capable of being informed by instruction or aroused by danger, still, as to all effectual efforts, man is dead in trespasses and sins; and can only know and love God, as he is transformed by the renewing of his mind. The whole question unfolds itself here. The real state of our fallen nature involves every other topic, and this among the rest. If this corruption is once fairly admitted, as set forth in Scripture, and deeply felt, as agreeing with the painful and daily conviction of experience, a commanding position is gained. The penitent inquirer will at once see the magnitude of that correspondent renewal of all the faculties of man which such a state demands.

The infinite holiness of the divine character will serve also to raise our conceptions of the great subject we are considering. Who can stand before the inconceivable majesty of God under the defilements of sin? His holiness is his glory. He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. The very angels are charged by him with folly, and the heavens are not clean in his sight. How then can man approach him without a holy state of heart? If, indeed, we "think wickedly, that God is even such an one as ourselves," our conceptions of this work of the Holy Spirit will proportionably sink. But, if we contemplate him as the King eternal, immortal, invisible, before whom the seraphim

veil their faces, and cry with ceaseless adoration, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts! we shall fall speechless before him in shame and confusion, and shall learn to appreciate that great change by which God condescends to renew a creature so lost as man, to reimpress upon him his spotless image, and thus to prepare him for his service.

But the stupendous mysteries of redemption place the importance of this subject in a still stronger light. The religion of the Bible addresses man as a sinner. It is a religion through a Mediator, and that Mediator the Son of God, the great High Priest; who, having purged our sins by his own blood, has entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. It begins with requiring subjection

to him in all the several characters in which he is revealed. The pride and self-confidence of our fallen hearts must be subjugated, if we would be true Christians: and we must renounce our own righteousness, which is of the law, that we may welcome and glory in the righteousness which is of God by faith. We must also have the mind which was in Christ, rejoice in his salvation, be governed by his love, do all things in his name, and ascribe whatever we perform that is good to his grace. The change, therefore, which is the commencement of all this, must be no trifling one. It must penetrate

and renew every faculty of the soul. Whenever the necessity of it is undervalued, the glory of the Saviour fades from our view. Our religion is in danger of becoming little more than a merely natural religion; and although there may be a formal denial of scarcely any one article of our faith, nay, though there be a readiness speculatively to assert and maintain nearly all of them, yet it is no longer the practical religion of the Bible, actually founded on the sacrifice and animated with the grace of Jesus Christ. Living faith in that Saviour, love to him, and a delight in speaking of his mercy and copying his example, must be the fruit of a new nature. When this begins to take place, all is practicable in religion. Then, and then only, the glowing language of the Apostles relating to Christ, is not interpreted away by a frigid gloss, nor merely admitted with a general acquiescence, but understood and welcomed as the natural and appropriate utterance of enlarged gratitude and love.

And if these considerations tend to heighten our conceptions of this spiritual transformation, what must we think of it, when we contemplate the glory and purity of heaven! To enter that blest abode, we must first partake of that entire work of the Holy Spirit, which prepares for it. There God will be adored in ceaseless acts of willing worship. There the songs of

praise to the Lamb that was slain, and has redeemed us to God by his blood, will for ever sound. There all will be peace, and repose, and spotless joy. To consider heaven chiefly as an exemption from punishment, or as a surprising elevation of dignity and glory, or even as the mere enjoyment of a refined intellectual pleasure, is to know little of its real nature. Holiness will be its element and its felicity. It would afford no joy to an unrenewed heart, even if it were possible that it should enter there. A paradise, approaching in its nature to that depicted by the Arabian Impostor, may afford some repose to the expectations of a sensual mind; but the rest which remaineth for the people of God is of another kind. It is to bring us, in the fullest sense of the terms, to Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first-born, which are written in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant. And what that change of heart must be, which is to constitute the meetness for this consummation, I will not stop to inquire. I will only say, that if of all these glories it is not possible to speak with adequate fervour, then we can never conceive highly enough of that transformation by

which the grace of God begins to qualify us for them 2.

I have pressed these various points with the greater earnestness, because they are calculated to exhibit, in a striking point of view, the nature of this great incipient work of the Spirit. If the student, instead of seizing at once the grand substance of truth in this respect, languish in hesitation; if he listen to the treacherous subtilty of his own heart, or lose himself among the objections of a sickly imagination; if he consult a luxurious and corrupted world, or lend himself to those who confound fervour with intemperance, and the most sober and enlightened piety, if it be spiritual and energetic, with enthusiasm: or if he dispose of every thing with an indolent carelessness, and sink the chief force of the great truth before us, in the outward transition from heathen or Mohammedan superstition to the profession of the Christian

The length to which the argument of my Discourse led me, made it impracticable to notice the counteracting influence arising in the actual lives and feelings of the best Christians, from the remaining force of sinful dispositions, combined with the temptations presented to them by the world and their other spiritual enemies. My object was to exhibit the magnitude of a real spiritual change in all the faculties of the soul, not in opposition to the large allowances to be ever made for human infirmity, but to the statements which would lower, and, in my mind, almost annihilate, the characteristics of the change itself.