being cast away. Does either doctrine need Scripture testimony? I know not how a man can read his Bible, and deny that both are to be found in almost every page of it. They are coupled, as in this text. The one is urged as the best reason of the other, as in the whole Epistles to the Romans and Ephesians, and as in the verse," Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do." Every prophecy in the Bible contains them both the sure infallible knowledge and decree of God which will surely bring the predicted thing to pass, the unconscious agents, whose piety, or impiety, whose obedience or wilfulness, turns to His praise, and brings about His purpose. Shall we attempt to reconcile them? Alas! a man must know but little of his own weakness and ignorance who attempts it. Can we reconcile eternity and time? Can we understand how God created any thing, where there was nothing? Can we understand how He created a free agent; free to obey or disobey; free to introduce or propagate evil in His world? If it has pleased God, in the midst of His own presential eternity, to create a duration,-if thereby drawing out into succession and consequence a train of gradual developements, He has created causes and effects, given scope for contingency, forecasting, memory,-if He has placed therein a multitude of free created agents; free to complicate the conditions under which they are to act; yet all their wanderings,

their recoveries, and the issues of them, eternally foreknown, and all but the evil that their wilfulness introduces and perpetrates, foredetermined; shall we presume to claim the power of reconciling His knowledge with our freedom; His supreme authority with our uncontrolled agency? To us, involved in visible and contingent things, conscious of possessing somewhat of free power, necessitated by our very nature to be ever using it, ever actively advancing in good or evil, the very obviousness of the one view, forced as it is upon us by all that we see and do, naturally disqualifies us from reconciling the two together. If we had the faculties to do so, we do not possess the situation from whence we could use them.

Indeed, the only question of any real importance to us herein, is this: why is the Apostle not content with urging us to use our own endeavours,— why does he so continually put forward the other view of God's decree and agency? The following considerations may help us to answer this question. 1st. That it is really true that God's hand and power are exercised in all things, overruling subordinate agents, devising, furthering, executing His purposes, so that though we cannot reconcile the independency of the first and second causes, yet it would not be the truth if either were concealed from us. 2dly. To abash human presumption, which is too apt to believe that it alone is the cause of every thing which is done around it. For this purpose St. Paul

uses the topic of God's decree, against the national presumption of the Jews, in the Epistle to the Romans, shewing how the selection of their nation was entirely of God's free pleasure—against individual presumption, in various passages; for men need to be reminded that they have nothing but what they have received of God's gift. 3dly. To give comfort. This is, I apprehend, the most common use of this topic in St. Paul's writings. In times of persecution and distress, when an infant Church was surrounded with deadly enemies, losing perhaps daily its most eminent members by martyrdom;-when there was indeed occasion of heavenly consolation for those to whom of all men their earthly prospect was "most miserable," St. Paul was wont to urge to the half-dispirited yet willing converts the faithfulness of God;-to assure them that the unchangeable purpose and promise of God were pledged to their salvation, if they fainted not; -that earthly adversaries might kill the body,that the kings of the earth might stand up, and their rulers take counsel together, but that the eternal Lord and His Anointed were on their side. This and the last consideration together will, I think, explain to us the use made of this topic in the Epistle to the Romans; the eighth chapter of which is the sublimest piece of Christian consolation in suffering that was ever penned, as the ninth chapter is the most unanswerable overthrow of the pride of national privilege. In like manner, if we

consider the opposition which the establishment of the Christian religion met with at Ephesus, the "holy city"" of the great goddess Diana, and the image that fell down from Jupiter; and the "labour and the patience" of the Ephesian Church, commemorated in the letter of the Apocalypse, and the history of Apollos, and “them who say they are Apostles, and are not," we may not unreasonably suppose that comfort, and the destruction of Jewish pride, were the objects which St. Paul had in view in introducing this topic so prominently in the Epistle to the Ephesians.

And so, from knowing the objects with which St. Paul urges this topic, we may learn the uses to which we ourselves ought to turn it. It is useful to discourage pride; and therefore surely not (as it is too often applied) to minister encouragement to pride. He surely mistakes the Apostle's doctrine, who thinks more highly of himself, who contrasts himself more favourably with other men, who is induced to value himself upon possessing privilege, or who in any degree rests upon privilege, on the strength of the doctrine of God's decree. For the Apostle applies it to destroy these very feelings; and that man makes no progress, who only substitutes one ground of pride and selfsufficiency for another. It is useful to give comfort, and therefore surely not (as it is too often applied)

to produce despair. It is a doctrine never used, as far as I know, to awaken sinners to repentance, always to encourage believers to perseverance. So too our Article tells us, that while the godly consideration of this doctrine is full of comfort to godly persons, it is one full of dangers (of despair and recklessness) to those who are carnal; meaning thereby that it is not well that it should be addressed or urged to such persons. Therefore it should be cautiously and scantily used. To a suffering and persecuted Church, or to an advanced and eminent Christian individual, the Apostle's example will warrant us in using it. To a mixed congregation, to an unawakened sinner, to a Christian of immature faith and holiness, in whom grace is only yet beginning to struggle effectually against the strength of the flesh, neither St. Paul's example, nor the passage of our Article, seem to mark it as appropriate. No; it is not to furnish a sign or mark whereby some men may know themselves to be in God's favour, and others, not in it, that this doctrine is revealed to us; it is in order to be a true and heavenly comfort to those who by other signs may reasonably believe themselves to be led by the Spirit of God. It is the doctrine of God's faithfulness to those who shall persevere in His love. To us, presented by believing parents at the font of His Baptism, taught His will, surrounded by opportunities of using the means of grace, there can be no possible ground for believing ourselves excluded from that sentence, except our want of faith, love, and holiness; no pos