stake; and it has happened, within the range of our own observation, that men of this class, who had given trustworthy reasons to believe that they were indeed converted and transformed by the renewing of their minds, were suspected of being merely nominal Christians, by some more ardent and sanguine followers of the Lamb. We do not refer at present to that pitiable error by which some are led astray, and are inflated by the idea of their intellectual superiority so that nothing but an intellectual gospel, and intellectual grace, and intellectual spirituality, were such combinations of words not utterly incongruous, can meet the high demands of their minds. These are the great swelling words of the intellectually vain, which indicate too surely that the character of the model disciple is not yet theirs, they are at once to be suspected as ranking amongst those who are without. But we refer to men of whom something more than charity bids us believe that they have passed from death to life; and some such we know who are suspected of being still in the gall of bitterness, because of the coldness which characterises their religion. It may have the steadfastness of principle; but it imparts no impulse-it generates no warmth. It resembles a cold winter scene, whose chief decorations are icicles or hoar frost, rather than the green and goodly scenes which greet the eye when the Sun of righteousness is shining, and his genial heat, if not his glowing fervour, is felt in the soul.

Place such a believer in a pulpit. He will announce dogmas as accurate, perhaps, as the mathematics; but as cold, and as remotely related to spiritual life. He may reason like Butler, or criticise like Bentley; but the whole tends to chill rather than to generate a healthful glow-it is as if the Scriptures did not contain the words, "It is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing." In brief, there may be light shining; but it is not into the heart. No irradiation reaches it. All is cold, cheerless, unattractive; and unless God had provided some better thing for us, the understanding might have been stored, but the heart would never have been warmed, roused, impelled. Who has not seen such a preacher, environed, perhaps, by not a few like-minded hearers-dragging, perhaps, the Word of God to the tribunal of man's judgment, and rejecting or receiving at the bidding of the intellect of man--not as we are taught by the Spirit of the living God?

Many are weak and sickly among us, and some sleep, because of this tendency and tone.

Or place such a man by a deathbed side. Is the dying one unprepared to meet his God? How unfit is the merely intellectual believer, when his own soul is not glowing with love-but rather chilled by a species of formality-to rouse, to urge, to persuade! Or is the dying one a child of God? Is the land Beulah in sight? Is the soul hovering on wing to be there? How unfit are those in whom the merely intellectual element preponderates, either to sympathise in the joys, or to comprehend the aspirations of the departing spirit! All that he can advance is felt to be vapid and unavailing; and it is well if he do not rank those prelibations of heaven, which are sometimes granted to the dying believer, among the results of enthusiasm. It is the heartfelt and the Spirit-produced that is adapted to such an occasion. The merely intellectual, however correct, consistent, and formally scriptural, can only put lead upon the wings of the soaring spirit. "Heart-light," one has said, "is life-light; warm, fervent, kindling others. Mere intellectual light is cold, pale, unattractive."-W. K. TWEEDIE.

THE TRANSITORY NATURE OF VISIBLE THINGS.

The assertion that the things which are seen are temporal, holds true in the absolute and universal sense of it. They had a beginning, and they will have an end. Should we go upward through the stream of ages that are past, we come to a time when they were not. Should we go onward through the stream of ages that are before us, we come to a time when they will be no more. It is indeed a most mysterious flight which the imagination ventures upon, when it goes back to the eternity that is behind us-when it mounts its ascending way through the millions and the millions of years that are already gone through, and stop where it may, it finds the line of its march always lengthening beyond it, and losing itself in the obscurity of as far removed a distance as ever. It soon reaches the commencement of visible things, or that point in its progress when God made the heavens and the earth. They had a beginning, but God had none; and what a wonderful field for the fancy to expatiate on, when we get above the era of created worlds,

and think of that period when, in respect of all that is visible, the immensity around us was one vast and unpeopled solitude. But God was there in his dwelling-place, for it is said of Him that he inhabits eternity; and the Son of God was there, for we read of the glory which He had with the Father before the world was. The mind cannot sustain itself under the burden of these lofty contemplations. It cannot lift the curtain which shrouds the past eternity of God. But it is good for the soul to be humbled under a sense of its incapacity. It is good to realise the impression, which too often abandons us, that He made us, and not we ourselves. It is good to feel how all that is temporal lies in passive and prostrate subordination before the will of the uncreated God. It is good to know how little a portion it is that we see of Him and of his mysterious ways. It is good to lie at the feet of His awful and unknown majesty and while secret things belong to Him, it is good to bring with us all the helplessness and docility of children to those revealed lessons which belong to us and to our children.

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But this is not the sense in which the temporal nature of visible things is taken up by the apostle. It is not that there is a time past in which they did not exist—but that there is a time to come in which they will exist no more. He calls them temporal, because the time and the duration of their existence will have an end. His is full upon futurity. It is the passing away of visible things in the time that is to come, and the ever-during nature of invisible things through the eternity that is to come, which the apostle is contemplating. Now, on this one point we say nothing about the positive annihilation of the matter of visible things. There is reason for believing, that some of the matter of our present bodies may exist in those more glorified and transformed bodies which we are afterwards to occupy. And for any thing we know, the matter of the present world, and of the present system, may exist in those new heavens and that new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. There may be a transfiguration of matter without a destruction of it-and, therefore it is, that when we assert with the apostle in the text, how things seen are temporal, we shall not say more than that the substance of these things, if not consigned back again to the nothing from which they had emerged, will be employed in the for

mation of other things totally different that the change will be so great, as that all old things may be said to have passed away and all things to become new that after the wreck of the last conflagration, the desolated scene will be repeopled with other objects; the righteous will live in another world, and the eye of the glorified body will open on another field of contemplation from that which is now visible around us.

Even those objects which men are most apt to count upon as unperishable, because, without any sensible decay, they have stood the lapse of many ages, will not weather the lapse of eternity. This earth will be burnt up. The light of yonder sun will be extinguished. These stars will cease from their twinkling. The heavens will pass away as a scroll and as to those solid and enormous masses which, like the firm world we tread upon, roll in mighty circuit through the immensity around us, it seems the solemn language of revelation of one and all of them, that from the face of Him who sitteth on the throne, the earth and the heavens will fly away, and there will be found no place for them.

Even apart from the Bible, the eye of observation can witness, in some of the hardest and firmest materials of the present system, the evidence of its approaching dissolution. What more striking, for example, than the natural changes which take place on the surface of the world, and which prove that the strongest of Nature's elements must at last yield to the operation of time and of decay-that yonder towering mountain, though propped by the rocky battlements which surround it, must at last sink under the power of corruption that every year brings it nearer to its endthat, at this moment, it is wasting silently away, and letting itself down from the lofty eminence which it now occupiesthat the torrent which falls from its side never ceases to consume its substance, and to carry it off in the form of sediment to the ocean-that the frost which assails it in winter loosens the solid rock, detaches it in pieces from the main precipice, and makes it fall in fragments to its basethat the power of the weather scales off the most flinty materials, and that the wind of heaven scatters them in dust over the surrounding country-that even though not anticipated by the sudden and awful convulsions of the day of God's wrath, nature contains within itself the rudiments of

decay that every hill must be levelled with the plains, and every plain be swept away by the constant operation of the rivers which run through it—and that, unless renewed by the hand of the Almighty, the earth on which we are now treading must disappear in the mighty roll of ages and of centuries. We cannot take our flight to other worlds, or have a near view of the changes to which they are liable. But surely if this world, which, with its mighty apparatus of continents and islands, looks so healthful and so firm after the wear of many centuries, is posting visibly to its end, we may be prepared to believe that the principles of destruction are also at work in other provinces of the visible creation—and that though, of old, God laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of his hands, yet they shall perish; yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment, and as a vesture shall He change them, and they shall be changed.

But there is another way in which the objects that are seen are temporal. The object may not merely be removed from us, but we may be removed from the object. The disappearance of this earth, and of these heavens from us, we look upon through the dimness of a far-placed futurity. It is an event, therefore, which may regale our imagination; which may lift our mind by its sublimity; which may disengage us in the calm hour of meditation from the littleness of life, and of its cares; and which may even throw a clearness and a solemnity over our intercourse with God. But such an event as this does not come home upon our hearts with the urgency of a personal interest. It does not carry along with it the excitement which lies in the nearness of an immediate concern. It does not fall with such vivacity upon our conceptions, as practically to tell on our pursuits or any of our purposes. It may elevate and solemnise us; but this effect is perfectly consistent with its having as little influence on the walk of the living, and the moving, and the acting man, as a dream of poetry. The preacher may think that he has done great things with his eloquence-and the hearers may think that great things have been done upon them-for they felt a fine glow of emotion, when they heard of God sitting in the majesty of His high counsels over the progress and the destiny of created things. But the truth is, that all this kindling of devotion which is felt upon the contemplation of His great