If I turn now to the Romans, it is otherwise. I get Christ alive on the earth, made of the seed of David, according to the flesh- and declared Son of God with power by resurrection. Still, flesh could not live unto God, nor they that are in it please Him. Hence we find Christ as come in grace for them, not dead but dying, and then alive to God. I get the condition and quality of man, not simply the work of God as to one dead. So as to men; I get the means of standing in righteousness before God, and not an absolute work. Nor is this all. In the Romans, the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God is not contemplated, nor the union of the Church with Him. Hence we are not said to be quickened together with Him, nor made to sit in heavenly places in Him. His exaltation is just mentioned in the eighth chapter, with "who even is at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us"which last thought does not of course contemplate

union.

In the twelfth chapter, the practical effects of union among ourselves is spoken of; but, in general, these topics form no part of the instruction of the Epistle. Men are living, guilty beings, the whole world guilty before God; and to learn, that in the remediless state of their nature, death is the only remedy; in itself fatal, doubtless, but perfectly saving when in Christ. It is atonement for all sin, and deliverance from the position in which we were; for death is evidently the end of that, and our life thus wholly new, Christ being risen from the dead, and we to walk as alive to God through Him. We are justified by His blood; and the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. But the Romans, as teaching the justification of a sinner, necessarily first views him as the sinner to be justified. Hence, it goes through the whole question of law; and we have the experiences of the man not justified, though convinced of sin, and then justified from the sin alive in conscience without law, dying under law, and alive in Christ, where there is no condemnation. The practical process is gone through. The effect is this, that he is brought up to the point where

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the Epistle to the Ephesians begins with him. He finds that there is no escape from the condition he is in, as a child of Adam, or a Jew, but by death. Yet, were it his own, it would, of course, lead him to judgment, not to justification, but where all guilt is proved. It is Christ who dies, and is set forth as a propitiation through faith in His blood; so that God is just, and the justifier of him that believes in Jesus. That meets the case of guilt, but is not life; for so Christ would be dead, and we brought, in Him, into death. This could not in any way be. For not only would there be no life, but it would even prove, as the apostle shews in 1 Cor. xv., that there was no remedy. Our faith would be vain; we should be yet in our sins. But we believe that God has raised up our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, who was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification. The consequence of this different view of things, is seen in the practical result in man under the operation of God's spirit. In the Romans, we have experiences flowing from the conflict of the newly introduced principle of life with flesh, or the effect of deliverance from it, by the knowledge of the power of deliverance in Christ. The former we find in the seventh chapter, where the conflict of the new nature with the lusts and will of the old, under law, are depicted; and the second in the eighth, where the spiritual blessings of one who is made free from the law of sin and death, by the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus, are drawn out before us in a way to produce the profoundest interest in the soul that enters into it. In the Ephesians, the man is dead in sins, and transported into heavenly places by the operation of God; being created anew in Christ Jesus, unto good works, which God has afore prepared, that we might walk in them. The works belong to the new place and condition in which alone we are known in the Ephesians. God has afore prepared works for his afore prepared new created ones. Hence, we have no experience of passing through conflict, and deliverance, and its results; but there is a demand to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called, and a desire that the saints, rooted

and grounded, may realise in their hearts, by Christ's dwelling in them by faith, the full effect, even to filling, to all the fulness of God, the greatness of the infinite scene of glory into which they are brought, and know that love of Christ which passeth knowledge.

In result, the general principle of the difference is this. In the Romans, the man is found alive in sin. Convicted of it, and has, Christ having died for him to put it away, to come, in the conviction of the hopeless badness of his nature, to death, and then rising again, alive through Jesus Christ, be thus justified before God, and by God, on the one hand, and alive in a new life on the other; then nothing shall separate him from the love of Christ. In the Ephesians the man is found dead in sin; but then he is raised up, and set in heavenly places in Christ, according to the power in which Christ, when dead, was raised of God, and set in the heavenly places, far above principalities and powers, and every name that is named, and brought as a new creation, children withal, and heirs, into immediate nearness to God. The additional truth is brought out, that we are united to Christ in this place, as members of His body, and His heavenly bride. I cannot here - time does not allow it - do more than draw out the great general principles of the different aspects of truth presented by the two Epistles. He who searches as a devout learner into the truth of God, will, I am sure, find in what I here notice in these Epistles, elements of deep and profitable instruction, as to his own relationship with God, the Christianity of his soul and of the word, and of his soul according to the word. Perhaps some one, for his own and our edification, may furnish us with further results which flow from it.

POETRY.

"THE SEA BIRD."

I'VE watch'd the sea bird calmly glide
Unruffled o'er the ocean tide;
Unscared she heard the waters roar
In foaming breakers on the shore.
Fearless of ill, herself she gave
To rise upon the lifting wave,
Or sink, to be awhile unseen
The undulating swells between
Till, as the evening shadows grew,
Noiseless, unheard, aloft she flew ;
While, soaring to her rock-built nest,
A sunbeam lighted on her breast,
A moment glitter'd in mine eye,
Then quickly vanish'd through the sky.

While by the pebbly beach I stood,
That sea-bird, on the waving flood,
Pictured to my enraptured eye,

- Now high,

A soul at peace with God:—
Now low, upon the gulf of life,
Raised or depress'd, in peace or strife,
Calmly she kens the changeful wave,
She dreads no storm-she fears no grave:
To her, the world's tumultuous roar,

Dies like the echo on the shore.

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"Father," she cries, "Thy pleasure all fulfil,
"I gladly yield me to thy sovereign will;
"Let earthly joys, let comforts ebb or rise,
"Tranquil on thee, my God, my soul relies."

Then, as advance the shades of night,
Long-plumed, she takes her heavenward flight;
But, as she mounts, I see her fling

A beam of glory from her wing

A moment to my aching sight

Lost in the boundless fields of light!

FRAGMENT.

When Jesus is testified of to the saints of God, by the power of the Holy Ghost, he who speaks, loses sight of himself, and his audience; and his audience lose sight of themselves and the speaker; and the vision of each is filled with the glory of Christ.

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If we seek and receive honour one of another, and not that which cometh from God only," these blessings cannot be realised. "He that speaketh of himself, seeketh his own glory but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him."

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H. P.