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use it, it was to prepare the heart through faith in the word preached, for the stronger evidence of the indwelling Spirit. Stronger it should be than anything mere mortal sense can testify: and so it is, when saving faith is once begotten in the soul. To the spiritual Christian, in proportion as he is spiritual, in proportion I believe to the strength and not to the weakness of his faith, the affected resumption of miraculous powers in the church is peculiarly painful: not only because he believes them to have been withdrawn when they had served their purpose of completing and verifying the written word; but because he feels them so ill-suited an ailment for the divine life within his soul; so dark, so low, as compared with the evidence of faith within. It seems once more to substitute sensible for spiritual things, and place a veil of matter between spirit and spirit: the opaqueness of things seen, between himself and the unseen realities with which he holds converse day by day; on which he lives and grows, "from faith to faith," till faith itself seems lost in its own reality, and calls itself sight again. It was faith's lofty vision Job had reached, when he said, "I have heard of thee with the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee." It was faith's exclusive vision Jesus meant, when he said "A little while, and the world seeth me no more: but ye see me.”

We cannot tell the unbelieving world what passes in the lonely chambers of the contrite, in the lonely bosom of the broken-hearted, when Jesus kneels beside the penitent at his prayers, grasps the cold hand of agonized remorse, and gathers the scalding tears into his bottle. We cannot make known the blest companionship of day-time walks, or the sweet commun

ings of night-time meditation, when buried griefs and incommunicable joys out-poured to the Unseen, find sympathy that waits not for either voice or vision. Can the wife show the fellowship of her widowed home, or the mother, when the last she had is gone?

A prophet could relate what passed in a king's palace; when his sleep went from him, neither were instruments of music brought before him; but has he toldhas Daniel told the converse of the mysterious den where the voracious beast stayed his appetite to listen; or of the charmed furnace where the terrified Babylonian saw "Four men loose?"

Can any tell what passes between the soul and the Unseen, when the holy book is in the hand, when the sacred emblems are between the lips, when heaven's gate is opening in the distance, and the messengers of mortality are at the door? These are faith's secrets; not lawful, because not possible to be uttered, without calling them what they are not, things of sense, and submitting them, as we may not, to the misapprehension of unbelief. The soul that so enjoys by faith the evidence, the proof, the reality of things unseen, has a sensitive dread of whatever tends to lower it into sensible signs and outward manifestions; whether they be sacramental elements or supernatual gifts. To this feeling, perhaps, we may attribute the extreme aversion the most spiritually-minded persons feel, from misapprehension as I think, to the doctrine of the personal reign of Christ upon earth; as if it were to exchange the intercourse of spirit with spirit in the unseen world, for the renewed intercourse of flesh and blood. They feel, and justly feel that Christ's bodily presence was less effectual to his disciples than the Spirit received

from him after his departure, as a medium of union and communion with himself. "It is expedient for you that I go away, for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come." Not till faith was substituted for sight, the intercourse of spirit for the intercourse of sense, were the apostles themselves, "able to comprehend the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ that passeth knowledge;" passeth all knowledge of which the heart of man was capable, even by personal intercourse with Him, until Christ was formed in them, "dwelt in their hearts by faith." Far other than the intercourse of sense, as they had sometimes known the Son of Man, but knew him now no more, was the expectation of Paul, when by the earnest of the Spirit given him, he longed for re-union with the Son of God; and very different, as I understand it, is the anticipation of those "who love his appearing," and dwell joyfully upon the expectation of his coming; when "with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, we shall be changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord :”—not by descending from a life of faith, to a life of sense again; from things spiritual and heavenly, to things temporal and earthly; from high and holy communing, to external signs and wonders; but by the attainment of something above faith and beyond it, called in the Holy Scriptures knowledge-" Then shall I know even as I am known:" some limited communication perhaps of that power by which Deity knows, without the intervention of either sight or faith: a modified emanation perhaps of that faculty which once dwelt in humanity without measure, "and needed not that any should testify of man, for he knew what was in man."

CHAPTER VIII.

IN THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH.

FAITH and obedience are Jehovah's eternally-united law: we have supposed them to be the law of universal being. To separate them is the device of man: the lie, the favorite lie of him who is the father of lies. Some of us he persuades to try faith without obedience: "Holding the truth in unrighteousness :" but I apprehend this is oftener profession than belief. St. James does not say, "If a man have faith and hath not works," but "If a man say he have faith and hath not works."

There have been professed Antinomians, and practical Antinomians, but I have always doubted if there have been believing Antinomians; that is, if any one believing the truth as it is in Jesus, and deriving his views of it from the Bible only, has really held himself free of its commandments. If indeed a man has revelations of his own, or traditions of his fathers, or doctrines of men, whether they be old wives' fables, or questions of science falsely so called, on which he builds his faith, instead of, or together with, the written word: since he supersedes the Gospel, I cannot say but he may also supersede the law and yielding but a partial faith to the word of God, it is likely he will yield it but a partial obedience also.

:

This, by observation, we shall find to be the fact. We shall rarely find an individual, or a party, having another rule of faith beside the doctrines of the Bible, but they have another rule of life beside the precepts of the Bible and contrariwise, in pretty near proportion one to the other: whether by adding to or taking from the words of the sacred book, exacting more or less than God has ordained to be believed and done. I do not apply this to the weak believer; the tried, the tempted, the even overcome; who do not the things they would, and hate things they do for these consent to the law that it is good, and their very conflict with sin is an evidence of faith. The warrior who is borne wounded from the field, does not forfeit his share in the rewards of victory; and the faithful soldier of Jesus Christ may be as true when he is beaten, as when he is victorious, if he be found manfully fighting against the world, the flesh, and the devil. But I mean to say that persons allowedly departing from the practices of the Gospel, will, on close scrutiny, be generally found to have departed also in some manner from its doctrines ; making it doubtful whether any man has ever really believed without obeying the truth,—has had faith without works. The more frequent method of contravening the Almighty purpose, is to attempt obedience without faith. Hundreds and thousands have tried it, and tried it honestly, and failed contritely. "I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge." A hard and bitter service it has often been, a service of fear, without either faith or love, and always unsuccessful. "Say, ye that desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law?" with all the thunders of Sinai in its

Yes, they hear it,

voice: but Satan

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