is not a necessary or infallible proof of renewal of heart. It is desirable to seek this, but it is not salvation. Too much is said at the present day about the comparative merits of systems, and too little is felt of the power of real, living religion. We have too many ecclesiastics and too few ministers: churchmen and dissenters abound; Christians are still scarce. Pray do not teach your children Episcopacy, and Presbytery, and Free-churchism, or Relief-churchism, or if there be any other analogous ism. They will soon enough learn to wrangle and dispute about these. Teach them first of all Christianity, and to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. This is the root

and pith of Christianity; all else lies around it; this is itself. Never mind if your children turn out defective Episcopalians, or indifferent Independents, if they grow up children of God, and patterns of Christian virtue. Would you not prefer Better, surely, pass to

dissenting saints to church sinners? heaven through a Methodist meeting-house than plunge into hell by the way of a cathedral. Surely, surely, it is better to be uncanonically saved than to be canonically damned. Better, beyond controversy, enter heaven right through a rubric, than sink to ruin with ceremonial conformity to its minutest requirements. The kingdom of God-that is, true Christianity—is not meat, or drink, or rubric, or rite, or ceremony, or church, or dissent, but "righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost."

Nor is the testimony of others to our character an infallible evidence that we are new creatures, ready for admision into the New Jerusalem. Paul thought Demas was a Christian; the apostles deemed Judas an earnest and sincere fellow-worker with themselves. Satan can paint a Christian as perfectly to our eye as God can make one. Still less is our own persuasion evidence either of the depth or reality of grace. A whole church once thought of itself, "I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing," while its real condition was thus delineated by the Searcher of hearts: "Thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked."

Some will so far delude themselves, that they will enter into the presence of the Judge, saying, "Lord, Lord, have we not

prophesied in thy name, and in thy name have we cast out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity." Two builders are described in Scripture, each equally confident: the testing winds burst on their respective fabrics and that built upon the sand fell. It is not the strength of our confidence, but the strength of the foundation, on which we must rely; and on that foundation which is laid of God, none but living stones can be reared, or any other than a holy superstructure rise from the earth to heaven.

Christianity is not a religion of form, or circumstance, or ceremony, or of baptism, or of circumcision. With and without these it has flourished; for these are but its accidents-its temporary and evanescent robes, the signs of its present state, and not the inseparable accompaniments of its future glory. It is the religion of the inner man, the life of the heart, the peace of the conscience. Its dwelling-place, its sacred fane, its consecrated shrine, is the heart that has been hallowed by the Holy Spirit of God. The gospel is not in tongue or in appearance, but in the inward parts; not in word, but in power; not a name to live by, but life; not a system without us, but a principle within us; not the expulsion of one theory in order to make room for another, nor a collection of dogmas, a vocabulary of shibboleth, but holiness, and happiness, and truth. To eat with unwashed hands, or to heal on the Sabbath-day, or to leave unwashed the outside of the cup, are not the sins it selects for reprehension. To be, not to seem, is its requirement. "To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God," are its unpretending but fragrant fruits. "Uncircumcision is nothing, and circumcision is nothing, but a new creature." There is neither Jew, nor Gentile, nor Greek, nor barbarian, nor Roman, nor Hun, nor Englishman, nor Esquimaux, nor plebeian, nor noble, nor queen: Christ is all and in all to them that believe, as their title, and Christianity is all and in all as their qualification; all else is responsibility. What we require as a preparation for this new state, the procession of which already appears above the horizon, emerging from the smoke of European ruins, is that all within us should be made new; that Jesus should

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enter that desecrated temple, more precious in its wreck than Solomon's or Herod's-the temple of the soul-and command those brutal appetites-those wrangling passions-those crowds of lusts, to retire-that it may be made no longer a house of merchandise, a den of thieves, but our Father's house, a house of prayer. Then shall we see within, and finally without also, the evidence of the fulfilment of these words: "I will make all things new."

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LECTURE VI.

THE CONQUEROR.

"He that overcometh shall inherit all things."--Revelation xxi.

WAR is the aspect of this dispensation; earth is a battle-field; Christians are soldiers; the Bible is our armoury; victory our hope.

We are encompassed with a cloud of enemies as well as of witnesses; the whole field of our existence and action is covered with them; every hill, and dale, and valley; every height and depth; the past, the present, and the future,-all glisten with their hostile array. The stamp of Satan has conjured up these desperate squadrons, and they are prepared for victory or destruction. Sin is not the least powerful nor the least present enemy. It has infected the air we breathe with hostile miasma; it has left its sear blight on every acre of the earth; it has distilled its deadly poison into every heart, from royal height down to plebeian level; it waits and watches for impress and victory at every avenue, and even in a Christian's heart it is not utterly extirpated; its condemnation is put away through the blood of Jesus, and its power is broken by the Holy Spirit; but it still vexes, assails, and sometimes prevails against the believer. It is, indeed, denuded of all its attractions in a Christian's eye, and arrayed in its own inherent and essential hues; so truly so, that it comes to him always as a foe, and is never welcome as a friend. Sin lives in the Christian, but the Christian does not live in sin; it exists in him as an intruder, detested and extruded by every energy he has, not as a lodger, either welcome from character, or tolerated for profit. There is the same difference between sin in a converted man and sin in an unconverted man, as there is between poison as it exists in a rattlesnake, and poison found in the body of a human being. In the one it is congenial to its nature, and

cherished as its defence; in the other it is felt as a foreign element, and the system has no repose till it is expelled. In the unbeliever sin overcomes the man; in the believer the man overcomes the sin. In the heart of the former, sin luxuriates an indigenous plant; in that of the other it is cut down, and crushed, and stunted as a poisonous exotic. Sin overcomes the child of nature-sin is overcome in the child of grace.

The next enemy we have to overcome is the world. It is now in all its phases and aspects the world-the enemy of the people of God. The friendship of the world is enmity to God, and whoever is the friend of the world is the enemy of God. "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him: for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but of the world." It is, however, a disheartened, because a discomfited foe; it wars against the people of God, not as a confident and hopeful enemy, but because it is incapable, from its instincts, of doing otherwise. Its opposition is its necessity. It battles without hope, or rather in despair. It must, however, be remembered that this victory consists not in mechanical separation from the world, but in collision with it-in resistance, in protest, in spiritual victory over it. The epicurean says, "Eat, drink, and be merry; for to-morrow we die." The Romanist says, "Fast, and starve, and stint, and escape into a convent, for if you remain in the world it will conquer you." The Christian says, "Remain in the world, but be not of it; do not shrink from its responsibilities to avoid its perils. Stand where God in his providence has placed you-patient in suffering, humble in prosperity, Christian in all things. Do the good that requires to be done-avoid the evil that menaces you— treat the smile of the world as the passing sunbeam, and its frown as a momentary cloud." "Endure as seeing Him who is invisible."

We are called upon to overcome the world's allurements. A corrupt world crowds its temptations upon you; places of sinful amusement, and others of yet deeper evil, open their doors, and light up their lamps, and display all their attractions. These are the splendours of corruption-the phosphorescence of decay.