even then corrupted the simplicity of Christ's religion, calling themselves by a name which implied that they, and they alone, knew the gospel, and explaining away its plain statements by mystical interpretations. In opposition to their fanciful assertions of the unreal and delusive character of Christ's humanity, the apostle declares that in Him, in His real and bodily form, dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead. "And ye," he goes on, "are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power; in whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands;" and that circumcision he defines to be "the putting off the sins of the flesh." He tells them farther, that they are buried with Christ in baptism, wherein also they are risen with Him, through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised Him from the dead-(that is, by believing those inspired messengers who bore witness to the truth of Christ's resurrection)-that, moreover, when they were dead in their sins and the circumcision of their flesh, God had made them alive together with Christ, having forgiven them all trespasses; "blotting out the hand-writing of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross." After inferring, from this abolition of the Mosaic law, the errors of the Judaising Christians, and having warned the Colossians against them, St. Paul proceeds, in the text and the verses which follow it, to state the consequences which flow from the condition which he has thus

declared to be that of Christians; namely, from their participation in the death, the burial, and the resurrection of their Saviour. If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God; set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth: for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

Let us, then, having thus traced the connexion of the inspired argument, endeavour to extract from these words all the fulness of their meaning. Let us examine the sense in which the apostle declares to the Colossians, and in them to the whole Christian Church, that they were partakers in the death and in the resurrection of Christ.

Now Christians are said, in the New Testament, to be both dead and risen with their Lord, in two senses in the first place, actually; and in the second place, virtually and potentially. In the first place, by the mere fact of their admission into a state of covenant with God. In the second place, by the power received in consequence of that adoption. By the first and lowest sense is declared what they have actually been made, as Christians; by the second is described what they may all become, if their own sins defeat not the operation of God's grace. The first meaning announces a privilege; the second enforces a duty.

To explain this more fully. First, as to the Christian's actual, secondly, as to his potential, death and resurrection with Christ.

In the first place, we find St. Paul repeatedly declaring that every Christian has become a sharer in Christ's death, by the very form of his admission into the Church. As, where he reminds the Roman converts, that so many of them as were baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into his death, "therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death." And this he urges to enforce his question, "How shall we that are dead to sin, live any longer therein." And as here he represents Christians as actually dead to sin, so in the following chapter he declares that they are become dead to the law. In the former case addressing himself to the Gentiles, in the latter to the Jews; and telling both alike, that by their admission into the Christian Church they had entered into a new state of spiritual being, and were consequently dead to their former state; whether, on the one hand, it had been a state of heathen vice, or, on the other, of Mosaic bondage. And in both cases he gives the reason why this deliverance had been wrought out for them. To the Gentile-"We are buried with Christ by baptism unto death; that, like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." To the Jew-"We are dead unto the law; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter." We must remember, too, that this actual death to a former state of being, was typified in the outward form of that rite which admitted the converts into union with the flock of Christ; when

the baptized person was plunged below the surface of the water, and thus made to undergo a kind of burial, to represent the transition he was making from one existence to another. And it is this to which St. Paul so often alludes, when he speaks of our being buried with Christ by baptism, and thereby made to share the death of our Lord.

Inseparably connected with this actual death, which, in the sense above explained, the Christian undergoes, is the resurrection from it to a new and higher state of being. "Ye are buried with Christ in baptism," says the apostle, "wherein also ye are risen with Him;" in fact, death and resurrection are here simultaneous; or rather, this death is itself resurrection, since by it we are delivered from a state of real spiritual death. And this explains the true agreement of those seemingly inconsistent metaphors, in which Christians are said to be "dead with Christ," yet again "alive from the dead;" as, for instance, where St. Paul tells the Ephesians that God had, when they were dead in sins, quickened them (that is, made them alive) together with Christ. All such expressions describe (metaphorically indeed, but in such metaphors as to denote the vast magnitude of the change effected,) that new state of privilege into which the Christian (by the very necessity of his condition as a Christian,) is initiated. They indicate a great difference between the spiritual condition of a Christian and a Heathen, and a difference which depends, not upon the use they have made of advantages received

alike by both, but upon the gifts bestowed upon the one, and denied to the other. The very knowledge of the way of life imparted, the aid of the Holy Spirit offered to every Christian, give him powers, and impose on him responsibilities, which separate him by the widest gulf from one who has no heavenly teaching to guide, no divine assistance to support him. And these powers, this responsibility, are conferred by God's free election; by the very same election which determines that he shall be born in an English cottage, rather than in an Arabian tent. Thus, independently of any merit of his own, he becomes engrafted into the Church of Christ; and, as one of its members, he is the actual partaker, in the sense here explained, of his Saviour's death and resurrection.

But there is a higher sense in which Christians are said to be dead and risen with Christ, not actually, but potentially. For these privileges bestowed upon them, this federal participation in their Saviour's passion and exaltation, are given for the end that they might be thereby enabled to partake, in a fuller and more availing manner, of a spiritual death to sin, a moral resurrection to goodness. These gifts, procured by a Redeemer's blood for them, the inward aid of God's Holy Spirit, the admission to constant audience at the throne of grace, contain in themselves virtually all the holiness of heart and life which forms the true essence of Christianity; just as the seed virtually contains the plant, the acorn the oak. The