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self-sacrifice the evidence of love earnest and true behind it. If there be a pulse in the wrist, you may be sure there is a heart behind it; if there be a tangible and practical expression of devotedness to the Saviour, you may be sure there is a heart of love behind it; and I cannot conceive that a Sunday-School teacher can so devote himself to a work, often thankless and unsatisfactory, often ill-requited, and necessarily unrewarded in this world, from any other motive than love. If you love the Saviour, you will often think of him; and so the meanest act of service will be covered with a portion of the glory of the Master, and will be dignified by the recollection of the truth that it is for his sake.

In the next place, if we love Christ we shall love all that are like Christ. It is a law that the brothers and sisters of the same family love each other; and it is a law no less universal, that the brothers and sisters of the same Christian family love each other. I know it is a very easy thing for the churchman to love the churchman, and for the dissenter to love the dissenter: an earthly love can manage this; but the difficult or at least the dutiful thing is for the dissenter to love the churchman in spite of his churchmanship, and for the churchman to love the dissenter in spite of his dissent. Love, nevertheless, will penetrate the exterior circumstance which conceals it, and fasten upon the inner loveliness which is the transcript of the likeness, and the outline, though dim, of the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. I have often wondered what after all, if we are Christians, shall we think of all our quarrels and disputes, acrimony and bitterness, strong language, bad temper, and evil passions excited about church and state, about conformity and dissent, about presbytery and episcopacy, when we meet in heaven, where there are neither churchmen, nor dissenters, nor episcopalians, nor presbyterians, but only Christians. How shall we then look back, and if we look back, with what regret and amazement shall we do so, on those disputes and quarrels and enmities which have rent and disturbed the visible Church, and hindered the spread of the glorious Gospel for which the visible Church was instituted! If Christ has loved us, and we love Christ, we shall increasingly love all

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true Christians, and be ready, in spite of all minor points of difference, to do them all the good we can.

Such are a few of the proofs of love to Christ. Try yourselves by them. Do you thus love Christ? do you thus think of him? do you thus look to him? do you thus speak of him? do you thus love his people? and lastly, let me add, can you sacrifice for him? If two persons are walking in the same direction, and a servant in livery follows them, you do not know whether of the two is his master so long as they both keep the same road: but the road diverges; one of the masters goes to the right, and the other to the left; you then ascertain whose servant he is by his following his own master. Now as long as our worldly profit and our Christian principles flow in the same channel, which, blessed be God, they often do and may do, it is very difficult to determine whose we are but when the turning comes-when the crisis arrives, at which we must surrender the world and follow Christ, or surrender Christ and follow the world, then it will be seen, and we too shall feel whom we love, and whose we are, and with whom we expect to be reckoned. Can you, therefore, give up all for Christ's sake? I trust you have the feeling that would dictate such surrender and sacrifice; and when the crisis demands such sacrifice, you are prepared, I doubt not, to make it.

Thus, I have shown you what are the characteristics of Christ's love to us, and our love to him. It now remains for each one to ask himself, Do I love Christ? and if he can say, "Lord, thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love thee," then it is plain that Christ loves him.

LECTURE XXXI.

DIVINE CHASTISEMENT.

"As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent."-REV. iii. 19.

In my last lecture, I showed that God's love to us is everlasting: man's love is the creation of an hour, and in an hour it evaporates and dies. God's love is not a passion that suddenly springs up and overflows like a mountain stream, and is then dried up; but an everlasting principle that began in the depths of an eternity past, and will rise and flow till like a mighty ocean it covers all in eternity to come. "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." I stated next, that God's love to us is sovereign. We love the creature, because in that creature there is something that provokes, excites, creates our love. But when God loved us, he could see nothing in us worthy of that love or calculated to excite it in him or concentrate it upon us. In other words, he loved us, not because we were beautiful, but to make us so: not because we were worthy, but to make us worthy. Our love is the creature's love, created by something external to it: God's love is the Creator's love, lighting upon an object that is unworthy of it; but not leaving that object till it is transformed by its presence, and made beautiful and worthy of its tenantry.

I also showed you that men's disputes about the doctrine of election, wherever those men are true Christians, are very frequently logomachies, i. e. battles about words. You will meet with one who says, "God hath chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy;" and I am one that believes it; and believes it to be as I plainly indicated in the Bible as almost any truth in it. But you will find others, who say that God did not love us thus from eternity; that he

only called us in time; and that election is not a scriptural doctrine. I ask of such a person, "Do you believe that God loves me before I love him? in other words, that my love to him is only the echo of his love to me? Do you believe that his love is the original, mine the copy? that his is the first sound, mine the echo? that God calls before I hear? that he touches me before I respond? that he draws before I follow?" He replies, "Certainly; if I did not admit all this, I should not admit the doctrines of grace." Then our dispute about election is a mere dispute about words. It matters not whether God determined to save me millions of millennia ago, or whether God was pleased to think of me for the first time a few hours ago, and in his sovereignty to call me to his kingdom. It is equally a call, not dependent upon anything in me, but on the sovereignty and unmerited love of that God who loved me in spite of me. The truth is, that with God this past, this present, this future is nothing. Men talk of the past, the present, and the future; all this is the imperfect human speech trying to embody and to define the infinite and the inexpressible eternal things. With God there is no past, nor present, nor future, but all an open, unlimited, transparent now. The past of eternity and the future of eternity are with God equally present to him, just as the word that now escapes from my lips is present to your ear, and the ray that shines from my face lights upon the retina of your eye. There is no past with God; there is with him no future; and what we call time is just a little parenthesis in the bosom of eternity—a portion of the eternal current-cut off by an ever-flowing and imaginary line which we baptize by the name of time, just because we have only this human word to express an idea which is only luminous and real to that God to whom all things are naked, and by whom all things are understood.

God loved us then from everlasting; he loved us in his sovereignty; and he loved us, as I told you, so truly, that, as the expression of that love, he gave Christ to die for us. Many Christians, as I have often observed, many true Christians, have a most imperfect and unscriptural idea of God's love. They seem to think that God hated us, and watched to destroy us, when Christ stepped in, died upon the cross, and, in consequence of this, God

is forced to pardon them whom he would otherwise destroy; and so now loves them whom before he hated. Such a notion would imply that God is changeable; that God's feelings can be com pelled by something external to God; which is altogether absurd and unscriptural. So far from God's love being created by Christ's death, it is all the reverse. Christ's death was not the cause of God's love, but the fruit of it; not the creation of a love that was not, but the exponent of a love that was previously in existence. And Christ's death and sacrifice were required, not to make God love us, but, among other relations, to be the channel and the outlet for the coming forth of that infinite, illimitable and boundless love which needed but a channel for its outlet, that should glorify justice, holiness, and truth.

Having noticed God's love and its characteristics, I endeavoured to show you that the best evidence of God's outer love to us, is our inner consciousness of love to him. No man can open God's secret book and decipher it; no leaf of that mysterious record was ever scattered by sibyl, prophet or apostle, and given to man to read, to translate, or copy. But we have in our hearts what is just as good, the evidence that we love him, or the evidence that we love him not; and if we are conscious that we love him, then this love in our hearts is the evidence that he loves us; for, says the apostle, "We love him because he first loved us.' Does any man ask me, therefore, Am I elected of God? I answer, It is easy to settle this: have you elected him to be your God? then doubt not that he has elected you. If you ask, Does God love me? it is easy to answer that: Do you love him? then doubt not that he has loved you with an everlasting love. But you say, How shall I know that I love him? I answer, Less by the fervour of the passion that you feel, and more by the fixity of the principle that sustains and guides you through life. Love to God is not an overwhelming passion that carries us almost to fanaticism; but is a sustaining and abiding principle that becomes deepest where it is most required, and that is felt to be strongest when the emergency occurs that needs most its expression. For instance: I speak to affectionate sons in this assembly-Is there a son in this assembly in whose bosom is the image of a mother the holiest thing upon earth? and in whose heart there glows

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