dervaluing of this part of the Christian | the pages of the word of His testimonydispensation. The office of the Holy let us feel assured that in Him or in His Ghost as a revealer is little adverted to, communications there is no darkness at and therefore little proceeded upon in any all. It is not because He is dark, but be

cause we are blind that we do not understand Him; and we give you, not a piece of inert orthodoxy, but a piece of information which may be turned to use and

of our practical movements. We set ourselves forth to the work of reading and understanding the Bible, just as we would any human composition-and this is so far right for it is only when thus em- to account on your very next perusal of

ployed that we have any reason to look for the Spirit's agency in our behalf. But surely the fact of His agency being essential, is one, not of speculative but of practical importance and ought to admonish us, that there is one peculiarity, by which the book of God stands distinguished from the book of a human author, and that is that it is not enough it should be read with the spirit of attention, but with the spirit of dependence and of prayer.

We should like if this important part in the process of man's recovery to God, held a more conspicuous place in your estimation. We should like you to view it as a standing provision for the church of Christ in all ages. It was not set up for a mere temporary purpose, to shed a fleeting brilliancy over an age of gifted and illuminated men that has now rolled by. Such is the value, and such the permanency of this gift of the Holy Ghost, that it almost looks to be the great and ultimate design of Christ's undertaking, to obtain the dispensation of it, as the accomplishment of a promise by His Father. And when Peter explained to the multitude its first and most wondrous exhibition on the day of Pentecost, he did not restrict it to one period or to one country of the world. But the gift of the Holy Ghost is " unto you," he says, "and to your children, and to as many as the Lord our God shall call." We think that if we saw Christ in person, and had the explanation of our Bibles from His own mouth, this would infallibly conduct us to the highest eminences of spiritual wisdom. But blessed be they who have not seen, but yet have believed and Christ hath expressly told us, that it is better He should go away from the world, for "if He did not go away the Spirit would not come-but that if He went away He would send Him." What the mysterious connection is between Christ's entrance into heaven, and the free egress of the Holy Ghost upon earth, it is not for us to enquire. But such is the revealed fact, that we are in better circumstances for being guided unto all truth by having a part and an interest in this promise, than if we had personal access to the Saviour still sojourning and still ministering amongst us. Let us not despise that whic has SO mighty a place assigned to it in the counsels of God-and if heretofore, a darkness has hung over

any part of the Bible-when we say that it is the office of the Spirit to open the eye of your mind to the meaning of its intimations, and that God will not refuse His holy Spirit to those who ask Him.

This brings us by a very summary process to the resolution of the question How is it that the Spirit acts as a revealer of truth to the human understanding? To deny Him this office, on the one hand, is, in fact, to set aside what by the fullest testimony of the Bible is held forth as the process, in every distinct and individual case, whereby each man at his conversion is called out of darkness into marvellous light. On the other hand, to deny such a fulness and such a sufficiency of doctrine in the Bible, as if beheld and believed is enough for salvation, is to count it necessary that something should be added to the words of the prophecy of this book, which if any man do, God will add unto him all the plagues that are written therein. There is no difficulty in effecting a reconciliation between these two parties. The Spirit guides unto all truth, and all truth is to be found in the Bible-The Spirit therefore guides us unto the Bible. He gives us that power of discernment, by which we are wisely and intelligently conducted through all its passages. His office is not to brighten into additional splendour the sun of revelation, or even to clear away any clouds that may have gathered over the face of it. His office is to clarify our organs of perception, and to move away that film from the spiritual eye, which, till He begins to operate, adheres with the utmost obstinacy in the case of every individual of our species. The ebbs and the alternations of spiritual light in our world, are not due to any fluctuating movements, in the flame, which issues from that luminary that has been hung out as a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our paths. It is due to the variations which take place, of soundness or disease, in the organs of the beholders. That veil which was at one time on the face of Moses, is now upon the heart of the unconverted Israelites. The blindness is in their minds, and they are in darkness, just because of this veil being yet untaken away in the reading of the Old Testament. When they turn to the Lord, there will be no change made either in the Old Testament or in the New-but this veil which is now upon ever-during record. The light is near us, their faculties of spiritual discernment, and round about us; and all that remains will simply be taken away. The uncon- to be done for its being poured into the

verted of our own country, to whom the gospel is hid, do not perceive it, not because there is a want of light in the gospel which would need to be augmented, but because the God of this world hath blinded their own minds, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ who is the image of God should shine unto them. God hath already commended all the external light of revelation, which he ever purposes to do, in behalf of our worldand that light shines upon all to whom to the openness of day some secret thing

innermost recesses of every soul, is the destruction of that little tegument which lies in the channel of communication, between the objects which are visible and him for whose use and whose perception they are intended. To come in contact with spiritual light, we have not to ascend into heaven, and fetch an illuminated torch from its upper sanctuaries-we have not to descend into the deep, and, out of the darkness of its hidden mysteries, bring

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gle shall have the whole body full of light.' 'Light is sown unto the upright, and breaketh forth as the morning to those who judge the widow and the fatherless. To him who hath, more shall be given' and 'he who keepeth my sayings, to him will I manifest myself.' These are testimonies which clearly bespeak, what ought to be the conduct of him who is in quest of spiritual manifestation. They will serve to guide the seeker in his way to that rest, which all attain who have attained an acquaintance with the unseen Creator. It is a rest which he labours to enter into and, in despite of freezing speculation, does he turn the call of repentance to the immediate account of urging himself on to all deeds of conformity with the divine will, to all good and holy services.

certain virtues is blind and cannot see | darkness. He who is desirous of doing afar off; and another, that men who did God's will shall know of Christ's doctrine not, up to what they knew, award the that it is of God.' He whose eye is singlory and the gratitude to God, had their foolish hearts darkened, so as to have that which they at one time possessed taken away from them; and our Saviour resolving the condemnation of men's unbelief into the principle that they loved the darkness, and therefore wilfully shut their eyes to the truth that was offered all this goes to demonstrate, that presumptuous sin stands in the way of spiritual discernment; that evil deeds, and the indulgence of evil affections, serve to thicken that film which has settled upon the mental eye, and obscures its every perception of the truths of revelation. And this much at least may be turned into a matter of sure and practical inference from all these elucidations that the man who is not yet awakened to a sense of his iniquities, and not evincing it by putting forth upon them the hand of a strenuous and determined reform; that the man who stifles the voice of conscience within him, and, the slave of his inveterate habits, never, either in practice or in prayer, makes an honest struggle for his own emancipation; that he who makes not a single effort against the conformities or the associations of worldliness; and, far more, he who still persists in its dishonesties or its grosser dissipations-he may stand all his days on the immediate margin of a brightness that is altogether celestial, and yet, in virtue of an interposed barrier which he is doing all he can to make more opake and impenetrable, may he, with the Bible before his eyes, be groping in all the darkness and in more than all the guilt of heathenism. These sins infuse a sore and a deadly distemper into his organs of perception, and by every wilful repetition of them is the distemper more fixed and perpetuated and therefore it is that we call upon those who desire for light, to cherish no hope whatever of its attainment, while they persist in any doings which they know to be wrong. We call upon them to frame their doings in turning to the Lord if they wish the veil to be taken away-and, instead of hesitating about the order of precedency between faith and practice, or about the way in which they each reciprocate upon the other, we call upon them simply and honestly to betake themselves to the apostolical order of "Awake, O sinner, and Christ shall give thee light."

There is another set of passages which may be quoted as a counterpart to the former, and which go to demonstrate the connection between obedience and spiritual light-even as the others prove a connection between sin and spiritual

But more than this. It is the Spirit who opens the understanding; and He is affected by the treatment which He receives from the subject on which He operates. It is true that He has been known at times to magnify the freeness of the grace of God, by arresting the sinner in the full speed and determination of his impetuous career; and turning him, in despite of himself, to the refuge and the righteousness of the gospel. But, speaking generally, He is grieved by resistance, He is quenched by carelessness, He is provoked by the constant baffling of His endeavours, to check and to convince and to admonish. On the other hand He is courted by compliance; He is encouraged by the favourable reception of His influences; He is given in larger measure to those who obey Him; and He follows up your docility under one dictate and one suggestion, by freer and fuller manifestations. In other words, if to thwart your conscience be to thwart Him, and if to act with your conscience be to act with Him -what is this to say, but that every inquirer after the way of salvation, has something to do at the very outset in the furtherance of his object? What is this to say, but that a nascent concern about the soul should instantly be associated with a nascent activity in the prosecution of its interests? What is this to say, but that the man should, plainly and in good earnest, forthwith turn himself to all that is right? If he have been hitherto a drunkard, let him abandon his profligacies. If he have been hitherto a profaner of the Sabbath, let him abandon the habit of taking his own pleasure upon that day. If he have been hitherto a defrauder, let him abandon his deceits and his depredations. And though in that region of spiritual light upon which he is entering, he | last messenger is at the door. There is

will learn that he never can be at peace with God till he lean on a better righteousness than his own-yet such is the influence of the doctrines of grace on every genuine inquirer, that, from the first dawning of his obscure perception of them, to the splendour of their full and finished manifestation, is there the breaking and the stir and the assiduous effort of a busy and ever-doing reformationcarrying him onwards from the more palpable rectitudes of ordinary and everyday conduct, to the high and sacred and spiritual elevation of a soul ripening for heaven, and following hard after God.

• We know that we are now standing on the borders of controversy. But we are far more solicitous for such an impression as will lead you to act, than for any speculative adjustment. And yet how true it is, that, for the purpose of a practical effect, there is not one instrument so powerful and so prevailing as the peculiar doctrine of the gospel. It is the belief that a debt unextinguishable by us has been extinguished by another it is the knowledge that that God, who can never lay aside either His truth or His righteousness, has found out such a way for the dispensation of mercy as serves to exalt and to illustrate them both it is the view of that great transaction by which Helaid on His own Son the iniquities of us all, and has thus done away an otherwise invincible barrier which lay across the path of acceptance-it is the precious conviction that Christ has died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and thus has turned aside the penalties of a law, and by the very act wherewith He has magnified that law and made it honourable it is this, which seen, however faintly by the eye of faith, first looses the bond of despair, and gives a hope and an outlet for obedience. The subtile metaphysics of the question, about the order of succession with the two graces of faith and of repentance, may entertain or they may perplex you. But of this you may be very certain, that, where there is no repentance, all the dogmas of a contentious orthodoxy put together will never make out the reality of faith-and, where there is no faith, all the drudgeries of a most literal and laborious adherence to the outward matter of the law will never make out the reality of repentance.

Life is too short for controversy. Charged with all the urgency of a matter on hand, we tell you to turn and flee and make fast work of your preparation for a coming eternity. The sum and substance of the preparation is, that you believe what the Bible tells you, and do what the Bible bids you. Bestir yourselves, for the

not time for cold criticisms, or laborious investigations, or splendid oratory, or profound argument-when death has broke loose amongst us, and is spreading his havoc amongst our earthly tabernacleswhen he is wresting away from us the delights and the ornaments of our society upon earth-when he is letting us see, by examples the most affecting, of what frail and perishable materials human life is made up and is dealing out another and another reproof to that accursed delay, which leads man to trifle on the brink of the grave, and to smile and be secure, while the weapons of mortality are flying thick around him. When will we be brought to the beginning of wisdom-to the fear of God to the desire of doing His will to the accomplishment of that desire, by our believing in the name of His only-begotten Son, and loving one another even as He has given us commandment? Let us work while it is day -and, set in motion by the encouragements of the gospel, let us instantly become the followers of them who through faith and patience are now inheriting the promises.

You occasionally meet in the New Testament, with an express reference to a certain body of writings, which are designated by the term of Scriptures. We now apply this term to the whole Bible. But, in those days, it was restricted to that collection of pieces which makes up the Old Testament. For the new was only in the process of its formation, and was not yet completed; and it was not till some time after the evangelists wrote their narratives, and the apostles their communications, that they were gathered into one volume, or made to stand in equal and coordinate rank with the inspired books of the former dispensation.

So that all which is said of the Scriptures in the New Testament, must be regarded as the testimony of its authors to the value and importance of those writings which compose the Old Testament. And it would therefore appear from Paul's epistle to Timothy, that they are able to make us wise unto salvation.

There can be no doubt, however that one ingredient of this ability is, that they refer us in a way so distinct and so authoritative to the events of the New Dispensation. They give evidence to the commission of our Saviour, and through Him to the commission of all His apostles. The wisdom which they teach, is a wisdom which would guide us forward to the posterior revelations of Christianity. The Old Testament is a region of comparative dimness. But still there is light enough there, for making visible the many in

dices which abound in it, to the more illuminated region of the New Testamentand, by sending us forward to that region, by pointing our way to Christ and to the apostles, by barely informing us where we are to get the wisdom that we are in quest of even though it should not convey it to us by its own direct announcements, it may be said to be able to make wise unto salvation.

The quotation taken in all its completeness is in full harmony, with the statement which we have now given. From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, through the faith that is in Christ Jesus.'

Christian can now read the very first promise in the book of Genesis, that the seed of the woman should bruise the head of the serpent,' which only served to light up a vague and general expectation in the minds of our first parents he can now read it with the same full intelligence and comfort, wherewith he reads in the book of the Romans that the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.'

But there is still more in it than this. If there be any truth in the process whereby the Holy Spirit adds to the power of discernment, as well as to the truths which are to be discerned-then this increased power will enable us to see more-not merely in the later, but also in the earlier truths of revelation, than we would otherwise have done. It is like a blind man, in full and open day, gradually recovering his sight as he stands by the margin of a variegated parterre. Without any augmentation whatever of the external light, is there a progress of revelation to his senses, as to all the beauty and richness and multiplicity of the objects which are before him. What he sees at veals to us those more distant tracts that zling uniformity, over the whole length were utterly unobserved, causes to start and breadth of that space which is in

But there is more in it than this. The same light from heaven by which the doctrine of the New Testament has been made visible, has also made more visible the same doctrine, which in the Old lay disguised under the veil of a still unfinished revelation. In the first blush of morning, there is much of the landscape that we cannot see at all-and much that we do see, but see imperfectly. The same ascending luminary which re- first, may be no more than a kind of daz

out into greater beauty and distinctness, the fields and the paths and the varied forms of nature or of art that are immediately around us-till we come to perceive an extended impress of the character and the goodness of the Divinity, over the whole range of our mid-day contemplation. It is thus with the Bible. That light, in virtue of which the pages of the New Testament have been disclosed to observation, has shed both a direct and a reflected splendour on the pages of the Old-insomuch that from certain chapters of Isaiah, which lay shrouded in mystery both from the prophet himself and from all his countrymen-as in reading of Him who bore the chastisement of our peace, and by whose stripes we are healed, and who poured out His soul unto the death, and made intercession for transgressorswe now draw all the refreshing comfort that beams upon the heart, from an intelligent view of our Redeemer's work of mediation; and behold plainly standing out, that which lay wrapt, in a kind of hieroglyphic mantle, from the discernment of the wisest and most righteous of men under a former dispensation Thi This power of illumination reaches upward, beyond

scribed with so many visible glories; and, afterwards, may plants and flowers stand out in their individuality to his notice; and then may the distinctive colours of each come to be recognized; and then may the tints of minuter delicacy call forth his admiration-till all which it is competent for man to perceive, of what has been so profusely lavished by the hand of the great Artist, either in one general blush of loveliness, or in those nicer and more exquisite streaks of beauty which He hath pencilled in more hidden characters, on the specimens of flowers and foliage taken singly, shall all be perceived and all be rapturously enjoyed by the man, whose eyes have just been opened into a full capacity for beholding the wondrous things, which lie a spread and a finished spectacle before him. And it is the same with the Bible. That book which stands before the eye of many an accomplished disciple in this world's literature, as transfused throughout all its extent with one pervading and indiscriminate character of mysticism, gradually opens up to the eye of him who is rescued from the power of the god of this world, and whose office it is to blind the minds of them who

the confines of the letter of the New Tes- believe not; and he beholds one general

tament; and throws an evangelical light upon the remotest parts of an economy which has now pessed away. The rays of our brightest un have fallen in a flood of glory over the oldest and most distant of our recorded intimations; and a

impress both of wisdom and of moral beauty upon the whole; and he forms a growing and more special intimacy with its individual passages; and feels a weight of significancy in many of them, which he never felt before; and he is touched