events.

power. The same is the case with great social To those who are early familiarised to bring the thought of God's Presence into their common lives (and it is a lesson that may be taught very early, and with very great benefit), the ungodly are readily regarded as a sword of God's wrath: wars, and rumours of wars, earthquakes and pestilences, nation rising up against nation, and men's hearts failing them for fear, all serve as tokens of the present nearness of the Almighty, and assurances of His bringing to pass the things that He has fore

told.

This may be esteemed the "natural Presence" of the Omnipresent God in all the world, to be morally noted and remembered by all who know Him. The "supernatural" Presence of Christ in the Church is yet another and greater thing. Under the Gospel we are taught, that when the Lord ascended with His Body into the heaven, so as for awhile to be absent in the flesh from the Church, He became more truly and more present with it in the Spirit according to His own most true promise: "I will not leave you comfortless; I will come unto you." " A little while, and ye shall not "A see me, and again a little while and ye shall

"Touch

see me, because I go to the Father.” me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father."* From the day on which the Holy Ghost descended on the Church at Pentecost, whereby the Lord God dwelt with it, the whole body of the baptized is Christ. The poor, naked, hungry, prisoners are Christ; the helpless, persecuted Christians are Christ: He is with the Church to the end of the world. Where two or three are duly gathered into His name, He is there. It has become expedient for the Church that He has gone away in the flesh, for now is He with her in the Spirit. Now she may touch Him in all the sacred ways of nearness and communion which He offereth, for He is ascended into heaven.

Thus, in Christian morality, the maintaining of the sense of God's Presence has become a very high and sacred, as well as peculiar duty; for it requires that Christian men should realize to their minds, and ever keep up the sense of this mysterious and spiritual Presence of Christ with His Church, filling their thoughts with it, and by it directing their lives and affections during this "waiting-time," while He

* St. John xiv. 16; xvi. 26; xx. 17.

is gone into a far country, intending to return and take account with His servants.

(7.) Again, as the belief in God and things heavenly is requisite, as the basis of Divine morality, so it is also essential to such Divine morality that a man maintain a perpetual consciousness of the complete vanity and worthlessness of all the visible things and temporal interests which surround us upon the earth, in comparison of the love and favour of God, and the great things which He designs for His obedient people. This, too, is a thing to be done by express and continual moral effort. It is necessary, by distinct and constant acts (becoming, no doubt, easier, and apparently more spontaneous the oftener they are repeated; but still acts of effort and intention not natural), to reverse, as it were, the natural perspective of things, by which the nearer things look the greatest, and the distant things the smallest to our sight. We have to teach our faith to contradict our eyes, and while the latter insist on magnifying the near and present, and making it shut out the view of the distant, to force the former to see that, on the contrary, the near things are trifling and insignificant, while the distant ones alone are of real importance to us

in respect of our real goodness and essential being.

(8.) Having God signifies, further, the maintaining, under all circumstances, not only of worldly prosperity, but also of trial, change, and difficulty, a constant and supporting sense of His fatherly power, goodness, and love; and, by consequence, the reverent filial devotion and submission of heart and affection which belong to sons.

This duty, which is naturally required of all such as have learned to believe in the fatherly love, goodness, and power of God towards His creatures, testified even in the midst of much physical and moral evil by the beauty and sweetness which He has infused into life and nature, the enjoyment which He bestows upon His creatures, by the wondrous organization which He has given them, and the not less wondrous adaptation of that organization to the position and circumstances in which He has placed them; by the plain preference which He has shown for truth and virtue, by making, in spite of occasional irregularities, essential power and essential happiness to belong to them instead of to their opposites,-this duty, is to Christians deepened and strength

I

say,

ened out of all calculation by the knowledge that they, by being planted into the Body of Christ, have obtained a new and divine sort of sonship, far beyond, in grace and glory, anything which they could have hoped for as being naturally the sons of God. It has pleased the Lord to say that Christians are one in Him, even as He is one with the Father. To them the Father imparts of the eternal love with which He loveth His Only Begotten Son. In the Beloved, they too are beloved. As then He, in suffering, in agony, and in death was still beloved, and in all these terrible trials still faithful to that love,-the prime leader and perfect accomplisher of the example of faith to His people,-so in Divine morality under the first law, must His obedient followers learn to look to Him as to their model, and through Him to the unfailing fatherly love of God in Him assured to them, running with sacred patience, even in the utmost trouble, pain, or distress, the holy race which God in His Providence may be pleased to set before them.

(e.) Again; a man cannot have God in the sense of the first law, unless he does all things, and devotedly lays out his whole life to the