withdraw you from outer things into that presence in which all temptations fade away, all things assume their true proportions; in which is quietness for the spirit of man; in which, as in the dewy freshness of the morning, all graces grow; in which love to God is shed abroad in the heart, and from which you go forth another man to the struggle and strife of your daily warfare with evil.

Beware, too, of allowing any sense of distance to grow up between God and your soul. Any indulged sin of heart, of desire, of thought, or of act, tends at once to create it. Then indolence pleads that by degrees that sense of distance will of itself, without your troubling yourself about it, die away, and that you will be where you were of old. But it is not so. That passing sense of distance soon hardens itself into a habit if it be not at once removed. Whenever, therefore, you are conscious of it search earnestly to find its cause. Cast the lot of God until you have found the hidden wedge of gold and the goodly Babylonish garment, and bring them forth and burn them before the Lord, lest that lot be cast against thee, and take thee to thy destruction. Use faithfully the blessed mediation of the Eternal Son. Rest your soul on His sacrifice once offered for you on the cross. Doubt not for an instant that there is full, free, sure pardon for every one who turns from his sin to God; that we "have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." Trust to that mediation. Do it honour. Return through it at once to thy Father. In any allowed estrangedness from Him is the seed of rebellion and of ruin. then revenge upon yourself your provocations of Him. Do not pass them by; He blesses such discipline of yourself, and under that blessing it breeds in your soul tenderness, watchfulness, and love to Him.

And

It will aid you, too, in practising the yielding of the will to Him, and in this is the master secret of all spiritual growth. This, in sorrow, plucks the sharpest sting out of the anguish; this sweetens the asperity and the ruggedness of a temper naturally uneven; this sanctifies the affections. As the voice of the heart becomes indeed "not my will but Thine be done," the work is accomplished, the moral discipline has been perfected, the spiritual renewal under the hand of God the Holy Ghost has been wrought. The golden stairs lie straight before you, and turning on their adamantine hinges the golden gates which lead into the city shall open for you of their own accord.

Thither, by the might of His Holy Spirit, through the atonement wrought for us by the Incarnate Son, may the Eternal Father bring at last every one of us His ransomed and regenerate creatures.

Now to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be might, majesty, and dominion, for ever and ever. Amen.

SERMON II.

Personal Responsibility of Man, as entrusted with a Revelation.

GALATIANS i. 15, 16.

"But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood."

MY

Y subject this evening, Christian brethren, is "the Personal Responsibility of Man, as entrusted with a Revelation :" and I have thought it well to introduce it to you, not by any abstract discussion of the nature and limits and results of that responsibility, but by the exhibition of a notable case-perhaps the most notable. case in history-in which a revelation was definitely made and the consequent responsibility consciously and avowedly accepted, and followed out to its legitimate consequences.

St. Paul speaks in the text of God having been pleased to reveal His Son in him, that is, in St. Paul; and it is necessary at once to observe that the meaning which the merely English reader of this Scripture would probably attach to the words is not exactly its true meaning. "To reveal His Son in me," might seem to imply some internal revelation, some process within the Apostle's own heart and moral being, which gave him an absolute and infallible knowledge of the truth of Christ. I do not say that there was nothing at all of

this kind, I think there was: it seems incapable of contradiction, that whenever the heart of a man is truly converted to God the work must be, and always is, the work of the Holy Spirit, and cannot be merely the result of thinking, or reasoning, or arguing: and therefore, although it is perfectly true that such a view of the conversion of the human heart is capable of being abused and distorted into fanatical errors, still the view itself must be prized and maintained. That, however, to which St. Paul more immediately referred was a different thing: when he said "God hath revealed His Son in me," he intended rather to refer to the fact that God intended to reveal His Son to mankind by and through him; he was to be the instrument of the revelation he was "a chosen vessel to preach the Gospel." God had revealed Christ to him, that he might reveal Him to others; and so the meaning is, not so much that a light was lighted by divine power in the mind of St. Paul, as that a light was intended to shine out from him for the illumination of the world.

So that, after all, perhaps the difference between the two interpretations is not so wide as it seems. It may be a great matter to the critic to determine whether the particle, which St. Paul used, be translated to mean 'within,' or to mean 'by' or 'through:' but really when weighed in spiritual scales the two meanings come much to the same thing, or at all events one implies the other; for God can never make a revelation of His Son through a man, until He has first made the revelation within him: the lamp cannot illuminate until the light has been lighted within it: the light shines without, because it shines within; and if St. Paul could speak confidently of God having been pleased to call him by His grace, and to reveal Christ through him to

the heathen, it was because he could speak confidently of that revelation of Christ to his own soul, which had so thoroughly converted his mind and changed the purpose of his life. For how stood the fact? Saul, as we all know, was going to Damascus to persecute the Christians; on the way Jesus Christ spoke to him: in a certain sense it was not the first time that Christ had spoken to him: he must have heard a good deal about Christ, and have formed a very strong opinion concerning Him; he must have seen with that penetrating intellect which so strikingly marked him, that either the faith of Christ or the traditions of his fathers must perish; but he had never for a moment realized who and what Jesus Christ was: that knowledge came to him when he was struck down to the earth, and the exceeding bright light from heaven shined upon him. I cannot say exactly how the knowledge came to him even then; as the Egyptian magicians said, "It was the finger of God;" but Jesus Christ spoke to him,—we know that: the utterance was apparently simple, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" but it was an utterance that was "quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword," because it was "the Word of God;" and no sooner had that revelation of Jesus Christ penetrated into Saul's heart, supported and strengthened as it was by further and fuller revelations, than the persecutor became a preacher, and the enemy of Christ became His Apostle, and old things passed away and all things became new; there was a new purpose, and a new object of love, and a new work, and new hopes: in the language most appropriate to the subject of this sermon, St. Paul felt his responsibility as being "entrusted with a revelation." And so it was that he was in the habit of expressing himself very strongly con

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