glory, he should have no heart for happiness; but should still love to cower in the dark while light ineffable solicits him to behold and to enjoy it! Oh, horror yet more terrific, that him whom love and joy cannot attract, even vengeance and torment cannot alarm; that, unwilling to receive God as merciful, he cannot be taught to remember Him as just; or to reflect that he who refuses to prepare for the inheritance of the saints in light, is by that very refusal hardening his own heart to the temper of the inheritors of darkness!

Finally, brethren, professing, as even by your very attendance in this house of God you now profess, to aim at heaven, essay to live in the spirit of heaven! Cultivate its dispositions! its love for a loving God, its tenderness for even unloving man! Live, as millions of spiritual creatures are even now living, who differ from you in this, indeed, that they see what you believe, that they possess what you inherit, but who, in all their angelic ecstasies, can point to no such attestation of infinite affection as God has manifested to you, and who might well be the pupils in divine love of those for whom God Himself became man, and poor, and crucified, in order that, having purchased us by His blood, He might purify us by His Spirit, and, refining His creatures of the dust into His own likeness, to prepare them for His own kingdom, might "make them meet to be" at last" partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light

SERMON VIII.

OCCASIONAL MYSTERIOUSNESS OF CHRIST'S TEACHING-CHRIST OUR “LIFE"

JOHN, viii. 51.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.

THE

HE Scriptures of God, my brethren, are not to be practically interpreted without the Spirit of God. It is perfectly true that much may be done in the field of critical argument and exposition without any supernatural aid. It is quite certain that a vast and elaborate commentary upon these Scriptures may be written, and read, and understood, without the influence of the Holy Spirit. It is supposable that a man may declaim with an overwhelming energy, and a force of genius altogether astonishing, upon the majestic mysteries of God's providence and grace; that he may have power to arouse feelings, whether of tenderness or terror, that long lay slumbering in the lowest depths of the natural human heart, and, with a potency like the fabled miracles of magic, to call them out at his bidding; and yet that neither he, nor any one of his audience, have ever known, in any sense that shall tell to their eventual salvation, one breath of the effectual Spirit of God, one pulsation of the genuine spiritual life! There is absolutely nothing to prevent the intellect from exercising itself upon the Christian revelation, more than upon the contents of any other printed book; or the reason from estimating it, or the imagination from building on it, or even the gentler affections from softening at its details. It is thrown in the midst of the world.

exactly like any other volume around it, printed with the same types, read with the same eyes, heard with the same ears; and the faculties and feelings of man will of course act upon it as they do upon any other history. But (if the Book itself may be allowed to declare its own claims and prerogatives) all this external similarity is accompanied with a total internal difference; and this book differs from every other, in requiring, so to speak, an organ specially prepared, to receive its real purport. These things are "spiritually discerned."

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And yet, while we uphold this awful distinction, we must balance the account by another principle, which seems intimated with equal clearness, and which, I believe, it would be fatal to all right views of religion to overlook. The change which takes place in each individual soul under the mysterious agency of the Spirit, is vast, but it is not unlimited. Whatever real fanaticism (in some ages of the Church), or unintentional but injudicious exaggeration, may have urged,— it does not appear that the office of the Spirit of God is to supply us with affections in themselves substantially new,-to bestow a something which is neither love, nor fear, nor hope, nor desire,—but simply to direct the old affections to higher objects, to employ the former mechanism for more exalted poses. The whole array of the human affections, under their old names and in their old characters, are brought out in strong relief in every page of Scripture; the object of the apostolic preaching, and teaching, and warning, and example, is manifestly not to annihilate, but to "direct, sanctify, and govern them," upon better principles and under higher guidance. But we have spoken of a great and necessary change: with these elements preserved unaltered, where, then, is the scene of the work of the Spirit? where is the field on which this mighty revolution is wrought? Unquestionably, in the object revealed, and in the corresponding attraction of the heart to that object. He who is supernaturally gifted sees not with other eyes, but he sees what other eyes cannot see, and loves what other hearts cannot love! When the first martyr," full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven," his visual organ was itself, doubtless, unchanged; but while others looked upon the com

mon skies, and saw but clouds or sunshine, he alone " saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God." Head and heart, the regenerate is still the same man; but in a new world of bright and eternal realities: and though "every thought," his whole intellectual organ, remains unmutilated, yet every thought is "brought captive to the obedience of Christ." Thus God conciliates His worlds of nature and grace, and evinces that nothing was made in vain. Sin itself is an element in discipline; and as for the affections enthralled by its despotism, they are sinful not in themselves as affections, but in their depravation; they are meant to be not the bond slaves of evil, but the liberated" servants of righteousness;" they are born for eternity and for God!

Let us, then, ever maintain for the Spirit of Truth-and more than ever in these days, in which we are wont to hear the gravest truths of revelation questioned, or diluted, or overlooked-His own unparticipated right to illumine man; not indeed by making man no longer man, but by feeding the affections with holy food, by inviting them to holy objects. In this work He is alone. "It is the Spirit that quickeneth." The old and the new creation are alike exclusively divine. The revelation of God itself, as delivered in books, dare not dispute this honour with the Everlasting Spirit. That revelation is written in a language familiar to our daily thoughts and converse; it speaks of life, and death, and faith, and hope, and love,-all household words, which in their earthly acceptation every man can speak of and define: but to pass from the earthly term to the heavenly purport, from the natural object to the supernatural, from the life of the flesh to the life of the Spirit, from the faith which trusts in the brother-man to the faith which trusts in the "first-born among many brethren," from the love and hope that are entangled among creatures of clay to the love and hope that are busy among the immortal realities of heaven,—this is an art which the Spirit that inspired the Scriptures alone can teach to the man who reads them!

Reflections of this kind, my beloved brethren, are naturally prompted by the passage before us, taken in connexion with the singular dialogue of which it is a part. They are among

the first which will occur to meditative students of our Lord's habitual teaching (in which there was at all times a striking similarity of style and method); but perhaps on no occasion does this profound lesson of the necessity of spiritual enlightenment meet us more forcibly than upon the perusal of this remarkable discussion, recorded in the eighth chapter of St. John.

The divine instructor is in the midst of His Jewish audience. They surround Him, half awed by His dignity, half provoked by His calmness. Undisturbed, and as if He felt himself more truly addressing ages to come,-as if He stood in the presence, not of a few contentious disputants, but of the Church He was to found and to redeem,-yea, as if He spoke in the presence of "an innumerable company of angels" and the "spirits of the just," whom He was to "perfect,”—in such a tone as this He replies to their cavils. His words, while they sufficiently answer the objections of His adversaries, yet answer them upon principles which they cannot yet comprehend ; and though these weighty sentences seem at first sight designed for present and immediate use, they are now known to be really pregnant with the deepest mysteries of the spiritual life, and only to be understood by those who have had experience in that life. Christ spoke to futurity, and pre-supposed

spiritual illumination not yet bestowed. He would evince the necessity of a divine interpreter to unfold and explain His own words; and therefore he speaks-truths indeed, but truths whose deep purport He knew those whom He addressed were wholly unable to penetrate. What are the topics of this solemn discourse?" Truth"-" freedom"-" life"-" death,"-all intelligible terms, surely, but, in their spiritual import, to the unspiritualized mind, dark as the counsels of God, fathomless as eternity!

Two important uses can be made of this peculiarity in our Lord's method of address, combined with this view of its object. The first we have in some measure seen. Such a discourse as that to which I am calling your attention shows us Christ Himself proceeding on the necessity of the supernatural illumination He was afterwards to bestow. He speaks, as it were, in cypher; the Spirit of God is to furnish the solution. He