God. We must rouse ourselves to a more vivid and intense recognition of His Presence, and of our utter dependence on Him. We must pour out our souls in earnest and importunate cries for the energies and succours of His Spirit.

But general declamation, however true, however unctuous, will not satisfy a sincere soul. If any of us are earnestly bent on securing a revival of religion in our own hearts, and on helping to rouse the Church to a more intense spiritual life, we shall want to know more exactly and definitely how we are to set about the task. "What am I to do? what one thing? Give me something definite, something practicable, to aim at,"-this is the cry of the sincere but perplexed soul.

And in answer to that appeal, I would suggest that we may often learn what our duties are by marking what our sins are. And the great sin of the Church is, as it has been in all ages, our forgetfulness of God and of our utter dependence on Him, even when we are diligently using the means of grace which He has put into our hands. In fact, we ourselves fall into the very sin which we constantly rebuke in men of science. To them we are for ever saying: "You hide God away behind the great laws and forces of the physical universe. You speak of them as though they were selfacting, self-originating, and administered themselves. You forget that only as God sits behind and above them, and acts through them, can they produce the fair and beautiful results in which we rejoice from day to day." We fall, I say, into the very sin we rebuke. For, mark in the truths of inspiration, in the Gospel, in the corporate life, the worship, and the sacraments of the Church, God has put great spiritual laws and forces within our reach. Through these, He has pledged Himself to work for our spiritual culture, and for the redemption of the world:-through these. But how often, how commonly, do we regard the Gospel, and the teaching and worship of the Church, as capable in themselves, if only they be diligently used, of producing great spiritual results, forgetting that only as God acts by them, and through them, can they produce any result worth having. Of course I do not mean that we are prepared to maintain as a scholastic thesis, to be argued out in the forms of logic, That, now we have got the Church and the Gospel, we can do without God. We shrink from the mere thought, and indignantly repudiate it. We are even profuse in our acknowledgements of our entire dependence on Him. What I mean is that, practically, we ignore the fact which we are so forward to acknowledge. We observe days and ordinances. Week by week we go up to the Sanctuary. We join in the prayers. We sing our hymns. We take the sacrament. We respect the minister. We form societies, benevolent and missionary, and take some part in working them. And, too often, we sink into a mere routine, and tread it in a mechanical way, bringing no profound spiritual energy or emotion to our service. Too often, we use all the machinery of the Church, as if, of itself, it would grind out large and happy spiritual results. We are disappointed and chagrined if the results do not come, although, as we have used our religious machinery, we have never once roused ourselves to a vivid and intense recognition of our need of the Divine presence and aid, and felt, that do what we might, we could do nothing to purpose apart from God.

This, indeed, was the very sin into which the Jews were for ever falling. They were for ever forgetting God, and their dependence on Him, both in their daily life and in the worship of the Temple. Year by year they ploughed their land, sowed their seed, went through all the approved pro

A New Baptism of the Holy Ghost the Great Want of the Age. 329 cesses of husbandry, and expected that they would reap their harvest quite apart from the Divine benediction. Year by year, too, they came up to the Temple; they offered their sacrifices, kept fast and feast, said their prayers, sang their psalms, paid their tithes; and went home confident. that God would bless them and do them good, although they had never once realised His presence in the Temple, nor raised their hearts to Him on the wings of spiritual emotion and desire. It was the supreme function of the Hebrew prophet to recall a forgotten God to their thoughts, to bid them turn, and return, unto the Lord, to exhort them to rend their hearts as well as their garments, to offer Him the sacrifices, of contrition and obedience, and not the heartless oblations of which He was weary. Again, and again, God Himself had to visit them with strokes, to smite the land with drought and the harvest with locusts, or to deliver them to the horrors of battle and scige and captivity, that He might raise them out of their formal and mechanical round of service into a spiritual recognition of His presence in the field and the temple, into a sense of their dependence on Him for that besides bread on which man lives, and for that in worship which alone nourishes and sustains the soul.

Their sin is our sin; their want, our want. Practically, we forget the God whom we honour with our lips. We must be roused, we must rouse ourselves, to a more vivid recognition of His presence, a more intense craving for genuine spiritual communion with Him, before we can hope that He will baptize us afresh with His Spirit, and, through us, pour out His Spirit on all flesh. For to what purpose would the Spirit descend so long as we are unprepared to receive and use His sacred influences?

If, then, our want is great, is not our duty clear and definite? If only the wise and pure Spirit of God can save us from our worldliness and our scepticism, do we not see distinctly what we must do to secure the Divine presence, activity, blessing? Consider yourselves, my brethren: consider your daily life and your Church life; and then decide for yourselves whether or not you are doing your best to secure the baptism we need and crave.

Day by day you go down to business. You toil; you plan; you bend all your energies to the single end of bringing your work to a prosperous issue. But, as you go down to workshop or counting-house, do you, sincerely and habitually, feel that, however skilful and diligent and cautious you may be, you cannot succeed in anything you attempt, unless God be with you and for you? Do you, hour by hour, and moment by moment, as you go about your work, feel that He is with you, and that, because He is with you, you need have no fear, no care? If He were to step into your shop or counting-house; if, as you were engaged in your daily task, a vivid sense of His presence were to arise within you, and, looking up, you were to behold Him standing by your side, would not that be a shock to you, would you not regard it as a strange, perhaps even an unwelcome, surprise and interruption? Practically, do not you, like the ancient Jews, expect that, if you plough and sow, your harvest will come; that if you get good orders and execute them well, you will grow rich by a natural and inevitable process, by the operation of fixed physical and mercantile laws which somehow administer themselves, and which say nothing to you of the everpresent ever-active Being who alone gives them validity and force? You who build, do not you live and act and think as though, if you use good materials on a well-laid plan, you can build well enough without God? Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it," says

the Psalmist but now, honestly, do you believe that, and act as though you believed it? You who manufacture goods, do not you act as though, if only you can hit the market, get good patterns, employ skilful workmen to execute them, and push your trade with energy, you can get on well enough without troubling God-at least in your business? And yet, what is this but to live without God in the world in which you spend nearly the whole of your time?

For

Or consider your Church life. You go up to the house of God, let me suppose, with tolerable regularity. You take part in the services, and are interested in them. You do your full share toward sustaining our various institutions. You give liberally; and are anxions that the work of the Church should be well supported, that the congregation should increase, the Sunday-school prosper, and that there should be constant and promising additions to the number of them that believe. The supposition is not an ungenerous one, as you will admit: for I have assumed that you do far more than can be affirmed of many members of our Churches. But, when you have done all this, you may have left your main duty undone. the Church is a community of spiritual men. It exists for spiritual ends. Financial, numerical, and institutional prosperity are valuable only as they are the signs of a vigorous and thriving spiritual life. What, then, of spiritual insight, emotion, force, effort, do you contribute to the real life of the Church, to its quickening and redeeming energy? Before you come up to the sanctuary, do you habitually strive with God, in prayer, for a blessing on the work and worship of the day? Do you bring with you hearts thirsting and panting for Him, for His truth, for His grace? When you leave, do you study how you may retain any lesson you have learned, any gracious impression you have received? Do you honestly feel that, do what you will, you will neither get nor do any good, unless God be manifestly with you? Are you not too apt to think that if the finances prosper, and the congregation grows, and the preaching is good, and the Church is united, and its various institutions are successfully administered-that all this will suffice of itself; that you may confidently look for the happiest results, although you at least are not feeling your utter dependence on the ministry of the Holy Ghost, and importunately seeking it night and day? If God should appear to you, or should inwardly make you aware of His presence, while you are praying or singing a hymn, would you be much less surprised and shocked than if He were to come into your countinghouse or workshop? Would His Presence be much less unexpected even when you are beseeching Him to be present in your midst than when you are absorbed in your daily toils and cares? And yet,

O Thou, the Hope of Israel,

The Saviour thereof in time of trouble,

Why shouldest Thou be as a stranger among us,
And as a wayfaring man that turneth aside for a night?
Why shouldest Thou be as one struck dumb,

As a mighty man that cannot save?

Thou art in our midst;

And we are called by Thy name:
O leave us not,*

but quicken in us a sense of Thy presence, and of our need of Thee! We think too much of the Church, and its machinery and message; too little of that Divine Spirit who alone can give quickening power to the Word and carry the work of the Church to a successful issue. We think

* Jeremiah, xiv. 8, 9.

A New Baptism of the Holy Ghost the Great Want of the Age. 331

too much of men, too little of God. Until we feel our need of Him, and heartily crave His presence and blessing, He, whose will is our salvation, cannot save and bless us as He fain would. The "means of grace," as we call them, are only means, or ways, or channels by which the grace of God may flow in upon us. The power is not in them, but in Him. And, therefore, we need to learn anew the lesson of John the Baptist. Like him, we can preach repentance, and announce the kingdom of heaven. Like him, we can baptize men unto repentance; we can awaken attention; we can excite expectation; we can even convict men of their sins, and succeed in effecting an outward cleansing and reformation. But, behind us, as behind him, they should ever hear the feet of the Coming One, the Lord from heaven, who alone can quicken them to newness of life. At our best we are, as he felt himself to be, but as the poor slave, commonly the lowest in the household, who latched and unloosed his master's sandals. Only our Master Himself can speak with authority and power. Only Christ can "baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire." So long as, forgetting Him, we put our trust in men, in their teaching, in their administration of the sacraments, or even in the Word of Truth itself and the machinery of the Church, we are simply guilty of an idolatry more subtle, and therefore more dangerous, than the worship of stocks and stones. may make a fetish of the very Church, nay, of the Gospel itself. We do, if we detach either from Christ, and conceive of it as able to meet our needs apart from His indwelling Spirit and power.

We

As, therefore, we would gain for ourselves, for the Church, for the very world, a new baptism of the Holy Ghost, let us raise ourselves to a keener, a more steadfast and intense, recognition of Him who is the sole Head of the Church and the very Substance of the Gospel. Let us wait on Him, and look for His appearing. Let us be as men who watch for their lord. We shall not watch and wait in vain.

Yet even now, saith the Lord,

Turn ye to Me with all your heart,

And with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning;
And rend your hearts, and not your garments,

And return to the Lord your God,

For He is gracious and merciful,
Slow to anger, and of great kindness,
And repenteth Him of the evil.

Who knoweth? He may return and repent,
And leave behind Him a blessing.

He may! Nay, He will. For it shall come to pass in those days of seeking and repenting, saith the Lord, that

I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,

And your sons and your daughters shall prophecy,
Your old men shall dream dreams,

Your young men shall see visions,

And even on the bondsmen and the bondswomen,
Will I pour out my Spirit in those days,

And it shall come to pass

That whosoever calleth on the Name of the Lord shall be saved.

LOVE TO CHRIST: THE MOTIVE POWER TO DEVOTEDNESS IN HIS SERVICE.*

BY THE REV. J. P. TETLEY.

MANY and various are the motives which may actuate men in the service of Christ. One gives himself to this service from a feeling of emulation. He sees others displaying power and winning respect in the school or the church, and becomes ambitious of this result. But when misrepresentation comes upon him, he is offended, and retires from the field in disgust, proving that the motive which at first impelled him, has either degenerated into, or else was never anything better than, personal vanity and a desire for distinction. Others work from the desire of reward. But although rewards are promised to the faithful servant, and it is right and cheering to contemplate them, yet to labour solely in the hope of reward is to make an utter selfishness the ultimate end of that which was designed to be a work of self-sacrificing love.

A much higher motive than this, and one which has been pre-eminent in many Christians, is philanthropy-a feeling of overpowering compassion for the woes of our fellowmen. This is a noble principle of action, and has led to rich results in the amelioration of the physical and temporal condition of men. But if brought into action as the ruling power in seeking the spiritual uplifting of the people, it is utterly inadequate. In this higher sphere it meets with an opposition before which it quails and dies. The man who seeks the temporal benefit of his fellows is at once appreciated by them, and is hailed as their benefactor and friend. This stimulates and sustains him in his work. But he who seeks the spiritual regeneration of men meets with an opposition, the most determined from the very individuals he seeks to benefit. And seldom is there found in the human breast philanthropy of such an exalted kind that, without being supplemented by something else, it can long sustain an opposition like this.

A stern sense of duty and responsibility moves others, putting upon them an almost irresistible constraint. But desirable as this motive may be, were it to operate alone, it would reduce to a grinding slavery the service which should be an eternal joy. A sense of duty may be so overpowering as to crush out of a man the "Woe is unto me, if of agony, cry I preach not the gospel;" but it could never produce the spontaneous outbreak of enthusiasm, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Many other motives may impel the Christian to the service of his Lord; but these, even when they are good and noble, will fail to sustain the constant wear and tear, and the frequent wrench and strain which that service puts upon them unless they are intensified and crowned by the supreme motive of love to Christ. This must be supreme. "If ye love me, keep my commandments." To everyone of His disciples the Saviour puts the thrice repeated question, "Lovest thou me?" and not until we can answer with the truthful emphasis of Peter, "Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I I love thee," do we receive the commission, "Feed my lambs." And that which Christ thus requires as the ruling principle in His service was strikingly displayed by the apostles and early disciples. The apostle Paul explained the grand secret of their unflagging zeal and glorious success when he said, "For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all,

* Substance of an Address delivered at the Burnley Association.