pride, remain. There could not be a worse sign for you as regards the reality of your christian confidence. And it will be a worse sign still, if you are habitually irritated by your defeats, and even dare to murmur impatiently against the strange severity of God,-as if it were a strange thing for you that your faithful God will try to bring you off the lees on which you stand! A far more strange thing is it that, having no great persecutions to suffer for Christ, you can not find how, as a follower, to endure theso common trials. God forbid that you so little understand your privilege in them. Receive them meekly rather, and bow down to them gladly. Bid them welcome when they come, and, if they come not, ask for them; lift up your cry unto God, and beseech him that by any means he will correct you, and purify you, and separate you to himself.

But there is a use of this subject that has many times occurred to you already, and to this, in conclusion, let us now come. By the visitation of God upon us,-upon you, that is, and upon me,--the tenure and security of our relation as pastor and people has been interrupted now for two whole years. Whether it was God's design, by this interruption, to refine us and purify us to a better use of this relation, or to bring it to a full end, remains now to be seen The former is my earnest hope and my constant prayer. Was there nothing in us, on one side or on both, that ic quired this discipline and made it even necessary for us? Is there no reason to suspect that, in our state of confidence and security, we were beginning to look for the blessing of Moab and not for the blessing of Israel? For

*This discourse was so far colored, as a whole, by the peculiar interest of the occasion referred to here in the close, that retaining the occasional matter appears to be required.

myself, I feel constrained to admit that I had come to re gard my continuance here too much as a matter of course, an appointment subject to no repeal or change. I had learned to trust you implicitly as my friends, and knew that you could never be less. I had let my roots run out and downward among you, in a growth of nearly a quarter of a century. There was stealing on me thus, as I now discover, a feeling of security and establishment, which is not good for any sinful man, and will not let him be the pilgrim on earth that he ought. Under the semblance of duty and constancy, I had undertaken to die here and nowhere else, knowing no other people, place, or work. And under this fair cover crept a little foolish pride, it may be, that really needed chastisement. As if it were for me to say where I would stay or die! Just here, unwittingly, my imagined constancy became presumption. Furthermore, I had always been too much like Moab, as I now see, and bitterly needed some kind of captivity more real, some change more crippling, than the trivial adversities I had heretofore tossed aside so lightly.

Meantime, was there nothing on your part, or in you, that required a similar discipline? Having seen your church almost uniformly prosperous for a long course of years, and growing steadily up from a feeble and small one, to a condition of strength, were there not many of you that were losing a righteous concern for it, and beginning to leave it practically to me, as if I could take care of it? ceasing in that manner from their trust in God, by which they had before upheld me, and from those personal responsibilities for it, which are the necessary condition of all earnestness in the christian life? I should do wrong not to say that I have, many times, been so far oppressed

by this conviction, as to doubt whether it might not even be better for you, if I were entirely taken out of the way. You have been subjected to some uncommon trials on my account. Have you never slid from the christian constancy and patience in which you stood, into a temper of mere selfreliance, as if by some human sufficiency you had been able to stand unbroken? Were you touched by no subtle pride, were you betrayed into no undue self-confidence, were you slid unwittingly into no trust in a worm that you mistook for trust in God? Ah, if you had been cut down as a church by adversity, crippled, weakened, emptied from vessel to vessel, brought into captivity as regards all hope from man, how much might it have done for you. It is the blessing of Moab, as I greatly fear, that has injured you, and, as God is faithful, he would not let you suffer in this manner longer. And so, both for my sake and for yours, he has brought this heavy trial or adversity upon us. By this he takes us off our lees, and his design has been to ventilate us by the separation we have suffered. He means to purify us, to take away all our self-confidence, and our trust in each other, and bring us into implicit, bumble trust in himself.

And the work he has begun, I firmly believe that he will prosecute till his object is gained. If two years of separation will not bring us to our places and correct our sin, he will go further. He will finally command us apart and tear us loose from all our common ties and expectations. For myself, I am anxious to learn the lesson he is teaching, and I pray God that a similar purpose may enter into you. Let not this happy return, which God has vouch safed me, and the congratulations of the occasion, drive away all the sober and searching truths God was trying to

enter into our hearts. Be jealous of any such lightness. As you rejoice with me and give thanks unto God for his undeserved goodness, consent with me to God's corrections also, and join me in the prayer that other and heavier corrections may not be made necessary, by the want of all fruit in these. For be assured that, as you are Israel and not Moab, God will deal with you as he deals with Israel, and will not spare till your purification is accomplished. Let us go to him as penitents, in our common sorrow, and make our common confession before him, determined, every one, that he will turn himself to God's correcting hand, and follow it. And as thou hast smitten us, O, Lord, do thou heal us; as thou hast broken, do thou bind us up; that we may be established in holiness before thee, and walk humbly and carefully in thy sight, as they whom the Lord hath chastened.

XXIII

CHRIST AS SEPARATE FROM THE WORLD.

HEBREWS vii. 26.--"Separate from sinners, and mak higher than the heavens."

WITH us of to-day, it is the commendation of Jesus that he is so profoundly humbled, identified so affectingly with our human state. But the power he had with the men of his time moved in exactly the opposite direction, being the impression he made of his remoteness and separateness from men, when he was, in fact, only a man, as they supposed, under all human conditions. With us, it is the wonder that he is brought so low. With them, that he could seem to rise so high; for they knew nothing, as yet, of his person considered as the incarnate Word of the Father. This contrast, however, between their position and ours is not as complete as may, at first, seem to us; for that which makes their impression, makes, after all, a good part of ours. For when we appeal thus to his hu miliations under the flesh, and as a man of sorrows, we really do not count on the flesh and the sorrows, as being the Christly power, but only on what he brought into the world from above the world, by the flesh and the sorrows,--the holiness, the deific love, the self-sacrificing greatness, the everlasting beauty; in a word, all that most distinguishes him above mankind and shows him most transcendently separate from sinners. Here is the great power of Christianity—the immense importation it makes