in another place, "the unction of the Holy One." The ointment which was prepared for the high priest of old was an ointment which it was blasphemy to imitate, and he who ventured to imitate it was put to death. This eye-salve is, no doubt, the Holy Spirit of God. I know no stronger proof of the dreadful corruption of which man is the victim by the fall than this fact, that it needs not only a God to redeem him, but a God to convince him that he is redeemable at all. Men ask you, Where is a text to show that man is corrupt? I answer, here is the evidence; In vain God has bowed the heavens to open my grave; God must again bow the heavens to open my understanding to believe it. It needs not only my God in my nature to redeem me from the curse; but it needs the Holy Ghost, who is God, to come into my bosom and persuade me to accept of the redemption that is offered me " without money and without price."

Never forget this, my dear friends, that we can never pray, nor preach, nor hear, nor feel, nor know, nor make one step in the right and upward direction, until the Holy Spirit of God enlightens and sanctifies and directs us.

I pray that you may have this eye-salve, that you may possess "this unction of the Holy One;" that you may see your pride to be your shame, your beauty to be your deformity, your glory to be but dust, your strength to be but weakness, your wisdom folly. Pray that you may have this eye-salve, this Holy Spirit; that you may see sin to be the evil, the only evil in the whole universe of God; that you may see holiness to be the chief beauty; living religion to be the purest happiness; enthusiastic devotion to Christ to be the greatest moderation and the gravest wisdom. Pray that you may see your soul to be precious, your Bible precious, your Saviour to be, if possible, more precious still. Pray that you may be led to see this, if you see no more ;no infallible directory but the word of God; no atoning or expiatory virtue anywhere but in the cross and passion of Christ; no regenerative or sanctifying or

quickening power but in the Spirit of God; no way to heaven but that of which Christ is the door; no fitness for heaven but that of which the Spirit of God is the author, and no obstruction to your instant peace with God but what is in yourselves.

"'Tis thine to cleanse the heart,
To sanctify the soul,

To pour fresh life in every part,
And new create the whole.

"Dwell, Spirit, in our hearts,

Our minds from bondage free;

Then shall we know, and praise, and love
The Father, Son, and Thee."

LECTURE XXX.

SOVEREIGN LOVE.

"As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten."

REV. iii. 19.

THESE words are part of the epistle to the Church of Laodicea. They are addressed to her immediately after the counsel which the Lord had given her to buy of him "gold tried in the fire that she might be rich;" and in order to comfort those in the midst of her who were the people of God, amid the fiery trial to which she was to be soon subjected, God tells her, "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten." Mr. Winslow, in a very excellent work called "Grace and Truth," makes the following remark on this text: "Had we not a 'thus saith the Lord' for this truth, its greatness would render it incredible." Christ loves us, and because he loves us, he does not let us alone. Is it then true that we are loved of Christ? that we sinners are loved in spite of our sins, loved of Christ? His manger, his cross, his passion, his agony, and his bloody sweat, are all the evidence of this one proposition, "Christ loved Every fact in the Saviour's history-every sermon that he preached-every bright incident that broke forth in his life-every circumstance that surrounded him, are additional evidence that he loved us. Nor when we come to the last scene of his sad and awful biography, is there less proof of his love. The patience of the victim-the forbearance of the Almighty-the fact that no earthquake swallowed up the murderers of the Lord of Glory,-that no lightning smote and no thunderbolt blasted them - the awful

us."

eclipse that shrouded all, in which no word was uttered but love-the awful silence that pervaded all, in which no accent was audible but love, are eloquent and decisive evidences of his own assertion, for which, to quote the language of the author to whom I have alluded, we have a "thus saith the Lord"- "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten."

Having ascertained the fact that Christ loves us, let us try to ascertain the nature of his love by its characteristics. I will not dwell on them; I will briefly, but as distinctly as possible recapitulate them. In the first place, it is an everlasting love. Christ's love to us was not a sudden impulse that rose within his mind under some sudden influence, and, like man's, evaporated when he had expressed it; but it was an uncreated, and, literally and strictly, an everlasting spring in the bosom of God. "I have loved thee,"

he says, "with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee." How grand is this truth! that we, sinners saved, are the subjects of a love that glowed and burned, and panted for its egress before the worlds were created, or the angels sung together for joy at the completion of the once beautiful works of God! Secondly, it is an unfailing love. It rose from the depths of eternity, and it will roll into the depths of eternity again. It lasts while God reigns and ages roll. It can never be exhausted; when it has overflowed and overwhelmed, if I may so speak, the greatest number of the greatest sinners, it still is unexhausted, as much as if it had never flowed forth at all. He himself has told us, a woman may forget her babe, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb, yet will not I forget thee." In the third place, it is a sovereign love. When God loves, he loves as God; when a creature loves, he loves as a creature. A creature loves an object, because in the object he sees something beautiful or good; God loves an object though in it there be nothing good, in order to make it, by his creative power, alike beautiful and good. Our love is created within us by an

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object without us; God's love is sovereign. We love the beautiful and good because they are so; God loves the guilty and the depraved in order to make them what they should be.

This love, in the fourth place, is a distinguishing love. There is one fact in the Bible which has always in some degree perplexed me; and the more I think of it, the less am I able to comprehend or explain it : Why did Christ in his love pass by the higher nature, the angelic, that fell, and seize in its saving grasp the lower nature, humanity, that also fell? There is no

answer to this question, except such as is supplied by the characteristic I have specified; it is a distinguishing love of this we must say to Jesus just what he said to his Father, "Even so, for thus it seemed good in thy sight."

In the next place, Christ's love to us is a costly love. It cost an infinite descent, unspeakable travail, agony, and death: he endured the cross-he drank our curse -he bore our burden in his own body on the tree-he expressed the intensity of his love by the agony of his suffering for us; we can only estimate the greatness of the price he paid by the portion of it we can count. It was not by gold or silver, or any such corruptible thing, but by his own precious blood that he redeemed: "Ye are bought with a price,”—" a price," as if all in the world were not even worthy of the word " price."

The next characteristic of this love is, unchangeable. The love of the Saviour is the "same yesterday, today, and for ever;" it never changes. If his love were to fluctuate and change with the ebbs and flows of our love to him, we should have been cast off long ere now. But he loved us in our ruin; and our after unworthiness, criminal as it is, has not lessened that love. He loved us in spite of our sins at the first, and he will love us still in spite of our sins; and having loved us from the first, he will love us to the last. He is the unchangeable God: he changes not, therefore we sons of Jacob are not consumed.

But, it may be asked, who are these whom he thus