that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father in heaven.

And as members of a Church, as a congregation collected together, you will testify your love by your liberality to the claims of Christ, and by your liberal response to every appeal in the missionary cause. You will make this to be clearly understood, that your Christianity is not a Sunday coat, to be put off when Monday comes; that it is not a shibboleth, a holiday attire; but that it is a silent, it may be, but a plastic, transforming, sanctifying principle, implanted by the Spirit of God, and which the world can neither crush nor conceal.

LECTURE VIII.

THE BATTLE OF LIFE.

"He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the Churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God."”—Rev. ii. 7.

I HAVE explained, first, the commendation of the Church at Ephesus as it is expressed in the second and third verses; next, the censure pronounced upon it, so gently and courteously pronounced,- "I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love;" next, the prescription, "Remember from whence thou art fallen, repent, and do the first works "

I ought to have added in my last discourse some remarks on the sixth verse: "This thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitanes." These were a sect who held wrong principles, and indulged in still worse practices. We have here an important distinction. Our Lord thus addresses the Church of Ephesus; "Thou hatest," not the Nicolaitanes themselves, but "the deeds" by which they were degraded. The distinction in a Christian's mind should ever be, "love to the sinner, the most ardent he can feel; hatred to his sins, the most unmitigated he can conceive." Our Lord so loved the sinner that he died to redeem him; he so detested the sin that he shed his blood to expiate and cancel it. We must love the Nicolaitanes, and pray for them, and try to convince and to convert them, but all the while our familiarity with their persons must produce no sympathy with their sins; and these we must hate not merely because they are inexpedient, not merely because they are unpopular,-not merely because they will do damage to us in the world,— but on this high and holy ground, that Christ hates them. Sympathy with

Christ's mind is the glory of the Christian, and in proportion as we grow in grace, in the same proportion do we love what he loves and hate what he hates.

We then come to the promise: "Let him that hath an ear hear what the Spirit saith unto the Churches." It is not a promise to the Ephesian Church only; "let him that hath an ear,"-Ephesian, Roman, Greek, Englishman, Scotchman, Irishman-"let him that hath an ear" — let all humanity- "hear what the

Spirit saith," not to one Church, but "to the Churches" of every age, country, form, denomination, and circumstance; "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God."

Let me speak now, not of the victory, but of the conflict; not of the laurels, but of the garments rolled in blood. The expression victory sounds musical in a nation's ears; but often it rings with terrible knell in many a widow's and an orphan's heart. Victory is sung in poet's song, lauded in the senate, shouted by the nation, as if it were an accent of jubilee; but all the while that a nation's heart is bounding, many a widow's and orphan's heart is breaking. "To him that overcometh,"-the word victory implies previous conflict; such conflict as is the invariable mark of our present state. If we are the people of God, Christianity declares that it is so. Whether we like it or not, we are made soldiers the moment that we become Christians. The whole earth becomes a battle-field the moment that the whole heart becomes the seat of the grace and spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. Who, it may be asked, are the forces who are engaged in this field? On the one side, Satan, and the beast, and the false prophet, and all that are assimilated to their character or infected by their principles. On the other side, the Lord Jesus Christ, and they that bear his name-that glory in his cross-who are baptized with his baptism and regenerated by his Spirit. These are the two hosts; they are correlatives; one or other must be supreme; there can be no peace or compromise between them; and as long as the world has Satan in the midst of it-its usurper, and as long as the Church of Christ has the Lord of Glory in the midst of it-its Captain, so long there will be conflict. The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable; and until the whole earth is filled with

the purity of truth, it will not repose in the quiet, and be covered with the prevalence of Christian peace. And remember-as long as this dispensation remains-conflict, battle, struggle is its characteristic; and if there be any man in this assembly who does not know what it is to battle with iniquity without-who does not know what it is to struggle with temptation, and evil, and wickedness within-that gives too unequivocal proof that he is not the soldier of Christ, he is on Satan's side, and Satan will leave him unmolested as long as he makes no effort to cease to be his victim. Only when he begins to enlist himself beneath the banner of his Lord will Satan make the attack upon him.

In the next place, the theatre of this conflict is the world in which we live. There is no conflict in heaven, because storms and discord and evil passions cannot enter there. There is no conflict in hell, for all there is defeat-desperation-despair. But earth, which lies between the two, not yet covered with the sunshine of the one, nor, blessed be God, yet consigned to the gloom and bitterness of the other, is the great battle-field on which Satan wars with Christ, and the hosts of heaven are arrayed againt the hosts of hell. The prize is your soul-my soul.

"What is the thing of greatest price,

The whole creation round?

That which was lost in paradise-
That which in Christ is found.

"The soul of man- -Jehovah's breath-
It keeps two worlds in strife;
Hell works beneath its work of death,
Heaven stoops to give it life.

"And is this treasure borne below
In earthly vessels frail?
Can none its utmost value know
Till flesh and spirit fail?

"Then let us gather round the Cross,
That knowledge to obtain;
Not by the soul's eternal loss,
But everlasting gain."

This is the prize; this the subject of the conflict.

Having seen the two parties, let us next examine the weapons

wielded on the one side by Satan and by them that are his; and next, the weapons wielded on the other side, that is, by Christ and them that are his.

First, let me look at the weapons wielded by Satan and his forces.

"He is a

The first weapon that Satan wields is deception. liar," says the Apostle, "and the father of it." He seduced Eve from her loyalty, Adam from his allegiance, humanity from its God, by the skilful use of a lie: "Hath God said that ye shall surely die?" And so he uses this weapon still. He teaches one there is no God-that a God is the dream of bigots, the bugbear of enthusiasts. He teaches another that the Bible is a book of exquisite poetry, beautiful history, and excellent morality; useful to keep the vulgar in awe, but not fit for superior minds or noble understandings; and as for Satan, (for Satan will suffer this,) he is a figure of speech, a pretence, a myth; and a new heart is the dream of an enthusiast, and the requirement of fanatical methodism. He will teach others that the world is a glorious place, money the greatest good, and to get rich in the shortest time and by any means, if the means are only mighty and rapid, is the way to enjoy the greatest happiness; that a man has reached the culminating point of the happiness of which he is capable, when he can sit down, amid all the profits he has reaped, in his country-seat and amid his fertile fields, and say, "Soul, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry, for thou hast much goods laid up for many years;" not knowing that a voice may be on its journey from the throne, "This night thy soul shall be required of thee." Others, again, whose hearts are touched, whose consciences are stirred, and who begin to think that it will not do to live in sin, and yet that they must not commit themselves to Christianity-those men who are afraid of their infidelity lest it should fail them, and who are frightened at Christianity lest it should annoy them—who dare not embrace the Gospel lest they should lose the sweets of sin, and dare not continue in sin lest they should lose the quiet of their consciences those men who are struggling between antagonistic principles, and powers, and prospects-Satan meets and wields the weapon that succeeded so splendidly in the case of Felix, and