vens; a single misfortune near the heart will hide all the earthly evidences of divine beneficence. But a God made known in Christ crucified,-give us, O heavenly Spirit! but a firm faith in this, and no earthly visitation can shake our confidence in His love! Afflictions may, for a moment, cloud our apprehensions of the divine mercy, but there is an evidence in that one awful fact, the God condemned for man,—that must triumph over every temporary obscuration, re-assume its placid empire in the soul, and restore the trembling Christian to His Lord again.

But come, bring your pupil, your Gospel-deprived pupil, from the outward to the inward world; set him to explore his own heart, and to find his duties and his hopes there! Unfold to him all the variety of his powers and his affections; show him the just prerogatives of his reason, the due subjection of the inferior nature. Much will you have done, and yet little! Much will you have furnished to perplex, but no light at all towards a solution! A nature so sublime, so debased,—with such occasional perceptions of good, such perpetual tendencies to evil,-how shall he know whither to turn in this chaos? Above all, how shall he know the right, when there is that within him which perpetually urges him to love the wrong? Can the judgment be trusted when the passions are ever ready to betray it? What is the reason of most men but a special pleader to the passions, a hired advocate ready to justify whatever they have predetermined? A fixed standard, independent of these variations, we must have; that standard is, and is only, in the Gospel of Jesus! You would tell your pupil why man is evil, and yet the mysterious child of eternal hopes? Cast aside your

pompous pretences of an education independent of the Gospel; place before the immortal being for whom you are prescribing, a page of the story of Paradise for the one, the death, and victory over Death, of the Saviour, for the other; and one lesson will have taught him more than years of ineffective inquiry.

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We have searched nature; we find her dumb until the Gospel of Christ give her a mouth and utterance : we have sought this hidden wisdom in the heart of man, and found no response, or none worth a pause, till the same Gospel tells us the history of that heart, its fall and its restoration: shall we now direct our ungospelled pupil to dream of God, and find his " wisdom" in his dreams? But I refrain from even the supposition. A voice beyond man bids me resign the theme, an oracle from the sanctuary that supersedes all discussion. "Jesus saith, I am the way. . . . No man cometh to the Father but by me." 'No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." This suffices. You may demonstrate a First Cause, and call Him, if you please, the Monarch of the Universe; but the knowledge of God, as God is, is in Christ alone. And amid all the boasts of an arrogant age, amid its pretences to penetrate unauthorized into the very courts of God, it is still our blessed belief, the spring and support of our exertions, that "God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ!" There alone we profess to find it there alone we would bid those, who ask us the way to God, to seek it and be happy.

SERMON XVIII.

THE DIVINITY OF OUR PRIEST, PROPHET, AND

KING.

PREACHED ON TRINITY SUNDAY, BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN.

2 COR. v. 19.

God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.

HE Christian Church, by immemorial usage, and

THE

on the justest principles, appropriating distinct days to the special consideration of each of the leading elements of our belief, invites us, upon this occasion, to reflect upon the loftiest of them all,—upon a doctrine which (as if to force upon us the immeasurable advantages of Revelation, as distinguished from the intimations of the natural faculties) is at once placed beyond the discovery, perhaps even beyond the conjectures, of Reason, and, at the same time, when once known, becomes discernibly the central point of our whole system of religious beliefs, around which the rest group themselves in natural arrangement, and deprived of which they seem to lose their presiding principle, their collective symmetry, and their relative order. Happy would it be, if, on an occasion such as this, it were permitted us, forgetting all the cavils which the fevered restlessness of a too ambitious ignorance has perpe

Y

tually raised against the mysteries of God, to resign ourselves wholly to the feelings which the simple reception of the truth brings with it; and as we reflect, to know by the same testimony of inward consciousness, that they are deceived, who tell us that this is a doctrine which, even if conceded to be true, is barren of practical fruit, isolated from the Christian life and experience. Of a truth, they who dwell in the light of this belief, when they drop into the dead world of common life, might well be as men whose upward eyes have been too dazzled with the brightness of the heavens to discern the objects and relations of earth. Such elevation is in itself high and holy; but let us remember that there are few or no merely contemplative abstractions among the truths which God has thought fit to reveal to His Church. The speculative doctrine is, in this instance, met by a practical counterpart, mysterious indeed as itself, yet of deep and daily interest to every regenerate soul. As that Godhead, which was substantially one with the Father and the Spirit, hath entered into fellowship with the human nature, so are we invited to a corresponding fellowship with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. These are the two terms-and the necessary terms-of the mystic intercourse of heaven and earth. This is the inheritance, sealed to every believing soul, that in it should abide these three mysterious agents; and that in our union specially with the Son, as in His specially with us, should be virtually involved the union with the Father and the Holy Ghost. Thus are we, through that blending of the human and divine in Christ (and even natural reason in its calmer hours might apprehend that

thence only could the wondrous object be effected), introduced into the very presence of Deity in all its aspects; incorporated, as it were, with the Godhead; "partakers,” in the Apostle's language, "of the divine nature;" and immortalized hereafter in glory by that eternal essence thus mystically united to our own.

The assumption of humanity by the divine Substance in its second Person, is, then, the fact or doctrine which makes the remoter mystery of the Trinity of practical importance to us; and on this subject specially I shall endeavour, this morning, to fix your attention. The general question of the Trinity divides into the characters of divinity and of personality, as attributable to each of the three Persons. With respect to the Father, both divinity and personality are conceded by all who profess to call on His adorable name. As regards the Son and the Spirit, the case is reciprocally reversed. Of the Son of God (as manifestly one with the "Son of Man") the personality is granted, and the divinity denied; of the Holy Spirit, on the contrary, the divinity is usually, in some sense, granted (when He is considered as an attribute or influence of God), and the distinct personality refused. I may, perhaps, conclude, that many of the topics that concern the latter question were, either directly or indirectly, brought before you on the last Sunday; and this exclusion, with the admission, already stated, of the divinity and personality of the Father, leaves, as my more immediate subject, the union of a true and perfect deity with the human nature of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I will attempt, on this occasion, to evince that there is, apart from all direct scriptural affirmations of the