the church big in visibility, organization, ordinances, forms, and the pomp of circumstance and power. But why, says the Word of God, if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances after the commandments and doctrines of men, as if the church were a mere worldly corporation? These are profane and vain babblings, that will increase unto more ungodliness. And certainly a church that undertakes to constitute itself in Christ, by virtue of its organization, as a church historically apostolic, and then sets up the dogma that men can be in Christ only by being in the church, is but a shadow cast by the true body of Christ; or rather, it is a merely fleshly body, vainly puffed up by a fleshly mind, and not holding the Head, the Lord Jesus, from whom all the body, by joints and bands having nourishment ministered and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God. A church proclaiming that men must come to Christ by the church, increaseth with the increase of men, but not of God. Under such a sign and dogma of tradition and world rudiment, men that come into the church to get to Christ, stop with the church, and go no further, and are likely, under the anodynes of ordinances, never to gain Christ. For along with this error comes in that other deceivableness of unrighteousness and frustration of the grace of God, anwering to the Jewish tenet of circumcision as the gate of heaven, against which Paul thundered such fiery anathemas-the tenet of baptismal regeneration-rendering the grace of God of none effect, and justification by faith a dead and useless doctrine. It may be laid down as a rule infallible, that whoever trusts in any church, or in any ordinance, or in any creature, to bring him to Christ, or to put him in Christ, will never find Christ, will never come to Christ. will, so long as this delusion lasts. And thus it was that Paul, by God's commission, launched the bolts of such a fiery vengeance against those who thus corrupted the church and the Word of the living God. I tell you, said he, that Christ is become of none effect unto you, whosoever ye be, that trust in such things; ye are fallen from grace. If you be baptismally regenerated, and trust in that, you will never be regenerated in any other way, and Christ can profit you nothing. If you trust to get to heaven, because you are the children of the church and of Abraham, God will sooner people heaven from the stones in the streets, than admit you there, by such contempt, nullification, and falsification of the cross of Christ. Let no man beguile you of your reward by such things." As many as desire to make a fair show in the flesh, they make much of such things, and glory in them. But God forbid that we should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto us, and we unto the world. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.

He never

Now, in one way and another, the world is full of these errors,

corrupting the truth, deluding the soul, and deadening the Word of God. Some of these errors are like a breastwork of cotton, before a beleaguered city, in which all the balls of an invading army may be buried, and never one reach the walls, or houses, or people of the city. Just so, the very arrows of God's truth fall blunted before hearts thus entrenched by the elastic rudiments of the world, by the traditions, and commandments, and doctrines of men.

And therefore it was, and is, that our blessed Lord, in the New Testament and in the Old, always did, and still does, speak with such devouring indignation against those who make paths to heaven which he has not made, and set up gates and sign-boards to heaven, of their own construction, which are gates to hell; making the commandment of God of none effect, through their tradition. Ye hypocrites! in vain do ye worship me. Ye blind leaders of the blind! Ye that beguile, and they that are beguiled, shall both fall into the ditch. It was because these dogmas and ordinances of men are the source of fleshly arrogance, persecution, and pride, the denial of the cross, the destruction of faith, the perversion of the Word of God, the corruption of the church, the delusion and destruction of the soul!

Now our subject, and this text, out of which it has directly grown, shows you what you are to find in God's Word-Jesus Christ and him crucified; what constitutes the worth of God's Word Jesus Christ and him crucified; for what you are to cherish, study, and prize God's Word-Jesus Christ and him crucified; and how you are to study God's Word-in Christ and him crucified, in the light of his cross, and by the teachings of his Spirit. If you do not find Christ in the Word, and life and immortality only through him, the Word, with all its glory, will be of no use or efficacy with you, save in your condemnation. And our blessed Lord himself has said, that the Word which he has given unto you, and spoken to you, that shall judge you at the last day.

But if you do find Christ in it, then you will ever value it in and for Christ. You will love it for its clear, decisive, glorious manifestation of Christ and him crucified. You will be watchful against all handling of the Word of God deceitfully, to mar the glory, beauty, and completeness of that doctrine. You will be jealous of all philosophy and vain deceit, and all the traditions of men, and all the rudiments of the world, and all the speculations of intruding fleshly minds, that would beguile you from the simplicity of your faith, and make you distrust or forget your completeness in Christ. You will be anxious to study the Word of God in God's light, by the guidance, interpretation, and indwelling life of God's Holy Spirit. It is he, the Spirit of Christ and of the Father, the Messenger of the Father and the Son, who is to lead you into all truth, to sanctify you by the truth, and in so doing, and in order so to do, taking of the things that are Christ's-not man's—and showing them to your souls. You will rely, not upon the enticing words of

man's wisdom, but upon the demonstration of the Spirit and of power. You will love Paul's exclusiveness-"I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified." And in proportion as you love and imitate that, because your love, like Paul's, is set only upon Christ, in that proportion will you also know and love the comprehensiveness and the glory of Paul's prayers; and the great strife of your prayers, the fire and life of your study of the Word, will be "that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him." And thus he will "grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length, and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. And unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly, above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, world without end. Amen."

VI.

CHRIST AS A MECHANIC.

BY REV. WILLIAM W. PATTON,

PASTOR OF THE FOURTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, HARTFORD, CONN.

"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joses, and of Juda and Simon ? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him."-MARK vi. 3.

GOD in the execution of his designs follows a course which differs widely from that which human wisdom would have suggested. Man is impatient; he burns with a restless desire to see his plans immediately accomplished, and hardly conceives of an important object before he rushes impetuously to secure it. Hence he often mistakes both as to the character of the end and the adaptation of the means, and, as a natural consequence, reaps bitter disappointment where he expected a harvest of success. God, on the other hand, forming his purposes in infinite wisdom, and dwelling amid the ages of eternity, where "one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day," acts without rashness, without impetuosity, without haste, and with unerring certainty. When the great design of human redemption was formed, man's wisdom, could it have been consulted, would have suggested the propriety and importance of having the atonement made immediately. He would have had the cross planted by the very gate of Paradise, that as the guilty pair issued from the garden, they might behold the vicarious sufferer opening the way for their return to life. Yes, human reason would have had the whole world pointed to an actual expiation from the very beginning, that each successive generation might have lived and died amid the noonday refulgence of gospel light. God thought otherwise. Infinite wisdom was not hasty in its efforts. To the divine mind there was in the future a "fulness of time," when it would be appropriate for the Saviour to appear and to enter upon his astounding mission. That fulness of time involved, as the event proved, a lapse of four thousand years. We may not comprehend, even after the fact, all or any of the reasons which had weight with God, but we may be certain that no mistake was made, and no fault committed. He whose moral nature is summed up in Love had surely a deep interest in pursuing the course that would

ultimately tend to the greatest good of his creatures, nor would he have delayed the actual work of atonement for forty centuries, if there had not been sufficient and benevolent reasons.

The text is connected with another illustration of a kindred nature, of the difference between the divine and human mode of procedure. Men are fond of parade. They love ostentation, and if engaged in a great design, plan to have the arrangements and instrumentalities splendid and imposing, that the stamp of greatness may be visible through the whole affair. They are not content to have the result speak for itself, and announce its own magnitude and importance, but must herald its praises and celebrate its majesty in every preliminary step. It is not so with God. He loves, even amid his mightiest operations, and in the execution of his noblest designs, to conceal his greatness. Often in the review of past events are we forced to say in the words of the prophet, "There was the hiding of his power." This principle of the divine procedure was strikingly announced by the Saviour, when he said, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation." Men love to speak amid the stormy wind, the earthquake, and the fire; but the utterance of God is in the still small voice." Had men been consulted with reference to the manner in which God should become manifest in the flesh, they would probably have recommended a glorious and triumphal descent from heaven, that should strike the nations with astonishment and awe, and secure universal submission. They would have considered no other theophany worthy of the Infinite Being, or adapted to secure the end contemplated in the redemption of a fallen world. And here, as before, God was of a different opinion, and sent his Son into the world in a lowly and humble manner, or as the apostle expresses it, "in the form of a servant." I wish on the present occasion to draw attention to this fact, and to certain lessons which it is fitted to impart.

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I. Let us consider the earthly position which the Saviour assumed. When the great scheme of human redemption was devised, it was determined that the Saviour should assume the nature of the race that was to be saved, and should be born of a virgin mother. But who was the mother? From what family was she selected? Which of the royal daughters of earth was worthy to give birth to the promised Messiah? Was the choice made from the family of the Roman emperor? or of the kings innumerable who were his allies or tributaries? No: the mother of Jesus was neither queen nor princess. Was she then of noble race, numbered among the titled and wealthy of society? She was indeed of high and even royal extraction, in so far as centuries before her ancestors had been the monarchs of Judah and Israel, but as to her immediate and proximate relatives, they were probably all obscure and poor. Nothing definite is known of the early worldly position of Mary, the mother of Jesus; but as she married-a