into one act of obedience, even as within the limits of a single verse they have been embodied by the apostle into one precept. He tells the Gentiles not to boast themselves against the children of Israel;-and why? because it was by faith only that they stood-" And be not therefore," he says, "high-minded, but fear." Here, and within the compass of one utterance, the right fear and the right faith are both contemporaneously pressed upon them. The right fear would keep them from boasting, allied as it was with the sentiment that although they stood, it was by no power or holiness of their own. The right faith would direct their eye to that fountain of grace which was above them, and whence they drew those supplies of light and of strength, which from the unbelieving Jews had been withholden, and as they looked to that God who alone made them to differ, they would not be high-minded.

But the most complete scriptural illustration of this doctrine which can be given, is from that celebrated passage where the apostle tells his converts to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God that worketh in them both to will and to do of His good pleasure. It is conceivable how a man should both will aright and work aright in virtue of an influence from heaven, and how, to obtain this influence, a prayer should arise from the heart, and a power should come down both upon the heart and upon the hand for all the services of a vigorous and an active obedience. But why should there be a fear or trembling in this process? The fear is lest, among the besetting urgencies of sense and of nature, we should be tempted to forget God, and so He should withdraw His helping hand from us. The fear is lest, in the confidence of nature, we should go forth against the adverse influences by which we are surrounded, and so be overcome. The fear is lest we should lose our hold of God, and so He, quitting His hold of us, and abandoning us to our own unaided impotency, should leave us to the disgrace and the ruin of a fatal overthrow. The fear is lest, not praying as we ought, we should be deprived of the needful element for

right and acceptable performance; and, most important of all, the fear is lest, not performing as we ought, we should provoke God to withhold His answers of grace and of graciousness from our prayers. It is this last which harmonizes man's utmost activity with man's utmost dependence. This is the state of it: he does all that he can with the strength which he now has, and he looks to God for that strength being kept up and extended. He knows that if he do not work up to the power which is at present in him, that power will not be added to, and, what is more, that even such as it is, it may be withdrawn. He knows that if he do not trade with all diligence on the actual stock of grace, this stock will be actually diminished. Whatever, therefore, in the way of duty or of service, his hand findeth to do, he doeth it with all his existing might, lest deserted in wrath by the sustaining might of God, he should not only be arrested in his progress towards the strength and the stature of a more advanced Christianity, but should decline into the utter impotency of one who is altogether without grace and without godliness. It is precisely because God worketh in him to will and to do of his good pleasure, that he fears lest that good pleasure should be forfeited in the time that is to come by his careless and remiss improvement of all which it has done for him in the time that now is. The precise reason why so strenuous and so busy and so much on the alert in stirring up and putting to its practical use the gift that is in him, is, that if he do not he will receive no more gifts, and what he has will be taken away. A more plain and also more powerful incitement to all diligence, and that throughout every single instant of his course, cannot well be conceived than that if he do not at this instant work to the uttermost of that ability wherewith the Spirit has now invested him, the Spirit will be grieved, and may, on the very next instant, abandon him to his own unsupported feebleness. The relation between the hand that works and the hand by which it is strengthened, furnishes the very strongest, and at the same time most intelligible motive to steady, faithful, and enduring obedience.

M*

The man works out his salvation upon the strength of what God has wrought into him; and he does it with fear and trembling, just because most fearfully and tremblingly alive to the thought, that if he does not, God may cease working in him to will any more or to do any more. The doctrine of grace, thus understood, so far from acting as an extinguisher upon human activity, is in truth the very best excitement to it. This dependence between the busy exercise of all your present graces and the supply of new, is the fittest possible tenure on the part of God whereby to hold man to his most constant, most careful, most vigilant obedience. It is felt that the only way of obtaining enlargement and vigor for future services, is to acquit one's self to the uttermost of his present strength of all his present services; and that thus, and thus alone, he can step by step work his ascending way to a higher and a higher status in practical Christianity. We are aware of the reproach that has been cast on the doctrine of the Spirit's influences; but we trust it will be seen from these views, however imperfectly given, that he who labors in all the present might given, and looks for more, instead of living in the mystic state of an indolent and expectant quietism, he of all other men is the most awake to every call of duty-the most painstaking and arduous in every performance of it.

There is nothing in that mercy which descends upon us from heaven to supersede the activities of men upon earth. Instead of superseding, its very design is to stimulate these activities. When it works in us, its precise outgoing is just to set us working. Had it operated by an outward or physical constraint upon the hand, then might it only have worked on us to do. But it operates on the inner man, and so as to gain the consent of the heart; and accordingly works in us both to will and to do. It acts in truth by the influence of moral suasion, and addresses itself to the various parts and principles of our moral nature. The man instead of being driven by a force from without, is really and in substance under the government of his own feelingsbut these are feelings capable it would appear of being re

us.

fined and elevated by the influence of that supreme virtue which is above us, even as we experimentally know that they are capable of being refined and elevated by the influence of that social virtue which beams upon us from the companionship of a good and well-principled society around At all events, the thing is misunderstood if you conceive of him who has been quickened into action by a touch from the upper sanctuary, that he is therefore set aside from the exertion of his own powers, and the guidance or the control of his own purposes. The visitation, in fact, is upon the inward powers and sensibilities, not of a dead but of a living mechanism, and the effect of it is not to overbear any of the proper functions of the man, but to set all his powers and purposes and inward principles in action. Accordingly, in our text, the effect of God's having visited and redeemed His people, is that His people serve Him. Upholden though they be, and led although they be by the hand stretched forth upon them from heaven, it is a hand not of impulse upon matter but of application to mind, and which acts on that mind in sweetest unison with all its faculties, insomuch that these children of grace, instead of idly waiting in the anticipation of what is to come, are most strenuously and laboriously working under the ascendency of a moral force that is present, and which bears upon the heart as well as on the hand. We deceive ourselves then if we think that under the economy of the Gospel we are exempted from the assiduities of service; and although we shall never move aright unless breathed upon by an influence from above, yet he only has indeed partaken of that influence who, in practical deference to the authority of God as his Master, holds forth in the history of his life the aspect of a willing and a doing and a stirring and a painstaking obedience.

SERMON XVIII

[PREACHED at Glasgow, October 29, 1815.]

II. CORINTHIANS VI. 17, 18.

"Wherefore, come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty."

You will observe that Paul in these verses is addressing a number of professed Christians, who were surrounded with the allurements of idolatry. There was a power of temptation in these allurements greater than they have ever thought of to whom the profligacies of the pagan worship are unknown; but the apostle, whose converts lived in the midst of them, was aware of the constant vigilance they would have to maintain among the constant opportunities and solicitations which beset them in every quarter. He watched over them with a godly jealousy. He feared for them even to painfulness. His apprehension was that he would again lose them; and, aware of the danger that lay even in their most distant approaches to the objects of that enticing ritual, he insists on a clean and total separation. It is under a feeling of the hazard to which they were exposed that he calls upon them, in a former epistle, to beware of security: "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall." It is with a reference to the very same subject that he calls upon them to beware also of a despairing sense of helplessness, under the force of these surrounding temptations. He commits them to the faithfulness of God. "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to men; but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that you are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able