it out till now. Thus do art and nature speak for us, and thus do we adopt them as our own. This is the way in which His righteousness becomes righteousness for us. This is the way in which the heart presents to God the sacrifice of Christ, gazing on that perfect Life we, as it were, say, “There, that is my religion that is my righteousness-what I want to be, which I am not-that is my offering, my life as I would wish to give it, freely and not checked, entire and perfect." So the old prophets, their hearts big with unutterable thoughts, searched "what or what manner of time the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand of the sufferings of Christ, and of the glory which should follow;" and so with us, until it passes into prayer: "My Saviour, fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my clumsy hand has drawn of a divine life, with the fullness of Thy perfect picture. I feel the beauty which I can not realize-robe me in Thine unutterable purity:

"Rock of ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in Thee."

II. The influence of that sacrifice on man is the introduction of the principle of self-sacrifice into his nature-" then were all dead." Observe, again, not He died that we might not die, but that in His death we might be dead, and that in His sacrifice we might become each a sacrifice to God. Moreover, this death is identical with life. They who in the first sentence are called dead, are in the second denominated "they who live." So in another place, "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live;" death, therefore, that is, the sacrifice of self, is equivalent to life. Now this rests upon a profound truth. The death of Christ was a representation of the life of God. To me this is the profoundest of all truths, that the whole of the life of God is the sacrifice of self. God is love; love is sacrifice-to give rather than to receive-the blessedness of self-giving. If the life of God were not such, it would be a falsehood to say that God is love; for even in our human nature, that which seeks to enjoy all instead of giving all is known by a very different name from that of love. All the life of God is a flow of this divine self-giving charity. Creation itself is sacrifice-the self-impartation of the Divine Being. Redemption, too, is sacrifice, else it could not be love; for which reason we will not surrender one iota of the truth that the death of Christ was the sacrifice of God--the manifestation once in time of that which is the eternal law of His life.

If man, therefore, is to rise into the life of God, he must be

absorbed into the spirit of that sacrifice-he must die with Christ if he would enter into his proper life. For sin is the withdrawing into self and egotism, out of the vivifying life of God, which alone is our true life. The moment the man sins he dies. Know we not how awfully true that sentence is, "Sin revived, and I died ?" The vivid life of sin is the death of the man. Have we never felt that our true existence has absolutely in that moment disappeared, and that we are not? I say, therefore, that real human life is a perpetual completion and repetition of the sacrifice of Christ-"all are dead;" the explanation of which follows," to live not to themselves, "to but to Him who died for them and rose again.' This is the

truth which lies at the bottom of the Romish doctrine of the mass. Rome asserts that in the mass a true and proper sac rifice is offered up for the sins of all-that the offering of Christ is forever repeated. To this Protestantism has ob jected vehemently, that there is but one offering once of fered an objection in itself entirely true; yet the Romist doctrine contains a truth which it is of importance to disengage from the gross and material form with which it has beer, overlaid. Let us hear St. Paul: "I fill up that which is be hindhand of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh for his body's sake, which is the Church." Was there then something be hindhand of Christ's sufferings remaining uncompleted, of which the sufferings of Paul could be in any sense the com plement? He says there was. Could the sufferings of Paul for the Church in any form of correct expression be said to eke out the sufferings that were complete? In one sense it is true to say that there is one offering once offered for all. But it is equally true to say that that one offering is valueless, except so far as it is completed and repeated in the life and self-offering of all. This is the Christian's sacrifice. Not mechanically completed in the miserable materialism of the mass, but spiritually in the life of all in whom the Crucified lives. The sacrifice of Christ is done over again in every which is lived, not to self but to God.

life

Let one concluding observation be made-self-denial, selfsacrifice, self-surrender! Hard doctrines, and impossible! Whereupon, in silent hours, we skeptically ask, Is this possible? is it natural? Let preacher and moralist say what they will, I am not here to sacrifice myself for others. God sent ne here for happiness, not misery. Now introduce one sen tence of this text of which we have as yet said nothing, and the dark doctrine becomes illuminated-" the love of Christ constraineth us." Self-denial, for the sake of self-denial, does no good; self-sacrifice for its own sake is no religious act at

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all. If you give up a meal for the sake of showing power over self, or for the sake of self-discipline, it is the most mis erable of all delusions. You are not more religious in doing this than before. This is mere self-culture, and self-culture being occupied forever about self, leaves you only in that circle of self from which religion is to free you; but to give up a meal that one you love may have it is properly a relig ious act-no hard and dismal duty, because made easy by affection. To bear pain for the sake of bearing it has in it no moral quality at all, but to bear it rather than surrender truth, or in order to save another, is positive enjoyment as well as ennobling to the soul. Did you ever receive even a blow meant for another, in order to shield that other? Do you not know that there was actual pleasure in the keen pain far beyond the most rapturous thrill of nerve which could be gained from pleasure in the midst of painlessness? Is not the mystic yearning of love expressed in words most purely thus, Let me suffer for him?

This element of love is that which makes this doctrine an intelligible and blessed truth. So sacrifice alone, bare and unrelieved, is ghastly, unnatural, and dead; but self-sacrifice, illuminated by love, is warmth and life; it is the death of Christ, the life of God, the blessedness and only proper life of man.

VIII.

THE POWER OF SORROW.

"Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye might receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death." -2 Cor. vii. 9, 10.

THAT which is chiefly insisted on in this verse is the distinction between sorrow and repentance. To grieve over sin is one thing, to repent of it is another.

The apostle rejoiced, not that the Corinthians sorrowed, but that they sorrowed unto repentance. Sorrow has two results; it may end in spiritual life, or in spiritual death; and in themselves, one of these is as natural as the other. Sorrow may produce two kinds of reformation-a transient, or a permanent one-an alteration in habits, which, originating in emotion, will last so long as that emotion continues, and then after a few fruitless efforts be given up-a repentance which will be

repented of, or again, a permanent change, which will be reversed by no afterthought-a repentance not to be repented of. Sorrow is in itself, therefore, a thing neither good nor bad its value depends on the spirit of the person on whom it falls. Fire will inflame straw, soften iron, or harden clay; its effects are determined by the object with which it comes in contact. Warmth develops the energies of life, or helps the progress of decay. It is a great power in the hothouse, a great power also in the coffin: it expands the leaf, matures the fruit, adds precocious vigor to vegetable life: and warmth too develops with tenfold rapidity the weltering process of dissolution. So too with sorrow. There are spirits in which it develops the seminal principle of life; there are others in which it prematurely hastens the consummation of irreparable decay. Our subject therefore is the twofold power of sorrow.

I. The fatal power of the sorrow of the world.

II. The life-giving power of the sorrow that is after God. The simplest way in which the sorrow of the world works death, is seen in the effect of mere regret for worldly loss. There are certain advantages with which we come into the world. Youth, health, friends, and sometimes property. So long as these are continued we are happy; and because happy, fancy ourselves very grateful to God. We bask in the sunshine of His gifts, and this pleasant sensation of sunning ourselves in life we call religion; that state in which we all are before sorrow comes, to test the temper of the metal of which our souls are made, when the spirits are unbroken and the heart buoyant, when a fresh morning is to a young heart what it is to the skylark. The exuberant burst of joy seems a spontaneous hymn to the Father of all blessing, like the matin carol of the bird; but this is not religion: it is the instinctive utterance of happy feeling, having as little of moral character in it, in the happy human being as in the happy bird.

Nay more: the religion which is only sunned into being by happiness is a suspicious thing-having been warmed by joy, it will become cold when joy is over; and then when these blessings are removed we count ourselves hardly treated, as if we had been defrauded of a right; rebellious hard feelings come; then it is you see people become bitter, spite ful, discontented. At every step in the solemn path of life something must be mourned which will come back no more; the temper that was so smooth becomes rugged and uneven; the benevolence that expanded upon all narrows into an everdwindling selfishness-we are alore; and then that death

like loneliness deepens as life goes on. The course of man 13 downward, and he moves with slow and ever more solitary steps, down to the dark silence-the silence of the grave. This is the death of heart; the sorrow of the world has worked death.

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Again, there is a sorrow of the world, when sin is grieved for in a worldly spirit. There are two views of sin in one it is looked upon as wrong-in the other, as producing loss-loss, for example, of character. In such cases, if character could be preserved before the world grief would not come; but the paroxysms of misery fall upon our proud spirit when our guilt is made public. The most distinct instance we

have of this is in the life of Saul. In the midst of his apparent grief, the thing still uppermost was that he had forfeited his kingly character: almost the only longing was, that Samuel should honor him before his people. And hence it comes to pass, that often remorse and anguish only begin with exposure. Suicide takes place, not when the act of wrong is done but when the guilt is known, and hence, too, many a one becomes hardened who would otherwise have remained tolerably happy; in consequence of which we blame the exposure, not the guilt; we say if it had been hushed up all would have been well; that the servant who robbed his master was ruined by taking away his character; and that if the sin had been passed over repentance might have taken place, and he might have remained a respectable member of society. Do not think so. It is quite true that remorse was produced by exposure, and that the remorse was fatal; the sorrow which worked death arose from that exposure, and so far exposure may be called the cause: had it never taken place, respectability, and comparative peace, might have continued; but outward respectability is not change of heart.

It is well known that the corpse has been preserved for centuries in the iceberg, or in antiseptic peat; and that when atmospheric air was introduced to the exposed surface it crumbled into dust. Exposure worked dissolution, but it only manifested the death which was already there; so with sorrow, it is not the living heart which drops to pieces or crumbles into dust, when it is revealed. Exposure did not work death in the Corinthian sinner, but life.

There is another form of grief for sin, which the apostle would not have rejoiced to see; it is when the hot tears come from pride. No two tones of feeling, apparently similar, are more unlike than that in which Saul exclaimed, have played the fool exceedingly," and that in which the publican cried out, "God be merciful to me a sinner." The

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