DISCOURSES.

I.

THE SPIRIT OF LIFE IN JESUS CHRIST.

ROMANS VII. 2.

THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT OF LIFE IN JESUS CHRIST.

'A MAN,' says the Apostle Paul, 'is the image and glory of God.' And truly, it is from our own human nature, from its deep experiences, and earnest affections, that we form our conceptions of Deity, and become qualified to interpret the solemn intimations which creation and scripture afford to us respecting him. Without the stirrings of divine qualities within us, without some consciousness of that which we ascribe to the all-perfect, the names and descriptions by which he is made known to us would be empty words, as idly sent to us as treatises of sound to the deaf, or some high discourse of reason' to the fool. All that we believe without us, we feel within us; and it is the one sufficient proof of the grandeur and awfulness of our nature, that we have faith in God; for no merely finite being can possibly believe the infinite. The universe of which each man conceives, exists primarily

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in his own mind; there dwell the Angel he enthrones in the height, and the Demon he covers with the deep; and vainly would he talk of shunning hell, who never felt its fires in his bosom; or he converse of heaven, whose soul was never pure and green as Paradise.

In virtue of this resemblance between the human and the divine mind, Christ is the representative and revealer of both. God, by the very immensity of his nature, is a stationary being, perfect, and therefore unchangeable; and so far as Jesus Christ was 'the same yesterday, to-day and for ever;' so far as one uniform mind and power possessed him, as one sacred purpose was impressed upon his life; so far is he the emblem of Deity; affording us, in speech, in feeling, in will, in act, an idea of God, which nothing borrowed from material creation or mortal life can at all approach. His unity of soul, the unalterable spirit pervading all his altering moods of thought, — in short, his identity with himself, is altogether divine. In so far, on the other hand, as he underwent vicissitudes of emotion,-in so far as he spake, thought, acted differently in different periods of his career, and a changed hue of soul came over him, and threw across the world before him a brighter or a sadder shade, so far is he the ideal and picture of the mind of Man. His self-variations are altogether human.

The casual vicissitudes of feeling in Christ, his alternations of anxiety and hope, of rejoicing and of tears, have often been appealed to, as traces of his having had a like nature with our own. The appeal is just; and shows us that he was impressed, as we are, by those outward incidents which may make the morning happy and the evening sad. But

besides these accidental agitations, which follow the complexion of our external lot, there is a far more important set of changes, which the affections and character undergo from internal causes: which occur in regular succession, marking and characterizing the different periods of mental, if not physical life; and constitute the stages of moral development through which the noblest minds visibly pass to their perfection. The incidental fluctuations of emotion raised by the good or evil tidings of the hour, are but as the separate waves which the passing wind may soothe to a ripple or press into a storm; but the seasonal changes of character, of which I now speak, are rather the great tidal movements of the deep within us, depending on less capricious forces than the transient gale, and bearing on their surface the mere film of tempest or of calm. The succession is distinctly traceable in the mind of Christ, making his life a model of moral progression the most impressive and sublime. He thus becomes in a new sense the representative of our duty, our visible and outward conscience: revealing to us not only the end to which we must attain, but the successive steps by which our nature reaches it; the process as well as the result; the natural history of the affections which belongs to the true perfection of the will. He is the type of the pure religious life; all its developments being crowded, by the rapid ripening of his soul, into his brief experience; and we read in the gospel a divine allegory of humanity, symbolical of those profound and silent changes, of passion and speculation, of faith and love, through which a holy mind rises to its most godlike power.

I propose to follow Jesus through the several