LECTURE VI. REVELATION iii. 3. Remember, therefore, how thou hast received and heard; and hold fast, and repent. In the last church-state, of which we considered the Church in Thyatira to be the type, we beheld the Christian Church suffering deeply and grievously from the errors and the oppression of Popery. We traced it during the time when that unscriptural system was predominant, and we concluded at the period of the ever-blessed Reformation, when the infliction of the threatened punishment had commenced, when the Church of Rome had been cast upon her bed of languishing, from which she never since has arisen, and from which she never shall arise, in her pristine energy and health, but shall continue wasting gradually, yet surely, until she go hence and be no more seen. The Church of Sardis, then, of which we are to speak this day, we believe to be the type of the Christian Church after the Reformation, including the present period within its limits and stretching on even to that blessed and happy time, foretold by the prophet, when "knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea.”* We commence by again calling your attention to the appropriate nature of the preface to the epistle before us. "These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars." The seven stars are, as we are told in the 20th verse verse of the 1st * Isaiah xi. 9. chapter, the symbols of the angels, or bishops, of the seven Churches; while the phrase, “the seven Spirits of God," is the language which the evangelist adopts in the 4th verse of the same chapter to express God the Holy Ghost, in this remarkable benediction, "Grace be unto you and peace, from Him which is, and which was, and which is to come; and from the seven Spirits which are before His throne; and from Jesus Christ;" clearly showing that the seven Spirits before the throne can intend only "God the Holy Ghost," since no created beings could ever have been united by the apostle, with God the Father and God the Son, as the eternal source of grace and peace. Our Lord, therefore, in the passage before us, by describing Himself as one who hath "the seven Spirits of God," intends to remind His Church, that He has, as the prophet Malachi expresses it, "the residue of the Spirit ;" that Christ and |