with which you should feel yourself urged and occupied, is, that by the operation of that Spirit you may indeed be enlightened in the truth of God, and made wise unto your own salvation. For this purpose let me assure you of His readiness to help and to visit all who ask Him-let me entreat your attention to that Bible, which with Him is the mighty instrument, whereby the understanding and the heart and all the faculties of man are gained over to that truth, which is able at once to sanctify and to save us-let me press you to awake and be active in the work, putting forth all the strength that is in you, and confident that if you really do so more strength will be given-So that if the whole force which you have now be honestly and heartily directed to the object, by force the kingdom of heaven will be carried.

165

LECTURE LX.

ROMANS, viii, 29.

"For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the first-born among many brethren.'

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THERE is a vast and immeasurable progression o events, between the conception of God's will in the depths of the eternity that is past, and the full consummation of that will in the yet unresolved mysteries of the eternity that is to come. And we oc cupy our given place along the line of that progression. We form one in the series of many generations; and, in our assigned part of this mighty chain, we can only see a little way on either side of it-because from our post of observation, and with our limited range of faculties it soon loses itself both in the obscurity that is behind, and in the almost equal obscurity that is before us. Nevertheless we concede to Him who originated the whole of this wondrous process, that His eye reaches from the beginning to the end of it-that, from the ofty and uncreated summit of His own omniscience, He can descry all the successions of the universe that Himself hath made—that in the single fiat of His power, by which the mechanism of creation was called forth, and all its laws were ordained, there were comprehended all the events that took

place in the history of nature or of providence— and that neither their variety can bewilder, nor their minuteness can elude the one glance, by which He is able to embrace all worlds, and look onward through an infinity of ages. And He doth thus foreknow, just because He did predestinate-just because in the very constitution of His work, there are the principles and the powers by which its every evolution is determined-just because the sovereignty that He hath over it, is far more absolute than that which the human artificer hath over all the operations and results of the machinery that he hath framed. It is not the only mode of conception in which we might regard the sovereignty of God, to imagine of every one event as isolated from all the others; but which still, at some period of high antiquity in the history of the Godhead, was made the subject of a distinct and authoritative ordination. There is another mode, and by which the sovereignty would still be maintained in all its entireness-even to imagine of Him, that He brought forth the universe, just as a skilful inventor bringeth forth a piece of curious and complicated workmanship; and that He furnished it at the first with all the springs and the weights and the moving forces, that fix and ascertain both the most minute and the mightiest of its evolutions; and that the wisdom by which he could frame the mechanism, is inseparable from the wisdom by which He could foresee all the particulars of its operation: And thus, just as you might say of him who maketh

and who windeth up some orrery of human art, and who so is able to calculate and to predict all the consequent movements and positions of it at any point of time that may be specified-that it is he who by his own will hath determined through each of its separate footsteps the miniature history of his own little workmanship-in like manner may you say of the great the stupendous apparatus of creation, that all the facts and the futurities of its state at every moment are determined by Him who called it into being at the first, and endued it at the first with all its properties. We do not affirm in which of these ways it is that the affairs of the divine government are conducted; but in either way, you concede to Him who presideth over it, the entire and absolute sovereignty-in either way you realise the idea of a predestinating God.

And we seldom meet with any disposition to question this entire and unexcepted sovereignty of God, in reference to the material world. In all the operations of a purely unconscious materialism, there is abundant willingness to admit a precise necessity, a rigid and unfailing ordination. There is not a more impressive exhibition of this, than in the simple but magnificent apparatus of the visible heavens—where, out of only two forces, those enormous masses that float in boundless vacancy, have for thousands of years preserved with mathematical certainty in the courses that God hath ordained for them-insomuch, that, even by the skill of man, the mystic complexity of these shining orbs

hath been most beauteously unravelled; and, sure as geometry itself, the place and the velocity and the direction of every planet are most rigidly to be found. Now this is predestination; and it positively matters not to the question, whether the actual state of the heavens be willed by God at every one instant, or be the sure result of that invariable law which He at first impressed upon them.

And even in other departments of the material world, where the order of succeeding events hath hitherto baffled all human calculation, still it is held that there is such an order necessarily fixed by the laws of nature, or by the will of Him who hath established these laws-insomuch, that even the fluctuations of the weather are not at random; and a certain principle determines every fitful breeze, and every forming cloud, and every falling shower-though that principle hath not yet been seized upon by us, so as that we can prophesy a day of rain, just as we can prophesy the day of an eclipse. The vastness of Nature's variety, soon overpasses our feeble apprehension—yet this does not hinder our belief, that, apart from life and thought and volition, there reigns throughout the whole of its wide empire an unfailing necessity; and, supposing that there were nought but blind and unconscious materialism in the world, we should not quarrel with the doctrine of predestination. We should recognise the appointment of God as descending even to the humblest event in the history of nature-as determining the force of every