selfishness and alienation from the life of God; dead and cut off from the sources of life, purity, and joy in God; dead and without spiritual affections or communion with God, but on the contrary under his just wrath and condemnation.

This is the key to all the other parts of the subject. The whole end of Christianity and all the motives it employs, depend, in point of effect, on our making the practical confession of the apostle our own; depend on our feeling personally and individually that in our natural state we are selfish, blind, disordered creatures, and dead before God. This is the first step in the judgment.

2. The second follows, laying down an important distinction; pointing out a broad transition from one state to another, from death unto life, from the condition of those who were dead in selfishness to that of those who live to God; "We thus judge, that if Christ died for all, then were all dead; and that he died for all, that they which live.” There are then those who live; there are those who are quickened by the power of the Holy Ghost, who are raised up together with Christ, who partake of a new life with its appropriate perceptions, feelings, hopes, fears, joys, sorrows. These stand in contrast with their own former selves, and with all who still remain in the state of death in which Christ found the whole human race. Here an important, an all-important transition is noted. We can never feel the commanding motive which Christianity employs, till we know something

of the state of heart to which that motive is addressed. This is the second part of the act of judgment. As in the first creation, Adam, till God "breathed into him the breath of life and he became a living soul," was merely a mass of limbs, and form, and external features, without any power of performing the actions of a reasonable creature; so the fallen, selfish heart of man, dead to spiritual things, feels nothing of the interior life of love to God and man, till the blessed Spirit imparts a new and divine principle. Notions, forms of religion, creeds, knowledge, profession, will never take the place of this spiritual life which can alone give to all their excellency and force.

3. A solemn obligation of fulfilling the design of this great change, is deduced as the conclusion of the whole: "We thus judge that they which live, should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them and rose again." It is quite clear, then, that the mark and evidence of those who have thus "passed from death unto life," is precisely this, that they no longer live the selfish life they once did, but fulfil the obligations of that death of Christ which is the source of their pardon, and the motive to their new obedience. They judge that this was the express end of the death and resurrection of Christ. This is not an accidental, but direct consequence. It is not a hasty resolve, but the result of a calm deliberation on the mysteries of redemption, and the obligations of the life they have received thereby. It is the very scope and

design of the whole vast undertaking of Christ; enjoined by it, and inseparable from it.

If such, then, be the high end which Christianity proposes to herself, such the exalted motive, and such the deliberate judgment which connects the two, then allow me, in application,

To direct your attention to an emphatical word in the text, on which I have not hitherto fixed your notice. The word HENCEFORTH, intervenes between the two main branches of the text; "that they which live, should not henceforth live unto themselves." This marks an era, a memorable time in the life of man. This erects a barrier between two periods of life: the one past, when we lived unto ourselves; the other future, when we live unto Christ, and to our brother for Christ's sake.

Where shall we, then, put this "henceforth ?" Can it be truly said of us, that though we once lived a worldly, sensual, formal life like others; though we once were dead in selfishness and folly, in pride and appetite, in forgetfulness of the soul and eternity; yet God has been pleased to bring us to spiritual life, to rescue us from the gulf of sin and misery into which we were sinking deeper and deeper, and to teach us to know ourselves and our Saviour; and that we are now aiming by the constraining power of his love, to live unto him? Can we say this? Then put the "henceforth,”

there; that is the remarkable period. From that time-whether imperceptibly brought on as to the specific effect, as reason and conscience were matured, by the grace of God resting on the due use of the sacraments, education and other means of grace; or more distinctly marked off by some stroke of affliction; or occasioned by the recurrence of solemn addresses from Holy Scripture; or dated from our preparation for the affecting rite of Confirmation-whatever was the mode of the divine operation, the change is to be dated from the time that we began to live "unto him that died for us and rose again."

Run the heavenly

Continue then in your course. race. Examine your progress at each recurring period of receiving the body and blood of your Saviour Christ. Detect the vast remains of selfishness in your heart, spirit, and conduct. Pursue them out in their meanderings. Imbibe more adequately the commanding motive of the love of Christ. 66 Qui amat non laborat," says Augustine -nothing is painful to love, it fills the soul, it makes it forget all other things, it changes the taste, is ever active, ever alert, ever studious, ever watchful for opportunities. "It is in virtue of a delectatio victrix," says a modern author, "that Christianity makes us its own."

But if there is no point in your moral history where you can erect this memorial; or if the matter be doubtful; or if declines, like a land-flood, have sapped the barrier, then I beseech you this day to

R

begin; I pray you to set up the ensign here. Henceforth, I earnestly entreat you to enter on a religious life. Henceforth examine the proofs of a selfish and dead state of heart. Henceforth consider

the claims God has upon you; and your fearful guilt in having lived so long unto yourself. Let "the time past of your life suffice to have wrought the will of the Gentiles." Henceforth live to Christ, live to your neighbour, live to the gospel, live to prayer, live to your Bible, live to your own happiness, live to heaven. This only, will bring you back to that for which man was created, and without which he must be for ever miserableto derive all his happiness from God; to subject his will to that of his Maker in the Revelation he has made to him of it in Christ Jesus; and to seek his own felicity in harmonious connexion with the present and eternal happiness of others.