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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 "the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea.

a

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 of the 1st

a 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 shewing 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

His Spirit are never separated; that if we "have not the Spirit of Christ we are none of His ;" and that if we desire a real revival of religion in the Church at large, such as marked the era of the Reformation, or a distinct and influential increase of spiritual feeling in our own hearts, they are to be obtained entirely by the outpouring of God the Holy Ghost, and this can only be expected by earnest, faithful, persevering application to Him, who hath "the residue of the Spirit." A truth how well remembered during the first days of the Reformation, let the prayers and the practices of the whole body of Protestant confessors and Protestant martyrs most loudly tell; but alas! ought we not to add, also, a truth how lamentably forgotten, how seldom acknowledged, how little acted upon, in the Protestant Church, after the first ardour of the Reformation cooled, let almost a century of deadness and formality in the reformed

Churches, both on the continent and at home, as plainly declare. Thanks be

to God, however, this truth is once again reviving, and men will now hear of spiritual influences, without ridicule; and of the operations of the Holy Ghost, without prejudice; and of the necessity of being born again of the Spirit, and renewed by the Spirit, and directed daily and hourly by the good Spirit of our God, without doubting, with Festus of old, the sanity of the speaker, or believing that such vital and blessed truths have their origin in the heated brain of the enthusiast. For this, we desire continually to thank God; for we believe that never is there in any age, a real increase of true religion, and practical holiness, without its having been preceded and accompanied by a wide extension of this great truth, and a large outpouring of the spirit of prayer, for these divine and essential spiritual influences.

We proceed to the consideration of