Elijah-thereby maintaining and exemplifying the distinction between the secret things which belong unto God, and the revealed things which belong to us and to our children.

And surely if God, even at the time of a special and extraordinary communication to one of His highest prophets-when telling him of these seven thousand men―reserved the secret of their predestination, and laid all the stress upon their practice -Surely it is not for us, unvisited by any such illumination, to explore the dark recesses of a past eternity, or seek to open the book of God's decrees, that we may find the names of the persons who are recorded there. There is a better method, and one nearer at hand, by which to assure ourselves that we are the subjects of a blessed ordination, even by doing as these Hebrew saints in the days of Elijah, by keeping ourselves unspotted from the world. The Lord knoweth them that are His, and so knew them from all eternity. But man knoweth them that are the Lord's in another way; and this in virtue of the perfect, the never-failing harmony, which obtains between the election and the sanctification. It is true that God predestinates to eternal life, but never without predestinating those whom he designs for this glorious inheritance to be conformed to the image of His Son.1 Election is anterior to character-Yet so unbroken is the connection between them, that character becomes a criterion by which to ascertain the election. For 1 Romans, viii, 29.

this we need not aspire to the inaccessible steeps which are above, but have only to persevere in the toils of our appointed task below. "The Lord knoweth them that are his," and some there are who love to carry upward their speculation there, even to the highest point of a high and supralapsarian Calvinism. Let not this supersede the carefulness wherewith every Christian should observe, nor yet the earnestness wherewith every Christian minister should urge the saying "Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity." 1

But there is something more in this verse which we have not yet adverted to-fitted to animate and cheer the heart of him who eyes with despondency the present moral and religious state, whether of the country or of the world. We mean the superiority by which God's estimate, or the true estimate, of what was still good in Israel, exceeded in amount that of the prophet. The even so' of the next verse warrants our making this application. Elijah's imagination was, that he stood alone; but God knew better, and told him of seven thousand who were like-minded with himself. And so are there many in this our day, and sometimes the more saintly and spiritual are the most liable to this miscalculation, who, as they contemplate the prevalence of infidelity and wickedness around them, underrate the Christianity both of their own neighbourhood and of the nation at large. The 12 Timothy, ii, 19.

number of God's hidden ones may be

greater than we think of-known only to Him, and in places where we have no suspicion of their existence. It is thus that the pleasing discovery is sometimes made within the bosom of vicinities and households where we least expected it; and many, we trust, even at short distances from our own habitation, are the unseen heirs of grace and immortality, whom we shall never recognise as such till we meet them in heaven. It were better certainly for the interests both of personal and public Christianity, that all real disciples of the truth as it is in Jesus, should know each other better, and company with each other more. And this makes our obligation all the more imperative of "confessing with the mouth the Lord Jesus,"1 or of coming forth with those frank and intrepid avowals which might "declare plainly that they seek a country"-and thus, by leading to a greater mutual acquaintanceship, might bring these fellow-travellers to Zion more closely and constantly beside each other. It were well in these expectants of a higher citizenship, these voyagers for heaven, to seek out each other by the way-and that not merely for a benefit to themselves, from the fellowship or communion of saints here; but for the greater command which it would enable them to wield over the moral destinies of the world. Union, it has often been said, is strength; but it is not in the secret, but in the ostensible union of the friends and followers of 1 Rom. x, 9. 2 Heb. xi, 14. 3 John, xvii, 21.

Christianity, that the great strength of their cause lies; and what with the greater force of that cementing principle which binds them together, as well as the mighty hold which their peculiar objects have over conscience, the highest faculty of our nature, we should look for the greatest possible results from their visible combination-in speeding onward the triumphs of the faith, or the full and final establishment in the world of the empire of Truth and Righteousness.

And it is not enough that we look to the state of Christianity as it now stands. We should look to Christianity in progress. For by however small a fraction we may compute its hold of our species now, a time is coming when we shall cease to count it by minorities and remnants. The eye of God not only explores the present; but, with a thorough cognisance of time as well as space, it reaches onward to the most distant futurity. He not only knows, but He foreknows. By the voice of an immediate revelation, He gave comfort to the despairing heart of Elijah, when He told him of the numbers, who, even at the time of what seemed an all but universal defection and idolatry, still held by the true religion. And by the voice of prophecy in Scripture, He gives the like comfort to us, as we cast perhaps a desponding eye over the moral state and prospects of the world-in the bright perspective which He there has opened up to us, of the enlargement and the triumphs that still await the gospel of His Son. For amid all

that is fitted to darken and discourage, we should recollect of the present that it is but the infancy of the Christian religion, and that we are yet among the struggles and the uncertainties of its embryo state. To have some idea of the glorious and magnificent expansion before us, we have only to look at the millennium of our regenerated world in the dimenisons of prophecy, where every day is a year and every year is made up of centuries-insomuch that what may be termed the middle age of Christianity, is reckoned by only three years and a half, comprehensive though it be of many generations. And beyond this spectacle of blessedness and glory, we have the glimpse of further and larger developments, which, in the closing chapter of the book of Revelation, retire onward from the view till lost in the distances of eternity. Could we see the whole in the light of the Infinite Mind, the perfect wisdom and perfect goodness of all His purposes would be seen most gloriously; and as even in one of Israel's darkest days, when He told of the seven thousand whom He reserved to Himself, He alleviated the brooding imagination of the prophet, and taught him not to think so despairingly of the state of his nation-so could we be made to behold across our present day of small things, the evolutions of a greatness and prosperity still in reserve even for a world now lying in wickedness; or did the mighty and successive eras of the Divine administration rise in vision before us, then, instead of looking forward with dejection or dismay, we should lift up