with every word, and every look, and every self-denial, may we seek to increase the sum of joy in the world. Oh! how many are making misery, and making men cry! May we be among those who shall make them smile. May we seek to make the heart happier. May we seek to rub away the crease that sorrow and care have put upon the brow. Grant that we may make the heart rich. And so may we live and labor, until thou hast need of us above. And then solve all mysteries. Then, in the one dying, give us knowledge and life, and bring us where all shall know even as we are known. And to the Father, the Son, and the spirit, shall be praises everlasting.— Amen.

THE IDEAL

OF

CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE.

"Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words; and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him."— JNO. XIV. 22, 23.

No susceptible nature ever reads these marvelous chapters containing Christ's love-talk, in the seclusion of home, and in the last hours that he was spending peacefully with his disciples, without feeling that they are full of meanings which ordinary life furnishes no clue for. Barren or shallow natures are apt to feel that they are extravagant; that they are a kind of spiritual sentimentalism. Venerating natures, that yet do not reach up to the level of these discourses, are wont to think that they are mystical and marvelous. But great hearts have always felt that they were the unfolding of a life of which they had had glimpses, and toward which they were striving, but which had no perfect realization in their experience, and probably none in the experience of any except the Master himself.

In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and perhaps seventeenth chapters of John, there is a more perfect dwelling upon the ideal Christian character and life than in any equal compass in the New Testament. And according to the teaching of our Master, here and elsewhere, the perfect Christian life has the following great constituent elements.

1. It is a life of vital unity with God. It may or may not be consciously in unity with him; but the teaching is, that, as the body derives its stimulation, its food and force, from its contact with the material globe, and from its obedience to physical laws, so that which Christianity includes derives its vitality from its connection with the invisible God. Its force and its food are from no lower source.

In our text Christ promises, not obscurely, to his disciples, that if

SUNDAY MORNING, May 22, 1870. LESSON: JNO. XIV. 8-31. HYMNS (Plymouth Collection) : Nos. 912, 898, 1257.

they love him, and if they will but open the door through which alone. God can enter into the human soul, the great golden gate of love, he will come in, and the Father with him, and that there shall be a love

life begun.

2. It is declared, as an element of the typical Christian experience, that it shall be a life of perfect peace.

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

And again, elsewhere, we find the apostles interpreting this:

"The peace of God, which passeth all understanding [or analysis], shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."

Here is what the apostles spoke out of their own experience—an experimental interpretation of this promise of the Master. The "fruit of the Spirit" is said to be "love, peace, joy in the Holy Ghost."

Here, then, are two great elements-first, a unity with God through love; and second, the effect, which is a dominating peace.

3. This state is declared to be one which delivers the soul from the power and the domination of sin. When the soul has risen into this state of communion with God, and has entered upon this deep spiritual tranquility, it is declared to be sinless-a matter which has perplexed, and annoyed beyond measure, interpreters and experimental Christians. Such language as this, in the fifth chapter of the first epistle of John, has been very much a matter of debate:

"For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world; and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." "We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not."

This is another peculiarity of the Christian state, par excellence, that it is sinless; that men have ministered to them, not simply "joy in the Holy Ghost," not simply Christ's "peace which passeth all understanding," but the power to "overcome the world.”

4. It is taught us, unequivocally, that in the typical Christian state of mind, there are forces developed of which, in our lower natural state, we have no hint, no warning; forces that are not ordinarily developed, and that cannot be developed by any secular and purely wordly educaforces which we are accustomed to call miraculous.

tion;

If you will turn to Matthew's Gospel, you will find Christ enunciating this in the most distinct manner, in the seventeenth chapter. The disciples had asked him why they could not cast out these evil spirits. "And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief."

It was because they were living on a lower plane where the power

to do such things was not known.

"For verily I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible to you."

Lest it may be thought that this was a transient and metaphorical teaching, listen again to a declaration in the same book, and the twenty-first chapter, where the fig-tree was cursed, and it withered away, and the disciples, remarking it, were astonished.

"Jesus answered and said unto them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also, if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea, it shall be done. And all things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive."

Now, that this was not understood by the apostles themselves as being a mere metaphorical or figurative promise, is shown in the directions which are given by them for the healing of sickness, by prayer of faith and by their own power of working miraculous cures, which they held in reliance upon, or in explicit faith of, this declaration of the Master.

Here, then, are the four great elements which constitute Christian experience. It is a life of unity with God, developing the supreme power of love in the soul. It is a life in which there is such an influence exerted upon the mind that all the soul is perfectly harmonized, and yet perfectly alive, so that it rises into a "peace which passeth all understanding." It is a state in which such is the power of this divine influence of joy and peace in love that the man has control over himself and over his circumstances, and sins not. It is a life and experience which goes still further than this. When a man has been lifted up into this state of feeling, he is existing upon a plane in which the relation of his mind to matter itself is changed, and new forces and new possibilities are involved. And that which a man cannot be and cannot do when he is living on the lower plane, he finds, strangely, that he is able to be and to do when he has risen into this higher spiritual condition. He has power over natural law. We have power now over natural law; but it is in a lower way. It is because I have power over natural law that I am a husbandman, and that you are a mechanic. It is the knowledge of natural law, and the knowledge of how to use it, that means skill and ability among men.

The Christian development, the typical Christian experience, it is declared, carries this power over nature still higher. And there are forces in the human soul that are developed at last which give a man a more permanent control over nature than is possible to the common state.

Here, then, Christian experience has the divine presence and a joyful companionship. It lifts up the soul above the agitations of human life and heart-experience; it frees it from the power of all ordinary temptations that assail it; and it develops a simple force which gives law and knowledge and power over the physical world, to an extent

which is not vouchsafed to ordinary conditions of life. Such is the Christianity of the New Testament.

I remark, in view of the forgoing exposition,

First, that this Christianity, or this development of Christian experience, is but the unfolding of the elements which belong to every man's nature. It is the unfolding of latent forces that belong by constitution to the nature of the human mind. Every human soul has this latent power.

It is not, then, a special superaddition in the form of a technical result in Christianity. Christ, who was the sublimest interpreter, the grandest natural philosopher, that ever lived, unfolded to us the knowledge of this hidden life of the soul, and taught the method of disclosure, and that it is the birthright of man to come to this higher range of development, of power and of experience.

It is by spiritual agencies, and not by physical appliances, that it is to be achieved. It is by love, and not by the passions and appetites; it is by the exercise of the supersensuous faculties, and not the physical senses; it is not by science, but by faith, that we are to come into this higher state. But all men have in them the roots of that which may be, by the divine Spirit, developed into this higher fruit of Christian experience.

Now, of this view, which I have not attempted to modify, but which I have made strong on purpose, that it may strike you as something quite transcendental-as something far above the ordinary actual experiences of human life-of this view, you will say, "Does it not rule out the experience of Christendom, generically considered? If that which you have declared to be the true Christian experience, is the true Christian experience, are there any Christians? Are there churches full of them? Are there houses full of them? And does it not strike despair to souls that are conscious of their inability to reach any such view, and to make any such attainment as this?"

Those are fair questions, and I will answer them fairly. The answer depends upon whether this Christian character which I have presented to you as the true experience of Christian life is the average experience, and the condition of all hope and all acceptance with God; or whether it is the typical, the ideal character, or pictorial view of that which is possible, and to which the Master is bringing his disciples. It will depend upon whether it is understood that, in practice, this is an experience that is reached gradually, by gradations, or whether it is understood to be something which every man has when he is converted. It depends upon whether it is regarded as a state which men come into at once, or whether it is that teleologic or final condition toward