that mind itself, but in the Spirit of God, who knoweth it. Blessed be God, who is Love, and who loveth eternally to see men blessed in holy obedience! Woe unto us! for we have turned into a curse every good gift of God in his law: as it is written, that, not the good commandment, but sin, became death unto us (Rom. vii.). Sin came of the devil: it savours of its author: it is the fruit of a lie concerning God, the only Fountain of truth; Christ, the only Image; the Holy Ghost, the only Operator of truth. It is nothing so light as the mere contradiction of a law; it is the contradiction of God, who is love: it is not contingent upon the publication of his law; it is there beforehand. But just as by the law is the knowledge of God, so by it is the knowledge of sin, in the same mode and degree. Sin is condemned by the light: so Christ, having in him the perfect law and light of God, wrought out as a creature, and in the sight of all creatures, God's perfect contradiction of sin. And this he did in flesh of sin; in that flesh of which it is said that in it "dwelleth no good thing;" that it "cannot please God;" and that it "cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven.' The Father, being now wearied with the wickedness of man, sent his Son, the comprehensible Person of Godhead, to receive the Holy Ghost, the communicable Person of Godhead; and, so furnished, to glorify God, both in all his love to man and in all his controversy against man's sin; not in the identical flesh. of any sinner, but in the flesh of sin or shortcoming; in the same flesh with every sinner; taking up into his person, without Adam's responsibility, the whole representation of Adam; to confess its sin; to undergo its curse with joy; to vindicate God at its hand, while blessing it at the hand of God; to publish in one breath, and on his own person, the judgment and the grace of the Father; to make its death a death at once of debt by the flesh and of grace by the Spirit; and to obtain for the flesh, through death, a life beyond all accusation, straight from the throne of God-a life, not natural, as in creation, but spiritual, by regeneration of the Holy Ghost. All flesh had sinned and come short of God's glory-in other words, had missed the mark of their being-in the fall of Adam and its fruits; but Christ, who sinned not in Adam at all, being then in the Father's bosom, took up all flesh; and, being therein upheld in perfect holiness by the Spirit of his liberal Father in its horrible pit and miry clay, he saw to its end the history of Adam's flesh, and became the Second Adam, on a new footing of eternal and Holy-Ghost life, by resurrection from the dead; invested with authority over all flesh; anointed, as God's King and Priest, with a "precious ointment," to "the skirts of his garment (Ps. cxxxiii. 2); the Commissioner of God speaking from heaven; the Interpreter of God to the creature; the Introducer

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of the creature to God; the Manifester of God in and by the creature-all through the workmanship of the Holy Ghost, without whom there is no knowledge of Christ, even as without Christ there is no knowledge of God.

But as the relations of Christ to the Father by the Spirit are two-fold-namely, those in which he glorified the Father, and those in which the Father glorifies him-so are those of his people to God through him. Not that the two classes are at variance with each other; for as it was Christ's greatest glory to glorify his Father, so it was at the same time the Father's greatest glory to glorify Him; and as it is our greatest glory to shew forth the praises of God, so is God's greatest glory to be seen in the glorifying of his church. But it is plain, that as our life hid in Christ is a resurrection life, the life of the perfect Christ; and as we are his only witnesses in the earth; it ought to include not only the glory of the Father in him, but the glory of his flesh, as glorified by the Father with the Son's eternal glory before the world was. In the days of his flesh, Christ's main work was the condemnation of sin; his occasional work, the exhibition of glory. But presently, at the Father's right hand, his chief work is the manifestation of glory, and the preparation of the glory to be revealed with him. The Christ personal has ceased to condemn sin in the flesh, for he has overcome; and he has left to his members the bequest of his conflict, and with it the bequest of the Holy Ghost.

In the days of his flesh, Christ was actually dead unto sin, and by faith set at the Father's right hand: now he is seated on the Father's throne, and dead to sin through the members of his body, the church. And in like manner the church, now called to be actually dead unto sin, do but taste of the powers of the world to come; yet they are called to taste of them. And hence arises the distinction between those fruits of the Spirit which more directly constitute our death unto sin, and those which, as an earnest, bespeak our life unto God-that hidden life, which yet waits its manifestation with Christ. This important distinction, and fulness of furniture to the church, is beautifully apparent in the words of Paul, when he prays for the Thessalonian converts "that God would in them fill up all the good pleasure of goodness, and the work of faith with power; that the name of Jesus Christ our Lord might be glorified in them" (2 Thess. i. 11). And how much the church has now forgotten either to know or to seek the glory of the name of Christ, is in few things to be more distinctly seen than in her utter ignorance of the work of faith with power. Of the manifestation of the Spirit (pavepwois) she knoweth neither the experience nor the profit withal; of its relation to the Lordship of Christ she does not know any thing; and she cannot do so

until she know something of that Lordship itself. For she conceives of it as a mere exhibition of Divine authority, and not as an acquisition by the Man of Sorrows, at once the fruit and the reward of his faith. She makes no more than a spiritual authority of that power in heaven and on earth, over matter and mind, over angels and men, over time and space, over sickness and sin, to the Father's praise, presently belonging to Him by whom and for whom are all things, and who, having by himself purged our sins for ever, has sat down at the right hand of God. In short, she regards the term spiritual as meaning, not what is of the Holy Ghost, be it in matter or in mind, but what is unreal and impalpable: and therefore she is amazed to be told that her testimony, as the epistle of Christ, is wholly a blank as to the most glorious of his characters, that in which he is soon about to come. She has set herself by a thousand arguments to account for, instead of lamenting, the fact that no such demonstration exists; and by a thousand fancies to conjecture the occasions which called forth phenomena almost regarded as fabulous; forgetting the true argument, her paralyzed and withered faith; and the true and standing demand for it, till the Lord come, and his people cease to endure. Nor does she rest here she even glories in her shame; and, instead of being humbled at having so grieved away the Spirit of her Lord, and being so barren in the testimony of his presence, she publishes the absence of any such testimony as a proof incontrovertible that man by wisdom hath comé nigher to know God; that the cultivation of the natural man has gone far, and will finally succeed, in removing the necessity for the testimony of the Holy Ghost; and that the truth of God, which could not without signs and wonders have commended itself to illiterate Pagans, can quite well commend itself by simple propriety and fitness, and political advantages, to a civilized population. Now, I am very far indeed from desiring to give the regeneration of the Holy Ghost a place inferior to his extraordinary gifts; for, although few really apprehend, and as few state, the former as a true and proper REGENERATION, it is surely a far more marvellous thing that a dead man should be made alive, and an old man made a new creature to God, than that a new creature should receive a gift, and a vessel of grace be made an instrument of God's power. Yet I have no hesitation in saying, though I say it in sorrow of heart, that any man who is as well pleased to be without as to have the visible manifestation of Christ's Lordship in his church, prefers Christ as a notion to Christ as a person, and lives on the faith of Christ as a totally different thing from the evidence of his unseen but personal presence. He is in that matter really not loving Christ (for we cannot have too many tokens from one we love); and he would be as well pleased to keep

Christ for ever at a convenient distance, by a form of faith, as to see him eye to eye, and exclaim, "This is our God; we have waited for him: Hallelujah! the marriage of the Lamb is come. Nor do I feel less constrained to say, that any man who pleads the improvement of society as an argument against the need for such a manifestation in the present condition of the church, is in that matter simply denying the Holy Ghost altogether. What! does he not know, that whatever a man learns, he learns either of God or of the devil? If mankind have really learned so largely of God, I see not the fruits thereof; and cannot imagine that those who are the temples of the Spirit should be so filled with zeal against the very idea of his manifest working. Indeed, it is only because men do not shew that their so-called holiness is of the Spirit, that it is not equally blasphemed. And if mankind have not been learning of God, then the more largely, only the worse; the more they have learnt of the liar, the less are they disposed to the truth: and the more that liar has seduced men to look upon his lies as preparatives for the truth, or as a set of rival truths, the more need is there that Christ do disabuse them of the wisdom of the serpent by the power of God, and decide by signs and wonders between God and Baal. If ignorance of the true God called for the demonstration of the Spirit, a superadded knowledge of this world's god calls for it no less; and that the more, now that he comes as an angel of light to regenerate the earth, to make a god of man, and a kingdom of heaven out of man's inventions. Let the elect beware! They stand by faith: let them betake themselves from the visible things of the devil, and dwell in God within the veil, seeing Him who is invisible: and, oh, let them wrestle with the God of Jacob, till he water the parched land of a popular, intellectual, and mercantile church with the morning dew and simple refreshment of the Holy Ghost. Then shall they know how to stand; for greater is He that is in them, than he that is in the world. "Behold," saith the Lord, "I and the children which God hath given me" (Heb. ii. 13), when he speaketh of all the sons of God, past, present, and to come, since he rose receiving gifts for man. "Shall be for signs and wonders," saith the same Spirit, in Isai. viii. 18. "Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature" (Mark xvi. 15), is the present watchword and warrant of all those unscriptural societies which are at once denying God's love to the world, and seeking to convert it all without Christ, instead of calling out the election for Christ from a love-despising world; as our Knox saw right, when he said, "To reform the face of the whole earth never was, nor yet shall be, till that the righteous King and Judge appear, for the restoration of all things" (Treatise of Fasting). These

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signs shall follow them that believe," &c. (ver. 17), form the immediate promise of him who shall be true when every man is found a liar: but, like every promise of a jealous God, it saith not, Ye shall have this without faith, but, Trust ye me for this. And is this shameless church, who has been spoiled of her adornments because she would not trust her Spouse, daring now to speak falsehoods concerning his mind, and intrude herself into his presence, overburdened, almost unknown (but her sin is not hid), under the ornaments of a harlot? Oh, let us cry aloud for the Holy Ghost; for men do now on every hand tread the very brink of blasphemy against him. Thou Spirit of Christ, how art thou not grieved! We do magnify our Father's patience, that yet thou art suffered to strive. Alas! we are fallen! We are building, as if for eternity, a church without a Christ, a life of God without a Spirit. We ring changes on names, and meditate not the name of Jesus. We make void the word through our traditions, the grace of God through our systems, the offence of the cross through our good report among the devil's children, the poverty of Christ through increase of goods. We save our lives, and so are about to lose them. We cannot think of being counted fools, for we know not the foolishness of God, having not the Spirit. Oh that it were with us as in the times of old, when the saints, filled with the Spirit, spake unto one another "in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs" (Eph. v. 19); when they came together," every one with a psalm, a doctrine, a tongue, a revelation, an interpretation, and all to edifying (1 Cor. xiv. 26); when by the Holy Ghost men said "Jesus Lord" (1 Cor. xii. 3); exercising divers gifts by one Spirit; serving in divers ways the same Lord; subjects of divers operations at the hand of the same God, profiting and profited by the manifestations of the living God of a truth with living men; declaring at every hand the despised Jesus as the Lord of the world, of the hand, of the tongue, of the heart, of the mind, invested with power, and ever prepared to bend all nature, when his glory needs it, to his people's trustful prayers. Oh that, like our Master, we teemed with the fulness of God, receiving grace for every grace that he received, and giving as liberally as he; and that we were quick of understanding in the fear of the Lord, to discern between good and evil, as the very mind of God and the very mind of the devil. THROUGH the Spirit we should have the word of wisdom, whereby to understand things unrevealed, and reveal them; receiving them through that Spirit who alone knoweth the things of God. ACCORDING to the Spirit we should have the word of knowledge; knowing nothing in the flesh; whatsoever we learn of things revealed, learning it as the Spirit means it. In the Spirit we should have all faith, so as to know those things as