among the Bishop's papers after his death and sent to us by his aged widow, Mrs. Bishop Hamline of Evanston, Illinois, who reveals at the age of almost four-score unabated interest in the spread of holiness. For the revival and extension of this experience she has for years held a meeting in her parlours every week. Her close of life is like the sun going down amid a sheen of golden brightness.

We were well acquainted with Rev. Clinton W. Sears. We were Conference colleagues; he was a man of culture and superior gifts. When the civil war broke out he volunteered as Chaplain. In the army he contracted disease which sent him to a premature grave. The experience here narrated gave him victory in death.

L.

Richmond, Nov. 7th, 1846.

MY DEAR BROTHER,-My heart is drawn out to address you a few lines. I rise with feebleness from a bed of sickness to

ocean

pen these few lines. If I hold my peace the stones would cry out." To-day my whole soul and body seem enveloped in the glory of God. I am almost ready to inquire-Am I in the body or in heaven? My body does not seem like the one I formerly possessed. I am so filled with the Divine presence, Jesus is "all in all." The "love of God is indeed an without bottom or shore." I took my pen to tell you something of the state of my mind, but human language is wholly inadequate. It is a great weight of glory pressing in upon me on every side. I doubt whether few persons were ever happier in the body. I am baptised with the Holy Ghost, I am swallowed up in the love of God. O, think me not beside

[It is a very hard field of labour.-ED.] I would not have missed what I have this day experienced. My life has indeed been filled with inconsistencies and backslidings. You remember the blessing I received in Portsmouth, but I did not retain the unclouded evidence. I did not confess Christ as I ought. I yielded to surrounding difficulties. I was brought into thraldom, but my Saviour did not leave me. He has followed me ever since. Though a poor unworthy sinner, I was convinced that it was the will of God that I should enjoy a confirmed state of holy living, or why should the subject be so impressed on me? But, like a doubting Thomas, I needed evidence to confirm me. That evidence I now have, clear as the sunlight, such as I never had in all my Christian experience. I have not the shadow of a doubt. I am now an entire, new creature. I am crucified to the world. "The life I now live is by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I will praise the name of Jesus and confess Him to all the world as a

to record His love. It is to exalt His name-a name more inexpressibly sweet than any or all others. O, join with me in the cry Jesus, Jesus!! While I write I can hardly refrain from dropping the pen and crying Glory, Glory to my blessed Redeemer! What am I that I should be so blessed? I never had a conception that religion could make one so happy. I have been blessed before, but I never felt such a stream of glory pouring in on every side.

I have been ill for some days, but it has been a glorious time. Thank God for the discipline of affliction. I thank God that I was ever sent to Richmond circuit.

prayer for His people, urges as His plea on their behalf the extent to which they are the objects of the Father's love: "Thou hast loved them as Thou hast loved Me," and the plea must ever be irresistible. You cannot conceive of God withholding from those He so regards what is asked for them, especially by Him whom He heareth always, and delighteth to honour.

The plea comprises much with regard to those for whom it is used. It implies that they stand where Christ Himself does, are embraced by the same paternal arms, and share with Him what He enjoys.

One with Him by the faith they exercise in Him, and the possession of His Spirit, they sit with Him in the same heavenly places, and have His security and accept

ance.

"As thou hast loved Me." The love of the Father to the Son is beyond all that finite minds can grasp, or human language express. To attempt its measurement would be more futile than the endeavour to number the stars, or to tell where God's works of creation end. Yet Scripture often speaks of it, and in terms that are perfectly intelligible. It is indicated by the relations which Christ sustains to the Father, and the language in which they are expressed. He is His "only begotten and well-beloved Son; ""the Brightness "the Brightness of His glory and the express image of His person; "His manifested presence and

likeness.

But the love of the Father to the Son is indicated not only by the relations which Christ sustains to Him, but by the offices He fills.

The Father entrusts Him with His honour-that honour of which He is so jealous, and which He will on no account give to another. But this He would never have done, and especially in a world where there was so much to tarnish it, unless He had had the fullest confidence in Him, and cherished the greatest love to Him. But this is how the Father regarded Him. And the confidence was not misplaced. The honour entrusted to Christ was, as it proved, safe in His hands. There was nothing on which He placed a higher estimate, guarded with greater care, and sought so earnestly to promote. His language to the Father therefore was, when finishing His course below, "I have glorified Thee on the earth; I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do."

But the Father showed His love to the Son not only by entrusting Him with His honour, but by assigning to Him the privilege of repairing the breach which sin had made, and restoring men to righteousness and happiness. Nor did He fail in the accomplishment of the task. He fulfilled every requirement that needed to be met for that end, answered for all sin, opened the Kingdom of Heaven for all believers, and placed at men's disposal every provision for their salvation.

Then what an evidence was the exaltation of Christ to the highest place of honour, not only of the completion and satisfactoriness of His work on men's behalf, but of the Father's love to Him? Had not God loved Him with an infinite, all-complacent love, He never would have placed Him at His own right hand in the heavens, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come, put all things under His feet, and made Him Head over all things to the Church. It is because He regards Him with a love and delight far beyond what anyone else deserves and is capable of receiving, that He will have Him in such nearness to Him, and see Him crowned with so many honours.

But now the wonder here is, not that God should regard Him with such admiration and love who so perfectly resembles Him and serves Him, but should give to us, as far as possessed of the power of occupying it, a like place in His affections. And yet Christ assures us that such is the case; that as the Father loves Him so He loves us; that as He is " before God, "so are we (even) in this world," as to acceptance and heirship. But for such Divine and unquestionable testimony, we should have regarded the thought of its being thus with us as an impertinence, and even blasphemous. The words of Christ are, however, too plain to be misunderstood, and too decisive to be contravened. It is thus then, child of grace, that you are estimated and felt towards. You may be fallible and unworthy, weak in the faith you exercise, and without personal right or title to the Divine favour, yet your place is in the great Fatherly heart of God. You dwell in love, and are where Christ Himself is.

But love requires purity in the object of its regard. It takes nothing into its embrace that is unclean. As light, it refuses communion with darkness.

But love not only requires purity, it gives it. It destroys sin, scatters the darkness of unbelief, and beautifies with salvation. To dwell in love, says the Apostle John, is to dwell in God. But you cannot dwell in the All-Holy without becoming like Him. You reflect the light in which you live, just as you reflect the

image you admire, and assume likeness to Him with whom you commune. Godlike men are the necessity of the age; and they are found in those who keep in union and communion with Christ. Such men are "strengthened with might by the Spirit in the inner man, have Christ dwelling in their hearts by faith, and being rooted and grounded in love, comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height of the knowledgepassing love of Christ, and are filled. with all the fulness of God." So endowed and established, they are vitalized in all their powers, purified in their affections, and heightened in their aspirations. The love that possesses them, purifying and energising them, 66 constrains them to live not to themselves, but to Him who died for them, and rose again."

Live in love, and you will be holy. Dwell in God, and you will be like Him. Keep your eye on the heart of God, as towards you in the measure indicated, and your feet will ever be found in the ways of His commandments. Oh, you cannot live otherwise than to the honour and praise of Him who regards you with an infinite affection. Bear in mind the place you occupy in His heart, and there will be no withholdment from Him of anything He requires of you. Love makes lovely. Its characteristic is to draw from evil and towards the good. A mother's love has often drawn from sin, and made of the prodigal a virtuous man; and the love of God is men's salvation-the lever that raises them from depths of defilement to heights of purity and power-the influence that takes possession of their entire being, and sanctifies and beautifies the whole.

BIBLE READINGS.-No. 4.

Stumbling Blocks in the Epistles of St. Paul-Continued.

WHENEVER apathetic Christians

are urged to stretch every nerve to grasp the prize of completed holiness or evangelical perfection, no reply is more common than this, "The great Apostle to the Gentiles, even in the maturity of his Christian experience, distinctly disclaimed

spiritual perfection: why then should I strive after the unattainable ?" Let someone read Phil. iii. 12: "Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect." These words of St. Paul are not only an excuse to the sluggish disciple, but they are often a real stumbling block to the soul hungering and thirsting after righteousness.

Let us ascertain the exact meaning of the Apostle in verse 12, in which he denies that he is perfect, and in verse 15, in which he undeniably classifies himself among the perfect. "Let us, therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded." It must be that there are two different meanings attached to the term "perfect." We open several recent critical English versions, such as those of Dean Alford and the American Bible Union, and we find them using the verb "have been perfected" instead of the adjective "perfect" in verse 12. We open the Greek Testament and we find a verb used in this verse instead of an adjective. Now what is the exact meaning of this verb? Three New Testament Greek lexicons lie open before me, all citing this verse and all agreeing with Robinson in defining this verb thus; "not that I have already completed my course and arrived at the goal, so as to receive the prize." What is the prize that St. Paul has not attained, or, rather, obtained? The word "obtain does not imply progress and approach gradually. We attain an education, but we obtain a loan, a gift, a crown, or an inheritance. The original Greek sustains the word obtain in 1 Cor. ix. 25: "They do it to obtain a corruptible crown. If you would know what it is which St. Paul has not obtained, read verse 11. The laws of grammar require us to supply the nearest noun as the object of "obtained," and this is "the resurrection of the dead." This is the key to this entire chapter and is the last thing mentioned in its last verse. Read verse 21: "Who shall change our vile body that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious But was it not evident that Paul body. had not passed through the resurrection? Why should he tell us, that, before he has gone down into the grave, he has not risen from the dead? If you will now read 1 Cor xv. 12, you will see that in St. Paul's day there were those who put

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an entirely spiritual interpretation upon the resurrection, and insisted that Paul had already passed through it in his transition from spiritual death to spiritual life. This was a kind of Sadducean construction of the doctrine. Read 2 Tim. ii. 18, for a confirmation of our argument that it was not unnecessary for St. Paul to assert that he had not obtained the prize of a glorious bodily resurrection. But what was the goal? The end of life with all its perils. Not yet could he say, what he said three years afterwards, when he was about to be led out to the block on which he was to lay down his life. Read 2 Tim. iv. 6-8. With a term of life and labour still before him, he might well say "I have not reached the end of my earthly career," i.e., I am not yet perfected. Read now Luke xiii. 32: "Behold I cast out devils, and I do cures to-day and tomorrow, and the third day I shall be perfected." Here we have the remarkable fact that Christ disclaims perfection till the third day, in the use of the very same verb used by St. Paul when he disclaims perfection. But the translators of our English Bible have given the correct translation to the verb used by Christ and have blunderingly used the adjective "perfect," as they did in Phil. iii. 12. If they had perpetrated the same error in rendering the words of Jesus as they have in those of St. Paul, the enemies of Christ in every age would be quoting this text to prove that His character was not faultless, and that His claim to equality with the Father was baseless. What Jesus means by being perfected the third day is that his earthly course will then terminate. Our conclusion is that St. Paul no more disclaims, in Phil. iii. 12, a perfect spiritual life, a completed inward and outward holiness, than does Jesus Christ himself in Luke xiii. 32. Nor is this a solitary text in which Jesus Christ is spoken of in the process of being perfected, not in His nature as the Son of God, nor in His completed moral character, but in the sufferings, death, and resurrection necessary for Him to pass through in order to become a Saviour of sinners.

Read Heb. ii. 10:

"For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings."

Jesus as the file-leader of our salvation was perfected through sufferings.

Read Heb v. 9;

"And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him."

Also xi. 40:

"God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect."

The ancient martyrs are not to be raised from the dead and glorified till we, believers of later times, are at hand to share the last crowning act by which they will be perfected, soul and body wearing the glorious image of Christ. We conclude, therefore, from this examination of the verb "perfected " in Phil. iii. 12, that St. Paul disclaims not moral purity in its highest degree, but only his finished earthly course and heavenly glorification.

Read now verse 15: "Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded." Here he does include himself among the perfect. He is complete in his moral and spiritual life. He lacks nothing pertaining to his moral perfection. He loves God with all his heart. In respect of this high standard he does not come short. He obeys the command in Matt. v. 48. In one direction he is perfect, even as his Father in heaven. What point that is will be seen by reading the context from verse 43. He loves according to his finite. capacity with no mixture of hatred, as God does according to His infinite capacity. Paul's was not a perfection of degree, but of kind. He loves with all his capacity to-day, but to-morrow he will have a larger capacity, and so on for ever in endless progression. Absolute perfection belongs to God only.

The best statement of the harmony of Phil. iii. 12 and 15 is derived from Bengel's Gnomon. In verse 12 St. Paul denies his perfection as a victor; in verse 15 he assumes his perfection as a racer. Carry with you, my friends, this succinct harmony of these verses and they will give you no more trouble. Now that the barrier is removed, why not enter in at the narrow gate of gospel perfection and dwell henceforth in the Beulah of first love? It is a very broad land.

"There's a wideness in God's mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea."

SALIENT POINTS OF AN EXPERIENCE.

BY REV. S. BAKER.

HAD no early religious education, nevertheless was frequently convicted, during my youth, of sinfulness and need of salvation. In my twenty-third year, when at college and in the senior class, at a protracted meeting held in the M. E. Church of the place, I surrendered to God and received Christ. The joy which immediately followed was so full and rapturous that no doubt has ever risen concerning the genuineness of my conversion. In this state of ecstacy, while speaking to a number of my fellow-students who were present, I noticed a partiality for my favourites which I then feared ought not to exist. In the course of the next twenty-four hours I detected so much defection that my joys became disturbed, and I concluded that either I had misapprehended the nature of true religion, or I had not obtained a genuine article. To settle the question in my mind, I hastened to the parsonage and made a statement of the facts to the pastor; and I now see that if I had received proper instruction, I would have, then and there, passed into the experience. of entire sanctification, but I went away with the impression that to resist these inherent tendencies to evil constituted the life-long work of the Christian warfare.

The authorities of the Church hurried me, in the course of a few months, into the pulpit, and assigned me a field of labour under the Presiding Elder. While at this work, I met with "Upham's Interior Life," which I read with great avidity, and which disclosed to me the nature of my want as I had never seen it before. I commenced then to consecrate myself anew to God, and fast and pray for a clean heart. This was continued with considerable earnestness until I received, a few months later, my first appointment from the Conference. The books which then came into my hands, such as "Wesley's Sermons," "Plain Account," and the like, greatly intensified my longings after holiness; and these longings and personal efforts after a clean heart rendered my labours very effective in winning souls to Christ. This eagerness for purity, however, which had not at any time been as intense as it should have been, soon gave way to a semi-carelessness about the mat

ter, and, for twenty years or more, with an occasional aspiration that way, I remained in a state of unsatisfactory religious experience.

Some fifteen years ago I became, as I then supposed, unable for effective service in the ministry, and engaged in mercantile pursuits. In this I was prospered greatly, and soon found my heart attaching itself to the riches of this world. At this I became somewhat alarmed, and commenced to plead with God to make me and my money useful to the people, and protect me from the danger which I saw impending. The more I prayed the more I felt my leanness and my need of a better religious life. While in this state of mind, some local preachers who had recently come into the experience of perfect love, held a convention in our place, and their sweet spirit and holy fervour made a deep impression upon my mind. One of these brethren induced me to purchase from him a copy of "Wood's Perfect Love," which I read with the deepest interest. While reading the experience of the author, I became so moved, that I determined never to be satisfied with anything short of heart purity, but was in blissful ignorance of what it was about to cost me.

True to my purpose, I at once proceeded with the work of self-examination and the consecration of myself anew to God. After meeting a few unimportant issues, it was suggested by the Spirit-as my family was not large, my residence and business house were all I could desire, and my stock and surplus funds laid aside were all that I and family would need— that whatever I could make hereafter should be devoted to charitable purposes. I had a severe struggle to yield this point, but grace triumphed, and for a time my victory seemed to be complete. I had in my safe at the time some securities, in the form of Government and mortgage bonds, which I did not need in my business, and which the Spirit sought out, and intimated should be given to benevolent uses. Here a struggle ensued which was much fiercer than any which had preceded, but the Spirit helped my infirmities, and I consented to sell these securities and devote the proceeds to the cause of Christ. I now thought, in view of the keenness of my suffering, that the sifting process was at an end, the morti