retribution must, of course, be a world of strange com panionships. We are expressly told, and it seems a matter of reason also to suppose, that the spirits of guilty men will not be assorted there by their tastes, but by their character and demerits. Death is the limit and end of all mere conventionalities. The fictitious assortments of the earthly state never pass that limit. Rank, caste, fashion, disgust, fastidiousness, delicacy of sin-these are able to draw their social lines no longer. Proximity now is held to the stern, impartial principle of inward demerit;-That all may receive according to the deeds done in the body. This is the level of adjustment, and there appears to be no other. The standing of the high priests, the Scribes. and Pharisees, and the forlorn woman of my text, may be inverted now, or they may all take rank together. And so also many of you, that are now pleasing yourselves in the dignity of your virtues, and the honors of your social standing, may fall there into group and gradation, with such as now you even look away from with profoundest distaste or revulsion. The subject is painful; I will not pursue it. I will only remind you that where the lines of justice lead, there you must yourselves follow; and if that just award of respectable sin yields you only the promise of a scale of companionships from which your soul recoils with disgust, there is no wisdom for you but to be as disgustful of the sin as of the companionships, and draw yourself, at once, to Him who is Purity, and Peace, and Glory, and, in all, Eternal Life.

XVIII.

THE POWER OF GOD IN SELF-SACRIFICE.

1 COR. i. 24.-" Christ the power of God."

THE Cross and Christ crucified are the subject here in hand. Accordingly, when Christ is called the power of God, we are to understand Christ crucified; and then the problem is to conceive how Christ, dying in the weakness of mortality and exhibiting, just there, if we take him as the incarnate manifestation of God, the humblest tokens of passibility and frailty, is yet and there, as being the crucified, the power of God.

At our present point and without some preparation of thought, we can hardly state intelligibly, or with due force of assertion, the answer to such a question. The two elements appear to be incompatible, and we can only say that the power spoken of is, not the efficient, or physical, but the moral power of God; that namely of his feeling and character But as this will be no statement sufficiently clear to stand as the ruling proposition of a discourse, I will risk a departure from our custom and, instead of draw ing my subject formally from my text, I will begin at a point external and draw, by stages, toward it; paying it, as I conceive, the greater honor, that I suppose it to be so rich and deep in its meaning, as to require and to reward the labor of a discourse, if simply we may apprehend the lesson it teaches.

Christ, then, the crucified, and so the power of God-this is our goal, let us see if we can reach it.

We take our point of departure at the question of passi. bility in God-is He a being passible, or impassible?

It would seem to follow from the infinitude of his creatively efficient power, and the immensity of his nature, that he is and must be impassible. There is, in fact, no power that is not in his hands. There are cases, it is true, where superiority in volume and physical force rather increases than diminishes passibility. Thus it is that man is subject to so great annoyance from the mere gnat, and the creature is able to inflict this inevitable suffering upon him, just because of his own atomic littleness. But there is no parallel in this for the relation of God to his creatures, or of theirs to Him; because they continue to exist only by His permission. Besides, He is spirit only, not a being that can be struck, or thrust upon, or any way violated by physical assault. What we call force, or physical power can not touch him. And even if it could, he is probably incapable of suffering from it, as truly as even space itself. Like space, like eternity, he is, in his own nature, as spirit, essentially impassible-impassible, that is, as related to force.

But the inquiry is not ended when we reach this point, it is only begun. After all there must be some kind of passibleness in God, else there could be no genuine char acter in him. If he could not be pained by any thing, could not suffer any kind of wound, had no violable sym pathy, ne would be any thing but a perfect character. A cast iron Deity could not command our love and reverence

The beauty of God is that he has feeling and feels appropriately toward every thing done; that he feels badness as badness, and goodness as goodness, pained by onc, pleased by the other. There must be so much, or such kind of passibility in him that he will feel toward every thing as it is, and will be diversely affected by diverse things, according to their quality. If wickedness and wrong stirred nothing in him different from what is stirred by a prayer, if He felt no disaffection toward a thief which He does not feel toward a martyr, no pleasure in a martyr faithful unto death which He does not in his persecutors, He would be a kind of no-character, we can hardly conceive such a being.

A very large share of all the virtues have, in fact, an element of passivity, or passibility in them, and without that element they could not exist. Indeed the greatness and power of character, culminates in the right proportion and co-ordination of these passive elements. And just here it is, we shall see, that even God's perfection culminates. He is great as being great in feeling.

We raise a distinction, as among ourselves, between what we call the active and the passive virtues. Not that all virtues are not equally active, in the sense of being voluntary, or free, but that in some of them we communi cate, and in some of them receive action. If I impart a charity, that is my active virtue; if I receive an insult without revenging, or wishing to revenge it, that is my passive virtue. All the wrong acts done us and also all the good are occasions of some appropriate, proportionate and really great feeling, which is our passive virtue. And without this passive virtue in its varieties, we should be only no-characters, dry logs of wood instead of Christian men. Or, if we kept on acting still, we should be only

active machines, equally dry as wood, and only making more of noise; for what better is the active giving of a charity, if there be no fellow-feeling, or pitying passion with it, to make it a charity?

Now God must have these passive virtues as truly as men. They are the necessary soul of all greatness in him. How then shall we conceive him to have them and to have his sublime perfection culminate in them, when he is, in fact, impassible?

This brings us to the true point of our question. We discover, first, that God is and must be physically impassible. We discover, next, that he ought to feel appropri ately to all kinds of action, and must have, in order to his real greatness in character, all the passive virtues. He must in one view be impassible and in some other, passible, infinitely passible. And how is this, where is the solution?

It is here; that God, being physically impassible, impassible as relates to violating force, is yet morally passible. That is, he is a being whose very perfection it is, that he feels the moral significance of things, receives all actions according to their moral import, whether as done to himself, or by one created being to another. In this latter sense, he feels actions intensely according to the moral delicacy of his nature, deeply according to the depth of his nature. In this point of view, he is, just be cause he is perfect and infinite, infinitely passible. He has just that sense of things which infinite holiness must have, loves the tears of repentance in his child just as infinite mercy must, turns away from all wrong, as profoundly revolted by it, as his infinite, eternal chastity must bo