ill on our parts, which, so long as it continues, must for ever, as now, keep the blessing from us.

But instead of this true and wholesome way of regarding God's promises, men have had recourse to another. Instead of seeking for the cause of the non-fulfilment of a promise in themselves and their own evil, they have declared that the promise was fulfilled. They have deceived themselves and others; lying against the most evident truth, and declaring that to be, which, with the most positive certainty, was not. They have, for instance, in this very passage found Christ's promise to be fulfilled where it was not, thus leading men to think that He was present when His absence ought to have set them rather to seek for Him, and to ask why He was absent. They have talked of His being present in a fancied succession of - ministers, in baptism, and in the Lord's supper; as if, supposing only we had these things, then we must have Christ; as if the fulfilment of His promise was to be found in any outward ordinances, even in those of His own appointing, much less in things of man's mere device which he never commanded at all. They have talked of a secret presence, not secret merely as to the manner of it, but secret as furnishing no evidence of itself; so secret that none could discern or feel it with any sense or power of our nature, whether of body, soul, or spirit. And by this notion of a secret

presence of Christ, or of Christ's Spirit, they have conceived what is not only a folly gross as that of the grossest idolatry of old, but they have directly contradicted our Lord's words, where he says of the Spirit, that although no man knows whence it cometh, or whither it goeth, yet that he hears the sound of it. Conceive what he would say who were to insist that the wind was blowing, when not the faintest stir was heard in the air, and the smallest leaf on the lightest spray was resting motionless. Yet he would not speak more madly, nor nearly with so deadly a falsehood, as those who say that Christ and Christ's Spirit are necessarily present, where there is neither to be seen wisdom, nor righteousness, nor love.

In the old dispensation God deigned to abide visibly amongst His people when He did not abide in their hearts; and when the light and glory were departed from the mercy seat, men did not fondly insist upon it that they were still there, and that the glory of the second temple could not be less than that of the first temple; they saw, and knew that it was less, and good men mourned for it, and comforted themselves with the word of prophecy, which told them that the glory of the second house should one day be greater than that of the former, because the Lord Himself with a more perfect manifestation of Himself should visit it. But when Christ was less present

with His people under the new dispensation, when the outward signs of His power were withdrawn, and falsehood and sin began to pollute His living temple, men did not open their eyes to see and acknowledge the change, but they closed them harder and harder, and went on repeating that Christ must ever be present, and that His church must ever be possessed by His Spirit, when their own lie was driving His Spirit, which is the Spirit of truth, farther and farther from them, till not Christ nor Christ's Spirit, but the very great enemy himself took his seat in the holy precinct, and called himself God, and was called so by those who worshipped him.

So it was; and again voices are busy in repeating the same falsehood; in talking loudly about holy times, and holy things, and holy places, and saying that Christ is there. Oh! blessedness above all blessedness, if indeed He were there, for then were the church perfected! For if He be verily present always in His ordinances, and much more if He be present indeed in any place made with hands, it must show that He is indeed truly present in His church, that is, in the hearts of His people, and that out of the abundance of His presence there, even outward things partake of it. For so it is, that when the most inland creek begins to feel the coming in of the tide, and the living water covers the blank waste of mud and

gravel which was lying bare and dreary, then we know that the tide runs full and strong in the main river, and that the creek is but refreshed out of its abundance. But who will ever see the little inland creeks filled, when the main river itself is so shallow that men can go over dry-shod? And who will ask the tide to fill those remote and small corners in the first instance, as if they were to make up for the shallowness of the great river? Not through outward ordinances, even the holiest, does the church become holy; but if it might once become holy by the presence of Christ's Holy Spirit in every heart, then its ordinances would indeed be holy also; we might say that Christ was in them then, and we should say so truly.

Look at us here:-we want no outward ordinance; we have a ministry, we have the sacraments; is Christ therefore with us? He is ready to be with us, that is our Christian privilege, and of that His ministry and sacraments are a visible sign; they tell us plainly and truly that all things are ours if we will but have them; Paul, Apollos, Cephas, the world, life and death, yea, greater things even than all these, redemption, sanctification, Christ and God. Signs they are of God's readiness to come to us; but they will not bring Him to us. They will help us to gain Him if we strive earnestly to do so, but in themselves He is not. The promise, "I am with you alway, even to

the end of the world," has a far deeper and more blessed meaning than the perpetual existence of the sacraments, and much more than the existence of any particular order of persons to administer them.

A few years ago there would have been no need to use such language as this anywhere, least of all here. There was then no fear generally in this country of any person's overvaluing the sacraments or the ministry; the danger was rather the other way. But now we are on a sudden brought back to ages which we had known only in history. Evils which we had fancied to be gone by for ever are spreading their poison far and wide around us. So we fancied that pestilences were gone from Europe never to return; but God thought fit to send a pestilence, and human art was as powerless to meet it as it had been in the times of the pestilences of old. We thought that any child who had been taught in the Scriptures could see the falsehood of, popery; we almost wondered how our fathers could have spoken so earnestly against what seemed so little formidable. But we have lived to see, not children only, but teachers, or at least those who by their office ought to have been teachers, carried away as easily by the worst errors of popery, as the strongest men were stricken down and cut off in a few hours, ten years ago, by the visitations of the pestilence. Where