WHO CAN BE AGAINST US?

"If God be for us, who can be against us?"-ROMANS viii. 31.

If the Lord be in the midst of a people, they are sure of moral, spiritual, and even of temporal victory; it is only the cause that has lost his presence, by being conducted contrary to his will, that will not prosper, because it is not sustained and upheld by him. I do not know a truth more appropriate for the days and scenes that are before us. We can march into all the windings of futurity, face all its difficulties, move along all its eddies and its turnings, its ups and its downs, the fears it creates within, and the fightings it provokes without,-in short, all that may be, or must be, we car bravely face, and triumphantly acquit ourselves notwithstanding the severest ordeal. We can carry this sustaining and strengthening truth into every day, and week, and month, of the whole year: "If the Lord be for us, who, in the 360 days that are to elapse, can be with any prospect of success against us." It is a truth for all that can overtake or befall us, a prescription for the display of a heroism in the future, that shall exceed all that we have done, or sacrificed, or

suffered, in the past. May he that inspired it in the page without write it in the living tablets of our hearts within. "If God be for us;" there is the foundation of all the comfort and the peace of the Christian. If he be in the midst of us, as Moses said he was in the midst of Israel, then our battles are his; if he be not in the midst of us, with a trembling heart and with a shrinking spirit we may go into the future that is before us, for we can expect no success, as we have no promise of a blessing. Is God then for us? The answer to that question is given by asking another: Are we for him? The true way to find out if God has chosen me, is not to try to penetrate the inscrutable mysteries of his purpose, but to ask, Have I chosen him? If I have elected him to be my Father and my God, by the influence of his grace enabling me, I may conclude with absolute certainty that he has elected me to be his servant, his child, the heir of his glory, and a partaker of his inheritance hereafter. If God be with us, we are with him. Are we, as the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans-the most magnificent, perhaps, amid the many magnificent chapters that constitute the Bible-expresses it, in Christ? If so, to us there is no condemnation. Are we the sons of God? If so, that chapter will tell us we are heirs of God, and jointheirs with Christ. Is the Holy Spirit sanctifying our hearts, making intercession within us? Then he that knoweth the mind of the Spirit heareth him, and heareth us speaking also by him. Is that chapter an outer lesson, or is it an inner life? Is it a mere statement on the page without, that you can read and forget, or has it so actuated and quickened your hopes,

and joys, and confidence, and life, that the truths of this chapter, entertained with hallowed hospitality in the heart, have thrown forth upon the whole outer life the very tints of heaven, and proved to all that see us whose we are, and in the light of whose countenance we are walking all the day. If this chapter be ours in the deep sense in which it is the possession and experience of the people of God, God is for us; and if for us, there is nothing in 1855 that the complications of events can possibly generate, that Satan can devise, that force or fraud can adduce, that can really, though it may seemingly, successfully be against us. A Christian leads a charmed life; he is immortal everywhere. Death and life, and height and depth, are all servants to him, ministering to his good; they are not foes that in spite of God can injure and destroy him. We do need most truly in going into the future—a future that the statesman, and the wise and accomplished minds of this world, will tell you is gloomy and ominous, and full of dire forebodings and spectral fears—this holy presence, this presence of God with us, as our God. We have no strength to do, to dare, or to suffer, unless He be pleased to give it. It is very humbling, but it is very wholesome doctrine, that man does not know how weak he is without God; it is very glorious and inspiring comfort that man has never reached a just apprehension how strong he is when God is with him. When we lost our loyalty to God in Paradise, we lost him with us. He left the polluted shrine, he fled from the altar on which the divine coal was quenched, and we are now by nature without God, without strength, weak; and it is true of the strongest, the wisest, and

the most influential on earth, "Without me ye can do nothing." We are not sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; our sufficiency is of God. No patronage can be a substitute for the presence of God; no influence, or wealth, or power, may supersede the necessity of that presence. That presence is our only and impenetrable shield, our availing and glorious support. With his pesence we can do all things; without it we can do nothing. Pharaoh of old had armies on his side, and trained horsemen and countless chariots to pursue the retiring Israelites; the Israelites had nothing equal to their defence, or on their side, but God; yet Pharaoh fell, and Israel triumphed. Saul had all the resources of a kingdom; he was the persecutor of David; the shepherd stripling had only God with him; David rose to a throne, and Saul perished. Haman persecuted Mordecai with all the influence of royalty; but Mordecai was exalted, and Haman was destroyed. "Hold thou we up, and I shall be safe. If thy presence go not with us along the channels of this and every year, carry us not up hence." But the blessed promise is, "My presence shall go with thee. I will never leave thee; I will never forsake thee. I am found of them that seek me." In order to see the force and taste the comfort of this beautiful truth, let us try to form a just and accurate view of what God is, who is pledged to be with us, and this will show us how little we have to fear anything that man can do when encompassed by his presence, as by a holy and a blessed atmosphere. Let us ascertain what God is defined to be. One text tells us very simply that "God is love;" a love that poured down its influences

on us in spite of sin; dependent for its current not upon our deserts, but upon its own deep and inexhaustible spring.

This love that God is, and has provided for the subordination of every opposing element, in order that he might redeem us, we may surely expect will provide for the removal of every obstruction that may prevent his redeemed people reaching the rest from which he came to shed his blood, and to which he has entered to prepare a place for them; surely this love will not be frustrated in its efforts, or disappointed in its expectations; or fail, after triumphing at the Cross, to carry home to heaven the purchased and the blessed spoils. God loved us not because we were holy, but in spite of our being the reverse. And if his love lighted upon us when we had no claim to it, but the very opposite, may we not expect that his love will not forsake us, though we have done so much to forfeit it? God's love lighted upon us in sovereignty; it is continued with us in sovereignty. If it were contingent upon the depth or the continuity of our love to him, it would have been withdrawn years ago, and we should have been lost for ever. But, blessed thought, when we forget him he forgets not us; when our hearts grow cold, his paternal heart only overflows with richer love; when we stray from him, instead of letting us alone, he comes after us and restores our souls for his own name's sake.

Having loved us from the first, when there was nothing in us to merit that love, he will love us to the last, though there be much in us to forfeit that love. But he is not only love, but this God is omnipotent.