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the love of God must be real, and sincere, must be enduring, or it is nothing worth. You are not asked to let your hearts flame with a sudden emotion, you are not bound to have any fixed or stipulated quantity of love to God; but whatever your degree in this grace may be, it must be, I mean must exist.

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And neither has the love of your neighbour those difficulties which the irreligious man will jestingly cast in your way, firebrands to scorch you from your path. Only be constant in prayer and in feeding at all occasions on the Body and Blood of your SAVIOUR, earnestly looking for His Grace to be with you, and the unevennesses will be smoothed, and one by one you will find that the evil passions which have opposed you and turned your hearts away from looking affectionately on your fellow creatures, will fall before you, and leave you what and where you would be, the followers of your SAVIOUR in His strait and narrow way. The world will still go on round us in the pursuance of its baneful lusts, men will still be causing and

continuing schisms in the Church, will be hateful and hating one another; we ourselves may be persecuted and slandered, as indeed we are, for the sake of the Faith, which was once, and once only, delivered to the Saints; we may be reviled, buffeted, cursed: but we must not be like them; "when they revile we must not revile again;❞ we must show that we have not thus learned our duty in CHRist Jesus; that we are ready to suffer all, and yet, in obedience to His will, and in the exercise of our strict subjection, to love our enemies, to bless them that curse us, to do good to those who hate us, to pray for them that despitefully use us and persecute us; and all in the full infallible certainty that in so doing we are, according to CHRIST'S promise, the "children of our FATHER which is in Heaven," while here on earth, and that we shall be so in His Kingdom hereafter which is eternal, world without end. Amen.

SERMON XV.

BOLDNESS.

EPHES. iii. 12.

In Whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the Faith of Him.

I need hardly tell you Who this is, in Whom, says the Apostle, " we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of HIM," namely, CHRIST JESUS Our LORD; but it is not perhaps every one who knows what is the boldness and access with confidence which Christians may have, because they do not know, really, what is the faith of, or in HIM.

Now suppose we were here in the world with the law of Moses done away, and therefore all outward sacrifices for sin taken out of our hands: suppose, as we well know must be the case, we were guilty of sins without number, and were

every day making the number greater: suppose in this situation we had no SAVIOUR, no hope of a Mediator or Intercessor between GoD and us, what must we think would our prospects be?

Knowing as we should that God was good above all possibility of overlooking sin, that He was just too and would give to every man his due, that He was allseeing and could see what was every man's due; what could we do but tremble and look forward to the reward of lives according to our iniquities, and that we should be dealt with according to our sins?

But, suppose in spite of this knowledge some man among us were to pretend to have no fear, and to be able to approach GOD of himself, what would such boldness avail him?

Now, I have made this dreadful, and we may thankfully say, this impossible supposition, in order to prepare you to receive with more understanding, and greater thankfulness, the meaning of the Apostle's declaration, namely, that the only way in

which we can have boldness and access with confidence to our FATHER which is in Heaven, is by the Faith of HIM, JESUS CHRIST.

Boldness, as used by the Apostle here, means in part, boldness of speech, by which Christians confess that they are Christians in the world, and defend the Religion of their LORD and Master with their lips to the best of their power. So that a man who is a servant of GOD will not only serve HIM in his own heart, and worship HIм in spirit and in truth to himself, but will at all times be ready to declare his faith openly, and put to silence those who gainsay the truth of the Gospel which he knows and feels. Many indeed are the occasions on which he can thus exercise boldness, and be of help to the cause of the Church of CHRIST1.

But there is another meaning of boldness which probably the Apostle chiefly intended here, namely, boldness in ap

1 See Sermon ii. p. 33.

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