A SERMON,

&c.

REV. III. 8.

"I know thy works: behold I have set before thee an open door and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name."

These words are extracted from the charge addressed by the Son of Man in his state of glory to the angel or chief pastor of the Church of Philadelphia; one of the seven enumerated to St. John unto which he should write and send what he had seen in the vision of the Apocalypse*. Whether by the selection of this mystical number from among the principal Churches, then subsisting in the world, it were intended to personify the Church universal upon earth, and, by means of the messages directed to those separate communities, to furnish the entire communion of saints through all time with a memorial of the works becoming its holy calling, the dangers and assaults to which it must be exposed, the errors and delusions which would extensively prevail in it, and the glorious rewards to which

* Rev. i. 11.

B

such as resisted these might finally aspire, the season may not yet perhaps have arrived for our determining. But leaving these things to be brought to light in the course of God's providence, it is not too much even now to say that, however collateral circumstances may vary with the change of time and place, every national Church, which is a branch of the true Catholic Church, must ever have essentially the same duties to fulfil, the same adversaries to encounter, the same promises and encouragements to rest upon; and consequently whatever things may have been written aforetime, for the admonition of our predecessors in the faith, were written also for our learning. The words which were originally descriptive of the Church of the Philadelphians will never fall to the ground for want of a parallel to which they may be continually applicable.

The literal interpretation of those words requires no extended comment, but may perhaps be set in a clearer light by a single observation. The form of expression here used is familiar with St. John; as for example in this same chapter he writes, "Thou hast a name that thou livest and art dead.”* Here it is obvious that duly to express the emphatic sense of the original we should say and yet art dead:" an insertion which the translators have felt themselves authorized to make in a passage of the Gospel by the same St. John, where the man who was born blind says to the Pharisees "Why herein is a marvellous thing that ye know not from whence he is, and yet

* Verse 1.

he hath opened mine eyes." According to the same principle our text would read thus, "I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and yet thou hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name.

Of this passage I conceive we may justifiably make an application to ourselves; because it cannot be doubted by any one who attends to the course of events, and recognizes therein the control and direction of a particular providence, that God has set up the Church of this nation to act a conspicuous part, and to be an instrument in his hand for accomplishing some singularly important end connected with the progress and final prevalence of the Gospel. He has "set before us an open door," and we may safely rely on his assurance that "no man can shut it," so as to prevent our passing onward to fulfil the appointed purposes of our high calling.

The original and most correct idea of the Church is that of a community united by one faith in the hope of the same calling, stationed by God in the midst of a sinful, a reluctant, and an opposing world; which, by the operation of an influence purely spiritual, is to be won over and subdued to the dominion of holiness. The Church is therefore most properly represented by images and comparisons which depict a struggle between adverse natures and contending properties; sheep exposed to the ravages of wolves;

* John ix. 30.

light struggling to expand itself through darkness; a host encompassed by enemies, visible and invisible, whose exertions are incessant to prevent any extension of the sacred enclosure. Such in the truth of things is the Church of God in this world; and, if our intercourse and connection with temporal interests have tended in any degree to obscure this image in our minds, and to substitute for it one of a more complex nature, it is time that we should be brought back to juster views. None of us lives for himself alone; and though it be undoubtedly the chief concern and first duty of every one to work out his own salvation, yet Christian charity itself forbids us to discard all anxiety for the general welfare of the Church; its condition being such as is here depicted. The Church of the living God is that channel through which the streams of grace and salvation are to flow, and to be distributed over the whole earth; and to feel no concern whether that channel is kept pure and undefiled, or whether it is choked by corruption, is in reality to be indifferent whether the cause of salvation proceeds and prospers, or whether the gates of hell prevail against it.

None, then, who regard the Church as ordained to maintain a perpetual conflict against the power of evil and the rulers of the darkness of this world, can be surprised if it be recommended to them that they collect their thoughts at the present moment, and employ them, in a spirit of serious contemplation, upon the signs which are around, and the prospects which are before them. Among them there is indeed