by worldliness, the soul of Man is naturally fitted to receive divine communications from God, to recognize His goodness, and know itself His child; — and secondly, that Jesus Christ, by his perfect representation of his Father's spirit, awakens all these higher susceptibilities, and acts as an instrument of divine attraction to draw the Soul into spiritual union with God.

The fullest and truest conception of Christianity would be obtained by developing the significance of that description of Christ, which represents him as the Image of God. An Image gives all the proportions of the original, though upon a smaller scale,

as when some boundless expanse of earth and sky is pictured, in every feature, on the smallest tissue of tender nerves within the eye. Thus when Christ is called the Image of God, it is meant that what God is on the scale of Infinity, — that Christ is, on the scale of Humanity. God possesses every moral attribute that characterized Jesus, and in the same relations to each other, but in an infinitely greater and fuller degree. The moral features are the same, only, in the one case, on the scale of created being, in the other, on the scale of the eternal and immeasurable Mind. Thus, Christ's spirit of Mercy is the Image of God's Love; Christ's Holiness, of God's Holiness; Christ's active Goodness, of that Beneficence which worketh ever, and interrupts its loving constancy by no Sabbath pause; Christ's union of Sinlessness with compassion for Sin, the image of that Holy yet forgiving Father, whose arms are ever open to the wanderer, though

he says to that holier child, who strays and wanders not, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine." The divine light diffused through the Universe, and in all the workings of Providence, was concentrated within the soul, and in the person, of Christ, that he might convey directly a representation of God to the soul of Man. 66 God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined into our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." If, then, we would know the moral character of God, we have only to look on the face of Jesus Christ, and then lift our thoughts and hearts to the Infinite Original. If Christ was merciful to man, then God is infinitely merciful. If Christ was forgiving to the penitent, and had no difficulty in reconciling his personal Holiness with the throb of Mercy, then God is infinitely compassionate, and his tenderness to the penitent is one form of his moral Perfection. If there was no unforgivingness in Christ, there can be no unforgivingness in God, — for the Image must be faithful to the Divine Original. Whatever moral feature, then, you find in Christ, ascribe it to God with an infinite fulness; and whatever moral feature you do not find in Christ, ascribe it not to God at all.

Such was the Truth by the manifestation of which, in its simple purity, St. Paul commended himself to the affections and consciences of the Corinthians it needed only that it should be preached without mixture of personal objects or regard to self, to bless and justify its Apostle. This is the

us."

link of transition, that leads him to speak of the sufferings which for their sakes he willingly encountered, in the preaching of this Gospel: "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of The same faith in God, and love for Man, which had supported the Author and Finisher of this Truth himself, must also supply the inward strength of its persecuted Apostles, in the days of worldly conflicts, and of martyr zeal. Even the Lord Christ had this spiritual treasure in a frail and earthen vessel, so that the excellency of its power was only realized by a sustained, and sometimes struggling, faith in the invisible things of God. As Jesus mourned over in dejection, and upbraided the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done because they repented not, as though he must abandon that hard and thankless race, — and then, revived by trust in God, uttered with new and more fervent tenderness the appeal of undrooping Love, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavyladen, and i will give you rest"; as he sunk into trouble of soul under the contemplation of that awful weight of responsibility which was to press upon his bowed and suffering form, and in an hour when he would be alone in the world, only that his Father was with him, and then rose into the light of the divine Purpose that had been clouded for a brief moment, "Yet for this cause came I to this hour: Father, glorify thy name "; as the words of the remembered Psalm, learned in childhood's hour, fell, perhaps half unconsciously, from the trembling

lips which agony had parted,-" "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and then, to show that that spirit could not be forsaken, those lips closed for ever in strains of Faith,-"It is finished: Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit"; so, with all who would lead his life of Faith, and amid the outward forms and shows of things live true to the hidden spirit and secret purposes of God, the outward man perishes, and the outward life discourages, and the inner man of faith and spiritual endurance must be renewed from day to day,— and only through looking not to things which are seen, but to the things which are unseen, if they are pressed they are yet not in straits, if they are perplexed, they are yet not in despair, if they are persecuted, they are yet not forsaken,—if they are cast down, they are yet not destroyed, and that if they bear about with them the suffering and the dying of the Lord Jesus, it is, that in his strength, and by God's blessing, the life also of the Lord Jesus may in some degree be worthily imitated, and represented in their mortal frame.

It is remarkable that in this passage St. Paul, speaking of the persecution and sufferings he endured for the sake of his children in the Faith, uses the very same sort of language which, when used by the same Apostle in reference to Christ, a speculative Orthodoxy interprets into the Doctrines of Atonement and Vicarious Death. He was 66 tinually delivered up to death, that a divine life might be communicated to them"; "all his sufferings were for their sakes," "and death worked in

con

him that life might work in them "; he was willing to meet affliction and death, if he could only thereby accomplish his mission, and impregnate them with Christian life, knowing that he who raised up the Lord Jesus would raise up him also, and present him together with those whom he had begotten in Christ." Then, at least, would his trust in the Truth, and the Love in which he administered it, be justified by God.

And the source of all this spiritual confidence, and the source too of all the strength that any spirit has, not in sufferings alone, but in prosperity's most favored hour, and amid the bloom and life of the most blessed affections, is derived from that inward eye which “looks through the things that are seen and temporal, to the things that are unseen and eternal." Affliction,-mental distress, the pangs of pain and death; — these indeed may be seen and witnessed, and dread and awful they are; yet when most lingering, they pass like a dream, and are among the things that are gone for ever; but the unseen purpose of God into which the spirit entered abides for ever, a wreath of unfading glory for the now sainted head of Meekness and patient Trust. And does not Prosperity itself require us to enter into the unseen spirit and purpose of God as much as, perhaps even more than, Affliction, which brings its own warnings and spiritual suggestions with it? What, but this blindness to the unseen purpose of the spirit of God, turns many a life of outward blessings into the deepest miseries of a burdened existence, and takes away that inward peace, that life of the soul