There is the true point of modesty-he has found it at last! Whoever finds it has made a great attainment. How clear is it also, in this subject, that there is no place for complaint or repining under the sorrows and trials of life. There is nothing in what has befallen, or befalls you, my friends, which justifies impatience or peevishness. God is inscrutable, but not wrong. Remember, if the cloud is over you, that there is a bright light always on the other side; also, that the time is coming, either in this world or the next, when that cloud will be swept away, and the fulness of God's light and wisdom poured around you. Everything which has befallen you, whatever sorrow your heart bleeds with, whatever pain you suffer -even though it be the pains of a passion like that which Jesus endured at the hands of His enemies-nothing is wanting but to see the light that actually exists, waiting to be revealed, and you will be satisfied. If your life is dark, then walk by faith, and God is pledged to keep you as safe as if you could understand everything. "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." These things, however, I can say with no propriety to many. No such comforts or hopes belong to you that are living without God. You have nothing to expect from the revelations of the future. The cloud that you complain of will indeed be cleared away, and you will see that in all your afflictions, severities, and losses, God was dealing with you righteously and kindly. You will be satisfied with God and with all that He has done for you; but, alas! you will not be satisfied with yourself. That is more difficult—for ever impossible! And I conceive no pang more dreadful than to see, as you will, the cloud lifted from every dealing of God that you thought to be harsh or unrighteous, and to feel that, as He is justified, you yourself are for ever condemned. You can no more accuse your birth, your capacity, your education, your health, your friends, your enemies, your temptations. You still had opportunities, convictions, calls of grace, and calls of blessing. You are judged according to that you had, and not according to that you had not. Your mouth is eternally shut, and God is. eternally clear. Finally, it accords with our subject to observe that, while the inscrutability of God should keep us in modesty and stay our complaints against Him, it should never suppress, but rather sharpen our desire of knowledge. For the more there is that is hidden, the more is to be discovered and known, if not to-day, then to-morrow, if not to-morrow, when the time God sets for it is come. To know, is not to surmount God, as some would appear to imagine. Rightly viewed, all real knowledge is but the knowledge of God. Knowledge is the fire of adoration, adoration is the gate of knowledge. And when this gate of the soul is fully opened, as it will be when the adoring grace is complete in our deliverance from all impurity, what a revelation of knowledge must follow! Having now a desire of knowledge perfected in us, that is, clear of all conceit, ambition, haste, impatience, the clouds under which we lived in our sin are for ever rolled away, and our adoring nature, transparent to God as a window to the sun, is filled with His eternal light. No mysteries remain but such as comfort us in the promise of a glorious employment. The light of the moon is as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun sevenfold; and every object of knowledge, irradiated by the brightness of God, shines with a new celestial clearness and an inconceivable beauty. The resurrection morning is a true sunrising, the inbursting of a cloudless day on all the righteous dead. They wake, transfigured, at their Master's call, with the fashion of their countenance altered and shining like His own: Creature all grandeur, son of truth and light, There was a cloud, and there was a time when man saw not the brightness that shined upon it from above. That cloud is lifted, and God is clear in His own essential beauty and glory for ever. VILL THE CAPACITY OF RELIGION EXTIRPATED BY DISUSE MATTHEW XXV. 28-" Take therefore the talent from him.” MANY persons read this parable of the talents, I believe, very much as if it related only to gifts external to the person; or, if to gifts that are personal, to such only as are called talents in the lower and merely manward relations and uses of life—such as the understanding, reason, memory, imagination, feeling, and whatever powers are most concerned in discovery, management, address, and influence over others. But the great Teacher's meaning reaches higher than this, and comprehends more-viz., those talents, more especially, which go to exalt the subject in his God-ward relations. The main stress of His doctrine hinges, I conceive, on our responsibility as regards the capacity of religion itself; for this, in highest pre-eminence, is the talent-the royal gift of man. The capacity of religion, taken as the highest trust God gives us, He is teaching His disciples may be fivefolded, tenfolded, indefinitely increased, as all other gifts are, by a proper use; or it may be neglected, hid, suppressed, and, being thus kept back, may finally be so reduced as to be even extirpated. This latter-the extirpation or taking away of the holy talent, is the fearful and admonitory close to which the parable is brought in my text. In pursuing the subject presented, two points will naturally engage our attention. I. That the capacity for religion is a talent-the highest talent we have. And, II. That this capacity is one that, by total disuse and the overgrowth of others, is finally extirpated. I. The capacity for religion is a talent-the highest talent we have. We mean by a talent the capacity for doing or becoming something; as for learning, speaking, trade, command. Our talents are as numerous, therefore, and various as the effects we may operate. We have talents of the body, too, and talents of the mind or soul. Our talents of body are strength, endurance, grace, swiftness, beauty, and the like. Our mental or spiritual talents are more various, and, for the purpose we have now in hand, may be subdivided into such as belong in part to the natural life, and such as belong wholly to the religious and spiritual. All those which can be used, or which come into play in earthly subjects, and apart from God and religion, are natural; and those which relate immediately to God and things unseen, as connected with God, are religious. In the former class we may name intellect, judgment, reason, observation, abstraction, imagination, memory, feeling, affection, will, conscience, and all the moral sentiments. These all come into the uses and act a part in the activities of religion, but they have uses and activities in things earthly, where religion is wholly apart, or may be; and therefore we do not class them as religious talents. An atheist can remember, reason, hate, and even talk of duty; and therefore these several kinds of talent are not distinctively religious. The religious talents compose the whole God-ward side of faculty in us. They are such especially as come into exercise in the matter of religious faith and experience, and nowhere else. They include first the want of God, which is, in fact, a receptivity for God. All wants are capacities of reception, and in this view are talents according to their measure. Low grades of being want low objects, but the want of man is God. And as all great wants in things inferior, such as knowledge, honour, power, belong only to great men, what shall we consider this want of God to be, but the highest possible endowment? Nearly related to this talent of want is the talent of inspiration. By this we mean a capacity to be permeated, illuminated, guided, exalted by God or the Spirit of God within, and yet so as not to be any the less completely ourselves. This is a high distinction-a glorious talent. No other kind of being known to us in the works of God, whether animate or inanimate, has the capacity to admit in this manner and be visited by the inspirations of God. It requires a nature gloriously akin to God in its mould thus to let in His action, falling freely into chime with His freedom, and in consciously self-acting power receiving the impulsion of His eternal thought and character. We have also another religious talent or God-ward capacity, which may be called the spiritual sense or the power of divine apprehension. Some kind of apprehensive or perceptive power belongs to every creature of life, as we may see in the distinguishing touch of the sensitive plant, in the keen auditory and scenting powers of many quadrupeds, in our own five senses, or, rising still higher, in that piercing insight of mind which distinguishes the intellectual and scientific verities of things. So also there is given to our spiritual nature a still higher talent -the spiritual sense the power of distinguishing God and receiving the manifestation or immediate witness of God. I speak not here of a speculating up to God, or an inference that conducts to God, but of a window that opens directly on Him from within, lets in the immediate light or revelation of God, and makes the soul even conscious of His reality as of its own. The capacity of religious love is another and distinct kind of talent. Other kinds of love are merely emotional or humanly social, involving no principle of life, either good or bad, and no particular spiritual condition. Whereas this love of God, and of men as related to God, is a determining force in respect to all character and all springs of action. We have it only as we have a certain talent or capacity of religious love--the capacity that is to let in or appropriate the love of God to us. Which if we do it comes, not as some rill or ripple of our human love, changing nothing in us, but it pours in as a tide with mighty floods of joy and power, and sets the whole nature beating with it, as the shores give answer to the ocean roll and roar. Now the man acts out of love and from it. He chimes with all good freely; for his love is the spirit of all good. His activity is rest, and a lubricating power of joy gladdens all the works of duty and sacrifice. The power of faith also is a religious talent, which is to religion what the inductive or experimental power is to science. It is a power of knowing God, or finding God by experiment. It is the power in human souls of falling on God, and being recumbent on Him in trust, so as to prove Him out and find the answer of His personality. Reason cannot do it, but faith can |