Imagini ale paginilor
PDF
ePub

stone-itself a mystery, may be looked on as a type or picture of every soul, saved or unsaved. Every soul feels, reasons, and thinks;-and yet the soul is neither feeling, reason, nor thought: these are mere qualities which belong to the soul in every state, but form no part of its essence. By these, we recognize the spiritual entity, and form an opinion respecting it. In itself it is a mystery.

II. THE SOUL OF THE UNREGENERATE, HOWEVER, IS, LIKE THE STONE, VERY HARD. All stones are not equally hard; rough hardness is a characteristic of each. Neither are all souls equally without feeling or moral susceptibility; though all are sadly deficient in this respect. This is illustrated— (1) By the cruel practices of Pagan nations. Infanticides, parricides, self-torture, human sacrifices, Sutteeism, &c. (2) By the indifference of those who are not Pagans-even Christians, to the welfare of others. There is a world of selfishness in the Church. Many have entered the Church for selfish purposes-to secure secular advantages on earth, and heaven at last. As they take up religion to get to heaven themselves merely-for gain, they care little or nothing for the condition of others. (3) By the difficulty invariably found of awakening the soul to an earnest enquiry for its own personal and highest interest.

III. THE SOUL OF THE UNGENERATE IS, LIKE THE STONE, NOT WHAT IT ORIGINALLY WAS. The stone is hard; but it was not always so. From the form of its elemental parts,the minute particles that form it, I see it has not been always as hard as it is now. Here, in this part of it, you see a fossil-the track of a reptile, the scales of a fish, the shell of a mollusc, the bark of a tree, or the leaf of a flowerless plant. This stone must have been soft when the reptile crawled upon it, the fish swam in the water above it, leaving its scales upon the mud beneath-when the aquatic snail left behind it its silicious home, and when the tree fell or the leaves were scattered. Every pebble or grain of sand was

once a part of a great rock, and that rock itself a soft material: but heat, pressure, and time combined, made it hard. Even the flint existed in a soft and pulpy form. It is composed for the most part of the debris of animals, minute, but mighty, which once lived and formed calcareous shells from the ocean waters. They all perished in their turn, and were buried in the sponges which then lived on our shores. In process of time they were hardened into flints. Similar is the history of your soul, my unregenerated brother. It was once soft, tender, and full of feeling, though now it is hard. This is proved-(1) From the universal traditions of men. All nations have their notions of a golden age that is past. (2) From man's intuitive ideas of the moral nature of God. We cannot conceive it possible that such an unfinished mass of heterogeneous elements as man is proved to be-combining the highest intellectual glory with the lowest animal degradation-should come from the hand of God just as he is. (3) From the infallible testimony of the Scripture, “God made man upright," &c.

BEEN GRADUALLY HARDENED.

IV. THE UNREGENERATED SOUL HAS, LIKE THE STONE, Whatever tendencies to evil are bound up in the heart of a child, this I venture to affirm, no man is born a monster. Even Nero, who assassinated his mother, set fire to the Roman Capital, and brought to an untimely grave in misery, thousands of men, women, and innocent children, had once a tender heart, like others. It was gradually hardened. "Would to God I could not write?" was his feeling exclamation once when a death warrant was presented to him for signature.

V. THE UNREGENERATED SOUL, LIKE THE STONE, BEARS IN ITSELF A FAITHFUL RECORD OF ALL THE POWERS WHICH

HAVE HELPED TO MAKE IT WHAT IT IS. In the stone, some of its particles are spherical; showing that, once, after having been broken from the mother rock, they were for centuries under the action of flowing water; others are crystal

the future to The influence

lized, showing that once they were in a state of solution; others, are organic, showing that they were once the seat of vegetable or animal life. In the form and composition of these particles we find a record of the various changes through which the stone has passed, as well as the numerous influences which have been at work in the effecting of those changes. Could we only understand the mute language eloquently uttered, a history of the world, for ages, chemically, botanically, and zoologically, might be constructed from a single stone. The soul of man is similar. In eternity, it may be possible to trace distinctly in every soul in heaven or hell a faithful record of all the influences, which, on earth, have ever tended to elevate or degrade it. Our own power of vision may be sufficiently strengthened in conduct with ease such a wonderful analysis. we now exert, great or small, good or evil, will never cease to act. The fluttering of the insect's wing, in the calm of Summer or in the Winter storm, alters the atmospheric current, and the relative position of every material particle in the universe, as truly and in proportion to the moving force, as the peal of a thousand thunders-the shock of the earthquake which covers continents with ruins, or the rupture into a million of fragments of a planet in its course. Our actions also, make indelible impressions by means of air, light, heat, electricity, and moral and intellectual laws, upon others both near us and afar off. We may yet trace our own words and deeds in souls, like fossils in the stone-in souls eternally ruined or made for ever blessed. As every scene we witness makes an indelible impression on the retina of the eye, so that when it is mentally reproduced by the imagination, a faint outline is visible in the eye itself; and, as the last scene the dying man beholds, remains imprinted on the retina until the very remembrance on which the scene is drawn be disintegrated and dissolved by the process of decay, so the various powers which have acted on the soul and aided its upward or downward motion will remain for ever, and may be yet legible on its very structure.

VI. THE UNREGENERATED SOUL, LIKE THE STONE, MAY BE SOFTENED BY THE APPLICATION OF APPROPRIATE ELEMENTS.

The flint may be reduced to pulp, by chemical re-agents, and moulded like the clay, to any form. The hardest metals may be dissolved. So may also the hardest heart. The love of Christ is the dissolving element for souls. If your heart is hard, my friend, go to the bleeding Saviour. Let His dying love but touch its hard material, and in a moment it will become soft and tender, and may be moulded by the grace of God into the image of that Saviour Himself.

EVAN LEWIS, B.A., F.R.G.S., &c., &c.

Rothwell, Northamptonshire.

SUBJECT:-The Resurrection.

"The same day came to him the Sadducees, which say," &c.-Matt. xxii. 23-32.

Analysis of Homily the Three Hundred and Sixty-second.

In this narrative of our Lord's encounter with the sceptics of His day, four things claim our notice :-The objection. The refutation. The argument. The limitation.

I. THE OBJECTION. The objection of the Sadducees, although illustrated by an extreme case, was on their grounds perfectly legitimate. They urged the confusion which must result from relationships, which in this life are successive, becoming at the resurrection contemporaneous. Exactly analogous to this is a difficulty propounded by some at the present day, based on the fact that the particles composing the living body are perpetually changing: whence it has been asked-If a soul has been vitally united to many successive sets of atoms, to which of those sets shall she be united in the resurrection? "for they all had her.”

II. THE REFUTATION. The reply of our Lord disposes at once both of the ancient and modern difficulty. Having reminded His opponents that an explicit revelation from God bars all objection, and that to assume such and such consequences as inevitable is to limit the resources of omnipotence to our own contracted notions, He proceeds to declare the fallacy of their suppressed premises-that a resurrection necessitates the renewal of all the conditions of the present life. On the contrary, He assures them that those marital rights, which seemed to them involved in such hopeless confusion, will exist no longer. In like manner it may be replied to the modern objector that, if the change of particles alluded to does not interfere with the present identity of the body, much less can we affirm it to preclude the perpetuation of that identity under conditions totally unknown to us. For anything we know, atomic identity may form no feature in the resurrection body.

III.

THE ARGUMENT.

The argument propounded by our Lord in proof of a resurrection rests on the words addressed by Jehovah to Moses from out of the burning bush. In it we remark two peculiarities. (1) That this affirmative argument is not drawn from anything in man's own nature, but from his relationship to the Everlasting. This is high ground, and it is the only safe ground. Who that has studied the subtilties of metaphysicians about immateriality and indestructibility has not felt a painful misgiving as to the soundness of such evidence on which to rest an immortal hope? After all the labored pleadings does not the thought intrude-"That which has had a beginning may have an end?" Hence heathen theories of immortality have mostly leaned for support either on Platonic pre-existence, on the one hand, or on Oriental absorption, on the other. It is only when we leave our dialectics and turn to the moral evidence, and see in the many triumphs of guilt and sufferings of innocence the necessity of an after-death retribution, that the mind attains anything like satisfaction on the subject. And what is this,

« ÎnapoiContinuă »