Follow it There is a

disgust. Sin works by no set methods. It has a way of ruin for every man that is original and proper only to himself. Suffice it to say that, as long as you are in it and under its power, you can never tell what you are in danger of. This one thing you may have as a truth eternally fixed, that respectable sin is, in principle, the mother of all basest crime. on to the bitter end and there is ignominy eternal. law of retribution that keeps it company, and is never parted from it; by which law the end is being shaped and the hideous result prepared. If the delicate, pretentious, always correct sinner keeps to his decency here, the proper end will shew itself hereafter, and then it will be seen how dark, after all, how deep in criminality, how bronzed in guilty thought, is every soul becoming under even the fairest shows of virtue, coupled with neglect of God, and separated from His personal love.

Advancing now a stage, observe, again, that it is on just this view of the world and of human character under sin, that the whole superstructure of Christianity is based. Christ comes forth to the world as a lost world. He makes no distinction of respectable and unrespectable as regards the common want of salvation. Nay, it is plain, from His searching rebukes laid on the heads of the priests, the rulers, and others in high life, that He is sometimes moved with greatest abhorrence by the sin of those who are most respectable and even sanctimonious. Hence the solemn universality of His terms of salvation. Hence the declared impossibility of eternal life to any, save by the same great radical change of character a fact which He testifies directly to Nicodemus, the conscientious inquirer after truth, the sober and just senator, one of the very highest, noblest men in the nation—"Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." He asks not how you appear, but whether you are human. Nay, if you come to Him, like the young ruler, clothed in all such comely virtues, that He is constrained to look on your ingenuous, conscientious character with love, He will tell you, when you ask Him what you are to do to have eternal life, that you must forsake all, and come and follow Him. Decency, correctness, praise-all these are but the guise of your sin, which guise He will tell you must be for ever

abandoned as a ground of confidence before God, and the sin which it now only adorns and covers must be itself removed, and for ever taken away by the blood of the Lamb.

Have I now in my audience any forlorn one, like the woman of my text, any youth, or older person, who is consciously sinking into the toils of vice, and beginning to taste its bitter humiliations; any that has consciously lost or begun to lose the condition of respect and reputable living; any that begins to scorn himself, or seems to be sinking under the pitiless scorn of the world's judgments? To such a one I rejoice to say, in the name of Jesus Christ, that there is no scorn with Him. He does not measure sin by our conventional and often false rules of judgment. The basest sin He was even wont to find, in many cases, under the finest covering of respect. He will judge you rightly, not harshly. If you have fallen, or begun to fall, He wants to raise you. He offers you His free sympathy and support, and, if others lay their look of contempt upon your soul, He invites you kindly, whispers love and courage, and if you are ready to receive Him, waits also to say-"Thou art mine; go, son; go, daughter; sin no more!"

Brethren professed in the name and gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is Him I follow, and not any want of charity I indulge, when I remind you that a still more mournful application of this subject is possibly required. What, alas ! and apart from all severity of judgment, is the profession of many disciples but a state of serious and reputable sin? They are virtuous persons, as that term is commonly used; good always on the negative side of prudence and caution; they have no vices; they bring no scandal on the cause of Christ by their walk. But to what does all this amount, if there be nothing further and more positive to go with it? Does the mere keeping out of vice and scandalous misdoing-does the exactest possible life, in fact, if we speak only of its correctness, constitute a living and true piety? What is it, even at the best, but a reputable, or possibly a somewhat Christian-looking state of sin? The Pharisees and other religious persons of the Saviour's time were abundantly and even sanctimoniously exact persons. And yet the Saviour discovered in them, if we can judge from

the tone of His rebukes, the worst and most incurable type of moral abandonment. They had so little sense of holiness, and so little sympathy with it, that they were His bitterest enemies, and even became His betrayers and murderers. He saw all this beforehand, wrapped up in their character; their washings, sacrifices, long prayers, and scrupulous tithings did not conceal it. You certainly have no such ceremonies; you do not believe in them, but you have covenants, communions, baptisms, family altars. Have you, in company with these, and answering to these, the new man of love, created anew in Christ Jesus unto good works? If you have not, if you live a dumb, unpositive life, under the power of the world, selfish still as before, and self-pursuing; if the old man is not crucified, and the new man, Christ, is certainly not being formed within you, then your profession signifies nothing but the mere respectability of your sin. What is your supposed piety but this, if it have no spiritual and inwardly transforming power? Christ is redemption only as He actually redeems and delivers our nature from sin. If He is not the law and spring of a new spirit of life, He is nothing. Beware, let me say to you in Christ's name, "beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees." The true principle, my brethren, is this; and if this will yield us no just title to the Christian name, what we call our piety is in honest truth nothing more or better than a decent shape of sin-"For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God". -as many, no more. Are we so led? Do we so live?

To dismiss this subject without some prospective reference, or glance of forecast on the future, is impossible, however painful and appalling the contemplations it will raise. When you go to stand before God, my friends, it will not be your dress, or your house, or your titles, or your wealth, no, nor even your virtues, however much commended here, that will give you a title of entrance among the glorified. Respectable sin will not pass then and there as here. The honour, the nobility of it is now gone by. The degrees, indeed, of sin are many, but the kind is one, and that a poor, dejected, emptied form of shame and sorrow. How appalling such a thought to any one who is capable of thought, and not absolutely brutalised by his guilt!

Furthermore, as sin is sin everywhere and in all forins, the respectable and the unrespectable the same in principle, and when the appearances are different, the same often in criminality, the world of future retribution must, of course, be a world of strange companionships. 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 honours 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.

XVIL

THE POWER OF GOD IN SELF-SACRIFICE.

1 CORINTHIANS 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 departure from our custom, and, instead of drawing 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 honour, that I suppose it to be so rich and deep in its meaning, as to require and to reward the labour 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 passibility in God-is He a Being passible, or impassible?

It would seem to follow from the infinitude of His creativelyefficient 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