our heavenly Father, who knoweth that the unconverted world, and a laborious church "have need of these things."

Before the influences of the Holy Spirit were made the subjects of promise, in connection with a system of means, they were arbitrarily sovereign, and might have been given or withheld at mere pleasure. Since they have been promised, they are sovereign only in two senses. First, they are conveyed in the use of certain means, sovereignly appointed by God, and in the use of these means alone, to the exclusion of all the adjustments of human will-worship. Secondly, their communications are sovereignly bounded, by the sovereign limitation given by the Creator to each individual capacity they are accessible to every one "according to his several ability." In this exercise of sovereignty there is no fitful interruption, no arbitrary restriction. Where the promises and the means are, and the church is bound to send them everywhere, there the influences of the Holy Spirit are and every man who receives them is commanded to take more of them, and to grow in grace. By exercising Divine influences every man can enlarge and improve his "several ability;" and make it of wider comprehension for receiving larger communications of this abundant supply. In the sense, then, of arbitrariness, and capriciousness, and uncertainty, the influences of the Holy Spirit are NOT sovereign. We have proved they are accessible to all — that all men are commanded to live in them, and walk in them—that the apostle supposed it to be as practicable to be filled with the spirit, as it was not to be filled with wine, and that to be without them is a crime in man. The fact, that the Holy Spirit forbad the apostles to preach in certain cities, involves the doctrine that his influences are permanently present in the gospel; for he might have sovereignly permitted them to preach there without his influences, and thereby give a practical demonstration that the gospel can be preached faithfully, but in vain, on account of the desertion and withdrawment of the Holy Spirit. The minds of the apostles would have rerevolted from the hypothesis, of a sovereign desertion of their message by the Holy Spirit, as they would from "another gospel." Until the Church of Christ renounce this sentiment, and renounce it from an intellectual conviction, and a thorough persuasion that it is erroneous in itself, disparaging to the gospel, ignominious to the Holy Spirit, and fatal to the interests of the world, our deliberations will always want confi

dence, our measures will ever want sustained vigor, and our most sanguine hopes will be at best only doubtful speculations.

I. The hypothesis of a sovereign desertion, or capricious withdrawment, of the Holy Spirit, is contrary to the entire character of God's providential blessings in the world.

On this hypothesis the providence and the mercies of God would be intermittent, and the world would be blessed only by occasional starts, sweeping gusts, and sudden shocks. The results of a sovereign suspension in the administration of gravitation, cohesive attraction, the earth's motion, and the succession of rays of light, would be disastrous in the extreme; and, in the convictions of Christians, such a fitful administration of holy influences would be to the church and to the world equally calamitous. Besides, it is an established fact, that where the influence embodied in any matter evaporates or perishes or withdraws, that portion of matter ceases to be what it was. If the salt lose its savour it ceases to be salt; if the loadstone lose its magnetism it ceases to be a magnet; if the sun lose its heat or light it ceases to be a sun. In the same manner, if a country withdraw its power and authority from an edict it ceases to be law; and if the scriptures lose the influences of the Holy Spirit they cease to be the word of God. In circumstances of such variations and transitions, it is impossible for Christians to apply their energies with vigor, and with confidence in the sufficiency and the appointed instrumentality of the word. The church cannot possibly maintain, either in her retired devotions, or in her public ministries, an unshaken reliance upon the promised influences of the Spirit, when there is, in fact, an absolute uncertainty whether the word handled, on a given Sabbath, or in a given sphere, shall be or not a disowned letter, or an accredited message of the Holy Spirit. Had the actual practice of the Christian church not risen superior to this hypothetical creed, her history would have been as afflictive as that of a world governed by the influence of a fitful gravitation.

II. A sovereign desertion of the Holy Spirit is inconsistent with all the Scriptural accounts of the absence and the nonoperation of Divine influences.

The scriptures never ascribe the ineffectualness of the word to anything in itself-nor to the absence from it of anything that ought to be in it. In reading them we never meet with any hint that the word, in a given case, was without the Holy Spirit. In all the scriptural accounts which repre

sent the operations and manifestations of Divine influences as being stopped or checked, the interruption and suspension are always traced to causes in man only, and to causes that are described as sinful, wicked, and criminal. The suspension is never a proceeding of mere sovereignty; it is an effect growing necessarily out of the moral relations supposed, and resulting from the facts of the case, and from the actual positions of adjusted means and causes. Such a suspension, so far from being sovereign or arbitrary, is only a measure of Divine faithfulness to His own wise arrangement of things; and it is a measure of righteousness, as much so as the poverty of the idle and the remorse of the guilty, are a just suspension of the happiness of these characters.

God distinctly and solemnly asserts that the cause of suspension is not in his sovereign pleasure, but in man ;—not in man's incapacity, but in his perverse abandonment of the means of conveying holy influences, or in his voluntary inaptitude for their operations and tendencies. "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear; YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD." (Isaiah i. 15.) "Behold the Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear." (Isaiah lix. i, 2; 1. 1, "He will even hide his face from them at that time, as they have behaved themselves in their doings." (Mic. iii. 4.) These three testimonies bear witness, that the suspension of the operations and developements of Divine influences is always traced to the sovereignty of human capriciousness, and never to the arbitrariness of the Holy Spirit.

2.)

It has been conjectured that the numerous instances of the inefficacy of the word, as among the Israelites under the miracles of the wilderness, the Jews under the prophets, and nations now under the gospel, are proof that the influences of the Holy Spirit are not always truly present. This is a mere

conjecture, for all the persons, in every age, who are instances of this inefficacy are charged with the crime of resisting the Spirit of God. Did the Holy Spirit ever work on these persons without the word? If he did, then it was not by disregarding the word that they resisted the Spirit, but by quenching some miraculous impulses. If He did not affect them by his word, but without the word, then their rejecting

the word was not resisting HIM. On this hypothesis their sin is, that they only rejected truths in which, at the given time, there was no Holy Spirit. If any minister of the word, who disputes the permanent presence of the Holy Spirit in the gospel, will try to convince his congregation of their heinous criminality in rejecting truths, that have no influences of the Spirit in them, he will feel the flimsiness of this position.

Of all sentiments connected with sovereign desertions, the most revolting is that which ascribes the unsuccessfulness of our Lord's personal ministry to the Holy Spirit's withholding his influences. Never could an assertion be made more opposite to the reality of the case. Our Lord himself was full of the Holy Ghost, even without measure.

There was

no absence or suspension of Divine influences in him to occasion his failure. There was nothing in the character of his ministry, or in his manner of dispensing it, that was calculated to prevent his success; for he spake with authority, with the power of God, and the words that dropped from him were "spirit and life." The narratives of his life and ministry never intimate that his preaching failed through the want of Divine influences. Jesus Christ himself invariably ascribes the unsuccessfulness of his ministry to the obduracy and unbelief of his hearers. Our Blessed Lord marvelled at the unbelief of men: had he thought that a Divine influence beyond what was in his ministry was necessary to make them believe, and that this influence were sovereignly withheld, on no known principles could he have really and sincerely marvelled. This is demonstrated by the melancholy fact, that the abettors of sovereign withdrawments DO NOT marvel that sinners are not converted. Our Saviour told his hearers that, having attended his ministry and yet believed not, they had 66 no cloak for their sin." In the present day, the hearers of the gospel solace themselves in this doctrine of sovereign withdrawments of the Spirit, as in a mail impenetrable, which forms an ample and safe cloak for their sin of unbelief. Such an account, then, of our unsuccessfulness is evidently inconsistent with all the scriptural representations of the inefficacy of the ministry.

III. Sovereign withdrawments of Divine influences are in opposition to the scriptural character of God.

While, with a solemn appeal to his eternal God-head and character, he reprobates the imputation that the inefficacy of

truth is owing to his sovereign will, He announces himself as being ever disposed and willing, ever ready and anxious, to manifest the influences of his grace. He appeals to the sympathies of a father, and says, "If ye being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him." He even appeals to the sensibilities of a mother, and says, "Zion said, the Lord hath forsaken me, and my God hath forgotten me. Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." He is sometimes described as longing to make large communications of his Spirit: "O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments, then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea." Another description represents him as maintaining an undisturbed permanency in his word and ordinances: "The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty, he will rejoice over thee with joy, he will rest in his love." Indisputably such a rest must mean more than a casual sojourn, and more than a flitting visit. Blessed God even challenges his people, by their use of means, to put him to the test whether he is really present in them or not: "Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it."

The

This is the character of the God of Love, who delighteth in mercy, and who cannot lie. This God has said, "I will never leave thee nor forsake thee." For a people to turn on his character petulantly, and aver that, after all, he sovereignly withdraws his blessing from the means, is the arrogant presumption of hardened insolence.

IV. To teach that the Holy Spirit occasionally withdraws his influences from the ministry, for reasons of sovereignty, is an attempt to destroy that which is imperishable the immutable and eternal obligation of duty.

When the sinner receives the impression that, in conversion, God sometimes works without means and passes them by, or that the connexion of his influences with the means is only casual and uncertain, it were no strange thing that the sinner himself should pass them by, and slight and neglect them as having no great value in the process of his salvation. He not only becomes reckless of all obligations to use means