INDEX.

THE

GOSPEL MAGAZINE.

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"Comfort ye, comfort ye, my People, saith your God."

Endeavouring to Keep the Unity of the Spirit in the Bond of Peace." "Jesus Christ, the same Yesterday, To-day, and for Ever. Whom to know is

Life Eternal."

No. 1,

NEW SERIES.

JANUARY, 1853.

No. 145, OLD SERIES.

A WATCHWORD FOR THE OPENING YEAR 'FIFTY-THREE.

" FOLLOW ME."-LUKE VI. 27.

BELOVED, we trust the Lord has given us a word on your behalf, for the year upon which we are about to enter; and we covet personally a participation in the same. In the adoption of it we must premise one all-important factthat you have followed the Lord in the regeneration. We shall presume upon this; and as the Lord the Spirit may enable, shall ground our observations upon this supposition. Nor can we, beloved, in doing so, overlook the very precious proof of Divine sovereignty which is hereby afforded. God forbid that we should ever shrink from looking this truth fairly in the face-unpopular as it is mysterious as it is-uncongenial as it is to the proud free-willism of the human heart, God grant that we may never be left to the too common ensnarement of shunning in this, as well as in any other particular, to declare the whole counsel of God. And the idea suggests, upon the threshold of our subject, a threefold thought:1. What God must do. 2. What he has done. 3. What encouragement for hope, and trust, and plea.

First, What God must do. It were as easy to reconcile Satan to God's method of salvation, as the proud creature man. There is in the human heart, in proportion to the extent of its development, as much opposition to Divine sovereignty, and all that is inseparable therefrom, as in Satan. Through pride and non-submission to the Divine will, and wisdom, and power, Satan kept not his first estate; in the same spirit proud man arraigns Jehovah at his bar, and presumptuously asks, "Who is the Lord, that I should obey him?" Men may expatiate largely upon the magnitude and the munificence of Jehovah's handywork in creation-yea, more, they may get, or seem to do so at least, a glimpse of the wisdom, and the love, and the power, brought to bear upon redemption; but let the subject be brought home personally and practically, in all its flesh-mortifying demands, and there is an instantaneous recoil-a most determined antagonism-a resolve not merely to forego, but to oppose, a salvation which can alone be possessed on such creature-humbling terms. We contend, therefore, that it is "the Lord alone that bringeth down them that dwell on high; the lofty city HE layeth it low; HE layeth it low, even to the ground; HE bringeth it even to the dust."

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2. What God has done. Beloved, what say you to this? What hath God wrought? Oh, think upon the past—aye, and even ofttimes the present— inveterate hatred to God's method of saving sinners. Was there not a time when, in your vain self-conceited hostility, you would sooner have been damned than accept salvation upon terms which would admit your pauperism, and impotency, and hell-deservings? What! be saved as though I were a drunkard, or a thief, or a whoremonger, or a murderer? I as vile and as unworthy of salvation as these? Are my morality, my consistency, my truthfulness, my alms-deeds, to stand for naught; and must I come in by the same door, and be just as great a debtor to discriminating love, and mercy, and grace, as a Magdalene, or a Saul, or a dying thief? Are these what are called Gospel premises? Then I will have naught to do with them. Beloved, who subdued this, and substituted the "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" "Who art thou, Lord?" Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ?"

3. What encouragement for hope, and trust, and plea. Has He done this for me--and who but Himself could have accomplished it ?—and will He not do more? Am I not a willing captive? So far from opposing his salvation, should I not deem it the richest mercy to be made a partaker of it? I more worthy than a drunkard, a thief, a whoremonger, or a murderer? Nay, what should I have done, and where and what at this moment should I have been, but for sovereign mercy, Divine grace, superabounding love? What preserved? Who upheld? Whence that marvellous, yea, that almost miraculous interposition here, there, and at the other place? It was the Lordthe Lord; no thanks to me: it was by no goodness, nor foresight, nor firmness of mine. I was running headlong to destruction-had reached the very brink of the precipice-another step-yes, only one, and then! ah, then!But wonder of wonders! miracle of miracles! here I am still kept, still upheld, still with the heart and the eye Christward and heavenward! I have no other hope, neither do I desire any other salvation!

'Though words can never tell my case,

Nor all my sorrows paint;
This I can say before thy face,
That Christ is all I want."

And may I not hope? Is it presumption to trust?

this in vain?

Can He have done all

"Can He have taught me to trust in his name,

And thus far have brought me to put me to shame ?"

That be far from him. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Lord, to whom can we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.”

Beloved, we must pause for a moment. In our day the fundamental truths of our most holy faith-Jehovah's sovereignty and Jehovah's power-are assailed. Matters are reversed. God is made subservient to man, instead of man being made subservient to God. The omniscient self-existent I AM is represented as waiting for and wooing (but for most part ineffectually and with disappointment) his guilty, self-willed" grasshoppers;" and the truth of his own word, "Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power," is in effect, if not in so many words, denied. We pause, therefore, in order to bring forward examples from his own word to show that when the Lord says, “Follow me," follow they must. A few proofs from both the Old and New Testament Scriptures will suffice. And it is worthy of especial observation, that Adam in his creature-purity, and prior to the implantation of new-creating power, departed from Jehovah ; but every redeemed sinner created anew in Christ Jesus, departs not, but draws nigh by the irresistible love-constrainings of the Holy Ghost! This new-creature purity and power is as superior to Adam's

primeval sanctity, as light is superior to darkness-heaven to earth. The power of Jehovah is evidenced in man as a sinner, in a way in which it is not evidenced in him previous to his becoming a sinner. In his primeval state there was nothing to repulse; in his fallen condition there is. Prior to his fall he was the friend of God; immediately upon the fall, he was at enmity with Him. Hence what a power must that be which can-and in its own set time to favour Zion-does, subdue the carnal mind, and prostrate the rebel at the footstool of Divine mercy. Tell us not that Jehovah can be defeated; imagine not that because the prince of the power of the air seems to ride roughshod over the hearts, the consciences, the destinies of men, that therefore the Lord God omnipotent is in measure outwitted, superseded, or overcome. It is a blasphemous supposition. Nay, we triumph in the fact, that threatening as may be the aspect of human affairs in the creature's estimation, the glorious, the immutable, the self-existent I AM" does (notwithstanding) as he will in the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth; that none dare stay his hand, nor say, What doest thou?"

"Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord." Here is the key to unlock the cabinet containing all the covenant mercies subsequently enjoyed. "Noah found grace”—and why? Because there was anything naturally or inherently to attract that grace? Because he was not quite the sinner that his fellow-men were? Nay, so to speak, there were all the materials for sinning in Noah, even as in other men; only there was this difference-the Lord put his finger upon the machinery which Satan would otherwise have set in motion to serve his own base ends. But remarkable it is, that even in the case of the highly-favoured Noah, the Holy Ghost has not deviated from his uni; form principle of drawing the portraiture of the saints. Even Noah shall betray sad proof of the fall. He is overcome with drunkenness—a sin only exampled in one other case, as far as we at the moment remember, in the whole book of God-we allude to the case of Lot.

Is it not also equally clear that the influence was not natural, but Divine, that constrained Abram to "get out from his country, and from his kindred, and from his father's house." What induced him to come forth from his idolatrous dwelling-place, his idolatrous people, and his own idolatrous practices, but the irresistible "Follow me " of an irresistible God?

Intent as he was upon the well-watered country round and about the cities of the plain-whence was Lot willing, after having escaped the guilty Sodom, to "follow" onward, whilst his wife with a lustful lingering "looked back from behind him, and became a pillar of salt ?" Divine sovereignty.

What but Divine power could constrain Moses to take upon and abide in that dark, mysterious, and flesh-and-blood forbidding path through which he conducted the chosen tribes? How glorious was that power which could cause him to "choose rather to suffer affliction. with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season,"

How conspicuously does this power shine, indeed, throughout the Old Testament history. In Samuel, and David, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Daniel, how ready the response to the Lord's "Follow me."

Nor does the same truth lose one iota of its claims in New-Testament times. Not only were patriarchs and prophets made willing in the day of the Lord's power; but apostles, martyrs, yea, the "great cloud of witnesses" also. True it is, we read of one in whom there was the semblance of this willingness, who began to make excuse, saying, "Suffer me first to go and bury my father;" but not so-no, not in a solitary instance, where the Lord was disposed to put forth his Almighty power. Peter and Andrew may be following their lawful avo