On the Nature of the Sin against the Holy Ghost

“Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

Let us never suspend the practical influence of what we do know, by idly rambling in a vain and impertinent pursuit after what we do riot know. Thus much we know from the Bible, that God refuses not his Holy Spirit to them who ask it — that every right movement of principle within us is from him — that when we feel an impulse of conscience, we feel the Spirit of God knocking at the door of our hearts, and challenging from us that attention and that obedience which are due to the great Lawgiver — that if we follow not the impulse, we provoke and dissatisfy him who is the Author of it — and that there is such a thing as tempting him to abandon us altogether, and to surrender the friendly office of plying us any longer with his admonitions and his warnings. Hence, an emphatic argument for immediate repentance. By every moment of delay, we hasten upon ourselves the awful crisis of being let alone. The conscience is every day getting harder; and he who sits, behind, and is the unseen Author of all its instigations, is lifting every day a feebler voice; and coming always nearer and nearer to that point in the history of every determined sinner, when left to his own infatuation, he can Jiold up a stubborn and unyielding front to all that instrumentality of advice and of expostulation which is brought to bear upon him. The preacher plies him with his weekly voice, but the Spirit refuses to lend it his constraining energy- — and all that is tender, and all that is terrifying in his Sabbath argument plays around his heart, without reaching it. The judgments of God go abroad against him, and as he carries his friends or his children to the gfave, a few natural tears may bear witness to the tenderness he bore them — but that Spirit who gives to these judgments all their moral significancy, withholds from him the anointing which remaineth, and the man relapses as before into all the obstinate habits, and all the uncrucified affections which he has hitherto indulged in. The disease gathers upon him, and gets a more rooted inveteracy than ever — and thus it is, that there are thousands and thousands more, who, though active and astir on that living scene of population which is around us, have an iron hardness upon their souls, which makes them, in reference to the things of God, dark and sullen as the grave, and fast locks them in all the insensibility of spiritual death. Is there no old man of your acquaintance, who realizes this sad picture of one left to himself, that we have now attempted so rapidly to set before you? Then know, that by every deed of wilful sin, that by every moment of wilful delay in the great matter of repentance, that by every stifled warning of conscience, that by every deafening of its authoritative voice among the temptations of the world, and the riot of lawless acquaintances, you are just moving yourself to the limits of this helpless and irrecoverable condition. We have no doubt, that you may have the intention of making a violent step, and suddenly turning round to the right path ere you die. But this you will not do but by an act of obedience to the reproaches of a conscience that is ever getting harder. This you will not do without the constraining influence of that Spirit, who is gradually dying away from you. This you will not do but in virtue of some overpowering persuasion from that monitor who is now stirring within you, but with whom you are now taking the most effectual method of drowning his voice, and disarming him of all his authority. Do not you perceive, that, in these circumstances, every act of delay is madness — that you are getting by every hour of it into deeper water — that you are consolidating a barrier against your future return to the paths of righteousness, which you vainly think you

will be able to surmount when the languor and infirmity of old age have got hold of you — that you are strengthening and multiplying around you the wiles of an entanglement, which all the strugglings of deathbed terror cannot break asunder — that you are insulting the Spirit of God by this daily hbit of stifling and neglecting the other and the other call that he is sounding to your moral ear, through the organ of conscience. And O the desperate hazard and folly of such a calculation! Think you, think you, that this is the way of gaining his friendly presence at that awful moment, when the urgent sense of guilt and of danger forces from the sinner an imploring cry as he stands on the brink of eternity?

“How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity, and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge? Turn ye at my reproof. Behold I will pour out my Spirit unto you; I will make known my words unto you. Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh. When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind J when distress and anguish cometh upon you: then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me.*’

You see, then, how a man may shut against himself all the avenues of reconciliation. There is nothing mysterious in the kind of sin by which the Holy Spirit is tempted to abandon him to that state in which there can be no forgiveness, and no return unto God. It is by a movement of conscience within him, that the man is made sensible of sin — that he is visited with the desire of reformation — that he is given to feel his need both of mercy to pardon, and of grace to help him — in a word, that he is drawn unto the Saviour, and brought into that intimate alliance with him by faith, which brings down upon him both acceptance with the Father, and all the power of a new and a constraining impulse, to the way of obedience. But this movement is a suggestion of the Spirit of God, and if it be resisted by any man, the Spirit is resisted. The God who offers to draw him unto Christ, is resisted. The man refuses to believe, because his deeds are evil; and by every day of perseverance in these deeds, the voice which tells him of their guilt, and urges him to abandon them, is resisted — and thus, the Spirit ceases to suggest, and the Father, from whom the Spirit proceedeth, ceases to draw, and the inward voice ceases to remonstrate — and all this because their authority has been so often put forth, and so often turned from. This is the deadly offence which has reared an impassable wall against the return of the obstinately impenitent. This is the blasphemy to which no forgiveness can be granted, because in its very nature, the man who has come this length, feels no movement of conscience towards that ground on wlncli alone forgiveness can be awarded to him — and where it is never refused even to the very worst and most maHgnant of human iniquities. This is the sin against the Holy Ghost. It is not peculiar to any one age. It does not he in any one unfathomable mystery. It may be seen at this day in thousands and thousands more, who, by that most familiar and most frequently exemplified of all habits, a habit of resistance to a sense of duty, have at length stifled it altogether, and driven their inward monitor away from them, and have sunk into a [‘profound moral lethargy, and so will never obtain forgiveness — not because forgiveness is ever refused to any who repent and believe the Gospel, but because they have made their faith and their repentance impracticable. They choose not to repent — and this choice has been made so often and so perseveringly, that the Spirit has let them alone. They have obstinately clung to their love of darkness rather than of light, and the Spirit has at length turned away from them since they will have it so. They wish not to believe, because their deeds are evil, and that Spirit has ceased to strive with them, who has so often spoken to them in vain — and whose many remonstrances have never prevailed upon them to abandon the evil of their doings.

Take all this attentively along with you, and the whole mysterioiisness of this sin against the Holy Ghost should be done away. Grant him the office with which he is invested in the Word of God, even the office of instigating the conscience to all its reprovals of sin, and to all its admonitions of repentance — and then, if ever you witnessed the case of a man whose conscience had fallen into a profound and irrecoverable sleep, or, at least, had lost to such a degree its power of control over him, that he stood out against every engine which was set up to bring him to the faith and the repentance of the New Testament — behold in such a man a sinner against conscience to such a woeful extent, that conscience had given up its direction of him; or, in other words, a sinner against the Holy Ghost to such an extent, that he had let down the office of warning him away from that ground of danger and of guilt on which he stood so immoveably posted — or, of urging him onward to that sure road of access, where if a man seek for pardon, he will never miss it, and where, if he cry for the clean heart and the right spirit, he will not cry in vain.

And as there is nothing dark or incomprehensible in the nature of this sin, so there is nothing in it to impair the freeness of the Gospel — or the universaUty of its calls and of its offers — or its power of salvation to all who will — or that attribute which is expressly ascribed to it, that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. It is never said that pardon through that blood, which is distinctly stated to cleanse from all sin, it is nowhere said, that this pardon is extended to any but to those who believe. If you do not believe, you do not get pardon — and if you will not believe, because you love darkness rather than light — if you will not believe, because you will not abandon those evil deeds which the Spirit tells you through the conscience, that you must forsake in coming unto Christ — if his repeated calls have been so unheeded and so withstood by you, that he has at length ceased from striving, then the reason why your sin is unpardonable, is just because you have refused the Gospel salvation. The reason why your case is irrecoverable, is just because you have refused the method of recovery so long, and so often, that every call of repentance has now come to play upon you in vain. The reason why you li under a guilt that can meet with no forgiveness, is not that one or all of your sins are of a die so deep and so inveterate, that the cleansing power of the Saviour’s atonement cannot overmatch them. Let the invitation to the fountain that is opened in the house of Judah, circulate among you as freely as the preacher’s voice — for sure we are, that there does not stand, at this moment, within the reach of hearing us, any desperado in vice, so sunk in the depths of his dark and unnatural rebellion, that he is not welcome if he will. But, if ye Xiill not come that ye may have life, this is your sin. This is the barrier in the way of your forgiveness. Grant us repentance and faith, and we know not of a single mysterious crime in the whole catalogue of human depravity, that the atoning blood of our Saviour cannot wash away. But withhold from us repentance and faith — let us see the man who stands unrebuked out of his wdckedness by all that conscience has reproached him with — unmoved out of the hardness of his unbelief by all that power of tenderness, which should have softened his unrelenting bosom, when told of the Saviour who had poured out his soul unto the death for him — if all this contempt and resistance of his has been so long and so grievously persisted in, that the Spirit has ceased to strive — then, it is not the power of the Gospel that is in fault, but the obstinacy of him who has rejected it. The sufficiency of the Gospel is not detracted from by so much as a jot or a tittle. To this very hour may we proclaim it as the savour of life unto life, to the very worst of sinners who receive it. But if he so turn aside from its invitations, and the habit be so fixed with him, and conscience get into a state of such immoveable dormancy, that the Spirit gives him over, it is not that the Gospel does not carry a remedy along with it for one and all of his offences, but because he refuses that Gospel, that it is to him the savour of death unto death.

A king publishes a wide and unexcepted amnesty to the people of a rebellious district in his empire, upon the bare act of each presenting himself within a limited period, before an authorised agent, and professing his purposes of future loyalty. Does it at all detract from the clemency of this deed of grace, that many of the rebels feel a strong reluctance to this personal exhibition of themselves; and that the reluctance strengthens and accumulates upon them by every day of their postponement; and that even before the season of mercy has expired, it has risen to such a degree of aversion on their part, as to form a moral barrier in the way of their prescribed return, that is altogether impassable? Will you say, because there is no forgiveness to them, that there is any want of amplitude in that charter of forgiveness which is proclaimed in the hearing of all; or, that pardon has not been provided for every offence, because some offenders are to be found, with such a degree of perverseness and of obstinacy in their bosom, as constrains them to a determined refusal of all pardon?

The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin; and there is not a human creature, who let him repent and believe, will ever find the crimson inveteracy of his manifold offences to be beyond the reach of its purifying and its peace-speaking power. And tell us if it detract by a single iota from the omnipotence of this great Gospel remedy, that there are many sinners in the world who refuse to lay hold of it. To the hour of death it is within the reach of all and of any who will. This is the period in the history of each individual, at which this great act of amnesty expires — and to the last minute of his life, it is competent for me and for every minister of the Gospel to urge it upon him, in all the largeness and in all the universality which belong to it — and to assure him, that there is not a single deed of wickedness with which his faithful memory now agonizes him, not one habit o£

y disobedience that now clothes his retrospect of the past in the sad colouring of despair, all the guilt of which, and all the condemnation of which, the blood of the offered Saviour cannot do away. But, though we may offer, that is not to say that he will accept. Though we may proclaim and urge the proclamation in his hearing, with every tone of truth and of tenderness, that is not to say, that our voice will enter with power, or make its resistless way through those avenues of his heart, where he has done so much to rear a defending barrier, that may prove to be impenetrable. Though there be truth in our every announcement, that is not to say, that the demonstration of the Spirit will accompany it — even that Spirit who long ere now may have left to himself the man, who, his whole life long has grieved and resisted him. It is still true, that the pardon lies at his acceptance; and it may be as true, that there can be no pardon to him because he has brought such an inveterate blindness upon his soul, that he will neither receive the truth, nor love it, nor feel those genuine impulses by which it softens the heart of man to repentance. And thus it is, that while the blood of Christ cleanseth the every sin of every believer, the sin against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven, because with this sin, and with its consequences upon him, man wills not, and repents not, and believes not.

And now for the interesting question, — How am I to know that I have committed this sin, that is said to be beyond the reach of forgiveness? We are sure, that the right solution of this question, if well understood, would go to dissipate all that melancholy which has been felt upon the subject, by many a bewildered inquirer. You cannot take a review of the years that are gone, and fetch up this mysterious sin to your remembrance out of the history of the sins that are past. There is not one of them, which, if turned away from, in the faith of that pardon that is through the blood of the atonement, there is not one of them beyond the reach of the great redemption of the Gospel. The sin against the Holy Ghost is not some awful and irrevocable deed, around which a disordered fancy has thrown its superstitious array, and which beams in deeper terror upon the eye of the mind, from the very obscurity by which it is encompassed. There ought to be no darkness and no mystery about it. The sin against the Holy Ghost is such a daring and obstinate rebellion against the prerogatives of conscience —

Y 2 that all its calls to penitency have been repelled — and all the urgency of its admonitions to flee to the offered Saviour, has been withstood — and all this obstinacy of resistance has been carried forward to such a point in the history of the unhappy man, that his conscience has ceased from the exercise of its functions; and the Holy Spirit has laid down his office of prompting it; and the tenderness of a beseeching God may be sounded in his ear — but unaccompanied as it is by that power which makes a willing and obedient people, it reaches not his sullen and inflexible heart. And instead, therefore, of looking for that sin among those imaginary few who mourn and are in distress, under an overwhelming sense of its enormity, I look for it to those thousands, who, trenched among the secularities of the world, or fully set on the mad career of profligacy, are posting their careless and infatuated way — and suffering Sabbaths and opportunities to pass over them — and turn with contempt from the foolishness of preaching — and hold up the iron front of insensibility against all that is appalling in the judgments of God — and cling to this perishable scene under the most touching experiences of its vanity — and walk their unfaultering path amid all the victims which mortality has strewn around them — and every year drink deeper into the spirit of the world — till the moral disease rises to such an inveteracy, that all the engines of conversion, unaided, as they are, by that peculiar force and demonstration which is from on high, fall powerless as infancy upon them, and every soul amongst them sunk in torpor immoveable, will never, never, be made to know the power and the life of a spiritual resurrection.

We know nothing that goes farther to nullify the Bible, than the habit of subjecting the interpretation of its passages to any other principle, than that all its parts must consist and be in harmony with each other. There .has a world of mischief been done by the modifications that have been laid on the obvious meaning of Scripture, with the purpose of rendering it more palatable to our independent views of what is right, and wise, and reasonable. This, in fact, is deposing the word of God from that primitive authority which belongs to it, as the court of highest appeal — all whose decisions are final and irreversible. Grant us that there is no contradiction between what we find in the book of God*s counsel, and what we know by the evidence of our own experience, or the overbearing testimony of others — and such we hold to be the ignorance of man about the whole of that spiritual and unseen world which lies beyond the circle of his own observation, that we count it not merely his most becoming piety, but we count it also his soundest and most enlightened philosophy, to sit down with the docility of a little child to all that is intimated and made known to him by a well-attested revelation. After the deductions we have just now made, we know of no other principle on which we should ever offer to modify a verse or a clause of the written record; but the principle of that entire consistency which must reign throughout all its communications. We know of no other cross-examination which we have a right to set up on this witness to the invisible things of faith — than to try it by itself, and to condemn it, if possible, out of its own mouth,;by confronting together its own depositions. We are only at freedom to sustain or to qualify the literal sense of one of its announcements, by the literal and equally authoritative sense of some other of its announcements. And such is our respect for the paramount authority of Scripture, that we know of no discovery more pleasing, than that by which the apparent inconsistency between two places, is so cleared up, that all necessity for encroacliing upon the literal sense of either of them is completely done away — for it goes to establish our every impression of the unviolable sanctity of its various communications, and to heighten our belief that every semblance of opposition between the particulars of the divine testimony, exists not in the testimony itself, but in the misapprehension of our own dark and imperfect understandings.

Now, if you look to the 31st verse of the 12th chapter of Matthew, you will perceive, that all who think the sin against the Holy Ghost to lie in the commission of some rare and monstrous, but at the same time specific iniquity, cannot admit the first clause of the verse without qualifying it by some of the undeniable doctrines of the New Testament. They would say, it is not true that all manner of sin shall be forgiven unto men, with the exception of this blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which they conceive to occur but seldom in the history of human wickedness. They would say, that there is forgiveness to no sin whatever but on the faith and the repentance of him who has incurred it — and we must, therefore, suppose this, and qualify the clause by this indispensable condition, and thus make the clause to tell us, how such is the power of the Gospel, that all the sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven of those who have embraced it — save that one sin against the Holy Ghost, for the remission of which not even their acceptance of the Gospel of Christ could avail them.

Now, the explanation we have given of this sin renders all this work of annexing terms and modifications to this verse of the Bible unnecessary, and gives, we think, even to its literal and unrestricted meaning, a most lucid consistency with all that is leading and that is undeniable in the doctrine of the N-ew Testament. If the sin against the Holy Ghost be just that sin, in virtue of which the calls and offers of the Gospel are so rejected, as to be finally and irreversibly put away from us, then it is true, it is absolutely and unreservedly true, that all other manner of sin shall be forgiven but this one only. All who so reject this Gospel, have sinned against the Holy Ghost — and none who accept this Gospel have incurred this sin, nor shall they want the forgiveness that is there provided for them. It is quite in vain to think, that the sin against the Holy Ghost is confined to that period of the world, at which our Saviour made his personal appearance in it. The truth is, that it is since Christ withdrew from the world.

that he now carries forward by the Spirit, as his agent and substitute, the business of pressing home upon men the acceptance of the Gospel, by working with their consciences. He employs the Spirit as his witness, since he himself has gone away from us; and as in the business of entertaining the calls and the offers of the New Testament, our doings are more exclusively with this Spirit, and not at all with the Saviour himself personally, we are surely as much in the way now of committing the sin in question, as in those days when the Holy Ghost was not so abundantly given, because Jesus Christ was not then glorified. All those, be assured, who refuse the Gospel now, do so because they refuse the testimony of this witness — do so because they stifle within them the urgency of his rebuke, when he tells them of faith and of repentance — do so, when he offers to convince them on principles, that would be clear to themselves, could they only be so far arrested by the imperious claims of God and of eternity, as attend to them — convince them that they are indeed on a way of guilt and of alienation, which, if not turned from, through the revealed Mediator, will land them in the condemnation of a most righteous and unmitigable law. And thus, in the day of reckoning, will this verse, in its most plain and obvious literality, be so accomplished on the hosts who are assembled round the judgment-seat — that all who are free from this sin shall have their every other sin forgiven, just because they have obeyed the Gospel in embracing the overtures of forgiveness — and that all who, on that day, shall find no escape, and no forgiveness, have this doom laid upon them, just because each, without exception, has incurred the sin to which no forgiveness is awarded, by the very act of neglecting the great salvation.

The sin then against the Holy Ghost, so far from conferring any rare distinction of wickedness on him who is guilty of it, is, in fact, the sin of all who, living under the dispensation of the Gospel, have, by their rejection of it, made it the “savour of death unto death.” It is a sin which can be charged upon every man who has put the overtures of forgiveness away from him. It is a sin which if, on the great day of examination, you are found to be free from, will argue your acceptance of the Gospel, in virtue of which its forgiveness is made sure to you. And it is a sin, which, if found on that day to adhere to you, will argue your final refusal of this same Gospel, in virtue of which

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your forgiveness is impossible — because you are out of the only way given under heaven whereby men can be saved. So that this sin, looked upon by many as the sin of one particular age, or, if possible to realize it in the present day, as only to be met with in a few solitary instances of enormous and unexpiable transgression, is the very sin upon which may be made to turn the condemnation and the ruin of the existing majority of our species.

Before we are done with this subject, there is one question that remains to be disposed of. Does it appear, from the historical circumstances of the case, that that conduct of the Pharisees which called forth from our Saviour the denunciation of the text, bears a resemblance to the account we have given of the sin against the Holy Ghost, as exemplified by the men of the present generation? In their rejecting of Christ, was there a determined rebellion of purpose against the light of their own conscience? Was there a wilful and resolved suppression of the force of evidence? Was there a habitual stifling within them of the movement and the impulse of moral principle? Was there a firm and deliberate posting of themselves on the ground of opposition, in the whole of their past resistance to this Jesus of Nazareth? Was there an obstinate keeping of this ground? Was there an audacious and desperate intent of holding out against all that could be offered in the shape of proofs or of remonstrances on the side of Christianity? Was there a voluntary darkening, on their part, of the light of truth, when it began to dawn upon their souls, and threatened to carry their convictions away from them? Was there a habit of fetching up, at all hazards, every argument, however false and however blasphemous it may be, on which they might rest the measures of a proud and interested party, and thus might give the shape and the colour of plausibility to that systematic opposition they had entered on?

It strikes us, that the whole history of the Pharisees in the New Testament, holds them out in the very attitude of mind which we have now described to you. And think you not that, in the work of maintaining this attitude against the warfare of all that moral and miraculous argument which was brought to bear upon them, they never smothered the instigations of conscience, and through it rebelled against that Spirit, who conveyed, by this organ of the inner man, the whispers of his still but impressive voice? “Which of you convinceth me of sin,” says the Saviour, “and if I tell you the truth, why do you not believe me?” Did conscience never tell them how impossible it was that Jesus of Nazareth could lie? Did not the words of him who spake as never man spake, bear upon them the impress of truth as well as of dignity? Is there not such a thing as the suspicious aspect of an impostor, and is there not also such a thing as the open, the declared, the ingenuous, and altogether overbearing aspect of integrity — and is it not conceivable, how, in this way, the words of the Saviour might have carried such a moral evidence along with them, as to stamp an unquestionable character on all his attestations? Now, was there no resisting of the Holy Spirit in the act of shutting the eye of the judgment against the whole weight and authority of this character? In the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the men of that day were honoured with the singular privilege of beholding God manifest in the flesh — of seeing all the graces of the Holy Spirit substantiated, without one taint of imperfection, on the life and character of one who wore the form of the species — of witnessing, if we may so express ourselves, a sensible exhibition of the Godhead — of hearing the truth of God fall in human utterance upon their ears, with a tone of inimitable candour — of seeing the earnest longing of God after the creatures he had formed, stamped in living and undeniable traces upon a human countenance — of beholding the tenderness of God expressed in human tears, by him who wept over the sins and the sufferings of mankind — and all the goodness of Deity distinctly announcing itself in the mild and impressive sympathies of a human voice. Think you not that there was no struggling with their own consciences, and no wilful blinding’ of their own hearts, on the part of those by whom such an exhibition was resisted? Surely, surely, the Spirit of God did much to subdue their acquiescence in the alone way of salvation — when all his fruits and all his accomplishments were gathered upon the person of the Redeemer into one visible assemblage — when the whole force of this moral ascendancy was made so nearly and so repeatedly to bear upon them — when truth, with all its pleading energy, assailed them — and gentleness tried to win them over to the cause of their own eternity — and the soft eye of compassion beamed upon them — and the unwearied forbearance, which no weight of personal injustice could overcome, told them how, for their sakes, Jesus of Nazareth was ready to do all and to suffer all — and patience, even unto martyrdom, left a meek, but a firm testimony behind it. O! think you not, that in the perverse representations, and the spiteful mahgnity, and the sullen immoveable hardness, by which all this was withstood and overborne, there was such an outrage upon the authority of conscience, and such a dark and determined principle of rebellion against him who prompts it with all its instigations, as by provoking him to cast them off from all his further communications, might raise an eternal barrier against that faith, and that repentance, and that obedience to the Gospel of Christ, through which alone forgiveness is extended to a guilty world?

To aggravate still further this resistance to the moral claims of the Saviour, on the part of his inflexible enemies, let us see how these very claims told on the consciences of other men. The officers whom they sent to apprehend him, when they went faultered from the purpose, at what they saw and heard — and when they returned with their errand unfulfilled, and the answer in their mouth, that “surely never man spake like this man,’* they found the masters they had to deal with were made of sterner materials — men who knew not what it was to faulter — men who reproached them for their moral sensibility — and who had sternly resolved, at all hazards, and in defiance to all principle, to rid themselves of this dangerous pretender. Again, when they instigated Pilate to a capital sentence against him, the Roman Governor was shaken by all that he observed of this innocent victim — but look all the while at the unrelenting constancy with which they kept by their purpose; and in the barbarous prosecution of it, schooled the governor out of his difficulties; and raised the frenzy of the populace; and surrounded the best and kindest of the species with the scowl of a brutal and reviling multitude. And, lastly, when he had sealed his testimony by his blood, mark how the man who presided over the execution, was overpowered into the acknowledgment, that “Surely this was the Son of God;” and how they, unsoftened and unsubdued, stood fast to their object — and got his body to be watched, and a story to be devised, and a falsehood of deliberate manufacture to be thrown afloat, with which they might stem the growing faith of our Saviour’s resurrection. Now, in this difference between the resolved and inflexible hatred of the Jewish persecutors of Christ, and the relentings of other men, do you see no suppression of the voice of conscience — no resistance to that light of principle which sends forth an occasional gleam over the path of the determinedly reprobate, do you see no one of those ingredients which give to the sin against the Holy Ghost all the malignancy that belongs to it — or, rather, in this hard and unmoveable hostility against one whose challenge to convince him of sin, they dared not to entertain; against one, of whom they could not fail to perceive, that he was the mildest, and the sincerest, and the most unoffending, and the most unwearied in well-doing of all the characters that had met their observation, do you not perceive how it was in the cause of their own offended pride, and their own threatened interest, that they made their systematic resistance to every moral argument, and hurried away their minds from every painful remonstrance — and that too, in the very style in which the obstinately impenitent of the day do, in resistance to every demonstration of guilt, and to every warning of danger, walk in the counsel of their own hearts, and in the sight of their own eyes?

It is very true, that it was upon an outward act of speaking, on the part of the Pharisees, that our Saviour uttered this remarkable denunciation. But remember what he says himself upon this subject — how the things which come out of a man are evil, because they are the proz ducts of a heart which is evil. Remember what is said a few verses before — how our Saviour, who knew what was in man, knew the thoughts of those Pharisees; and it is upon his knowledge of their thoughts, that he ascribed such a malignity, and laid such a weight of condemnation on the words which conveyed them. Jlem ember what is said a few verses after, where the fruit is represented as bad, just because the tree is bad — where the words have their whole character of evil imparted to them, just because it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaketh, and out of the evil humours of the heart, that the man bringeth forth evil things. And surely, when, after our Saviour had uttered such a peculiar sentence of condemnation on the sin against the Holy Ghost, he expressly connects the words of the mouth, with the disposition of the heart, ere he tells us that it was by our words we shall be justified, and by our words we shall be condemned — we ought no longer to do what we are sure is done by many in their obscure imaginations upon this subject, we ought not to liken the sin against the Holy Ghost to the spell of some magical incantation, deriving the whole of that deadly taint which belongs to it, from some infernal charm with which the utterance of mere language is darkly and unaccountably impregnated. But knowing that every denunciation of our great spiritual Teacher, had some clear and unchangeable principle of morality to rest upon — and perceiving, as we do, that on this very occasion he refers us to the disposition of the heart, as that which gives to the utterance of the tongue all its malignity, let us, when reading of this desperate guilt of the Pharisees, look to the spirit and moral temper of the Pharisees, and, if possible, gather a something that may carry to our own bosoms a salutary and convincing application.

And a single glance at the circumstances may be enough to satisfy us, that never, in any one recorded passage of their history, did they evince the bent of so inflexible a determination against the authority of conscience — never such a wilful darkening of their own hearts against the light and the power of evidence, as in the passage that is now before us. The whole weight of that moral argument on which we have already expatiated, was reinforced by a miracle so striking and so palpable in its effects, that all the people were thrown into amazement. But what constituted the peculiarity of the miracle was, that it was just such a miracle as the z 2

Pharisees themselves had been accustomed to look upon with veneration, and had viewed as an example of successfid hostility against the empire of darkness. They had faith in these possessions. They counted every one of them to be the work of Beelzebub, and the casting out of any of them as a direct triumph of warfare against the prince of the devils. They themselves, it would appear, laid claim to the power of dispossessing these demons, and we have no doubt that the imagination of such a power residing with them and their children, or proselytes, would help to give them that prophetical sanctity in the eyes of the common people, which they so much aspired after. But when the very thing on which they tried to strengthen their own claims to authority, was done by that man, the progress of whose authority among his countrymen, they were determined, at all hazards, to arrest; they went round the whole compass of their principles, and quashed the voice of every one of them, rather than own the hand of God, or submit to the demonstration of his power in the miracle before them. It was indeed a desperate fetch that they made for an argument, when the very work in which they gloried, and on which they founded the credit of their own order, was so maligned and misrepresented by them. They had ever been in the habit of ascribing the possessions of that age to the power of Beelzebub — and now to give a colour to their hatred of Je. sus and his claims, they suppose the house of Beelzebub to be divided against itself, and they ascribe to his power a miracle, the doing of which went to dispossess him of a part of his empire. They pretended that their sons or their proselytes had the power of casting out those possessions, and never failed to ascribe this power to the Spirit and the countenance of God — but now they turned round upon the matter, and by rearing their argument against the Saviour in the direct face of their own principle, did they prove how firmly they were resolved to lay hold of an anything, rather than admit the claims of one who was so offensive to them. Thus did they give, perhaps, at this moment, a more conspicuous evidence than they had ever done before, how every proof and every remonstrance would all be wasted upon them. The Spirit of God had gone his uttermost length with them, and on abandoning them for ever, he left behind him their blood upon their own head, and the misery of an irrecoverable condition, that was of their own bringing on. He had long borne with them — and it will be seen in the day of reckoning, when all mysteries are cleared up, how great the patience, and the kindness, and the unwearied perseverance were which they had resisted. For though the Spirit strives long, he does not strive always; and they brought on this crisis in their history, just by the very steps in which every impenitent man brings it on in the present day, by a wilful resistance to the light of their own understanding; by a resolute suppression of the voice of their own conscience.

But we must bring all these explanations to a close. The distinction between speaking against the Son of man, and speaking against the Holy Ghost, may be illustrated by what he says of the difference between bearing witness of himself, and another bearing witness of him. If he had had no other testimony than his own to offer, they had not had sin. If he had not done the works before them which none other man did, and which no mere son of man could do, they had not had sin. If he had had nothing to show on which to sustain the character that signalized him above the mere children of men, their resistance coidd have been forgiven — but he had shown the most abundant evidence on this point — he had just performed a deed which theii’ every habit, and their every conception, led them to ascribe to the Spirit and the power of God — he had brought forward what, to their own judgments, was the testimony of the Spirit, and they resisted it. It was no longer now an opposition to man, and a railing of man, and a contemptuous negligence of man — all this is sinful; but it was not that which blocked up the way against the remission of sin — it was when they reviled him who offered to lead them on in that way, that they were ever strengthening the barrier which lay across the path of acceptance. While the last and most conclusive proof that would be given of Jesus having indeed the seal and the commission of the Spirit upon him, was not yet tried, and found ineffectual — all their opposition to him still partook of opposition to one of whom the most decisive evidence that he was any thingmore than the Son of man, was still in reserve. It still partook of opposition to a fellow-man. But when that decisive evidence was at length offered, and the Spirit interposed with his last and greatest attempt to vindicate his own seal, and to authenticate his own commission on the person of Jesus of Nazareth — then that which was before the speaking evil of the Son of man, became the speaking evil of the Son of God; and that, aggravated to the uttermost length that it now would be permitted to go. And the Pharisees, by smothering the hglit of all that evidence which the Holy Spirit had brought forward, both in the miracles that were done, and in the graces of that sinless example which was set so impressively before them, had, by that time, raised in their hearts such an entrenchment of prejudice against the faith of the Gospel, and so discouraged the Holy Spirit from any farther attempt to scale and to surmount it, that all recovery was hopeless, and all forgiveness was impossible.