not being formed within you, then your profession signifies nothing but the mere respectability of your sin. What is your supposed piety but this, if it have no spiritual and inwardly transforming power? Christ is redemption only as he actually redeems and delivers our nature from sin. If he is not the law and spring of a new spirit of life, he is nothing. Beware, let me say to you in Christ's name,-beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. The true principle, my brethren, is this, and if this will yield us no just title to the Christian name, what we call our piety is in honest truth nothing more or better than a decent shape of sin;-For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God as many, no more. Are we so led, do we so live?

To dismiss this subject without some prospective reference, or glance of forecast on the future, is impossible, however painful and appalling the contemplations it will raise. When you go to stand before God, my friends, it will not be your dress, or your house, or your titles, or your wealth, no, nor even your virtues, however much commended here, that will give you a title of entrance among the glorified. Respectable sin will not pass then and there as here. The honor, the nobility of it is now gone by. The degrees, indeed, of sin are many, but the kind is one, and that a poor, dejected, emptied form of shame and sorrow. How appalling such a thought to any one who is capable of thought, and not absolutely brutalized by his guilt. Furthermore, as sin is sin, everywhere and in all forms, the respectable and the unrespectable, the same in principle, and when the appearances are different, the same often in criminality, the world of future

retribution must, of course, be a world of strange companionships. We are expressly told, and it seems a matter of reason also to suppose, that the spirits of guilty men will not be assorted there by their tastes, but by their character and demerits. Death is the limit and end of all mere conventionalities. The fictitious assortments of the earthly state never pass that limit. Rank, caste, fashion, disgust, fastidiousness, delicacy of sin-these are able to draw their social lines no longer. Proximity now is held to the stern, impartial principle of inward demerit;-That all may receive according to the deeds done in the body. This is the level of adjustment, and there appears to be no other. The standing of the high priests, the Scribes, and Pharisees, and the forlorn woman of my text, may be inverted now, or they may all take rank together. And so also many of you, that are now pleasing yourselves in the dignity of your virtues, and the honors of your social standing, may fall there into group and gradation, with such as now you even look away from with profoundest distaste or revulsion. The subject is painful; I will not pursue it. I will only remind you that where the lines of justice lead, there you must yourselves follow; and if that just award of respectable sin yields you only the promise of a scale of companionships from which your soul recoils with disgust, there is no wisdom for you but to be as disgustful of the sin as of the companionships, and draw yourself, at once, to Him who is Purity, and Peace, and Glory, and, in all, Eternal Life.

XVIII.

THE POWER OF GOD IN SELF-SACRIFICE.

1 COR. i. 24.-" Christ the power of God."

THE cross and Christ crucified are the subject here in hand. Accordingly, when Christ is called the power of God, we are to understand Christ crucified; and then the problem is to conceive how Christ, dying in the weakness of mortality and exhibiting, just there, if we take him as the incarnate manifestation of God, the humblest tokens of passibility and frailty, is yet and there, as being the crucified, the power of God.

At our present point and without some preparation of thought, we can hardly state intelligibly, or with due force of assertion, the answer to such a question. The two elements appear to be incompatible, and we can only say that the power spoken of is, not the efficient, or physical, but the moral power of God; that namely of his feeling and character. But as this will be no statement sufficiently clear to stand as the ruling proposition of a discourse, I will risk a departure from our custom and, instead of drawing my subject formally from my text, I will begin at a point external and draw, by stages, toward it; paying it, as I conceive, the greater honor, that I suppose it to be so rich and deep in its meaning, as to require and to reward the labor of a discourse, if simply we may apprehend the lesson it teaches,

Christ, then, the crucified, and so the power of God-this is our goal, let us see if we can reach it.

We take our point of departure at the question of passibility in God-is He a being passible, or impassible?

It would seem to follow from the infinitude of his creatively efficient power, and the immensity of his nature, that he is and must be impassible. There is, in fact, no power that is not in his hands. There are cases, it is true, where superiority in volume and physical force rather increases than diminishes passibility. Thus it is that man is subject to so great annoyance from the mere gnat, and the creature is able to inflict this inevitable suffering upon him, just because of his own atomic littleness. But there is no parallel in this for the relation of God to his creatures, or of theirs to Him; because they continue to exist only by His permission. Besides, He is spirit only, not a being that can be struck, or thrust upon, or any way violated by physical assault. What we call force, or physical power can not touch him. probably incapable of suffering from it, as truly as even space itself. Like space, like eternity, he is, in his own nature, as spirit, essentially impassible-impassible, that is, as related to force.

And even if it could, he is

But the inquiry is not ended when we reach this point, it is only begun. After all there must be some kind of passibleness in God, else there could be no genuine character in him. If he could not be pained by any thing, could not suffer any kind of wound, had no violable sympathy, he would be any thing but a perfect character, A cast iron Deity could not command our love and reverence.

The beauty of God is that he has feeling and feels appropriately toward every thing done; that he feels badness as badness, and goodness as goodness, pained by one, pleased by the other. There must be so much, or such kind of passibility in him that he will feel toward every thing as it is, and will be diversely affected by diverse things, according to their quality. If wickedness and wrong stirred nothing in him different from what is stirred by a prayer, if He felt no disaffection toward a thief which He does not feel toward a martyr, no pleasure in a martyr faithful unto death which He does not in his persecutors, He would be a kind of no-character, we can hardly conceive such a being.

A very large share of all the virtues have, in fact, an element of passivity, or passibility in them, and without that element they could, not exist. Indeed the greatness and power of character, culminates in the right proportion and co-ordination of these passive elements. And just here it is, we shall see, that even God's perfection culminates. He is great as being great in feeling.

We raise a distinction, as among ourselves, between what we call the active and the passive virtues. Not that all virtues are not equally active, in the sense of being voluntary, or free, but that in some of them we communicate, and in some of them receive action, If I impart a charity, that is my active virtue; if I receive an insult without revenging, or wishing to revenge it, that is my passive virtue. All the wrong acts done us and also all the good are occasions of some appropriate, proportionate and really great feeling, which is our passive virtue. And without this passive virtue in its varieties, we should be only no-characters, dry logs of wood instead of Christian men. Or, if we kept on acting still, we should be only