Spiritual gravitation.

our gratitude and our confidence, and these feelings, when wrought into the heart, put us in our proper place towards Him. Affectionate dependence on the Creator is the spiritual health of the creature, as averseness and independence are his spiritual disease.

Men are very apt to consider sin as consisting merely in this or that particular action. The old philosophers taught that virtue is the mean between two extremes; thus, for example, that the virtue of generosity is the mean between the vices of prodigality and avarice; courage the mean between rashness and timidity, and so of the rest: thus making the difference between virtue and vice to lie merely in the degree, not in the kind. But the Word of God teaches another sort of morals. According to it, sin consists in the absence of the love of God from the heart, as the dominant principle; so that sin is not so much an act as a manner of being. It is not necessary to go to the expense of an action in order to sin; the habitual state of most minds,—of all minds, indeed, naturally, even in their most quiescent form,—is sin; that

is to say, the love of God is not dominant in them.

The centripetal force constitutes an element in every line which the planet moves in its orbit. Were the influence of this force to be suspended, we should not think of reckoning the number of aberrations which the planet might make in its ungoverned career; we should say that its whole manner of being, severed from the solar influence, was one continued and radical aberration. In like manner, the soul ought to feel the love of God as a governing element along the whole course of its existence; every movement of thought and feeling and desire ought to contain it, as an essential part of its nature. When this principle is wanting, we need not reckon the moral aberrations which the spirit makes; its whole existence is an aberration, it is cut off from the spiritual system of the universe, it has lost its gravitation.

In such a state of things, it is evident that a pardon which did not bring back the wanderer, and restore his lost gravitation, would be of no use to him; until his gravitation is recovered, he is a blot on the creation. Love to

God is the gravitation of the soul, and it is restored by the apprehension of His mind and will as revealed in Christ Jesus. A faith which does not restore spiritual gravitation is useless; and that only is true gravitation which keeps the soul in its orbit.

The movement of the soul along the path of duty, under the influence of holy love to God, constitutes what in Scripture are called good works. Good works are works which proceed from true principles. The external form of an action cannot alone determine whether it be a good work or not. Its usefulness to others may be determined by its external form, but its moral worth depends on the moral spring from which it flows. Good works, then, are properly healthy works,-works proceeding from a living principle. Healthy bodily actions can only proceed from healthy bodily principles; and healthy spiritual actions can proceed only from healthy spiritual principles. All efforts to do good apart from that life from above which our Lord proclaimed to Nicodemus are in Scripture called dead works.

A man who has lost his health does not recover it again by any endeavour to perform

healthy bodily actions, for of these his bad health renders him incapable (in which incapacity, indeed, his bad health consists), but by the use of some remedial system, generally involving much self-denial; and as health returns, its proper and natural actions return along with it. Health is not produced by these actions, but it produces them, and is strengthened by them. Physical enjoyment consists in these healthful actions; they are the spontaneous language of physical health. They constitute the music, as it were, which results from the organ being well tuned.

It is the same thing with the actions of the soul. Spiritual health is not acquired by good actions, but it is followed by them, and strengthened by them. They also are music, sweet music. And oh!

were these spirits of

ours, with their thousand strings, but rightly tuned, what a swell of high and lovely song would issue from them,-a song of holy joy and praise, commencing even here, and still rising upwards, until it blended with the full harmony of that choir which surrounds the throne of God.

Appropriation invol

very idea

of faith.

CHAPTER III.

The true meaning of Justification by Faith.

WERE some great convulsion of nature to destroy all the human race save one single individual, the Bible with all its contents would belong to that individual. It is addressed to Adam's race, and he would be the sole representative of the race; but we all and each of us belong to and represent Adam's race as much as such an individual would; we have therefore the same right in the contents of the Bible that he could have.

I am persuaded that faith in the gospel ved in the always is and always must be an appropriating faith, and that there is no true faith in the gospel which is not so. When a man opens his eyes upon the sun, he necessarily appropriates his share of its light, and he cannot look upon the sun without making this ap