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THE SECURITY OF IT.

[Serm. are fresh and vital and germinant for every person who enters into them and claims them. 'Seeing that the whole covenant stands ultimately upon this assurance, "I will be their God and they shall be my people;" there shall be a communion between me and them, an intercourse which their hardness and forgetfulness may interrupt, but which is really implied in the eternal relation that subsists between us, nay in all the relations which subsist between them as neighbours and brothers of each other.'

Such a covenant Jeremiah saw there must be involved in the law which had been given to his forefathers, a covenant certainly existing in the divine mind, though latent and still only dimly seen by the sons of men. To see it at all, to be able to say confidently' this must be,' to have a divine assurance that what must be, is, and that it will be fully manifested;—this was comfort immeasurable, unspeakable, making dungeons tolerable, and the loss of human friendship a gracious sorrow, the ruin of a city and a land a witness for good, even in proportion to the bitter present misery which it caused. All Jeremiah's dark history becomes bright when this truth dawns upon him, when he is able to dwell in the belief of it.

And yet, brethren, it did but dawn upon him. And Whitsunday tells us that we are living in the very blaze of it. The new covenant has been proclaimed. It is that very one, "I will put my laws in your hearts, and in your minds will I write them." My Spirit shall dwell in you to be the source of faith and obedience, to resist the evil which will always be assaulting you, to draw you to the good which is always near you, to bring you out of darkness into God's light, out of selfishness into love, out of division into unity. He is given, that you may not each

XXIV.] THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH AND POWER.

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one be holding out to his neighbour mere hard crusts of doctrine, dry intellectual propositions; but that the humblest peasant, the feeblest child, may have in him that which responds to the highest truth and can embrace it. He is come as a witness and pledge that a reconciliation has been made for the universe, that man is at peace with God in His Son, who has offered the perfect and wellpleasing sacrifice. He is come to assure us that the Father has made all things new, grounding them on the revelation of His own eternal Name, His own absolute love.'

This is the covenant into which we are born by our baptism. But oh, brethren, do we believe that it is so? Do we believe that God has said to us, "I will put my laws in your hearts, and in your minds will I write them; I will be to you a father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters?" Do we believe that a peace and forgiveness has been proclaimed to us and to mankind, that we may feed upon the sacrifice in which they are gathered up, that we may have communion with the Love that has bestowed them? Do we think that there is an unction within us, whereby we and the most miserable people of this land may enter into the meaning of the deepest mysteries, and that we need not merely receive them with our outward ears, but be renewed by them in the very spirit of our minds? Alas! brethren, let us confess it, we do not believe this. The divine truth of Whitsuntide is floating away from us. We do not grasp it, we do not live upon it. And therefore we sigh in vain for reformation. For the divine power which is to bring reformation is hidden from us.

Like the Jews we think we are delivered over to the evils which bitter experience shows that we are prone to commit. If it can be proved that our forefathers and we have yielded

430

FAITH IN A PHRASE.

[Serm. to covetousness, strife, rivalries, our wise men ask triumphantly whether these are not established principles of human nature and treat the struggle with these as one which only boys or fanatics would engage in. It is in vain to answer, that men have struggled with them in all ages, and that, unless some victories had been won over them, Society would have ceased to exist. It is in vain to say that all the improvements moral, intellectual, physical, of which we boast, have been the consequences of a divinely formed resolution in the hearts of a few men, generally scorned by their contemporaries, to overcome what had been reckoned inevitable evils, involved in the constitution of things. The ready and decisive reply that all such changes are owing to the "Progress of Civilization"—owing, that is to say, to a certain formula which we do not choose to translate into the facts for which it stands-disposes of all such arguments. No doubt we can reverence those who have fought and fallen in the endeavour to break some chain of custom and to vindicate some eternal law of God, when they are removed to a safe distance. We build the sepulchres of the prophets whom our fathers killed and say that if we had been in the days of our fathers we would not have partaken of their sins. But unless we fully believe that the Spirit of the Prophets is intended for us and can work in us as He worked in them,-unless we believe that He is come to convince us of our sins and of a righteousness which is stronger than our sins, and of a judgment which shall put down the one and give the other a complete victory,-we had better have left the sepulchres unbuilt; we had better not pretend to honour the memories of men whom, if we had met them face to face, we should certainly have hated. It is a fearful thought that Israel was subjected to a Baby

XXIV.]

UNBELIEF IN A DIVINE POWER.

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lonian captivity of seventy years, and has been subjected to a worse than Babylonian tyranny for eighteen hundred years, because it counted the Covenant of God a dead document instead of a living power. It is a more appalling question, what must be in reserve for those nations which will not have the law of God written in their hearts; which choose to follow their own lower instincts; which say to the Holy Spirit, Depart from us.'

But as there was a light in that thick darkness so there is in this. The Covenant of God cannot fail; the purpose of God must be accomplished. There must come a day when God shall be known as the Father of all the Families of the Earth, and when they will not refuse to be His children.

SERMON XXV.

THE HEAVENS OPENED TO THE EXILE.

LINCOLN'S INN, TRINITY SUNDAY.-JUNE 6TH, 1852.

EZEKIEL, I. 1.

Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I sat among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.

THE Book of Lamentations throws much light upon the time to which it refers, and upon the prophetical character. I have no wish to pass it over. But in strict chronology it follows the earlier chapters of Ezekiel, seeing that its subject is the destruction of the city and the temple, to which Ezekiel, as he sat among the captives by the river Chebar, was still looking forward. The difference even of a few years, at this critical period of the history, may affect the meaning of a whole book. There are passages in the later chapters of Ezekiel which may illustrate and receive illustration from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. On these grounds I believe I am justified in postponing the consideration of them, even if I had not the additional motive, that there is scarcely a passage in the Old Testament which seems more suitable