sick-beds, and pain, and sorrow, and suffering, and even exclaim by the margin of the grave, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" is a religion that man did not make, for man's religion can never touch man's heart-it is from God; and we will go and seek to taste of a cup which the believer has drunk, and has found to be so sweet and so precious, if peradventure we too may find it and drink of it likewise. bless what I have said, to his glory and to our good!

The Lord

Amen.

LECTURE XXXII.

THE APPEAL OF LOVE.

"Behold I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." -REV. iii. 20.

WE may love the unseen, but we cannot love the unknown; it is therefore important to determine who it is that thus speaks, "I stand at the door, and knock." You must have noticed, and many, I hope, remember the beautiful, varied, and expressive names by which he who thus speaks is represented. He is spoken of in the very introduction of the Apocalypse as "He that is like unto the Son of Man; clothed with a garment down to the feet; his head and his hairs white as snow, and his eyes as a flame of fire. And when I saw him," says the Seer, "I fell at his feet as dead." It is this divine personage then he that bowed the heavens to open our graves-who came from the throne, and suffered on the accursed tree who is love, and by whom alone God's love can light upon us-who speaks not to the bishop of Laodicea alone, but unto every minister in Christendom― unto you or me, and each one of us, with as distinct an emphasis as if that one man were the only being in the universe—“I stand at the door of thy heart and knock: if any man will open, I will come in and sup with him, and he with me." The door that is here alluded to is the door of access to the human heart; the home to which he seeks admission is the temple that he originally built so glorious for himself, but over which there hath passed so deep, so terrible an eclipse. Certainly in the applicant who claims, nay, who does not claim it as his right, but who asks (485)

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as a favour admission to the house; and the house to which he seeks admission, there is the greatest possible contrast. The one, the applicant, is all glory, beauty, excellence, perfection, blessing; the other, the human heart, that house that was once built of jewels, made so beautiful and resplendent, with a light so glorious is now a wreck; poisonous weeds are growing about it; all venomous reptiles crawl and breed in its defaced and darkened chambers, and all evil spirits hold in it their foul and continuous festival, though from its surviving holy spots there leap forth at intervals, those live sparks that reveal what the glory once was, and what the desolation now is, and give earnest of what the beauty shall be when the Creator who formed it shall rebuild and rebeautify it, and make it his own home again for ever.

But in looking at such a house, and acquiescing in the description of it which I have given, and in noticing such an applicant, it may be asked,- Why should he approach it? why should he knock and ask for admission? It cannot be because we have invited him; we never asked him to do so. The Church at whose minister's heart, and at whose people's heart, he asks for admission, repeated the language and gloried in the features which we repeat and glory in, "We are rich, and increased in goods, and have need of nothing;" and little knew, what we know not as we ought to know, that we are poor and blind and naked, glorying in our shame, and having nothing good that we can call our own. It is not true, then, that we have invited him. When he came to his own, his own received him not. It was written upon his life an inscription only equivalent in the depth of the wickedness it revealed, to that which was read upon his cross—“He was despised and rejected of men." We asked him not; why, then, does he come to our hearts, and ask for admission? It cannot be to augment his own happiness; it cannot be to add to the praises that are continually hymned before him; for where he is, in the unutterable glory, "the glorious company of the apostles praise him; the goodly fellowship of the prophets praise him; the noble army of martyrs praise him;" his Church redeemed from every land and people and tongue continually praise him. It cannot be, then, that it will exalt him, that our faint notes should be needed to mingle with the hallelujahs of the blessed,

or that our presence in glory is requisite to make that glorious One more glorious than he is. If he had expunged the earth from the number of the orbs of creation when that earth fell, or if he had done what it deserved, made this earth one vast grave, and Adam and Eve its first, its last, its twin occupants; if each wind that rushed over it had sung a perpetual miserere, and the curse it provoked had wrapped it as a dark and terrible shroud for ever, heaven would not have wanted inhabitants, nor would God have been without praise, nor would Christ have been less happy in himself: why, then, does he thus appeal to our hearts, and knock at the door of our minds, and ask admission to our bosoms. There are angels that fell from a greater height still and are plunged into more terrible woe; and yet he speaks not thus to them. The only answer is, he knocks at the door of each heart in the exercise of that sovereign love in which he came to the cross and died for us. He comes first to us; he does not wait till we go to him: it is the grand characteristic of the Gospel, that the first movement downward is on God's part, before there can be a responsive movement upward on our part. If Christ were to wait till we spontaneously made application to him, he would wait for ever. But his love is too great for that; call it election, call it predestination, call it sovereignty, call it grace, call it by whatever name you like best, the fact is, that he draws us before we follow, that he teaches us before we respond to him, that he speaks to us in his love, and our love is but the echo of the love that is in him, the great original.

We love

It is the law of the creature's being, that the creature can only love where there is something previously beautiful, or attractive, to draw out and fix that love; but when God loves, he loves where there is nothing beautiful, holy, or happy, in order to make holy, beautiful, and happy the object of his love. as creatures, our love being a created love-created by something external to us; he loves as God, his love being an uncreated, a sovereign love, making that on which it lights, holy, beautiful, and happy.

But, let us ask again, in looking at this most touching and interesting appeal of heaven to earth, of Christ to humanity, what can be his object in thus standing and knocking at the door of

the human heart? That object, interpreted by our sin, we should suppose to be, to spy out all the dark nooks of the human heart; to judge of the length and the breadth of its sin; to measure the extent of its alienation and its estrangement from God: and having seen how dark, how guilty it is-and I believe that the most awful spectacle upon earth would be a naked, unvarnished, I unconverted human heart we might suppose then, that our Lord's object in his coming into it is to see all, and trace all, and notice all its guilt, and then to destroy or punish with eternal misery the unhappy one that has such a heart. But it is not so. Interpreted by his love, his errand is a very different one. He asks admission into the heart, not as the righteous judge to condemn it, but as the merciful Saviour to forgive it; he does not demand possession as a king, and crush where there is no conversion, but he begs and prays for admission as a suppliant, to save, to convert, and not to destroy. He desires, not to destroy our wills, but to bow them and make them willing; not to punish, but to pardon; and he shows in thus waiting at the door and knocking, the counterpart, or rather the original, of that noble feature in this, with all its faults and shortcomings, noble land of ours, that the Queen of England, beloved and popular as she is, dare not enter the poorest peasant's hut, or the poorest mechanic's lodging, without the permission of that peasant, or the acquiescence of that mechanic. It seems that the Lord of glory has such reverence for the house that he built, and so estimates the aboriginal dignity of man's soul, the tenant of that house, that he will not force an entrance, as omnipotence could do, but will wait and pray for an entrance, making us willing, never doing violence to the will of his rational offspring. "I stand at the door, and knock."

This leads me, in the next place, to notice, what his position is" standing at the door, and knocking." I need not say that the language is figurative: but all figure has an original type of which it is the delineation. The substance is set in the imagery. The idea taught us is that Christ is not satisfied to send an angel to prepare his way; nor is he satisfied with sending a summons from the skies: he comes down and stands, and personally knocks at each heart, and himself begs for admission into it-to do what?