! with God through Jesus Christ, and re-confirmed afterwards, was a hope that same truth with the more remote and ul- | upon your minds between the hope of joice in the hope of His glory. Now the second hope is distinct from this first, and is grounded on distinct considerations-not upon what the believer sees to be in the testimony of God, but upon what he finds to be in himself-It is the fruit, not of faith, but of experience; and is gathered, not from the word that is without, but from the feeling of what passes within. One would like to know how the first and the second hopes find their adjustment, and their respective places, in the bosom of a disciple; and what is the precise addition which the latter of these brings to the former of them -whether the want of the second would larken and extinguish the first, by making aim ashamed of it. This matter can be illustrated as before by the case of Abraham. God, in his first communication with him, made him a twofold promise-one of which was to have its fulfilment many ages after, and another of which was to be fulfilled in his own life time. He promised that in him all the families of the earth should be blessed; and He also promised that, upon his leaving his own country, He should meet with him and show him the land that his posterity were to inherit. Abraham simply in virtue of faith would hope for the accomplishment of both promises. He would both see afar off the day of Christ and rejoice; and he would also leave his own country, in the confident expectation of again meeting with God, and having the land of his descendants pointed out to him. Conceive him then to have been disappointed in this expectation-to have wandered in vain without once meeting the promised manifestation -to have had no other message or visitation from the heavens save the first, which, by warranting the hope of another that it did not realise, would give him ground to suspect was a delusive one. Would not Abraham, in this case, have been ashamed of his rash confidence, and of his hasty enterprise, and of the vain and hazardous evils into which he had thrown himself? Would not the fallacy of the promise that he looked for in life, lead him to withdraw all confidence in the promise that was to have its consummation at a period of exceeding distance away from him! And, on the other hand, did not the actual fulfilment of the near, brighten and confirm all his original expectations of the distant fulfilment! Were not all his subsequent meetings with God, to him the pledges and the earnests of the great accomplishment, that still lay in the depths of a very remote futurity? Did not they serve to convince him, that the hope which he conceived at the first, and which had been so maketh not ashamed? And that hope which had nothing at first but the basis of faith to rest upon, did it not obtain a reinforcement of strength and of security when it further rested on the basis of experience? I make a twofold promise to an acquaintance-the lesser part of which should be fulfilled to-morrow, and the latter on this day twelvemonth. If he believe me to be an honest man, then, simply appended to this belief, will there be a hope of the fulfilment of both; and, for a whole day at least, he may rejoice in this hope. To-morrow comes; and, if to-morrow's promise is not fulfilled, who does not see that the hope which emanated direct from faith is thereby darkened and overthrown, and that the man will be ashamed of his rash and rejoicing expectations? But if, instead of a failure, there is a punctual fulfilment, who does not also see, that the hope he conceived at first obtains a distinct accession from the experience he met with afterwards; and that without shame or without suspicion, he will now look to the coming round of the year with more confident expectation than ever? It is quite true, that there e is is a a hope in believing; but from this plain example you will perceive it to be just as true, that experience worketh hope. Now it is just so in the gospel. There is a promise addrest in it, the accomplish. ment of which is far off; and a promise the accomplishment of which is near at hand. The fulfilment of the one is the pledge or token of the fulfilment of the other. By faith in God we may rejoice in hope of the coming glory; and it will be the confirmation of our hope, if we find in ourselves a present holiness. He who hath promised to translate us into a new heaven hereafter, has also promised to confer on us a new heart here. Directly appended to our belief in God's testimony, may we hope for both these fulfilments; but should the earlier fulfilment not take place, this ought to convince us, that we are not the subjects of the latter fulfil. ment. A true faith would ensure to us both; but as the one has not cast up at its proper time, neither will the other cast up at its time-and, having no part nor lot in the present grace, we can have as little in the future inheritance. Let us therefore not be deceived. You hear people talk of their pence with God, while art and malignity and selfishness are at full work in their unregenerate bosoms-while no one evidence is apparent of any gracious influence at all having been shed abroad in their hearts-while the nearer promise has had no fulfilment upon them, though guaranteed by the faith and the hope of experience; and how if the latter is wanting, the former on that account may come to be darkened and extinguished altogether. But remember you are not to wait for the second hope, till you conceive the first. It is the first, in fact, which draws the second in its train. It is the first which originates a purifying influence upon the soul. It is in proportion to the strength and habitual ascendancy of the first over the soul, that place such a character is formed as may furnish terior one, and though the same God who ordains life everlasting also ordains all the heirs of it to be conformed to the image of His son; and no one enters upon the inheritance on the other side of death, without the Spirit being given to him as the earnest of his inheritance on this side of leath. By this test then let us examine ourselves; and have done, conclusively done, with that odious and hypocritical slang, into which the terms of orthodoxy and all the phrases of commonplace professorship enter so abundantly-at the very time perhaps when the heart rankles with purposes of mischief; or, in the contest between faith and sense, the latter has gained a wretched ascendancy over him. Should this be the melancholy con- | dition of any professor who now hears us, let him rest assured that he has lost the things that he has wrought, that he has the whole of his original distance from God to recover anew, that he has to lay again the foundation, and has in short to do all over again. The promise of life eternal is still addrest to him, but the promise of meetness for it in a holy and renewed character goes along with it; and this present world is the place where it must be realized; and it is only by making himself sure of repentance here, and of the clean heart here, and of the right spirit here, that he can make himself sure of his calling and election hereafter. In the language of the apostle then-work out your salvation, and labour with all diligence unto the full assurance of hope unto the end. the second with a solid basis to rest upon. It is the hope of the second verse which germinated the whole of that process, that led at length to the hope of the fourth verse. You cannot be too sure of the truth of God's sayings. You cannot have too much peace and joy in thinking that the remission of sins is preached unto all, and that you are one of them all. There is a hope here which ought to arise, on the instant of belief arising in the mind; and, so far is this from superseding the hope of experience, that it will in fact bring the very feelings and raise the very fruits upon the character of the believer, as will cause the hope of experience to come surely and in succession to the hope of faith. Our best advice for brightening the second hope to the uttermost, is that you keep alive the first hope to the uttermost Your experience will be bright, just in proportion as your faith is bright, and it is just if ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and if ye be not moved away from the hope of the gospel which ye have heard, that you will at length be presented holy and unblamable and unre We shall be happy, if we have succeeded in impressing a clear distinction | provable in the sight of God. LECTURE XIX. ROMANS V, 5. And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given unto us." You are already, we trust, enough familiarised to the distinction that has been offered between the hope of faith and the hope of experience. God promises to all who trust in Him, that He will give them an inheritance on the other side of death; and that He will also give them, in the shape of certain personal graces and endowments, an earnest of the inheritance on this side of it. On the very first moment that you hear these promises, if you believe in the honesty of both, you will hope for the fulfilment of both; and this is the hope of faith. Should the promise that is of earlier fulfilment come to pass at its proper time, this will be to you a satisfactory confirmation of your first belief and of the hope that comes out of it; and you will look forward with surer anticipation than ever, to the latter of the two fulfilments. This is the hope of experi. ence-a hope that brightens with the growth of grace on the person of the believer; and with every new finding within himself of the working of that Spirit of holiness, by which he is made meet for the everlasting abodes of holiness. Intations of the poor, when he causes food ments which had become due. It operates like a first instalment, which, when paid with perfect readiness and sufficiency, certainly brightens all the hope of a thorough fulfilment of the various articles of agreement, which you had when it was first entered upon. And thus it is that, though there is a hope in the second verse that is appended immediately to your faith in God-there is also a hope in the fourth verse, that has been wrought in you by experience. You must also be sensible what the effect would have been, had there been a failure instead of a fulfilment of that promise, which falls to be accomplished first. It would have darkened and overthrown, not merely your hope of the near, but also your hope of all the ulterior good things that you had been led to depend upon. There is nothing which brings the feeling of shame more directly into the mind, than the failure of some confident or too fondly indulged expectation. "They shall be greatly ashamed that trust in graven images." "They shall not be ashamed that wait for me." "And lest," says the apostle, "we should be ashamed in this same confident boasting." Because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.' The love of God may signify either our love to God, as in the passage-this is the love of God that ye keep His commandments;' or it may signify God's love to us, as in the passage- In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.' In the verse under consideration, we apprehend that the love of God must be taken according to the latter signification. It is thus that, speaking strictly and literally, one being when kind to another, sheds upon him the fruits of that kindness, rather than the kindness itself. But the use of language has been so far extended, as to admit of the latter expression. It is quite according to established usage to say, 'I have received much kindness from another, though I have properly received nothing but his severance of a disciple, when all that is around him lours and looks dismal. It is He who causes a luminousness to rest on those eternal prospects, which are seen afar, through the dark vista of a pilgrimage which is lined on the right hand and on the left, with sorrows innumerable. It is when a bitterness comes upon man which is only known to his own heart, that a secret balm is often infused along with it, with the joy of which a stranger does not intermeddle. There is a history of the soul that is unseen by every eye, but intimately known and felt by its conscious proprietor; and often can he testify of a tribulation that would have overwhelmed him to the death, had not a powerful influence from on high supported him under it. And when the season of it at length passes over his agitated spirit and leaves the fruit of a solid peace, and an augmented righteousness behind ityou perceive, how in him the process is exemplified, of tribulation working in him a more strenuous perseverance in all the habits and principles of Christianity; and of perseverance working in him such an experience of himself, as argues his state of discipline and preparation for another world; and of this experience working in him the hope that He who thus fulfils upon him, the guidance in time that He has promised, will finally bestow upon him the glory He has promised in eternity. He, says the apostle, who hath wrought us for immortality is God, who hath also given to us the earnest of the Spirit, and therefore we are confident. It is very true, that an early fulfilment is often the satisfying token of some later fulfilment; and that grace imparted to us on this side of death, is a pledge of glory being conferred upon us on the other side of death; and, in particular, that the Holy Ghost, bestowed upon us so as to work a meetness for the inheritance, is symptomatic of our future translation into the inheritance itself, and thus superadds the hope of experience to the hope of faith. But you must remark, that the very hope of faith, the hope which you conceive at the outset of your belief in the gospel, is money or his attentions or his patronage. wrought in you by the same Holy Ghost. And in like manner, do I receive love from It is not of yourself-it is the gift of God. God when I receive the Holy Ghost. And It was by demonstration of the Spirit, that as a beneficent proprietor is said to shed your eyes were opened at the first to perabroad of his liberality among the habi- | ceive the truth of the promises; and by and more in the hope of faith, through the power of the Holy Ghost. a fuller demonstration He can make you see this still more clearly, and rejoice in it still more confidently than before. The effect then of an additional and subsequent supply of this divine influence, is, not merely to furnish you with a pledge upon earth of the preferment that awaits you in heaven, and so to furnish you with a new ground of hope upon the subject, even the ground of experience; but it is also to brighten the ground upon which to those who obey Him. Follow out the Thus we trust, you perceive, that the good works and the graces of personal religion, not merely supply you with fresh evidences for your hope, but also brighten your original ones. They cast backwards as it were a good reflex influence on the faith from which they emanated. It is said of the Holy Ghost, that He is given all your hope rested originally, even the impulse of a conscience which He hath ground of faith. It is to give you a more enlightened in every practical business full and satisfying manifestation of the that you have on hand; and you will find, direct truth of God in the gospel than be- as the result of it, a larger supply of that fore. The Holy Ghost does not merely light which makes clearer than before, all put into your hand another and a distinct those truths and promises of Christianity, hold, by giving you in the performance on which a firm dependence may be laid of an earlier promise, a proof of the sure- by an act of believing. It is thus too ness with which the later promise shall that, if you keep the sayings of Christ, be performed also; but He strengthens He will manifest Himself; and though works are of no value unless they are wrought in faith, yet the very doing of them is followed up by such larger revelations of the truth and doctrine of God, that by works is your faith made perfect. Give us a man walking in darkness, and having no light, from whose mind the comfort of the promises is fading away, and whose fits of thought and pensiveness speak him to be on the borders of some deep approaching melancholy. It is sin in all probability that has conducted him onwards to this mental dejection; and that not merely by its having obliterated those traces of personal character, the observation of which, had at one time wrought the hope of experience in his bosom-but by its having grieved and exiled the Holy Spirit for a season, whose office as a revealer and as a remembrancer of all truth, is therefore suspended; and who has therefore left the tenement of his heart desolate and uncheered by that hope of faith, which shone in a beam of gladness on the very outset of his Christianity. For the treatment of such a spiritual patient, we are often bidden tell him of the fulness that there is in Christ; and tell him of the power which lies in His blood, for turning guilt of the most crimson dye into the snow-white of purest innocence; and to tell him of the perfect willingness that there is in God, to hold out to him over the mercy-seat the sceptre of forgiveness, by the touching of which it is, that he enters anew into reconciliation before Him. And it is right, it is indispensably right, to tell him of all this; but we would tell him more. The voice of man, if the visitations of the Spirit do not go along with it, will not force an entrance, even for these welcome accents of mercy, into the heart that He had so the hold which you had by faith upon the promises, prior to all experimental confirmation of them in your own personal history. He does not merely supply that evidence for the truth of the gospel promise which is seen by the eye of experience; but He also casts an additional light on the evidence that you had at the first, and which is only seen by the eye of faith. Never, in the course of the believer's pilgrimage, never does the hope of experience supersede the hope of faith. So far from this, in the very proportion that experience grows in breadth, does faith grow in brightness. And it is this last which still constitutes the sheet-anchor of his soul, and forms the main aliment of its peace and joy and righteousness. It is well, that, on looking inwardly to himself, he sees the growing lineaments of such a grace and such a character forming upon his person, as vouch him to be ripening for eternity. But, along with this process, will he also look outwardly upon God in Christ, and there see, in constantly increasing manifestation, the truth and the mercy and the unchangeableness of his reconciled Father, as by far the firmest and stablest guarantees of his future destiny. The same agent, in fact, who brings about the one effect, brings about the other. He causes you not merely to see yourself to be an epistle of the Spirit of God, and to read thereon the marks of your personal interest in the promises; but He also causes you to see these promises as standing in the outward record, invested with a light and an honesty and a freeness, which you did not see at the first revelation of them so that it is not only the hope of experience which is furnished you anew, as you proceed on the career of actual Christianity; but, in proportion to your advancement on this ca- recently abandoned. And, to win the reer, are you also made to abound more | return of this gracious and all-powerful monitor, we would did him work for it. We would tell him, that it is by toiling and striving and pains-taking, he must recover the distance which he has lost, and call the departed light and departed influence back again. If there be a remaining sense of duty in his heart, we bid him work with all his might to prosecute its suggestions; and never cease to ply his labours of obedience till He, who still it appears is whispering through the organ of conscience what he ought to do, shall be so far satisfied with the probation, as again to shed a sufficient manifestation on the doctrines which he must never cease to contemplate. And this not merely to restore to him the hope of experience, but to revive in him the hope of faith; and, full of penitential labour as well as of penitential meditation, to make his light break forth again on the morning, and his health to spring forth speedily. This holds out to us another view of the indissoluble alliance, that obtains between the faith of Christianity and the obedience of Christianity. It is not saying all for this, to say that the former originates the latter. It is saying still more to say that the latter strengthens and irradiates the former. The genuine faith of the gospel never can encourage sin; for sin expels that Spirit from our hearts, who perpetuates and keeps alive faith in them. And by every act of disobedience, there is a wound inflicted on the peace and joy, which a belief in the gospel ministers to the soul. It is by practically walking up to the suggestions of this heavenly monitor, that we brighten within us all His influences; and thus, as righteousness. The first is, that he may brighten his personal evidences, of being indeed one of those whom God is enriching and beautifying with grace in time; and thus will he strengthen that basis on which the hope of experience rests, when it looks forward to a preferment of glory in eternity. The second is, that he may strengthen that very faith, by which he relied at the first on the promises both of grace here, and of glory hereafter, for, after all, it is by faith he stands; and the whole of his spiritual life will forthwith go into decay, should he only look to the hope reflected from himself, instead of drawing it direct and in chief abundance from the Saviour. An exuberance of fresh and healthy blossom upon a tree, affords cheering promise of the fruit a that may should we think of the soundness of that man's anticipations, who should cut across the stem because he thought it independent of the root, which both sent forth this beauteous efflorescence and can alone conduct it to full and finished maturity? And the same of spiritual as of natural husbandry. Were there no foliage, no fruit could be looked for-yet still it is union with the root, which produced the one and will bring on the other. And, in like manner, if there be no foliage of grace in time, there will be no fruit of glory in eternity. But still it is by abiding in Christ, that the whole process is begun, and carried forward, and will at length be perfected. Give up the hope of faith, because you have now the hope of experience; and you imitate precisely the man, whom the leaves had made so san be expected from it. But what the result of a strict and holy practice, is guine of his drest and supported vine there a clearer and fuller light reflected back again, on the very irst principles from which it emanated-so that Antinomianism, after all, is very much an affair of theory, and can only be exemplified in the lives of those who either profess the faith, or imagine that they possess it, when they are utter strangers to it. The real faith which is unto salvation, not only originates all the virtues of the gospel; but, should these virtues decay into annihilation, it also would fall back again to non-existence along with them; and, on the other hand, does it uniformly grow with the growth, and strengthen with the strength of a man's practical Christianity. On two distinct grounds therefore, do we urge on every believer, a most persevering strenuousness under every temptation and difficulty, in all the ways of which he had trained along the wall, that he cut asunder the stem and trusted to the abundance of his foliage. And therefore we reiterate in your hearing, that the hold of faith is never to be let go; and that from Christ, who ministers all the nourishment which comes to the branches, you are never to sever yourselves; and that the habit of believing prayer, which is the great and perpetual aliment of all virtuous pr practice, ce, is never to be given up; and thus it is, that, let the hope of the 4th verse brighten to any conceivable extent upon you, from the light which is reflected by your person-yet still it is the faith by which you are justified, and the hope of the 2d verse directly emanating therefrom, that form the radical elements of your sanctification here, and your meetness for the inheritance hereafter. |