as in the other; but a yoke still, constraint and discipline still. Such, says the Apostle, was the legal state and spirit, the feeling towards God as the task and work-master: "This I must do, and that, or I shall be punished, I shall be beaten with stripes, I shall have no hire, no wages; I shall be cast out altogether." This state of mind, says the Apostle, savours of the Jerusalem that now is, and is in bondage with her children; * which hugs its yoke, and prefers the slavery of Hagar and her son to the freedom of Sarai and her son: which seems to be fruitful in its beginnings, but ends in barrenness.

So did the Jewish teachers, some even that had outwardly embraced Christianity, try to block up the way to God's favour, to acceptance and salvation, by building up barriers which God had thrown down; to wall up again God's open, unobstructed, way; to frighten back the poor sinner that was coming, taking God at His word, and saying,—

66

Just as I am, without one plea,

But that Thy blood was shed for me;"

that had taken courage at the promise, in its unrestricted breadth of wide open arms, and a Father's sweet smile of acceptance; to scare that poor sinner with such words as "What! you dare come, uncircumcised, with no Jewish sacrifice to offer; unpledged to an endless round of prescribed services and observances; with such a scanty show of good deeds to reckon up; with no money or price to offer for salvation; no fasting or tithes to boast of? Would you look for life as a gratuitous gift, without having done anything to pay for it?"

* Gal. iv. 25.

The Apostle deals with this in two ways.

With the false teachers, who, for private ends, and in spite of superior knowledge, sought to introduce their old and alien elements into the freedom of the Gospel of Christ, he deals sharply and peremptorily: "I would they were even cut off which trouble you.' With the Galatians themselves, who followed in the wake of these false teachers, beguiled and bewitched by them, impelled too by that natural instinct which leads men to prefer purchasing salvation, whole or in part, to receiving it; he deals tenderly, paternally, remonstrating with them on the folly of their retrograde course. "Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?" + As if he would say, "The Gospel is not a new roof on old walls, a new superstructure supported by an old foundation; it is a new heaven-born thing; not half shadow, and half substance, but all substance." the full-grown man does not, must not, become the infant again, nor the freed man rivet about himself the chains that were snapped asunder; so does he charge them with all affection, not with angry, spiteful bitterness, but as one that felt for them while he chid them, to "stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free."

As

In opposition to this bondage, he lays as the foundation of all freedom this fact: "God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons."§ All sonship of men to God, he says, rests on the sonship of Jesus; that sonship of which God spoke in vision to His Holy One, saying, "He shall

* Gal. v. 12.

+ Gal. iii. 3.

Gal. v. I.
§ Gal. iv. 4, 5.

call me, Thou art my Father. Also I will make Him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth." In a servile state, and with slavish feelings, then, they must have continued, but for the sonship of the Lord Jesus, in which sonship they are embraced, as many as receive Him. Their adoption is the payment in full and for ever of the great and costly price which He rendered in their behalf. There is no freedom but to those who, being joined to God's only begotten SON, become sons. To them all bondage is past and gone, from within and without, from all power in earth or hell that might seek to enthral them again. It is perfect, eternal freedom. Therefore thou art no more

a slave, but a son."+

II. But what, then, is the Holy Spirit's part or office in this? His great work, as St. Paul reminds us, is to announce and bear witness of this, and to set the seal of it upon the soul; to enable the soul to be fully possessed of the conviction of it, and to act on that conviction; instead of working as a slave, to work as a child. We see at once, dear brethren, on this showing of the Apostle, what a great and blessed part of the work it is which He undertakes; thus co-operating with the Son in bringing to completion the Father's great design. And it is because these things are not mere views and doctrines, as some would say, but living facts, mighty working powers, called "the seven Spirits of God;" the gifts of the ONE Divine Spirit distributed sevenfold, i.e., endlessly diverse and manifold; that we can preach on, though often discouraged, and come to find, now and again, that behind the weakest human agencies there has been one at work, whose forces man cannot calculate or measure.

* Ps. lxxxix. 26, 27.

+ Gal. iv. 7.

Rev. iii. I.

The Holy Spirit, we said, witnesses of or announces this adoption: and just as we saw in prayer that He intercedes, not from without, as Jesus at the mercy-seat, at the Father's right hand, but in and through the soul of the believer; so His witness of sonship is not as of one coming and speaking from without, but of one dwelling in us. Thus He makes our own selves witnesses to ourselves. "Because ye

are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father."* That He makes ourselves witnesses to ourselves, is abundantly clear from that expression of the Apostle in Rom. viii. "The Spirit itself bears joint witness (ovuμapтvρei) with our spirits that we are the children of God." It would be to little present purpose indeed that a man were made free after being a bondslave, if he were not made conscious of it, if there were nothing to be witness to him of his altered state. Suppose a man to be in honourable captivity, allowed to walk abroad within narrow limits, but not secure of his life beyond: but a decree is passed, and he is free; but no one tells him this: he wanders about the same old narrow domain within which he is restricted and tethered; though in fact a freeman, yet in mind, character, feeling, he is in bondage still. When we were, at one time, besieged in the fort of Agra, the enemy secretly departed, but they gave no notice of their departure. For some little time we thought ourselves in confinement, when in fact we were free. There was no reliable witness of it. Just as it was when Samaria was besieged by the Syrian army, and the Syrian army That brought no release of their captivity; none of the joy and lightness and buoyant elasticity and

fled.

* Gal. iv. 6.

large resource and energy of freedom, till the four lepers returned to tell it. So to the children of God, as regards their comfort and activity of service and joyousness of obedience, it would be a small matter that they were slaves with the chains knocked off, prisoners with the prison doors open, if there were no witness of it to them. Therefore the Spirit of God is sent into the hearts of the people of God to witness it. III. But this is further, in several places, called "a sealing of the Spirit." "Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts." * This term "seal" is not applied to baptism, because the Spirit's seal is always the seal of a real thing, a real inward change, which is more than we can pronounce of all the baptized. We see rather that in the majority of those baptized, so far as man can judge, there is no such change of heart, nor even a desire for it, because of what has to be given up, because of the clinging hold which the world has; and if baptism were the Spirit's seal, it would be a guarantee of inward transformation and conversion of heart in all the baptized. We see that wherever this seal is, it is a mark of real alteration, of deeply, savingly wrought renewal. It has to do with a heart work. "God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts." It has to do with an act of the soul, by which itself receives God's good gift of His Son, saying, "I will receive the cup of salvation.”+ The Apostle does not say, "Having been baptized, ye were sealed," but " having believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise." Accordingly, in the twenty-seventh article of the Church of England we are carefully guarded against mistake here: "The promises of forgiveness of sin and of our adoption to * 2 Cor. i. 22. + Ps. cxvi. 13. Eph. i. 13.