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Marriages.

On the 19th of April, at the New Jerusalem Church, Summer-lane, Bir

mingham, by the Rev. Edward Madeley, Mr. William Faraday Johnstone to Miss Ellen Crockford.

On the 12th of June, at the New Church, Bedford street North, Liverpool, by the Rev. J. B. Kennerley, of Salford, Mr. George Pixton, son of Mr. George Pixton, to Miss Elizabeth Skeaf, daughter of the late Mr. Joseph Skeaf, both of that town.

On the 19th of June, Albert, son of James Billings, Esq., of Taunton, to Henrietta Maria, youngest daughter of Mr. J. G. Shaw, of Bristol.

Obituary.

On March 22nd, aged 62, Rachel, wife of John Hardman, of Kersley, was removed into the spiritual world. For the last six years of her life the deceased was afflicted with paralysis, and for the latter portion of that period was perfectly helpless. When in health, she was regular in her attendance on the ministrations of the church; and when confined at home by sickness, her greatest comfort was in hearing the Word, and in the devotional exercises of her pastor.

On March 24th, in her 31st year, Margaret, the beloved wife of Mr. Stephen Rhodes, of Farnworth, was called from this lower sphere. Dying during her confinement, the circumstances were peculiarly distressing to her bereaved partner and her young family, and her departure was as sudden as it was painful to the survivors. Her affectionate attention to her duties as a wife and mother, whilst they add poignancy to the grief of the circle over which she presided, and especially of her sorrowing husband, furnish nevertheless an antidote in the well-grounded assurance they convey, that to her it is an exchange of earth for heaven. One feature which is worthy of record as an example to mothers, was her sedulous care in cultivating in the family circle attention to habits of devotion; and it was a

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cause of sincere grief to her, if through inadvertance or from other causes, these duties were neglected. In the New Church, where there seems to be a want if not of the devotional spirit, at least of the manifestation of it in practice, any example which may serve as an incentive to the cultivation of it is too valuable to be allowed to pass unnoticed. Her end was as peaceful as it was affecting.

Passed into the spiritual world, April 2nd, Mr. Edward Deans, whip-maker, and for several years superintendent of His sufferthe Sunday school, Leeds. ings were very great, dating their origin several years back. He had long been disqualified from any active duties in the school or church. While in connection with the former, his attendance was punctual, regular, and exemplary.

T. L. M.

Departed this life, at New York, April 17th, Mr. George Fitton, late of Manchester, England, aged 75 years. He became a New Churchman through the teachings of Mr. Clowes, and was one of the first members of the Peter-street Society. He was cheered by the doctrines of the church, and left this world without anxiety or bodily pain. P.B.

On April 29th, at Farnworth, aged 77 years, Martha, the surviving partner of the late William Partington. The deceased was a daughter of the late Thomas Gee (well known in the early history of the church in Lancashire as an affectionate receiver and advocate of the doctrines), and was indoctrinated from an early age in the truths of the New Dispensation, which she exemplified in her life, being known to all acquainted with her as a kind neighbour, ever ready by active sympathy to assist according to her means those who needed it. Her last illness was a very painful one, her greatest anxiety was however the trouble she occasioned to others. The Word and devotional exercises gave her the greatest solace, aud enabled her to look forward with hope and confidence to the change that awaited her, and which she has since realised.

CAVE & SEVER, Printers by Steam Power, Hunt's Bank, Manchester.

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THE conduct of the Lord's apostles at the time of His last and greatest trial, presents a view of human nature humiliating, indeed, but highly instructive. He was betrayed by one, denied by another, and forsaken by all the rest. In any ordinary case, such conduct on the part of followers towards their leader, or of servants towards their master, would be deemed disgraceful. But what shall we say respecting the conduct of the apostles, when we consider the character of the Master whom they served, the words of wisdom, such as never man spake, which they had so often heard from His sacred lips, the acts of superhuman power and goodness they had witnessed in His holy and beneficent life, and the tender ties of love and mercy by which He had bound them to Himself? Still more reprehensible does their conduct appear, when we reflect that immediately before the eleven forsook Him, He had warned them of their coming trial, and that they, in answer to His prediction of their faithlessness, had earnestly joined in Peter's protestation "Though I should die with Thee, yet will I not

forsake Thee."

But extraordinary as this conduct seems, and ready as we all are to regard it with astonishment and indignation, we do not, perhaps, sufficiently reflect that it is nothing more than what happens in the case of every disciple who follows the Lord in the regeneration. The history of the Lord's first disciples, as we find it in the Gospel, is internally a history of Christian experience; and the trial of faith and constancy to which the apostles were subjected at the time of the Lord's apprehension and crucifixion, is one which every disciple has to [Enl. Series.-No. 104, vol. ix.]

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encounter in a corresponding stage in the regenerate life. The two distinct periods in the history of the Lord and of His disciples, the one that precedes and the one that follows His death and resurrection, are patterns of two distinct states in the progress of regeneration. Every disciple first knows the Lord after the flesh before he comes to know Him after the spirit. Although the Lord Himself is no longer material, having purged out every imperfection which He inherited from the fallen mother, and made His humanity divine, yet our first faith in Him, and our first love and obedience to Him, are so to a great extent. We may have learnt from our first instructors in the truth, that the Lord's Humanity is Divine, and that His kingdom is not of this world; but there is so much of the material and the worldly in our own thoughts and affections that we think and feel in a natural manner respecting them. The Lord, so far as respects ourselves, is, so to speak, re-incarnated in our yet carnal thoughts and affections; and He has to be glorified in us by the suffering and death of the frail humanity with which we have invested Him in ourselves; by His rising from the dead and from the tomb of our sensual and corporeal apprehensions of Him as the Truth and the Life; and by His ascending out of the external into the internal man, which to us is His practical ascension into heaven. Now, the passing of the Christian disciples from the one state to the other—from the carnal to the spiritual-is like that of the Lord's first disciples, from the views they entertained and the hopes they cherished before the Lord's death, to those into which they came after His resurrection, and especially after His ascension, and the pouring out of His spirit upon them on the day of Pentecost. Before the Lord's death, they regarded Him as a temporal sovereign, come to restore the kingdom to Israel, in which they expected to occupy stations of eminent dignity. With Him these temporal hopes were crucified. They trusted that it was He who should have redeemed Israel. That trust the death of the Redeemer cast rudely to the ground; and as with the Lord's death all their carnal views and hopes expired, so with His resurrection new views and hopes began to live. Slowly but effectually the new light and life increased in their minds, till they who, in the hour of their Lord's temptation and of the power of darkness, had forsaken Him and fled, stood forth the undaunted champions of His holy cause, and even gloried in privation, in suffering, and death itself for His sake. They who had clung so long and tenaciously to the idea of an earthly king and kingdom for Israel, now preached a Divine Saviour and a spiritual and heavenly kingdom for all men. In them the old man with his worldly lusts had died, and the new man with his

heavenly affections lived. Just so is it with everyone who follows Him in the regeneration. The disciple is not above his Master, nor the servant above his lord. The Lord having glorified His humanity by a process similar to that by which He regenerates man, His experience is the pattern of ours, and is reflected as truly in our conduct as in that of His first disciples. The analogy between the Lord's experience and that of His disciples is clearly pointed out and even minutely traced in the writings of the apostles themsevles, who came to know by experience that the Lord's life was reflected in their own. They speak of the Christian disciple suffering with Christ, dying with Him, being buried with Him, rising with Him, living with Him, walking with Him in newness of life; and the Lord Himself promises to those who overcome that they shall sit with Him in His throne.

How precious a truth is this! What meaning and power does it give to the life and death and resurrection of our Lord! It shews us that the Lord came into the world and assumed our nature, first and above all to effect in himself, as our Saviour, what must be effected in us, as the subjects of His Salvation. It shows us, in fact, that it is only by the Lord having glorified Himself that he can regenerate us. From the moment we obtain a clear view and a firm hold of this great doctrine of the gospel, the Lord's life, and death, and resurrection assume a new character, and the Christian religion becomes a new power. The connection between the Lord's experience and our own, is then seen to be not simply that of similitude, but that of cause and effect. A similitude between the Lord's experience and ours is universally recognised; but who sees that the Lord's glorification is the pattern and the origin of our regeneration? Who, indeed, understands the real meaning either of glorification or of regeneration? How then can the intimate connection and perfect correspondence between them be perceived? And yet, this is the very essence of the Incarnation, and Christianity is the light which unfolds and the power which applies it. But for this great doctrine, the Incarnation becomes either unintelligible or full of inexplicable horrors: unintelligible to those who believe that Christ came only to save us by His teaching and example; full of inexplicable horrors to those who believe that He came to save us by suffering and dying to appease Divine wrath and satisfy Divine justice, and so reconcile an offended Deity. But when it is seen that the Lord came into the world to effect in Himself, as a man, that very work which must be effected in us before we can be saved; and that having made His humanity new, He can now make us new also, spiritually forming or recreating us into the image and likeness of Himself, so that our vile body-not

the natural but the spiritual-may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, "according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself;"-when this is seen, then can it clearly be perceived that the Incarnation was an absolute necessity, not because it reconciled God to us, for which there could be no need, but because it has the power of reconciling us to God, for which there was, and is, and will ever continue to be an absolute necessity. This makes the record of the Lord's experience an ever-living history, not merely because in it we can read our own, but because we can see that "our life is hid with Christ in God;" (Col. iii. 3.) spiritual and eternal life in the creature being but the life of Christ unfolded in human experience, and culminating in Christian perfection. We can, therefore, see the Lord's experience reflected or repeated in a lower sphere, in that of His first disciples, in which again we can in a nearer image trace our own. The two very different states of the disciples, the one before and the other after our Lord's death, are still, for this reason, experienced by those who follow the Lord "whithersoever He goeth;" the Lord's death being that event which ends the first, and prepares the way for the commencement of the second; the first of which is reformation, the second regeneration. Reformation is that state in which the Christian disciple resists evil; regeneration is that state in which he does good. The first is a state of conflict and suffering, a state which is only ended with the death of the old man, in whose lusts the conflict originated; the second is a state of peace, the result of victory, and in which, when once attained, the Christian can "go on unto perfection," from one state of goodness to another. These states in man are, it is true, especially in the present day, but faint and imperfect images of the corresponding states of humiliation and glorification through which the Lord passed, and which were His states of conflict and of victory,—of warfare and of peace; for He became a man of war that He might be the Prince of Peace. But when we know that the Lord's work of glorification and our work of regeneration are related to each other as cause and effect, and that the second never could have been effected but for the first, the necessity and power of the Incarnation become clearly evident; and the history of the Lord's life becomes in the highest degree significant-the living example of our own.

The two states of which we have spoken, as also the transition state between them, may be seen in the history of the Lord's disciples. We see in the conduct of the apostles, during the time the Lord was with them in the flesh, much that tells us of the yet unspiritual state of their hearts and minds. Their looking only for the establishment of

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