of the Church, is obvious from innumerable declarations and circumstances of his history. Why, if his dissolution was not voluntary, why was it endured? Where was the craft which could have ensnared him? where the force which could have prevailed against him, had he chosen to escape or to resist? Have you forgotten how often, until his hour had fully come, he baffled, with his calm omnipotence, the efforts of his enemies to arrest and to destroy him? -how, even at last, when, with the traitor at their head, the armed men came out with swords and staves to take him, he had but to speak one tranquil word, and, smitten with its majesty, more than with all the thunderbolts of battle, the veterans of Rome's all-conquering empire went staggering backwards to the earth ?-how, when he stood upon the very threshold of his final agony, he assured his trembling disciples, that he had only to pray the Father, and legions, twelve and more, of the celestial would have come flashing down on steeds of lightning to the rescue? And then, how deeply is the spontaneous character of his passion marked in the circumstances of the closing scene itself! When he was taken from prison and from judgment," and "as a lamb was led to the slaughter,"-how meekly did he ascend the fatal hill, without remonstrance, without opposition, though persuasion dwelt upon his lips, and omnipotence slumbered in his arm!-how patiently did he endure that ghastly death, though all

the torn sensibilities of his nature called to him, with a louder voice than the taunting multitude, "Come down from the cross, thou Son of God !"-how resolutely did he decline to be spared one pang of the appointed suffering, when he put aside the offered draught of wine and myrrh, designed to blunt the edge of pain, lest it should overcloud his soul's clearminded agony !—and, finally, how strikingly did he proclaim that he died, not as sufferers on the accursed tree were wont to die, by the slow decline of nature's powers as life ebbed languidly away, but by a voluntary act resigning his soul into his Father's hands, when, to show that all his natural powers were yet entire, at the moment when he saw that enough had been endured, and the great expiation was complete, he "cried with a loud voice, and," in the wellselected words of the Evangelist, " yielded up the ghost."-" No man taketh my life from me; I lay it down of myself!"

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What was the motive, then, which produced in the Redeemer's mighty soul this more than heroic willingness to die,-to die with added circumstances of wo, in comparison of which the mere pang of dissolution might be accounted ecstasy? It was not, you will believe, any absolute delight in agony,-any abstract indifference to pain. All the facts of our Saviour's life demonstrate, on the other hand, how keenly-sensitive a humanity he bare,-how exquisitely strung with all those trembling chords of sen

sibility by which anguish vibrates to the soul; nor are there any portions of his history more affecting than those in which we are admitted to behold the struggle which the natural recoilings of humanity maintained against the conquering energy of his firm purpose and his steadfast will. But what was that which thus nerved his purpose, and in his human heart made his will triumphant over his desire ? It was the might,-in his bosom the omnipotence of love. Oh! how well does that victorious love deserve the eulogy which the mystic spouse herself bestows on it!" Thou hast bound me as a seal upon thy heart,—as a signet on thine arm; for love is strong as death,-its ardour unquenchable as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire,-its flame a flame of Jehovah. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the torrents drown it." They tried to quench his love, the multitude of angry waters. They tried to drown it, the might of the torrent-floods. The sorrows of death compassed him, the floods of the ungodly came round about him. The sorrows of hell compassed him about, the pains of death prevented him." Many waters came in upon his soul,-a wrathful baptism rushed down upon his head from heaven,-and "all God's billows and his waves went over him." But still the sacred flame survived, and by its own intense vitality burned on unquenchable in the heart of the enclosing seas, till it emerged at last from that dark

ocean of tempestuous proof, an orient orb of splendour, and in its sudden and victorious light the universe was glad.

It is with great regret, my brethren, that I find myself precluded from proceeding, for the present, in the special illustration of this overflowing and exuberant text. We should have found an ample subject of most instructive and most animating meditation in the topics that remain, the blessed effects resulting to the Church from the love and sacrifice of Jesus in her progressive sanctification here,-in her consummated perfection hereafter. In the mean time, let it suffice, without any lengthened illustration, to observe, that the grand leading benefit which the love of the Redeemer prompted him to seek, and which his sufferings and sacrifice were intended to procure for his beloved Church, was holiness; that the primary part of that "so great salvation which is in Jesus Christ with everlasting glory," is her restoration to moral excellence and spiritual beauty, begun on earth and perfected in heaven. I fear we are too apt in our habitual conceptions,—I am sure it is too much the tendency of our theological discussions,―to reverse the scriptural order of rank between the two leading blessings of the Gospel,-our pardon and our purification. We are too ready to reckon the latter something subordinate to the former, to value sanctification chiefly as the evidence of justification,

-holiness as the proof and the pledge of pardon. Let us learn from this, and innumerable passages besides, to estimate more justly this invaluable blessing, as the primary benefit of the Christian salvation, as in itself the flower and crown of what is good, and glorious, and desirable to man,-as the supreme and final end to which, in reference to the Church, the whole deliverance accomplished by the love and by the death of Jesus tends. Therefore it was, that, having loved the Church, he gave himself for it, with the immediate view, no doubt, that he might make atonement for the sins of all believers, and secure their pardon in believing, but for the ulterior, and we may say, yet higher end, that, being justified, they might be sanctified,—that he might have it in his power, consistently with the claims of his Father's justice, and holiness, and truth, to confer on them his unerring and purifying Spirit,-to pour on the polluted brows of his now ransomed Church the mystic baptism of the Holy Ghost,-to bathe her soiled and tainted soul in the laver of regeneration, the fountain of celestial virtues, which he hath opened for sin and for uncleanness. He "gave himself for the church that he might sanctify and cleanse it, by the washing of water through the word," by the purifying power of the celestial Spirit operating through the truth as his appointed and appropriate instrument. Meanwhile, though holiness be thus a blessing of inestimable worth, such