It is now my part, brethren, to call you to the performance of a great duty; a duty which easily and naturally connects itself with the train of thought which we have been pursuing. We have seen, in the course of our remarks, that it is chiefly through the ministry of His ordained servants that God dispenses those spiritual influences which constitute the Church's life. But under all ordinary circumstances, this ministry cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled, except by those who give themselves wholly to the execution of it, and concentrate upon this one point their entire energies of soul and body. Therefore, the Word of God prescribes (and it is an appointment whose expediency approves itself to our reason), that the Christian minister shall have a right to refrain from secular pursuits, and to claim a maintenance from his fellow-men, in requital of his spiritual services: even so hath the Lord ordained that they "who preach the Gospel should live of the Gospel."

The venerable Institution, which to-day claims your benevolent support, bases its charitable operations upon this precept of the Divine Law. Of the duty inculcated upon the laity in the passage which I have quoted, it takes the most liberal and enlarged view, rightly accounting that provision for the members of a man's family is the most effective way of rendering assistance to himself; and that the feeling that such a provision is within reach, will tend greatly to relieve that burden of anxiety whose pressure is so great a hindrance to every earnest pursuit, and most of all to that of the sacred ealling. We request, then, your liberal contributions in support of this Institution, based, as it is, in principle, upon that Word which is our rule of life as Christians. Its prosperity has an important bearing

I

upon the comfort, and, through the comfort, on the ministerial efficiency of our poorer clergy.

Remember ye, brethren, that upon the efficiency of the Christian ministry depends, in great measure, the life of the Christian Church; and in the full consideration of this truth, give your support to the object we are advocating. God, indeed, is independent of any means in the communication of His blessings. He can dispense, if it so please Him, with the planting of Paul, and the watering of Apollos; but, as in nature the exertions of the husbandman are a necessary condition, though not an originating cause, of the earth's increase and fruitfulness; so it is in grace. "The prophets prophesying" are the ordinary means which God employs and blesses, in order to bring their fellow-men under the control of a spiritual influence. These are the golden pipes, through which the golden oil of Divine grace is emptied into the candlestick. May He grant unto us, as a Church, pastors after His own heart, who shall feed us with knowledge and understanding, so that through them may be transmitted to us freely this sacred oil, and that, fed by its continual influx, our light may shine brightly before men, and our candlestick remain before the Lord in His Sanctuary, never to be removed out of her place!

SERMON VIII.

FINAL IMPENITENCE.

Preached in Lent, 1857, at the Church of St. Mary-theVirgin, Oxford.

66 Then he said, E pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house: for E have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.”—LUKE xvi. 27, 28.

WE are to speak to you this evening on the awful subject of Final Impenitence; and on a subject so full of mystery, so beset (as we conceive) with erroneous fancies, we specially desire to speak in such a manner as that, in our every assertion, we may be led by the hand of God's Word.

Holy Scripture presents for our contemplation one actual and one imaginary example of Final Impenitence; and from these, as being all that it has pleased Almighty God to reveal, we must gather all that we can ascertain on the subject. The actual example is Judas Iscariot, who is expressly termed "the son of perdition," and of whom our Lord confesses that he alone of all "the glorious company of the Apostles" was "lost." The imaginary example is the rich man of the parable, some of whose words I have just read. In a certain point of view, the imaginary example is even more valuable than the historical one Our blessed Lord

moulded the parable of Dives and Lazarus as it pleased His gracious Wisdom; He had the absolute control of His materials. With the history of an individual, on the other hand, although of course it is supremely overruled by the providence of God, there must ever be an interference arising from the agency of man's will. Parts of the example, therefore, may not so exactly suit the lesson which God intends us to draw from them, as in a case where the illustration is professedly fictitious.

Yet it is curious and interesting to observe how many points of resemblance the historical and the imaginary example present. The besetting sin of Judas, that which lured him step by step to perdition, was covetousness. Dives is represented as surrounded with all the objects which wealth can purchase, and which it is implied (if not expressed) in the narrative, had ensnared his affections.-Judas grudged to Christ the alabaster-box of ointment of spikenard, secretly wishing that the proceeds of the sale of it might have been thrown into the common purse, and so have swelled his gains and pampered his lust of money. Dives hardens his heart against the sorrows of Lazarus, cannot afford him aught but the crumbs.Judas stood on the highest pinnacle of religious privilege. Dives is a son of Abraham.-Judas, though impenitent to the last, displays the relentings of natural affection in his final interview with the chief priests. Dives, even amid the horrors of an eternity of woe, shows that natural sensibility is by no means dead within him.

We invite you then, my brethren, to study the model of Final Impenitence which our Lord Himself has constructed for us, and to frame your notions of

its nature exclusively on that model. Let us glean out from this solemn narrative the true idea of the character of Dives. His story is not one of highhanded crime and outrage. It presents to us merely the picture of a selfish and semi-sceptical worldling, lying in the bosom of the Church and in the lap of luxury at the same time.

May Almighty God bless the contemplation of it to your souls.

Our text, then, records the experience and expresses the sentiments of one who had his portion in this life-the experience, I say, and sentiments of such an one, when he has passed out of this condition of existence into another, not cognizable by human senses. We have here, then, a glimpse afforded us, by Him who cannot lie or deceive, into that mysterious realm which lies beyond the grave, and into those distinct and separate portions of it allotted respectively to the souls of the righteous and the ungodly. The latter is described emphatically as a place of torment, although it is not to be confounded with that eventual place of torment into which the final sentence of the great judgment-day will bid the ungodly depart. The place spoken of is a place of preliminary and anticipative woe, in which the souls of the impenitent are harassed by a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, and so taste the bitterness of eternal death, before that awful sentence is fully consummated upon them.

It is something-it is a step towards higher reaches of faith, to be well assured of the existence and reality of this invisible realm, in which the spirits of the departed energize (for surely such is the plain teaching of the parable) after they are severed from the body,