attained to that holiness and righteousness which ought to be the mark of Christians. Beware of slumbering or halting on the road. Beware of mistaking words and professions for christian faith, a decent behaviour for christian practice, the outward form for the inward spirit. It is not enough for Christ's soldiers to stand their ground, and maintain their stedfastness: they must press forward and gain more ground. It is not enough for them not to fall from grace: they must make new shoots upward, and grow in grace; and this can only be done by growing in religious knowledge also.

Such, my brethren, is the purport of St. Peter's farewell charge to us: and surely the last words of so great an apostle must be well deserving of our most serious attention. Let me beg you therefore to give me that attention while I try to set before you, what is meant by growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The grace of God, in its most general sense, stands for his favour and loving-kindness. When we pray for it, we pray God to bestow his favour upon us. But in the New Testament the words are applied more especially to that most wonderful and chiefest instance of God's love, his seeking to save and restore a guilty world through the blood of his Son. Herein, above all, was the grace

and goodness of God displayed to us in its whole power, in that, when we had strayed from God, God sent his own Son to lead us back to him,—in that, when expiation and atonement for sin were required by his justice and holiness, the Lamb of God came and offered up himself as a sacrifice in our stead, in that, to give us a new heart, a heart capable of loving and obeying the Father, the holy and eternal Spirit is waiting to take up his abode within us, to fill our souls with the comfort of his presence, and to make our very bodies his temples. These, my brethren, are the blessings which God is holding out to you, and to me, and to every one who is called by the name of Christ. He invites you to them, as to a rich feast, in that noble passage of Isaiah; (lv. 1.) "Ho every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters; and he that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price." No invitation can be more bountiful, or more pressing: none therefore can be more gracious. It has the grace of condescension, for the Sovereign of the universe to abase himself so as to invite, and even to entreat his creatures, as he does in many passages of Scripture, where he almost

forces them to come in and see the dainties he has prepared for them. It has the grace of bounteousness, to make ready so nourishing and rich a ban

quet for all who will be at the pains of going to it. To this we must add that most necessary and precious gift, or favour, or grace, (for the name does not matter, so you understand the thing,) the grace of mercy. When a king grants a pardon to his rebellious subjects, it is called an act of grace. Well then may the universal pardon which the King of heaven has freely offered to his rebellious subjects and children, if they will only come to him and accept it, well may a pardon joined with so much bounteousness and condescension be called preeminently the grace of God.

To be in a

From this explanation of grace it is easy to gather what the being in a state of grace means, and also to perceive when it may be truly said of any one that he is in such a state. state of grace is to be at peace with God: it is to have come in and surrendered ourselves, as it were, and confessed our guilt; and having acknowledged our rebellion, and thrown ourselves on his promised mercy, and pleaded the death and merits of his Son as our only ground of pardon, it is to shew our grateful sense of the forgiveness vouchsafed to us by living thenceforward as becomes the people of God. This is being in a state of grace. For though God's pardon is unbought and not to be bought by any human means, though they who buy it are to buy it without money and without

price, still it is not unconditional. He pardons all who come to receive their lives at his hand, but none else. If a man will not come to God, his sin and guilt cleave to him. When pardon is granted to a rebel, on his surrendering himself to the king's officers, and delivering up his arms, and promising to behave better, it stands to reason that the pardon will hold good only so long as the promise is kept. If the man breaks his word, and commits fresh outrages against the king's authority, his life is once more forfeit. This, which is true of earthly pardons, is equally true of heavenly. Every one who lives in sin, is living at enmity with God. He is living in rebellion against the ruler of the world; and so long as he continues in such rebellion, he is shut out by his own wilful obstinacy and perverseness from the free pardon which God has offered to us. It is impossible to be in a state of grace, so long as we abide in any known sin, whether of body or mind, whether of habit or passion, whether of society or selfishness. Of every sin, and every kind of sin, understand clearly, that the indulging in it

is a bar which must shut you out from a state of grace. They who are in a state of grace have at least set their faces toward the heavenly city: they have passed the strait gate, and have entered on the narrow way that leads to life.

It is not enough however for a person to be in a state of grace, unless he afterward persevere and grow in grace. Now what is meant by growth in grace? It means that the beginning of a journey is not the end of it. It means that we must advance in holiness, that, instead of resting on our oars, and priding ourselves on our present small attainments, we must press forward, giving all diligence, as St. Peter expresses it in a former passage of this Epistle, that we may add to our faith virtue, or energy, and to energy knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness universal charity. Here is a goodly list of qualities wherein to cultivate growth in grace, and to go on all our lives advancing from grace to grace and from strength to strength.

But why does the apostle call it growth? Perhaps to remind us that the improvement he exhorts us to is not a mere mechanical task, which a man can begin and finish for himself; but that it is more like the gradual and secret workings of nature, where, though it is man's duty to dig and plough, and plant and sow, and weed and water, yet, after all is done, God alone giveth the increase; and unless he is pleased to bless the labours of the husbandman, they will have been