but why should we not boldly acknowledge all that God has done for our souls, whether it be little or much? Let us not despise the day of small things.

The tendency of these confessions, whether in a free conversation on the state of our souls, or in submitting to the ordinances of religion, is to strengthen the principle of faith, and lead to a more decided influence of the gospel over our hearts and lives. Thus it is that we acquire power over temptation, strengthen and settle in us the principles of righteousness, and enter fully into the joy of God's great salvation. Think not that you are equal to the task of leading a Christian life, without these divinely appointed auxiliaries to your faith. Piety nourished in secret, has but a pale and sickly life, like plants in a dark cellar, which bloom without fruit and die without hope. It must have air, and light, and action, or how can it have increase or productiveness?

CONCLUSION.

1. The precise nature of the Spirit's work in our regeneration is herein revealed. It is that of unfolding the spiritual connections of Christ's resurrection. The word of the truth of the gospel states the outward, but the Spirit makes us see the inward facts and relations of this great subject. It is through his influence that the commandment comes, sin revives, and we die. He makes Christ's love in dying for us the means of begetting love in us, thus shedding it abroad in our hearts, and filling us with all joy and peace in believing. He witnesses with our spirits that we are born of God, by exciting in us the affections of the new birth. It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.

2. Sinners must consider, however, that their voluntary co-operation is necessary throughout this process. The holiness and love of Christ, distinctly brought to our view, are adapted to raise in our minds a class of emotions which only require an appropriate action on our part to lead on to saving results. We can no more avoid being affected by them, when thus brought to our view, than we can avoid being touched by the story of the Roman daughter, whose father was condemned to death by starvation, and whom she kept alive in prison by means of the aliment which nature had provided for her new-born infant. The most undutiful children feel the beauty of this story, and if they were only to act on the impression, they would become more kind and respectful to their parents.

So, the worst of sinners cannot fail of being impressed with Christ's love in dying for sinful men, when they seriously contemplate the subject in the light of his resurrection, setting forth the greatness and glory of his character. Action on this impression in confessing their sins, is faith, and the more decisive and longer

continued this action is, the more controlling the influence of the faith becomes, till at length, through the accompanying agency of the Holy Spirit, they are renewed to obedience and begotten to a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The work of the Spirit in the production of saving faith, essential as it is, is never effectual, without the voluntary co-operation of the sinner himself in some form of confession or manifestation.

3. Herein also we see the precise nature of unbelief. It is not simply the unconvinced reason withholding its assent from a lack of evidence, but it is a rebellion of the will against those decrees which the conscience gives forth under the promptings of the truth as it is in Jesus. Unbelief consists in resisting the impression of obligation to reform our lives, which the facts connected with Christ's resurrection make upon our minds, and hence it is the opposite of confession, it is a denial of Christ before men.

If the truth as it is in Jesus did not contain in itself a powerful call upon us to break off our sins by righteousness, how should our unbelief and resistance to it be esteemed so great a crime? How should this be singled out from all our other sins, as the reason of our being doomed to hell? If the word of Christ was not in the sinner, under the form of this powerful movement of conscience towards a new life, how should his resistance to it involve a guilt so black and a doom so fearful? Did not the sin of the Jews consist in opposing themselves to their inward sense of Christ's holiness and love, because his character did not accord in other respects to their worldly expectations from the Messiah? They sacrificed his holiness to their pride, his love to their ambition, and in this their sealing sin consisted.

Our faith, therefore, is the reverse of this process; it is following out all the tendencies of this holiness and love, and actively repressing and crucifying pride, ambition, avarice, and every contrary tendency. It is confessing Christ before men, coinciding and agreeing with Christ, and thus both faith and unbelief is a voluntary process throughout, never depending on the sufficiency or in-sufficiency of evidence addressed to the reason.

Finally, sinners may see how impossible it is for them to occupy a neutral position in regard to Christ. Can conscience be neutral on a clearly stated question of right and wrong? Can the heart be neutral in reference to a matter involving the most serious consequences to our interest and our happiness? Do not the pleadings of conscience on the one hand, and of appetite on the other, the conflicts of reason and passion, of truth and error, of holiness and sin, within our own breast, create an imperious necessity of taking sides one way or the other? The outward may admit of neutrality, but not the inward, not the contrary tendencies and issues of our own spiritual nature, arising from the introduction of Christ's word into our minds. He that is not with me is against me, and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad."

XIV.

THE PLACE AND IMPORTANCE OF AN INDIVIDUAL.

BY REV. ALBERT BARNES,

PASTOR OF THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA.

"But now are they many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you."-1 COR. xii. 20, 21.

My remarks on this occasion will have a single object. They will be designed to impress upon my hearers a sense of personal obligation in the cause of religion; the obligation resting on us as individuals. In doing this, I shall endeavor to ascertain the place and the importance of the individual in the social organization, and particularly in the church:-"There are many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.' It will contribute to give order to the remarks which I propose to make, if I arrange them under the three following heads:-the erroneous views which prevail in regard to the place and the importance of the individual; the place which, according to the divine arrangements, he necessarily occupies in the social organization, and the place which he may voluntarily occupy in promoting the cause of religion.

I. First, the erroneous views which prevail in regard to the place and importance of the individual.

In regard to this, there are two quite opposite errors, though not equally bordering on virtue, or equally harmless.

1. The one which is most common, and the least virtuous, is that of over-estimating our importance, and consequently of being unwilling to occupy the place which we were designed to fill. It is unnecessary, I presume, to attempt to demonstrate the fact here adverted to, or to search out the causes of it. The error is the child of selfishness and pride; the effect of closing our eyes on the truth respecting ourselves; the result of always looking at one minute object, until it magnifies itself so as to occupy the whole field of vision. There are few persons who at some period of their lives are not seized with this overweening estimate of themselves;

there are many whom it accompanies all their lives, descending with them even to the mouth of the tomb. We think of our own consequence; our talents; our attainments. We think what a breach will be made when we die. We think of the mourners who will gather around us with broken hearts. We think of the solemn, sad procession that will go with us to the tomb:-forgetting how seldom it is that the hearts of any considerable proportion in a funeral procession are serious and solemn at all, or care anything about the dead. We look at our own affairs and press them forward, as if everything else should give way to them, and as if the world had no interests so great that they may not be required to yield to our convenience.

Now, how contrary all this is to truth and reality, it is hardly necessary to attempt to show. Few will care about it at all when we die; and the world at large will care nothing, and know nothing about it. A very little circle of friends will be affected-as a little circle of water is agitated when a drop of rain falls into the ocean. At the centre of that small circle of friends, there will be some deep emotion, and some tears of genuine grief will be shed; at a very little distance, the emotion will be fainter and feebler; at a point but a little more remote there will be none, and soon, very soon, all the agitation there was will have died away-as when the little drops of rain fall into the ocean—

A few friends will go and bury us; and then they will turn away to their own concerns, forgetful that we are sleeping in the grave. Affection will rear a stone, and plant a few flowers over our grave -but the hand that reared the stone or planted the flowers will soon become unable to cut the letters deeper as they become obliterated, or to cultivate the flowers-and in a brief period the little hillock will be smoothed down, and the stone will fall, and neither friend nor stranger will be concerned to ask which one of the forgotten millions of the earth was buried there. No "old Mortality" will go to cut again those effaced words which told our name, and the time of our birth and of our death. Every vestige that we ever lived upon the earth will have vanished away. All the little memorials of our remembrance-the lock of hair enchased in gold, or the portrait that hung in our dwellings, will cease to have the slightest value to any living being, nor will even momentary curiosity be excited to know who wore that hair, or whose countenance is delineated there.

2. The other error is the opposite one-more rare but more virtuous, and more nearly bordering on truth-that of undervaluing our importance as individuals. In melancholy mood we look at the facts just adverted to. We think of the hundreds of millions that dwell on the earth, each one just as important in his own sphere as we are, and ask ourselves how many there are of these that we know, or care about; and then, by a natural transition, we ask pensively, how many of them know us, or care anything about us. We remember what countless hosts have lived, and played their parts, and are forgotten; and then we seize the glass of the astronomer and look out on other worlds and systems--when the imagination is lost in their immensity and their distance, and fancy them all peopled with as dense a population as our own, and come back with the impressive truth that all our earth compared with these worlds is literally less in proportion than a single grain of sand to all the sands which are spread along the shores of oceans, and with no mock modesty we ask, what are we? Of what importance are we amidst these multitudes; these worlds? What interests would suffer if we should be overlooked; who would weep if we should be forgotten forever? "What is man that Thou-the Maker of these worlds-art mindful of him?" Who, in these worlds, would know it if I should cease to be?

Looking out, then, on these opposite errors, it is of importance to understand our real place in the system of things where our Maker has placed us; the real work which is given us to do; the real bearing of what we do on the organization around us.

II. My second object, therefore, was to consider the place which the individual necessarily occupies in the social organization. Perhaps we shall find something, not inconsistent with the exercise of humility and modesty, which will inform our minds with a conviction of his importance.

We have an illustration of what I mean in the text, and in the other verses relating to the same subject, in the chapter from which the text is taken. The body is made up of many members or parts, each one of which in its place is necessary to the harmony and happiness of the whole, and no one of which can be spared without injury. The eye cannot undertake to do the whole work allotted to the animal frame, and say to the hand, I have no need of thee; the head cannot undertake the entire functions, and say to the feet, I have no need of you." It may be indeed a question, which is the most valuable or useful, and which could be spared with the least disadvantage; but no member, however unimportant, is lost without our being made sensible, if we were never before, of its value. It is saying only what will occur to any one to remark, that the whole body is made up of all the individual members; that a nation is but the aggregate of individual citizens; that an army is made up of individual soldiers; that the "milky-way" in the heavens is made