Man Converted

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. — EZEKIEL xxxvi. 26.

ATT is a happy thing that baptism is not the door of heaven. Otherwise it had been unhappy for millions, who, dying in earliest infancy, never undergo that rite — never pass that way. Dying unbaptized, we hold that they die not on that account unsaved; for whoever dare hang God’s mercy on any outward rite, we do not, and although we believe that this interesting ordinance is also, when engaged in with faith, an eminently blessed one, we dare not. Thousands go to heaven without baptism. Thousands, alas! perish with it. Heaven is greatly made up of little children — sweet buds that have never blown, or which death has plucked from a mother’s bosom to lay on his own cold breast, just when they were expanding, flower-like, from the sheath, and opening their engaging beauties in the budding time and spring of life. “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.” How soothing these words by the cradle of a dying infant? They fall like balm drops on our bleeding heart, when we watch the ebbing of that young life, as wave after wave breaks feebler, and the sinking breath gets lower and lower, till with a gentle sigh, and a passing quiver of the lip, our sweet child leaves its body lying like an angel asleep, and ascends to the beatitudes of heaven and the bosom of its God. Perhaps God does with his heavenly garden as we do with our own. He may chiefly stock it from nurseries, and select for transplanting what is yet in its young and tender age — flowers before they have bloomed, and trees ere they begin to bear.

In the words of the Westminster Catechism, “Baptism is a sacrament, wherein the washing with water, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, doth signify and seal our ingrafting into Christ, and partaking of the benefits of the covenant of grace, and our engagement to be the Lord’s.” Baptism attaches us to the visible church; admits to that, and is its door of entrance; but, while this ordinance unites to the body of professing believers, no more than the sacrament of the supper does it of necessity form a living attachment between us and the Saviour. Let us see what is done in these ordinances.

Years ago a man stood up in the house of God, and in his arms there lay a sleeping child. Dipping his hand into a laver, the minister sprinkled some drops on the infant’s face, and over the unconscious creature pronounced the names of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. That child was you. By hands, now mouldering in the grave, your father then tied you — so to speak — to Christ. Well, time rolls on, and infants grow into children, chil dren shoot up into youths, and youths change into bearded men; and then there comes another day. A table is. spread in the house of God. Like the white shroud in which kind women swathed his body, a linen cloth covers the memorials of Christ’s death. The sacred symbols are uncovered; the commemoration begins; and, amid the stillness of that solemn scene, with thoughtful countenance, a man leaves his seat, and taking the bread, and raising the wine cup in his hand, he dedicates himself to the Saviour. That man again is you. And now awake, not asleep, conscious of what is done, not passive but active now, with your own hands you have cast another knot upon the cord by which your father years ago bound you to Jesus. You are now tied — doubly tied — yet it does not follow that you are engrafted into him.

I .have seen a branch man had bound to the bleeding tree,;that, being engrafted into its wounded side, both might thus be one. Yet no incorporation followed; there was no living union. Spring came singing, and with her fingers opened all the buds; summer came, with her dewy nights and sunny days, and brought out all the flowers; brown autumn came to shake the trees and reap the fields, and with music and dances and mirth to hold “harvest home;” but that unhappy branch bore no fruit, nor flower, nor even leaf. Just held on by dead clay and rotting cords it stuck to the living tree — a withered and unsightly thing. And so alas! is it with many; “having a name to live they are dead.” They have no faith; they want that bond of living union between the graft and what it is grafted on — between the sinner and the Saviour. And therefore, in quitting this part of our subject for another, let me ask, “believest thou;” and if thou dost not, oh, let me urge you to pray with the man in the Gospel, “Lord help mine unbelief?”

Do you say, I cannot believe? In one sense, that is true; in another, it is not. It is not true in the same sense as it is true — that a man who has no eyes in his head — nothing but empty sockets — cannot see. All men, in fact, are born with faith. Faith is as natural to a man as grief, or love, or anger. One of the earliest flowers that springs up in the soul — it smiles on a mother in the infant’s cradle; and living on through the rudest storms of life, it never dies till the hour of death. On the face of a child which, left for a little time with strangers, has been caressed with their kisses, and courted with their smiles, and fondled and dandled in their arms, I have seen a cloud gathering, and growing darker, till at length it burst in cries of terror and a shower of tears. The mother returns; and when the babe holds out its little arms to her, in these I see the arms of faith; and when, like a believer restored to the bosom of his God, it is nestling in a mother’s embrace, and the cloud passes from its brow, and its tears are changed into smiles, and its terror into calm serenity, we behold the play and power of faith. This is one of its earliest, and — so far as nature is concerned — one of its most beautiful developments. So natural, indeed, is it for us to confide, and trust, and believe, that a child believes whatever it is told, until experience shakes its confidence in human veracity. Its eye is caught by the beauty of some flower, or it gazes up with wonder on the starry hea vens; — with that inquisitiveness which in childhood, active as a bee, is ever on the wing, it is curious to know who made them. Now it would believe you if you said you made them yourself. Such is the faith which nature gives it in a father, that it never doubts his word. It believes all he says, and is content to believe where it is not able to comprehend. For this, as well as other reasons, our Lord presented a child as the living model of a Christian. He left Abraham, father of the faithful, to his repose in heaven; he left Samuel, undisturbed, to enjoy the quiet rest of his grave; he allowed Moses and Elias, after their brief visit, to leave the earth, and wing their way back to glory. For a pattern of faith, he took a boy from his mother’s side, and, setting him up, in his gentle, blushing, shrinking modesty, before the great assembly, he said, “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall in no wise enter therein.”

While Paul said, “When I was a child I spake as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” neither he nor any other man ever thought of leaving the faith of childhood with its rattle and its toys. Faith is, in fact, the very life and soul of friendship. What is a friend, but one whom I can trust, one who, I believe, will in sorrow’s hour mingle his tears with mine, one on whose support I reckon when my back is at the wall? Without faith in each other’s friendship, kindness, and honesty, this

s world would be turned into a Bedouin desert; men would become Ishmaelites; my hand against every man, and every man’s hand against me. Faith is the marriage-ring; the guardian angel of conjugal felicity; the jewelled zone that binds society together; the power, mightier than steam, or wind, or water, that moves all the wheels of commerce. Unless man could trust his fellow-man, business would come to a dead stand; the whole machinery of the world were stopped; our busy streets would bear crops of grass; and, though winds blew and tides flowed as before, rotting ships would fall to pieces in our silent and deserted harbours.

Leaving the crowded city for rural scenes, or setting your foot on board ship, and pushing out upon the heaving ocean, you find faith ploughing the fields of both — faith in the laws of nature, in the ordinances of Providence. When the air has still a frosty breath, and, although cleared of winter snow, the earth is cold and — looking dead as a corpse but disrobed of its shroud — it shews neither flower nor leaf, nor sign of life, the husbandman, notwithstanding, yokes his team and drives the bright ploughshare through its breast. With confidence in his step, liberality in his hand, and hope in his eye, he scatters the seed far and wide on the bosom of the ground. He is a believer; a believer in Providence — in the laws and procession of the seasons. He has faith; not saving faith indeed, but still true faith. He believes that out of these frosty skies gentle zephyrs shall blow, and soft showers shall fall, and summer beams shall shine; and, looking along the vista of time, he sees golden com waving thick upon these empty fields, and hears in this silent scene the joy of light hearts ringing in the laugh and song of the reapers. His ploughing and his sowing are acts of genuine faith; and, as he strides across the field with his sowing sheet around him, he is an example of one, who, with his eye, as well as his foot, on earth, “Walks by faith, not by sight.”

Then, again, sailing as much as sowing is an act of faith. In this rough and weather-beaten mariner, on board whose ship we are dashing through the gloom of a starless night, and over the waves of a pathless ocean, I see faith standing at the helm. That man has faith in the needle. Believing that the heart of an angel is not more true to God than this needle to the north, he presses forward over the watery waste in a voyage, that may with perfect truth be called a voyage of faith. Would to God we had as strong a faith in the Bible! Would to God that our trembling hearts pointed as true to Jesus, as his needle in all weathers, and on all seas, to the distant pole! What we want divine grace to do, is not so much to give us faith, as to give to the principle or faculty of faith, which we have by nature, a right, holy, heavenward direction; to convert it into faith in things eternal. The faith that sees the unseen — a faith just as strong in the revelations of the Bible as in the ordinary laws of nature, this is what we need. Let it be sought in earnest, persevering prayer. It is “the gift of God;” for saving faith has God for its author, and the Spirit for its agent, as well as Christ for its object, grace for its root, holiness for its fruit, and heaven for its, re ward. Accepting the righteousness of Jesus Christ, “it makes us just; and seeing every sin pardoned, all guilt removed, God smiling, and heaven opening to receive us, faith is the spring of a peace of mind which is worth more than the wealth of worlds — which passeth all understanding. May God help us to the confession and the prayer, “Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.”

We have already stated that while salvation was the one thing needful, there were two things needful for salvation. Having considered the first of these, namely, the remission of sin and justification of the sinner, we now enter upon the second, namely, the renovation of the soul as enunciated in the words, “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.” And we remark —

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I. This is a great change. Not that all men think so.

Once on a time, for instance, we wandered into a church in this city. It was the Socinian chapel. The preacher read these words for his text, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” And just as at the fords of Jordan, they knew a man’s country by the way he sounded Shibboleth, so you can never fail to know a man’s creed by the way in which he handles such a passage as that. The preacher read his text; and then, as it were, sat down by the cradle, where his charge was sleeping, to rock them over into a deeper slumber. The text, forsooth, was an oriental figure! a hyperbole! — pointing to an outward change. No more was needed. In the strong arid highly figurative language which eastern nations are accustomed to employ, it described the change undergone by a man who has abandoned a wild and wicked life for habits of decency, honesty, and temperance. Far be it from me to speak lightly of temperance societies, or of any scheme whatever, that aims at the dignity and elevation of man; yet, according to the preacher, our Lord’s language meant nothing more than the change which these institutions are of themselves able to accomplish — a change of habits without any gracious change of heart. Did a drunkard become sober? he was born again; a libertine pure? or thief honest? or liar true? he was born again! In short, such was the style and character of the discourse, that if a poor hungry soul had gone there for bread, he got nothing — carried away nothing — but a stone. Instead of a fish, there was the serpent’s coil, the sound of her deadly hiss. Believe the preacher, and these words were applicable only to the scum and off-scourings of the city — the dregs of society — those poor, depraved, degraded creatures, who, weighed down by a load of poverty and ignorance, and guilt, have sunk to the bottom, and to our shame, are left to lie there in distressing and dreadful pollution. So far as any congregation of decent, well dressed, sober, honest, reputable professors of religion were concerned, the saying had no reference to them; our Lord — although he assuredly found in Nicodemus one of this class — did not speak of them; they, happy mortals! had no need to be born again.

You cannot fancy any two things more opposed than that doctrine and ours. We believe that the purest, the gentlest, the loveliest, most amiable creature that blesses fond parents, and one of nature’s fairest flowers, adorns earth’s happiest home, stands as much in need of becoming a new creature as the vilest outcast who walks these streets — the lost one, whose name is never mentioned but in broken hearted and wrestling prayers to God. The best of mankind are so bad that all have need to be born again; so bad, that the change promised in the text, and insisted on by our Saviour, cannot be a surface of superficial matter — a mere defilement of the skin which nitre and soap may remove. Words have lost their meaning unless this change is a radical reform — a change great in its character, and lasting in its consequences — a change, which, affecting not the habits only but the heart, both reaches downward into the deepest recesses of the soul, and stretches forward into the ages of eternity.

Now, I am afraid that some — dreaming that they have been born again, and so are safe, because their conduct is changed, and because, so far as their mere habits are concerned, they are better than once they were — have gone to sleep before this work is ever begun. In a matter of such momentous importance, beware of rash conclusions. Have we not seen the passions, like the fire t’V~upon the hearth, burn out and die for want of fuel? Have we not seen the course of vice, like a worn-out machine, stop from the decays of nature, from the mere wear and tear of its materials? And since virtue is cheap, while vice is costly, — levying a heavy tax upon the purse — destructive of health, and damaging to character, have we not seen self-interest turn a man from the indulgence of his strongest passions? Then, old age cools hot blood. Successive bereavements will in a way break the heart, and some deep disappointment may wean those, who have the keenest appetite for its pleasures, from the gaieties and vanities of the world. And, as in Roman .Catholic countries, many a cowled monk, and many a veiled nun, enters monastery or convent more under the influence of disappointment than devotion; so, when hopes are blasted, and pride is mortified, and ambition has lost the game, you may get sick of the world. Alas! all who bid adieu to the ball-room and theatre, and giddy round of fashion, do not leave the circle of her enchantments for the closet, the sanctuary, the fields of Christian ;,, „ benevolence. As by sleight of hand and necromantic /r trick Egypt’s magicians produced a set of mimic miracles, that were clever counterfeits of those which God wrought by the hand of Moses, may not other causes than true love of holiness or godly hatred of sin work such an outward, as bears some cunning likeness to a saving change? In matters of religion, beware of confounding an almost with an altogether Christian. So far as it goes, any change for the better is good. We hail it with hope. It is good so far as it goes, and good so long as it lasts; but oh, let us not fall into the fatal mistake of confounding an outward reformation with that divine, inward, eternal transformation which is wrought by the Spirit, and promised in the words, “A new heart also will I give you.”

Leaving the nature of this change to be afterwards considered, let me attempt meanwhile to shew that it is a great change. In illustration of that truth, look, I pray you, to the symbols under which it is presented in the Word of God.

It is a birth.

So soon as an infant leaves the womb — that darksome dwelling, where it has passed the first stage of its existence — although the same, it may be said to be a new creature. It enters on a new being. How great the change, from that living sepulchre, where it lay entombed, nor saw, nor heard, nor breathed, nor loved, nor feared, nor took any more interest than the dead in all that was happening around it! Alive, yet how like death its state has been. Having eyes it saw not, ears it heard not, feet it walked not, hands it handled not, affections it felt not. Its condition was a mysterious mingling of the characters of life and death. When the windows of its senses are thrown open, and streams of knowledge come rushing in on its young and wondering soul, and its eyes follow the light, and with these restless hands it is acquainting itself with the properties of matter, and sounds are entering its ears, amid whose mingled din it soon learns to distinguish the sweet tones of one tender voice — its mother’s, and it loves, and is loved, and lies nestling in dreamy slumbers on her bosom, or sweetly smiles in her smiling face — how great the change! Now, just because the change wrought on the soul in conversion is also great, and introduces its subject into a new and delightful existence, it borrows a name from that change. That is the first, this is the second birth ;*’ aye, and infinitely the better of the two. Better! because in that a son of man is born but for the grave, whereas in this a son of God is born for glory. Better! because the march of these little feet is along a rough path between a cradle and a coffin; whereas the way of grace, however full of trials, toil, and battle, is from the pangs of birth onward and upward to a crown in heaven. Happy for you if you are heaven-born, and heaven-bound. It may be that a stormy life is thy earthly destiny. Be of good courage. Let storms rage and tempests roar — however rude the gale or high the swelling billows — a heaven-born passenger in a heaven-bound bark, you cannot miss the haven. “There remaineth a rest to the people of God.”

This change is a resurrection. A resurrection is a great change. Go to the churchyard. Go to that lone home where thy dearest friends shall one day carry you, whether you will or not. “Come,” said the angels, “see the place where the Lord lay.” Come, let us see the place where we ourselves shall lie, and look at others as we ourselves shall be. Take man in any of his stages of decay. Look at this compressed line of mould, that by its colour marks itself out as different from the neighbouring clay. Black earth, retaining no apparent vestige of organization! what resemblance does it bear to a man? None. Yet gather it up and give it to the chemist; he analyses it, and pronounces this unctuous dust to have been once a human creature. It may have been a beauty, who saw with alarm the roses fading on her cheek, and age tracing wrinkles on her ivory brow, and mixing in grey hairs amid her raven locks. It may <l. have been a beggar, who, tired of a cold and hungry pilgrimage, laid his head gladly in the lap of mother earth, and ended his weary wanderings here. It may have been a king, who was dragged from amid his guards to the tomb, and sullenly yielded to the sway of a monarch mightier than himself. Or, look here at these yellow relics of mortality which the gravedigger — hardened by his trade — treats with such irreverent contempt. Look at these preachers of humility — at this mouldering skull, the deserted palace of a soul, within which high intellect once sat enthroned — at those fleshless cheeks, once wreathed with smiles, and blooming with roses — at that skeleton hand which may once have grasped the helm of public affairs, or swayed the passions of capricious multitudes, or held up the cross from sacred pulpits before the eyes of dying men — at those mouldering limbs, which piety may have bent to God — or at these hollow sockets — now the nest of slimy worms — where glances of love have melted and looks of fire have flashed.

Turning away your head with horror and humiliation, to think that you shall lie where they are — and be as they are — you say, Alas: what a change is there! Ah, but Christian Faith steps forward, and plants a triumphant foot on the black grave’s edge. Silencing my fears, dispelling my gloom, reconciling me to that lowly bed, she lifts her cheerful voice, exclaiming, True! but what a change shall be there! Looking through her eyes,

I see the spell broken. I see that dust once more animate. And when the blast of the trumpet — penetrating the caves of the rocks, rending the marble tomb, and felt down in the depths of ocean — pierces the ear of death in this dark, and cold, and lonely bed, where I have lowered a coffin, and left the dear form and sweet face of some loved one, I see mortality rising in form immortal, more beautiful than love ever fancied, or poet sang. How great the change, when these mouldering bones, which children look at with fear, and grown men with solemn sadness, shall rise instinct with life! Think of this handful of brown dust springing up into a form like that on which Adam gazed with mute astonishment, when first he caught his own image mirrored in a glassy pool of Paradise; in a form such as, when awakening from his slumber, he saw with wondering, admiring eyes, in the lovely woman that lay beside him on their bed of love and roses. And now, because the change which conversion works on the soul is also inexpressibly

great, it borrows a name from that mighty change; that, a resurrection of the body from the grave, this, a resurrection of the soul from sin. In this also we “pass from death to life”- — in this are “created anew in Jesus Christ.” “We rise with him,” says the Apostle, “to newness of life.”

The greatness of the change is set forth in the symbolical representation of it in the next chapter. Seized by the hand of the Spirit, Ezekiel is borne aloft, carried away through the air, and set down in a lonely valley among the hills of a distant land. At some former

* rpf* period, it appears to have been the scene of a great battle. There hosts had sustained the charge of hosts, and crowns perhaps were staked and won. The peace ,- of these solitudes had been rudely broken by the shrieks of the wounded, the wild shouts of the victors, the clash of arms, and the savage roar of battle. It was silent now. But the &de that swept over it had left it strewed with wrecks. The dead had mouldered unburied where they fell; the skull rattled in the cloven helmet; the sword of the warrior lay rusting beside his skeleton, and the handle was still in the relaxed grasp of the bony fingers. On these unsepulchred corpses the “birds of the air had summered,” and “the wild beasts of the field had wintered.” The rain had washed, and the sun had bleached the bones which the ravens had picked bare; — they were white and dry. In these grim and ghastly skeletons a doleful picture of death lay stretched out before the prophet; and in all the scene which he surveyed there was neither sign nor sound of life, but, it may be, the croak of the raven, or the howl of the famished wolf, or the echo of his own solitary footfall. Here Ezekiel was standing, a lonely man, amid the mouldering dead, when a voice made him start. It came from the skies, charged with the strange question,” Son of man, can these bones live?

We stay not to relate all that was said and done. It serves our purpose to say, that after the prophet had preached to the bones, he prayed to Him who — to dead bones, dead bodies, dead hearts, dead souls, dead families, and dead churches — is “the Kesurrection and the Life.” Ezekiel’s was the prayer of faith — and, as always happens, it had its answer. How encouraging to us, when on our knees, that answer! We feel as if Aaron and Hur sat by our side, and held up our weary arms. After preaching, the prophet prayed, and then there came from heaven a living, life-giving breath. It blows down the valley; and as in passing it kisses the icy lips of the dead, and stirs their hair, and fans their cheek, man after man springs to his feet, until the field which Ezekiel found covered with ghastly skeletons is crowded with a mighty army — all armed for battle and war — the marshalled host of God.

Verily that was a great change; but not less so the work of grace in conversion. While the prophet is gazing with astonished eye on this martial array, where, amid trumpet echoes, spears are gleaming, and plumes are dancing, as, bold in aspect and stout for war, the serried ranks march on, mark what the Lord said; — “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say, our bones are dried, and our hope is lost.” Now, is not this the very judgment — the identical sentence — which the sinner often pronounces on his own case so soon as his eyes are opened, and he sees himself lost and undone? What is the house of Israel here, but a type of God’s chosen people? What do we see in Israel here, but our condition by nature; a state of death; a state in which we are “dead in trespasses and sins.” On this account Satan would have us yield to despair. It is he, who says that for such sinners there is no help — no hope. It is his voice which speaks in

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‘^^^.. Mfri the complaint, “Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost.” The father of lies, the enemy of souls! listen not to him. Nor yielding even to a doubt, — for here “he that doubteth is damned” — but mark God’s gracious answer to such dark, querulous, desponding words — “Thus saith the Lord God; behold, 0 my people, I will open your graves, and I will put my spirit within you, and ye shall live.”

Hereafter we shall enter particularly into the nature of this great change; meanwhile let me ask, Have you any experience of it? I neither ask when, nor where, nor how you felt its first impressions. On these subjects the experience of saints is very different. Some can tell the time — giving day and date, the hour, the providence, the place, the text, the preacher, and all the memorable and ever interesting circumstances associated with their conversion. They can shew the arrow, «. which, shot from some bow drawn at a venture, pierced the joints of their armour, and quivered in their heart. They can shew the pebble from the brook, that, slung it may be, by a youthful hand, but directed of God, was buried in the forehead of their giant sin. They can shew the word that penetrated their soul, and — in some truths of Scripture — the salve that healed the sore, the balm that staunched the blood, the bandage that Christ’s own kind hand wrapped on the bleeding wound. Able to trace the steps and relate the whole progress of their conversion, they can say with David, “come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul.”

It is not so, however, with all, or, perhaps, with most. Some, so to speak, are &&H-born; they were unconscious of their change; nor knew when or how it happened; for a while at least, they gave hardly a sign of life. And thus with many the dawn of grace is in more respects than one, like the dawn of day. We turn our face to the eastward, and our back to the setting stars, to note the moment of the birth of morning; yet how hard it is to tell when and where the first faint, cold steel-grey gleam appears. And it is with many in regard to their spiritual dawn, — with the breaking of an eternal day, — with their first emotions of desire, and of alarm, as with that faint and feeble streak, which brightened, and widened, and spread, till it blazed into a brilliant sky.

The chief matter, about which to be anxious, is not the time, nor place, nor mode of the change, but the fact itself. Has this change taken place in you? .Are you other than once you were? Rather than be what once you were, would you cease to be? Would you prefer annihilation to your old corruption? Some alas! changing to the worse, give themselves up to sins, which once they would have blushed to mention. Breaking loose from the innocence of their childhood, casting oif the comely habits and pious practices of a paternal home, dead to all sense of shame, they rush into excess of riot; and, borne on by the impetus they have acquired in the descent, like one running down hill who would but cannot stop, when they reach the mouth of the pit they are borne over into perdition.

They change, but like “seducers,” they “wax worse and worse.” The night grows darker and darker; the edge of conscience duller and duller; the process of petrifaction goes on within, till the heart has acquired the hardness of stone. Wallowing now in the mire of the lowest sensuality, they can actually boast of sins, regarding which, on the day when they left a father’s roof, with his blessing on their head, and a mother’s warm tears on their cheek, they would have said with feelings of indignant abhorrence — “Is thy servant a dog that he should do such a thing.” What a melancholy change.

In beautiful contrast to a metamorphosis so sad and shocking, has the change in you taken an opposite direction? Can you say, I am not what once I was — I am better, godlier, holier! Happy are you! Happy, although, afraid of presumption, and in the timid modesty of a spiritual childhood, you can venture no further than one who was urged to say whether she had been converted? How humble, yet how satisfactory her reply! That, she answered, I cannot — that I dare not say; but there is a change somewhere; I am changed, or the. world is changed. If you can say so, it is well. Such an answer leaves no room for painful doubts. Our little Ichild — watching with curious eye the apparent motion of objects — calls out in ecstasy, and bids us see how hedge and house are flying past our carriage. You know it is not these that move; nor the fixed and firm shore, with its trees and fields, and boats at anchor, and harbours and headlands, that is gliding by the cabin windows.

That is an illusion of the eye. The motion is not- in .- them but us. And if the world is growing less in your eye, it shews that you are retreating from it, rising above it, and, upborne in the arms of grace, are ascending to a higher region; and if the fashion of this world, to our eye, seems passing away, it is because we ourselves are passing — passing and pressing on in the way to heaven. Sin never changes. If what once seemed lovely looks loathsome now — if what was once desired is detested now — if what was once sought we now shun and shrink from, it is not because sin is changed, but — blessed be God, and praise be to his grace — we are changed. Our eyes are opened; the scales have dropt from them; and the solution of the problem is found in the blind man’s answer — “Whereas I was blind, now I see.”