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LECTURE XLVIII.

ROMANS, viii, 6.

"For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."

THE death which is here spoken of, is something more than the penal death that is inflicted on transgressors, in the way of retribution. It is not a future but a present death which is here spoken of; and arises from the obtuseness or the extinction of certain feelings and faculties in the soul, which, if awake to their corresponding objects, would uphold a life of thoughts and sensations and regards, altogether different from the actual life of unregenerated men. To the higher and spiritual life they are dead even now; and, to estimate the soreness of this deprivation, just figure an affectionate father to have a paralysis inflicted on all those domestic feelings, which bound him in love and endearment to the members of his own family. Then would you say of him, that he had become dead to the joys and the interests of home-that perhaps he was still alive to the gratifications of sense and of profligacy, but that what went to constitute the main charm of his existence had now gone into annihilation-that to what at one time was the highest pleasurable feeling of his consciousness, he had become as torpid as if he had literally expired-and that thus he was labouring under all

the calamity of a death, to that which occupies a high place among the delights of the feeling and the friendly and the amiable. And it is in a sense analogous to this, that we are to understand the present death of all those who are carnally minded -not a death to any of the impressions that are made upon their senses from without-not a death to the animal enjoyments of which men are capable-not even, it may be, a death to many of the nobler delights either of the heart or of the understanding-But a death to that which when really felt and enjoyed, is found to be the supreme felicity of man-a death to all that is spiritual-an utter extinction of those capacities by which we are fitted to prove those heavenly and seraphic extacies, that would liken us to angels-a hopeless apathy in all that regards our love to God, and to all that righteousness which bears upon it the impress of the upper sanctuary. It is our dormancy to these, which constitutes the death that is here spoken of; and in virtue of which man is bereft, if not of his being, at least of the great end of his being which is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.

And you may further see how it is—that such a death is not merely a thing of negation, but a thing of positive wretchedness. For with the want of all that is sacred or spiritual about him, there is still a remainder of feeling, which makes him sensible of his want a general restlessness of the soul, on whose capacities there has been inflicted a sore mutilation; and from whose aspirings after unde

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finable good, the object is ever melting away into hopeless and inaccessible distance-a remorse and a terror about invisible things, which are ever and anon breaking forth, even amid the busy appliance of this world's opiates to stifle and overbear them. And there are other miseries, that are sure to spring from those carnal sensibilities which have undergone no death-from the pride that is met with incessant rebuke and mortification, by the equal pride of our fellow-men-from the selfishness that comes into collision, with all the selfishness. of the unregenerated society around it-from the moral agonies which essentially adhere to malice and hatred and revenge-from the shame that is annexed, even on earth, to the pursuits of licentiousness from the torture that lieth in its passions, and the gloomy desolation of heart which follows the indulgence of them-All these give to the sinner his foretaste of hell on this side of death; and, whether they be aggravated or not by the fire and the brimstone and the arbitrary inflictions that are conceived to be discharged upon him in the place of vengeance-still they are enough, when earth is swept away, with all its refuges of amusement and business and guilty dissipation, in which the mind can now be lulled into a forgetfulness of itself they are enough to entail upon the second and the eternal death, a burden of enormous and incalculable wretchedness-a curse so felt and so agonized under by the outcasts of condemnation, as to make the utterance of Cain their theme of

wailing and of weeping through all eternity, even that their punishment is greater than they can bear.

From what we have said of the death of those who are carnally, you will be at no loss to understand what is meant by the life of those who are spiritually minded. minded. We read of those who are alienated from the life of God, and to this it is that the spiritual find readmittance. They before stood afar off, and now are brought nigh. The blood of Christ hath consecrated for them a way of access; and the fruit of that access is delight in God—the charm of a confidence, which they never felt before, in His friendly and fatherly regard to them— a new moral gladness in the contemplation of that character, which now stands revealed in all its graces, while it is disarmed of all its terrors-an assimilation of their own character to His; and so a taste for charity and truth and holiness; and a joy, both in the cultivation of all these virtues, and in the possession of a heart at growing unison with the mind and will of the Godhead. These are the ingredients of a present life, which is the token and the foretaste of life everlasting-an existence in the feelings and concerns of which, all earthly existence is tasteless and unsatisfying; and to be awakened whereunto, is a transition as great and more joyful than for a dead man to be awakened from his grave.

But let me pass on from the life to the peace of those who are spiritually minded. There are two

great causes of disturbance, to which the peace of the heart is exposed. The first is a brooding anxiety, lest we shall be bereft or disappointed of some object on which our desires are set. The second is the agitation felt by all who have a taste for human kindness; and which taste is most painfully agonised, amid the fierceness and the tumult and the din of human controversy. You will at once perceive how the man who is spirituallyminded, rises above the first of these disquietudes -for there is an object paramount to all which engrosses the care of a worldly man, and on which his desires are supremely set; and so what to others are overwhelming mortifications, to him are but the passing annoyances of a journey; and the same revolution of fortune which would plunge the earthly in despair, leaves to him who is heavenly a splendid reversion of hope and of happiness. So that neither can the actual visitation of any disaster so utterly discomfit him; nor can the apprehension of its coming so torment his bosom, with the dark imagery of poverty and ruin and blasted anticipations. To him there is an open vista, through which he might descry a harbour and a home, on the other side of the stormy passage that leads to it; and this he finds enough to bear him up, under all that vexes and dispirits other men. The pure and lofty serene which lies beyond the grave, gives a serene to his own bosom. The main question of his being is settled; and that enables him to sit loose, and to be lightly affected,