God, yea Aversion to the thought of Him, is, alas! most personal; and, therefore, so must be our drawing towards Him, our seeking Him, our finding Him, our falling down before Him, our reconciliation to Him; our trust in Him-that is, our Regeneration. We must enter into an entirely new relation of our consciousness towards God, so that He whom we have dreaded because of his tremendousness, and shrunk from because of his purity, aye, and disliked the very mention of his name because of a conscious contrariety to his will-even He-the same-the Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of Hosts that changeth not-shall be fled to by us as a Saviour, trusted in as a Friend, loved and clung to as a Father, our Father reconciled to us in Christ. As the feelings of the prodigal towards his parent when he gathered all his goods together and took his journey into a far country to avoid his presence; to the feelings of the same prodigal towards the same parent, when he came to himself and said, I will arise and go unto my Father, and when he felt that Father's arms around his neck, and received that Father's kiss of perfect reconciliation, and heard that Father say, Make merry and be glad for this my Son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found such is the natural disposition towards God to that of our Regeneration: such is the transition from death to life, from the old man to the new,

:

which is denominated by the Sciptures, being "born again."

bracing truth, are

And would you see how thoroughly personal and conscious such a transition must be, observe what St. Peter says of it in his First Epistle (i. 14-25), when he is referring his readers to their own experience of this New Birth. Hearing, thinking, judging, ensurely personal acts,-acts of mind which no man can do for us, and which cannot take place within us independent of our consciousness. And of these acts of mind St. Peter speaks when he reminds the converts that they had been "born again by the word of God, which word by the Gospel had been preached to them," and that they had" obeyed the truth,"-submitted their judgment and convictions to its influence. Feeling (again) is surely a personal act, an act of the heart, which, from its very nature, we cannot but be conscious of, which we possess only so far as we are conscious of it. And of such acts of heart St. Peter speaks when he declares that they "by Christ had believed in God," had reposed their trust and confidence in him as their Father: and had "put their faith and hope in God:" and had "tasted that the Lord is gracious," had found the truth of God's forgiving love as grateful to their spiritual sensibility as the sweetest milk is to the bodily palate of the new-born babe. Desire, (once more,) resolve, endeavour, are

surely personal acts-acts of will; the very experiences which constitute us persons at all in contradistinction to things, moving from an impulse within ourselves instead of being moved like the windtossed leaf or the floating weed by impulses without us. And of these acts of will St. Peter speaks when he exhorts them, "Therefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies and envies and all evil-speakings, desire the sincere milk of the word that ye may grow thereby." So evident indeed is all this, and so impossible is it to conceive a human being going through these changes of the character without reflection and emotion and determination, by any other way than that of personal contion,-by sciousness and interest and effort,-that the drawing out the proof of this might well seem superfluous if not absurd, were it not that no words can ever be too many, no efforts too assiduous, no reasoning too minute, when we are endeavouring to banish and drive away that fatal delusion, that worst form of Enthusiasm (though it claims the merit of horror at Enthusiasm), which dotes upon the fancy that men may be sanctified without knowing it, and saved without the trouble of it, and be literally carried, like passive infants, by the angels into Abraham's bosom; -that, dozing listlessly for all their life in one state and that a state of irreligion,-they may nevertheless wake at last with glad surprise in another state

and that the state of glory-swept from destruction in a dream, and smuggled into heaven! May God deliver us from such Antinomian slumber, and startle us into new Spiritual life!

SECTION III.

THE MEANS OF SPIRITUAL REGENERATION.

SPIRITUAL Regeneration as a conscious experience, is the sense of love towards God. And the grand means of this experience is therefore that Exhibition of God's love towards us which is vouchsafed in the Gospel of Christ. For it is love that begets love. Love cannot exist alone. It must be reciprocal. And therefore our affection towards God must vary as our consciousness of the affection of God towards us. And this affection of God towards us is just the one great truth which is proclaimed in Christ. It is by manifesting this, that Christianity obtains a power over the hearts of men which no philosophy, no religion even, in its lower truths, can gain. And it is by commending this to the individual mind that the Spirit of Christ-which is emphatically "the Spirit of the Truth," of this particular fundamental truth of God's saving love, becomes the Spirit of life, and new-creates the soul. And this therefore is what St. Peter refers to, as the means and instrument of