gion of days and forms and stated punctualities, yet, beset and occupied as many of you are, you are, I hold that the highest principle, as well as the highest prudence, is involved in your set and regular observations of sacredness. The soul might else move adrift among the countless influences that are ever and anon bearing upon it; and such is the actual opposition between all the things which are in the world and the love of the Father, that the drift is away from God. To recover those thoughts of God and Christ which the world would dissipate -along with the stray thoughts to recall the stray affections, and so maintain and constantly renew a fellowship of heart with the Father and the Sonto light again and again the flame of sacredness within, and so to keep it from expiring utterly— to lift yourselves from the deadness and degradation of the things that are beneath-I am aware of no better expedient than that you have your times of communing through the Bible and prayer with the things that be above, and that you determinedly adhere to them. Let not the urgencies of business separate you from those precious minutes, which you should give to the remembrance of God's love to you in Christ Jesus; and then the fortunes of business, whether prosperous or adverse, shall not be able to separate your hearts from that love which you owe to God in Christ Jesus back again. Pray unceasingly for His grace to overcome the world, and you shall be more than conquerors through Him that loved you.

It is high time to break away from this world's entanglements—to dispossess your heart of things present, and turn them to the things that are to come; and that not to the coming things of your earthly pilgrimage, but, overleaping these and the death which is beyond them, to look onward to the awful realities which lie upon the other side. If you have not yet made the movement from the habit of walking by sight to that of walking by faith, it is a movement which must be made ere you die -else the life eternal, which is only to those with whom all old things have been done away and all things have become new, you shall never never realise. And it concerns you all to understand, that, by every day of postponement, you are getting more helplessly implicated in the slavery of sense and of sin than before-that if you seek not first the kingdom of God, every other thing which you seek and set your affections upon just widens your distance from Him the more-that the love of all which is in the world separates and alienates the heart the more irrecoverably from Him who made the world—that thus in every footstep you make, there is a farther departure from the Being whose favour is life, but whose frown is endless and irremediable destruction: And, more particularly, may every fresh speculation in which you engage, and that constant trooping of successive cares and hopes and interests from one mercantile engrossment to another, so multiply the ties by which you are rooted and fastened down to a perishable scene-that when

at length overtaken and torn forcibly away from it by the last messenger, you shall be found to be wholly of the earth and altogether earthly-overrun with carnality, and having a full part in the saying that the carnal mind is death. I ask you, not to be hermits and to abandon either the world or its business, but I ask you to be aware of the evil of it. I ask your instantaneous and habitual recurrence to the objects of faith, that the objects of sight may no longer have the ascendant over you. I ask you so to retire and separate yourselves from the love of things present, that you may not be separated from the love of God-not to give up the use of the world, but so to use it as not to abuse it—not to cast away from you the good things of this life, but, by your habitual regard to the better things of another life, to strip them of their power, so as that they shall not be able to separate you from the high interests of an accountable and imperishable crea

ture.

VOL. III.

X

322

LECTURE LXVIII.

ROMANS ix, 1-3.

"I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh."

THE matter of which Paul here makes such strong asseveration, is not one that could be looked upon by the eyes of those whom he addresses; but one that himself only could take direct and immediate cognisance of. It had not its residence without, so that others should have access to it by any faculty of external observation; but had its residence within-within the repository of the apostle's own bosom, and he only had access to it by the faculty of conscience. He could not therefore say of it-this is true, for come and see that it is so-he could not thus make his appeal to the senses of other men, for no other earthly eye was upon it than that of his own mind. He therefore had recourse to the only expedient which those in general have, who feel that a certain suspicion attaches to their testimony, and who have no additional testimony wherewith to confirm it-even that of strenuous and repeated affirmation, 'I say the truth, I lie not.'

But Paul, in this necessary defect of human witnesses, does make mention of other witnesses; and which he seems at least to appeal to. He does not simply assert that he says the truth, but that he says it in Christ;' neither does he simply quote the testimony of his conscience, but his conscience as bearing him witness in the Holy Ghost' —most competent witnesses assuredly to the matter here spoken of, seeing that both had thorough insight into the recesses of the human spirit— Christ knowing what is in man-the Holy Ghost searching all things, and how much more the things of man, when He searcheth even into the deep things of God.

In our readings of the Bible, we often acquit ourselves of the task very currently; and are apt to speed our way over whole phrases, without being at all arrested by any thought or feeling of their significance and that too with a book where there is nothing insignificant. The introduction of Christ and of the Holy Ghost in this verse, has perhaps with most of us never stirred up any enquiry into the mind and meaning of the apostle, when he thus refers to them. We recognise their names as wellknown sounds, that are quite familiar to the ear; and the understanding therefore not startled, as it were, into vigilance, by any strange or rarely uttered vocable, remains asleep and insensible to the thought which lies couched in the phraseology of the apostle. It is thus that it fares, we apprehend, in very many instances with the Bible-that this mine of precious