hear? Were she receiving of the Holy Ghost, she would be receiving the Father and the Son; were she receiving of the Spirit of the Christ, she would be glorifying the Father through him, in the power of his Christhood, or anointing. But she receives from man, from books, from education, from circumstances, from money, from influence, from reputation, from the ties of the natural, not of the spiritual being; these be her gods, these her fountains of life. These may teach forms, and doctrines, and systems, and points of theology, but they can never teach us God. Except we learn Christ, we learn nothing, for he alone is the image of the true God: God is never witnessed of but in him. Except we learn him by the Holy Ghost, whether in the sun and rain, or in the preached or in the written word, or in the testimony of the saints, we learn him not in the least. The word is the sword of the Spirit, but the Spirit is the teacher. There is neither truth nor breath of life in any intervening idol, be it as refined, as religious, as it may. It is life to know God; it is death to know merely about him. It is in beholding God, and not propositions, that we acquire his image. Were the church hearing Christ, would she hear as she does? Does she take heed how she hears, and know how every hearing heaps up a reckoning. Would she criticise Christ, would she spurn Christ, would she worship the messenger; would she be persuaded by the accents, overborne by the arguments, won by the natural amiableness, moved by the appliances, of the instrument, and not constrained by the commended truth and love in demonstration of the Holy Ghost? In short, would she receive any thing as truth though all men commended it, or reject any thing as untruth though all men blasphemed it; would she ever dream that men could make truth, or that Christ the only truth could ever be received or rejected, without receiving or rejecting Christ the only life? Oh that God would tear from before the eyes of men this fast-thickening veil of delusion; that he would crucify, and raise to resurrection life and power, all their faculties and all their acquirements; and teach them that doctrine means nothing but the knowledge of God, and that every part of the most complete and orthodox theology is an absolute lie of Satan, unless we can say of it that it likens us to the Father's well-beloved Son and Servant and King. So receiving and hearing, we should preserve what we received and heard; the seed of God would abide in us; we should lay up these things in our hearts, for they would sink into our ears; we should observe the law which we loved, and not fail in the testimony of our blessed Jesus; and by the Holy Ghost, who slayeth and maketh alive at every instant the temples of the living God, and so denies at once the repeal and the hopelessness of the law, we should be ever turned, not from

Satan to Satan, but from Satan to God; ever repenting, or evincing God's aversion from sin, in a sort not to be again turned from or repented of. But if Sardis will not watch she must just be overtaken by the Son of Man, who will come to judge all men, be they confident or confounded at his appearing; she will be unable to gather herself up for the Bridegroom; having refused to know when he is near; having scoffed at understanding; having smiled at God's call to take heed to the word of prophecy, the sure light, and taken heed to every lie of men or devils, false lights of hell, concerning the future; having said, I know not the hour, therefore I will neither watch nor be ready. O blind church! wilt thou then be suddenly come upon by thine own offended, long-enduring, blood-redeeming Lord, the Lamb who bought thee? I put it to every man, woman, and child, Wouldst thou be ready, thou foolish virgin, did the Lord come this night, to break up this world's peace of death, and all the self-complacent arrangements of a reposing church, amid the judgments of the jealous God? Whether wouldst thou be the woman left, or the woman taken? whether wouldst thou sing, or wail? Thou unready bride, thou joyous widow, thou gorgeous poor one, thou contented mourner, thou snugly established pilgrim, thou unreproached witness for the reproached One, thou saver of thy life, beware! thou knowest not the hour. Thou must be well furnished indeed for the judgment of the quick and dead, to care so little for it. How canst thou hope for what thou never desirest or deignest to think of? how canst thou wait for what thou hopest not? how canst thou be faithful, and not wait for the Son from heaven?

"Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk about with me in white (garments), because they are meet. He that overcometh, the same shall be invested in white garments; and I will not expunge his name out of the book of life, and I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels."-We have here presented to us, by the Spirit of God, the character and circumstances of the righteous in the church of Sardis; and two remarkable promises-the one addressed to these persons in particular, the other addressed generally, as in the other epistles, "to him that overcometh." The expressions, "even in Sardis," and "not defiled," convey a very solemn lesson to us not to judge according to the appearance; inasmuch as it informs us, not merely that God sees death in what men are now esteeming a reputation of life; but that (as it must always be in such circumstances) he sees all defilement in the current reputation of the church purity. Even we do see that defilement now and then laid bare, in spite of the dark folds of hypocrisy which shroud it, not merely from the world, but, I honestly believe, in

many cases from the men themselves, for they are deceived. But if we saw as God sees, what should we not behold, as the fruit of a praise-coveting church, and of pledges to Christian deportment which come not from the abundance of the heart, and therefore are never without hypocrisy redeemed! And in that day when hidden things shall come to light, oh what a drawing nigh with the lip, what a diplomacy without the seal of the King, what building without a foundation, what foliage and blossom without root or fruit, what a fearful eradication of life unto God by life before men, what an awful immolation of sacred honesty of heart and tender conscience before an honest God, at the altar of that idol called Christian Consistency, shall actually, aye, and very speedily too, be exposed, without a shred to cover them, under the sentence of Him who now regards without a fiction, and will ere long judge things and men exactly as he shall find them! Oh what a conscience-searing thing is it for a man to profess for God any doctrine which likens him not to Christ, which makes him not. alive; or at any time to speak or act but as he heareth or as he regardeth the living God! Bad, very bad it is, that at any time we should not have it to say, in the spirit of adoption and with the confidence of truth's children, We are first-born, and heirs of God, washed in the blood of the Lamb: but worse, far worse, to say it in the flesh, merely because it is expected that we should, because we have pledged ourselves to say it again by saying it in time past. Out of the heart's abundance alone ought the mouth to speak.- -Now this morbid condition of the church of Sardis seems to me to be the reason why the persons of the faithful, who remain even in her, are called names. The name is that by which the person is known, marked out, or signalized. For instance, the name of Sardis that she is alive, means her life being that by which she is characterized or known. A similar explanation may be given of the names of men, Rev. xi. 13; of the name of the beast, xiii. 17; of the names of blasphemy, xvii. 3; of the new name, ii. 17; and, lastly, of the resurrection name of Christ, more excellent by inheritance than those of angels (Heb. i. 4), and surpassing every name that is named, in this age or the age to come (Phil. ii. 9; Eph.. i. 21). In like manner, the church of Sardis, professing to receive from men ; and to hear from man; bartering away Christ at every turn for a little religious notoriety; unskilful to discern the wickedness of sin in the light of God's love; untaught to take fellowship of travail, mourning, and reproach with the Man of Sorrows; unsympathising with God in his kindness to the unthankful, in his patient bearing towards all; loving nothing better than to find common ground on which to labour with the wicked in dubious enterprises; marrying the sons of God to the

daughters of men; and so leagued with the things that are as to abhor the idea of looking for the things that are not, lest the world, whose friend she is, should suspect her for a foe;—this church, I say, has received her name through praise of men : and therefore the few witnesses left in her for God, being by this especially signalized, that their praise is not of men but of God, have praise of God just by watching, just by being separate, just by leaning on God, just by sitting above with Christ: and they have their names to live, not in the book of the world, which is death to God, but in the book of life, which is death to the world; owning no fountain of life but God, no manner of it but Christ's. They believe, because they seek not the honour of men, but that which cometh of God only. Well, therefore, are they here called names. And the defilement of the garments, which they are without, has an evident relation to the garments spotted with the flesh (Jude 23), and to that filthiness of flesh and spirit from which we are called to cleanse ourselves. As it is by contemplation of the promises of God that we are so to cleanse ourselves; and as it is in keeping our garments that we shew forth our watchfulness and godliness (Rev. xvi. 15; xiv.4); so it is by doing that which the angel of Sardis would not doby watching through knowledge of the word and the times-that these persons keep their garments clean, meet as the apparel of the kingdom of heaven, into which shall enter nothing that defileth, and nothing not clothed with Christ put on.

Of the two promises which follow, the one (addressed to the undefiled ones) regards the age that is now; the other (addressed to him who has finished the contest), the age that is to come. The former I conceive to regard that walking about with Christ, which, in this world, corresponds to the walking of Enoch with God in the world before the Flood; following the Lamb as virgins, daily washing in his blood, whithersoever he goeth; being one with him in mind, as men have never been before since the Apostles; being one with him in work, shewing forth at once his praise, his love, his power, and his travail, in a manner seldom witnessed; having the signs of Christ, the sign spoken against, wrought in us with all patience; the testimony of Jesus coming from us in the pureness of the Holy Ghost; the coming Lord and his myriads being our constant theme of joy, and our strong argument of endurance ;-peradventure (for I here speak not decidedly) the execution of judgment with Christ being in the course of this walking, as it certainly shall be at length, our portion. Here, then, is a promise of grace added unto grace; of the reward which stands in the keeping of God's commandments; of the gift to him that hath. And it is illustrated yet more by the reason," for they are meet;" which just imports, that they who have most kept themselves unto God are the vessels in whom

it is fittest that he should be yet further glorified. Now let it be carefully marked as a much-forgotten truth, that the promise for the world to come is even of the same kind with the promise just considered, and the moral condition of those to whom it is addressed. For nothing is more generally both the consequence of and the encouragement to ignorance of God, than the idea that a blessed independence of God for eternity is to be the reward for an irksome, though indispensable, bondage to him in time; that they who please God here, shall chiefly please themselves hereafter; that an elysium of indolence is to compensate for a life of toil; that they who set God before them here, shall be enabled hereafter to separate and appropriate to themselves certain things, which have a blessing in themselves and not in God and, on the other hand, that the wicked shall be eternally no more than passive subjects of compassion. But the text leaves all such views without a basis. The reward of faithfulness is in this world faithfulness increased. If the natural man could serve God, what joy or stedfastness could he extract from the promise that he shall have the reward of ever serving him ; or, if he could bear fruit, that he should never cease from fruitbearing? But in that kingdom whereof we speak, they that seek God's face, shall ever see it; they that are righteous, shall be righteous still; they that here keep their garments clean, shall be honoured to wear clean garments for ever; they that are then found filthy, shall be filthy as well as forlorn for ever.

The remaining part of the promise for the age to come consists of two branches, the one of which is just the counterpart of the other. The "book of life" has by some been conceived to contain in it the names of all men, and so to represent that judicial standing which all men have in the sight of God by the atonement of the Lamb, who died for all, and bore away the sins of all, so that they should no more be remembered against them as a reason why they should not come out of them unto the Father by Him: on which supposition, the rejection of the grace of God consigns a man to the second death by blotting his name out of that book in which it had once held a place. But while the gracious constitution of all men under Christ as a Fountain of life, is that glorious truth on which is properly built the whole principle of the judgment to come by the Son of Man the Father judging no man-a principle on which, did my subject permit, I should much love to dwell-God has no where expressed his gift of eternal life in Christ to every man by saying that he has written every man's name in a book of life. Although it is true that every unrepentant sinner perishes because he will not come unto God through Christ the Life; yet it is no less true that the election alone shall come, and that they all come whom the Father giveth unto Christ. But if all