he became the substitute of sinners, which we cannot be; for herein was seen the essential dignity and price of his Divine person substituted in flesh for those of men. But in all his jealousy for God, in all his worship of God, in all his trust on God, in all his grief for sin, in all his condemnation of it, in all his mortification of the flesh to all things in the world, in all the love which teemed from his human heart, in all the peaceful simplicity and singleness of his walk, in all his unshaken persuasion of things unseen and eternal, we are called to imitate him to the very letter; for God can never expect less of the regeneration than of his original creation, without admitting the Fall as a righteous excuse for man's iniquity. We have the same spirit of faith as Christ, to do the same works: and if man under the Law be guilty of all by breaking one point, the Gospel were truly a bounty on sin, did it represent God as ready to be contented with a short-coming which his Law condemned, or with any thing less than the fulfilment of the righteousness of the law in us. The condition stated in Rom. vii. is the wrong condition of a saint. Paul cried out" wretched," because he was in it. Christ is no deliverer out of a right state. It is not a contest with the flesh, but a victory over it, its crucifixion, its death, that constitutes holiness; and if the working of the flesh be sin, it is impossible, without supposing God to approve sin, to regard him as approving a condition in which the flesh is in any degree at work. Increase of holiness stands not in bettering, but in multiplying the works of the Spirit. Satan never more effectually gained his end, than by converting our short-comings into excuses for themselves, instead of constant causes why we should abhor ourselves in dust and ashes.

What is this law, the law of God? His very mind delared. It is spiritual; it is holy; it is good (Rom. vii. 12,-14). God made every creature to enjoy, to glorify, to know, to trust, to obey, to declare, him : he made no creature to serve any other end, to feel any other joy, to perceive or display any other glory; especially-oh, mark it well!-he made no creature to serve itself. Man came from God's hand ready to conform himself to God's mind, in whatever manner or degree he might see fit to declare it: and therefore, as long as man was thus right with God, the publication of God's law could be nothing but a blessing to him, whose joy lay in its obedience. It is not of God, but of the devil, that any man feels the declaration of God's mind a sorrow, or the demand that he fulfil it a burden. The inherent office of the Law is unchangeably to bless: its blessing just lies in its fulfilment. When that blessing failed, it was man that marred it: and the power of man so to do lies just in this, that the law has no power to enforce its own obedience; for the power to effect conformity to God's mind resides, not in

that mind itself, but in the Spirit of God, who knoweth it. Blessed be God, who is Love, and who loveth eternally to see men blessed in holy obedience! Woe unto us! for we have turned into a curse every good gift of God in his law: as it is written, that, not the good commandment, but sin, became death unto us (Rom. vii.). Sin came of the devil: it savours of its author: it is the fruit of a lie concerning God, the only Fountain of truth; Christ, the only Image; the Holy Ghost, the only Operator of truth. It is nothing so light as the mere contradiction of a law; it is the contradiction of God, who is love: it is not contingent upon the publication of his law; it is there beforehand. But just as by the law is the knowledge of God, so by it is the knowledge of sin, in the same mode and degree. Sin is condemned by the light: so Christ, having in him the perfect law and light of God, wrought out as a creature, and in the sight of all creatures, God's perfect contradiction of sin. And this he did in flesh of sin; in that flesh of which it is said that in it "dwelleth no good thing;" that it "cannot please God;" and that it "cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven." The Father, being now wearied with the wickedness of man, sent his Son, the comprehensible Person of Godhead, to receive the Holy Ghost, the communicable Person of Godhead; and, so furnished, to glorify God, both in all his love to man and in all his controversy against man's sin; not in the identical flesh of any sinner, but in the flesh of sin or shortcoming; in the same flesh with every sinner; taking up into his person, without Adam's responsibility, the whole representation of Adam; to confess its sin; to undergo its curse with joy; to vindicate God at its hand, while blessing it at the hand of God; to publish in one breath, and on his own person, the judgment and the grace of the Father; to make its death a death at once of debt by the flesh and of grace by the Spirit; and to obtain for the flesh, through death, a life beyond all accusation, straight from the throne of God-a life, not natural, as in creation, but spiritual, by regeneration of the Holy Ghost. All flesh had sinned and come short of God's glory-in other words, had missed the mark of their being—in the fall of Adam and its fruits; but Christ, who sinned not in Adam at all, being then in the Father's bosom, took up all flesh; and, being therein upheld in perfect holiness by the Spirit of his liberal Father in its horrible pit and miry clay, he saw to its end the history of Adam's flesh, and became the Second Adam, on a new footing of eternal and Holy-Ghost life, by resurrection from the dead; invested with authority over all flesh; anointed, as God's King and Priest, with a precious ointment," to "the skirts of his garment (Ps. cxxxiii. 2); the Commissioner of God speaking from heaven; the Interpreter of God to the creature; the Introducer

of the creature to God; the Manifester of God in and by the creature-all through the workmanship of the Holy Ghost, without whom there is no knowledge of Christ, even as without Christ there is no knowledge of God.

But as the relations of Christ to the Father by the Spirit are two-fold-namely, those in which he glorified the Father, and those in which the Father glorifies him-so are those of his people to God through him. Not that the two classes are at variance with each other; for as it was Christ's greatest glory to glorify his Father, so it was at the same time the Father's greatest glory to glorify Him; and as it is our greatest glory to shew forth the praises of God, so is God's greatest glory to be seen in the glorifying of his church. But it is plain, that as our life hid in Christ is a resurrection life, the life of the perfect Christ; and as we are his only witnesses in the earth; it ought to include not only the glory of the Father in him, but the glory of his flesh, as glorified by the Father with the Son's eternal glory before the world was. In the days of his flesh, Christ's main work was the condemnation of sin ; his occasional work, the exhibition of glory. But presently, at the Father's right hand, his chief work is the manifestation of glory, and the preparation of the glory to be revealed with him. The Christ personal has ceased to condemn sin in the flesh, for he has overcome; and he has left to his members the bequest of his conflict, and with it the bequest of the Holy Ghost.

In the days of his flesh, Christ was actually dead unto sin, and by faith set at the Father's right hand: now he is seated on the Father's throne, and dead to sin through the members of his body, the church. And in like manner the church, now called to be actually dead unto sin, do but taste of the powers of the world to come; yet they are called to taste of them. And hence arises the distinction between those fruits of the Spirit which more directly constitute our death unto sin, and those which, as an earnest, bespeak our life unto God-that hidden life, which yet waits its manifestation with Christ. This important distinction, and fulness of furniture to the church, is beautifully apparent in the words of Paul, when he prays for the Thessalonian converts "that God would in them fill up all the good pleasure of goodness, and the work of faith with power; that the name of Jesus Christ our Lord might be glorified in them" (2 Thess. i. 11). And how much the church has now forgotten either to know or to seek the glory of the name of Christ, is in few things to be more distinctly seen than in her utter ignorance of the work of faith with power. Of the manifestation of the Spirit (pavepwog) she knoweth neither the experience nor the profit withal; of its relation to the Lordship of Christ she does not know any thing; and she cannot do so

until she know something of that Lordship itself. For she conceives of it as a mere exhibition of Divine authority, and not as an acquisition by the Man of Sorrows, at once the fruit and the reward of his faith. She makes no more than a spiritual authority of that power in heaven and on earth, over matter and mind, over angels and men, over time and space, over sickness and sin, to the Father's praise, presently belonging to Him by whom and for whom are all things, and who, having by himself purged our sins for ever, has sat down at the right hand of God. In short, she regards the term spiritual as meaning, not what is of the Holy Ghost, be it in matter or in mind, but what is unreal and impalpable: and therefore she is amazed to be told that her testimony, as the epistle of Christ, is wholly a blank as to the most glorious of his characters, that in which he is soon about to come. She has set herself by a thousand arguments to account for, instead of lamenting, the fact that no such demonstration exists; and by a thousand fancies to conjecture the occasions which called forth phenomena almost regarded as fabulous; forgetting the true argument, her paralyzed and withered faith; and the true and standing demand for it, till the Lord come, and his people cease to endure. Nor does she rest here she even glories in her shame; and, instead of being humbled at having so grieved away the Spirit of her Lord, and being so barren in the testimony of his presence, she publishes the absence of any such testimony as a proof incontrovertible that man by wisdom hath come nigher to know God; that the cultivation of the natural man has gone far, and will finally succeed, in removing the necessity for the testimony of the Holy Ghost; and that the truth of God, which could not without signs and wonders have commended itself to illiterate Pagans, can quite well commend itself by simple propriety and fitness, and political advantages, to a civilized population. Now, I am very far indeed from desiring to give the regeneration of the Holy Ghost a place inferior to his extraordinary gifts; for, although few really apprehend, and as few state, the former as a true and proper REGENERATION, it is surely a far more marvellous thing that a dead man should be made alive, and an old man made a new creature to God, than that a new creature should receive a gift, and a vessel of grace be made an instrument of God's power. Yet I have no hesitation in saying, though I say it in sorrow of heart, that any man who is as well pleased to be without as to have the visible manifestation of Christ's Lordship in his church, prefers Christ as a notion to Christ as a person, and lives on the faith of Christ as a totally different thing from the evidence of his unseen but personal presence. He is in that matter really not loving Christ (for we cannot have too many tokens from one we love); and he would be as well pleased to keep

Christ for ever at a convenient distance, by a form of faith, as to see him eye to eye, and exclaim, "This is our God; we have waited for him: Hallelujah! the marriage of the Lamb is come.' Nor do I feel less constrained to say, that any man who pleads the improvement of society as an argument against the need for such a manifestation in the present condition of the church, is in that matter simply denying the Holy Ghost altogether. What! does he not know, that whatever a man learns, he learns either of God or of the devil? If mankind have really learned so largely of God, I see not the fruits thereof 9 and cannot imagine that those who are the temples of the Spirit should be so filled with zeal against the very idea of his manifest working. Indeed, it is only because men do not shew that their so-called holiness is of the Spirit, that it is not equally blasphemed. And if mankind have not been learning of God, then the more largely, only the worse; the more they have learnt of the liar, the less are they disposed to the truth: and the more that liar has seduced men to look upon his lies as preparatives for the truth, or as a set of rival truths, the more need is there that Christ do disabuse them of the wisdom of the serpent by the power of God, and decide by signs and wonders between God and Baal. If ignorance of the true God called for the demonstration of the Spirit, a superadded knowledge of this world's god calls for it no less; and that the more, now that he comes as an angel of light to regenerate the earth, to make a god of man, and a kingdom of heaven out of man's inventions. Let the elect beware! They stand by faith: let them betake themselves from the visible things of the devil, and dwell in God within the veil, seeing Him who is invisible: and, oh, let them wrestle with the God of Jacob, till he water the parched land of a popular, intellectual, and mercantile church with the morning dew and simple refreshment of the Holy Ghost. Then shall they know how to stand; for greater is He that is in them, than he that is in the world. "Behold," saith the Lord, "I and the children which God hath given me" (Heb. ii. 13), when he speaketh of all the sons of God, past, present, and to come, since he rose receiving gifts for man. "Shall be for signs and wonders," saith the same Spirit, in Isai. viii. 18. "Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature" (Mark xvi. 15), is the present watchword and warrant of all those unscriptural societies which are at once denying God's love to the world, and seeking to convert it all without Christ, instead of calling out the election for Christ from a love-despising world; as our Knox saw right, when he said, "To reform the face of the whole earth never was, nor yet shall be, till that the righteous King and Judge appear, for the restoration of all things" (Treatise of Fasting). "These