thou hast received;" at what a price your privileges have been purchased, at what a sacrifice these have been perpetuated; in spite of what unworthiness these have been continued. And while you "remember how thou hast received," "be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain and are ready to die," lest Christ come upon you in judgment, in an hour when ye think not. All things encourage you to do so. God waits to strengthen you. You have only to ask. God waits to bless you. You have only to open your heart to receive the blessing. Do not, my dear friends, misunderstand what Christianity is. It is not calling upon you to do something, to suffer something, to pay something, but to receive something, perfect, complete, and finished already. It is asking you to believe, and be saved; to look to and lean on God's love, as that love comes through the channel of Christ's sacrifice, and is applied to you by Christ's Spirit; and so looking, so leaning, so believing, you shall have a life that will outlast the earth, and shine only more beautiful when the firmament and all things seen shall have been burned up and passed away like a parched scroll. LECTURE XXII. THE WALK IN WHITE. "Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white; for they are worthy."- REV. iii. 4. I ADDRESSED you some time ago upon the introductory part of the address of our Lord to the Church of Sardis: "I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead." I endeavoured to explain what such a dead state of religious profession may be construed to mean. But after this part of his address, which declares the dark and unpromising condition of the Church of Sardis, our Lord indicates that in the midst of the enveloping darkness there were scattered and beautiful lights—that notwithstanding the all but universal hypocrisy, there were true men, and good men, and . faithful left: "Thou hast a few names even in Sardis [bad as it is,] which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy." "Name" is used in Scripture as a synonyme for person. We find it so used, for instance, in the Acts of the Apostles (ch. i. 15), where we read that "the number of names together were about an hundred and twenty." No doubt, therefore, the word "name" is used in Scripture, and here unquestionably, to denote a person. In this world names too frequently stand in all their ancient and just expressiveness, while the realities of which they were originally the exponents have utterly departed. In this age the meanest men often wear the most magnificent names; but in the spiritual world, and in the word of God, we find ourselves in the world of realities, and things are precisely what they sound. Perhaps one design of the use of the word "name" in this passage may be, that the contrast may more clearly appear to the expression in the first verse: "Thou hast a name that thou livest." If there be many depraved in the Church of Sardis, our Lord says they are not all so; if there be there names the most significant in sound, but the most untrue in their application, it is not so universally; there are even there names that are the exponents of character, and the persons that wear them are better and nobler than the most eloquent and high-sounding titles they bear if there be those who have an expressive name to conceal the features of the soul that is dead, there are, at the same time, those who have names which are the inadequate and unequal exponents of their features, their history, and their worth. "Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments." Seldom, therefore, we conclude, is the Church of Christ so corrupt that there are no true Christians in it. There is no Church in Christendom all of whose members are Christians; and there is no Church in Christendom in which there are not some Christians. In ancient times there was a Noah in the midst of the all but universal apostasy of the antediluvian world; there was a Lot in the midst of Sodom; an Abraham in the midst of Ur; a Job in the land of Uz. The sky is rarely so overcast that one or two bright stars may not be detected through some chink; the Alps and the Appenines are not so frost-bitten and blasted that there blooms not here and there a solitary violet that, sought out, will be found to repay by its beauty and fragrance him that seeks it. There is rarely a wilderness so bleak that there is not a spring, or an oasis, or a tree in it. When Ahab had destroyed the prophets of the Lord, and Elijah thought he was alone, there were seven thousand, invisible to him, who had not bowed the knee to Baal; and in Malachi's days, when almost the whole Church had apostatised, there was still a remnant that "feared the Lord, and spake often to one another;" and God entered their names in the book of his remembrance, and promised that they should be his in that day when he should make up his jewels. Here then we derive-first, comfort that there is no Church so depraved that there are not some good people in it; and, secondly, we are taught that Christ's promise, which says the Church of Rome has failed, if she be not the true Church, is notwithstanding fulfilled, because there are still at least two or three Christians to be found upon the earth-"Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world." Find three Christians left, and Christ's promise is seen to be true. Every living Christian is a living temple in which the Lord dwells — an evidence that he has not forsaken his Church-a proof that miracles are in the midst of it: for the greatest of all miracles is the transformation of a corrupt heart, and the quickening of a dead one. Let us also rejoice that the few found in the midst of a Church, or in the bosom of a city, or in the situations, the offices, and the high places of a land, are the substance of that Church, the safety of that city, the real patriots the best muniments. and battlements of the land in which they live. God would not rain his judgments on Sodom until Lot had escaped from the midst of it, nor would he pour down the vials of his wrath upon Jerusalem, justly and long fore-doomed of God, until the Christians had escaped and were all lodged in Pella. In the Apocalypse it is declared that Great Babylon shall not be utterly consumed until God's people in the midst of it have heard the warning cry, and have rushed to the true ark, there to find a shelter in the midst of the judgments which are destined to alight upon the world and the apostasy together. Let us, then, never forget that the highest Christianity is the highest patriotism - that the strongest pillar that sustains the throne and supports the state, is the Christian-that the moment Christianity is exhausted from a nation's life, the oxygen is gone from its atmosphere, the life-blood is emptied from its system, and all its institutions and economy must fall asunder like ropes of sand, that have no cohesion or binding power to keep them in unity. Let us then feel truly feel that when we spread the Gospel, we augment the element which contributes most effectually to the safety, the strength, and the perpetuity of our father land; and not only so, but when we spread the Gospel in the midst of the poorest and most destitute localities of that land, we do that which will extinguish all the elements of revolution, and raise the people, purify, ennoble them. At the same time, I cannot -- but add, as I have often said before, notwithstanding all the efforts of the City Mission, of Scripture Readers, of Parochial Ministers, and Ministers of every denominatioh, the hope of evangelizing the masses in London is distant indeed, unless something be done, not merely to ameliorate, but humanize their now brutalized physical and sanitary condition. I was speaking this morning in this church to a physician who belongs to the Board of Health, and who has been visiting the worst parts of Salisbury, London, and other places; and he told me (and I wish those were now present who are usually preseut at an earlier season of the year,) that the dogs of noblemen and gentlemen are treated in a way that the poor in this great metropolis are absolute strangers to. We hear of the pestilence in the midst of us. The wonder is, that instead of hundreds, it does not mow down its hundreds of thousands. This great judgment is sent upon us greatly and mainly to stir up those that have, to do something for those poor, destitute, hunger-bitten, perishing creatures in the midst of us, who are strangers to a blanket, to a fire, and nourishing food. Were an angel to come to our country from the skies, and to read upon our coins our half-pence, our pence, our shillings, our sovereigns-what I rejoice to read, but what I grieve to add is omitted on the last new coin introduced to our currency-Dei gratiâ, "By the grace of God;" and were this stranger from another world to hear us say that we are a Christian nation; and were he then taken to some of the dens and alleys in St. Giles's, to Field Lane, and the east end and south side of London, and allowed to witness the awful scenes in those localities, where man is brutalized-nay, sunk below the brutes and were he also to be told that on the body of a poor woman being brought before a coroner's inquest, it is proved upon evidence irresistible that by making shirts, (and this is your cheap goods, and your cheap market system!) she earns one shilling a-week, that she has not tasted animal food for six months, and that the threat of her master to reduce her pittance to sixpence a-week was the last stroke which, too severe for her to stand, struck her down the ripe victim for cholera; and were he again reminded that this is a Christian land,-would he not feel that it was a mockery, an |