ual life and gracious influence is to produce a oneness of purpose with Christ, a sympathy with his interests and glory, an intense affection for his character, attributes, and designs, which in some measure supersedes, or rather involves and absorbs faith, hope, and every other grace and virtue. The soul imbued with love to Christ is one with him in such a sense as to feel a spontaneous assurance of his favor. It thinks little of what proof may exist of a fact which is part and parcel of its existence, which has living demonstration in all its strong impulses and aspirations. Such a one communes with Christ. Christ is formed within him, lives in him, and he no longer asks, who shall ascend into heaven to bring Christ from above, or who shall descend into the deep, that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead? The confidence of loving and of being loved becomes entire, wanting nothing; and to be Christ's forever becomes more a reality already entered upon, than a question about which there are doubtful inquiries to be held.

It is quite in the spirit of my text to notice how much the incarnation of Christ and his participation of our nature tend to the production of this blessed confidence in him. We contemplate him as a man born of a woman, partaker of our weaknesses and wants. We look upon him as a son—a kinsman—a philanthropist. Our sympathies warm-our affections are elicited. We dare to love-we can love him. The distance and the dignity of the infinite are vailed, and we hail a brother, and receive a friend and a benefactor into our swelling hearts.

II.

THE CO-OPERATION OF DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY IN OUR SALVATION.

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.— PHIL., ii., 12, 13.

THIS passage of holy writ has been attended by fortunes somewhat remarkable. In the palmy days of the great controversy about liberty and power, which has enjoyed a vigorous life through almost the entire period of the Church's history, this has been a favorite proof-text with each of the opposing parties. Work out your own salvation, has been from age to age reiterated with a determined emphasis tantamount to a frank denial of all dependence on the power and grace of the Almighty. On the other hand, the complement of the text, "It is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure," has long been held to be a very manifest and triumphant vindication of Antinomian repose, and fairly to set the sinner free from all obligation either to resolve or to endeavor, seeing that God does of himself both the willing and the doing. In these days of comparative exemption from polemical excitement, and of profounder submission to the divine oracles, intelligent Christians are not likely to find in this portion of holy Scripture such conflicting elements. All parties not blindly devoted to theory are able to recognize the presence of a fundamental Christian truth. It is a very precise announcement of the Christian doctrine, that the salvation of a soul and the whole business of religion require the concurrence of both human and divine forces; that man can not work out his own eternal well-being without heavenly aids, and that God will not de it for him without his own

strenuous and willing co-operation. Man is utterly dependent upon God for the efficiency and success of his religious efforts. God has been pleased to set forth all the methods and agencies of his recovering grace under such conditions as leave them ineffectual and unproductive without the sinner's consent and co-operation. It is a joint operation, involving grace and a concurring hearty obedience. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.

I. This co-operation of divine and human energies has place in all the important facts and pursuits that make up the history of man.

1. It is true of the commencement of our being. God is our creator, and the giver of life to all; and yet our immediate progenitors, and the ancestors through whose veins our blood has flowed for so many generations, are, in a very important sense, the authors of our existence.

2. Our growth and education are the result of the same joint agency. God provides the germs of all that is possible to man-of bodily and mental growth-the organs of nutrition, strength, activity-the faculties of the mind which develop thought, invention, fancy, which are concerned in mental productions and achievements of all sorts. Of themselves, however, these only make wild savages and stupid boors. They require diligent culture by parent and teacher; they want reiterated lessons and exemplifications in knowledge, virtue, art, activity, suffering, in order to produce a man.

3. This fundamental law reigns over all the works of man. In tillage, where the earth's material substances, its sources of fertility and production, the germinating principle of all seeds, the successions of the seasons, and of day and night, of sunshine and clouds, of the former and latter rains are of God; while the plowing and the sowing, the culture and the harvesting, are human efforts without which all divine gifts are

in vain, and the earth will only cover itself with dark forests and unfruitful brambles.

4. In the elaborate productions of human skill and ingenuity we find a like illustration. In this church the material of every thing is God's work—the solidity, the ponderosity and strength of the earthy and mineral substances, the beautiful colors, the susceptibility of being wrought into tasteful, useful forms-the adaptation of the glass to exclude the wind and the storm, while it gives ingress to the light, are all properties with which God has endowed matter. But it is no less indubitably the energy of man that has lifted up these manifold deposits from the quarries and the mines, and gathered from the forest and from over the sea, and skillfully fashioned, and analyzed, and compounded, and reared up as we now see them, the various materials which constitute a temple for God's worship.

5. We see the same truth in what is perhaps the most wonderful product of human skill, the noble ship that traverses the sublime ocean, and defies its storms. What toil, what art were concerned in felling the unyielding oak and the stately pine, and bringing them from the forest, in imparting to them the proper shape, and securing the fit junctures, in rearing the masts, and binding the ribs, and molding the form, and stretching the cordage, and twisting the cable, and weighing the anchor! And yet how utterly worthless are these, and how unfit to secure their ends without the co-operation of higher agencies! Not only the properties of this vast assemblage of various materials, in virtue of which they are one and all adapted to their appointments; but the wind that fills the outspread sail, the powerful vapor that drives the leviathan machinery, the pliancy of the waves in yielding free passage to the floating ark, and the Vulcan strength with which it bears up the vast burden above the fathomless abyss below-all of these are gifts and cooperating forces which the great Architect of nature con

tributes to this wonderful product of human ingenuity and labor.

II. It accords well, then, with the analyses and illustrations with which the history of the life of man is filled, that the working out of our salvation should involve a co-operation of divine and human energies. The necessity of such a concurrence is plainly involved in the idea of a gracious dispensation to moral agents, and it is very plainly set forth in our

text.

What, then, let us reverently inquire, does God accomplish, and what does He demand of us in this joint performance?

1. God "works in us" by the light of His truth. The Scriptures refer to the works of God as they are manifested in the array of the universe as so many teachers, whose voices have gone forth throughout the whole earth, proclaiming the high attributes of Jehovah, and inculcating the great truths of natural religion; thus, even in the absence of more direct revelation, bringing all nations, the heathen themselves, under obligation to adore and obey the Author of so much magnificence and so much beneficence. But we are chiefly concerned with revealed truth and its operations upon the mind. It is of the very nature and essence of such truth that it shall gain our credence. The mind is so constituted as to be under the necessity of receiving the truth when it is fairly presented and understood. It can not but believe it. It can not, at its option, believe the opposing falsehood. It can not take darkness for light. It can not believe that the whole is less than a part. It can not believe that wrong is as good as right-that we do not owe obedience and love to our Creator and Benefactor. However the verities of religion are presented, if accompanied by fit proof, they are, and must needs be, believed spontaneously. It happens, therefore, unavoidably, that when the truths of religion are presented to men, in the