to save himself and others, but at last he pervicaciously asserts the use of means to be an impious act of meddling and interfering with what God says He himself will do.

Divine injunctions imply an adequate supply of means. Every command of God supposes accessible a sufficient supply of the influences and strength necessary and requisite to the discharge of the obligation. God is not the task-master of slaves, who enjoins the ends and withholds the requisite and adequate means. In universal nature, we find all the requisite physical influences already beforehand with us, as to our temporal duties; it were, therefore, wrong to surmise, that gracious influences will be lacking when we enter on the experiments and duties of religion. In moral obligation, if a system of means does not imply a present and ready communication of the requisite influences, and if the communication is not co-extensive with the length and breadth of the means, then a command to use them would be like the mandate to till and sow the ground, where the influences of the seasons were withheld. If there be a difference between right and wrong, it is wrong to command a man to see when he is not supplied with light, or furnished with eyes, and also when either of these are withdrawn or withheld. When God ordered that the Israelites, who were bitten by the fiery serpents, should look to the brazen serpent in order to be healed, the command implied an adequate supply of the requisite means and influences. Of this character is now the evangelical command to believe the gospel. The command means that man is to believe that the gospel is "able to save " him. The gospel is able to save him only as it is "the power of God," and full of the influences of the Holy Spirit. If these influences are not ever present in the gospel, but sometimes sovereignly withdrawn, it cannot be always man's duty to believe that the gospel has this character; for occasionally it would be believing what would not be true. It cannot be the obligation of man to believe that the gospel is the power of God to save him, at the interval in which that power is actually not present. The unconverted believe that the influences of the Holy Spirit are NEVER present, except, perhaps, when they feel some convulsive shocks of remorse; and, therefore, they think themselves never under obligation to believe the gospel. In this estimate the hypothesis of a sovereign withholding of the Spirit, is their sovereign defence for procrastination.

V. Any arbitrary withdrawment of the influences of the Holy Spirit would tend to shake the confidence of Christians in the inviolableness of the Divine promises.

On no duty or privilege do the inspired writers more insist than on "trusting in the word of the Lord." On the supposition that this word is sometimes full of sweet influences, and that at others they are sovereignly withdrawn or withholden, it is inconceivable how an unwavering confidence can be placed in its character. "God, willing more abundantly to show unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath; that by two immutable things in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation." Here is nothing either fitful, casual, or uncertain: all is firm and strong consolation. If there be any uncertainty in the Divine sovereignty, it is impossible for the church to depend with certainty upon what is in its exercise absolutely uncertain. To suppose God sovereignly to withhold or withdraw his promised presence from his own ordinances, is nothing less than the sober reality of Elijah's ironical imagery addressed to the prophets of Baal, a divinity absent from his sacrifices, a deity from home, and his temple and oracles deserted. With a confidence of such character, and on such grounds, it ceases to be a marvel that so many efforts and measures of Christians and of churches should prove feeble and abortive. No man has really tried the following promises and found their influences absent: "Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." No man has ever borne a testimony, that he tried these wells of salvation, and found that their living waters had retreated. Hear what God testifies concerning them: "Every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth." In opposition to this record, the hypothesis, which we are combating, asserts that there are seasons in which inquirers may ask and not receive, may seek and not find, because that the treasures which encouraged the application, have been sovereignly withdrawn or temporarily hidden. Let the church be of good cheer, the word of the Lord standeth sure. This promise has never been shaken or enfeebled: "I WILL NEVER LEAVE THEE NOR FORSAKE THEE." Let every Christian rouse and ply his energies, and say "I will go in the strength of the Lord." An angel can say no more: the church should say no less.

The supply of influence and strength is as certain to one as to the other.

VI. The various principles, which form the hypothesis of a sovereign desertion of the Spirit, are incongruous and inconsistent with each other.

It is imagined that these sovereign withdrawments of the influences of the Holy Spirit take place to try the virtues of believers, and to exercise the graces of the Christian church. The advocates of these sentiments do not suppose that the suspension of the operations of Divine influences is the result of sin and unbelief, and of voluntary and wicked inaptitude for their developements; but an arbitrary measure sovereignly adopted to test and prove the patience of the saints. It is difficult to conceive what Christian graces can be exercised, when God has deserted both ourselves and the means of grace, unless we say that doubts and fears are graces of the Spirit. It is manifest, from the language of many, that if doubts and fears are not genuine graces, they are generally esteemed as the current representatives of the precious metals. They are never supposed to betoken an unconverted state. Yet, how to doubt whether God be as good as he is described in his word, or to fear that he will not keep his promise, can be a virtue, or the representative of grace, seems inexplicable.

What grace can be exercised in this supposed state of desertion? We cannot exercise FAITH in his promise, when he himself has deserted it. We cannot exert our confidence and trust, when the Only Friend on whom we could calculate has failed us. Nor can we display humility, when commands are enforced with rigour, and the adapted and adequate means capriciously held back. Hope cannot be exercised, for that implies a fixedness of character in the Rock of Ages. Surely we are not expected to exercise joy; for the withdrawment of God is the chief ingredient of hell, and to rejoice in such circumstances would be a crime and an outrage. The incoherency of these elements appears further from the facts, that all these and kindred graces originate in the influences of the Holy Spirit, are fed and sustained by them only, and consequently can never be exercised where the requisite influences are not present. To exercise graces without the influences being present, would be as hopeless as to exercise sight, choice, and motion, without life or when animation was suspended.

VII. The supposition of a sovereign withholding or withdrawment of the Holy Spirit sheds a disastrous, benumbing, and deadening influence, on the energies and operations of the church.

Such

Disastrous and fatal must be the delusion, which teaches us to regard that as an evidence of God's love, which is in reality the glaring proof of our own sinful and wicked inaptitude for Divine influences. The man who believes in these arbitrary desertions, seldom or never thinks the worse of his own moral character for being under them: they are deemed the evidences of his adoption. The inconstant and unstable variations of the paternal conduct are, in his estimation, proofs and tokens that he is a child of God. So far from blaming HIMSELF for the withdrawments of the Holy Spirit from the word and ordinances, he calculates on sympathy, expects compassion, and deems awakening rebukes as only the cruel mockings of the sons of the bondwoman. A church in these circumstances asks for the prayers of their brethren as a people under a misfortune, and not as a people in a wrong. When has any church, at the close of a month, or at the termination of a year, reproached ITSELF for the little success which had been realized; or blamed and pitied any congregation that continues to dally with the means of grace? self-reproach would lead to a vigorous and impartial scrutiny into its own inaptness; and such a condemnation or commiseration of unconverted men would awaken it to a jealous concern for the glory of the gospel, and to an earnest longing for more numerous conversions. Instead of this salutary process, Christians, at each annual retrospection, solace and soothe themselves with the sovereign elixir that the influences of the Holy Spirit were sovereignly withdrawn. That sentiment must be pestilential and blighting, which gives ease and contentedness to a church in a state of real departure from God, of guilty unfitness for his influences, of offensive lukewarmness, and of condemnable unbelief. True it is, that when success is realized, the church heartily and exultingly ascribes it all to the Holy Spirit; but when a minister fails, or a mission declines, or a congregation decays, the church is not equally hearty in ascribing the miscarriage entirely to her own neglect or inaptitude. The moral state of our country is no more the result of Divine sovereignty, than patrician profligacy and plebeian pauperism; all are the results of means which we ourselves have put in operation, or else the

natural effects of our own negligence. The coldness, formality, apathy, and barrenness, of our churches should no more be ascribed to arbitrary withdrawment of Divine influences, than are our waste lands and forest-grounds, whose enclosure and cultivation we either voluntarily neglect or deliberately oppose.

When the influences of the Holy Spirit do not make themselves manifest in holy and spiritual phenomena, the church must be in a wrong state. It is a state with which Divine influences will not combine, or into which they will not enter. The church must honestly inquire into the frame and position that would put it into fit and direct communication with the influences of the Holy Spirit. 1. There must be serious alarm at the symptoms and evidences of their interrupted operations. These plague-spots are the want of progressive and eminent holiness in the members of the church; the rarity and painful fewness of conversions to the gospel; defective, partial, and neutralizing exhibitions, of evangelical doctrines; the indulgence and toleration of unhallowed tempers, such as worldliness, pride, contention, and implacable dispositions; truckling to the behests of fashion and formality in religious exercises; and the clammy lukewarmness of dead devotion. 2. There must be pungent convictions of the immense value and importance of Divine influences. They must be esteemed as better than all temporal mercies and earthly blessings. All other mercies are nothing but what these influences of the Holy Spirit make them. We are never at pains to detain a fellowship that we do not value: pressing a friend to stay shows that we value communion with him. It is a cardinal rule in the administrations of the Spirit to bestow favors, only where they are most profoundly estimated and prized. 3. There must be grief and sadness of heart at the probability of their suppression. "Our sins testify against us." The way to prevent such a severe judgment is to acknowledge that we deserve it. can have no hope of remission by extenuating our guiltiness. Godly sorrow worketh," and it must work in us, until we feel contrition for our sin, justify the Holy Spirit in the suspension of his operations, and dread the wretched consequences of our departure from the Spirit. 4. There must be fervent pleadings that this suspension may not continue. We must show that we are afraid of parting with the Holy Spirit, and that nothing is more desired than his return. All the

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