commandments of Christ.

You desire to reach the assurance of so bright and joyful an anticipation, as the apostle expresses in our text. It is to be reached by a path of labour, and so he says in another place" labour with all diligence unto the full assurance of hope unto the end." It is not by a flight of imagination that you gain the ascents of spiritual experience. It is by the toils and the watchings and the painstakings of a solid obedience. Performance alone will not do it for performance unsanctified by prayer is a legal and a presumptuous offering. Prayer alone will not do it-for prayer unaccompanied with performance, is an idle or a hypocritical effusion. But prayer and performance together will do it. What looks now a secret and inaccessible thing, will then become familiar for the secret of the Lord is with them that fear him. What now looks dark and deep and wholly undiscernible, will then become manifestfor to him that ordereth his conversation aright will God show His covenant. There is a working to establish a righteousness of your own, that will land you in utter disappointment and defeat; but there is also a working which is taken up with a looking unto Christ as the Lord your righteousness, that brings down upon your soul the illuminations which He is ever ready to bestow on His faithful followers; and which He delights in showering down upon them from his seat of exaltation-as the tokens of His love to all those who evince the sincerity of their love to Him, in the keeping of His commandments.

75

LECTURE LV.

ROMANS, Viii, 17, 18.

"And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer with him that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon, that the sufferings. of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”

AND if children, then heirs.' The one implies relationship to God, the other a right of property from Him-differing from the corresponding right in society in this-that for one man to be the heir of another, implies a right to that which the other possesses upon his relinquishing it by death. It is a right in reversion; but which, instead of entering upon at the death of another, he enters upon at his own death. And he is an heir of God, not because at that period he succeeds Him, but because at that period he is admitted by Him into the full enjoyment of Himself-nay, into as full a participation as his limited faculties will allow, of the very joys and the very characteristics of the Godhead. He then enters on the glory that is to be revealed, and he is then filled with the whole fulness of God. St. John felt himself unable to enter into the details of what that is which the children of God shall be, but still he

could say in the general that we shall be like Him. He knew of himself and of his fellow-disciples that they were the sons of God, and exclaims on the manner of love wherewith God had loved them in that they should be so called; and then he seems to pass from their relationship as sons of which he spake with present certainty, to their relationship as heirs of which he could only speak distantly and dimly-yet speaks in such a way as makes out a very apposite conception of our property in God; for what can give us a nearer use and enjoyment of the Deity, than we have by actually seeing Him as He is, and so gazing with unexpended delight on all those lovely and venerable graces by which He is irradiated and, what comes nearer to a communication of Himself unto us or to our having a portion in the Divinity, than our being made like unto Him? It would look too as if the circumstance of our seeing Him led, by a sort of casual or influential energy, to the circumstance of our being assimilated to Him-as if we gathered, by a sort of radiation from His glory, the reflection of a kindred glory upon our own persons-as if His excellencies passed into us when ushered into His visible presence, and became ours by sympathy or ours by transmission. He does not part with His character; but He multiplies His character by the diffusion of it through all the members of the blest household that is above; and they may most significantly be called heirs of God-may be most significantly said to have God for their portion, and God for their inheritance-When not only admit

ted to the full and immediate sight of Him; but when the efficacy of that sight is to actuate and inspire them with His very affections, is to cover and adorn them with His very moral and spiritual glories.

'Heirs of God.' This phrase brings us to the same conclusion as that in which we have often been landed, by the consideration of other phrases and other passages of the Bible, in regard to the kind of happiness that is to be enjoyed in heaven. To be filled with the fulness of God, is to have a full view of Him as He is; and not merely a full view of His character, but a full participation of it. This is the inheritance that we have to look for-ward to. An heir hath something in prospect, and something in reversion; and this is our prospect. There is a glory to be revealed; and of which we shall be admitted as the beholders, and not only the beholders but also the sharers of it. Our eye will be direct on the manifested Godhead; and in the act of looking to Him we shall be made like unto Him. We shall imbibe the very character that we gaze upon; and not only shall we have unspotted moral excellence in full and faultless perfection before us, but we shall have all that inherent delight which springs from the ample possession of it. So that after all, it is not the happiness of sense but mainly and substantially the happiness of sacredness. It is the It is the very kind of happiness wherein God hath dwelt from everlasting; and in which He had supreme and

ineffable enjoyment before the world was. It is that happiness to which the viewless Spirit of the Eternal is competent; and which lay profoundly seated in the depths of His incomprehensible nature, ere there was any sensible delight to be tasted or any sensible beauty to gaze upon. He was happy in the contemplation of His own virtues; and this is a happiness that we are made to inherit, when, admitted into His presence, these virtues stand in illuminated glory before us. And He was happy in the complacent possession of these virtues—in the harmony within to which they ever attune the bosom of their serene and abiding occupation in the deep and capacious peacefulness, wherewith they pervaded the very essence of the Divinity—in that fulness of joy, whereof purity and righteousness and love are the sole but the sufficient elements. This happiness too we are made to inherit, when the character of God is not only set before us in radiant perspective, but is made ours in real and actual possession-when all His moralities take up their dwelling-place in our own souls, and have over them entire and absolute dominion—when, in the ethereal play of our kind and holy and heavenly affections, we shall have pleasure for evermore-when ours shall be the blessedness that essentially resides in every wellconditioned and well-constituted spirit; and opposed to all that turbulence and misery, which wrath and malice and deceit and the fierceness of unhallowed desire are ever stirring in the heart