behold a rock
of adamant spring up before them, a barrier which neither
sand, nor wind, nor tempest, could overleap. What would
be their feelings of joy, their thoughts of gratitude, their
language of praise ! Oh ! who canjmagine the heartfelt
cry of . thanksgiving to God which would arise from that
vast multitude at so complete, so merciful, so unhoped-for
a deliverance. Then, brethren, such are the feelings
with which we would encourage you to " behold the
Man" of whom we this day speak. Our sins had raised
a tempest of the wrath of God, against which the whole
created host of heaven would in vain have attempted to
erect a barrier. Therefore said the Lord, " I have laid
help upon one that is mighty." " I looked, and there was
none to help ; and I wondered that there was none to
uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation." He
has on this day, taking upon himself our nature, placed
himself between us and his Father's wrath ; he stood
alone as that wall of adamant, between us and the
coming tempest. All that would have driven us from
the presence of God for ever, or have overwhelmed our
o

2g THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE.
souls with remediless destruction, fell upon Him, and
upon Him alone, and by his life of suffering and hu
miliation and obedience, and by his death of agony, and
by his resurrection of power, we were secured. The
tempest, which would have scattered us as chaff before
the whirlwind, has lost its power; and now, if we have
fled into the " hiding-place," if we are seated beneath
" his shadow," passes harmlessly above our head, or is
heard by us, as many of you this evening, when seated
comfortably in your warm and peaceful dwellings, sur
rounded by the quiet circle of your own happy families,
will listen to the winds or rain of winter, blessing God
that you enjoy a refuge and a home.
Such are the sentiments which the present season
ought more especially to awaken in our bosoms.
Yes, brethren, such are the feelings which you ought
to possess this day, such are the feelings which you will
possess, if you have been led by the Spirit of God to
him, who has thus been made of God, " a hiding-place,"
and " a covert" — feelings of security and joy and peace
and safety. But then, you, and you alone, can ascer
tain whether these feelings are your own. I need not
tell you that an unapplied Saviour, is no Saviour to
your souls. I need not tell you that the hiding-place, is
a hiding-place to him who is within it, not to him who
stands without : that the covert, is no covert to him who re
mains uncovered; that a Christian baptism, a Christian
sanctuary and Christan ministry, yea, and even a Christ
himself, are necessarily no safeguard to you. If 3'ou stand
without, justice must have its course ; the law which you
have broken must be avenged ; the Saviour whom you
have rejected must be glorified, if not by you, in your sal
vation, then upon you, in your punishment. If the safety,
which every redeemed and ransomed child of God may

THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE.

27

possess, is not yours, it is only because you accept it not ;
if the Spirit is not yours, it is only because you seek him
not ; if the Lord Jesus Ghrist is not yours, it is only be
cause you love him not. O fearful state for any indivi
dual possessing within him a never-dying soul, and
looking forward to a never-ending existence ; but most
fearful to you, if such there be, who, although the bap
tized members of the outward church of Christ, have
never sought, are not now seeking, a real interest in his
blood, a conformity to his will, a place in his kingdom.
II. But let us proceed from the consideration of the
similitude which regards his people's safety, to that which
regards his people's comfort.
A man shall be as " rivers of water in a dry place,, as the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land." While the
" rock," in climates and countries, such as we have
alluded to, shadows forth the strength and protection
which the Lord Jesus Christ offers to his people, "rivers
of water," beneath a burning sun, and on a burning soil,
equally shadow forth comfort and consolation.
In passing through the world, however, the people of
the world, surrounded by its joys, courted by its friends,
backed by its good opinions, may be enabled to delight in
it, to the children of God it is ofttimes, " a dry and barren
place." There are many causes, externally and inter
nally, to make it so. There are times when trials and
afflictions and anxieties press closely upon us; when
those we love are laid upon beds of sickness, or followed
to an early grave ; when our prospects are darkened by
disappointment, or marred by adversity ; when the world,
at all times destitute of the real consolations of the Chris
tian, becomes more barren, and more desolate than the
wide and waste-howling wilderness itself. At times like
these, whither can the child of God betake himself? You

25 THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE.
look not for earthly succour ; it is vain to look, for all
those whom you love are perhaps plunged in the same
calamity, borne down by the same trial as yourself. How
blessed, then, to feel that there is one who visited this
world of ours, and lived as you are now living ; who
carried about with him a body of infirmity and death ;
who grieved for the same losses, and wept over the same
afflictions from which you are weeping; and is presented
to you, in the Word of God, as man, that you may feel
assured of his sympathy, while he is also presented to
you as God, that you may feel certain of his power.
Does your soul, then, in these dry places, thirst for con
solation and succour? That Man is proclaimed in the
text to be as " rivers of water in a dry place ;" that Man,
in the days of his flesh, "stood and cried, If any man
thirst, let him come unto me and drink," and " the water
that I shall give him, shall be in him a well of water
springing up into everlasting life.'*
Here then is your consolation ; as your safety is to be
found in Christ, so also is your comfort. He shall be to
you not only a covert from God's wrath, but a river;
nay more, rivers, to show the abundance of his consola
tions, "rivers of water," when you are fainting under
the trials, or anxieties, or distresses of the world. Now,
brethren, do you know any thing of the blessedness of
this source of consolation ? It is not enough that the
river is running at your feet, but you must know that it
is there, you must drink of its waters, or they will not
assuage your thirst. Recollect a beautiful illustration of
this in the history of Hagar, when driven from the tent
of Abraham. You will remember that when she was
cast out into the wilderness with her child, and had
looked in vain for a supply of water ; when all that was
in the bottle was spent, when the streamlets were dry,

THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE.

29

and the clouds promised no rain, she sat down in utter
hopelessness and helplessness, having cast the child
under one of the shrubs that she might not see it die.
And we are told, that as she lifted up her voice and wept,
the Angel of the Lord called to her out of heaven, and
said, "What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not: and God
opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water," suf
ficient, amply sufficient, for the need both of the mother
and the child, during their whole sojourn in the wilder
ness. How beautiful an instance of the mercy and the
power of God I How apt a type of the Christian's situa
tion here below. You may at this moment be sitting
by " the river of water," of which I am speaking, and
yet be as ignorant — as practically ignorant of its exist
ence, as Hagar was ; as little benefitted, and as little
blessed, as if its healing waters were still a sealed foun
tain, which had never been opened, or a river locked in
everlasting ice, and whose streams never poured forth
rich abundance at your feet. What aileth thee, that
thou seest it not? Pray to Him who alone can open
your eyes. Pray to God for his dear Son's sake, to
show you the well which stands beside you, whose
living waters are for ever full, for ever flowing, and of
which, if any man drink, he shall never thirst. Beseech
him to reveal to you the Son of his love, as a full and
sufficient Saviour ; one who will not only bear all your
sins, but all your sorrows, and not only be your strength
and your salvation, but your joy, your peace, your strong
consolation. Lastly, are there none among you, even of the child
ren of God, who find this world to be a " weary land,"
on account of the spiritual disquietudes of your pil
grimage, not merely those you behold around you, but
those which you continually experience within you;
3*

30 THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE.
none, who, although reconciled, as we hope, to the God
of your salvation, still find constant opposition, and toil,
and conflict, from the troubles of the journey, and like
the Israelites of old, are often " much discouraged be
cause of the way ?" Yes, doubtless, there are some of
you who can say with the Psalmist, " I had fainted,
unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord, in
the land of the living." Doubtless, there are many who
even with this source of consolation, are still continually
distressed by the little spirituality of heart and life to
which you have attained. Your daily feeling is that
you are still so worldly, so cold, so indifferent to the God
and Saviour of your soul, that amid the upbraidings of
your own conscience, and the unceasing attacks_of your
spiritual enemies, this is to you, indeed, a " weary world,"
and a toilsome journey, and ofttimes do you wish its
labours over, and yourself at home. Yet, weary as is
the way, beloved brethren, every mile of it must be trod
den, and your anxiety must be rather to quit you like
men, and be strong; to "endure hardness as a good
soldier of Jesus Christ," than to be in haste for the rest
which remaineth for you at that journey's end.
Do you ask how you shall be enabled to achieve this?
Let the words of the text point out your remedy. There
is not only a hiding-place and a covert, but a rock, and
a great rock, in this weary land. You have already
found it a hiding-place, but perhaps you have contented
yourselves with coming just within the range of its
shadow ; you have been satisfied with escaping from the
burning beams of God's wrath, and the fiery darts of the
wicked one ; but you are still only within the extremest
limit of this overshadowing rock. Be persuaded, then,
no longer to rest and settle there ; pray and strive and
labour to advance. You may be partially sheltered

THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE.

31

where you are, you may even be safe where you are ;
but as you draw further and further within the Rock of
your salvation, you will find an increase of its sheltering
peace and comfort, which you now but little know.
There are recesses in that Rock into which you are
specially invited; and the closer you draw, the more
boldly you advance, the more welcome, the more happy,
the more blessed shall you be. There are veins of ore
in that Rock sufficient to enrich ten thousand worlds, for
the Word of the living God has called them " the un
searchable riches of Christ ;" but they will not enrich
you if you keep at a distance from them; you must
work the mine, you must dig the ore, you must, by
prayer and faith, appropriate it, make it your own, use
it, enjoy it, live by it and upon it, or you derive not
half the comforts and consolations which are treasured
up for you in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Seek these more constantly, more prayerfully, more
earnestly ; they will amply repay the search ; you shall
find in them wealth which neither Satan nor conscience
can disturb, joy which shall gladden every stage of the
journey, and yet, throughout it all, shall be only.in the
bud, but shall break forth into an everlasting fruit-bearing
at the journey's end.
Come then, this day, and commemorate the blessings
of which we have now spoken ; draw near with thankful
and rejoicing hearts to the table of him who loved you
and gave himself for you. Do not reject his invitation ;
remember it was purchased by the life's blood of him
who offers it. Do not refuse to meet him here, whom
you hope to meet and live with in heaven. Do not turn
your back upon a blessing, which love, boundless as
eternity itself, has purchased for you ; but draw near with

32 THE CHRISTIAN'S REFUGE.
faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort, and
like the beloved apostle, sit down this day under the
shadow of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever.
And may God grant that we all, who are partakers of the
symbols here, may together partake of the marriage
supper of the Lamb in the kingdom of our Father !

SERMON III.
CHRIST— THE FULNESS OF THE BE
LIEVER.

Ephesians i. 22, 23. (Part.)
The head over all things to the Church, which is his body, the
fulness of him that filleth all in all.
The great and blessed truth revealed to us in the text
is not confined to this single passage of the Divine word :
it is to be found propounded again and again ; in the
Epistle from which the text is taken ; in the First Epistle
to the Corinthians ; and in the Epistle to the Colossians
— sufficient evidence of its great and remarkable promi
nency in the teaching of the Spirit, and of its deep im
portance to the people of God. But then, brethren, it is
to the people of God alone that it speaks. It contains
nothing for the world ; the nominal Christian, the mere
outward member of our truly scriptural Church, the man
attached to it by birth, or by accident, will find nothing
in this high subject to gratify his curiosity, or to delight
his taste, or even, I fear, to enlarge his knowledge; ex
cept it is by showing him that there are great and im
portant truths in the religion he professes, of which he
is at present utterly ignorant ; for the blessed declarations
before us will be to him a sealed treasure, while to the
spiritually enlightened mind they are as plain, and as
influential, as any to be found in the revelation of God.
33

34 CHRIST THE FULNESS
The truth in the text is conveyed by a very simple
metaphor, which represents tbe Church of God, i. e.,
not merely our own national Church, which forms,
however, we trust, one of its most beauteous members,
but the whole family of believers throughout all time;
those now in heaven, and those now on earth, and those
who shall follow us, and fill up our places in the battle
when we are enjoying the repose of the victory. It re
presents, I say, the whole_Churcb. of God so composed,
under the similitude of one human body, of which the
Lord Jesus Christ is the one and only spiritual Head.
It then declares that this body, the Church, forms the
fulness, or the glory of Christ, who "filleth all in all."
My intention is, with God's help, to consider these
great truths as developed in the text, under two distinct
heads. I. The nature of Christ's relationship to the Church,
and his employment.
II. The nature of the Church's relationship to Christ,
and her exceeding great and precious privileges.
I. Then, Christ is the " Head over all things to the
Church," and " filleth all in all."
When the apostle declares that Christ is the Head of
the Church, doubtless, his first and most obvious inten
tion is to mark his pre-eminence, to demonstrate, as he
has elsewhere declared, that " God hath highly exalted
him, and given him a name which is above every name ;
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of
things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under
the earth; and that every tongue should confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
(Phil. ii. 9 — 11.) But this is far from being all that is
involved in the relationship. And this the same apostle
distinctly illustrates when speaking of Christ as the Head,

OF THE BELIEVER. og
in the Epistle to the Colossians, he immediately adds,
" From which all the body by joints and bands having
nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth
with the increase of God."
It is clear, then, from this passage, " having nourish
ment ministered," that it refers to Christ as our Head,
not only in point of pre-eminence, but in point of in
fluence. For as in the human body all the nerves spring
from the brain, and yet communicate life and feeling to
every part of the body, down even to the smallest and
remotest member, so all spiritual life, and all spiritual
feeling in the Church of God, take their rise from one
great and glorified Head; and spread downward from
that source of influence into the heart of every individual
member. Observe, not only the doctrinal truth, but the practical
lesson, which immediately flows from this important fact.
Until you are spiritually united by a true and living faith
to the Lord Jesus Christ, you must inevitably be as desti
tute of spiritual life and feeling, as a human body, from
which the head has been separated, would be destitute
of all sense and of all motion. While, on the other hand,
when by a living and obeying faith (for none other is a
living faith) you are united to our adorable Redeemer;
when yoii have been led to choose him for your portion,
to accept him in all his offices for your full and sufficient
Saviour, casting your soul unreservedly upon the promises
of God in Christ Jesus; you become spiritually members
of his body, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. Your
" life is hid with Christ in God." All that you need of
strength, of light, of grace, of guidance, are treasured up
for you in him, and are to be daily drawn out by you
from him, according to your daily wants, your daily sor
rows, and your daily temptations, and trials.

gg CHRIST THE FULNESS
We have said that this is the practical lesson to be de
duced from the scriptural relationship of the Redeemer to
the Church which he has purchased with his own blood.
Now let us mark the great encouragement to this lesson
which may be drawn from the employment of the Re
deemer, adverted to in the text. He " filleth all in all."
The true and sincere followers of God among you
well know your own emptiness. You are making larger
discoveries of it every day and every hour. When you
would do good, evil is present with you. When you
should enter into good resolutions, you are deficient in
the will to do so, and when you have entered into them,
you are destitute of the power of accomplishing them ;
and all this is matter of personal and individual expe
rience, just as certainly as of the Divine declaration,
" Without me, ye can do nothing."
Under this feeling then, of utter incapacity, look up
ward to your great and glorified Head, and as you have
already heard the nature of his relationship to his Church,
hear also for your encouragement and consolation, the
nature of his employment, that " he filleth all in all."
What a delightful view does this present to the Chris
tian of the Christian's Lord ! He is for ever employed in
filling up all graces, all wants, all imperfections, in all his
members, by the prevailing power of his intercession, by
the continual outpourings of his Spirit, by the constant
impartings of himself. To make this still more plain ;
you possess an understanding, a will, an imagination, a
memory, and a heart; all these, then, the Lord Jesus
Christ has undertaken, from the character in which the
text portrays him, to fill even to overflowing; your un
derstanding with spiritual thoughts, youv will with hea
venly desires, your memory with holy recollections, your

OF THE BELIEVER.

37

imagination with glorious anticipations, your heart with
himself. It is true, that to effect this great work in every indi
vidual member of his blessed body, much time, much
teaching, and, in many instances, much affliction, much
trial, will be needed, but it is not the less true that it shall
be done.
It may be, that some whom I am now addressing, are
thinking, while they hear these great and important
truths, Would that I might indeed hope that this could
be verified in my own case ! But I have been long seek
ing the truth, long desiring to know more and more of
God, and of my duty; and yet I feel as if with me the
great work were for ever to be recommenced; there is
scarcely any perceptible advance ; there is almost as little
of spiritual life now within my heart as there ever was,
and yet, I greatly fear, as much as there ever will be.
Upon this point, Christian brethren, you are not always
the most unprejudiced judges; while the many are apt
to determine far too favourably in their own cause, there
will always be a few of the real children of God, who
will write bitter things against themselves, which the
Lord hath not written, and look gloomily and despond-
ingly upon their own case, while the Spirit of God is
speaking peace and offering strong consolation.
Now as Christian ministers, there are few duties more
delightful than to offer the encouragements with which
our Master has intrusted us for the comfort of such souls
as these; to send them, by God's help, forward on their
Christian course contented and rejoicing. We would say
then to you, and such as you, — and we would not be
deterred from saying it, by the knowledge of that fatal
chemistry by which the devil can distil the strongest
poison from the sweetest flowers that grow in the garden
4

3g CHRIST THE FULNESS
of God, — we would say to you, the Saviour whom you
serve, and who has reconciled you to your Heavenly
Father, is engaged to "fill all in all ;" to fill up all wants
in all his members, to support every broken reed, to kin
dle into a flame every smoking flax; therefore you, al
though the feeblest, have no cause to despond; or yon,
although the youngest, the weakest, the most empty,
have no cause to despair. As long as there is on your
part, humble and holy walking, sincere and faithful seek
ing, earnest and conscientious acting according to the
light and grace which God has given you, so long will
there be, on his part, a fulfilment of this most blessed of
his offices, the strengthening and refreshing of your souls,
the guiding and the guarding of your steps, the filling up
of your manifold deficiencies.
How encouraging is the thought, how blessed the
view which this consideration presents us with. "To
you who believe," says an apostle, "Christ is precious;"
but how precious even an apostle could not say. You
love him now, because he calls you, justifies you, sancti
fies you. You will love him more as time wears on,
and as you advance in your Christian life and character;
for as a Saviour you will know him more; and to know
him is to love him. You will love him still better at
I he last great day, when time shall be no longer, because
you will hear from his own lips the sentence which shall
pronounce you blessed. But when all these are over,
when there are no more sins Jto pardon, no more pollu
tions to cleanse, no more sentences to pass, what will
there be for ever and for ever to draw forth your feelings,
your gratitude, your love? There will still be this
blessed relationship in which we are permitted to view
him even here, " Head over all things to his Church."
The same relationship of which you have now begun

OF THE BELIEVER. 39
to taste the blessedness and the joy, but then grown up,
matured, and perfected ; leaving him amidst the fulness
of your perfections, nothing to fill up in you ; and leav
ing you amidst the fulness of your fruition, nothing to
desire from him. For he who is now employed in fill
ing up all in all, shall then have filled up all in all.
The work will be for ever over, but the relationship will
for ever remain. Oh, most perfect and blessed accom
plishment of our Lord's dying petition, " That they all
may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee,
that they also may be one in us."
We proceed, Secondly, To consider the relationship
in which the Church stands to Christ, and her exceed
ing great and precious privileges.
The Church is, as we have seen, described in the text,
in the very remarkable character of Christ's body and of
Christ's fulness ; " the fulness of him who filleth all
in all."
How little does the world, how little does even the
Church of God, think of its own privileges and honour!
After all the great and glorious things spoken of the
Saviour, that this little flock, this poor despised company,
composed of many of the weakest men, and the feeblest
women, and the most helpless children ; and treated as
the offscouring of all things, the very scorn and ridicule
of a self-sufficient and ignorant world ; should be de
clared by the immutable Word of God to be the Saviour's
body and the Saviour's fulness, his honour, and his glory,
and his bride! So completely his purchased possession,
the prize for which he was content to pour forth his life's
blood like water from the cross, that if it were possible
that the gates of hell could prevail against her, so that
she could perish, he would be robbed of his reward. If
David could say of the mere type of the spiritual Church,

40

CHRIST THE FULNESS

" Very excellent things are spoken of thee, thou city of
God," what ought the Christian to feel when consider
ing the language in which that Church is itself described?
But this we conceive to be one of "the great faults of
Christians at the present day ; they look at the Word of
God, and at the promises of God, as applying to them
selves as individuals, and do not endeavour to take de
light in them as applicable to the Church as a body,
and to themselves as members of that body. What a
powerful incentive to Christian concord and Christian
unity is thus destroyed ! What an additional bond of
love would it be, how much more would exist of that
Christian sympathy which rejoices with those who re
joice, and which weeps with those who weep, and which
delights, in bearing one another's burdens, and so fulfil
ling the law of Christ, if we more prayerfully and more
constantly cultivated the habit of looking upon ourselves
and all our fellow-worshippers as members of one re
deemed family, one mystical body, whose head is Christ!
But even this important lesson is not all that we might
derive from keeping the scriptural view of the subject
continually in our sight. There are two peculiarly en
couraging deductions which may be drawn from it for
the encouragement of that class which I have already
addressed ; you who fear, that notwithstanding every
effort of watchfulness and prayer, you shall never arrive,
in Christian graces, at the stature of the fulness of Christ;
and you, who have equal doubts and fears, lest you
should never be admitted into the presence of Christ.
You, then, who fear that you shall never attain to the
full developement of the Christian character — if the view
which we have already taken of the employment of tlie
Redeemer, in filling up the measure of his people, be
not sufficient to assure you — consider this, that the ful-

OF THE BELIEVER.

41

ness of Christ, his very glory itself, is actually made to
consist of every member grown up to that fulness of
stature which God has appointed him.
In passing through the world, we are constantly led
to observe the great disparity, not only between the
natural endowments and the adventitious advantages,
but between the spiritual gifts and graces of (hose, who
we cannot doubt are equally sincere,, and equally among
the true people of God : some, for instance, possessing
high, very high degrees of knowledge, which are not
vouchsafed to others ; and we are sometimes tempted to
wonder how it is possible that Christians, differing so
widely iu their spiritual stature now, shall all be equally
happy, and all be united in the same heaven hereafter.
The view, then, which we derive from this portion of
our text clears up the mystery. If the Church be indeed
the body of Christ, all these differences and disparities
of growth have evidently been foreseen and provided
for; and on the last great day, when the body shall have
grown up to its perfection, and all the members of that
body shall be gathered to their glorified Head, we shall
no longer wonder at the disproportions. Every, even
the weakest and smallest of the company of true believers,
will find his place in that perfect body, though each will
differ from the other ; and it will then be seen that each
has attained just those proportions which were necessary
to the perfect symmetry of the body of Christ, and to
that place in the body which each was appointed to fill.
But let not these considerations, which are intended to
encourage the desponding, be perverted (o the content
ment of the indolent, or the self-satisfied Christian. It
is only when you have used, and are using, all " diligence
to make your calling and election sure," that you can
take the slightest encouragement from declarations such
4*

42 CHRIST THE FULNESS
as these. The very fact that you are ceasing to labour,
to strive, or to pray, would be among the most con
vincing proofs that you have neither part nor lot in the
matter; for that grace of God which is never withheld
from the faithful prayer of the weakest belieyer, will never
be extended to the self-satisfied, the careless, or the sloth
ful professor.
Lastly, to show that if you are living a life of holy
and devoted obedience to God, springing from a simple
reliance upon all that Christ has done, and is now doing,
for your salvation, your fears of not being finally admitted
into his presence are utterly vain.
If the Church be the body of Christ, then must every
one of its true members, whether great or small, be
present on that day, when the Lord Jesus Christ " shall
see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied ;" on that
day, when "he shall present it to himself, a glorious
church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing,
but holy and without blemish." If in the natural body,
the head cannot say even to the feet, I have no need of
you; then neither in the spiritual body will Christ say
to the weakest of his children, I have no need of thee.
Every soul that is here converted to himself, every
individual engaged by a life of holiness, in living to him,
is viewed by him as one stone more placed in the spiri
tual temple, as one member more added to its body.
And until all the members be added, and unless all
the members be preserved, the glory of Christ would be
imperfect, his body incomplete. If, then, you are the
very lowest and most inconsiderable of all the spiritual
members of the Church of Christ on earth, the salvation
of your single soul is as necessary to the perfect glorifica
tion of the Saviour as the salvation of the most advanced
apostle or prophet who ever lived; yea, even as the re-

OF THE BELIEVER.

43

demption of a world. For, if one infant child of God
were wanting, Jesus Christ could not be full, since he
has declared that the Church is his fulness, and as a
true and living member of that Church, even that child
must help to make up that fulness. The glory of heaven
would not content the Saviour if the humblest member
of his body were not there. Therefore, even during the
days of his flesh, we find him praying, "Father, I will
that they also whom thou hast given me, be with me
where I am." And again, "This is the Father's will,
that of all which he hath given me, I should lose nothing,
but should raise it up again at the last day." And again,
" It is not the will of your heavenly Father, that one of
these little ones should perish." As soon would a mortal
man submit willingly to be torn limb from limb, as that
the Lord Jesus Christ would consent to lose one inmate
of his blessed family, one member of his body, one jewel
of his crown.
May the Spirit of our God bestow abundantly upon all
of us the comfort of these soul-encouraging views, of
which the Word of our God so frequently and so largely
predicates. That he may do so, beloved Christian breth
ren, accustom yourselves often to dwell prayerfully and
gratefully upon those blessed truths of which we have
now spoken : and let the eye of faith be daily looking
forward to that glorious day when they shall all be
realized : when all the component parts of that colossal
body of which Christ is the head, shall be gathered from
the four winds, and from one end of heaven to the other,
and shall all meet together once and for ever, in his
blessed and glorious presence. When, at the voice of
the archangel, which is the trump of God, all those who
have departed this life in his faith and fear — many whom
we have known, and some whom we have dearly and

44 CHRIST THE FULNESS OF THE BELIEVER.
tenderly loved, all true believers of every age and country
and kindred and tongue, the profoundest sages of Chris
tian antiquity, the helpless and ignorant babe who died
yesterday — shall alike constitute the parts of but one
beautiful and perfect body; as the stones of one vast
temple, which, however different in their dimensions,
each fills the niche appropriated to itself, and each,
whether small or great, adds in equal proportion to the
beauty and the grandeur of the whole : on that great and
coming day, may it be found that of all who now wor
ship with us in the earthly temples of our God none may
be absent, none may be excluded from that spiritual
edifice, which has been more than five thousand years in
building, and which, when completed, shall endure
through all the ages of eternity !

SERMON IV.
THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN.

Acts xxvi. 28.
Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.
In speaking to you upon these words, it is not my in
tention to refer at all to the narrative in which they occur,
but to consider them simply as the declaration of a worldly
man, that he was almost persuaded to be a Christian, and
to deduce from it this important fact, that what was the
case with Agrippa, must be the case with others, may be
the case with us. It is therefore deeply important, as St.
Paul says, " to examine ourselves, whether we be in the
faith," lest, after years of profession, of church-going, of
sermons, and of sacraments, any of us may be found to
have come short of it, any of us may be discovered, at
the last great day of account, when ministers and people
shall again be assembled, to have been only almost,
while we believed ourselves to have been altogether
Christians. The great difficulties in the subject before us are these;
on the one hand, to speak with sufficient plainness to
penetrate the disguises and the deceits of the proverbially
deceitful natural heart; and on the other, to avoid dis
tressing the tender consciences of those real children of
God, who are the most likely to take to themselves the
'45

46 THE ALMOST CHRI8TIAN.
very warnings and cautions which least of all apply to
them. May the Holy Spirit of God be present with us, help
ing us to unveil the mere professor of religion, and to lay
open his heart to his own sight and his own knowledge;
and at the same time to prevent those who are really in
earnest in this great and blessed work from being cast
down by the sight of its difficulties, or dismayed by the
awful thought, that many who appear to have set their
foot on the threshold of heaven, shall never enter within
its everlasting gates.
I shall begin by endeavouring to distinguish the class
whom I would address as almost Christians. First, it is
evident that I do not refer to those who are living in a
course of habitual and notorious sin ; they are so far from
being almost Christians, that despite their baptism and
their name, they are much nearer altogether Heathen,
"aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, without hope
and without God."
It is evident, again, I do not speak of those who, with
out any gross delinquencies, are living hves of careless
thoughtlessness, to whom religion is at best but a Sunday
occupation, and who, if they have never had a doubt
upon the subject, have never had either a scriptural hope,
or a holy fear. These clearly cannot even be almost
such persons as Agrippa spake of being, and as St. Paul,
through Divine grace, really was.
When, therefore, I speak of you who are almost per
suaded to be Christians, I speak of you who have ad
vanced as far beyond the two classes to whom I have
already alluded, as you have fallen short of that into
which I trust the free and sovereign grace of God will
one day bring you. It is to you I speak, and that you
may be led to know, each for himself, whether you be-

THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN. 47
long to the class to which I refer, I shall endeavour to
point out to you, with all plainness and sincerity, those
delicate and yet important shades of distinction which
exist between the almost Christian and the wholly and
entirely Christian; earnesdy beseeching you not to apply
the description to your neighbours, but to yourself, to ask
upon each point that passes in review before you, " Lord,
is it I?"
The almost Christian, then, is one who has advanced
to a certain length upon all the great and leading charac
teristics which distinguish the real people of God from the
people of the world. These characteristics are —
I. The enlightening of the understanding and the
conscience. II. The converting of the will and the affections.
III. The reforming of the life and conversation.
First, then, the almost Christian is one who has ad
vanced very far in the enlightening of the understanding
and the conscience. With regard to the understanding,
it is difficult to say how far we may not advance upon
this great characteristic of the children of God, and yet
have no portion with them of his Spirit. From frequently
hearing the truths of the Gospel plainly stated, you may
Jeam to understand them, to talk of them, to enter into
all the shades of doctrine, to know to the most minute
article of a creed, all that is Orthodox, and all that is hete
rodox ; you may be enabled to unfold the mysteries of
redemption to others, and to dwell upon the beauties of
its wondrous scheme, and the excellencies of its salvation,
till those who hear you are astonished at the clearness of
your views, and the depth of your Christian experience.
You may go further than this ; you may be perfectly
convinced of the. truth of all that you advance ; of the
certainty that none can be saved but those who cordially

48 THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN.
and entirely embrace the doctrines of eternal life which
you so well understand ; and yet, with all this illumina
tion of the understanding, you may never actually em
brace these truths yourself.
As with the understanding, so with the conscience;
your conscience may enjoy perfect peace, the last best
gift of God's good Spirit, when built upon a right founda
tion (even the simple reliance upon the blood of Christ);
but you may enjoy a counterfeit of this peace, which
may only be the gift of the spirit of carnal security, or
the spirit of deadly slumber. And as you may easily
attain to peace of conscience in an unrenewed state of
heart, so may you in the same state attain to trouble and
distress of conscience, which are perhaps even less am
biguous evidences of a work of the Spirit than peace
itself. You may suffer under the strongest convictions
of sin without these convictions being ever followed by
conversion. After the commission of some sins more
disgraceful, or more subversive of your worldly happi
ness, your character, your reputation, or your health,
than many others, you may be visited with the strongest
compunctions and the deepest sorrow ; you may lament
your iniquity and your folly, and possess many of the
true signs of a genuine repentance, and yet never attain
to genuine repentance.
There is a remarkable testimony to the truth of this in
the example of Cain ; he groaned beneath the weight of
his sin and of God's disapprobation; he cried out, "My
punishment is greater than I can bear." Judas, again, is
another example ; he could find no respite from the
horrors of an accusing conscience but in a self-inflicted
death. Yet these were merely the natural feelings of
natural men, who were not even almost Christians;
there can therefore be no doubt, that he who deserves

THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN.

49

that appellation may have advanced quite as far as these,
and be as utterly destitute as they were of any portion of
saving grace. But perhaps some among you will very
naturally inquire, If this be so, how am I to discriminate?
How am I, in my own case, to ascertain whether the en
lightening of my understanding and of my conscience
may not be equally fallacious with those of whom I
have just heard; whether, after all, that which I have
imagined to be the light of the Sun of Righteousness,
the rays which beam from the cross of the Redeemer,
and have guided my feet into the way of peace, may not
be an ignis fatuus, that is merely seducing me to my
destruction. Be assured that God has not left himself
without a witness, or his people without a guide, upon
such important points as these. The enlightening of the
understanding and conscience of the true Christian differs
from that of which I have spoken in these important
particulars; while it lights it guides; it is no barren light,
it makes the soul grow in grace, and bring forth the fruits
of holiness unto the praise of God. It is not only thus
an influential knowledge, but it is a transforming know
ledge, — as St. Paul says, " We all, as in a glass, behold
the glory of the Lord, and are changed into the same
image." This is the invariable effect upon the heart of
the altogether Christian ; he is changed into some blessed,
although imperfect resemblance, of his divine Master.
But if, with an increase of knowledge, you are sensible
of no increase of holiness, of humility, of self-distrust, of
close-walking with God ; if, with peace of conscience,
you are aware of no increase of dependence upon the
finished salvation of your Lord and Saviour; if, with
trouble of conscience, you are sensible of no increased
hatred of sin, no earnest strivings against it, even in its
most secret and least suspected advances; then, indeed,
5

50

THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN.

you have the greatest possible cause of apprehension and
doubt, lest your foundation be on the sand, and your
superstruction " the wood, hay, stubble," which shall be
scattered as dust before the whirlwind in the great day
of the Lord.
The second characteristic which I have mentioned, as
invariably found in the true people of God, and the
counterfeit of which is not uncommonly seen in the
almost Christian, is the conversion of the will and the
affections. In the true people of God the conversion of the will is
thorough and entire. It is changed by God's grace,
drawn by the sweet but gentle influence of such natural
arguments as persuade without compulsion ; for though
God uses infinite power, he uses no violence; he sub
dues the will, he does not compel it. He overcomes a
sinner's prejudices as completely as he does his resistance.
He does not force him to an obedience painful and odious,
like the obedience of a slave, but wins him to an obe
dience agreeable and delightful, like tbe obedience of a
son. He does not bring him to submit to God without,
at the same time, teaching him that it is bis choicest hap
piness and his truest welfare to do so, enabling him to
love the will of God, and to say from his heart, " Thy
commandments are not grievous." This, again, marks
another striking distinction between the real people of
God, and the almost Christian. For you may be led to
give up many a sinful gratification, to attend to many a
spiritual duty, so that to the eye of man there may be no
distinction whatever between the almost and altogether
Christian. But how is it to Him who sees the heart?
The distinction to the eye of God is as visible as if no
outward act had ever been influenced, no outward ser
vice performed. He sees that the very sin which you

THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN. 5J
relinquish is dearer to you than the duties you profess to
practise. That, while spiritual services are tedious and
burdensome to you, sinful pleasures and delights really
engage your hearts, and are as sweet and fascinating to
you as they ever were. And yet with all this, your
affections even, as well as your wills, may be in some
degree influences by religious exercises and feelings;
you may often exclaim, "Would to God that I were
what I ought to be! Would that I were more con
sistent, and more devout, and more holy !" You may
often sigh to think how much there is in religion which
you cannot but admire, though to which you have never
attained ; you may almost envy those who are more in
earnest than yourself, and offer a few faint and languid
aspirations that you may die the death of the tighteous,
and that your last end may be like his ; you may, in
fact, however paradoxical it may appear, wish yourself
holy, and yet remain willingly sinful ; you may wish
that you were better, and yet never take one step to
wards amendment. Oh 1 if heaven could be gained by
wishing for it, how few would be excluded from its
blessed abodes. When you hear an awakening or a
convincing sermon, you may be perfectly unable to
resist its appeals, or to answer its arguments; when
eternity is set before you with its certainty and its near
ness, its delights or its terrors, you may be so powerfully
affected by it, that it may remain upon your memory,
and influence your thoughts and feelings for days after
wards; when the love of Christ, and the atonement of
Christ, and the sufferings and the agonies of Christ are
dwelt upon, you may feel them to the very ground of
your heart ; they may even draw tears from your eyes,
but they may be such feelings as have been excited, or
such tears as you have shed at many an affecting tragedy,

52

THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN.

or over many a foolish novel, the merely natural emo
tions of the merely natural man, and evidence neither a
converted heart nor spiritual affections. Again, then,
mark the contrast ; to be altogether a Christian does not
depend in any manner upon these transitory excitements;
the true conversion of will and affections^ is a holy, a
constant, a calm and prayerful striving* to render our will
conformable in every point to the Divine will, and to
bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of
Christ. The almost Christian never desires or intends
to do this; if he even prays that his affections may be
drawn off from some favourite sin, he does it as St.
Augustine tells us he did while only almost a Christian,
with the mental reservation that God should not do it
now ; that the sin is too dear to be given up at present,
but that at some more convenient season, or some to
morrow which will never come, his whole will shall be
conformed and whole affections given to God.
The third point upon which 1 have proposed to con
sider the almost Christian is, the reformation of his life
and conversation.
That both these may be to a certain and very great
extent effected by one who is still in an unregenerate
state, and therefore not among the true people of God, is
evident, not only from common observation, but from
the Word of God. Observe, for instance, this declara
tion of St. Peter, " If after they have escaped the pollu
tions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled
therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them
than the beginning." It is clear that the apostle does
not here speak of the true children of God, for we know
that the latter end with them will not be worse than the
beginning, since he who is the author is also the finisher

THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN. 53
of their faith, and has promised " to keep that which
they have committed to him against that day." St.
Peter must therefore be delineating the precise class
whom we are now considering, for he speaks of them as
people who have had a head knowledge of Christ Jesus
the Lord ; and even more than this, as people who have
escaped for a time the pollutions of the world. Now
this is just the case with the almost Christian; he may
have advanced even far in outward reformation, as well
as in knowledge, may have escaped the pollutions of the
world, and yet his latter end may be worse than his
beginning. You will observe, the apostle does not say
they have escaped the pollutions of the heart, but of the
world ; it is only an outward work that he is speaking
of, but this outward work of reformation and amendment
may have been a very striking and obvious one, and yet
may have never passed the boundary which divides the
almost from the altogether Christian. The motives
which influence the two classes, and the spirits which
guide them, are wholly different; and thus, though the
converted man must be a reformed man, the reformed
man may be as wholly distinct from the converted man
in the sight of God, as darkness from light. For in
stance, even when the most completely reformed, you
may have only exchanged one sin for another, a public
sin which would disgrace you before men, for a private
sin, known only to God; or you may have put away
many of your sins, only to retain some that are the
dearest, and most indispensable; or you may change
from a life of dishonesty and deceitfulness towards men,
to a life of honesty and probity; while God, his honour
and his glory, are as completely blotted from your
memory and your heart in the latter state, as in the
former. Do not deceive yourselves by imagining, even
5*

54 THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN.
this must necessarily be the work of the Spirit of God.
Be assured, he has no hand in any thing so unscriptural
and unholy. I believe that the great assistant of this
kind of partial reformation is the devil. That it is he
who helps men to relinquish some sins, only that he
may satisfy their souls with this miserable compromise,
and bind their remaining sins upon their hearts, with
chains of iron.
I do not scruple to say, because the whole tenor of
God's Word compels me, that you are not in reality
nearer God in this state of outward reformation, when it
extends no farther, which does not influence the secret
conduct, or purify the thoughts, or convert (he soul, than
you weie while in the most reckless course of open pro
fligacy : you may imagine that you are daily ascending
higher and higher towards heaven, that the walls of the
celestial city are within your view ; but, be assured, upon
the authority of God himself, that in attempting to reach
them thus, it is with the miserable certainty of finally
and irrevocably falling; and that at the very moment
when you think that you have risen the highest, and
attained the most nearly to the heavenly mansions, you
are only the more certain of tumbling headlong from the
dizzy height, and of plunging the deeper into the very
lowest depths of hell beneath.
My brethren, in concluding this important subject, I
would desire to impress its importance upon you, by en
forcing a single consideration ! You have an eternity
before you, of which you must shortly be partakers; an
eternity which you cannot avoid, and out of which there
will be no escape. Is it not, then, of unutterable conse
quence that you should ascertain where you are to spend
it ? Can any thing which can engage your thoughts and
your reflections possess a thousandth part the same de-

THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN. 55
gree of interest? Then attend to me while I remind
you of this unquestionable fact, that, whoever you are,
whatever you are, whatever be your rank, whatever be
your station, you must be either in a state of grace, or in
a state of nature ; and according to this, when you come
to die, you must find yourself either in a state of salva
tion or a state of condemnation. It is the altogether
Christian who can alone be saved, the almost Christian
will as certainly be condemned as the altogether sinful.
You may, as it were, be suspended between heaven and
earth while you live ; to-day, living for one world, and
to-morrow vibrating towards another; but you cannot be
suspended between heaven and hell when you die : to
one or other, you must assuredly be carried ; in one or
other, your eternity must be spent.
Think you that it is any satisfaction to Judas, amidst
his present agonies, to know that he was once as near the
Saviour as the beloved John ; that he as often heard the
same voice, sat at the same table, partook of the same
instructions, and to the eye of all, but his Divine Master,
appeared as entirely a disciple ? Will it be any satisfac
tion to you, if you finally perish out of Christ, to reflect
that there were hours in your life, when you sat among
the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, partook of their
instructions and their sacraments, and to the eye of even
the holiest of men were ranked among them ; that there
were moments in your life when you were almost per
suaded to cast in your lot with the people of God ? Alas !
so far from satisfaction, will it not add tenfold to your
misery and remorse, to think how near you were then, to
that blessedness from which you are now for ever shut
out. O my brethren, there is not a soul among you who
will be content on that day to be almost saved ; be not
then, I beseech you, content to-day with being almost

KG THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN.
Christians. Take, then, the subject before you, as afford
ing materials for thinking (for I only offer it in tbat light),
to the retirement of your own chambers; try yourselves
honestly upon each of the heads which have been brought
before you. Ask yourself whether the enlightening of
your understanding in Divine things, has been accom
panied by a corresponding influence upon your actions.
Whether your peace of conscience flow from an undi
vided trust in the great atonement of our Divine Re
deemer, and a simple dependence upon his righteous
ness. Whether you desire to give up all your own will,
even its most secret waywardnesses, to the will of God,
to be governed by him, and by him alone ; to yield all
your affections to him, loving nothing in opposition to
him, nothing more than him, nothing in comparison of
him. Whether, lastly, your reformation of life and con
duct flow from the one great principle of love to God, in
Christ Jesus our Lord, even a grateful love flowing from
a heart penetrated, subdued, and softened by a deep sense
of all that our adorable Saviour has done and suffered
for your soul. And now, beloved brethren, if there be
one here present who has been led by the remarks which
have been made, to say secretly, but from his heart,
"Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian;" almost
I resolve to part from that dear sin, to give up that
cherished lust, to avoid that evil companion, to renounce
those things which I know are separating between me
and my God; almost I determine this day to devote my
self, body and soul, to my Redeemer; how earnestly,
how affectionately would I entreat you, by the mercies
of God, by the blood of Christ, by the salvation of your
never-dying spirit, by the duration of eternity, to rest not
here : to cast yourself in secret, fervent prayer before the
mercy-seat, and, like bim of old, not to leave it without

THE ALMOST CHRISTIAN. gij"
a blessing; not to suffer those blessed resolutions to
escape, as probably many before have done, from your
mind, until you have, by God's grace, closed with the
offers of redeeming love, and become, not only almost,
but altogether such us he was who spake the words of
the text, Christ's here, and Christ's for ever.

SEKMON V.
THE BELIEVER'S ASSURED INHERITANCE.

1 Peter i. 3 — 5.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which ac
cording to his abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a
lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to
an inheritance incorruptible, and undefUed, and that fadeth not
away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of
God through faith unto salvation.
The Christian's duties of thanksgiving and praise for
all the temporal blessings, by which he is surrounded,
were set before you from this place, upon the last Sab
bath. In these he can unite with all creation ; for, by a
strong and beautiful figure of speech, we find the Psalm
ist calling upon the sun and moon, the fire and hail, the
snow and vapours, the creeping things, and flying fowls,
to praise the Lord. But there are also subjects upon
which, if the Christian, as is his bounden duty, offers
thanksgivings to his God, he must offer them alone ;
upon which the sun and moon, the mountains and the
hills, are silent ; for which the cattle and creeping things
have no voice; in which even his fellow-men, if they
have never turned their thoughts to the great and holy
subjects which engage his mind, if they are not in fact
also his fellow Christians, cannot unite with him ; in
58

BELIEVER'S ASSURED INHERITANCE.

59

which none can unite, but those who have experienced
the blessings, and partaken of the benefits of which he is
a partaker, and are looking forward to the joys which he
reasonably and unhesitatingly anticipates.
A remarkable instance of the truth of this observation
is afforded us in the words of the text. We there find
the apostle rendering blessings to God for mercies, which
none but the true Christian, the man who is really living
not to time, but to eternity, who has really passed from
a state of indifference to the things of God, in which all
are created, to a state of real and earnest participation
in them, can experience.
It will not therefore, by God's grace, be unprofitable to
analyze this instance of the apostle's thanksgiving. And
there are two ways in which, while I am so employed,
you may render the consideration useful to yourselves ;
first, by considering how far you can individually join
in the thanksgiving of the text. And, secondly, by re
flecting what is the position in which you individually
stand, with regard to God and to eternity, with regard
to your own souls and their salvation, if you cannot
join at all in these praises; which, though, in the
case before us, indicted by an apostle, have unques
tionably been, and shall unquestionably be, the lan
guage of the people of God in every age, and in every
clime, till time shall be no more. I merely throw out
these reflections for the personal consideration of you who
hear me; it is not my intention to dwell upon them,
even for a moment ; my business is simply to explain
the text ; it is yours, if you desire to profit by it, thus to
apply it to your own consciences and hearts : and may
the Almighty God direct you, that you hear not the
Word of God in vain !
We proceed then, to offer a simple analysis of the

60

THE BELIEVER'S

words before us. " Blessed be the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
I. That he has " begotten us again unto a lively hope
by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."
II. That he has prepared an inheritance for us.
III. That he has promised to keep us for the inherit
ance so prepared.
The first object, then, of the apostle's thanksgiving is,
— that God has begotten us again unto a lively hope by
the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
It is natural that the first step in the Christian life
should be the first subject of the Christian's thanksgiving.
God has begotten us again. Yes, my brethren, as
surely as that you were once born of flesh and blood,
so surely, if you are now on the straight and narrow path,
now preparing for a heavenly- inheritance, have you been
born again of the Spirit, made new creatures in Christ
Jesus, taught to put off the old man with his lusts, the
world with its unholy pleasures, self with its sins. It is
for this new creation in the soul, that the apostle first
praises God.
Observe how remarkably strong are the expressions of
his thanksgiving. He does not say, "Blessed be God
that he has reformed us, or improved us ; that he has
made us better than we were in the days of our igno
rance, and sin," but that he has "begotten us again."
How striking must be the alteration ; how entire must be
the change of motives and feelings, of inclination and
practice, to justify such a term as this! Could such a
phrase be ever applicable if the work were only a partial
work ? If we had left off some sins while we cleaved to
others, if we neglected some duties while we practised
others, we would ask any unprejudiced person among
you, if you had met with such a phrase in any

ASSURED INHERITANCE.

61

other book than the Bible, would you have had a mo
ment's doubt as to the meaning of the author? Would
you not yourself have said, Surely the change here
alluded to must be total and entire to justify such an ex
pression? There must be the implantation of a new
principle in the heart to give the full meaning to such
language. And if the phrase, " begotten again," could
lead you to this result, would not the declaration, " God
has begotten us," lead you to another result, viz., that
the work here spoken of cannot be your own. If, by
the unaided efforts of your own resolutions, you could
turn from a death in sin " to a life unto righteousness,"
would it not be a total misapplication of language to say,
that by such a change God had begotten you again ?
Most assuredly it would. The apostle in such a case
might have said, " Blessed be God that we have be
gotten ourselves again ;" but he could never have said,
" Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath be
gotten us," unless, as it most certainly is, the work of
this change in heart and life were wholly and entirely,
from first to last, the work of God himself. Be assured,
therefore, that if you trust to yourself, you will never be
influenced by any thing in yourself, to turn from the follies
and pleasures of sin to holiness and to God, but that you
must prayerfully, faithfully, constantly, seek a power
far greater than your own ; in fact, that you must un
ceasingly desire, and as unceasingly ask for, the sweet
and gentle, but still powerful and prevailing, influence
of God's quickening Spirit. It is he who finds you, as
the Scripture describes you, and as you feel yourselves
to be, " dead in trespasses and sins." It is he who
breathes into your soul the spiritual life of the children
of God. It is he who sees you fast bound by the thou-
6

62

THE BELIEVER'S

sand chains which the corruptions of your own nature,
and the fascinations of this world, have wound around
you; and who, by his all-powerful influence, dissolves
these chains, and frees you from your captivity; and
having given you the spirit of light and life, gives you
also the desire and the will to walk worthy of your high
calling, and to devote your newly-created powers to the
service of your Redeemer and your God. It is for this
that the apostle blesses the " God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ," and rightly blesses him ; for it is
the act of God's own free and sovereign grace, utterly
undeserved, and equally undeserved, by every individual
object of it. If I then address any who have attained
to one scriptural thought of God ; to one heartfelt desire
to know and to serve him ; to one prayerful aspiration to
be what he would have you to be, and what he
alone can make you, you will most readily and most
heartily join in the thanksgiving of the text; and while
others, even the possessors of immortal souls, the heira
of immortality, are like the mountains and the hills,
sunk, in a silence which their hearts cannot enable them
to break, you will join in saying, " Blessed be the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" for this undeserved
mark of his compassion and love. To him be all the
praise and all the glory. To you then, we would only
add, earnestly beseech him to carry forward the work of
mercy, which he alone could have commenced; and be
assured, that he who has begun the good work will con
tinue it until the day of Jesus Christ ; but that neverthe
less, according to his own gracious declaration, even for
this, he will be inquired of by you. But we must turn
to the second great and blessed subject of the aposde's
praises, the " lively hope," which next excites his thanks
givings.

ASSURED INHERITANCE.

63

There are those, my brethren, strange as it may seem
to you, who; when they think of spiritual religion, the
religion of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, think of it as
some gloomy and forbidden mysticism; something of
which they feel themselves to be ignorant, and are rather
inclined to thank God that they are so, believing that the
reception of it would deprive them of the harmless joys
and innocent pleasures of life, and that all religion is a
morose and melancholy thing. This is an argument
against the reception of the truths of the Gospel, so uni
versal, that it is impossible to avoid alluding to it ; and
yet so unscriptural, that the most simple reader of God's
Word can overthrow it. Look at the manner in which
the apostle expresses himself in the very words we are
considering. He blesses God that he has begotten us — -
to what ? To a lively hope, a cheerful expectation, a
soul-delighting and heart-elevating joy, by the resurrec
tion from the dead ; to an " inheritance incorruptible,
undefiled, and that fadeth not away." Does this appear
to be the language of a man who saw any thing in reli
gion of privation or restraint, of gloom or despondency ?
Is it not rather the expression of one who felt that his
greatest present happiness, quite as much as his future
welfare, depended entirely on those views of eternity
upon which the eye of faith had now opened ? He says,
in other words, " Blessed be God that by the resurrection
of Jesus Christ (which was the. seal and sign that his
atonement had been accepted for the remission of our
sins), blessed be God that I have now been created anew
in heart and affections, in motive^ and desires ; that I am
filled with a lively hope of a future inheritance, which
no sorrow can quench, and which death itself shall not
be able to destroy." How elevating such a subject ought
to be ! How cheering such a hope must be, where it is

64

THE BELIEVER'S

rightly received into the heart! There is nothing gloomy,
nothing desponding here. Has the world, and I address
myself to you who know the world, yes, to you who
know it best, and have tried it the most eagerly, and en
joyed it the most unscrupulously, has it, with all its
immunities and rewards, its wealth for the covetous, its
rewards for the ambitious, its luxuries for the indolent,
its gratifications for the sensual, — has it any thing to offer
which can stand a moment's competition with the Chris
tian's lively hope of a future but yet a certain inheritance?
No, brethren, you know that it has not. You know that
there is this, if there were nothing else, which blasts every
sinful pleasure of the world, and is as the never-dying
worm at its heart's core, even the revealed declaration of
our God, " Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth ; and let
thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth ; but know
thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into
judgment." Nay, more than this, were there no judg
ment to come, there is something in the very transitori-
ness of these enjoyments, the very feeling that they are
gone, never to return ; that twenty, thirty, forty years of
enjoyment have all passed away, of which you cannot
purchase back one hour, if you would give a thousand
worlds for it; that must make the worldly man, in his
moments of reflection, a melancholy man. Can they be
otherwise than melancholy, whose pleasures are merely
for the passing day, who have no comforts laid up for
old age and weakness, no consolation ready for a day of
sickness, no hope, no certain hope, in their death ? No !
be assured that the end of that mirth, as the wise man
says, " is heaviness." What would they give, who scoff
at the Christian's hope, who call religion a melancholy
thing; what would the happiest, the most thoughtless,
tlie most successful of the sons of earth— or rather what

ASSURED INHERITANCE.

65

would they not give, when on a bed of sickness, and
about to enter the valley of the shadow of death — for a
single hour of that peace and joy and strong consolation
which the true believer can alone experience; which is
his setded portion now, and which shall be his portion
throughout eternity ?
But we must pass from the apostle's thanksgiving for
the " lively hope" of the Christian, to the consideration
of that inheritance for which he hopes, and the blessed
and invaluable nature of it.
It is called, in the text, an " inheritance incon-uptible,
undefiled, and that fadeth not away." Consider, then,
for a moment, the nature and the blessedness of such a
prospect; and see whether it is not likely to be an in
fluential motive, not merely to present peace and happi
ness, but to present holiness and gratitude towards God.
You are placed here upon earth but for a short and
uncertain period ; for the longest life that ever yet was
lived, could, at the end of it, only enable its possessor to
say with Jacob, " Few and evil have been the days of
the years of my pilgrimage." We will suppose that,
while here, your lot is the happiest ever enjoyed by mor
tals, still all that you possess is transitory, all you do is
defiled, all that you love and enjoy is perpetually fading
from you. The most durable of your possessions cannot
be secured to you, even for the day that passeth over you.
The morning sun sees you rejoicing in your abundance,
the evening sun may behold you destitute and impo
verished. The year opens upon you surrounded by an
affectionate family, closely united to some beloved rela
tive or friend; how will you venture to assure yourself
that it shall not, before its close, see you bereft of every
joy that gladdens life ; separated from the friend that
cheers, or the child that endears it,
6*

gg THE BELIEVER'S
Now turn your eyes from what you are to what you
shall be, from what you now possess, to what is promised
you hereafter. An inheritance is placed before you, in
which every thing is in its nature entirely the reverse of
all that you are now possessing, of which the enjoyment
is declared, by the unerring Word of God, to be eternal,
for it is an inheritance indestructible : in which no taint
of sin shall ever pass upon it, for it is an inheritance un
defiled : in which no change shall ever interrupt or
diminish the happiness of it, for it is an " inheritance
that fadeth not away." No sound of sorrow shall ever
be heard within those blissful abodes. The wealth laid
up in store for you in those imperishable garners shall
never be exhausted. The friends you knew on earth
who have entered there, shall go no more out for ever ;
they are in their Father's house, rejoicing in their Re
deemer's presence, and beholding bis glory.
How delightful is the thought, how blessed the antici
pation, that not a person whom we have loved on earth,
if a real child of God, shall be absent from our future in
heritance, not a joy in which, as Christians, we have
delighted, that we shall not find awaiting us, but per
fectly purified, and unspeakably magnified, in our Re
deemer's kingdom ! That, indeed, is well worthy the
name of an inheritance, where all are heirs, and yet
where nothing is divided, but where each shall enjoy an
abundance of which no mortal tongue can tell the extent ;
where all that is seen and heard, and made in any man
ner the subject of our senses, shall minister delight to
them, to an extent now utterly inconceivable; where
our communion with God shall not be momentary, but
perpetual ; where our perfect union with our Redeemer,
and with all the inhabitants of his kingdom, shall be of
such a nature that it shall form the one great subject of

ASSURED INHERITANCE.

67

our thanksgiving, the one great crowning joy of all our
joys throughout eternity.
Such is a faint and imperfect outline — alas ! how faint
and imperfect !— of that blissful inheritance, for which
the apostle blesseth God, the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, that he has bestowed it upon his people.
But there is yet one peculiar feature, which to every
true and obedient believer in the Lord Jesus Christ,
must yield, while in this world, the highest encourage
ment, the greatest satisfaction. It is, says the apostle, an
inheritance "reserved for you., who are kept by the
power of God through faith unto salvation ;" that is, in
other words, This glorious inheritance is kept for you,
and you are kept for it. Here is a boundless motive for
gratitude, the one substantial ground for the present
peace of the Christian: not that there is in some far
distant clime an inheritance which, by some possibility,
may one day be attained, but of which you can possess
nothing like an assurance here below. Would this be
comfort? There might arise in your minds a certain
undefinable longing for something which appeared de
sirable, when opposed to the comparative worthlessness
of all in which your hands are engaged, or for which
your hearts are striving; but it would not yield that
peace to which we have already alluded, which can defy
the world and its impositions, the flesh and its tempta
tions, the devil and his threats. It is then this peculiar
feature of the Christian's inheritance, which can, and
will, and, blessed be God, daily and hourly, to the hum
ble follower of our Lord and Saviour, does bestow a
peace of mind, and a consolation which can defy all
worldly troubles and afflictions, and place its possessor
in a state where they shall never reach him, — the fact,

68

THE BELIEVER'S

and the assurance of that fact, that heaven is reserved for
him, and he, by God's grace, preserved for heaven.
There are times when you, I speak now to you and
to you alone, who are enabled to thank God that he has
begotten you again unto this lively hope by the resurrec
tion of Jesus Christ from the dead, who have reason to
hope that you are the unworthy partakers of this change
of heart, and of this change of life, of which we have
been speaking, — there are times when you may feel
doubtful whether you shall ever arrive at the one great
object of your anticipation and of your prayers; an
entrance into the kingdom and joy of our Lord.
Now, my brethren, at such moments call to mind the
declarations of the text, and see whether this will not
turn your silence into thanksgiving, your heaviness into
joy. The revealed Word of God declares that the in
heritance is reserved for you, and that you are reserved
for it. The word that expresses this is in the original a
veiy peculiar word ; it is that which is used for those
who are kept by a constant guard; so that it implies
that the Christian is never left alone or unguarded on
the road to his inheritance ; that you have a defence per
petually before you in all time of your trouble, and in
all time of your temptations and trials, through which
your spiritual enemies can never break, from which they
shall never force you. Your strength and your security
do not depend upon yourselves; they depend upon your
position. The weakest woman, the youngest child,
when placed in a well -garrisoned fortress, may smile at
the hostile army without, though thousands and tens of
thousands were encamped against them. And ought
not the Christian to know something of this security
when he has realized the truth of the declaration of the

A9SURED INHERITANCE. gQ
Spirit of God, "the name of the Lord is a strong tower;
the righteous runneth into it and is safe?" Most un
doubtedly he ought, for God is honoured most when his
people are comforted most, and when his promises are
the most unhesitatingly received. Believe, then, if you
are endeavouring to live to God, with simple reliance
upon the all-sufficiency of your Redeemer, that you are
going to an inheritance which shall never fail ; that you
are placed in a fortress which can never be taken; that
you are kept by a guard which cannot be overcome.
I need not urge you to be careful lest such a declara
tion as this should make you careless, indifferent, disobe
dient, or unholy. Surely, the very words of the text
themselves ought to prevent this. You are " kept by
the power of God through faith unto salvation." It is,
then, by God's power that you are kept, but it is through
your own faith. If this be absent the promise is void.
You are not told that you are kept by God's power,
without a lively influential faith. Man may tell you so;
but be assured God has never told you so. He who has
appointed the end has also appointed the means; and
those means are a true, living, active, and obeying faith];
a faith which worketh by love ; a faith which knows,
and which honours, and delights to honour, even the
very least of God's commandments ; a faith which, by
uniting you to your Redeemer, brings you within the
citadel ; and by causing you to cleave to your Redeemer,
keeps you within it.
Rejoice, therefore, in the Lord, my Christian brethren,
and glorify him in your bodies and your spirits, which
are his ; for his unerring Word has declared, " the Lord
is thy keeper, the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by
night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil : he

70

BELIEVER'S ASSURED INHERITANCE.

shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy
going out and thy coming in from -this lime forth, and
even for evermore." How astonishing a promise ! Three
times within two verses does the Almighty pledge him
self to preserve every obedient and believing servant
" from this time forth even for evermore." As, there
fore, you have been forgiven much, and as you have
been promised much, so will you love much, obey much,
practise much, of all that your Lord requires of you ; but
still you will cast all these duties away from you as the
ground either of your merits or your stability, and will
let your morning and evening song for ever be on earth,
as it will ever be yolir song in heaven, " Blessed be the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, accord
ing to his abundant mercy, hath begotten us to a lively
hope by the resurrection from the dead, to an inheritance
incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, re
served in heaven for you who are kept by the power of
God through faith unto salvation."

SERMON VI.
THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

2 Cor. n. 11.
We are not ignorant of his ..devices.
The devices of Satan, our great spiritual enemy, are
among the most fearful dangers of the Christian. It is
not merely that we are " very far gone from original
righteousness," as our Article expresses it ; that we are
conceived and born in sin, as the Bible reveals to us ;
that we carry about us a body of sin and death, and
within us " a heart deceitful above all things and despe
rately wicked," as our own experience fully establishes ;
but there is yet more, far more than this, to impede our
heavenward progress, and ruin our souls. There is in
every one's path, and at every one's heart, a cunning
and powerful, a busy and indefatigable evil spirit, seeking
to devour.
It is the fashion of the so-called philosophers of the
present day to disbelieve, or affect to disbelieve, the very
existence of this evil spirit, and by this means most effec
tually to forward his endeavours. It is the theory of an
other class to represent Satan to be a mere name, to
express an evil quality, or a collection of evil principles,
but to deny him all personality and existence as a spirit
of power and darkness. While there are few, even of
71

VO THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
the most established and enlightened Christians, who
have any just conceptions of the extent of Satan's power,
the immensity of his wisdom, the depth of his cunning,
the infinity of his resources.
It shall be my endeavour, then, to awaken the minds
of my hearers to this great and important subject, feeling
convinced that as our contempt of an enemy often leads
to our own defeat, so nothing, under God's grace, will
tend more to promote in us all holy circumspection and
watchfulness of conduct, than just and scriptural views
of those devices by which the great enemy of our souls is
for ever carrying on his exterminating warfare. Before,
however, I enter upon the devices of Satan, it is neces
sary that I should prepare the way by speaking of this
fallen spirit himself. And here, without referring to the
different passages of Scripture which demonstrate the
truth of what I advance, I shall confine myself simply to
the descriptions contained in them, adding nothing of
speculation or of human fancy to the plain historical
statements of the Divine Word. We find, then, from
that Word which cannot lie, that before time began, the
devil, who is called also in holy writ, Abaddon, Apollyon,
Beelzebub, Belial, and by many other appellations, " fell
from heaven," with a large assemblage of evil spirits,
who " kept not their first estate," but were " cast down by
God into hell," and are "reserved in everlasting chains,
under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day."
During the time that he is thus reserved for judgment,
we further find that he exercises, by God's permission, a
species of government, in the realms of darkness, over
those evil spirits who fell with him ; that he is represented
by our Lord as possessing a kingdom, and one never
divided against itself, but thoroughly united in implaca
ble and boundless hatred against God and his Christ,

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. 73
against the Lord and his people, and indeed against the
whole human race, in whose everlasting destruction he
is perpetually engaged. He is called, also, the "god of
this world," "the ruler of the darkness of this world,"
" the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobe
dience," because he directs and co-operates with evil
men to their ruin, being a lying spirit in the mouth of
false prophets, and false teachers ; a spirit of dishonesty
in the thief, of lust in the adulterer, of revenge in the
murderer, of enmity and disobedience to God in every
heart which has not been renewed and purified, which is
not directed and governed' by the Spirit of God. We
are thus, for instance, told distinctly in God's Word, that
it was Satan who prevailed on David to number the peo
ple ; that it was Satan who tempted Peter to deny, and
Judas to betray, his Master; and Ananias and Sapphira
to lie to the Holy Ghost.
We are assured also that he resists men in their efforts
to do good, as well as aids and assists and tempts them to
do evil ; thus we are told by the prophet Zechariah (third
chapter), "that when Joshua, the high priest, and the
Jews, assembled to rebuild the temple of the Lord, Satan
stood at Joshua's right hand to resist him ;" and when
Job was pronounced by the Almighty himself to be one
who " feared God and eschewed evil," Satan, in the ac
cursed jealousy of his heart, rested not until he had ex
hausted the whole quiver of his fiery darts to induce the
patient sufferer to " curse God to the face."
Having said thus much to establish from holy writ the
personality, and to give some faint idea of the occupations
and employments of this ruler of the powers of darkness,
I shall proceed to speak a little more in detail of some of
those numerous and subtle devices by which he carries
forward the great counter-scheme at which he has been
7

74 THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
working since lime began, to rob God of his glory in this
lower world, the Lord Jesus of his purchased people, and
«s of our souls.
It is evident, that if we were to attempt to enumerate
the devices by which Satan beguiles the people of the
world, and leads captive whom he will, every occupation,
every amusement, every person, every object which en
gages them must be made the subject of our considera
tion. This is impossible, and, therefore, for the purpose
of contracting the subject within something like reason
able limits, I shall confine myself to those devices where
with he beguiles the souls of men in reference to spiritual
things ;fconsidering them under two heads, and dividing
my subject into three discourses, limiting myself on the
present occasion to, 1st, The devices with which Satan
beguiles men before their conversion to God ; and in the
two next discourses, to the devices of Satan after men's
conversion.^ We proceed, then, this morning, to consider some of
the devices of Satan, by which he retains possession of
the souls of men during their unconverted state.
The first device which I shall bring before you, be
cause amongst the most obvious and most successful, is
his retaining men in bondage to himself through the
agency of their friends and companions. "A threefold
cord," said the wise man, "is not quickly broken."
Union is strength, " for evil as well as for good, for sinas
well as for holiness." One of Satan's great objects, there
fore, is to keep you in the companionship and friendship
of those who acknowledge and serve the devil's three
great representatives here on earth, " the lust of the flesh,
the lust of the eye, and the pride of life." AsJong as
you are contented tp live upon terms of friendship with
these enemies of your soul, and with those who follow

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. 75
them, Satan is content; he will neither distrust nor
harass you. The nearer in friendship and relationship
these evil companions are to you, the more completely
does it answer the purpose of your wily adversary.
Thus, in the case of holy Job, the friend of whom Satan
made the greatest use in endeavouring to draw him from
God, was his wife. She it was, who, in the most trying
hour of his mental ahd bodily suffering, came to him
with the taunting inquiry, " Dost thou still retain thine
integrity ?" following it by the dreadful advice, " Curse
God, and die !" Can we doubt in whose service she was
employed, or at whose instigation she acted so iniquitous
a part ? Thus, again, in the case of our Lord, when
Satan had been so effectually foiled in his own person,
and defeated in his most powerful assault by the Lord
Jesus, whom did he employ to tempt the all-perfect
Saviour? Was it not one of the best beloved of, the
apostles? to whose well-intended but insidious advice
our Lord was compelled to reply, " Get thee behind me,
Satan." So, brethren, will you find it in your own ex
perience, that of all the devices by which Satan leads
you captive at his will, the first, the most frequent, and
the most successful, is through the instrumentality of
your relatives and friends. What an argument is this
against forming intimacies, and still more, permanent
connexions with those'who fear not God. If you are in
earnest in your soul's salvation, you will, above all things,
and 'before all things, form your friendships, and en
deavour to unite yourself only to those who appear to
possess more of God's Spirit than you have ; you will
seek their company, their friendship, their love. The
last day only can determine how many a brand has been
plucked from the burning by the instrumentality of
Christian friendship. On the other hand, how many

76

THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

are there among you at this moment, who, if you spake
the truth, would be obliged to confess, that one of the
strongest and most influential motives which detain you
from giving yourselves to God with a whole heart, and
" following the Lord fully," is to be found in the entice
ments and allurements, the love or the fear of your rela
tives, your friends, or your companions.
The second device by which the devil tempts the un
converted is, the inconsistencies of the converted, that
is, of real Christians. This forms one of the most dan
gerous stumbling-blocks in the path of the unconverted.
Satan is continually disseminating, exaggerating, and
inventing instances of the inconsistence of religious peo
ple. " Observe," he says, " the pride, or the worldli
ness, or the vanity, or the covetousness of one who pro
fesses more godliness than those around him. Observe
his_ hastiness or moroseness, his unkindness and un-
charitableness, his melancholy and gloominess : will you
seek for a deeper feeling, and a more entire reception of
a religion which produces such fruits as these ?" is the
language of the tempter. These are, doubtless, in many
instances the invention of him, who, as the Word of God
assures us, was "a liar from the beginning;" in too
many instances, however, we acknowledge that they are
founded in truth ; but then, brethren, to be aware of this
device of Satan, you must recollect that these sins and
short-comings of religious people are not because they
are religious, but notwithstanding they are rehgious.
They are not the effect of their religion ; they would
have existed, and in all probability with tenfold acrimony,
if they had never been religious at all. The morose
man would have been morose; the covetous man,
covetous; the proud man, proud; if he had never
heard of religion. And, without doubt, he would have

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. 77
been ten times more morose, or covetous, or proud, than
he now is. The device of Satan consists in teaching
you to view these things as the fruits of his religion, that
thus the doctrines of grace, and the practice of ungodli
ness, may become associated in your mind as inseparable
companions. While Satan takes a peculiar pleasure in
blazoning these failings of God's people forth, and in
making them the subject of your thoughts and conversa
tion; he takes peculiar pains also, that you should never
know how poignant is the regret, how deep the repent
ance, how free and full the acknowledgment of these
infirmities and sins, before a throne of grace, by those
who commit them. Satan shows you the children of
God in their hours of weakness; it would defeat his
guilty purpose, were he<able to tell you of their penitence
and contrition, of their bitter tears and heartfelt prayers,
and free and full forgiveness, when they have drawn
near to the blood of sprinkling, and again found peace
for their souls. His purpose is fulLy answered if he can
thus induce you to hate and despise and calumniate holy
persons and holy things. Such a state of mind, on your
part, will widen the breach already existing between you
and your God, and will stand as a wall of adamant in
the way ef your soul's approach to the Saviour. You
will naturally be too proud to imitate the example, to
seek the counsel, to desire the intimacy, or to love the
religion of men, whom the devil teaches you to despise ;
and by thus keeping you from the servants of Christ, he
will often too fatally succeed in keeping you from their
Master. The third device of Satan, and closely following upon
the steps of the former, indeed necessarily connected
with it, is by misrepresenting religion itself. To the
young, Satan takes particular care to portray all true
7*

78 THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
and vital religion as a gloomy and melancholy subject,
which will rob you of your cheerfulness and joy. To
the weak and timid, as a difficult and dangerous enter
prise, upon which you had better not embark, but " sit
down first and count the cost ;" not as our Lord gave the
same advice, that you may rise up with resolution and
strength to begin to build, and to be enabled to finish,
but that you may never enter upon a course which
would free you from Satan's captivity, and number you
among the Lord's freemen. It is for this purpose that
he often shows you, while in an unconverted state, the
cross and its dangers, but hides from you the crown and
its glories.
If you value your own souls you will never rest con
tentedly with the views of religion which are given you
by its enemies. Search the Word of God for yourselves,
there only can you find the religion of the Lord Jesus
Christ in its purity and its perfections. Attend carefully,
while under a scriptural ministry; "Faith," the apostle
expressly assures us, " faith cometh by hearing." Com
pare what you hear, not with what those around you
tell you, or with what Satan through the instrumentality
of your own evil heart suggests, but compare what you
hear with what you read in God's own word ; and you
will, by God's grace, soon be made sensible of the truth,
and the value of all the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel,
and will find the service of the Lord Jesus Christ to be
perfect freedom, and all his paths peace.
The devices which I have hitherto enumerated, are
such as the devil practises with effect against all the un
converted. But he is obliged to have recourse to other,
and less palpable engines, when, either from the direct
operations of the Spirit of God, or the temporary effect
of some awakening discourse, or some afflicting provi-

THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

79

dence, the unconverted man is in a measure awakened
from his stupor, and led to begin to inquire after Divine
things. The fourth device, then, which I shall mention, is
usually applied by Satan to persons in the state of
mind to which I have just referred, as beginning
to inquire; and may be denominated, inspiring hard
thoughts of God, and discouraging thoughts of the
way of salvation. When the devil perceives that
you are becoming desirous to turn to God, he often
begins by representing our heavenly Father to you, as a
hard task-master; a harsh and severe judge: as one
who loves to take vengeance upon the ungodly, and re
joices in the destruction of the sinner. O how different
from the truth, how widely different from the character in
which God himself reveals himself to the hearts of his child
ren, when he speaks peace to the troubled soul, and pardon
to the penitent through the blood of Jesus ; when he
says, " I, even I, am he who blotteth out your iniqui
ties for my own sake, and will not remember your sin ;"
when he declares that he " willeth not the death of a
sinner," but that all should come to repentance. Even
Satan, for he once experienced God's tenderness, even
that condemned spirit knows that " God is love," though
he knows it only to the increase of his misery and
wretchedness and pain; and he therefore knows that his
only hope of retaining the sinner in his cruel bondage,
is by misrepresenting and defaming God; for let the
sinner possess but one view, one true and scriptural view
of the forgiving tenderness of God 'in Christ Jesus, let
him see but one ray of that redeeming love which is con
tinually shining from the cross of the Redeemer, and
Satan's power in his heart is for ever broken, Satan's
reign there for ever at an end. As soon, therefore, as
you are beginning to turn to God, Satan uses his every

80

THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

effort to malign him. He assures you that God is a
jealous God, a severe God, a God taking pleasure in the
death of a sinner, and, therefore, God will not pardon
you ; that God is your enemy, that he views you as a
task-master views his slave, and rejoices over your bur
den, and your inability to bear it; that your heart is so
hard that you cannot repent, and that God would not
accept you even if you could ; that your sins are so great
and yourself so vile, that it is vain, utterly vain, for you
to approach a holy God. When you hear the freest in
vitations to come to the Saviour for pardon and accept
ance, Satan suggests that, whatever others may have
done, you have sinned beyond the reach of such invita
tions as these, and therefore that it is vain for you to seek
a Saviour. But if he finds that all these devices are
fruitless in repressing your desire, and that you are still
anxious, increasingly anxious, to accept the invitation,
then he changes his plan, advises you by all means to
fly for help and deliverance to the Lord, but first to
mortify and to forsake your sins, to be humbled and
sanctified, holy and just and good, and then to go to the
Saviour. These are, indeed, most dangerous delusions ;
but, blessed be God, they will disperse at the touch of the
spear of the Divine Word.
Does Satan suggest to you that you are too vile and
too sinful to go to the Lord Jesus Christ? He might with
equal truth have kept Naaman, the leper, from the
cleansing waters. It was because he had a leprosy, that
he was sent to wash in Jordan ; it is because you are
thus guilty and thus polluted, that you must fly to the
cleansing blood of Christ.
Does Satan again urge you to be humbled, and to
labour after holiness, to fit you to come to Christ ? This,
again, is merely to keep you for ever from him. »
No ! When you have received Christ, when you have

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. gj
cast yourself upon him who is alone mighty to save for
salvation, and upon the strong for strength, then you
shall be enabled to perform all your duties, and fulfil,
however imperfectly, all God's requirements; but you
may exercise all self-denial, and partake of all ordinances,
and dig for ever in the mines of humiliation and contri
tion and holiness, and never find there the precious gems
of pardon and peace. Cast your soul with confidence
upon the Lord Jesus for free pardon and justification in
your present state, be it what it may, and he will give you
all these things, which Satan prompts you to seek for
yourself; a softened heart to feel and to forsake your sins,
a godly sorrow to work repentance unto salvation not to
be repented of, a spirit of holy, consistent obedience, to
run the way of God's commandments.
To conclude : in bringing these different devices of
Satan before you, and in attributing them to their righj
author, I feel that I am performing a great and impera
tive duty, as the minister of God, and one which, by
God's grace, may be made useful to some souls, in tearing
away the mask from the face of this deceiver. There
is, however, one danger attending this subject, against
which I could desire to guard you, and which naturally
flows from the considerations which have been brought
before you to-day. It is this : you may, perhaps, be
tempted to reason thus : If all these different hindrances
in the way of my salvation, if all these suggestions which
have often arisen in my heart, be indeed devices of the
devil, then surely I am guiltless ; the fault is Satan's,
and the condemnation must be Satan's, that I am not
yet converted to God. Brethren, be assured that this is
only an additional delusion from the tempter ; all revela
tion contradicts it.
For behold the sin of our first parents ; the Word of
God assures us that there, in a most marked and peculiar

gg THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
manner, Satan was the tempter ; that it was a device
which sprang immediately from himself, and yet, alas!
how tremendous is the curse which Adam's disobedience
entailed upon himself and his posterity.
So, again, with David, the Word of God as expressly
declares, " Satan stood up against Israel and provoked
David to number Israel" (1 Chron. xxi. 1) ; yet I need
not remind you that the punishment fell upon the
guilty David.
This is not only true, but, like all the dealings of our
heavenly Father, it is just. If Satan could compel you
to the sin to which he tempts you, then, indeed, it would
be most cruel, most unjust, that you should suffer for it:
but it is impossible ; Satan has no power beyond the
mere power of alluring and enticing; if he had, our
Lord would have been obliged to throw himself from the
pinnacle of the temple, and not merely tempted to do so;
and Job would as assuredly have been compelled to have
cursed God. Therefore St. James most truly says,
" Every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his
own lust and enticed :" he does not say, " When he is
drawn away by the invincible power of the devil." The
devil has no such power ; he never has drawn, and never
can draw away, any single individual, unless in complete
accordance with that individual's own inclination, and
perfectly in union with that individual's lusts.
It is, therefore, vain to endeavour to throw upon Satan
the guilt of your distance from God, your non-conversion
to the Lord Jesus; were this the truth, our Lord never
could have said, " Ye will uot come unto me that ye
might have life." There is no natural inability in any
man to seek the salvation of Jesus; that there is unques
tionably a moral inability, a dislike, a disinclination, a
violent opposition of the will, only enhances our guilt,
and will increase our punishment. But do not deceive

THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

83

yourselves by attributing your alienation from God to a
power which ^ou cannot, by God's grace, successfully
oppose. No ; you can resist the devil, or you would not
have been commanded to do so; you can, by God's
grace, vanquish him, or you would never be condemned
for your failure. In obeying the temptations of Satan,
you simply perform your own will ; you follow your own
inclination; no man can profess to say when he sins,
that he does so simply to please the devil. No ; Satan
and the sinner invariably agree upon this point ; you are
perfectly well aware that you sin simply to please your
selves, and it would therefore be too much to expect that
Satan should bear the burden and the condemnation.
Keep in mind, then, brethren, that this is a solemn
declaration of God, " Resist the devil, and he will flee
from you;" none ever acted upon it, in humble depend
ence upon the Holy One of Israel for strength, and was
disappointed. However evil men or evil spirits may
misrepresent the Gospel or its followers, be sure of this,
for it is the Word of the living God, that " If our Gospel
be hid, it is hid to them that are lost, in whom the god
of this world hath blinded the minds of them which
believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ,
who is the image of God, should shine unto them." But
be ye equally sure of this, that that gracious Saviour who
has said, " Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise
cast out," now invites, nay, beseeches the most hardened
and the most guilty, the youngest, and the most weak and
feeble among you to ,be " reconciled to God," through
his precious blood ; and that neither man nor Satan can
keep you from him, if you be willing to accept the
blessed invitation : may God of his infinite mercy grant
that you may this day receive it to the salvation of your
souls!

SERMON VII.
THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

2 Cor. n. 11.
We aie not ignorant of his devices.
In addressing you in my last discourse upon the very
important and deeply instructive subject of the devices
of Satan, I intentionally confined my observations to
those devices with which he particularly besets the path
of the unconverted. We, on that occasion, reviewed the
danger from our own families and friends; from worldly
and infidel and ungodly companions ; from the incon
sistencies and sins of real Christians; from Satan's mis
representation of religious persons and of religion itself;
from his suggesting hard thoughts of God, and discou
raging views of the way of salvation; and, lastly, where
all other devices fail to keep you from the Saviour, the
continual efforts which Satan makes to tempt you to be
come a Saviour lo yourself, and to strive after holiness,
humility, and sanctification through your own efforts,
instead of coming at once to that Redeemer, who can
alone enable you to fulfil these duties, and who must
himself be made unto you, " wisdom and righteousness
and sanctification and redemption."
We are, on the present occasion, to endeavour to set
before you some of those devices, wherewith this inde-
84

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. gg
fatigable enemy of all godliness besets the path of the
real children of God, seeking to drive you out of that
stronghold into which the Word and the power of God
have called you; or failing in this, to injure your peace,
to destroy your happiness, and to change " the ways of
pleasantness" into paths of painfulness, and the " light
burden" which a Saviour's love would lay upon his
people, into a galling yoke and a heavy bondage.
May the Spirit of wisdom and of love and of a sound
mind direct us in the investigation !
As in the last discourse, I endeavoured to follow some
little degree of order in arranging the devices of Satan,
from the most plain and obvious and common-place,
with which he attempts the hearts of all, to those with
which he more immediately assailed the heart, when be
ginning to feel desirous to turn unto the living God ; so
would I, on the present occasion, endeavour, in a similar
manner, to follow the steps of the destroyer, only premis
ing, that there can be no certain rule in these things, but
that since God's Word has declared that, "as in water
face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man ;"*
the experience of one may probably be the experience
of many, and the dangers and difficulties of others, may
lead you to foresee and forearm against your own.
The first device, then, with which Satan often be
wilders the mind and endangers the peace of the new
convert, is by perplexing him with the difficult and in
comprehensible subject of the secret decrees of God, pre
destination, election, and reprobation.
No sooner have you begun to feel the comfort of those
declarations of the revealed Word that, " God would have
all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of
* See Proverbs xxix. 19.
8

gg THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
the truth," and that " whosoever will, may take of the
Water of. life freely ;" no sooner, in obedience to the many
commands and invitations to come unto the Lord Jesus
Christ, and find peace for your soul, have you in much
weakness and trembling drawn near with faith to this
blessed and adorable Redeemer, trusting that poor and
miserable and sinful as you feel yourself to be, he will
neither despise nor reject you, than Satan, if you possess
an inquiring mind, often produces this temptation : He
will say, Is it not true, that " God hath constandy de
creed by his counsel secret to us," I quote the words of
the Seventeenth Article of our Church, " to deliver from
curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in
Christ out of mankind, and to bring them, by Christ, to
everlasting salvation ?" Yes, this is a solemn truth of
God, built upon all Scripture, and recognizerfin all the
formularies of our truly scriptural Church. But then
observe the deduction which Satan draws from it. He
suggests, If this be true, that God hath appointed to
eternal felicity those whom be hath chosen out of the
world, as " vessels before prepared for glory" to manifest
his mercy and love; then is it also true that God has in
like manner appointed to damnation, those whom he
hath chosen out of the world, for the purpose of mani
festing his severity and wrath. Then follow in the train
of this device of the evil one, doubts and fears, and per
plexing considerations which destroy the peace of the
new convert, and sometimes almost lead him to absolute
despair. He is led to reason with himself; " If I am
appointed by God to condemnation, what matter to me
the love of Jesus Christ, and the offers of his mercy ; the
decree has gone forth, the Word of God is immutable,
and one jot or one tittle shall never pass away till all be
fulfilled in the condemnation of those whom God has,

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. Q7
before the foundation of the world, appointed to destruc
tion." Brethren, whenever you are thus tempted by the evil
one, bear this in mind ; we know nothing of God's de
crees except as he has seen fit to reveal them. Now we
do not scruple to say, that there is no single passage in
Scripture, and no combination of passages which reveal
to us any thing so derogatory "to the character of God,
and so entirely contradictory to every attribute of God, as
that he should decree any single individual (irrespectively
of that individual's character and conduct) to everlasting
condemnation. When, therefore, Satan would harass
and distress your mind by such a delusion, your answer
is this, — Of God's secret decrees I know nothing, for
God's own Word has said, " The secret things belong to
the Lord our God ;" but there is one decree which God
has seen fit to publish before men and angels by the
mouth of his Incarnate Son, which, blessed be God, I
do know, and which so entirely contradicts the falsehood
which Satan calls a decree of the living God, that I am
satisfied at once that it is a mere device of the tempter;
God's decree is this, that " Whosoever (without a single
exception) believeth in the Son shall not perish, but
have everlasting life." Upon this decree, proclaimed
and ratified and sealed on Calvary, I am content to rest
my soul for time and for>eternity ; Satan himself cannot
impugn it ; " Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable
gift." But with the young convert Satan has yet far other
more successful, because more hidden snares, than this;
and when he cannot prevail with you upon doctrines, he
will endeavour to discourage you from duties. For in
stance, are you desirous of attending the table of the
Lord ; he will endeavour to demonstrate, by eyery sub-

gg THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
tilty and fallacy in his power, that you are unfit, that if
you go in your present state of mind, you will draw down
a curse rather than a blessing ; that you will " eat and
drink your own damnation, not considering the Lord's
body." How many an humble contrite believer has been
kept for years in succession from this blessed means of
grace, and this " most comfortable" ordinance, by such
delusions as these. But here, again, from the Word of
God, is your answer ; " They that be whole need not a
physician, but they that are sick ;" the very argument
which Satan advances to keep you away from your
Lord's table, is urged by your Lord as a motive for going
thither ; and may fairly be pleaded by yourself as a rea
son for his accepting you.
Again, Satan will discourage you from other duties by
such considerations as these. "He will tempt you to
perform them in a cold, dead, heartless manner; for
instance, while at prayer he will tempt you to vain
-thoughts, to impious thoughts, to profane and wicked
thoughts ; for he knows that a prayer which is not from
the heart of the child will never reach the heart of the
Father, and when he has succeeded in doing this, he
will plead these very distractions, which were occasioned
by himself, as reasons why you should forego prayer and
eveiy holy duty ; because to you they have thus become
not only unprofitable, but even sinful and unholy.
So, again, with regard to the great duty of self-exami
nation ; no sooner do you endeavour to engage in earnest
in this difficult work, than Satan is at your right hand
to oppose you. He will first suggest that the inquiry is
needless, that however it may be with the hypocrite, or
the immoral, or the profane, there can be no doubt that
your heart is right with God, and that to you it is un
necessary to examine yourselves " whether ye be in the

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. gg
faith." If this will not succeed, he will endeavour, the
moment you have tried to fix your thoughts and atten
tion steadily upon this one great object, to interrupt and
distract them by every imagination foreign to the subject
which he can introduce ; until the time is spent, and you
are obliged to confess, that instead of services and self-
examination, it has been consumed in little better than
the most trifling idleness. If this device, however, should
not succeed, but you are enabled to persevere steadfastly
in your intended occupation, and are resolved to ascer
tain the true state of your affections and heart, and the
true value of your religious duties, then Satan will even
help you to see their worthlessness and wretchedness, if
he may but build upon it the temptation that after all you
are yourself only a hypocrite ; that you have increased
your sin by your very prayers ; that duties so full of
coldness and carelessness are only adding to. your ac
count; until, at length he brings you to so bewildered a
state of mind that you know not whether you would not
sin the less by actually abstaining from duties altogether.
Many there are, even in the more advanced stages of the
Christian life, who suffer from these devices, and some
from still more palpable temptations than these. Some
times, even to the confirmed Christian, Satan will present,
the strongest suggestions of positive infidelity. There are
moments when he will lead them to question the reality
of every doctrine and every truth upon which their hearts
are fixed for eternity. Even the very being of a God,
the Divinity of the Saviour, the existence of a Divine
Revelation, the improbability that one among ten thou
sand spheres should have called the eternal Son from the
bosom of the Father to agonize and die for its redemp
tion ; each and all of these will at times be present to the
mind even of the most established believer. In all such
.8*

OQ THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
cases, prayer, humble, faithful prayer, is the child of
God's best and only refuge. Thus, " resist the devil,
and he will flee from you." Thus unite yourself still
more closely to the God of all strength and all consola
tion, and he will " bruise Satan under your feet shortly,"
and again anchor your soul upon the Rock of Ages,
from which, for a moment, the Prince of the power of
the air may have driven you.
The next device which I shall notice is of a very dif
ferent nature from these, and one from which we might
have hoped that the children of God would in a great
measure be free ; and yet, alas ! so deeply is sin imbed
ded in the heart, that I believe the experienced Chris
tian will not accuse me of exaggeration even here.
The device to which I allude is this, that Satan some
times tempts the people of God into sin, by suggesting to
them the facility of returning again to God by repentance.
This is a fearful and most dangerous fallacy. You are,
perhaps, conscious that you are about to enter upon some
forbidden path, to partake of some unholy gratification,
to perform some doubtful act, and instead of starting
back from it with abhorrence, and asking, " How can I
do this great wickedness and sin against God," you are
tempted to go forward by the very recollection of God's
former mercies and past forgivenesses ; you reason within
yourself, " This may possibly be wrong ; but if it be, I
will repent and forsake it, as I have done before, and I
know I have an affectionate Father, a merciful and
tender High Priest, who is not " extreme to mark what
is done amiss," and who will again bestow upon me re
pentance and pardon." My Christian brethren, this is a
most fearful and desperate delusion ; so fearful, that, if
you yield to it, it ought to make you question the very
fact of your conversion and your adoption altogether.

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. Ql
It is sad to fall into sin blindly and inconsiderately ; it is
worse, far worse, to sin with a knowledge that you are
sinning, and against the convictions fastened upon your
consciences by the Spirit of God ; but to sin with the
secret determination that, when you are satisfied, you
will return ; to sin because you know you have a God
who willeth not the death of a sinner, but had " rather
he should turn from his wickedness and live ;" this is
guilt of such black ingratitude, that we should indeed
tremble for the soul that contracted it. Beware, above
all things, of such presumptuous guilt as this, lest you
too late discover, that though the downward passage has
been easy, the upward path is impracticable, and that
there is no return, no place for repentance, though you
seek it bitterly and with tears. Few but those who have
experienced it can tell, how much more difficult is the
return to God than the departure from him. The heart
of man may not unaptly be compared to a spring lock,
which any individual may close, but he who holds the
key alone can open. Thus you may, indeed, easily
turn from God of yourself; you may shut out God of
yourself ; but you cannot turn to him, you cannot open
your heart to the admission of him, except by the aid of
that Being of whom the Word of God has declared,
" He hath the key of David, he openeth, and no man
shutteth; he shutteth, and no man openeth." How
strong, upon this subject, is the language of God himself;
" It is impossible for those who were once enlightened,
and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made
partakers of the Holy Ghost, if they shall fall away, to
renew them again unto repentance." Be careful, then,
how you suffer your great enemy to shut to the door,
lest He wljo says, " Behold, I stand at the door, and

92 THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
knock," shall depart from you excluded and neglected,
never to return until he comes in judgment.
The two next devices of Satan to which I shall advert
are spiritual pride and spiritual confidence.
Spiritual pride is one of the most successful tempta
tions with which Satan assails a new convert. We are
not surprised, in worldly matters, that the newly rich
should be proverbially proud of their- wealth. So in
spiritual graces, the man who possessed more yesterday,
will readily be tempted to vaunt himself of the little he
possesses to-day. He who has newly put on Christ, is
often as vain of the garments of salvation, as a child is
of his new clothes; and is not satisfied, unless all see
and admire and talk of him. Young Christians, there
fore, are usually the most forward in all companies to
boast of their achievements, and their acquirements. It
is not astonishing, therefore, that this device is often suc
cessful against them ; especially, when we bear in mind,
that the new convert knows but little, and sees but little,
either of the unsearchable riches of Christ, or of the
hitherto unattained advances in spiritual things which
lie before him. He is, therefore, no judge of the vast
extent, the infinite dimensions of Divine grace, and is
perfectly ignorant even of what his own necessities and
temptations will require. He thinks, naturally, that the
little he has is great, because he knows no more, and
this peculiarly lays him open to the temptation we are
considering. Every little act of self-denial appears to
him a wonderful effort, and every labour of love, a great
achievement. Even the apostles themselves, in the early-
part of their Christian career, were not free from this, or
we should never have heard St. Peter exclaiming,
" Lord, we have left all and followed thee," or have
been told thatahey had disputed among themselves by
the way, who should be " the greatest."

THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

93

One of the worst effects of this temptation is, that it
does not stand alone, it usually begets self-confidence.
You have, for instance, by Divine grace, overcome some
trying temptation; the devil's device is to make you
vain of your success, and the consequence is, that the
next time the same or a similar temptation occurs, you
are tempted to trust to your own power, and your own
strength, and your own former experience, and the grace
you have before received ; and the invariable effect is,
that you fall before the temptation.
Here, again, we may find an example even among
the most loved disciples of our Lord, "Be ye able to
drink of the cup which I drink of, and to be baptized
with the baptism that I am baptized with ?" said Jesus
to James and John; the answer, strongly savouring
of self-confidence, was, " We are able:?" yet wre do
not find that they were exceptions when " all the disciples
forsook him and fled."
Learn, therefore, never to trust to any thing in the
hour of trial, but to the strength to be derived immedi
ately from God. He would not have proclaimed him
self a " very present God in time of trouble," if his im
mediate presence had not been indispensable at such
times to the stability of his people. The largest degree
of grace . ever vouchsafed, will be insufficient to stand
against the smallest device of Satan, if it induce you to
trust to what you are, or to what you have, instead of
sending you to the ever-flowing fountain. Never are
you so secure as when you lie the lowest; or so safe, as
when you are content to go. out of yourself for all you
desire or need.
Lastly, this state of spiritual pride and self-confidence
is one which lays the believer especially open to all the
devices of Satan connected with heresy and error. I do
not mean to say that other Christians are never misled

94

THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

by these things, but unquestionably the young, the
ardent, the spiritually proud, self-confident Christian is
infinitely more exposed to them ; and such characters
will, I believe, be found upon examination to have
formed, in all ages of the Church, and especially in the
newly-revived errors now afloat among us, nine-tenths
of those who have swelled their ranks. There is some
thing so gratifying to our fallen nature in being more
learned than those around us, in receiving truths which
they cannot comprehend, in partaking of discoveries
which are not revealed to them; that many, very many,
even of God's own people, especially when their beset
ting sins are of the nature just alluded to, are for a time
misled by errors which, in after years, they look back upon
with shame, grief and penitence. To guard you against
this device, I would particularly caution you not to trifle
with error. Remember that when God's Word declares,
that there shall be " certain who shall privily bring in
damnable heresies," it distinctly establishes this solemn
truth, of which people are too little aware, that error can
damn as well as vice. It is not for us to say what errors
are thus dangerous ; but neither is it for us to conceal a
truth so little believed, so seldom acted upon, and yet so
certain and so appalling.
Do not trifle with error, by which I mean, do not will
ingly read, or hear, or place yourself in contact with error.
Pray to be " kept by the power of God" from every thing
which shall injure your singleness of eye, and singleness
of heart, and simplicity of view of Divine truth. These are
peculiarly trying times for such characters as those to
which I am now referring ; if you know youselves, your
own peculiar temptations, your own besetting sins, you
will be most watchful against this device of the tempter,
and will keepat a distance from every thing which will

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. gg
tend to favour or to foster it. Remember that by the
law of God, as delivered to Moses, the Nazarite who was
forbidden to drink wine, was also forbidden to eat grapes.
There was clearly no fear lest the grapes should intoxi
cate him, but there was much fear lest the taste of the
harmless fruit might beget in him the love and desire for
the forbidden and dangerous spirit. Do not, therefore,
willingly trust yourself upon the remotest confines of
error; if you would avoid the danger, do not be misled by
the specious device of the tempter, that you must read the
productions of those who differ, that you may judge
for yourself. No ; thank God that you are not called to
pass through this ordeal to enable you to judge for
yourself. If we know what truth is, we know what
error is, without studying error : just as by knowing what
harmony is, we know what is discord, without having
our ears set on edge to learn it. Thank God that you
have his Word and his Spirit, and that they are all-
sufficient to teach you to discern error, without wading
through its mischievous and destructive volumes.
But the time warns me to conclude.
The subject we have now been considering would still
be left in a very imperfect state, were we to conclude our
remarks upon it thus. I shall therefore hope in the next
discourse to bring before you some considerations which
will naturally grow out of this important subject. In
the mean time may we be led, by what we have already
seen, to think far more scripturally of the spiritual dan
gers to which we are exposed, that we may guard more
circumspectly, and pray more earnestly for the abiding
presence and aid of Him who has crushed the serpent's
head, and who will, by his Divine power and grace, en
able you, the weakest and feeblest of his followers, to be
come more than conquerors through him that loveth you.

SERMON Vm.
THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

Ephesians vi. 11.
That ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
It has been the object of the two last discourses to lay
before you a few of the most common and most danger
ous devices of our great spiritual enemy, in the hope,
and with the prayer, that some minds may be enlighten
ed, some hearts encouraged, some souls comforted, amid
the trials and the dangers of the Christian life. My in
tention at present is to offer, by the help of Giod's good
Spirit, such further suggestions upon this important sub
ject, as may tend to carry the remarks which have been
already made to a more definite and practical result.
The arrangements I shall adopt this morning will be,
first, to speak of some of the reasons for which it pleases
God to permit his people to be tempted; then, to review
some of the assistances which God bestows under tempta
tion ; and lastly, to offer some encouragements to those
who are tempted.
Before commencing upon this, however, I must en
deavour to remove one difficulty which may not unna
turally suggest itself to the mind of every reflecting
Christian, while striving to profit by the considerations
already brought before you. It is of this nature. If, as
96

THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

97

the Word of God assures me, " the heart is deceitful above
all things, and desperately wicked," how shall I be en
abled to ascertain, of any particular temptation which
assails me, whether it be the offspring of my own evil
imagination, and therefore has its rise and origin within
my own breast, or whether it come from without, and is
the inspiration of the spirit of wickedness and sin ?
This is an extremely difficult point to determine, and
in offering a few very brief remarks upon it, I would not
be understood to speak with the same degree of con
fidence as upon those things which are the subjects of
express revelation, for here we can only give the opinion
and experience of men, not the word of God ; of eminent
Christians, indeed, but still merely of uninspired mortali
ty. Following, then, the guide of Christian experience,
we should say that one of the most decisive points of
distinction is this ; that when sin is the natural birth of
our hearts, it grows up leisurely, and by degrees ; it does
not rush upon us at once in an overwhelming flood, but
is thought of and ruminated upon, and viewed, perhaps,
at first, with reluctance, but soon with complacency, in
all its different bearings ; and then entered upon gradually
from its lighter to its deeper shades of criminality and
guilt. For even a Heathen writer has handed down to
us the observation, that no man becomes in an instant
deeply abandoned. But when sin comes immediately
from the devil, there are none of these gradations, and
it is remarkable for its suddenness and abruptness. It
rushes in at once upon the thoughts, and we are hurried
away without time, or reflection, or consideration, into
transgression. It is, perhaps, on this account that the
devices of Satan are compared, in the passage of Scrip
ture from which the text is taken, to " fiery darts," which
can be cast in a moment, and carrying sudden destruc-
9

gg THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
tion to the soul. Two other methods of determining
this difficult point are, by the nature of the sins to which
we are tempted, and the effect they have on our minds
and on our hearts.
The nature of the sin. Some of the most horrible
and dreadful sins that can be conceived are referred in
the Scriptures of truth to the direct agency of Satan;
profane and blasphemous thoughts of God, murder, and
especially self-murder. To this sin, through the instru
mentality of Job's wife, Satan tempted that holy patri
arch; to this sin the devil, in his own person, tempted
the Saviour of the world, when, having placed him upon
a pinnacle of the temple, he said, " Cast thyself down."
To this, again, he tempted successfully the miserable
Judas, for we are expressly told that Satan entered into
him before he engaged in his last dreadful deed of blood.
If the nature of the temptation is thus in some degree a
proof of the source from which it flows, so also is its
effect upon our own minds and hearts. For instance,
suppose tbat the moment an evil suggestion arises in
your soul, you feel an unspeakable degree of loathing
and abhorrence; this is a strong presumptive evidence
that it is the work of an enemy from without ; the heart
does not usually feel such violent dislike and hatred for
sins which it has itself engendered. This then is a
favourable sign to the tempted believer, and one which,
if followed up by fervent, faithful, persevering prayer,
will usually be succeeded by victory over temptation and
the tempter.
But enough has been said upon this portion of our
subject. We proceed now to the consideration of some
of the reasons for which our heavenly Father of his
mercy and goodness permits many, nay, all his children

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. 99
auring their pilgrimage state, to suffer from the wiles of
the devil.
How essential a portion of our subject this is, may be
gathered from the fact, that we so often feel inclined to
wonder, and even to murmur, that when once brought
among the number of God's people, we do not experience
more freedom from these attacks. " If I were indeed a
child of God, I should not be thus continually harassed
and disturbed by temptation," is often the language of
of our hearts. " I was told that religious ways were
ways of pleasantness and peace, but I am incessantly
suffering from both internal and external disquietudes."
This mistake arises from our not fully understanding the
nature of the life to which we are called. When you
become, not merely in name, but in heart and in soul, a
Christian, you must remember that you become a sol
dier, not a conqueror ; that you are called to " fight," and
to " run," and to " wrestle," (all these are terms which
are applied to the Christian life,) to enter upon a course
of difficulty and trial, not upon a season of enjoyment
and rest. The Christian life, compared with the happi
est worldly life, is unquestionably pleasantness and
peace; but compared with "the rest which remaineth
for the people of God," it ever has been, and ever will be,
full of disquietudes and trouble; or why should our
Lord himself have told us first to sit down and count
the cost? You ought, therefore, to expect to meet with
these spiritual assailants and spiritual difficulties; and
the following are among the many reasons we might
offer, for which our heavenly Father sees good that it
should be so.
Temptation or trials are most effectual tests of our
Christian graces. Thus the full extent of Abraham's
faith would never have been known to the Church of

^00 THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
God, had it not been tried by God himself; and the
reality and depth of Job's sincerity and patience would
have been equally unknown, had they not been subjected
to the temptations of Satan. Our heavenly Father,
therefore, permits you to be tempted, to bring out your
Christian graces and your holy obedience into far more
abundant fruit-bearing to the honour of his name, thus
in the end working for you a far more exceeding and
eternal weight of glory.
While the temptations of Satan are producing this
good and valuable effect upon your Christian graces,
they are often producing equally salutary effects upon
the darker and more unholy portion of your Christian
character. For instance, you are perhaps beginning to
feel the risings of spiritual pride, for ever springing up
out of the remains of natural corruption even in the re
newed heart ; then does God permit your spiritual enemy
to tempt you, that so the very feeling of your liability to
sins, which you, perhaps, with some degree of self-com
placency, hoped you had for ever cast beneath your feet,
may tend to humble you and lower you in your own
opinion, to show you what is in your heart, and to de
stroy these first buddings of pride. It was thus that God
permitted St. Paul to suffer from a thorn in the flesh,
which he expressly says, " was a messenger of Satan
to buffet him," not because he had actually become
proud and self-sufficient, but lest he should be lifted up ;
lest he should grow proud, through the abundance of the
revelations which was vouchsafed him.
In this case, therefore, the temptation was permitted
by God as a preventive to feelings which, if suffered
to grow up, might have endangered the spiritual life and
peace of the apostle.
There are yet other and minor motives from which it

THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

101

probably pleases our heavenly Father to subject us to
the fiery trial of temptation. For instance, to enable us
wisely to counsel and thoroughly to sympathize with
those who are tempted. It was a frequent saying of
the great Martin Luther, that " temptation, meditation,
and prayer can alone make a minister." He who has
never been deeply tried and exercised in his own heart,
will never be able to say with St. Paul, " We are not
ignorant of Satan's devices," and therefore will never be
able wisely and feelingly to counsel those who are in
" danger through manifold temptations." It is when we
have often ourselves smarted from the fiery darts of the
enemy, that we know best the method of his attacks, and
the quarters from which they are to be expected, and
that we can instrumentally assist the suffering and tempted
believer so to hold up the shield of faith as effectually to
quench these weapons of the evil one.
It is on this account also, that aged and experienced
Christians are usually far more tolerant, and far more
lenient and kind in their judgment of their sinning bre
thren, than the young and untempted believer. They
best know the power of Satan and the weakness of their
own hearts; they best know that if they have stood
where others have fallen, the strength and the courage
and the merit are not their own ; and therefore while
they say, " Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to thy
name be the praise," they can truly and feelingly sym
pathize with every fellow Christian who is suffering from
those devices which they have, through the undeserved
mercy of their Redeemer, overcome or escaped.
But, probably, above all other reasons, the Almighty
permits us to be thus tried and tempted that we may not
fix ourselves too strongly and root our ourselves too
firmly here below, but may, in the midst both of worldly
9*

102 THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
and spiritual prosperity, know something experimentally
of the Psalmist's feeling, " O that I had wings like a
dove, for then would I flee away and be at rest." Blessed
is that trial, be it what it may, if it in any degree strengthen
this desire (so wholly unknown to the ungodly) to be for
ever with the Lord, and to behold his glory.
Without dwelling at greater length upon the reasons
for which a merciful God frequently permits even his
dearest children to be exposed for a time to the devices
of the wicked one, enough has, I trust, been said to de
monstrate (for this is my chief object) that it is perfectly
compatible with the wisdom and power, and even with
the love and mercy of God, that such things are permit
ted ; and I shall therefore proceed to consider some of
those assistances and supports which God in mercy
bestows upon his tempted children, that they may be
able to " stand against the wiles of the devil."
The first of these is the " sword of the Spirit, which
is the Word of God."
This is the only offensive weapon which you can suc
cessfully use against our powerful adversary. Even the
Lord Jesus Christ condescended to wield this weapon.
When Satan tempted him, he replied to every one of
the three temptations by a quotation from the written
Word, probably to encourage us by the thought that
even the eternal Son of the Father, with all the infinity
of weapons in heaven's own armoury at his command,
chose to select his arrows from the same quiver which is
open to you and to myself, to the very weakest and the
most helpless of his followers.
When Satan therefore approaches, go to the quiver of
God's Word, and draw your arrows thence, and Satan
shall as certainly fly from you as he fled from the sword
of your Leader.

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. 1 03
But, brethren, before you can do this, it is not enough
that the Bible is in your houses, it must often be in your
hands, and its truths treasured up in your memories, and
in your hearts. It is because men know so little of God's
Word, that they are so utterly helpless under tempta
tion. Were you in the habit of daily attentive reading,
and searching that Word of God, it would be impossible,
with all his cunning and all his resources, for the devil
to bring any single temptation, from the grossest and
most insulting, to the highest and most refined, for which
you would not be able immediately to find an appro
priate and successful reply. Let us take some common
instances : were he to tempt you to theft, or to drunken
ness, or to covetousness, you might say in reply, "It is
written," " Be not deceived : neither thieves, nor covetous,
nor drunkards, shall inherit the kingdom of God." Were
he to tempt you to gross licentiousness, " It is written,"
" Whoremongers and adulterers God shall judge." To
Sabbath-breaking, " It is written," " Remember the Sab
bath-day to keep it holy." To fear man rather than
God, " It is written," " Fear not them which can kill
the body, and after that have no more that they can do."
Were he to tempt you to doubt of your Lord's power or
willingness to save your soul from hell, " It is written,"
"All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth;"
and again, " Him that cometh unto me, I will in no
wise cast out." Thus, in the treasury of God's Word,
you will find " It is written," an answer, and an effectual
one, to every temptation which Satan can present. It is
the only certain method of resisting this powerful enemy ;
ihe method which your Lord himself adopted, and which-
your heavenly Father has from the beginning most
abundantly blessed.
As the written Word is the one great offensive weapon,

104 THE DEVICES OF SATAN.
so is constant, faithful, fervent prayer, the one great de
fensive weapon, in resisting "the wiles and devices of
the devil."
When you feel a temptation injected into your thoughts,
or your affections, betake yourself at once, to secret,
silent, prayer. You cannot be in any company, in
which a Christian ought to be, you cannot be engaged
in any occupation in which a Christian ought to engage,
or be partaking of any amusement of which a Christian
ought to partake, which would render the aid of silent,
ejaculatory pra}rer misplaced, or impossible. By this
you may, in a moment, remove yourself from the neigh
bourhood of the tempter, to the footstool of a throne of
grace. By this you may hide yourself, as it were, under
the very wings of Omnipotence, through which- no
weapons of Satan's armoury, no dart from Satan's bow,
can ever penetrate. The tempted believer, taking re
fuge, by faithful, heartfelt prayer, beneath the shadow of
the everlasting wings, is, as regards the wiles of Satan,
as secure, as Noah was, while in the ark of God's love,
from all the storms and tempests of the flood which
drowned the world. For it is this which realizes your
union with your Lord, and, by close and intimate com
munion, brings you at once to him, who, while Satan is
engaged in tempting you, is himself engaged in praying
for you; yes, in unceasing intercession, that though
" Satan has desired to have you, your faith fail not ;"
and therefore, like his of old, it shall not fail, but " shall
be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appear?
ing of Jesus Christ."
In conclusion, I would offer a few words of encourage^
ment to you who " suffer, being tempted."
There are, we believe, few, if any, of the real people
of God who do not suffer from the wiles and devices of

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. JQ5
Satan, and this to a far greater degree than the people of
the world. Of those who are living without God, we
have the authority of God's own Word for saying, at
least as a general rule, that, " they come in no misfor
tune like other folk," they are exempt from many of the
most trying mental exercises of which the mind of man
is susceptible. They are, as the same Word assures us,
already in " snare of the devil, taken captive by him at
his will;" and therefore his end is gained, he has no
need of wiles and devices to effect what is already
effected; his only effort with regard to them, is to lull
and to soothe and to satisfy and to keep them, that they
may neither perceive their thraldom, nor feel their chains,
until the iron has entered into their soul, and is for ever
riveted in the fires of eternity. But with you, who are
really endeavouring to follow Christ, the case, thank
God, is widely different, and Satan knows and feels it to
be so. He knows that an all-powerful Saviour has
engaged for your protection and salvation ; that however
he may rage and foam and struggle, he is himself as
completely in the Saviour's power, as you are, and that
the time is short in which he will be permitted to disturb
and harass the people of God, before he is consigned to
" the blackness of darkness for ever." Therefore are
his efforts great and terrible and unceasing, but the very
cause from which they spring ought to form one of your
strongest grounds of encouragement.
You have the assurance of your God, that Satan can
do nothing without his permission. If not a " sparrow
fall to the ground without your Father," then most cer
tainly shall hot his children stumble or fall without his
providential permission. While you seek him, he has
declared that " your footsteps shall not slide." While

106

THE DEVICES OF SATAN.

you serve him, his Word is pledged to you, " I will
never leave thee, nor forsake thee."
Whatever, therefore, be the efforts of Satan against the
welfare of your soul, you are secure of these two most
blessed facts; that your God, who has pledged himself
not to " suffer you to be tempted above what you are
able, but with the temptation to make a way to escape,"
is aware of your trial, and that he is present during your
trial; what more can you desire or need ?
It is true that you may not feel sensible of these most
comforting truths at the moment you need them most,
but then you must not blame God for this, you must say
with David, " this is mine infirmity;" they are equally
the immutable truths of God, and if you forget them, or
derive no consolation from them, it neither alters their
truth nor their stability, for the " foundation of the Lord
standeth" equally " sure," and his promises shall not
fail. You may, indeed, " lose sight of him by the way,"
this depends upon yourself; but you shall assuredly find
him at the journey's end, for that depends upon God,
whose covenant is an everlasting covenant, ordered in all
things, and sure. Therefore, brethren, " be strong in
the Lord, and in the power of his might; take unto you
the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to with
stand, in the evil day, and having done all, to stand."
Let every tried and tempted soul among us throw
aside all other dependencies, and rest calmly and con
tentedly upon these two, the strongest and the best, God's
promises and God's omnipotence, pledged as they are to
us, through Jesus Christ, for every hour of trial or of
suffering. In this blessed and comforting and soul-satis
fying assurance we shall obtain fresh grace, fresh strength,
fresh resolution, to " run with patience the race that is

THE DEVICES OF SATAN. J_Q7
set before us, looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher
of our faith ;" who has not only placed his own foot upon
that serpent's head, but will, in his good time, place there
in triumph the foot of the weakest and the tenderest of
his redeemed and purchased people ; to him, with the
Father and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory for
ever and ever.

SEEMON IX.
THE SOLEMN SEARCH.

Zephaniah I. 12.
And it shall come to pass at that time, that I will search Jerusa
lem with candles, and punish the men that are settled on their
lees : that say in their heart, the Lord -will not do good, neither
will he do evil.
In every congregation, there are many different classes
of hearers ; among them, perhaps, one of the most im
portant, and most prominent, is that to which such re
markable allusion is made in the words I have just' read
to you. Men who have become accustomed to the sound
of the Gospel; men to whom its threatenings and its
promises are so well known, that its threatenings excite
little apprehension, and its promises, little delight ; men
upon whose ear the strongest appeals to their consciences,
the most blessed invitations of a Saviour's love, fall un
heeded ; men who live in a state of quiet without safety,
of repose without security, and of peace without one
well-grounded hope of peace. Their state has been
described in several passages of Holy Writ, under the
very expressive metaphor of " settling on their lees," or
on their dregs ; a simile very natural from the lips of
those who lived in a land of vineyards, and to whom the
sight of casks of the wine of their country, which Jiad
108

THE SOLEMN SEARCH.

109

remained unmoved and unagitated for years together,
must have been of daily occurrence.
We find, therefore, the prophet Jeremiah adopting it
in one of the most striking of his predictions, when he
says, " Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he
hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from
vessel to vessel, neither hath been into captivity ; there
fore his taste remaineth in him, and his heart is not
changed. Therefore, behold the days come, saith the
Lord, that I will send unto him wanderers, that shall
cause him to wander, and shall empty his vessels and
break their bottles."
There appears, indeed, to be no state of mind which
the Almighty views with more displeasure, and which
he exerts himself (if we may so say) more constantly to
overcome or to punish, than this cold, dead, phlegmatic
state of the affections and the heart, which God himself
has denominated a "settling on our lees." Against this
it is, that the warning of the text is most peculiarly
pointed^ and against this it is, that I feel called by the
present season more especially to exhort and to warn and
to counsel you this day. ,
May the Spirit of God make his own Word " quick
and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword,
piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit,
and of the joints and marrow, as a discerner of the
thoughts and intents of the heart."
The first portion of the text describes, under a very
familiar figure, the exceeding carefulness and accuracy
with which the Almighty will carry on his search after
these men of whom we have been speaking, " I will
search Jerusalem with candles." Intending to imply,
" No house, however obscure, throughout the whole city,
no recess or closet in that house capable of containing one
10

1-1 0 THE SOLEMN SEARCH.
of these delinquents for whom I look, shall escape my
search. For if the light of day be insufficient, I will
bring even lamps and torches to "the search, rather than
omit a single individual who is thus slighting and dis
honouring me." It is not improbable that the expression
is here used by God to meet the infidelity and the atheism
of those who, according to this same prophet, exclaimed,
" The Lord sees not, neither doth he regard." Why
doth he not? because he wants light? "Well then,"
says God, " I will supply the deficiency ; I will search
Jerusalem with candles, and you shall learn whether I
can neither see nor regard."
The second portion of the text marks out, with a pe
culiar degree of distinctness, the character and the fate
of those for whom this search was undertaken. " I will
punish the men who are settled on their lees ; that say
in their heart, The Lord will not do good, neither will
he do evil."
It appears at first sight strange to us, that if God be
about to utter warnings, and to foretell punishments upon
Jerusalem, this should be the class of persons whom he
should especially visit; that if about to institute so
accurate a search, these should be the only persons
mentioned. The reason, brethren, is this, — the open sinner, the
thief, the adulterer, the drunkard, the murderer, is kuown
and read of all men; there is no need of fresh warnings
of condemnation upon him, and no necessity for candles
to search him out ; the very strictness of the search marks
not only the determination of God to discover all for
whom he seeks, but at the same time that he is looking
for delinquents whose crimes are not written upon their
foreheads, and their characters blazoned forth as the
noonday. Now this is precisely the case at all times,

THE SOLEMN SEARCH. j , ,
and in all places, with the class of persons of whom we
speak. There may be nothing in the outward life and
conversation of any individual among us this day, which
shall distinctly pronounce this man to be " settled down
upon his lees," to be living in an unholy and false se
curity ; and yet who will venture to assert that there may
not be many among us at this moment, who, in the sight
of God, are precisely the characters described, and warn
ed and threatened, in the text.
May the Lord reveal these persons to themselves, and
show them the difference between the true and settled
peace of the children of God, and the false and de
structive peace of those who are dwelling in this ruinous
security. To aid in this important work shall be my first en
deavour, and to advise and counsel those who may stand
self-convicted, shall be my second endeavour this morn
ing. The first class of persons, which falls the most ob
viously and undeniably under the description of the text,
is formed of those, if such there are, who live in that
state of practical fofgetfulness of God, so significantly
expressed by those who say in their heart, " The Lord
will not do good, neither will he do evil." Who have
no care whatever for the God who made, and the Sa
viour who redeemed them ; who scarcely ever bestow a
thought upon him. Yet these are not the avowed ene
mies of God ; they do not profane his name as the com
mon swearer does ; nor deny it as the Atheist does ; nor
dishonour it in their daily conversation as (he loose or
profane talker does. No; the text says expressly,
" They say in their hearts," and probably never hint at
it with their lips ; but their heart is full of practical in
fidelity, they believe that neither good nor evil comes

JJO THE SOLEMN SEARCH.
from God ; they attribute it to chance, fortune, accident,
any thing but God, to whom they would be ashamed to
refer it. The truth is, that God is not at all in their
thoughts ; they do not openly array themselves against
him, they content themselves with utterly forgetting him.
Against these, and such as these, although they may
pass well in society, as honest and honourable, and
amiable and upright, God* has denounced his vengeance
when he said, " The wicked shall be turned into hell,
and all the people who forget God." Yes, uncharitable
as man might esteem it in his fellow-man, God himself
has declared that he will know no difference on the great
day of account, between the man who openly sins against
God, and the man who contents himself with forgetting
him. Are there any among you to whom this distinguishing
mark is not experimentally unknown? Who, when you
rise in the morning, begin the day by forgetting God?
When you go forth to your daily avocations, seek not his
blessing ? When you return to your comforts and your
pleasures, acknowledge not his hand ? When you retire
to rest, close the day with the same forgetfulness of God
with which you opened it? You will at least need no
tongue to tell you that you have altogether " settled upon
your lees," and are in a peculiar manner the objects of
the threatening of the text. Your efforts are all for the
world ; its business or its pleasures occupy your every
thought and desire and feeling. Ydii, then, have need
to tremble at the warning of the text, for the God who
dictated it speaks expressly to yourselves, and says, " Re
joice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart
cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the
ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes : but

THE SOLEMN SEARCH. U3
know, that for all these things, God will bring thee into
judgment." But yet again, and another class presents itself; you
who have not profited by the chastenings and the judg
ments of God upon others, or upon yourselves during the
last twelvemonth. There is no stronger mark than this
of a soul sunk in carnal and deadly security. What do
we think of the thief who robs even beneath the gallows?
What does God think of that man who, when God's
judgments have been around him, and perhaps even
entered his own house, and struck down his worldly
prosperity, or blighted his affections, or disappointed his
hopes, is still the same unthinking, careless, God-forget-
ing being that he ever was ? Alas ! how many among
us will this 'convict ? /How many, for instance, who,
when the fears of the approaching pestilence* had driven
them to their knees, no sooner found it had pleased a
merciful Father so to temper it, in our visitation, that it
bore little resemblance to the pest which had'depopulated
less favoured regions, than they at once settled down
again, and from that hour to the present, perhaps, have
hardly felt a single earnest hearty desire for near com
munion with God, or devoted ness to his will and to his
ways.) How many more _ who, while the chastening
hand of God was upon themselves, or those they love,
became at once among the most humble of his followers,
but no sooner felt it was withdrawn than they sank into
the same security from which they had been so forcibly
drawn and so painfully aroused.
Brethren, there is nothing so provoking to a God who
chastens only that he may awaken and save, as this^,
neglect of judgments. If he beholds in any one instance
* The cholera in 1833,
10*

114

THE SOLEMN SEARCH.

among you such conduct, be assured that if he have
purposes of mercy for that soul, he will increase his
judgments, and repeat his visitations, and multiply his
chastenings until he pour you out from off your dregs,
whereon you are settled, and empty you from vessel to
vessel} and leave untouched none, — no, not one of those
things on which your hearts have dwelt and your souls
are fixing. It is God's invariable method! It is in
scribed, though we see it not, upon half the tombstones
which fill our burying-grounds ; it is written in every
page of God's revealed Word. Listen only to the fourth
chapter of the prophet Amos, where you find this method
of God's dealing detailed at considerable length. "I
have given you cleanness of teeth (or famine) in all your
cities : yet ye have not returned unto me, saith the Lord."
What comes next? "I have smitten you with blasting
and mildew : yet ye have not returned unto me, saith
the Lord.'* What then? " I have sent among you the
pestilence after the manner of Egypt : yet have ye not
returned unto me, saith the Lord." What further? "I
have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom
and Gomorrah : yet have ye not returned unto me, saith
the Lord." And how does all this conclude? "There
fore thus will I do unto thee : Prepare to meet thy God,
O Israel." Wave follows wave in thick and rapid suc
cession, judgment follows judgment, yet all without
avail ; they were as deaf to the voice of vengeance as
they have long been to the voice of mercy, so " settled
on their lees" that nothing can shake them : then does
God draw the remaining arrow from his quiver, and
verify the words of the Psalmist, "Thine arrows are
sharp in the hearts of thine enemies," by calling them
to immediate and inevitable judgment.

THE SOLEMN SEARCH.

115

But' we have still another class to whom to address a
word of warning and of exhortation.
You who neglect to benefit by ordinances, and though
the Word of God be in your ears, do not hear it, — that
is, do not cherish it in your hearts and practise it in your
lives, — listen to the manner in which God has described
conduct precisely such as this by the mouth of his
prophet Zechariah, " They made their hearts as an
adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the
words which the Lord of hosts hath sent ; therefore came
a great wrath from the Lord of hosts." And the manner
in which this wrath was manifested is told us in the fol
lowing verse : " Therefore it is come to pass, that as he
cried and they would not hear ; so they cried and I
would not hear, saith the Lord of hosts."
The hearing, of the want of which the Lord here
accuses his people, is not the mere hearing of the ear,
but the hearing of the heart. " They made their hearts
as adamant, that they should not hear." Brethren, are
you all free from this sign of carnal security ? Perhaps
there never was a time when more outward attention to
the Word of God was manifested, than during the past
twelvemonth ; but has there been the hearing heart? has
the Word, whether read or preached, or expounded,
brought forth fruit? Is there a deeper and stronger con
viction of sin ? Is there less of worldliness and vanity
and folly ? " What do ye more than others ?" was our
Lord's inquiry of his own disciples, and is, at the present
moment, of ourselves. It is vain to say, We hear more ;
we attend ordinances more ; or even we know more. In
the passage that I have read to you, you will observe,
that it was the state of the heart of which God com
plained, and by which alone he calculates the value of
the hearing ear, or the talking tongue. Is your heart

HQ THE SOLEMN SEARCH.
penetrated with a holy abhorrence of sin, of all sin, even
your most favourite, and is it filled with the love of the
Lord Jesus Christ? Is there more of the practical influ
ence of God's truth in your lives ? More real, heartfelt
respect to his hallowed day, and his revealed will ; more
of its amiable and blessed features in your tempers?
More of charity, more of humility, more of sincerity?
" By their fruits ye shall know them," saith the Lord.
If not, although you never may have omitted a single
opportunity when this house of prayer has been opened,
or the Lord's table has been spread, you may yet be un
moved upon the dregs, and therefore yet among the
number of those of whom the Lord has said, " These
will I punish." Still one other class must be briefly
alluded to. You who are really born again of the Spirit,
who have well-grounded hopes of your pardon and
acceptance, who look to Christ for a free and full salva
tion, and have settled down, I will not say, into an
Antinomian state of lethargy, but still into far too near
an approach to it ; who have lost your first love, and
your first zeal, and your first earnestness, and have grown
remiss in secret duties, and slothful in your more public
duties, and feeling a fancied security as to the safety of
your own souls, fake far too little thought for the souls
of those around you, and make far too few, or shrink
altogether from, self-denying exertions for the comfort
and happiness and welfare of those with whom you live.
Perhaps you scarcely know yourselves under this descrip
tion. The Lord enlighten and awaken, that he may
not be compelled also to trouble and to punish you.
But it is time that I should offer a few hints, though
they must be brief, by which we may all awaken from
a state of false and dangerous security. And in these I
especially address myself to you who are not theoretically

THE SOLEMN SEARCH. ;Q7
ignorant of the great truths of the Gospel; but who
know, and who hold them in a cold, dull, inoperative,
and uninfluential manner.
If you would be free then from this spiritual drowsi
ness, keep yourself in spiritual exercise. We have all
heard of cases when a man must be roused, and shaken,
and walked about, to keep him from a sleep, from which
he would no more awaken, and from which nothing but
the constant motion of the body preserves him. So it is
with you. Nothing will, under God's grace, tend so
much to rouse you from the state we have been describ
ing, as constant spiritual exercise. Be frequent then,
especially in secret religious duties, in prayer, reading,
meditation, self-examination, and converse ; but do not
confine yourselves to them ; you must exercise more
publicly your Christian graces, as well as perform these
private and necessary duties. Exercise your faith in
difficulties, your meekness under provocation, your pa
tience in affliction, your charity and kindness in relieving
the wants, or adding to the comfort and happiness of
those around you. If these opportunities do not readily
occur, seek for them. Be always doing something, how
ever small, for the honour and glory of God. Work for
the poor, visit the poor, minister to the poor ; teach in
our schools, assist missionary societies, unite your exer
tions for the better observance of the Lord's day ; do
something, do any thing, if your time and circumstances
will allow, rather than be spiritually idle. It is only by
constant activity that you can keep your souls awake.
For all have found, and you will assuredly find, that
whenever you give up spiritual exercises you will fall
into carnal security of some kind or other.
Again, as another remedy for this spiritual drowsiness,

JJQ THE SOLEMN SEARCH.
this " settling upon the lees," keep God always in your
sight, live much with Jesus, have close communion with
the Holy Ghost. Even the most heedless child pays
some attention when he is beside his father ; even the
worst servant, who yields but an eye-service, does not
sleep while the master's eye is upon him. Realize more,
then, of the presence of God every hour of every day;
see him in your chamber, in your office, in your shop,
in your rides, in your walks, in society, in the church;
never leave his side, never forget that he is close at hand,
seeing, hearing, knowing every thing. While conscious
of the nearness of such a witness, you will up and be
doing, and like the apostle, whatever you do, even to
eating and drinking, you will " do all to the glory of
God." Lastly, to guard against this dangerous security, look
often at the lapse of time, the nearness of death, the cer
tainty of approaching judgment. If any thing will pre
vent you from settling on your lees, if any thing will
rouse you from your slumbers, by God's help this will
do so.
Think you that there is one here present, who, if he
heard at this hour the awful summons, " Thou fool, this
night thy soul shall be required of thee," would close
his eyes one moment in sleep before that summons was
fulfilled ? There would be no slumber, no lethargy, no
drowsiness there ! How would he watch each hour of
the departing day! With what feelings would he behold,
for the last time, the sun sinking down into the west!
How attentively would he listen as each hour of dark
ness passed away, and how zealously would he pray, how
carefully would he converse, or how silendy and thought
fully Would he meditate while the last few hours of life

THE SOLEMN SEARCH.

119

were running out ! Where would vanity, worldliness,
covetousness, folly, be at such a time ? What would the
world and all its possessions be worth at such a season ?
Not one hour's purchase. And who will dare venture
to say that they are certainly worth more to him to-day?
Who, when he looks around upon this congregation, and
feels the positive certainty, that ere this season again re
turns some, nay many, will have heard and obeyed that
solemn summons; who can retire from this house to
dream away the coming twelvemonth, as he has dreamt
away the last? Surely it is the worst of madness not
to be aroused and to bestir ourselves when death and
judgment, heaven and hell, are at the door. May the
Spirit of God make us all more in earnest than we have
ever been in the great work which lies before us. Reli
gion must be every thing, or it is nothing. Therefore,
" Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy
might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge
in the grave, whither thou art hastening." Were you
ever, are you now, conscious that you have sins to be
given up, unholy practices to be discontinued, ungodly
company or pleasures to-be forsaken, — do it at once, do
it to-day. You have long enough experienced the folly
and the falsehood of doing it to-morrow, therefore do it
to-day. Leave not this house of prayer until you have
solemnly, earnestly, and from your inmost soul, besought
God to give you both the will and the power, to strengthen
the holy resolution which you now find rising in your
mind, and to carry it out into full and permanent effect.
O, it is fearful to think that there should be one soul
among us, lost to all eternity, by neglecting the counsel
of God, and by settling down again upon the dregs of
carelessness, formality, selfishness, and sin!

1 20 THE SOLEMN SEARCH.
LET US PRAY.
Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the hearts and wills
of thy people, that while many are sleeping around us
the deep sleep of death, we may have grace to devote
ourselves, our souls and bodies, to thy holy and happy
service; that we may follow the Lord fully, without
hesitation and without reserve, thinking nothing too dear
to sacrifice at thy bidding, and nothing too hard to under
take at thy command ; that when thou comest we may
be among the blessed number of those who are waiting
and watching, with their loins girt and their lamps burn
ing, to go in with thee and for ever be partakers at the
marriage supper of the Lamb.

SERMON X.
THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.

Jeremiah xxxiii. 6.
This is the name by which he shall be called, the Lord our
Righteousness.
Op all the blessed titles of the Redeemer, most blessed,
most consolatory, most delightful to the heart of every
true child of God, is this, " The Lord our Righteous
ness ;" conveying, as it does, to the believer, in the very
name by which his Lord and his Redeemer was an
nounced, his own undoubted charter to an inheritance
beyond the skies. But even while we record this great
and blessed truth, it is impossible not to fear that there
may be some, and some who bear the name of Christian,
to whom this glorious appellation conveys no such dis
tinct and definite impression. Some who hear it as a
mere distinctive title, as they would hear the Saviour
called, " The Root and Offspring of Jesse," or " The
bright and morning Star," or by any other of those names
of glory, with which the Word of God delights to de
signate the Saviour of the world.
It shall be our object, then, to endeavour to give such
a simple exposition of this, the highest and the best of all
11 121

1 22 THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
those terms of honour with which the name of Jesus has
been crowned, that no individual may leave this house
to-day unable — would to God that we might hope that
no individual should leave it unwilling — to realize all
the meaning and all the comfort of the name, and to
exclaim, with a deep and grateful sense of self-appro
priation, " The Lord my Righteousness."
The great and blessed doctrine, then, which we con
ceive to be proclaimed to the Church of God by the
words before us, is this: that when the promised Re
deemer should come, who is plainly predicted in the
verse which precedes the text, he should, as the Prophet
Daniel expresses it, " make an end of sins, and make a
reconciliation for iniquity, and bring in everlasting right
eousness." It is with the last clause of this verse more
particularly that we have now to do. Jesus was to be
called " The Lord our Righteousness," because by the
perfect obedience of his life\ by the entire submission of
his death, by the infinite value of his ransom, he wrought
out and brought in such a perfect and everlasting righteous
ness, as man could not even conceive, as angels and arch
angels could not emulate, and as God himself could not
refuse. Now, brethren, — and I address you as those who have
joined this morning not in word only, but in heart and
in soul, in the scriptural services of our Church; and
when you prayed, " Have mercy upon us, miserable sin
ners," felt convinced that you had many sins which had
need of pardon, and many painful short-comings, even
in your purest actions and in your holiest duties, both to
God and to your neighbours; and I would ask you if
the choice were your own, freely offered you at this
moment by our heavenly Father, of all that would, ac
cording to your own ideas of your own sinfulness and

THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS. ]03
infirmity, most forward the spiritual welfare of your souls,
what would you require? Feeling, as we have supposed
you do, your own utter incapacity to escape from the
condemning power of the law ; feeling that it ever has
and ever must convict you of sin, even when desiring
and striving and praying and labouring to be the most
righteous before God; what should you desire in a
Saviour, if God were to give you your own choice, and
put into your hands a blank to fill it up in that manner
which, according to your finite comprehension, would
make the way of salvation the plainest, and the road to
heaven the easiest, and a perfect righteousness the most
accessible, to such poor, sinful creatures as ourselves ? I
conceive that the reply of every one who is in earnest in
this great matter; of every one who has ever striven and
stumbled, and again, by God's grace, risen and striven,
and then by his own waywardness and infirmity stumbled
and fallen again ; would be something of a nature simi
lar to this ; It is much to have a perfect model set before
me; but then, alas! I cannot imitate it; it is still more
to have guiding and strengthening grace so freely offered
me (and how unspeakably do I value it) ; but still, when
I have done all, I am but an unprofitable servant, and
how can I be fit to appear before a perfect God ? Would,
therefore, that there might be such an infinite perfection,
such an infinite supply of righteousness treasured up in
Christ Jesus, that there should be enough for all, enough
for me ; that when I stand before the bar of God, and
feel overwhelmed with the consciousness of my past
transgressions, and upon looking at my righteousness,
see even the best of them to be as an unclean thing, as a
polluted garment, I might be enabled to look at him
who stands at God's right hand, and claim his righteous
ness as mine own, and plead his merits for mine, and be

124 THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
allowed his obedience to stand for mine ; and that all the
wonderful perfections of his life, all the matchless merits
of his death, might be as much my own as if I had
walked in perfectness from my cradle to my grave, and
had been one, in whose every most secret thought and
word and feeling and action, a God of perfect purity
had been " well-pleased."
What would be the feeling with which you would
hear, in reply, from the lips of the living God, if as a true
and humble penitent you have closed with the offers of
the Saviour, and fled to his great atonement for accept
ance, " Son, it is done as thou bast said. The Saviour
whom I have sent is called, or appointed to be ' the Lord
thy Righteousness;' not only all that thou hast ever
owed has he abundantly and fully paid ; not only all
thy sins have been once and for ever laid on him, but all
his righteousness is once and for ever laid on thee ; hence
forth, throughout eternity thou art to me as one clad in
those garments of righteousness and salvation, which be
long to the only-begotten Son." Can we receiye any
thing more blissful to the soul of the poor trembling, yet
deeply penitent and believing sinner, than an assurance
such as this. Pardon and grace and strength and perse
verance are indeed most blessed boons, but here is one
which outweighs them all, which restores to the human
soul that image of God which Adam defaced and ruined,
and which clothes it in a righteousness infinitely more
perfect, infinitely more valuable in the sight of God, than
Adam's could have ever been, had he remained to this
hour the spotless tenant of his earthly paradise.
But delightful as is the belief that such are really the
promises of God with reference to this great subject,
there are some, perhaps, who would most willingly and
gratefully apply them to themselves, if only they could

THE LORD OUR KlUHTj&uusiviass.

125

believe that they were indeed contained in God's own
Word, and not a mere portion of the divinity system of
some human teacher.
I shall proceed then to demonstrate what I have now
asserted, that you may examine the Word of God for
yourselves, and see whether these things be so.
In doing this, I shall pass by the strikingly corrobora
tive declarations of the prophet, " in the Lord have I
righteousness and strength ; and of the apostle, the
righteousness of God is " unto all, and upon all them
that believe," with many similar, confining myself to the
application of a single passage ; for if the mouth of Him
who cannot lie hath spoken it, it will be as convincing
to his people, and as certain and unquestionable to their
hearts, if it be but in a single word, as if it were blazoned
upon every page and written in every chapter of the Bible.
The passage then which I should select as one among
the many foundation-stones of this great doctrine, is at
the close of the fifth chapter of Romans, " For as by one
man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the
obedience of one shall many be made righteous."
The apostle here distinctly draws the parallel between
the disobedience of the first Adam and the obedience of
the second ; and he says, " As" by the first, many have
been made sinners, " So," or in the same manner, by
the second, " shall many be made righteous." It is evi
dent, then, that there is no force whatever in the assertion
of the apostle, unless the method by which the righteous
ness of Christ is said to make us righteous, be precisely
analogous to the method by which the sin of Adam is
said to make us sinners. Now, no true Christian, how
ever he may feel upon the point immediately before us,
will hesitate for a moment as to the scriptural view of
the effects of Adam's sin. No true Christian denies that
11*

126 THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
all mankind fell when Adam fell ; that as our federal
head, what he did, we are considered to have done ; and
that in consequence, as God's Word repeatedly declares,
we come into the world with a load of unpardoned guilt
upon our souls. Born in sin, for in sin did our mothers
conceive us, the most innocent infant in the world, until
cleansed by the application of the blood of Christ, is a
child of wrath, even as others. This was the manner,
then, in which, by the disobedience of one, all have been
made sinners ; not by a mere following the example of
Adam, as the Pelagians do vainly talk, and as our Ninth
Article expressly contradicts, but by the inherent taint of
a corrupt and fallen nature, stamped with the deadly im
press of its great progenitor's primeval sin.
This, then, is the manner also in which many, nay
every child of God, is made righteous. The moment
you are born into the family of earth, the sin of Adam is
laid upon you, and cleaves to you, and becomes your
sin; the moment you are born into the family of God,
the righteousness of Christ is laid upon you, and remains
upon you, and becomes your righteousness. From that
hour you are, as the apostle expresses it, " complete in
Christ," and being so complete, you plead, with rever
ence and deep humility be it spoken, you plead your
acceptance at the hands of God's justice, according to the
terms of the covenant with the Eternal Son ; and that
covenant having been published, God is, as St. John de
clares, " Righteous and just to forgive you your sins,
and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness." For it is
thus and thus only that the words of the Holy Ghost can
be fulfilled, that, "as by one man's disobedience many
were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall
many be made righteous." It is thus that " Christ is the
end of the law for righteousness to every one that be-

THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS. 1 27
lieveth ;" and that it pleases God to admit, and to reward,
as if it were the personal righteousness of every one of
his believing people, this perfect obedience to the Incar
nate Son. In the day, then, that by the act of sove
reign grace you close with the offers of your Redeemer,
he becomes "the Lord your righteousness;" in his
"obedience even unto death," i. e., from the cradle to
the cross, you are by God's mercy clothed ; a wedding
garment, well worthy of that wedding feast to which he
has purchased your admittance. Arrayed in this, the
poorest, weakest, most ignorant sinner among ourselves
shall not be ashamed, when invited to sit down with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the saints of God, at
the marriage supper of the Lamb. For the highest and
most glorious guest in that assembly shall have no better,
I may say, shall have no other garment than yourself.
" We overcame by the blood of the Lamb," shall be the
only watchword which shall enable you to pass through
the gate of the heavenly citadel ; " We are clothed in
the righteousness of the Lamb/' the only declaration
which shall admit you to the table of the heavenly
banquet. Brethren, I trust I do not state this great and glorious
truth in language stronger than Scripture warrants, or
than the true people of God, in every age, have adopted.
Hear only the words of that great luminary of our Church,
the judicious Hooker, " The righteousness wherein we
must be found," be says, " if we will be justified, is not
our own ; therefore we cannot be justified by any in
herent quality  Although, then, in ourselves
we be altogether sinful and unrighteous, yet even the
man who is impious in himself, full of iniquity, full of
sin, him being found in Christ, through faith, 
him God beholdeth with a gracious eye, putteth away

t 2g THE LORD OUR RIGHTE0USNES3.
his sin by not imputing it, taketh away the punishment
due thereto by pardoning it, and accepteth him in Christ
Jesus, as perfectly righteous as if he had fulfilled all that
was commanded of him in the law — shall I say, more
perfectly righteous than if himself had fulfilled the whole
law? I must take heed what I say; but the apostle
saith, ' God made him to b» sin for us, who knew no
sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in
him.' Such we are in the sight of God the Father, as
is the very Son of God himself. Let it be counted folly,
or phrensy, or fury, or whatsoever, it is our comfort and
our wisdom ; we care for no knowledge in the world but
this, that man hath sinned, and God hath suffered, that
God hath made himself the Son of man, and that men
are made the righteousness of God." Surely, then, we
may well add, in the glowing language of a dignitary of
our Church of a former day, " Had I all the faith of the
patriarchs, all the zeal of the prophets, all the good works
of the apostles, all the sufferings of the martyrs, I would
renounce the whole, in point of dependence, and glory
only in the atoning blood, and justifying righteousness
of Jesus Christ, my Lord."
In conclusion, brethren, the practical inquiry which
arises out of this high subject, is simply the question
which each man's heart alone can answer. " Is the
Saviour of whom I have this day heard, the Lord my
Righteousness?" Do you ask, how is this to be deter
mined ? What is the act of faith which is to make him
mine ? We reply, the first great point is that to which
we have already referred, the deep, heartfelt, uncompro
mising conviction and abhorrence and renunciation of
sin. This once wrought in you by that Holy Spirit,
whose alone prerogative it is to convince the world of sin,
and we advance one step farther, — we come to the act of

THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS. J29
justifying faith, for which you inquire ; that of which
all Scripture, all experience, all living- believers, all dying
saints, all blessed martyrs, all pardoned sinners tell. Now
this act is not comprised in a single thought, a single de
sire, a single word, but it consists in a state of mind, of
affections, of heart. That state which the Holy Spirit
alone can work, and which, where his Divine influences
are sincerely sought, he will work in any fallen, corrupt,
polluted child of fallen Adam ; that state which enables
you to leave all for Christ, to seek all from Christ, and to
find all, and more than all, in Christ.
Brethren, is this your state at the present moment?
Can you say, from your heart, There is no sin, no
pleasure, no profit, no feeling which I would not willingly
sacrifice, and desire to sacrifice, for Christ's sake, if God
require it ? There is no act, no thought, no word, no
righteousness of mine, with which, in the way of merit,
I would desire to approach God ; " my best is nothing
worth," all are vile, all are polluted, all are deserving
rather of punishment for their short-coming, than of re
ward for their merits. I, therefore, give up all, I renounce
all, I abhor all, if put in competition with what my Sa
viour and Redeemer has done and suffered for me ; to
that and to that alone I look ; my only hope, my only
solace, my only and all-sufficient Saviour, is Jesus Christ,
the Rock of Ages.
Then, brethren, this, as regards each individual among
you, so thinking and so acting, is the name whereby God
at this moment calls the Divine, the Eternal Son, " the
Lord your Righteousness." This is that justifying faith
which makes you one with God, and God with you;
this is that state of heart and affections, which all preach
ing, all reading, all meditation, all sacraments, all prayer,
are intended instrumentally to produce, or to build up, or

130 THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
to establish. We ask nothing more for you and for our
selves, than that this may be, not a momentary impulse
strongly affecting the mind, not like a cloud across the
sun, changing its appearance for a moment, and then
passing away for ever, but the abiding, settled, habitual
posture of our affections and thoughts; enabling us to
say, not once, but for ever, " The life which I now live
in the flesh, I live by the faith of ihe Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself for me," — " not having mine
own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which
is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is
of God by faith."
With these feelings, to you " to live will be Christ,
and to die will be gain," your life will be holy, your
death peaceful, your end glorious. He whom you have
loved and worshipped and obeyed, will be " the Lord
your Righteousness" now, the Lord your everlasting joy,
and your infinite happiness, in the kingdom of his
Father.

SERMON XL
CONFESSING CHRIST.

Matthew x. 32, 33.
Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess also
before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall
deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father
which is in heaven.
There is something peculiarly great and ennobling
in true Christianity. It refines the feelings, elevates the
heart, dignifies the manners, while it converts and saves
the soul. So strikingly is this the case, that it is a com
mon observation of those who have enjoyed the largest
intercourse with the religious poor, that they could in
almost all cases rightly pronounce, merely from externals,
whether the inmates of a cottage have been really brought
into the household and family of Christ Jesus our Lord.
No doubt the first great cause of this is, that the moment
the heart comes under the influence of Divine grace, it
is opened to the action of a multitude of thoughts and
impressions of a far higher nature than have ever yet
been brought to bear upon it; and while exercised in
these, it necessarily escapes from much of the dross and
dust and pollution of that lower world in which it has
been, hitherto, wholly occupied ; it becomes conversant
131

132 CONFESSING CHRIST.
with subjects as entirely above the comprehension ofthe
highest created intelligence, as they are above its own ;
it lives much in the contemplation of the eternal; it
unites daily, not only with the wisest and noblest and
best of men in their thoughts and prayers and medita
tions, but it goes higher still ; it has one subject and one
feeling and one song with angels and archangels, and
with all the host of heaven, while they laud and magnify
God's glorious name. These things must inevitably
elevate and adorn while they correct and sanctify ; and
the widest and longest experience fully proves that they
do so. But there is yet another, and though a lower,
still unquestionably a very influential promoter of the
same great effects. This is to be found even in the
manner in which, in the revealed Word, the religion of
Jesus is proposed to us. There is nothing low, nothing
mean, nothing pitiful, nothing clandestine, to be met
with throughout the whole of the revelation of Christ.
All is grand and open and noble ; the motives of the
Gospel are all as honest and sincere as they are pure and
uncontaminated ; the precepts of the Gospel are all as
distinct and unambiguous as they are lovely and of good
report; the policy ofthe Gospel is all as straightforward,
bold, and transparent, as it is holy, good, and wise.
Perhaps there is nothing which so completely charac
terizes, and at the same time identifies the religion of
Jesus Christ as this ; nothing which draws so decisive a
line between it and every false religion; and, more than
this, between it and every adulterated religion, every
human modification of the true.
It would not be difficult to find a thousand examples
to illustrate these observations, but we will content our
selves with the corroboration they receive from the single
injunction of the text ! Consider for a moment the cir-

CONFESSING CHRIST.

133

cumstances under which it was delivered, the time when
it was first so strongly enforced? and you cannot but
acknowledge, that if it stood alone, it is so entirely ad
verse to the dictates of a carnal policy, so completely
contrary to what man would term the interest of the
faith to which it refers, that to every unprejudiced mind,
while it powerfully corroborates the truths to which I
have just adverted of the ennobling character of the Gos
pel, it cannot but form a strong additional proof of the
Divine origin of a religion which would voluntarily sub
ject itself to such a test. The Jews had just before
passed a law that whosoever should confess Christ to be
the Messiah, should be " put out of the synagogue ;" in
other words, should be excommunicated, the heaviest
punishment they were, at that period of their history,
empowered legally to inflict. The Gentiles would, as
the omniscient Saviour perfectly foreknew, soon establish
an ordinance, that he who should dare to confess Christ
should be thrown to the wild beasts, or carried to the
stake. All human probability, therefore, of the spread
of Christianity, would seem to rest upon the fact, during
its infancy, of its quiet, silent, unobtrusive progress, and
this to depend upon the great tact and management in
the mode in which it was promulgated, to rely almost
for its existence on the judicious reserve which its fol
lowers should evince in preaching the peculiar truths of
the Gospel ; and that therefore not merely its prosperity,
but, as I have said before, its very existence, would de
pend upon the concealment and secrecy of its few and
timid and powerless followers. It was in the very face
of all these opposing circumstances, in contradiction to
every dictate of human policy and worldly expediency,
that our Lord delivered the declaration of the text,
" Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I
12

134 CONFESSING CHRIST.
confess before my Father which is in heaven. But
whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also
deny before my Father which is in heaven." It is
Ijardly possible to conceive a declaration which, to the
worldly wise and worldly prudent, must have sounded
so ill-timed, so injudicious, so insane, so suicidal. Never
theless, upon this command, the Saviour was content to
take his stand, and in the face of a world's hatred, and a
world's opposition, to require his followers boldly and
plainly to confess their allegiance to him ; and in spite
of the obvious dangers thus (not indeed counted, but .
certainly not in any degree evaded),. to plant triumphantly
the' religion of the cross upon the rains of every false
religion in the world.
/If, then, our Divine Master could, under circumstances
so extremely adverse, still think it right to declare and to
enforce the command of the text, it must be in all ages
the bounden duty of his ministers to carry forward the
selfsame message, and to urge it upon his people; as
much in Christian England, as it was in Antichristian
Jerusalem, or in Heathen Rome. No change of time,
no alteration of circumstances, effecting any the least
change or the least modification in the dictates of Him
who is " the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever," and
" with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of
turning.'! We shall proceed, then, to apply this subject to our-
selvesJand herein, with peculiar reference to that large
portion of our younger hearers, who, since the last Sab-'
bath, have openly confessed the Saviour of tlie worlcTjh
We will consider —
First, the necessity of obeying the injunction of the
text. Secondly, The prominency given to this duty in the

CONFESSING CHRIST.

135

Word of God, and some few of those common incidents
in daily life in which all classes of Christians are called
upon, from time to time, by the providence of God, to
yield obedience to it.
First, with regard to the constant and perpetual ne
cessity of our obedience ; if we look to the dictates of
self-interest, at least as interpreted by worldly wisdom,
or carnal policy, no doubt this might be made a very
prominent feature in the discburse. We .might point
out the danger, the impolicy, the unadvisableness of con
fessing Christ, at all times, and on all occasions, even before
the ungodly great, before the sneering infidel, before the in
credulous man of science, or the scoffing man of wit ; and
we might show the advantage of a judicious selection of
times and seasons in which, and persons before whom,
Christ should be confessed. But, if we treat this portion
of the subject by a simple reference to the revealed Word
of God, as we would desire to treat every subject from this
place, nothing can be shorter, or more plain, or more
simple. Our Lord disposes of the inquiry in a single
word, " Whosoever." There is no distinction as to time,
or place or person. It is " Whosoever shall confess,"
and "whosoever shall deny." It is just one of those
injunctions, upon hearing which even the apostle ex
claimed, " This is a hard saying, who can hear it?"
But this ought not to take m by surprise. When/my
younger brethren, you Iatelwntered upon the profession
of Christianity, yofti were plainly and distinctly told that
it was no flowery mead that you were invited to walk
in, but a narrow path and a straight gate, through which
you were to strive and to press, and. as the inspired
writer says, to " agonize," if yea hopcto enter the king
dom of heaven. ¥&w were told that you- were no longer
to travel with the crowd, upon the broad road which

136 CONFESSING CHRIST.
leadeth to destruction ; that the flock of Christ was in
variably called by himself a " little flock ;" that $65 were
not to expect to discover the road with ease, and to keep
it without effort, for that Christ himself again had said,
" Few there be that find it ;" that the religion j<» profess
is never spoken of in Scripture under any other meta
phors than thosje of a race, a journey, a wrestling-match,
or a battle : tbat it is vain, utterly vain, to imagine that
y&& shall escape from the difficulties which patriarchs,
prophets, and saints, in all ages, and in all countries,
have encountered ; that he who turns aside from the steep
and fugged and difficult path which has ever been trod
den by the people of Christ, to the heavenly Zion, and
hopes to find some shorter road across the fields, will
not only lose his labour, but unless he return to what
the prophet Isaiah denominates, the " king's highway,"
will also lose his soul.
We proceed, secondly, to offer a few remarks upon
the prominency given to this subject, in the Word of
God, and to point out a few of those instances in daily
life, which arise, from time to time, to elicit our obedi
ence to it.
Confession of the Lord Jesus Christ is made, from the
very beginning, in God's Word, one of the first and
strongest tests of discipleship. When the Gospel days
were foretold by tbe prophets under the old dispensation,
we find the confession of the lips bears as distinct a part
in the promises of what God would do for his people, as
the conversion of their hearts; thus, while we hear Jere
miah, speaking of Gospel times, in that well-known pas
sage, "After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my
law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts,"
we hear Isaiah describing the self-same times, he says,
" This is my covenant with them ;" " My words, which

CONFESSING CHRIST.

137

I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy
mouth, nor out of tbe mouth of thy seed, nor out of the
mouth of thy seed's seed, ftom henceforth and for ever."
And that we may not suppose that the mouth and the heart
are merely convertible terms, we find David, in the very
same Psalm, praying, first, that his heart might be inclined
to God's* testimonies, and then that the Word of truth
might not. be taken out of his mouth, but that he might
have courage to confess publicly, what he had received
and rejoiced in privately. In accordance with the same
fact, we find the Apostle (o the Philippians, declaring
not only that, " at the name of Jesus, every knee should
bow,'-(this might be done privily,) but addingf" and
every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."
While, again, St. John says, " Whosoever shall confess"
(not merely whosoever shall believe) " that Jesus is the
Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God."
And, perhaps, still more strongly in the well-known
passage in Romans, " With the heart man believeth unto
righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made
unto salvation."
We may then, without in^any degree straining the
sense of Scripture, derive from these passages this un
questionable fact : that as there cannot be true confession
of Christ without faith, so can there never be true and
lively faith in Jesus Christ without confession of it ; i. e.
without a readiness, when time and opportunity appear
to require it of us, to speak plainly, honestly, unambigu
ously, of our feelings with regard to Christ and his reli
gion, before the people of the world, before those who
differ from us, — yea, if called to do so, as David says, be
fore even kings, and not be ashamed. We are perfectly
aware that confession of Christ is at the present hour by
no means the same painful and arduous thing that it
12*

13g CONFESSING CHRIST.
once wa3 ; that in some sense the whole tide of the world
may be said to have set in in favour of Christianity; that
religion, to a certain extent, at least in this country, in
deed has become even fashionable! so tbat to confess
the Lord Jesus Christ before men is altogether a totally
different undertaking, in point of danger, from what it
was in the days when such a confession led ihe way to
the Roman amphitheatre, or the fires of Smithfield;^r
even, we may say, to what it was some fifteen or twenty
years ago.| Still will it always be, when fully, truly,
scripturally performed, a difficult, and a trying, and a
painful thing to flesh and blood. It is enough that God
has commanded it as a perpetual duty of the Christian,
to ensure the fact that Satan will take care that it shall
never be easy of performance, shall never want the thorns
and briers with which he has been so well enabled to
entwine every positive command of God. Take, for in
stance, the case of an individual in the lower ranks of
life. You are, speaking after the fashion of men, de
pendent for your livelihood upon the will, perhaps, of an
ungodly masts* divnikftees, and they require from you
some act of obedience which strikes directly at your prior
obligation to your God ; perhaps some open violation of
the Lord's-day ; perhaps some act of secret dishonesty or
overreaching, which they may profess to think compatible
with their duty as tradesmen or dealers.
This, then, is a case in which, even at the present day,
it is no easy thing to confess the Lord Jesus Christ; to
say with Joseph, " How can I do this great wickedness,
and sin against God ?" or with the apostles, to refuse the
command with the simple declaration, "We ought to
obey God rather than man ;" and yet this is precisely one
of those instances to which our Lord himself referred, and

CONFESSING CHRIST.

139
for which, as he has given a difficult command, so will
he certainly give grace to obey it.
/Or again, in the case of domestic servants ; you are
about to engage yourself in a family where you Will be
unable to fulfil God's command of hallowing his day by
an attendance at his house of prayer. Here, then, you
are bound to confess Christ before men, to reject such a
situation whatever be its temporal advantages, because
in a very important sense it would compel you to deny
your Saviour.!
But perhaps your trial may proceed^not from your
masters, but)from your companions, and is on that ac
count even yet more difficult. You are requested to
accompany them upon some Sabbath-breaking party, to
forget the vows you have so lately taken upon you, and
to join them in some act of immorality, or of sinful
pleasure, or of gross intemperance; how hard is it, not
merely to refuse, but to refuse upon the right and Chrisr
tian principle, to confess Christ before men ; to say at
once, " I cannot thus disobey my Lord, I cannot thus
dishonour him who died for me, and to whom I have
pledged myself in a perpetual covenant never to be for
gotten." But here again, ask, and you shall have, seek,
and you shall find ; grace and wisdom and strength equal
to your day are invariably bestowed, under all such cir
cumstances, to those who seek them.
But the difficulty of confessing the Lord Jesus Christ
before men, is by no means confined to the lower classes
in society, it affects, and powerfully affects, all, without
exception and without reserve, from the king upon the
throne, to the prisoner in the dungeon. There is not an
individual who is not, unless secured by the power of
Divine grace, on these subjects, afraid of his fellow-men,
and, therefore, oftentimes ashamed of Christ, of his Word,

140 CONFESSING CHRIST.
of his will, of his people. O, it is pitiful to think of the
meanness and the paltriness of the natural heart of man,
whatever be his station, nothing too low for it to sloop to,
nothing too contemptible for it to practise : and this not
alone in the poor and the needy and the uneducated, but
in the highest and the noblest and the proudest.
How many aie there, for example^n this great metro
polis)^ thin "suauon , ywho are seen crowding into the
nocturnal retreats of fashionable 'folly^not because they^
have any real pleasure in them, but because they are
ashamed to be missed there ; afraid of losing caste, if
they are not seenjwith the great and noble^ afraid of
being thought more religious than those around them;
afraid — must I say so — of confessing Christ. How many
are there at this moment, whose hearts are convinced of
the necessity, the propriety, yea, even the comfort, of a
more open, decided, uncompromising avowal of the Lord
Jesus Christ, a casting-in of their lot with the lot of his
people, and yet who dare not do it; who dare not con
fess him, because they fear the face of man, because
they dread the opinion of man more than of his Maker.
They are, therefore, bold where they should be ashamed,
and ashamed where they should be bold. They are bold
in speaking of their sins, of their follies, of their vices;
but they are ashamed of speaking, even before their own
friends and acquaintances, of God, of Christ, and of
heaven. They are ashamed of the stricter observances
of a religious life, even while they partially practise them ;
ashamed of a religious book, yea, even of the Bible itself,
and would hide it from the eyes of an ungodly compa
nion, even though they read it: and they would be
ashamed if, in such a state of mind, they could enter
heaven — they would be ashamed of heaven itself, until
they had well looked around them, and fully ascertained

CONFESSING CHRIST. 141
that none of a different opinion from themselves, whose
scoff, or sneer, or ridicule they dread, had been admitted
there. May God have mercy upon them, and give them
grace, before it be too late, to see the misery of such a
time-serving waiting upon him, to know that a secret
belief which shuns an open avowal of Christ, is removed
hut one step, and that a very short one, from an absolute
and positive unbelief and open denial.
Still we do not speak of a conscientious confession of
Christ as an easy duty, or one which, even under the
mildest circumstances, can be performed by your own
unaided resolution, however powerful.
A holy boldness in the confession of the Lord Jesus
Christ, is always spoken of in his Word as undoubtedly
the gift of God. " The Lord God will help me, there
fore shall I not be confounded, therefore have I set my
face like a flint ; and I know that I shall not be ashamed,
I shall not be confounded, for God is at my right hand."
And, again, Behold, I have made thy face strong against
their faces, and thy forehead strong against their fore
heads." And acting upon these and many other pro
mises, we find the apostles distinctly asking this as a
gift from God, " Grant unto thy servants, that, with all
boldness, we may speak thy Word." We believe, then,
that there is no situation, whether social and domestic,
or public and official, in which, if we really seek God's
grace for this important and difficult duty, it will be with
held. The cause of our repeated failures is, that we
either attempt the confession of Christ in our own strength,
or. we do not attempt it with a single eye to God's
glory. Wherever either of these is the case, we must
expect defeat and disgrace and disappointment, and we
shall most certainly fall. Peter is an example of the
former (the failure in confessing Christ, when trusting to

142

CONFESSING CHRIST.

our own strength,) and the many grievous instances of
the lapsed, during the times of Heathen persecution,
form the abundant examples of the latter.
But it is not merely to encouragement that we must
look to enable us to fulfil this most difficult duty; our
Lord himself has seen fit to add to this the painful alli
ance of his threatenings : " Whosoever shall deny me be
fore men, him will I also deny before my Father which
is in heaven." Whenever, then, you are tempted (and
who, is not at times so tempted) to deny, either by word
or action, the Lord who bought you with his precious
blood ; to be ashamed of the doctrines, the precepts, or
the ordinances of his religion (and how many are kept
from the Lord's table by this very feeling,) bring strongly
before your mind the short duration of this world's opi-'
nion and this world's censure. Realize the great assem
blage to which our Lord so briefly alludes in the words,
" him will I deny before the angels of God." O think
how rapidly all is passing which has yet to be between
that hour and the present ; of what profit will all which
now most influences your soul be to you upon that
coming day ! To stand before the Saviour's throne dis
owned, discarded, disgraced for ever; a convicted time-
server, a detected hypocrite ; to go up to that presence,
that awful, that unspeakably awful presence,' full of the
unholy, the groundless confidence of those who shall say,
"Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name?"
was I not baptized in thy name? did I not attend in
thine house? did I not eat at thy table? did I not ac
knowledge thee when in the presence of thy people?
And to hear in reply, " I never knew you ;" you denied
me with your lips, you denied me by your life, and the
immutable word has long since gone forth, " He that

CONFESSING CHRIST.

143

denieth me before men, I will deny before the angels
of God."
While, on the other hand, my Christian brethren, fand
especially you, my younger Christian friends, that have
lately entered upon the Christian course of voluntary
allegiances — Who. can worthily estimate, who can think
or conceive aright of the unspeakable peace and comfort
of that hour, if it bring with it, amidst the wreck and
ruin of a perishing world, the blessed confession from
the lips of Him to whom all judgment is committed, that
He is yours, and that you are his ? How blessed to be
confessed by Christ, when heaven and earth shall pass
away ; to be acknowledged then, as a sheep of his own
flock, a lamb of his fold, a soul of his own redeeming :
to hear him say, " This man, this woman, this child,
(and doubtless many such shall be there,) bore the scoff
and the ridicule and the opprobrium of an ungodly world,
for my sake ; and them that honour me, I will honour :
this young disciple was not ashamed of the Gospel of
Christ,- he knew it, loved it, practised it; he confessed
me by his life; and he confessed me with his lips, and
now, before assembled worlds, I fulfil my promise, I
confess him before my Father which is in heaven, and
before the angels of God; I have justified him, I have
sanctified him, and will for ever glorify him ; " That
where I am, there ye may be also." " Well done, good
and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
Brethren, let us all dwell much upon that day, think
often upon that promise, and by God's grace we shall
not be ashamed of him whose name we bear, whose
servants we are, whose cross we have professed to carry,
and "who of God" will then be made " unto us wisdom
and righteousness and sanctification and redemption."
-' r~f"

SERMON XII.
GO FORWARD.

Exodus xiv. 15.
Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.
In every portion of the history of the Israelites there is
so much to interest, so much to edify, so much to en
courage the Christian, that there are few parts of Scrip
ture more "profitable for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness," than those which refer to
the perils and the preservations of God's chosen people.
It is my intention this morning to bring before you
one of the most remarkable passage! in their astonishing
history ; one in which the power of God and his faithful
ness to his people are so gloriously developed, that no
Christian, be his age or experience what they may, can
review it without the deepest feelings of gratitude, that
he has himself been brought to the knowledge of such a
God, and reconciled by the blood of Christ to such a
Father. The incident in the history of the Israelites which led
to the command of the text is as follows. Their long
and grievous captivity under Pharaoh, king of Egypt,
had just been brought to a conclusion by the miraculous
144

GO FORWARD.

145

interference of the Almighty. But their difficulties,
which they no doubt had imagined would have been at
an end, appeared to be rather increased than diminished
by the change. While they were in bondage they were
not indeed happy, for they were the slaves of tyrannical
masters, and they received from those they served neither
remuneration nor pity. But what was the change of
state which they had now experienced ? They had been
marched out into " the wild and waste-howling wilder
ness," where there was not shade to shelter them from
the burning heat of the sun, no plentiful supply of water
to glake their thirst, no rest for the sole of their weary feet
These were difficulties sufficient, and more than suffi
cient to have appalled the stoutest heart ; but even these
were by no means the most severe with which the
Israelites had to contend. The inexorable Pharaoh,
from whom his sufferings had at last wrung only a con
strained permission to depart, no sooner found that they
were really gone, than his heart was again hardened, and
he resolved once more to bring them back to the scene
of their captivity. He therefore collects all his chariots
of war, his horsemen, and his armies, and follows the
unarmed and unprotected multitudes of Israel into the
very depths of the wilderness.
Behold then, brethren, the awful and critical situation
of the people of God ! Behind them was this enraged
monarch, who had now overtaken them, and drawn
around them the armies of his mighty ones, and en
camped so closely upon them, that nothing but his com
mand appears to be wanting to put them to instant and
remediless slaughter. Before them were the waters of
the Red Sea, which no human being had ever forded.
Can we conceive a more terrifying or a more hopeless
13

14g GO FORWARD.
situation? Who can be surprised at reading, "When
Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel lifted up their
eyes, and behold, the Egyptians marched after them,
and they were sore afraid." Then was demonstrated
their want of faith, of confidence, of reliance in the
power of their Almighty Leader : " Because there were
no graves in Egypt," said the Israelites, " hast thou
taken us away to die in the wilderness? It. had been
better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should
die in the wilderness."
This, then, was the remarkable moment that the words
of the text were spoken. In answer to the desponding
and faithless declaration which 1 have just read to you,
Moses himself, alarmed and uncertain, had replied,
" Stand still ; the Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall
hold your peace." But here even Moses appears to have
decided wrong. Great as is the duly oftentimes of stand
ing still and waiting for the Lord, (and a very important
and trying duty it is, and many are the promises attached
to its fulfilment,) there is also ihe still more necessary
duty of striving in the strength of the Lord, and acting
fearlessly and unhesitatingly under his guidance, and al
his command. This was the exercise of faith to which
God saw fit, on the present occasion, to command the
Israelites ; and his answer to the ejaculations, or it may
be, the mental prayer of Moses, — foi no prayer is re
corded, — was the commandment of the text: "Where
fore criest thou unto me?" saith the Lord, "speak unto
the children of Israel, that they go forward."
Never was there a period since time began, when such
a command, if uttered by man, would have been so
futile ; when such a command, even though proceeding
from the mouth of the Almighty God himself, must have

GO FORWARD.

147

appeared so absolutely impracticable; and yet there
never was a time when God permitted it to be more
triumphantly obeyed.
The Israelites went forward, and the waters of the sea
were immediately divided by the word of God ; those
remote recesses of the ocean into which the light of day
had never penetrated, were all made visible to their
astonished sight; the very element through which they
passed appeared to change its nature ; to open up from
its extremest depths, and to stand as "a wall," says the
Word of God, on their right hand and on their left,
while the people of God passed through the depths of
the sea without even wetting the soles of their feet.
The Egyptians also went forward, and the path looked
safe and dry before them, and the waters stood as a wall
on their right hand and on their left. Both the friends and
the enemies of God, therefore, were together in this awful
and astonishing passage. Both had with equal fearless
ness advanced together, but there was still an important
difference: the Israelites had gone forward at the com
mand, and therefore in the strength of the Almighty ;
while the Egyptians had advanced in the plenitude of
their own pride, and in the might of their own strength.
Do you not, then, already anticipate the difference of
their fates?
All that fearful night the two hostile armies were to
gether traversing that road of miracle ; but we read that
the angel of God, who usually went before the Israelites,
removed and went behind them ; and the pillar of the
cloud also moved and went behind them, standing be
tween them and the Egyptians, shedding light and com
fort and assurance of protection upon the people of God,
but hanging in portentous darkness upon their enemies;
ej that, as the Word of Gpd declares, " The one army

. ID GO FORWARD.
came not near the other all night." "And it came to
pass, in the morning watch, that the Lord looked," such
is the emphatic language of holy writ, " unto the host of
the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and cloud, and
troubled the host of the Egyptians," and made them to
go heavily. Then Moses, at the command of the Most
High, " stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the sea
returned to his strength, when the morning appeared;
and the Egyptians fled against it ; and tbe Lord over
threw them in the midst of ihe sea. And the waters re
turned, and covered the chariots-, and the horsemen, and
all the host of Pharaoh ;  there remained not so
much as one of them."
Interesting as is the narrative, brethren, I will not en
large upon it, but will rather leave you to read it and re
flect upon it for yourselves; for the time usually allotted
to spiritual instruction is so brief, that I am anxious to
hasten to the personal application of the subject be
fore us.
Let us, then, proceed, first, to trace the likeness exist
ing between the Israelites, recently delivered from the
land of their captivity, and those among you who are but
newly awakened to your own position as sinners, and
desirous of being indeed delivered from worse than
Egyptian bondage, and forwarded on the road to the
everlasting mansions.
One of the earliest feelings by which you are likely to
be influenced is of this nature. We will suppose, and
we trust, with regard to some among you, righdy sup
pose, that you are tired of the servitude of sin, or of the
world, wearied with the bondage of Satan, in which we
all, by nature, are enthralled, and in which many, alas!
how many, continue at the present moment entangled;
but you have seen, by God's grace, your misery and your

GO FORWARD. 149
danger, and you imagine, and properly imagine, that a
great and effectual step has been taken in bringing you to
this state of feeling,.for it is the work of God'sSpirit, even
of Him alone; but you are led, naturally, though erro
neously, to expect that your present comfort and happi
ness and security will be as certain as your more distant
and undoubted prospect: i. e. (taking the Israelites as
the type of the Christian), you expect to enjoy the hap
piness, of Canaan, while traversing the wilderness which
lies before it. You are enabled, with the apostle, in some
degree to rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, and of
the rest which remaineth for his people, but you expect
and want even more than this, you love not the wearisome
travel, the hardrfought, conflicts, " the great fight of afflic
tions," which will render that rest so doubly dear to all
who are permitted to obtain it. You would like, even
while on earth, at once to place your foot upon the
threshold of heaven, before it has been, soiled and pierced
and braised by the ruggedness of the way which leads to
it. This would doubtless be the course of nature, but it
is not the course of grace. Just as it was to have been
expected that Pharaoh, who had so long and so uninter
ruptedly enjoyed the services of the Israelites, should
make many an effort to regain them for his servants, so
the Word of God, and the daily experience of Christians,
teach us to expect that the powers of darkness will league
together, in close and active alliance, to endeavour to re
gain their victim, and to snatch the prey from the hand
of the great Deliverer. It is not only most natural that
Satan should do so, but it is most certain that he does do
so. And if there be a time in your Christian life which
calls most loudly for your own efforts and caution and
circumspection, and the prayers and counsel and encour
agement of your Christian friends, and the especial aid
13*

150

GO FORWARD.

and assistance of God's good Spirit, it is the period which
succeeds that when you experience the first effectual
struggling of the Spirit of grace against the spirit of dark
ness in your heart ; the time when the stubborn will is
bending-, and the hard heart softening, and the affections
(hitherto captivated by the world) are loosening its bonds,
and the whole man is beginning to return to the God and
Father of all his mercies ; for then it is that the first ten
der upspringing of the spiritual plant is in tbe greatest
danger, that the faint flame, as yet scarcely kindled, ap
pears liable to be most easily blown out. Then it is that
the devil rages most violently, and goes to the full length
of his chain, and leaves no effort untried, no nerve un
strained, if he may but reach and devour the escaping
captive. Then it is, that he revives within your breast
passions and desires which you had hoped were utterly
extinguished ; that you are at times almost tempted to
exclaim in the sadness of a desponding spirit, to the God
and Saviour of your soul, " Let us alone, that we may
serve the Egyptians, for it had been better for us to serve
the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness."
But, brethren, you who experimentally know these things,
take courage, you shall neither " serve the Egyptians,"
nor " die in the wilderness." The powers of darkness
are indeed in league against you, as they have been
against every child of God since time began, as they
were against your Divine and perfect Master ;> they may
endeavour to magnify to your apprehension tbe perils
which are before you, the seas of danger and of opposi
tion through which you may be called to pass; they
may strive to convince you that what is painful, is in
sufferable, that what is difficult is insurmountable; they
may have the power of knowing much of the real diffi
culties with which the path of eveiy believer is encom-

GO FORWARD. 101
passed, but be assured, they do not know, they never can
know, for nothing but happy and blessed experience can
teach the strength of the arm which will guide, the light
of the countenance which will cheer, the love of the
Spirit of Christ which will protect you. The uncreated
Angel of the covenant has pitched his tent and unfurled
his standard between you and your spiritual enemies ; it
is light and peace to you, but darkness and dismay to
them. In the desert through which you are to pass,
you shall find the highway of the Lord ; in tbe deepest
waters of trial and affliction and temptation which await
you, there is a dry path and a safe path prepared for you,
upon which they cannot follow you far, in which your
footsteps shall neither stumble, nor slide.
If then you have, any among you, begun to feel that
the course is more arduous, and the prospect less en
couraging, than you once thought them, how earnestly
would I desire to impress upon you the instructive lesson
which has this day been set before you. 'You perceive
what God has done for those who obeyed and trusted
him ; you hear from the words of his never-broken
promises what he will do for every penitent who come3
lo him through the blood of his dear Son; and do you
now ask, what shall you do? our reply shall be made to
you in the words of the text, " Go forward." In the
case of the Israelites, it would have been death to have
retreated, or to have remained stationary. In your case,
to remain stationary is impossible ; you must advance or
recede. To retreat, would be as certain destruction to
you, as to the bands of Israel ; there is, therefore, no
alternative of safety but in advancing.
We would say then to each and to all among you, for
none have advanced so far as to be beyond the reach of
this counsel, rest not in present attainments, let those

152 GO FORWARD.
attainments be what they, may ; there is still much to be
learnt, which you have not learnt; much to be practised,
which you have not practised ; much in your spiritual
life to be experienced, which you have not experienced;
therefore, let your great aim and object be to advance.
We say, "Go forward," faithfully and prayerfully, cir
cumspectly and boldly. Remember, for your encourage
ment, under what peculiar circumstances of danger and
of difficulty this command in the text was first given. A
deep and mighty ocean crossed their path, and yet the
•Israelites were ordered to advance. The moment they
boldly and faithfully obeyed, every danger vanished,
every difficulty was overcome. The waters fell back
before them, not a hair of their head was touched, not a
sole of their foot was wetted ; while, had they attempted
to return, they must have perished with the Egyptians.
Such, also, will be your safety if you advance ; your
ruin if you recede. Let your prayer be, " Lord, in
crease my faith." According unto " thy faith," said
our Lord in the days of his flesh, and thus says he now,
" According to thy faith be it done unto thee." So will
you be enabled to fulfil- this most important, most diffi
cult command. The most timid child is not afraid to
walk in the dark, from the moment that he touches his
father's hand, or hears his father's voice. Why is this ?
Because he has a perfect trust in his father's power and
love ; therefore the danger is no danger to him. Only
trust God, with half the confidence which you expect
from your own children, and your life will be the Chris
tian's life of faith, and your walk the Christian's walk
of decision and boldness.
I have said before, that this injunction is needful to us
all. Who then is that faithful and wise servant, who is
never found sleeping at his post, when he ought (like

GO FORWARD.

153

the wise virgins), to be watching ; or standing still, when
he ought (like the advancing Israelites) to be " going
forward?" But, if needful to us all,, is it not pre
eminently needful to those among you, who have been
privileged for years to hear and to believe the word of
truth, and yet whose spiritual advancement bears no pro
portion to your spiritual knowledge ? Who,, when you
look backward for a year, or it may be, for many years,
appear to be standing identically in the same spot, in the
spiritual life, which you then occupied* No warmer
interest in these things now than then ; no greater fre
quency in your applications to the book: of God,, or to
the blood of Christ ; no greater fervency in your prayeis ;
no stronger and more successful restraint over your pas
sions, your worldliness, your temper, or your tongue ; no
more self-denying, or persevering efforts to bring every
thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, or to
labour, and delight to labour, in good works for his
honour and glory. Surely, brethren, if you are conscious
that these, or any of these allegations, apply to you, you
will not deny that the injunction of the text also applies
to you, with peculiar force. You will feel ashamed,
that, after all God has done for you, temporally and
spiritually, you have made such slow, such inadequate
progress in the Christian life, such little advancement in
the way to heaven. But you will not,, as too many do,
rest satisfied with the mere acknowledgment of your
short-comings; you will not content yourself even with
your feeling of them, and regret for them, however heart
felt or sincere. If you are in earnest, if you are truly
sensible of this deficiency, you will set yourself to con
sider seriously, earnestly, prayerfully, the cause of your
non-advancement. Is it your natural indolence, the dis
inclination to the things of God, we all have, flowing

154

GO FORWARD.

from a corrupt nature and a perverted heart? Is it the
too powerful attractions of a world in which you are
daily immersed, and whose fascinations you cannot
resist? Is it the difficulty of your peculiar situation
which hedges you around with impediments always op
posing, and weights continually pressing upon you ?
Well, be it what it may, your remedy is the same, for
you will remember that, when we spoke of the Israelites
and the Egyptians passing through the Red Sea, the
only difference between them was, that the former walked
with God, and the latter without him. Therefore the
former made the passage and went forward, while the
latter perished in the attempt. So with yourselves. You
must look for strength unto Jesus, the author and finisher
of your faith, whose grace is sufficient for you, and you
will persevere. You must seek a counterpoise for all
these things in the promised influences of his Holy Spirit,
to be your pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night.
Neither must you seek this coldly and languidly. You
must say, "My life, my soul, my eternity, depend upon
my going forward ; for what I have long called standing
still, has, I find, been in reality going backward. My
prayers, my zeal, my love, my obedience, are not only
not improved, but they are not what they were ; I cared
more and felt more for all these things once than I now
do ; and it is evident that, unless checked by the strong
hand of my God, and again drawn forward and brought
into closer union with my Redeemer, I shall continue to
recede, I -shall ultimately sink, I shall perish everlast
ingly." Once be led, by God's grace, to feel, acknow
ledge, and act thus, and we have no fear for the result.
The promise, and the Saviour who made that promise,
are both your own. " They shall never perish, neither
shall any man pluck them out of my hand."

GO FORWARD. Jgg
But I must add, in conclusion, a few words to you,
who, by God's grace, do not require to be thus urged for
ward by the recollection that you are falling back.
We trust that many of you are endeavouring to fulfil
the command upon which we have this day spoken.
Striving to advance, not as though you had already
attained, either were already perfect, but forgetting those
things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those
things which are before, you daily press, or strive to
press, towards the mark of your high calling.
You, also, have a duty to perform, and we say to you,
" Go forward," gratefully, cheerfully, joyfully. Prove
to those around you, that religion is not the dull and
stagnant and cheerless service which the worldling thinks
it. Demonstrate that, while all your motives and all
your aims and all your hopes are higher, infinitely higher,
than his can ever be, your comforts, also, and your peace,
your cheerfulness and your resignation and your happi
ness, are all of 1hem equally above and superior to any
which he can dream of. That as you advance in years,
that period when the hope of the hypocrite fails, when
the temper of the mere worldling becomes too often
in-itable and querulous, your enjoyments are but heighten
ing, your prospects becoming less clouded and more
serene ; that the glorious anticipation before you is throw
ing many a beam of light into nature's darkest hour and
over her most wintry day ; and that you are able, humbly,
yet confidently, seriously, yet cheerfully, to go forward
from strength to strength, assured that there is one, who,
when your heart and your flesh fail, will be (because
he has promised to be) " the strength of your heart and
your portion for ever."
This ought to be, my beloved Christian brethren, this
will be, if you seek it from him to whose Holy Spirit we

1-JJQ GO FORWARD.
are taught to trace every good and perfect gift, (" love,
joy, and peace" among the number), this will be the
frame of mind in which you will be enabled to live, and
to glorify God, and to recommend, by your example, the
religion which you love.
Thus advancing in the Strength and in the footsteps
of your Divine Leader, you shall be enabled to " go for
ward" boldly, consistently, joyfully, and, at the last,
triumphantly, through Him who loved you, and gave
himself for you.

SERMON XIII.
SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS.

2 Cor. iv. 17, 18.
For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us
a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory ; while we look
not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not
seen : for the things which are seen are temporal ; but the things
which are not seen are eternal.
There are few things of which men form so false
an estimate as of the calamities and trials of this
mortal life. The merely thoughtless man, when sud
denly overtaken in his career of sin by any of the multi
plied afflictions which beset our path, plunges deeper
into ihe ocean of folly in which he lives ; and while he
carries the barbed arrow in his side from scene to scene,
and from place to place, and from pleasure to pleasure,
considers his affliction only as one of the unlucky acci
dents of the world in which he lives, and consoles him
self with the aphorism of the poet, " The longest day,
live till to-morrow, shall have passed away." The more
reflecting man of the world views these same afflictions
only as miseries which he is compelled to endure be
cause there is no escape ; but he repines while he suffers,
and while he writhes beneath the hand of a chastening
14 157

/
Jgg SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS.
God, refuses to humble himself and to "hear the rod or
him who appointeth it." How strildngly different is the
case with the Christian when he is subjected to the
afflicting visitations of his God. Although he feels as
deeply, as acutely as the men of the world, he has within
him a settled and never-failing principle that moderates
his sorrow, sanctifies his affliction, and bestows a peace
and comfort and strong consolation, which none but a
real child of God can ever know. He neither looks at
his calamity as an unlucky accident, nor as a grievous
and unavoidable misery ; he knows that nothing, either
of good or evil, comes to him, which is unintended for
him, or unappointed for him by Him whose highest attri
bute is love. He sees the trial as written against his
name in the Lamb's book of life, as a clause in the ever
lasting covenant, as one link in that eternal chain of
providences and mercies which is wound around himself
and all who are dear to him on earth, and which is
fastened to the throne of God's immutability and love in
heaven. If you are a child of God, therefore, you will
remember that God has engaged to keep you from the
evils, the snares, the temptation, of the world. In the
covenant of grace God has engaged himself to purge
away your sins, to brighten your graces, to crucify your
hearts to the world, and to prepare you and to preserve
you for his heavenly kingdom. Afflictions form one of
the methods by which he usually effects this; and it is
agreeable to his covenant, even to that portion of it
which he- has seen fit to reveal to us, that they should do
so, for has he not said, " If my children forsake my law,
and walk not in my judgments; if they break my
statutes, and keep not my commandments; then will I
visit their transgressions with the rod, and their iniquity
with stripes ; nevertheless, my loving-kindness will I not

SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS. \ gg
utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail."
Afflictions, therefore, are the very fruits of God's faithful
ness, to which the covenant binds him. God would be
unfaithful if, first or last, more or less, he did not afflict
his people. It is this persuasion, therefore, that enables
every real child of God to exclaim, even from a sorrowing
or a broken hearf, " I know that this affliction comes to
me directly from the hand of a Father who loves me,
who does not willingly grieve even the most wayward of
his children, who would not willingly afflict me. He
knows that I need it, he knows that if his chastening
hand were not often upon me, I should be continually
'starting aside like a broken bow;' I bow before his
justice, I acknowledge his mercy, I bless him for this
tribulation, and my daily prayer is, that it may work
that holy and sanctifying effect upon my heart, without
which I fear I shall never be rendered ' meet to be a
partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light.' " How
completely, my brethren, do these blessed feelings, com
mon to all the children in our Father's redeemed family,
draw the sting from every trial, and sweeten the bitterest
visitation ; how entirely do they enable us to enter into
the mind of him who wrote the words of the text, and
who spake of some of the heaviest trials which ever
Weighed down mortality, as " our light affliction, which
is but for a moment."
But these considerations do not stand alone in the
heart of the Christian ; there are others equally availing,
and all flowing from the same source, tending to make
the afflictions of earth both light and momentary. The
most influential of these is the certainty which the Chris
tian enjoys, that in all his losses he still possesses some
thing which he cannot lose ; that in being enabled to say
with the Church of old, " My beloved is mine, and I am

160 SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS.
his ;" or with the apostle, " Nothing shall separate m«
from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord ;"
he has that of which neither affliction, nor death, nor
time, nor eternity can deprive him, and in comparison of
which all that he has lost, or can lose, are utterly insigni
ficant. The strength of this principle, in producing the
effect of which I speak, has often in all ages of the
Church been demonstrated. During the persecutions of
the martyrs it seems to have been more powerfully and
sweetly operative than any other. Among many similar
instances recorded by Fox, there is one of a pious woman
who, when taken before the cruel Bishop Bonner, and
threatened that her husband should be put to death, un
dauntedly replied, " Christ is my husband." When told
that her children should be taken away, answered again,
" Christ is better to me than ten sons." When threat
ened that she should be robbed of every outward comfort,
and stripped even of her raiment, still had faith to reply,
" Yea, but Christ is mine, and you cannot strip me of
him." The assurance that she had a saving interest in
her Redeemer, that the Beloved was hers, and she was
his, made every sorrow light, and every trial momentary.
The apostle does not, however, content himself in the
text with asserting the lightness and the transitoriness of
the Christian's sorrow, he goes further than this, he de
clares that in its effects it is a positive blessing ; he says,
" Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh
for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory."
Blessed words ! may the Lord fulfil them to every soul
among us in our hour of need. But let us be careful
that while we thus seek their fulfilment we firat duly ap
preciate their intention.
It involves a point upon which the natural heart is too
often widely mistaken, viz., — that great sufferings can-

SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS. Igl
not but deserve and obtain for us great rewards. Be
assured, my brethren, that nothing^pould be farther from
the intention of the apostle in ihe text than to counte
nance such an error. When he says that our affliction
" worketh for us," nothing could be farther from his
thoughts than that the affliction should, in a meritorious
manner, purchase or procure for us " the eternal weight
of glory ;" this would at once contradict a large portion
of the declarations of Holy Writ, which invariably pro
nounce eternal life to be tlie unmerited " gift of God."
Our tide to that blessed inheritance, thanks be to God, is
a very different and a far more certain one ; it is a title
written in the blood of the everlasting covenant, and
made over to us when we are adopted into the family of
God ; for the Word of God declares, " If children,"
whether suffering children or rejoicing children matters
not, but if children, " then heirs, heirs of God, and joint
heirs with Christ." Assuredly, therefore, never could
the heaviest sufferings merit the slightest reward, much
less could the trials of a passing moment merit the joys
of a never-ending eternity.
In what sense, then, can the words of the apostle be
fairly taken ? doubtless in this, that these afflictions work
for us a far more exceeding weight of glory, by working
in us a far more fit and holy frame of mind, and therefore
a far greater capacity for the enjoyment of it.
Do I, then, speak to any of you this day, who have
been visited wilh trials from the hand of your heavenly
Father — and at some period or other of their course who
has not? Any of you who have suffered in your fami
lies, in your property, in your health ; any who have
come, it may be even this day, from scenes of sorrow to
the house of God ! While the portion of Scripture before
you is well calculated, by God's blessing, to minister to
14*

162 SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS.
your peace, be assured it can only do so, by ministering
to your holiness. It indeed tells you that your afflictions
shall work for your happiness and glory ; but is this an
unqualified assertion? Do all afflictions minister thus
—mercifully to the soul which suffers them ? Far, very
far fiom it. Many a man leaves a bed of sickness with
a heart more hardened against God, a life more totally at
variance with his will, than he entered it. Many a mo
ther commits her child to the grave, but does not, alas!
bury with it her own hostility and indifference to the
things of God. Many a one loses his health, his pro
perty, all that he possesses in this world, without obtain
ing the smallest portion in that better part which shall
not be taken from him. Does the experience of none
among you, my brethren, justify this? Have none
among you suffered frequently, suffered deeply, from
the hand of an afflicting God, and yet are little conscious
of having ever derived any real spiritual benefit? Are
there to none among you events in your past life, that
weigh heavily upon your spirit, which you can never
eradicate from your memory, and never dwell upon with
out the most painful and distressing feelings, and yet
have no reason, no scriptural reason, for supposing, that
these, or any of these, have worked, or are working, for
good? Then let us examine a little into the cause ; this
is so contraiy to God's intention, that there must be some
fault, some failure in yourselves. It is not improhable
that we shall find the cause of this failure, if we look at
the limitation of the apostle in the text ; he assures you
that your afflictions shall work for good, while you " look
not at the things which are seen, but at the things which
are not seen."
Here, then, is at once the key to the mystery ; here is
the reason, if it be so, plainly set before you, why no

SANCTIFIJilU ArriilliXluJMo. 163
trial, no sorrow, no affliction of yours, has ever really
worked for your future glory. You have contented
yourself, while under it, at looking at the things which
are seen. You have dwelt solely or chiefly upon your
trouble, or your disappointment, and never raised your
eyes beyond it ; you have viewed it in all its distressing
bearings, have pondered upon every secondary cause
which led to it, have dwelt upon all its sorrowful effects,
have thought how greatly such an event, if it had occur
red, would have mitigated it, how surely such a line of
conduct would have prevented it, how much less you
should have suffered, if there had been but one little
circumstance in your calamity different from what it was.
In fact you have kept your eye fixed upon " the things
which are seen," and you have, in consequence, missed
the blessing which you might otherwise have reaped.
You have just adopted the precise line of conduct depre
cated in the text, and which never has, and never shall
(so God's Word declares), bring either peace, or comfort,
or profit to the afflicted soul. My beloved brethren, much
of the choicest portion of Christianity consists in this, in
closing the eye of sense, and opening the eye of faith.
Adopt now then for the first time this new line of con
duct; you have gained neither present comfort, nor
future hope, by all that you have hitherto attempted ;
surely, then, if it be but an experiment, it is worth the
trial. Endeavour, therefore, to follow the injunction of
the apostle ; cease to dwell upon your troubles and your
sorrows, to look only at the things which are seen ; close
this eye of sense, and begin by opening the eye of faith,
to look at " the things which are not seen." Instead of
the poor perishing creature which has been the sole cause
of your sorrows, the sole object of your regards, look at
the eternal God who is " All in All." Instead of poring

164

SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS.

upon the trials and miseries of lime, look at once with
the steady gaze of faith, which will penetrate the veil;'
look at once upon (he glories of eternity. Instead of
looking after those who have been taken from you, those
in whose love and friendship you delighted, look at him,
" whom having not seen," his people " love," even at
that Saviour who to every believing soul is "precious."
How astonishing would be the influence upon all our
minds if we could fully realize this ; if we could dwell
with a constant meditation upon these unseen realities.
I know how difficult it is to lift up the sorrowing head
and to. raise the weeping eyes lo heaven ; but there is
one who is able and willing to aid you in this blessed
work, even the Holy Ghost the Comforter. Pray for his
light and power, and he will take your eyes off the
" things which are seen," however endeared, and how
ever precious, and fix them upon the unseen things which
lie before you. The effect of such a change is incalcula
ble, it will influence the events of every day, the feelings
of every hour. From the moment you thus begin, under
the teaching of God's good- Spirit, to make "the things
which are not seen" the object of your thoughts, you
will find a new temper of heart, a new bias to the soul ;
there will be an eternal principle within you carrying all
your feelings forth to eternal ends. As it is in a far
smaller degree in worldly matters, so will it be in an in
conceivably great and glorious degree in spiritual things.
Every worldly object appears large in proportion to its
nearness. While, therefore, all the petty business and in
terests of earth appear of a most absorbing greatness to
those who are for ever walking up and down among
them, without a thought or a glance beyond them; to
you, who have thus, as it were, got upon the mount of
eternity, they will be as mere specks in tbe distant pros-

SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS.

165

pect, all will be contracted within their true and proper
limits. You will learn to look upon the weightiest busi
ness of earth as children's pastime, compared with the
enjoyment of God, and the living for ever in the presence
of a loved and loving Saviour. " The things which are
seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are
eternal." Yes, this is the great distinguishing character
istic ; this it is which gives them their influence and their
power; you look at the poor drooping blessings of earth,
and you feel that in a few years even, at the best, they
must inevitably wither within your grasp ; you turn to
the glories of heaven, and you see them in all their native
freshness and youth and beauty, when ten thousand
centuries shall have run their unwearied course. You
look at the bitterest cup of sorrow which God has ever,
or shall ever put into your hands, and you will drink it
almost without a sigh, if you will but turn your eyes
from its contents, and fix them upon those rivers of joy
which are running for ever at God's right hand ; and
which, through the blood of Jesus, may all be made
your own. These will be among the first and most ob
vious effects of dwelling upon the unseen realities of
God. But there will be far greater and more blessed ef
fects than these. As you become more and more inte
rested in them, more entirely devoted to them, and occu
pied among them, your thoughts and your tempers ancr
affections and pursuits will all be led to harmonize with
them in a manner which you can now scarcely antici
pate ; and you will daily be obtaining a stronger assur
ance that you are indeed accepted of God ; that Christ is
yours, that the pardon of sin is yours, that Divine favour
is yours, and that heaven is your own. Surely, then,
you will not hesitate to call the heaviest affliction light,
the longest trial momentary, if it can be thus made in-

166 SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS.
strumental in working for you a " far more exceeding
and eternal weight of glory." What that glory is, we
are unable either to know, or to describe, for an apostle
was obliged to exclaim, " It doth not yet appear what we
shall be." Sufficient is, however, told us in the Word
of God, lo satisfy the largest imagination, to fulfil the
most ample desires. All evil shall there be removed,
all good shall there be enjoyed, and both throughout
eternity. All evil shall be removed. There are but three things
which greatly trouble the people of God on earth, and
not one of them shall be found in heaven.
The first is, sin, the continual backsliding of our cor
rupt hearts; but there, there will be neither sin nor
temptation, neither devils to tempt, nor a corrupt heart to
be tempted. We shall be all pure, as well as ail glo
rious, for the Word of God has declared that his people
shall be presented "a glorious Church, not having spot
or wrinkle, or any such thing, but holy and without
blemish." The second is, the frequent interruption of the sense
of God's favour. We are here in a perpetual state of cloud
and sunshine ; now, God lifts up the light of his counte
nance upon us, and we are cheered ; and again, he hides
his face from us, and we are troubled ; but there, the
communion will be constant, a day without night, an
everlasting sunshine without a cloud. Perpetual service
and perpetual enjoyment. " They are before the throne
of God, and serve him day and night in his temple."
The third thing which troubles us here is, the frequent
recurrence of anxiety and difficulty and disappointment
and sorrow. This also shall be at an end. There is no
sighing, no sorrowing, no anxiety there. Affliction gives

SANCTIFIED AFI< LICTIONS. Igf
place to glory — the light affliction which is but for a mo
ment, — to the exceeding and eternal weight of glory.
While all evil shall thus be removed, all good shall
as certainly be enjoyed. The great object of our eternal
blessedness is God himself. We now enjoy something
of him, but it is through a medium of a most imperfect
nature, viz., through a weak and wavering faith, and a
frail and feeble love : there it shall be through the me
dium of the clearest vision and of the most perfect love.
If it be declared in the word of truth that even here,
" he who is joined (o the Lord is one spirit," though the
union be of that most imperfect nature to which I have
just alluded, what will it be in that blessed place where
the union shall be complete ; when " we shall see the
King in his beauty," and when our souls shall be
"filled with all the fulness of God?" My brethren, it
is hard for me to speak of heaven, it is impossible for any
one to speak correctly of it, until the great voice call
upon us to come up and see what God has prepared for
those who love him. It is enough to know that perfect
vision shall produce perfect assimilation ; " We shall be
like him," says St. John, " for we shall see him as he
is." As iron, by lying in the fire, becomes as it were all
fire, so shall the presence and sight of God our Saviour
transform us into the perfect resemblance of God our Sa
viour. While perfect assimilation shall produce perfect
happiness and perfect satisfaction, for the Psalmist de
clares, " When I wake up after thy likeness, I shall be
satisfied with it;" the soul, with all its infinite capacities
and all its infinite desires, shall be completely, fully, and
for ever satisfied. This is all that God has revealed, all
I desire to know ; in having God we shall have enough,
and in seeing, loving, and being made like him, we shall
at once enter upon a state of happiness as infinite in

Jgg SANCTIFIED AFFLICTIONS.
extent as it will be eternal in duration. That this may
one day be experimentally known and enjoyed by every
soul who now hears me and by myself, may God of his
infinite mercy grant, through our Lord Jesus Christ, to
whom, &c.

SERMON XIV.
REDEEM THE TIME.

Ephesians v. 16.
Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
Of all the talents with which the Almighty here on
earth intrusts his creatures, time is the most important,
and we fear we must add the most frequently abused.
Our infancy is spent in idleness, our youth in thought
lessness, our age in business; but which of them, as re
gards the great mass of mankind, can be said to be
employed for God, or for the important purpose for which
it is bestowed ? All complain of the shortness of time,
and yet most possess more than they know what to do
with, and every one more than he employs well. Still
it is of this much-wasted and misapplied talent that we
shall one day be called upon to render a strict account.
Consider, then, how you would yourselves act under
similar circumstances, and you may learn to know what
you have reason to expect at the hands of God.
If you were to hire a labourer for a day's work, and he
were to come to you in the evening, and upon your asking
him, "How have you spent your day? what have you
done for me?" he were to reply, "I have spent four
15 169

170 REDEEM THE TIME.
hours in loitering or talking with my fellow-labourers,
and four at my meals, and three more in working for
myself, and the remaining hour I have dedicated to your
service;" would you be satisfied with such a reply?
would you pay that man his wages? I trow not. And
yet let me ask you what better account, when you retire
to rest at night, can you give to your Heavenly Master
of many a day which passes over you ? After you have
deducted all that has been spent with your fellow-
labourers, at your meals, and in labouring for your bread
which perisheth, what remains for God? And is not
God a God of recompense ? and has he not declared that
as a man soweth so shall he also reap ? Truly, then,
unless we can render some better account than this, our
day of reckoning will be a fearful day, and our sentence
the sentence of the unprofitable and idle servant. Let
us then seek for the aid of the Divine Spirit, to enable
us to receive and to apply the valuable injunction of tbe
text ; that we may be taught so to employ our time, that
when summoned to render an account, we may do it
with joy.
I shall consider, then,
I. What it is to $edeem time.
II. From what we should redeem it.
•III. For what we should redeem it.
In explaining whal is meant by redeeming time, I
shall take the most simple illustration possible; the word
is in the original to buy out, and the English word
redeem expresses this as closely as possible.
If an estate be mortgaged, if an article be pledged, the
owner cannot" repossess himself of them, unless he be
able to buy them out, or redeem them. By the use of
this term, therefore, the apostle not merely urges us to
future diligence, but most strongly implies our former

REDEEM THE TIME.

171

improvidence and misuse of time ; the very fact that it
is necessary to redeem it, implies that we have, as it were,
mortgaged it to Satan, pledged it to vanity and sin.
Now, strictly speaking, time misapplied is irrevocable;
the hours and days and years that have been so improvi-
dently disposed of, are among those unredeemed pledges
which must remain, as evidences of our folly and our
guilt, to all eternity. The sin may, blessed be God, be
removed by a penitent application to the blood of our
great Redeemer; the guilt may be washed away, the
iniquity be blotted out for ever ; but the years so spent
can never be recalled, redeemed, or brought back again;
the hours which we have sacrificed before the shrine of
foolish or of guilty pleasure, can never now (as they
might once have been) be laid upon the altar of the
living God. That blessed privilege, as regards those
hours, is for ever lost to us; that opportunity for ever
passed away. Once gone, they are gone for ever; and
hours which might have been adding to the happiness
of our fellow-creatures, to the increase of our own joy,
to the glory of God, to the extension of our Redeemer's
kingdom, to the jewels in our Redeemer's crown, have
perhaps (how fearful is the thought) been employed in
aiding others, by our countenance and example, in their
progress to that gulf from which we ourselves, by the
undeserved goodness of our God, may have so mercifully
escaped. Since, then, the advice of the apostle, in its literal and
strictest sense, cannot be applied to the time which is
passed, we must endeavour to render it applicable in our
own case to that which may remain to us. My breth
ren, who shall say what this may be ? It is easy to
number the days that have fled, but who can calculate
what is to come? Can the youngest or the strongest

172 REDEEM THE TIME.
here present say, that he assuredly shall hail the opening
even of another month in the same health, under the
same circumstances, or even in the same state of exist
ence, in which he has beheld the present? You know
that he cannot. You know that your sentence may
have gone forth, that your hours may even now be num
bered. When, then, I say to you, " Redeem the time,"
I urge it both upon your conscience and upon my own
to delay no longer, but to begin in good earnest to live
to God, to seek, if you have not yet sought and found,
a Saviour ; to devote not merely this Sabbath-hour, or
the Sabbath-day, to his honour and glory, and the soul's
great work for eternity, but every day and every hour,
(so far as the absolutely necessary business and relaxa
tion of life will admit,) to the same blessed and all-im
portant occupation.
I proceed, then, to consider from what you are to
redeem the time which yet remains to you.
First, then, I charge you to redeem it from sloth and
procrastination. An idle Christian is a disgrace to the
very name he bears.
Did our Divine Master, while on earth, so occupy his
time about his Father's business, that he often, as the
Evangelist declares, had not time to eat and to drink,
and can you imagine that you are among the number of
his followers, when you find time, perhaps, for little else?
When every duty that is urged upon you, is too toilsome
or too troublesome; and when you would rather sit for
days in perfect inactivity, or in the most trifling occupa
tions of this poor, miserable, transitory life, than stir one
hand, or engage in one labour, for the glory of God or
the eternal existence which is approaching? How totally
different would be the whole aspect of society, of our
country, of the world, if every Christian, the moment he

REDEEM THE TIME, ] 73
begins to be awakened to the things of God, were in
good earnest to set himself to labour for God, and what
ever his hand found to do, to do it with his might.
It is fearful to think how often, when Satan cannot
storm the citadel by open violence, he thus possesses
himself of it by secret intrigue, and prevails to the ruin
of a soul through idleness alone. You who would start
with abhorrence if the great tempter were to bring to you
a gross temptation, yet fall willingly into his snares of
indolence and procrastination. For instance, in the
morning you say there will be time to read the Word of
God, to pray, to meditate, to examine into your heart, in
the evening; but in the evening some more pressing
occupation presents itself, and when this is over it is too
late, and these great duties are again postponed. To
day there is little opportunity of doing good, of fulfilling,
or even of commencing some work of kindness, or labour
of love, which you propose, for promoting the comforts
of your fellow-creatures, or the glory of God, but to
morrow you are assured that there will be time, and to
spare ; I need not say, that that to-morrow never comes.
O how many immortal souls are thus slumbered and
trifled and procrastinated away, until the chamber of
sickness hears the ten-thousand-times repeated fallacy,
" When I recover, every day shall be spent for God ;"
and the bed of death alone demonstrates the emptiness
and the delusion of it.
Secondly, I would urge you to redeem your time from
vain and foolish company, and idle and unprofitable
pleasures. There is nothing which tends more to rob
the heart of every spiritual affection, to deaden the love
to God, to make all religious exercises dull and unprofit
able, than these great time-destroyers. Thus the Prophet
Isaiah, describing persons who so occupy tliemselves,
15*

174 REDEEM THE TIME.
says, " The harp and the vid, the tabret and pipe and
wine, are in their feasts; but they regard not the work
of the Lord, neither consider the operation of his bands."
Will you ask in reply, is then the spiritual life of the
Christian, as portrayed by tbe example of his Divine
Master, and urged upon him by his commands, at variance
with all the innocent intercourse of life? If we become
really in earnest in the great work of salvation, must we
give up our friends, our social meetings, and many of
the greatest enjoyments of our present lot ? This is by
no means implied in the command to redeem your time
from foolish company, and idle and unprofitable pleasures.
When you become distinctly and decidedly the friends of
the Lord Jesus Christ, they who are not his friends will
(such is the fashion of the world) very shortly cease to
be your friends ; while they who love him, will infallibly
love you. And so far from your being required to give
up your social meetings, and the innocent intercourse of
lifer, none really taste their pleasure in its least imperfect
state, but those who meet in social intercourse, as they
ought to meet, the Spirit of whose God has told them,
" Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to
the glory of God."
Lastly, I would urge you to redeem your time from
worldly cares and worldly business. Our Lord himself
has declared that " a man's life consistefh not in the
abundance of the things which he possesseth," and he
exemplifies this truth by the story of the foolish rich man,
who " laid up treasure for himself, but was not rich to
wards God." If you will act faith upon the promises of
God, and " seek firat his kingdom and his righteousness,"
his Word (that Word, which, although heaven and earth
pass away, he has declared shall never pass away,) nis
Word, I say, is pledged to you, that " all these things

REDEEM THE TIME. 175
shall be added unto you." Let me then intreat you
while you are labouring, as you ought to labour, care
fully, sedulously, for the things of this world, still to re
deem some portion of your precious time from their
engrossing grasp. Give some portion, however small, of
every day to God, to private prayer and quiet meditation
upon the things which belong to your peace ; to reading,
carefully and prayerfully, his blessed Word. O, re
member that your soul may perish in the very midst of
the highest respectability and the most unimpeachable
moral conduct ; that you may destroy it as certainly and
as irrevocably by sins of omission as of commission.
Think you that the rich man of whom our Lord has
told us, would not have bartered all these recollections,
and all the miserable comfort he could extract from them
for one drop of water to cool his tongue.
Yes! it does not require to have passed into the unseen
world to tell you this. We behold too many, far too
many instances, even on this side the grave, when the
worn-out spirit, leaving a world for which alone it has
hitherto lived and striven and laboured ; whose applause
was its very breath, and whose riches its reward, for a
world of which it has heard but little and cared less;
would at that moment gladly, O how gladly, exchange
the richest inheritance which mortal ever squandered
upon earth, to redeem one little hour for prayer and
penitence and pardon and preparation for heaven. Alas !
how vain a wish, and yet how natural to experience,
how agonizing to behold ! Would you avoid it, then,
"redeem the time;" be earnest, be instant in your re
solution ; " rejoice as though you rejoiced not, weep as
though you wept not, buy as though you possessed not,
and use this world as not abusing it; for the time is
short, and the fashion of this world passeth away."

176

REDEEM THE TIME.

A very few words, in conclusion, upon the objects for
which you are to "redeem the time," and I have done.
The first great object is for the glorifying of God.
This was one of our dying Lord's last declarations : " I
have glorified thee on earth, I have finished the work
which thou gavest me to do." If you are a follower of
the Lord Jesus, you must strive by his grace to be ena
bled to say the same. He had his work, and you have
yours. His was the work of redemption, yours is the
work of constant service and continued thankfulness.
You must employ every hour you can redeem from the
idleness, the pleasure, the labours of life, for this great
end. You must passively glorify him by the meek and
patient and thankful endurance of every trial , every sorrow,
every affliction, which he lays upon you. You must ac
tively glorify him by your untiring efforts in every labourof
love which he calls you to perform for his name's sake.
You were created for this end, " The Lord hath made
all things for himself," says the inspired word. You
were redeemed for this end, " That we should be to the
praise of his glory," says the aposde. And will you fail
of the one great end for which you were created and re
deemed? No! If you have indeed been born again of
the Spirit, your increasing inquiiy will be, " Lord, what
wouldst thou have me to do?" And if there be an
object proposed to you, by which, through your exer
tions, your labours, your efforts, however self-denying or
unpleasant to the natural man, you may hope to glorify
God, the cheerful unsolicited language of your heart
will be the language of the prophet Isaiah of old, " Here
am I, send me."
Above all, far, infinitely above all, you will " redeem
the time," that you " may win Chris"t, and be found in
him." Every hour you can redeem will be made in

REDEEM THE TIME.

177

some manner or other to contribute to this important and
blessed end. This is the one great object of the be
liever's search on earth ; to know more, to obey more, to
love more, — the Lord Jesus Christ, the Alpha and
Omega, the Author and Finisher, the beginning and the
end, the first and the last. To adopt the words of one
of the most beautiful of the Homilies of our Church,
" Christ is the light, let us receive the light; Christ is the
truth, let us believe the truth; Christ is the way, let U3
follow the way." And since time is passing, and eternity
approaching, let us " Redeem the time, because the days
are evil." " Let us receive Christ, not for a time, but
for ever ; let us believe his Word, not for a time, but for
ever ; let us become his servants, not for a time, but for
ever; in consideration, that he hath redeemed and
saved us, not for a time, but for ever ; and will receive
us into his heavenly kingdom, there to reign with him,
not for a time, but for ever. To him, therefore, with the
Father, and the Holy Ghost, be all honour, praise, and
glory, for ever and ever."*
* Homily for the Nativity.

SERMON XV.
THE JUDGMENT.

Acts xvii. 31.
He hath appointed a day, in which he will judge the world in
righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained ; whereof he
hath given assurance Unto all men, in that he hath raised him
from the dead.
" If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain,
and your faith is vain also. If Christ be not risen, then
they which have fallen asleep in Christ are perished."
Such are the declarations of God's unerring word upon
the subject of to-day's high festival.
The resurrection of Christ, then, is the great, the vital
fact of his religion, by which God publicly announced
that the ransom had not only been paid for fallen man,
but accepted by his Maker ; that the Saviour who had
entered into the prison-house of the grave as man's
surety, had been liberated ; that man's debt was can
celled, that God was reconciled, that man was free. It
has pleased God, therefore, that this great and blessed
truth should be established by every species of evidence
of which such a fact is capable ; by the testimony of
friends ; by the confession of enemies ; by the announce-
178

/

THE JUDGMENT.

179

ment of angels : by the declaration of God himself. So
overpowering, indeed, is the mass of evidence, that it is
not too much to say, that no single fact in the history of
the world has come down to us with such an array of
witnesses as the resurrection of Jesus. To dwell, how
ever, either upon the details of such a history, with
which you have been familiar from your childhood, or
upon the minute and conclusive evidence of a fact of
which probably no individual before me possesses a
single doubt, would appear a sad misuse of such precious
opportunities as the present. Taking, therefore, these
things for granted, as in a Christian congregation I feel
fully authorized to do, I shall rather employ myself, in
the endeavour to set before you some great and important
deduction from the event which we commemorate this
day, than to dilate upon that event itself.
The one great truth, then, to which, looking simply
for help to the Holy Spirit of God, I would this morning
direct your attention, as developed in the text, is this ;
the universal judgment of the last day : and I shall en
deavour to show, from- the words before us, first, the cer
tainty that this universal judgment will take place;
secondly, the manner iu which (including one marked
peculiarity) it will be conducted ; and, lastly, the person
who shall come to be our Judge.
And first, as to its certainty. Had the bare possibility
been revealed to us, that after this life ended, there might
be some account to be rendered of all that had been trans
acted here ; had fhe probability been suggested, that some
who had once lived here below should stand at some
given day before an unerring tribunal, and that each and
all of us might possibly be among their number, is there
a thoughtful man, is there a prudent man living upon
earth, whose mind would not occasionally have looked

IgQ THE JUDGMENT.
forward to such a season, and backward to the events of
his own life, that he might see in what manner he was
prepared to meet it ? But, brethren, how very far does
the reality exceed the conjecture ^possibility and pro
bability are out of the question ; it has been made the
subject of a distinct revelation and assurance of the living
God ; and this assurance comes to us not founded upon
an argument, but upon a fact, upon that very fact which
we this day commemorate : " Whereof," namely, of the
great doctrine of a universal judgment, says the apostle,
" God hath given assurance unto all men in that he hath
raised Christ from the dead." Observe the strength of
the apostle's argument. Our Lord, in the days of his
flesh, made two assertions, both equally improbable to
mortal eye, equally impossible to mortal agency. He
asserted, first, that if the Jews destroyed his human body,
in three days he would raise it up again ; and, secondly,
that as surely as he should do this, so certainly would he
do the same with every human body which ever had ex
isted, or ever should exist, and on some great and coming
day would summon all to his own judgment-seat. Now
the first of these two assertions was, as on this day, ful
filled, for " Christ is risen ;" the certainty of the second,
therefore, is placed beyond a doubt, rendered absolutely
unquestionable; and our Church does not hesitate to
profess it an article of her creed : " He sitteth on the
right hand of God the Father Almighty, from thence he
shall come to judge the quick and the dead." — " We
believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge." Not
only is this certain, but more than this; the very day
upon which the great assize shall be held is itself immu
tably fixed. " God hath appointed a day in which he
will judge the world," says my text; it is not left to
chance or circumstance to determine that day, but it is

THE JUDGMENT.

181

even now as .irrevocably appointed as that day of which
you have this morning heard, which was foretold four
hundred and thirty years before, and yet on the " self
same day all the hosts of the Lord went out from the
land of Egypt," So is it with us, our great day is ap
pointed. Every month that passes over us, every sun
that rises, but hastens on that day of doom. It is one
week nearer to every individual among us, than when
he last listened to our Sabbath bells. And yet, with all
this certainty, nothing is so sure to us as its uncertainty :
" Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not
the angels that are in heaven," for " the day of the Lord
so cometh as a thief in the night."
All things will continue as they were from the creation,
until the very moment when that last coming of the Son
of man shall burst upon an astonished world. The sua
will rise that morning as bright as he has ever risen, not
knowing that his work is done, his labours over ; " re
joicing as a giant to run his course," but ignorant that
that course is finished, his agency no longer necessary,
his light no longer needed ; that he will, ere that day's
lengthened shadows have gone down, be stopped in mid
career, and laid aside for ever; the moon and stars, with
their ten thousand splendours, will each quietly and
calmly die out upon the morning of that solemn day, as
they have done to-day, but never again to be rekindled.
" Man will go forth to his work and to his labour until
the evening," expecting to return again at that evening
hour as usual to his assembled family, but that evening
hour will never come; it will be a day which no evening
and no night shaU terminate ; a day which shall never
end ; a day begun in time and not to be concluded in
eternity. Myriads of mortal eyes shall see its opening —
not one shall look upon its close. For on that day the
16

Jg2 THE JUDGMENT.
bright advancing sign of the Son of man shall be seen in
the heavens ; that splendour before which the light of
the mid-day sun shall fade away, and all its glories be
eclipsed. Then shall the trumpet of the archangel call
forth the dead from the sleep in which they have so long
been buried; and earth and sea will give up their in
habitants, and every grave will open, and living forms
shall be seen rising from those dark chambers which are
now beneath us and around us, and the teeming earth
repeopled, as in a moment, by all the generations who
have lived and died upon its surface, with their progeni
tor Adam at their head. The vast population of the se
pulchre, even now outnumbering all who live, shall then
present themselves ; for the great white throne shall de
scend, and the voice of Him who sits upon that throne
shall be heard throughout all space, and they who hear
shall live. , Nothing shall hasten, nothing shall hinder,
nothing shall procrastinate that day one hour beyond the
time which God has fixed, for it is he who has appointed
it before the foundations of the world were laid. Brethren,
do you doubt that such a day as this is thus immutably
fixed ? I own I have no excuse ; I believe it as firmly,
I am convinced of it as surely as of my own existence at
this hour. But if you have one doubt upon this subject,
did you never sit down quietly and take up your Bible
and say, ' I will carefully examine this messenger from
God ; I will see whether the coming of this great day be
so certain as priests and preachers would fain make it ;
and if I find it so, I will never rest again until I am at
least in earnest in my preparation for its approach?"
Have you never acted thus with even common wisdom
and common prudence? then may God grant that you
may begin to-day, that you may ascertain this great point
to your own conviction, and having found, as you will

THE JUDGMENT. Ig3
find it written as with a sunbeam throughout the revealed
Word of God, may it by God's grace lead you to- the
next inquiry, What part shall I bear in those great so
lemnities ?
There is a day coming for which I am utterly unpre
pared; I have sins to confess on that day for which I
know no remedy ; they are past, they are recorded in the
book of God's remembrance ; I cannot reach that book
to tear from thence the pages which record my shame ;
repentance itself cannot avail for this. How shall I meet
that coming day? If there be one soul among you
brought to this point at this moment, how gladly would
we reply, and how earnestly would we pray that the
Spirit of God might impress the reply upon your heart,
" The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin."
Yes ! will avail, to blot out eveiy sin that God hath writ
ten against you, if only you seek it with a true and living
faith. It is a little sentence, but O the mysteries in that
little sentence ! Of all the myriads who will stand be
fore the judgment-seat, there will be peace in no single
heart in which that little sentence has not brought it !
" The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin."
We proceed, secondly, to consider the manner in which,
including one marked peculiarity, the judgment of that
day will be conducted.
" The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a
shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump
of God ;" " before him shall be gathered all nations, and
all that are in the graves shall hear his voice and shall
come forth. And the dead, both small and great, shall
stand before God, and the books shall be opened, and
the dead shall be judged out of those things which are
written in the books, according to their works."
But, brethren, let us not satisfy ourselves with this

184

THE JUDGMENT.

merely general view of a scene in which each shall bear
his own immediate and individual part. It will, by
God's grace, be profitable to endeavour to realize, as far
as flesh and blood can realize, our own doings and our
own feelings on that coming day.
Conceive the prison-house of the grave shattered to its
very foundation by the piercing cry of the archangel ;
personal identity again restored, the long-lost body re
united to its imperishable inmate ; all this the act, the
miracle of a moment, and ere that moment has elapsed,
finding yourself traversing the unbounded fields of space,
and standing alone, as regards human help, or coun
tenance, or support, standing, even in the midst of that
countless multitude, quite alone in the presence of the
Judge. A memory at that hour supernaturally bestowed
upon you, from which no single act, or word, or thought
of the longest life will be excluded ; for our Lord has
said, even " every idle word that men shall speak, they
shall give account thereof in the day of judgment;"
therefore all shall be remembered, all rehearsed, all pro
claimed ! Actions which you would not have performed
in the presence of a child, thoughts for which you would
have blushed to have found utterance before your dearest
friends, all published then ; no mysteries and no secrets
shall outlive that day.
But the great and marked peculiarity of the judgment
to which I have referred, because it is so strongly pre
dicated in the text, remains yet untold, God shall "judge
in righteousness." How solemn a thought!* It will be
pre-eminently a day of righteous judgment, not a day of
forbearing mercy ! It will be a day of strict and unerring
justice, in whioh, wonderful as it may appear, mercy
will form no ingredient. Nay ! be not surprised at this,
do not misunderstand me, it cannot be otherwise ; for,

THE JUDGMENT.

185

you will acknowledge, God will condemn every impeni
tent sinner, this will be strict justice ; God will pardon
every penitent believer who has fled for refuge to the
blood of Jesus, and this also will be strict justice, as strict
and as undeviating as the former. Our Church declares
the same truth when she says, in the words of St. John,
" God is righteous and just to forgive us our sins, and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Only one attri
bute of God, therefore, is recorded in the text, as to be
exercised at this great tribunal ; it is simply, " He will
judge in righteousness." Let, then, those among you
who believe in the coming of this great day, and yet are
content to trust to some undefined notions of God's
mercy out of Christ for your safety and your pardon,
think well of the assurance before you. You shall stand
before a perfectly righteous Judge. There shall be no
favour, as there shall be no injustice there. You shall
state your own cause and be your own accuser. You
shall give an account, not of the merely exterior history
of your life, but of the most secret recesses of your heart,
a heart, the hidden iniquities and deep deceits of which
we shall never, ourselves, thoroughly know till then.
You shall proclaim before enemies who have hated you,
and the friends who have loved you, those acts, if such
there are, which you have here, by eveiy artifice, con
cealed from their eyes. Nor will these form a thousandth
part of tbe confessions of that day. To all outward
actions will be added the untold and unnumbered ini
quities which burn within : the defiled and vicious inten
tion ; the unkind, uncharitable temper; the overreaching
and avaricious desire ; the mean and secret jealousy ; the
dark and malignant insinuation ; the sensual and carnal
inclination, all fondly cherished, though deeply veiled at
16*

Igg THE JUDGMENT.
present, all then to be proclaimed aloud before assembled
worlds. But the fearful catalogue is not yet closed, sins of
omission, in thick and terrible array, are crowding on upon
the newly-awakened, the supernaturally strengthened
memory. Duties left undone — through years and years
of warnings, carelessly forgotten, and when recollected
brushed hastily aside, or angrily discarded — will all be
most vividly remembered then. Opportunities of good,
of usefulness or kindness to others, occurring every day,
and every day postponed or evaded. Prayer to God,
absolutely neglected, or, throughout a whole life, coldly y
formally, perfunctorily performed. , The Word of God !
an unknown, unread, uncared-for history, left to moulder
on the dusty shelf with other books, whose day and
fashion have long since passed away. The Sabbaths of
God ! O how will the voice of broken Sabbaths cry on
that day against those who are now paying only a con
strained and half obedience to them, or with a still higher
hand and a more rebel heart, openly violating them by
their week-day occupations, or profaning them by their
pleasures. The Sacraments of God ! to which all are so
constantly summoned, where all may "find grace to
help in time of need," and from which, I grieve to say,
so very many still turn neglectfully away. The Son
of God ! O if there were no sins of omission here, all
might yet be well, for he has a balm for every wound,
a remedy for every guiltiness of the sinner's soul; he
who deserves all, and more than all, that you can render
of love and gratitude and unqualified obedience, robbed
of his honour, shorn of his glory, the merit due to him
and him alone, attributed to yourselves and your per
formances, while in your affections and hearts, the Son

THE JUDGMENT. Ig7
of God is subordinated to every trifling but engrossing
pleasure, to every worldly business, and, in some in
stances we fear, to every debasing lust.
But we are, lastly, to consider the person by whom
this righteous judgment shall be conducted. " God hath
appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in
righteousness, by that man whom he hath ordained."
With such a context, how cheering to the penitent sin
ner's heart is this appellation; the apostle does not say,
by that Lord ; by that Almighty Ruler, by that everlast
ing Father, by that omnipotent God, but by " that
man;" to remind us that he who shall come to be our
Judge, was once a man, a feeble, weak, and suffering
mortal like ourselves, that he died upon the cross, that
he lay within the sepulchre, that he experienced once
all our infirmities, and has not forgotten them to this
hour; nay, will not have forgotten them on that day
when you and I shall stand before his judgment-seat.
He then, who now beseeches you, by us, week after
week, and Sunday after Sunday, to ccme to him for
faith and repentance and pardon, to take his yoke upon
you, and learn of him, that you may find rest for your
souls ; this is " that man," who is coming to be your
Judge. My brethren, you who are Christians in heart
as well as name, you will feel at this moment the full
meaning of that declaration of the apostle, when, after
giving one of the most appalling accounts of the coming
of our Lord to judgment which the book of God con
tains, he concludes with "Wherefore, comfort ye one
another with these words." Yes, the declaration that
Christ shall be our Judge, is one to the Christian, ex
clusively of comfort, of the most soul-satisfying, the most
unbounded comfort; for were we told that such a day
must be, that such a tribunal must be erected, but that

Agg THE JUDGMENT.
we might select, from all tbe children of Eve, our own
judge, who should try us individually, and compelled
to judge in righteousness, should proclaim our everlast
ing sentence; I believe were this choice given to every
soul among us at this moment, that but one cry would
ascend to God from (he lips of every true believer in the
congregation, and that cry would be, Let me be judged
by none but the Lord Jesus Christ. So certain does
every Christian feel that there is no love, no compassion,
no mercy equal to the love and compassion and mercy
ofthe Saviour. "Wherefore comfort ye one another
with these words."
But while I thus speak, I dare not think that all can
thus derive comfort; that all can be pleased to hear that,
"that man" shall be their Judge, whom some are openly
neglecting and disobeying ; " that man," whose Gospel
is now preaching to them, but they hear it not; whose
atoning merits are now freely offered them, but they
accept them not ; whose righteousness might now be
made their own, but they desire it not. It can be no
comfort to those, brethren, that the day is fixed, that the
judgment shall be righteous, and that Christ shall be
the Judge. No, I see no comfort for you in the re
flection, except it be this; that although the day is ap
pointed, it has not yet arrived; that although the Judge
is determined, be has not yet ascended the tribunal, that
he is still waiting to be gracious, still employed in
interceding for those whom he must shortly try, still
willing, at the prayer of faith, to bestow every Christian
grace, which on that day he will expect to find. But,
"the time is short, the fashion of this world passeth
away," and that which I now revert to as a source of
comfort, may ere to-morrow's dawn be the bitterest in
gredient in your cup of recollection, for it may only rank

THE JUDGMENT. Igg
among those blessed opportunities in which faith and re
pentance, and Christ and happiness, might all have been
your own, but which have passed away for ever. For
how impressive is the thought, that even while we yet
speak, the Judge is waiting for the appointed hour;
watching the dial as the shadow is creeping slowly round
it ; listening till the last chime on earth has struck, that
he may issue the command to the angel of the Revela
tion who shall swear, " There shall be time no longer."
Then shall all, and infinitely more than all, that we at
present know be realized. Then shall " that man,"
who this day* " broke the bands of death," going down
into death's own dominions, and rifling his very strong
hold in the grave, then shall he set his foot for ever on
that serpent's head, and take unto himself the everlasting
victory. Beloved brethren, what a comfort will it be at
that hour for us poor worms of earth to claim kindred
with the Conqueror, affinity with the Judge, to call to
mind the day when he was made " One with us, and we
with him ;" to remember those blessed seasons when his
written Word, his sanctifying Spirit, his felt presence,
were among our happiest hours on earth, to recollect the
days when we met together in his house of prayer, and
united together in his praises, and assembled together
round his table, and were partakers of the blessed sym
bols, and fed by faith on him, who appointed them, and
shed the tear of penitence, or rejoiced in the concious-
ness of his pardoning love. O what a host of blessed
recollections shall on that day fill the souls of God's
people ! But will there be no alloy ? Our sins ! The
Judge himself has said, " Their sins and their iniquities,
will I remember no more ;" and we, at that hour, may
* Preached on Easter-Sunday.

190 THE JUDGMENT.
well forget what Christ refuses to rememDer. Will there
then be no drawback to our joy, while standing before
the tribunal of God, our Saviour, Judge, and Friend?
Yes, surely, there will be one recollection, which
nothing but an entrance within the everlasting mansions
shall be able entirely to overcome ; the thought that we
served the Lord Jesus so little, preached him so imper
fectly, obeyed him so reluctantly, and loved him so
coldly, while on earth.
The Lord pardon us for this our sin, and accept us in
this our duty, and remove from us, by his cleansing blood
and sanctifying Spirit, before we go hence, and are no
more seen, all that is unholy, ungrateful, and unforgiven,
for his dear Name's sake. PRAYER.
0 holy and eternal Jesus, who hast overcome death,
and triumphed over all the powers of hell, darkness, and
the grave ; manifesting the truth of thy divinity, the
majesty of thy person, and the rewards of thy glory, pre
serve our souls from eternal death ; make us to rise from
the death of sin, and to live the life of grace established
in faith, joyful through hope, and rooted in charity, that
when thou shalt reveal thyself on thy great and coming
day, we may be enabled to say, I am thine, O Lord
Jesus, and thou art mine. 0 dwell with us, and let us
dwell with thee, adoring and praising the eternal glories
of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for ever.

THE END.