SERMON XXI.

CHRIST'S DEPARTURE THE CONDITION OF THE

SPIRIT'S ADVENT.

PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN.

JOHN, xvi. 7.

It is expedient for you that I go away, for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you.

HE gift of Christ and of His Spirit, resident as

THE

Paraclete in the Church, forms, as I have endeavoured in the last discourse to illustrate, the direct counterpart to that other fatal gift, which, like it, was superadded to the simplicity of our original nature. Man was made "a living soul," by the creative Spirit which "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;" and, with expressive propriety, God incarnate, emitting a recreative Spirit, employed the same action, when promising to breathe into His Apostles the breath of a new life. He said, "receive ye the Holy Ghost." The latter endowment, however, neither destroyed nor renewed the former; it was meant to meet and overcome that which had subsequently entered as a principle of rebellion and ruin. In Adam and Eve alone, of all the human race, existed our nature in its elementary simplicity; the Satanic intrusion, at the moment of their

fall, burdened it with an alien principle of evil, thence, in right of that gloomy conquest, transmitted to their heirs for ever; the divine incarnation, equally, superadded to it a celestial supplement, in right of Christ's victory transmitted to all who are His, and bound up immortally with the substance of their being. Both are hidden from human consciousness, even as the soul itself is; like it, both are known by the results of their secret activity. The motions of the carnal man, and the motions of the spiritual man; the active vices of the natural mind, and the living graces of the regenerate mind; the deeds of darkness and the deeds of light; the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit (as you find them contrastedly enumerated in Galat. v., and such like passages);-all these are the respective manifestations, in the sphere of action and of consciousness, of the two rival principles, themselves sunk in the secret depths of the souls of men.

It has indeed been very commonly held, yet I cannot but think on slender foundations, that Adam himself possessed the supernatural graces which are now issued by Christ, or graces correspondent to them. Our inspired information respecting the first man is very limited, yet I cannot but think it nearly decisive against this doctrine. The expressions commonly quoted are certainly quite insufficient to establish it. We are told that he was created "upright" (Eccles. vii. 29), and "in the image of God." The former term manifestly imports no more than that he was formed without any taint of positive sin, in contradistinction from his descendants. The latter is sufficiently answered when we regard him as possessed of all the

higher faculties of humanity, in their unfettered development, their due authority, and their mutual harmony, conscience, intellectual powers, freedom of will, and dominion over the creatures; these being the qualities which make man in this world analogous to what God is in the universe. The further ascription seems to depend chiefly on two expressions of St. Paul, one of which speaks of "the new man," as "after God" (in conformity with God's will, Kaтà Оeòv) "created in righteousness and true holiness" (Eph. iv. 24); from which it is inferred, that Adam's resemblance must have coincided with these characters, and thence been identical with the Christian's; as if the resemblance to God (supposing it here intended) may not consist in a vast variety of particulars, all excellent, but all distinct, and some more excellent than others;-the other passage (Col. iii. 10) declaring, that "the new man is renewed in knowledge after the image of his Creator,” the Creator, whose image is here said to be stamped upon the regenerate, being assuredly Christ Himself as revealed in the Gospel, according to the expression (Eph. ii. 10), that the Christian is "created in Christ Jesus," and having no relation (except, perhaps, that of very remote allusion) to the original formation of man in a divine image. But what seems decisively to prove that Adam did not possess the supernatural graces in question, is this; that these graces are now, and are admitted to be, essentially connected with the immortality of glory; that that immortality to Adam was suspended upon his eating of the "tree of life;" and that he never did eat of the tree of life. I need not recall to your memory the awful words of his ex

pulsion: "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil, and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:" therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, "to till the ground from whence he was taken." Hence it is that, in the visions of the Revelation, the same " tree of life" re-appears in heaven, and re-appears also as the immediate gift of Christ. "On either side of the river was the tree of life" (xxii. 2). "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God" (ii. 7).

As these considerations seem plainly enough to show that in our parents in Paradise we see the simple substratum of humanity, self-dependent, and in its self-dependence overthrown; so the whole strain of Scripture bears testimony to the Satanic nature of the added element, from the hour of the fall perpetuated in and around us. "The enemy who soweth tares is the devil." "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do." "When the strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace." Satan entered into Judas." "The god of this world hath blinded the eyes of them who believe not." "We wrestle against the rulers of the darkness of this world;" we" withstand the wiles of the devil." "The prince of the power of the air" is expressly declared to be "the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience." Men may be recovered "out of the snare of the devil," who are "taken captive by him," and thus "delivered from the power of darkness." Prompting the first murder, for "Cain was of that wicked one," his

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instigation shall urge the last, for his shall they be who are to "compass the camp of the saints and the beloved city" (Rev. xx. 9). Revealed first in a serpentine form, preparatory to his entrance into the human soul (both intrusions, perhaps, being necessary to his power over the brute and the rational creations), in that form, as if to recall the prolonged identity of his nature and agency, is he spoken of in the closing scenes of the latter days, when, as we read, an angel shall "lay hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil and Satan." These declarations, with others already cited, that regard the servitude of sin, sufficiently detect the true source of this world's wickedness; but when we read of this evil principle as "a spirit working in the disobedient," and when we remember the expressions of St. Paul regarding the inherency yet distinctness of sin, and when we consider more closely the very nature of spiritual influences, we can scarcely refuse to recognise in this diabolical agency no distant or accidental operation, but the very thing we all can feel yet none can explain; that indwelling tyranny, separate from the man but utterly incorporated with the man, which is so mysteriously interwoven in his nature that the will is a will and yet a captive, and the tyrant and the slave blended inconceivably in one. Perfectly correspondent to this, and neither more nor less inexplicable than this is, the Spirit of the second Adam inheres in the human soul.

Speculations that undertake to explain this mystery are an infallible proof that the speculator does not understand either the place of the mystery or the conditions of an explanation. To explain a fact is to re