paltry, and unworthy of the ambition of a rational man, still less of a Christian.

And lastly, my dear friends, let us know that we shall be thus honored and thus clothed, not because our names are in the Lamb's book of life, but because Christ loves us, and we love him as a response to that love. Some men have a sort of stereotyped Christianity; they think in this way :-"I am chosen to eternal life; I am predestinated; I am sure that my name is in the Lamb's book of life." Where they obtained the knowledge does not trouble them; they profess to have this knowledge, and then they say, "I need not mind much how I live; I need not care much how I act-all is safe." Would it be auspicious reasoning if a wife were to say, "I know that my husband has taken me for better and worse, and that he must provide for me, because the law of the land says so: our tie is indissoluble; I have the wedding-ring on my finger, I may therefore act as I please without consulting his wishes or his happiness." The husband would have no great opinion of such a wife. She should believe that her husband loved her, and therefore she was safe, and for this reason alone; and we are to believe that our state for ever-our names not being erased from the book of life, is not because they are stereotyped, fixed there, and not to be broken,-but because he that loved us from the first, loves us to the end, and none shall be able to pluck us out of his hand.

The following is the most recent description of Sardis :

Sardis, the metropolis of the region of Lydia, in Asia Minor, is situated near mount Tmolus, between thirty and forty miles east from Smyrna. It was celebrated for great opulence and for the voluptuous and debauched manners of its inhabitants. Considerable ruins attest the ancient splendour of this once celebrated capital of Croesus and the Lydian Kings. It is now reduced to a wretched village called Sart, consisting of a few mud huts, inhabited by Turkish herdsmen. A great portion of the ground once occupied by this imperial city, is now a smooth grassy plain, browsed over by the sheep of the peasants or trodden by the camels of the caravan, and only a few disjointed pillars and the crumbling rock of the Acropolis remain to point out the site of its glory. The ruins are more entirely gone to decay than in

most of the ancient cities in those parts. No Christians reside on the spot. Two Greek servants of a Turkish miller were the only representatives of the Church of Sardis in 1826. Its present state affords a striking illustration of the accomplishment of the prophetic denunciation against the Church in that city-"a name to live while dead."

33

LECTURE XXIV.

THE KEY OF DAVID AND THE OPEN DOOR.

"And to the angel of the Church in Philadelphia write; These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name." -REV. iii. 7, 8.

THE Lord Jesus is plainly the sublime personage who here introduces himself as the holy, the true, the possessor of the key of David. Isaiah beheld his glory while he worshipped, and said, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts." The "Holy One of Israel" is not only his name, but it is the sublime prerogative which he claims for himself. "Thou wilt not suffer thine Holy One' to see corruption," is the epithet bestowed by the Father upon the Son. Christ was holy as God, holy as man. The highest holiness that man can reach is a borrowed holiness; the holiness of Christ was aboriginal, underived, and full of glory. He describes himself here as "the True One." The "True" is also a frequent epithet of Christ in Scripture: "That we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ;" and he says of himself, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Christ is the truth of all literature, of all science, and philosophy. Every prophecy finds in him its performance as the truth. Every promise provokes in him its echo; for he is its truth. All the precepts and doctrines of Christianity have in him their roots, coherence and unity. He is the key that unlocks all God's dispensations in the history of the past-all the mysteries inscrutable to man that envelope us in the present,-from whom

too the future shall have all its glory and light. He is "the Holy One, the True One, and hath the key of David, and openeth, and no man shutteth."

The expression here used is plainly an allusion to the language of Isaiah,—or rather of God, speaking by the mouth of Isaiah,— when he says of Eliakim, "I will clothe him with thy robe, and strengthen him with thy girdle, and I will commit thy government into his hand: and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to the house of Judah. And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open. And I will fasten him as a nail in a sure place; and he shall be for a glorious throne to his father's house." This is evidently a prediction of Christ as having "the key of David."

The door that is here spoken of is a figure employed in Scripture in a variety of senses. For instance, in the Epistle to the Corinthians, we hear the apostle describing the opportunity of preaching the Gospel thus, "A great door and effectual is opened to me." Again, in 2 Cor. xi. 12, he says, "Furthermore, when I came to Troas, to preach Christ's Gospel, and a door was opened unto me of the Lord." Whatever then be the meaning of that door and it may have various meanings-Christ is the key that opens it. Is there wanted a door? or rather, is there now no door that is not shut to the spread of the everlasting Gospel in heathen lands? Each door Christ points out to the ministers of the cross, and opens it by that mysterious key that hangs at his girdle; so that thereby the Gospel shall have free course, and be glorified; and when he discloses and opens such a door, 66 no man can shut it." Who was it that opened a door in the isles of the Pacific, till those isles brightened into gems reflecting the glory of the Lord upon the bosom of the deep? He that hath the key of David. Who opened a door unexpectedly in the walls of China, leading inward to the very heart of that empire, and furnishing access there to the preachers of the Gospel? Who has opened a door in Rome itself for the circulation of the word of God and the preaching of the glorious Gospel? Not chance; not the Autocrat by his armies; not the mob in the ayopa by its voice; but He who rules amid the nations, and reigns in provi

dence, and "worketh hitherto," "He that hath the key of David, and openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth."

But Christ does not merely open a door among nations for the spread of the Gospel: he does more; and without doing more, the opening of a door would be ineffectual. He opens the door in the human heart for the entrance of the Gospel. We have a beautiful allusion to this in the Acts of the Apostles, where it is said, "The Lord opened the heart of Lydia." In vain is the Gospel preached with the most persuasive eloquence; in vain is it proclaimed amid circumstances propitious to its spread, and presenting encouragement to its friends; in vain does it gain a momentary ascendency over man's mind;-unless the Lord shall scatter the prejudices that cloud the mind, and eradicate the passions that encrust the heart, and make a door into its inmost recesses, its sound shall prove only as the tinkling cymbal and the sounding brass, and its effects momentary as the morning cloud and the early dew.

Christ opens a door to us for the descent of the forgiveness of sin. Through him alone can it reach us. Here perhaps is the opportunity for the explanation of a popular misapprehension. Christ's death was not designed, nor is it now meant, to make God have mercy upon those on whom he would otherwise have let forth his wrath; but Christ's death was intended to open a door for the egress of that love which viewed us from everlasting ages, and having loved us from the first, loves us even to the last. In other words, the death of Christ was not the Genesis of a love in God that was not previously there, but it was the opening a door for the egress of a love that was eternally there. It is not the proposition of the Bible, that Christ died that God might love us; but that God loved us, and therefore Christ died for us: hence one of the most beautiful lights in which you can look at that death is, as a provision for the egress of the love of God in full consistency with the demands of his justice, the pledges of his truth, and the exactions of his holiness: so that in that door, God's justice is the threshold, God's mercy and love are the lintels and the door-posts; and those very attributes, which, without an atonement, would naturally have obstructed and resisted,