and America, that the result will be, perhaps, no excitement, or agitation, or physical emotion; but a deep, and solemn, and most joyous sense of things Divine, that will make many a heart bound that is now breaking; and fill our souls with glorious truths, and our mouths with melody; and bring that day near when the Psalmist's strain upon a people's lips will unload their hearts of their deepest gratitude, and express their thankfulness to Him who loved them, and washed them in his blood, and has made them members of that true Church whose head and whose glory Christ is.

LECTURE XXI.

THE PENTECOSTAL PROMISE.

The day of everlasting refreshment draws near. Promise passes into history. God says by Ezekiel :

:

"Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean, from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you."-EZEKIEL Xxxvi. 25, 27.

WHERE the Spirit of God has been given, as I believe has been the case in America, in Ireland, and in Scotland also, we have discovered extravagance which it would be uncandid to be silent on. But this does not prove that the work is not divine, but that a divine work is operative among imperfect human beings. The eccentricity and the fanaticism spring from man; the holiness, the piety, the brotherly love, the devotedness, all come down from God, the Fountain of good. But strange it is that the very people who would blame you if you showed no excitement in the things of Cæsar, nevertheless seize, Zoilus like, upon every tiny fault, and magnify it to the uttermost, and infer most illogically the character of the whole work from incidental defects inseparable from it here. If you employ a barrister to plead your cause, and you find him talking with coldness and unconcern when your highest interests were in jeopardy, you would never employ that barrister again. Or if you had as your representative in Paliament one who took no interest in your town, or city, or county; who, when

T

advocating your advantages, talked as if he were advocating some paltry, personal pleasure, you would not give him your vote the second time. In other words, you admire, nay, you insist upon excitement on the Exchange, in Paliament, and yet on that floor on which are transacted, not the interests of a nation, not the interests of commerce, but the interests of the soul, eternity, judgment to come, you deride the least excitement as ungenteel and unbecoming. This is not just. Wherever there is a divine work, there will be always alloy mixed up with it; wherever God has his coin in currency, Satan will set afloat his spurious paper. That has been the experience of all the past. Do you believe in the Spirit of God at all? Do you believe that the Spirit of God changes human hearts? Do you believe in the simplest truths of evangelical religion? If you do, and if you believe it is not an unreasonable thing that God should raise the dead, why should it be thought an unreasonable thing that God the Spirit should change men's hearts? We perhaps have all laid down laws, and say, the Spirit must come in this way, and He must come in that way, and He must influence men according to some other way. That Holy Spirit is sovereign. He may come like the gentle zephyr, that scarcely rustles the leaves of the tree, or he may come like the great hurricane, that sweeps before it all obstruction, and cleanses the air, and purifies the heart, and inspires a life in men's souls that does not die for ever and ever. Do not be afraid that men will get too excited about religion or that they will be too anxious about the things of eternity; there is not the least risk of it; the risk is all the reverse. As long as this dispensation lasts, so long you may assuredly expect increase of feeling; but there is no risk of there being too much. I regard the work in Ireland as the work of the Spirit of God, and not on my authority, but upon the authority of a number of most able and judicious men; for I made it a study to collect all the statements of those who had been there;

the most judicious, the least prejudiced, the least passionate. I collected them and printed them in letters, which some of you may have seen; and these all, with one voice, testify that, whatever be the deduction because of the alloy of human imperfection, there is demonstrably a divine work there. In the sessions in Belfast there are not one third of the crimes or criminals for trial in 1859 that there were in 1858 and 1857. And the statement that you have read in bad papers about this Revival having made people lunatics is strictly untrue from beginning to end. Of course there are people that you cannot excite upon any subject without injuring their brains: one only wonders that man's poor brain, which has to do all work, for it is the greatest working power that we have, stands so much as it actually does. And we all know that there are people who have weak brains, just as they may have weak hands or weak limbs; and the organ that is weakest, when overtasked, gives way. That takes place on the Royal Exchange, in Parliament, among scientific men; and it is only in keeping with the universal experience, that where religion has become the excitement, it may take place there; I do not deny it; all that we argue is, that whatever strongly excites the soul, and by the soul, as medical men know, the nervous economy of man-and the brain is the great seat and source of all nervous power -you may expect that the organ, in some cases, will give way; but if it do, it is not because religion has a peculiar power to drive men mad, but because excitement upon any subject whatever is apt to injure those whose cerebral structure is constitutionally feeble. But I look upon a man who becomes deranged as in his soul, and intellect, and mind-in all, in short, that is the man as really sane; that which has given way is not the soul, but the instrument through which the soul acts. If a man's legs be paralyzed, the man's soul is not injured, but only the instruments by which he walks; if his two hands are struck with paralysis, the

man remains intellectually sound, the two instruments only with which he writes are useless; and when a man's brain has given way, the man remains: no disease, merely physical, can enter into the holy of holies, where the soul sits and acts in its own grand supremacy; it is merely the instrument by which it acted that now no longer obeys. The overtasked eye loses its power of vision; the over-excited ear loses its capacity of hearing; the over-stimulated brain loses its power of action; and men speak of the mind being deranged it is not the mind but its machinery; the mind remains in all its integrity-its media, through which it transmits its volitions, and these alone, are in fault. The greatest lunatic, the most helpless idiot, is as perfect and intelligent, in the far-back depths of his soul, as those who are sane. I have been pained at seeing idle boys. tease a lunatic, or an idiot; for I have not the least doubt that he feels all the agony of the ill-treatment, and understands, but cannot express, his wounded feelings. It is not he that has gone wrong, but the medium by which impressions come in to him, and through which these expressions go out to you.

If a person sits at London Bridge, at the electric telegraph, and, according to your orders, transmits a message to a relative of yours in Paris, if the message does not reach the end, what is at fault? The person at the electric telegraph office has not lost his power, but there is an interruption in the medium-the wire is broken. In the same manner, in the case of the lunatic, it is not the soul within that has parted with his power, or is denuded of his functions, but those electric wires that we commonly call nerves have ceased their connexion as media through some interruption of the first link in their physical structure and economy. We cannot admit, for a moment, the common notion that when people become eccentric on the subject of religion that religion makes them mad; it is not so. Hence the statements made in certain Irish papers upon what is taking place in Ireland are not fact, nor justified by fact.