great principle of accruing grace, sealed by the promise, “My grace is sufficient for thee."

So, again, there are many who faint when they look on almost any duty or good work, because they are so consciously unequal to it. Why, if they were not unequal, or felt themselves to be equal, they had better, for that reason, decline it; for there is nothing so utterly weak and impotent as this conceit of strength. Brethren, the day is wearing away, this is a desert place, there are hungry, perishing multitudes round us, and Christ is saying to us all, "Give ye them to eat." Say not, "We cannot; we have nothing to give." Go to your duty, every man, and trust yourselves to Him; for He will give you all supply, just as fast as you need it. You will have just as much power as you believe you can have. Suppose, for example, you are called to be a Sabbath-school teacher, and you say within yourself, I have no experience, no capacity, I must decline. That is the way to keep your incapacity for ever. A truce to these cowardly suggestions. Be a Christian, throw yourself upon God's work, and get the ability you want in it. So, if you are put in charge of any such effort or institution; so, if you are called to any work or office in the Church, or to any exercise for the edification of others; say not that you are unable to edify; undertake to edify others, and then you will edify yourself, and become able. So only is it possible for Christian youth to ripen into a vigorous Christian manhood. All the pillars of the Church are made out of what would only be weeds in it, if there were no duties assumed above their ability in the green state of weeds. And it is not the weeds whom Christ will save but the pillars. No Christian will ever be good for anything without Christian courage, or, what is the same, Christian faith. Take upon you readily, have it as a law to be always doing, great works; is, works that are great to you; and this in the faith that God so clearly justifies, that your abilities will be as your works. Make large adventures. Trust in God for great things. With your five loaves and two fishes He will shew you a way to feed. thousands.

that

There is almost no limit to the power that may be exerted by a single church in this or any other community. Fill your places, meet your opportunities, and despair of nothing. Shine lights, because you are luminous; let the Spirit of Christ and

of God be visible in you, because you are filled therewith; and you will begin to see what power is possible to weakness-"Have faith, O ye of little faith." Hear the good word of the Lord, when He says, "I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. Fear not, thou worm, Jacob. Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth; thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff." Such are God's promises. Let us believe them; which, if we can heartily do, nothing is impossible.

XIX.

HE THAT KNOWS GOD WILL CONFESS HIM.

PSALM xl. 10-"I have not hid thy righteousness within my heart;

I have declared thy faithfulness and thy salvation: I have not concealed thy loving-kindness and thy truth from the great congregation."

WHAT any true poet will say is commonly most natural to be said, and deepest in the truth; for his art is to be unrestrained by art, and to let the inspiration of his inmost, deepest life vent itself in song. And this exactly is the manner of our great Psalmist. We are not to understand that, in using the indicative form, he is merely reciting an historic fact, and telling us that he has not hid God's righteousness in his heart. His meaning is deeper-viz., to say that he could not do it, but must needs testify of the goodness, and sing of the sweetness, and exult in the joy, he had found in the salvation of God and the secret witness of His Spirit. Nay, he must even send his song into the temple, and call on all the great congregation of Israel to sing it with him, and raise it as a chorus of praise to the great Jehovah. What I propose, accordingly, at the present time, is to speak of—

The necessary openness of a holy experience; or, in other words, of the impossibility that the inward revelation of God in the soul should be shut up in it, and remain hid or unacknowledged.

I shall have in view especially two classes of hearers that are widely distinguished one from the other; first, the class who hide the grace of God in their heart undesignedly, or by reason of some undue modesty; and secondly, the class who, pretending to have it, or consciously having it not, take a pleasure in throwing discredit on all the appropriate expressions of it, such as are made by the open testimony and formal profession of Christ before men.

The former class are certainly blameable in no such sense or degree as the others. They are naturally timorous and selfdistrustful persons, it may be, and do not see that they are distrusting God rather than themselves. They seem to themselves to have been truly renewed in the love of God, but they have some doubts, and they make it appear to be wiser that they should not, just now, testify their supposed new experience. It is better, they think, to wait till they have had a long, secret trial of themselves, and learned whether they can endure, -better, that is, to see whether they can keep alive the grace under suppression; when it must be infallibly stifled and cannot live, except in the open field of duty and love and holy fellowship. They are not simple; they are unnatural; what is in them, in their feeling, their secret hope, their joy begun, they regulate and suppress. If they were placed in heaven itself, they would not sing the first month, pretending that they had not tried their voices, or perchance doubting whether it is quite modest in them to thank God for His mercy, till they are more sure whether it is really to be sufficient in them. There is a great deal of unbelief in their backwardness; a great deal of self-consciousness in their modesty ; and sometimes a little will is cunningly mixed with both. Sometimes they wait to be exhorted and made much of by the sympathy of others. Sometimes the very wicked thought is cunningly let in, behind their seeming delicacy, that God should do more for them, and give them an experience with greater circumstance.

In opposition, now, to both these classes, and without assuming to measure and graduate the exact degree of their blame before God, I undertake to shew that, where there is a true grace of experience in the heart, it ought to be, must, and will be manifest. And I bring to your notice—

1. The evident fact that a true inward experience or discovery of God in the heart is itself an impulse also of selfmanifestation, as all love and gratitude are—wants to speak and declare itself, and will as naturally do it, when it is born, as a child will utter its first cry. And exactly this, as I just now said, is what David means-viz., that he had been obliged to speak, and was never able to shut up the fire burning in his

spirit from the first moment when it was kindled. He speaks as one who could not find how to suppress the joy that filled his heart, but must needs break loose in a testimony for God. And so it is in all cases the instinct of a new heart, in its experience of God, to acknowledge Him. No one ever thinks it a matter of delicacy, or genuine modesty, entirely to suppress any reasonable joy; least of all, any fit testimony of gratitude toward a deliverer and for a deliverance. In such a case no one ever asks what is the use? where is the propriety? for it is the simple instinct of his nature to speak, and he speaks.

Thus, if one of you had been rescued, in a shipwreck on a foreign shore, by some common sailor who had risked his life to save you, and you should discover him across the street in some great city, you would rush to his side, seize his hand, and begin at once, with a choking utterance, to testify your gratitude to him for so great a deliverance. Or, if you should pass restrainedly on, making no sign, pretending to yourself that you might be wanting in delicacy or modesty to publish your private feelings, by any such eager acknowledgment of your deliverer, or that you ought first to be more sure of the genuineness of your gratitude, what opinion must we have, in such a case, of your heartlessness and falseness to nature. In the same simple way, all ambition apart, all conceit of self forgot, all artificial and mock modesty excluded, it will be the instinct of every one that loves God to acknowledge Him. He will say with our Psalmist, on another occasion, "Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul. Verily God hath heard me; he hath attended to the voice of my prayer."

2. The change implied in a true Christian experience, or the revelation of God in the heart, is in its very nature the soul and root of an outward change that is correspondent. The faith implanted is a faith that works in appropriate demonstrations, and must as certainly work, as a living heart must beat or pulsate. It is the righteousness of God revealed within, to be henceforth the actuating spring and power of a righteous and devoted life. It will inform the whole man. It will glow in the countenance. It will irradiate the eye. It will speak from the tongue. It will modulate the very gait. all the transactions of business, the domestic tempers, the social

It will enter into