horse; the goad for the ox; and fear for that man who is the next remove higher. But as soon as fear has done its work, which is made necessary merely because men's hides are so tough, then they are prepared to get out of the way of it, and to be plied with something nobler. Does fear die away, then? No, it transmutes itself. It becomes an undertone. It no longer exists in its own absolute form. It adds itself, as a kind of color, to every other faculty of the mind; so that conscience has its latent fear, hope has its latent fear, and love has its latent fear. It is no longer coarse, selfish, animallike, but it gives stimulus and edge and inspiration and aspiration to each of the better feelings in the soul.

Do not think, then, that you must not preach fear. Preach it; but, as soon as you can, preach it as belonging to everything which is beautiful, and sweet, and pure, and truthful, and high, and noble.

Whether you preach one view of sin or another, measure your preaching by this: Does it discourage men? Does it drive them off from religion? Does it make them more obstinate and self-willed? Or, does it make men tender? Does it enlarge their sense of infirmity? Does it show them where infirmity breaks over into sin? Does it make them feel that they need the down-shining, everlasting presence of the Divine Spirit? If such is the fruit of your preaching of sin, your church will speedily be filled, and the work of Christ will go on under your ministration to the sanctifiation of the hearts of your people, as fast as the work of summer goes on when autumn is near at hand, and the sun is in its full blaze.

HIS afternoon I purpose speaking to you on the subject of Repentance, Conversion, and Sanctification, the three stages of Christian life.

DISCIPLES OF CHRIST.

.

What is a Christian? It is one who is undertaking to learn how to live as Christ commanded. What is enough to enable one to say, "I am a Christian"? On what ground may you, as pastors and teachers, encourage your people to feel that they are Christians, and to make a public profession of their faith in Christianity? Whoever gives you reasonable evidence that he has set out in good earnest to become a disciplethat.is, a learner - in the spirit and school of Christ has a right to hope. Almost always the statement in my time has been that a man must have certain interior changes of which he, or somebody, should be conscious,

certain philosophical, interior conditions, which should evince their reality by outward life. My own. judgment is that the definitions of becoming a Chris

tian should be simplified and brought back to where they were in the time of Christ and his Apostles.

THE THREE ELEMENTS.

There are certainly three things which are implied, although they may not be consciously analyzed and distinctly set before the mind of a person who is a beginner in this new style of life, — namely, renunciation, adhesion, and construction. It will not hurt you to have substituted for the names "repentance, faith, and right-living" these less familiar names; for sometimes a new word sets a man a-thinking; whereas, if a word has been used from time immemorial, it is so smooth from handling that it is apt to slip through the mind without producing any impression. Renunciation is a resolute purpose to abandon wrong; a vivid discrimination of some kind between right and wrong, according to the intensity of the man (low if he be low, middle if he be at the middle, and high if he be high), accompanied by a desire to turn from that which is wrong. Adhesion is a distinct sense of followership; the acceptance of Christ, not intellectually, as we accept Sir William Hamilton in one school, or as we accept Comte in another school, or as we accept Herbert Spencer in another school, but as one accepts some ideal master whose personal life is a living representation of what he intends to be; and he who comes into the Christian life accepts the Lord Jesus Christ as the embodiment of that life which he means to live, and as the representation of that character which he means to form in himself; and it is to this Christ that he comes with personal adhesion.

SEED-TIME AND HARVEST.

Now, it is not right for you to make out a full definition of faith, as it exists when it has ripened in men, and come to its climax, and then say that a man is not converted until he has such a perception of Christ as that, and such a form of adhesion by faith to him. For we are not to test the beginnings of life by the phenomena of its maturity. You are not to apply to a new-born babe the tests which you apply to a man, who, by law, has attained his majority. A babe must be judged through faith, by what he is to be, much more than by what he is.

So when men begin the divine life, although some, under circumstances of which I shall speak, from the beginning give evidence of wonderful transformations, and have a very beautiful experience, yet, taking men collectively, you are to judge of them, not by what they say when they are catechized and taught what to say; but by what you know, looking at them with perceiving eyes and with understanding hearts, to be the actual condition of their inward state of mind. I know that persons who have been brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord by Christian parents, whose house has been a church, and whose daily life has been almost that of a catechumen, may be brought into a full disclosure of Christian life, with phenomena which will be ripe and ample; but often these persons were converted from the cradle. They were trained in their will, as well as in their other faculties, into Christian living, so that when the disclosure comes it is like the unveiling of a statue on

a public square. To the great mass it seems to have sprung into being then and there; while, in reality, it has been the work of the chisel and the mallet for months, and, it may be, through years. The disclosure is sudden, but the formation was not.

The seed-form of experience is enough, therefore, on which to encourage a man to say, "I am a beginningChristian." If men are afraid to say, "I am a Christian," because they cannot stand all the tests of Christianity, let them modify their statement, and say, not, "I am beginning to be a Christian," which might involve some absurdity, but "I am a beginning-Christian. I have begun to be a Christian." How far have you gone? Have you renounced all sin? Woe be to that man who should dare to say "Yes" to that question. No man can tell what he has renounced of unborn things. No man can say, "I have cleansed my heart in innocency," in any modern philosophical sense of that expression. But as I understand it, and according to my conception of sinfulness, he can say, “I have made up my mind to abandon sin."

You will usually find that, to men of low and rude culture, sin is some one or two objective things, and their renunciation of sin will be mostly in regard to those distinct offenses. Higher than these, is a grade of men to whom sin is not only a series of acts, but a principle from which such series of acts have an outflow; in their case there will be a larger and broader renunciation of sin: but this larger and broader one is not to discountenance the smaller and narrower

one.