suredly wherein God would have us to glorify him in any particular way; being spiritually conversant, not merely with the mind, but with the individual intentions of God (1 Cor. xii. 8,9). So we should not be as children, tossed with every wind of doctrine, irresolute to confess, unable to declare our God; but, being rooted in love, would grow up into Christ the Head; neither hearing nor giving uncertain sounds, but ever furnished, dead and mortified to all that is in the world, having signs wrought in us with all patience, and counting it all joy through much tribulation to enter into glory.

"I know thy works, that thou hast the reputation of being alive, and art dead."-The general meaning of this awful declaration from the Searcher of hearts, concerning that condition out of which our church is just beginning to emerge, is obvious at first sight; but its special point and application deserve peculiar attention. To be alive, is to live to God; -a conscious act, which can come to pass only by the Spirit of life "quickening us together with Christ from the dead:" and the ministry of word and sacrament by God's ambassadors, is that appointed means of giving and sustaining life, which no man can despise and thrive. Whence it is plain, that if the Church of Sardis have forgotten Christ as the Possessor of the seven spirits and stars, although she has life, without which she would be no church at all, she must be dragging out a sickly and moribund existence in the sight of God, though not in the sight of men who are alive unto sin. Accordingly we find her called "dead." But, while Christ sees her to be so, she has the reputation of being alive. By this is to be understood, not merely that she thinks herself alive in many instances she does; in many, I am persuaded, she does not; for, seared as her conscience often is by the withering honour of men, which forms at once the cause and the antidote of her disgrace at the hand of God, it cannot but frequently tell her in secret that she is dead; for conscience, where it is allowed to speak, always tells the truth; and I have no doubt that her horror of the corpse makes her trick it out the more. Neither is the fulness of the text expressed by taking it to import no more than a false appearance of an ordinary share of life: it truly imports a shew of unusual energy; a shew unusually splendid; a splendour unusually wide. The thing which she hath is the "name," or reputation: and even as the name of the risen Jesus, crowned as he is with a crown of eternal life, not natural but Divine, at the hand of the living God-that "Name" at which God now demands of every knee to "bow"-is the revelation of the Christ to the glory of the Father in the sight of all things in heaven and earth and hell; and as whatsoever life the church hath, she hath by knowing the power and experiencing the fellowship of his resurrection name; so the church of Sardis, in

having" a name to live," sets herself forth as peculiarly like her Lord, and a light of peculiar splendour over all the earth; thus coupling the most splendid reputation, parade, and notoriety, with the most abject darkness, impotence, and death. She professes to be, like the Thessalonian church, a type to all the faithful in zeal and fruitfulness. From her, if you were to credit appearances, has sounded out the word of the Lord through all the earth (1 Thess. i. 7). But, alas! it is the sound, not of the Holy Ghost, but of "a tinkling cymbal." For, in imitating the Lord, she has forgotten him as the "Man of sorrows;" the Man who dealt with nothing seen, who leaned on nothing made; who received his Father's words in much tribulation, and uttered them in much reproach: and, in professedly turning from idols, instead of waiting for the Son of God from heaven, she would fain constitute an eternal church without the Lord; she would fain live at an unharassing, unhumbling distance from God, under the mask of living by " the evidence of things not seen;' and she is traversing the nations, to turn them from the lesser idolatry of stocks and stones, and the lesser blindness of misinterpreting the things made, to the crying idolatry of God's own word and servants and service, and the awful crime of perverting the things written, yea, of misinterpreting the person of the Christ of God. Go where you please, you hear the cry concerning her, Alive, alive, alive! glorious in strength, fair in countenance, splendid in apparel, prosperous in work!— alive in Bible Societies; circulating the word now as if it were a god, now as if it were a bale of merchandise ;-alive in schools; teaching men Christ by the hour;-alive in philanthropy, with the most prudent reticence of Christ to keep in paying members; -alive in missions, home and foreign, served by men who have no other prospect, not by men who have no other thought; preaching a false gospel, and keeping up interest by lies ;—alive in the whole trade of religion, but without a sheaf to shew to God as the God of the harvest. But from whom do ye hear this cry? From all decent men alike, whether they know God or not; from all professors of Christ, whether they bring forth fruit or not. All praise her with one consent; all help her with one purse. This cannot be of God: God doth not so confound things. The ungodly would not subscribe to serve God; and what, then, can we think of his church, if they coalesce to serve her, but that she telleth not what she ought to be, telleth not what Christ is; but telleth a lie, and that for money; telleth it to obtain the fruits of the Holy Ghost without the crucifixion of the flesh? Alas! she is no longer a widow; not because her Husband hath come, but because she hath forgotten him: she is married unto the world. She talks of religion, not of the living God; of her own opinions, not of his living Word; in

her own vain modesty, not in the lowly confidence and glorying of one who knoweth "Him that is true." And while she racks her intellect upon external evidences, and her imagination to stir up sentimental fancies, for contribution's sake, and to extract sentimental sighs over the vanity of the very world she clings to, she cannot possibly be a "stranger" here, because she can only be so by "having another country."

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"Become thou watchful, and establish (snpov) the things that remain, that are about to die" (or, for the future, what are about to die); " for I have not found thy works fulfilled (TETλnpwμɛva) before God."-The injunction here given and its argument have a striking relation to one another. I have not found thy works fulfilled before God," is the reason which our Lord gives for his command to "watch." The works of the angel of Sardis appear fulfilled. He has done so much, and registered it so faithfully, and blazoned it so broadly, that all but unreasonable ones—that is, all who "judge according to the appearance"-deem him almost ready to receive his crown; having nothing left undone for God, with such a machinery in full operation, such a flowing in of time and talent and wealth. But Christ saith, they are not fulfilled: a negative most emphatic indeed. "Thou art as far below as thou deemest thyself above the average; comparing thyself with others, not with God. As thy privileges rise, so do my demands at thine hand; and, nevertheless, thy renderings unto me have been not even stationary, but retrograde. Thou hast not blessed me with service, because thou hast refused to bless me more by receiving of my fulness. Say men as they may, I have not found thy works what men have called them: it is before God that I have found them wanting; before God, in whose sight all things are open and manifest; before God, whom I always hear before I judge.' And why are these works found so unfulfilled? By reason of the unwatchfulness of the church (or of the angel who represents her); by her not "watching unto prayer," and being "sober;" by her not abiding awake, but sleeping in the night; by her reposing in the lap of the world, and not being wakeful, "as those that wait for the morning;" finally, by her resolution to turn herself away from God's great argument for watchfulness, the coming of the Lord: as it is written, "What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch" (Mark xiii. 37): "Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when he cometh shall find watching" (Luke xii. 37): and,as a warning against the three unclean spirits which shall gather the kings against their coming Lord, " Blessed is he that watcheth" (Rev. xvi. 15). Nothing is plainer, than that they who look not for the day of the Lord as their fulness of joy, will never watch for him. They that love HIM not-let them love churches, and sermons, and preachers, and societies, and prayers, and praises, ever so much-will never look for him; but, on the

if

contrary, serving themselves, and trying just one of the thousand ways to solve the problem of greatest comfort in the world that is now, they will rather have things as they are; with just enough of the form to quiet their deceived consciences, perhaps to flatter their vanity; and so little of the power as not to impair in the least their appetite for any of the things that perish; which things often come in their most subtle and destroying form as things pertaining to the conscience and the faith. And so they say, Where is the promise of his coming, whose ordinances we prefer to himself? And being blinded, and not wise to understand, they say, because they wish, that all things continue as they were. Now against all this thus saith the wisdom of God, Watch; be separate; sit loose; cumber not yourselves, you be soldiers; be ready; have your citizenship in heaven, whence you look for the Saviour; sit in heavenly places with Christ, overcoming the world; be not entangled; be temperate for the mastery's sake; say plainly that you seek a country; let your moderation be known unto all men; the Lord is at hand : thus alone shall you have strength and establishment, reaching out unto a kingdom that cannot be moved, and now walking in its power, settled firm on the settled word of God. To this exhortation the expression "establish the things which remain," evidently points. The world that is to come, in all its parts, material and immaterial, is of the Holy Ghost, regenerate out of destruction, indestructible unto God; even as Christ, risen from the dead, and constituted the second Adam, the primogenitor of a new and Godhead life, is, in body and in soul, the quickening Spirit. That world is indissoluble, because it is righteous. There God shall have his own place. Every act of righteousness, every rendering of his due place to God, partakes of the establishment of the world to come. And therefore the command in the text just amounts to this: What remains is ready to die for you are drawing life, not from the fulness of Him in whom our life is hid within the veil, but from this barren world; and you are settling yourself amid the things that are, and not expecting till Christ, who is your life, shall appear; not thirsting at all. Draw your life from Christ, and look for him, and so you shall fix and settle your uncertain, inconsistent testimony, your tossed and darkling faith: for except your heart be fixed on God, and his own mind be in you, you cannot stand fast for him, though it be fixed in subtle idolatry even on the Scriptures themselves, and you approve them all as true. And now I say, that all things are ready to die; for men have departed from Holy Ghost life, and the true channels thereof. They deny God as the fountain; they deny the Christ of God as the cistern. They deny that life is given to every man; and so shift the responsibility of spiritual and eternal death from the

resistance of the Holy Ghost by man, to the niggard bestowal of God. They deny the doctrine of the Anointed One, the doctrine of Christ come in the flesh-that is, of our flesh in the Son-anointed to the praise and inheritance of God, which denial is Antichrist (2 John 7, 9; Rev. xii. 10). They deny the teaching of the Holy Ghost as an indwelling Person. They mock at increase of wisdom beyond the routine of solemn and sounding traditions. They almost gnash their teeth at any one who will confess that he hath verily got an understanding to know Him that is true; that he hath a certainty of the Spirit, which is an anchor to him and a condemnation to men; and not a mere opinion, which every man may entertain with impunity for himself. Alas! they who say that men now know by the devil's teaching so much of God as not to need the helps of weaker ages, do now begin to blaspheme the mighty works by which our gracious God shews himself, as of old, a living God, and not that congeries of theological abstractions which our churchmen have made him; and a present God, notwithstanding all that men have done to remove him to such a distance as will permit those who love him not to praise him, those who hate him not to fear him, and those who trust him not to pray to him without the fear of being startled by really getting what they ask, or being intruded on by him where they had not appointed or desired to meet him. The intellect of man, the love of the world, have made of none effect the faith of God. The prophets prophesy falsely, and the people love to have it so. They get no vision from the Lord to guide the people within the darkness; and when the burdens of the Lord arrive, they will tell of false burdens, to the people's ruin (Jer. v. 31; Lam. ii. 9, 14).

"Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and preserve, and repent. If therefore thou watch not, I will come as a thief upon thee, and thou shalt not know what hour I shall come upon thee."-This command to remember being two-fold, is neither more nor less than a command to remember Christ in the two characters which his title reveals,—that of the quickening Spirit, and that of the Speaker from heaven. For as it is by the Holy Ghost that we receive, so it is by the preacher that we hear. And as the command to establish the dying things, is a command to be taught in the things of the kingdom; so this command to remember, is a command to acknowledge the Spirit of Christ who is the earnest of the kingdom, and the embassy from God which is the glad tidings of the kingdom. Now, was there ever a time in the Gentile dispensation when the church was at once apparently receiving so much, and forgetting so entirely how only she can receive from God; or apparently hearing so much, and so unmindful whom alone she is called to