Love, again, has a higher excellence, because the honour which it brings to God is more open and visible. If it were possible that faith and hope should exist alone in any heart, we should yet have no proof that they were present there. But love reveals the secret. Men 66 see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven." Moreover, Love has this peculiar value; that, as faith honours God's truth, and hope comforts man's heart, love, while equally honouring God and comforting the individual possessor, diffuses its blessedness over all with whom it comes in contact. It enables human beings to adopt, as their own, the full harmony of angels. Faith gives "glory to God in the highest;" hope, wherever it resides, brings "peace on earth;" and love is "good will towards men." But the principal ground of this preference of love, is the same which constitutes the superiority of all the three over gifts and external privileges. While they are transitory, faith, hope, and love are "abiding; " but then, which of the three will "abide" the longest? We answer, "Love"for love alone will survive the grave. Faith and hope, howsoever they may outlive all other distinctions, have nevertheless their own date. There will be no faith, in that blessed world where " we shall know even as also we are known;" where experience and not testimony will assure to us our never-ending heritage. There will be no further occasion for hope, where nothing remains to be desired. "Hope that is seen is no longer hope; for, what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?" But love is the eternal employment, the sole business, the single grace of heaven-love to God, pure and undefiled; love to our redeemed fellow-men," without partiality and without hypocrisy;" the love of Christ as the Author, of the Holy Ghost as the Agent, of our still increasing blessedness. The "greatest of all" will assuredly be charity, in a world Where Faith is sweetly lost in sight, Are you and I, dear brethren, on our way to that blissful place? What an important question! Remember if any of us are on our way to manhood, we have, while yet children, the form and lineaments of the human figure already stamped upon us, however imperfectly our faculties may hitherto be developed. What evidence then have you, of your being "children of God?" Is his nature renewed in you? Has he inclined you to trust in him, to hope in him, to love him above all, and to love all for his sake? I do not ask, whether these graces are full-grown in you: I know that they are not. Do they exist? Are you bestowing upon them the culture which they demand? And do you at all" grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?" Oh, thou heart-searching Spirit of the Father and of the Son, enable each of us to give to these questions such an answer, as may not turn to our confusion, in the day when" the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed!" 240 SERMON XV. ISAIAH XL. 27-31. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God? Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint. If we were disposed to adopt the Mahometan mode of reasoning, in support of the Divine Inspiration of the Scriptures, it would not be difficult to shew, that our Sacred Volume stands upon a far higher eminence than theirs. Where will you find,' say the followers of the false Prophet, 'language so elegant, so pure, so sublime, so inimitable, as in the Koran?' 'Where,' it might be replied,' will you find poets and moralists, who can compare, in all these respects, with the Hebrew writers?' But when we have said this, and when even Infidels have borne reluctant testimony to the superiority of Isaiah to Mahomet, what have we gained? Guilty Man admires-but still hates what he commends; and, having taken to himself great credit for just and discriminating taste in composition, turns away from the blessed book in which all his hopes are contained, to seek his gratification in pursuits and pleasures totally at variance with those hopes. Not so the genuine Christian. Attracted, it may be, to the perusal of the Bible by the beauties of its style, he soon perceives a Divine unction accompanying what he reads. He feels himself in the presence of an unseen Deity, who is unlocking to his view the recesses of his own heart: and he cannot lay aside the holy volume, without a secret conviction, similar to that which came over Jacob at Bethel, "Surely the Lord is" here, "and I knew it not!"-Take, for instance, the passage upon which we are now about to meditate. If you read it with faith, you will not fail to remember, that thoughts of despondency, such as are described by Isaiah, have passed through your own mind; and you will be at once humbled and encouraged by the eloquent rebuke here given to them. 'God is speaking to me in these words,' you will say: R |