He disappeared from the eye, as the condition of descending with a new power into the heart. These things are the blessed objects of our faith and hope, whether we can see or not see their reciprocal correspondencies. It is certain that we possess our Lord, by a presence more real and more intimate than he enjoyed, who "lay in the bosom of Jesus." "Christ in us, the hope of glory," abides with power and vitality, such as His bodily presence never diffused. "He hath ascended up far above all heavens," but it is "that he might fill all things." In designating his Church the "kingdom of heaven," and "of God," does he not Himself blend in one wondrous transit His passage into the highest heavens, and into this lower province of the same heavenly empire? That that mysterious translation was gradual is certain, from many expressions relating to it; for aught we can tell, it was accomplished not till the very day and hour of the Pentecostal visitation; so that at the same instant the glory of His presence might be filling the holy of holies, and spreading into this outward earthly sanctuary of the universal temple. It is because of this double immanence, that His very offices in heaven, intercessory and commemorative, are discharged by His Spirit in the Church, heaven's earthly province. Does He intercede with the Father on the throne of His glory? Even so is He present and busy with the two or three gathered in his name for prayer; even so does His Spirit intercede with unspoken groanings in the inmost heart of a suffering disciple. Does he make mention of His sacrifice, pleading on behalf of the guilty the obedience unto death? Even so the Spirit-guided Church, in the most solemn rite of all her services, even so the Spirit-guided heart, in those hourly appeals that "make mention of His righteousness only." He is gone, but whither? Into the spiritual world? Into the spirits of His elect, then, for these are an integral portion of that world. He has abandoned a visible, to assume an invisible throne. "It is expedient that He go away," for thus He is more blessedly, more divinely ours. The presence to sense has passed into the presence in spirit; but the presence itself has never ceased, it has but deepened and closed around us. Reason (we have seen) denies not the possibility, revelation pro

nounces the certainty, of this mystical abiding,—the source of all spiritual blessings, the fundamental idea (as I believe) of all true Christian theology. Let it be our prayer, that the sense of such a gift may move us to watchfulness, purity, and godly fear; that we may feel ourselves holy things set apart for the uses of heaven, vessels of grace in the temple of our God. Since that temple was built on earth every sin became sacrilege. Who shall dare pollute the body that Christ has honoured by His adoption? Who shall dare stain the soul that Christ glorifies with His presence? We Christians live in a new world, breathe a new air; other suns are those by which we see, other voices are those we hear. We dwell in Christ and Christ in us; this is our world, we ask none else; this is the substance of our hope here, as it is to be the substance of our heaven hereafter. Heed then, my beloved brethren, earnestly heed, your high calling in Christ Jesus; glory in it, for angels cannot match it! Guard it, for it is the envy of demons! Live in it, for it is the source and principle of your immortality! Remember, with trembling joy remember, that Christ, in all the power and majesty of the Godhead, "is in you, if ye be not reprobates ;"

"for ye are the temple of the living God, as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people!"

X

SERMON XXII.

THE FAITH THAT COMETH BY HEARING.

PREACHED FOR THE NATIONAL INSTITUTION FOR THE EDUCATION OF THE DEAF AND DUMB CHILDREN OF THE POOR IN IRELAND.

ROMANS, X. 14.

How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard.

THER

HERE is but one conceivable answer to this question in its large and general sense; in that sense which was pertinent to the Apostle's argument. Belief is impossible, where it is impossible to convey any knowledge of the subjects of belief; the body cannot digest without nutriment to engage its digestive function; the mind cannot believe without facts and propositions to occupy its believing faculty. "Faith cometh," then, "by hearing," as truly as "hearing cometh by"—ariseth out of and pre-supposeth-" the word (or utterance) of God." The voice of God, the hearing of man, the consequent belief,— are the three necessarily successive links in the golden chain of revealed salvation. Sever the continuity of any two, and the electric spark cannot be transferred across the interval. From the throne of the Most High to the ear of man, from the ear to the heart, is the luminous pathway of the Spirit. "How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard?"

I speak this day, however, for an Institution, which is one of many that have ventured to solve this problem in its more limited and literal sense. The happy ingenuity of benevolence has conquered a difficulty so great, that an Apostle employed it to symbolize an impossibility. Patient observation quickened by love has devised means to open a channel of natural com

munication between heaven and these desolate hearts. It has wrought out a system of supplementary organs for receiving and uttering blessings. The age of miracles being past, Christian charity, animating the intellect to new energies, has stepped in to occupy their place; and though no ardour of charity, no potency of science, can say, with the great Physician," thou dumb and deaf spirit, come out of him!" they, nevertheless, can rob that spirit of his deadliest sting, abridge his gloomy prerogatives, and startle his silent empire with the triumphant message of salvation! Under the efficacy of this incomparable art, wonders are achieved, of whose ultimate value eternity alone shall tell the amount. The slumbering spirit, born in that slumber, awakes to unsuspected faculties. There is, as it were, a mental creation renewed. Originally capacitated for the skies, it starts into knowing itself immortal; the soul, so long a voiceless desert, is a desert no more, for lo! "the voice of one crying in that wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord! make straight in the desert a highway for our God!"

These are great achievements, they are an honour alike to the understanding and the heart of man. Executed in behalf of any class of sufferers, they would be interesting and admirable. Executed for the poor, the helpless, and the orphan, they are godlike. They present multiplied images of Him, who "went about doing good," and whose chosen objects of charity were those whom the world had rejected; whose divine specific was tendered to those to whom the resources of medical art were unable to offer any word of comfort, and cared not to offer it, if they could. Christianity is the foundation of these blessings not less truly because often circuitously and indirectly; and verifies, in innumerable ways of unsuspected influence over the temporal state of man, that she has indeed, in proportion to her extension in the world, "the promise of the life that now is," as well as "of that which is to come." Even those who are Christians more in profession than principle, who, though within the walls of the Christian temple, worship only in its outer courts, cannot help owning a sympathy with the success of Christian labours. This divine visitant has softened the universal temper, and made benevolence attractive even to those

who are little influenced by the peculiar motives she suggests. The light is reflected to numbers, who unhappily withdraw themselves from the cheering radiance of its directer beams. The very hem of Christ's garment had virtue; and a kind of derived and transitory blessedness seems to hover around even the remotest thing connected with that Church, which is His mystical and earthly body. When Isaiah "saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up," "His train filled the temple;" even now His image cannot be drawn down from heaven, and realized on earth in holiness, without filling its temporary habitation with a retinue of blessings. Men become habitually, and at length almost instinctively, benevolent, from the happy contagion of example. If they cannot sympathize with the heavenly, they can appreciate the earthly, aims of charity; and those who feel but a feeble interest in Christian enterprises, under their spiritual aspect, cannot but own the work a noble one, that labours to lighten man's heavy inheritance of worldly woe.

But the solemn duties of this place and occasion demand that I should present to you this matter mainly in its connexion with the eternal world; and though I am not sanguine enough to expect it from all, I trust that in the congregation I now address I shall not be without numbers, who can feel such connexions to be, practically, the most important of any. I trust that there are among you many, to whom the thankful acknowledgment of God's " inestimable love in the redemption of the world" is more than the mechanical expression of the lips; who perpetually and profoundly feel, that the gift of Christ Jesus to sinners is the master mercy of God to man; that the surrender of a universe to our enjoyment could not have competed with the surrender of Himself its Author; nor the bestowal of ten thousand faculties unpossessed before, with as many thousand objects to engage them, rival the value of that unspeakable union by which He lifts us to share the throne of His glory, now in hope, and hereafter in reality. The weight of a Christian argument, heavy and oppressive to so many, by such is joyfully borne; for to them it is only a new excursion through their accustomed regions of thought; it is only telling over, in a new form of computation, their cherished treasures; it is only contem