226 THE CHURCH TO AIM AT THE SAME OBJECT, ETC.

in the arrangements of the Holy Spirit, the salvation of man and of the world is to be perfected by the instrumentality of means. These means, to be efficient, must be used, and used by men. We have no ground to expect that the Holy Spirit will use them in some miraculous manner: we do not expect HIM, for instance, to preach the gospel, or to publish and distribute Bibles and tracts, or to give lessons in our Sabbath Schools. If these means are to be employed at all, then they must be employed by the church, before the improvement and salvation of the world can be secured.

The united church of Christ is the commissioned apostle of the nations of the world. Its office in the world is really and fully apostolic. The two disciples, of whom the Holy Spirit said, "Separate unto me Barnabas and Saul," represented the office and the character of the entire church of Christ. Every church, and every member of every church, is "separated unto the Holy Spirit." To be separated to the Spirit means to be set apart to the same objects, the same purposes, and the same designs as the Holy Spirit. "Know ye not that the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself?" that is, for his own purposes, his own measures, and his own work. "Separated to the Holy Spirit!"- this is honorable distinction-this is tremendous responsibility. The Christian thus separated should live for nothing else: all his mind and all his heart are for the Spirit; his soul and his body are for the Spirit; all his judgment and all his skill must be for the Spirit; all his feelings and all his desires must be for the Spirit; all the capabilities, and all the senses, of his body, must be for the Spirit; all his time, property, character, influence, health, life, death, all, ALL must be for the Spirit. If he lives for anything else, he is unfaithful to the Spirit; he wrongs and injures he grieves and vexes the Holy Spirit of God, by which he was sealed, and marked as the Spirit's

own.

The church thus separated must live, move, and have its being for the Holy Spirit. All its members and all its officers must be for the Spirit; all its ordinances and all its institutions must be for the Spirit; all its doctrines and all its discipline must be for the Spirit; all its prayers and all its acts must be for the Spirit. In prosperity and adversity, when it is weak and when it is strong, through good report and evil report, it must be for the Spirit. The object of the Holy Spirit is spiritual, and can be accomplished only by

spiritual means wielded by spiritual men: "The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but spiritual, and mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds." These warriors are to have no shield but their faith, no helmet but their hope, no darts but prayer, no sword but the word of God. None but spiritual men will use these spiritual means to accomplish the spiritual work which has been entrusted to them by the Holy Spirit. No agent is qualified to use them, whose own heart is alienated from the Spirit. If persons will enter on the work of the Spirit, who have never surrendered themselves to the Spirit, the object of the Spirit will never be secured by their ministry. Spiritual men alone will mind the things of the Spirit; they alone have a relish for spiritual work, and they alone have the requisite taste, discrimination, desire, energy, and longing, for its accomplishment. It is only men separated to the Spirit, that will make the world spiritual, and bring it to be consecrated and separated to the same Spirit. The president of scientific societies separates for their work scientific men, and the Holy Spirit separates, for his spiritual work in the world, a spiritual church. Let every church and every Christian keep back no part of the price thus separated, and thus surrendered to the Spirit; let everything be employed as it was devoted, to the grand object of the Holy Spirit, the salvation of the world from sin.

§ I.- The Prevention of Sin the Duty of the Church.

The salvation proposed by the Holy Spirit to the world, consists in the remission or prevention of the punishment, which is due for the sins committed in time past through the forbearance of God, and comprises the prevention of wrongdoing for the future. The church, then, is to save the world, by informing it of the fact, and explaining the grounds of the suspension of the punishment, and also by supplying it with means, inducements, and advantages, for preventing the commission of the sins, which had provoked the anger of God and injured their own souls. No persons will attempt to convert and save the world, who do not believe that the world is sinful, that it is in the wrong, and in a state condemned by God hence all the persons, who have either neglected, or opposed, aggressive movements of evangelization, have always thought and pleaded, that the world was good enough as it was, and that there was no occasion or call for saving efforts.

:

On the first sabbath of time, every thing in this world was very good, but hypothetically susceptible of evil. Soon after that hallowed day, evil entered into the world, and, since then, it has prevailed with tremendous and destructive success. From that day to this, a controversy has been maintained, between man and God, on the inquiry whose work it is to prevent sin. Man blames God for the existence of evil, and charges him foolishly with abetting, and even originating it; but God, both in the clear declarations of his word, and in the firm testimony of conscience, charges man himself with being the author, and the doer of all the sin that is in the world. In the scriptures, God calls upon every man to discharge his duty against this common enemy, and binds every man to hinder its incursions and to stop its progress. They who comply with God's demand and summons, take side with God, plead his cause, are his witnesses, and form his church. The paramount object of their being gathered together on God's side is that they should overcome evil with good. In this holy and benevolent project they are to" resist unto blood, striving against sin," that is, striving to prevent it, and to stop its influence and devastations. In these noble efforts, Christians are called to risk their ease, their rank, their property, their liberty, their health, and even their life. To prevent sin they are to resist to tears, to personal self-denial, to commercial loss, to temporal reproach, and, should the contest wax hot, even unto blood, and the surrender of life. God has, according to this reasoning, made the prevention of sin to be the work and the duty of men, and especially of his own people; and in no case has he ever taught them to expect him to prevent it by any exercise of his own immediate agency.

1. God has so constituted the universe that he never does interfere by power to prevent sin. The principle of moral government is "the royal law of LIBERTY," and every subject of it is free. Liberty, and not force, is the law of the moral universe. The power of God is not the rule of his government for we know that God can do many things which he never brings to pass. A man who expects God to effect all that he believes God able to do, is mad; that is, his mind is not in harmony with this universe, but is out of the boundaries of this system of things. Our own experience teaches us, that God will never do for man, what man can do himself. God can erect houses and build ships, but he does

not he can till the ground and hedge the fields, but he does not: he can prevent conflagrations and shipwrecks, but his power in these things is not the rule of his conduct: he can prevent poison from destroying, and strong drinks from intoxicating, but we have no encouragement to expect the interposition of his power for such purposes. It is his unchangeable and irrevocable will that the ways of trangressors shall be hard to interfere, then, by power, to prevent the "hard" concomitants and results of transgression, would be to employ his omnipotence to derange his own system. Up to a certain point, he has put it in our power to prevent the operations of poison and of intoxicating drinks; but, even to that point, he will never introduce his own power to supply our deficiency and negligence. If the holiest man on earth were to take poison, the influences of the Holy Spirit would not be expected to prevent the poison from acting; nor, if he were to take intoxicating drinks, could he expect the power of the Holy Ghost to prevent his disgraceful inebriation.

2. The natural evils found in the world are to be withstood

and prevented entirely by the agency of man. When man was created he was put in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. Eden, then, even in its best state, was susceptible of natural evil, were it only from luxuriance of growth, and the falling of the leaves. To control, direct, and manage such affairs, man was put in the garden to keep it. Why did not God keep it. Why did not God keep the trees from growing too luxuriantly, or prevent deciduous leaves from falling inconveniently? The only reason we can give is, he made man to keep it. And the man, who expects God to do everything, ought to ask himself seriously, "Why did God make ME?" God made man to do something. If God intended to do that work himself, he would not have formed man to do it; and since he made man to do it, he will not interfere, by power, if it be left undone. The power of disease is to be subdued, the evils of national barbarism are to be cured, the night of popular ignorance is to be chased away, and the chains of political bondage to be snapped, not by a direct interposition of Omnipotence, but by the instrumentality of means employed by the agency of men themselves. Analogy and scripture show that moral evils, injuries, and wrongs, are to be controlled, subdued, and prevented by a similar agency. The moral evils of pride, ambition, covetousness, avarice, extortion, censoriousness,

intemperance, and profaneness, are not to be subdued and hindered by an immediate act of Divine power, but by means to be exhibited and employed by good men for this purpose. To check these, the agency of man is employed in supplying education, laws, examples, public opinion, and scriptural sanctions. To neglect this agency, and at the same time to expect the Holy Spirit to prevent all evil by his direct power, would be a conduct for which neither the book of nature, nor the book of revelation, supplies any authority whatever.

3. God has supplied man with all necessary and adequate means for the prevention of sin. Free agency itself is an eminent and powerful means for preventing sin. No man is constrained to sin, or bound to do wrong. There is nothing in the universe that can force man to act wrong; for moral government is so constituted as, that in proportion as force constrains him to act wrong, the act ceases to be sinful. Satan can only supply the temptation, but cannot force compliance : man himself must enter into it; and if he enter, he enters voluntarily and freely. Free agency, therefore, must be a noble power for checking and hindering the incursions of sin. Suitable opportunities are also means of preventing sin. No man can say that his disposition is decidedly against sin, but he has never had opportunities to prevent it. The hour of temptation is the crisis to oppose sin. When we ourselves are tempted, and when we see others tempted, then is our season to discover the way of deliverance, and prevent the sin from taking place. The various relations which we sustain in life are sources of influence and power against sin, as well as grounds of obligation and responsibility. The influence of a parent and master, of a leader and governor, should be employed as means to check and hinder sin. The influence and authority of office and station, of rank and wealth, of example and character, are means supplied to us by God for the prevention of wrong against man, and of sin against God. In addition to all these, the Holy Spirit has given to the church the truths of revelation, that it might be better furnished with means for saving the world by the prevention of sin : "The word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one." This is one of the principal means which Jesus Christ employed to destroy the works of Satan, and to hinder the progress of evil. He met every intrusion of sin, and onset of evil, with the weapon 66 IT IS WRITTEN." When Christ commissioned his church to conquer the world