is like the one landscape seen in different lights, and we can scarcely recognise it for the same! "The law of the Spirit of life" has already begun to supplant the "law of sin and death." Whether the misfortunes of the people, knowing, as we do, how largely affliction is employed as an instrument in the hand of God, might have been concerned in fitting them to receive this higher tone of spiritual promise, it is not easy to say with certainty; but it is remarkable that it is from the depths of captivity, in the hour of bitterest bondage, that Jeremiah and Ezekiel have reached the culminating point of the promise of holiness to come, that great announcement of the covenant, the peculiar charter of our religion,-which you will find cited in that character by St. Paul in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Hebrews. "Behold the days

come that I will make a new covenant with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, for this is the covenant that I will make. I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts, and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people."

If these anticipations of spiritual vitality, of life from the death of sin, be thus the constant character of the Old Testament (itself unpossessed of the gift), we may repeat that in this sense also was the Lord of glory justified, when He appealed to those Scriptures in the mass, for their testimony to Him as the Author and Giver of life.

3. It remains that we speak of the last subject of attestation, the testimony of the Scriptures to Christ, as the source of an immortality of glory to His followers. Few minutes are left us for this: but it need not detain us long. It seems, in relation to our subject, the topic most prominent of all; but, in truth, it is, in a great measure, contained in the former. Christ's atonement, Christ's gift of the Spirit, Christ's gift of glory, follow in necessary internal connexion; and wherever the two former are proclaimed, the last is substantially involved. But, according to the universal law of progressive development, the Old Testament predictions become less and less vivid as we advance through the three: the earliest, the atonement, is presignified the most distinctly of all; the sanctification by the

Spirit, less and more lately; the final glorification faintly, and more often by implication than assertion. Nor indeed could EITHER the present or the eternal life of the Spirit have been adequately manifested in type or prophecy without the OTHER; and it is remarkable that the prediction of the spiritual covenant, which I have just cited, declares that Jehovah will become "a God" to His sanctified people, a phrase whose import as extending to the future world, Christ Himself, on one illustrious occasion, interpreted. The connexion of the gift of the Holy Ghost with immortal glory is not arbitrary or external, but inward and essential. Mány have insinuated that to insist on the heavenly recompense is to corrupt the purity of the religious motives. Deeper reflection would have taught them that, without the heavenly future, it would be impossible to preach our religion at all. Men cannot possess the elevation of the Christian affections on a temporal scheme, and without constant reference to a larger world as their own. Men cannot breathe the breath of heaven without the free amplitude of heaven around them. You cannot proclaim a religion built on mystical union with God, unless you first lift men into God's world,—into a world, therefore, of incorruption, of eternity. Even could we exclude the notion of reward altogether, our religion could not live and grow without heaven and immortality as its element. And (without arguing that, on any other supposition, their fortitude must have exceeded that of our Christian martyrs) I cannot doubt, that though, perhaps, forbidden by the Spirit to declare their convictions, except in glimpses and enigmas, the holy men of old must have lived on such a belief; that "the fathers looked not for transitory promises;" that some "sought the heavenly" country in the strength of a general dependence on the tried faithfulness of God; others, favoured with visions, more or less express, of "His day," who now appealed in turn from their unbelieving descendants to them and their Scriptures for the promise of "eternal life," as being "they which testified of Him." As the hour drew nearer, we know from other sources that the conviction became more decided; some of the apocryphal books teem with notices of a future state. National misfortune drove the

Jews from the present to a coming world; and before the advent of Him who was destined to "bring them" to perfect "light," "life and immortality" had already feebly dawned upon the beliefs or the hopes of Israel. But in Him alone was that consummated, which Israel till then could only conjecture. They might "search the Scriptures" in pursuit of " eternal life," but in Him alone had those Scriptures centred it; in Him every scattered ray that brightened their immortal prospects converged into one resplendent focus; His marvellous existence alone satisfied, in one comprehensive solution, all their difficulties, accomplished all their promises, substantiated all their hopes. He was rejected, but on that rejection was built the world's acceptance, the atonement, the illumination, the immortality. To it you owe that, redeemed from dumb idols, you can this day expatiate at will through the old Jewish inheritance, once so jealously guarded; that you can "search the Scriptures," and, discerning on every page the hidden name of Jesus, can hear them whisper of" eternal life," but only as they speak of Him, who is the sole dispenser of the priceless wealth of immortality.

SERMON XV.

HUMAN AFFECTIONS RAISED, NOT DESTROYED, BY THE GOSPEL.

1 TIMOTHY, vi. 17.

Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy.

HE business of the pulpit, my brethren, is to take man as

THE

it finds him, though not to leave him as it finds him. Its position places it in the midst of a lost and degraded world, and it must regard that world as such without qualification or compromise, or else miss of its proper destination. Christianity itself, as recognised in Christian lands,-what is it but (as it were) a vast medical establishment for diseased minds? And the functions of the pulpit,-what are they but the solemn and public tender of divinely authorized remedies to the assembled patients in each ward of that mighty hospital, the sin-afflicted world? The physicians may vary in skill or activity, the sufferers in the virulence of the evil; but the relation between them remains substantially unchanged. Nor does it affect the truth of the representation that, in a vast majority of instances, the sick are unsuspicious of their sickness; any more than the confidence of the insane would be accepted as evidence of sanity. The ignorance is a part of the disease, and the first step to health is to know how far we are from it. The pulpit, then, I repeat, must take man exactly as it finds him, with all his multitude of passions and prejudices around him; with his discontented, yet perversely obstinate devotion to this world, and his feeble aspirations after a better. It must

take the whole mass as it moves in the crowded walks of common life, and not any imaginary or fictitious humanity;-it must take it, that, purifying, directing, strengthening these weak elements, it may, in the energy of the Spirit of God, mightily accompanying the Word He once gave, mould them into a better harmony, and, of these rude materials of intellect and affection, frame a "Temple of the Holy Ghost" for time and for eternity!

"Of these materials," I say, for here is the point. The Apostle sets before us, in the text, two applications of the same human affection. He bids us not to "trust in uncertain riches," but to trust "in the living God." He assumes that there is in the heart of man the tendency to dependence upon something beyond itself, yet intimately connected with itself; and, above all (and as the chiefest instance of the principle), upon that wealth, which is the pledge and representative of all earthly enjoyment, and which is thus the great mediator between the heart and the world that attracts it. He assumes that this trusting impulse exists, and he would not destroy but reform it. He would exhibit the true and eternal object for a tendency in itself indestructible; and would intimate that there is prepared for the just desires of the soul a sphere of being, adequate to these desires, and from which the present detains us, only as the counterfeit and mockery of it! On the one hand, “uncertain riches;" on the other the parallel announcement, that "God giveth us richly all things to enjoy." And thus the Spirit, that spoke in the exhortation of Paul, instructs in the great truth, that the faculties of men are themselves a mechanism for eternity; that it is not they, it is not Love, and Reliance, and Hope, and Desire,—but their habitual objects, that man must toil to change; that if your worldliness assume (as in the text) the form of unbounded trust, to be a disciple of the mighty Master, you must not cease to trust, but, with a thousandfold force, concentrate all the energies of your dependence upon "the living God;" in short, that you must be the man you were, but not where and as you were, the same faculties, but not the same uses; even as the breathing organs of a human body are still substantially the same, when at one hour inhaling pestilence and ruin, at