the wreck of earthly things, and the agitations, and confusions, and troubles, and disorders, of every earthly convulsion. Márk the language of the Psalmist when sheltered in this refuge, when safely lodged in this strong hold: "God," he cries, "God is our refuge and strength, therefore will we not fear though the earth be removed, and though the waters be carried into the midst of the sea. Or finally, does the poor prisoner shrink back from the prospect of death, and does he dread and shudder at the last enemy of man? Even here, even against this difficulty has Christ provided a remedy; for he has extracted the sting of death; he has despoiled the enemy, and caused him to lose his power of injury, and become but the opening of the prison door to the blessings, and life, and joy, of Christ.

But in order to render available this strong hold, it must be actually entered. All other refuges and sources of relief must be relinquished and abandoned. All other posts (to carry on the metaphor) must be forsaken, and relinquished as untenable, and the sinner must fly to Christ, and him alone, as a refuge. As Noah of old fled for refuge to the ark when the overflowing waters were about to cover the earth: as the man-slayer was directed to fly to the city of refuge lest the avenger of blood should overtake him: or as Lot fled when the brimstone and fire overwhelmed the cities of the plain: so in like manner must the trembling sinner fly to Christ: every other refuge is a refuge of lies: he must come and repose his all in Christ alone.

Need I remind you, dear brethren, how loath the heart of man is to do this; how readily man catches at this and that, and the other earthly support, and clings to that as his refuge? How unwilling he is to renounce them all, and discard them all, and cast them all away, and fly to Christ alone. The struggle is sometimes long, the struggle is sometimes severe. The man clings to the earth; earthly ties and earthly hopes entwine themselves about him, and he cannot resolve to quit them. The constraining influence of divine grace can alone cause the prisoners of hope to turn to this strong hold. When the Spirit of God begins to work within, when the power of the Holy Ghost begins to open the eyes, and awaken the heart, and turn the soul, then it is that the sinner begins to see the insufficiency of his earthly supports: then it is that he is driven off, first from one post and then from another, until he relinquishes them all, and by faith lays hold on Christ. Here is the open door: here he clings with firm, and safe, and secure, grasp; he rejects all his vain confidence, and cries with Israel of old," Asshur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses: neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, Ye are our gods: for in thee" pre-eminently, in thee distinctively, "the fatherless findeth mercy.'

And now am I speaking to any who feel uninterested in this momentous subject; any who are still exposed to the perils of eternal punishment, and yet have never sought, have never inquired after any refuge? Allow me plainly, yet most affectionately, to speak to such. My subject, dear brethren, addresses you; it reminds you of your peril and it points out to you a way of escape. It calls you" prisoners;" perhaps you may be tempted to doubt the propriety of this application. You feel free and active; you deem yourselves at liberty; but are you really free? I say, are you really free? Look at these frail decaying bodies in which you are shut up: think of that propensity to sin which you must feel; reflect upon the shortness of life and the uncertainty of earthly hopes, and the nearness of eternity. You say that you are free; but I ask

can you calculate upon one single hour? You call yourselves the sons and daughters of liberty, and say, with the Jews of old, "We were never in bondage to any man:" and yet sin is enslaving you; and yet pleasure is engrossing you; and yet the world is chaining you down with its iron fetters, and preserving you in its powerful, its adamantine bonds.

And then, as to the future, what are your prospects? What security is there? You know not how soon your prison doors may be opened, and you led forth as a criminal to execution. You know not how soon you may cease to be a prisoner of hope, and become a prisoner of despair. O trifle not with the present season, trifle not with your present advantages: but now we invite you to Christ; now we call on you to wake from your slumber, and shake off your chain, and to seek after that liberty wherewith Christ makes his people free. "Turn you to the strong hold, ye prisoners of hope." Look not to this deluding world: rest not in the doubtful and insecure position: but now, while life lasts; now, while the door of mercy is open; now, while the gospel message is sounding in your ears; now, while we are privileged still to address you as prisoners of hope-O fly to the place of refuge: O take shelter in the arms of a gracious and almighty Saviour: O come and seek protection under the wings of mercy, and seek a refuge from the coming storm.

And to you, beloved brethren, who have fled for refuge, I need only say, Abide in it; keep close to Christ; suffer not Satan or the world to tempt you from your refuge, out of Christ. If you are only in him, nothing in time or eternity can hurt you. "There is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." Satan cannot hurt you; sin shall not have dominion over you. You have a refuge from every storm; you have a retreat from every tempest; you have a covert from every attack. Let your trials, and sorrows, and afflictions drive you nearer to Christ: let the very assaults of Satan only drive you closer to Christ: let the sense of the weakness and frailty of this earthly body, and these uncertain props, lead you to lean more simply, more entirely, more freely, more unreservedly on him. Prisoners ye are; but prisoners of hope. Soon shall you be released from the bondage of corruption: soon will this prison-house, this earthly tabernacle, be dissolved. Then, indeed, you will be confined awhile in the prison-house of the grave; but even there ye are prisoners of hope. The decaying remains of the Christian believer are the remains of a prisoner, but of a prisoner of hope. You descend into the narrow confines of the grave; but with a hope full of immortality. The voice of the archangel and the trump of God shall summon forth and call up the imprisoned dust, and then shall you be summoned to an unchanging state of immortal liberty and endless joy.

THE FULNESS OF THE GOSPEL

REV. J. HAMBLETON, A.M.

CHAPEL OF EASE, HOLLOWAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1835

"And I am sure that, when I come unto you, I shall come in the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ."-ROMANS, xv. 29.

WE are at length come, through the good providence of God, to the evening of the last Sunday in our ecclesiastical year. Next Sunday, if God permit, we enter on the animating topics connected with the second advent of Christ. To-night it may be good and profitable to endeavour to take a somewhat connected view of the various subjects brought before us from time to time under the ministry of the Gospel, and consider what is that "fulness of the Gospel" with which the Apostle desired, expected, and felt confident he should be able to visit the Christians at Rome. This subject may, with the blessing of God, be truly useful to all of us, to minister and to people. It may help the minister to consider that solemn question, which ought to come before his mind from time to time, Do I, as a minister, habitually desire to come among the people to whom I am sent, in the spirit in which Paul here declared he desired to visit the Christians at Rome? The same subject may help you, my Christian friends, to consider what use you make of that same Gospel of which the Apostle thus speaks.

Our subject was originally intended for a people to whom the Gospel of Christ was now no longer strange. They to whom he is writing his epistle, had heard the Gospel; many of them had received the Gospel, and were adorning it in their daily walk. Yet they all needed the Gospel still, both the written and the preached word. The Apostle had written to them a long and beautiful epistle, which contains one of the clearest and richest exhibitions of divine truth which can be found in the whole of the Sacred Volume; where you see that they who already knew the Gospel, have occasion still to study their Bibles, that their knowledge may be enlarged, and deepened, and expanded; yet still again and again in the course of it the Apostle expresses a most anxious desire to come personally among them in the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel, to open his own heart; to explain, in part or entirely, the divine message; to enlighten the ignorant, to stir up the careless, to encourage the timid, to strengthen the weak, to console, animate, and edify the true believer.

Such was his desire in wishing to visit the Church at Rome. To the eye of man by nature the Apostle's visit to that place may seem but a small event, a mere matter of chance, and to be of no great consequence whether he went or not: but to the eye of faith which, in the midst of seeming changes, sees wheel

within wheel at work, all guided by infinite wisdom, in perfect harmony to one great and glorious end-the Apostle's coming to Rome was connected with the fulness of the blessing of Christ's Gospel, and might prove a far more important event than any connected with the famous history of that city and empire: for the salvation of precious and immortal souls might be most deeply concerned, and though I hope we know and feel our immense inferiority to him, yet as we have the same Gospel to preach, the same mercy to set forth, and the promise that his grace should not stop at the apostles, but be granted to all his faithful ministers to the end of the world, we may, and ought, to feel that it may please our God to glorify himself in the weakness of the means he uses, to make us instruments in saving sinners from eternal misery, and so, in adding, if it may be, but one jewel more to the bright splendour of the diadem of the Messiah. I hope never to forget the advice which I once heard given in a sermon addressed to students in divinity: "Whenever you sit down to compose a sermon, never forget that the salvation of a soul for eternity may (under God) depend on that very sermon." The thought humbles while it encourages.

The spirit in which the Apostle was sure he should come to Rome is, then, our subject. It is one from which all of us have much to learn. We are too apt to take up with speculative views, a mere notion of the Gospel, and then to imagine we know it all. We are sometimes ready to compare what we hear with what we know already, instead of enlarging, deepening, and ramifying that knowledge into all its proper scriptural heads.

We must begin with the fulness of the misery of the lost, ruined state of sinful men: for these two points are intended to proceed together: the fulness of the blessing of Christ was designed to meet the fulness of the misery of lost, ruined men. If you stop and hesitate, as thousands do, at the one-at the fallen state of man-you cannot enter aright into the other. Though God is infinite, he does not, if I may so speak, waste the exertion of his perfections. Even at the Deluge, that mighty exertion of divine power, as soon as the object designed was accomplished, God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged. So if God has provided a "fulness of blessing" in the Gospel of Christ, I am quite sure there must have been a fulness of misery in the lost and ruined state of sinful men. Look first at our original corruption; what a fruitful source is that of moral depravity! What torrents of wickedness have flown, and are flowing, from that fountain of evil! Read, if you have doubts, what Scripture says of original sin: "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me :" "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one:" "The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born:" "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." We are by nature children of wrath." Then read the ninth article of your Church; see what is the doctrine of your own Church as to this point: " Original sin," it tells you, "is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore, in every person born into this world it deserveth God's wrath and damnation." Then read your own hearts: survey them, not in the deceitful mirror of your own opinions, but in the faithful mirror of God's word. Has all been pure, holy, spotless there? Have no corrupt desires, no unholy imaginations, no evil pro

pensities been found there? Your consciences give the answer. Then the doctrine of original sin is too true. There are no such unholy desires ever arising in the souls of men once truly delivered from original sin. This union continues till the house infected with this leprosy is pulled down; till they drop into the grave the sin-stained garments of the flesh and their souls, washed in the blood of Jesus, escape to heaven.

But original sin is not the only charge which the Bible brings against us; it is not the only one which "the fulness of the blessing of the Gospel of Christ" is designed to meet. Original sin in our nature, has broken out into actual sin in our lives. I do not, for I cannot, and if I could I would not, particularize all your sins: that will be work for God himself in another and a greater day than this, unless in that day they shall be all blotted out in the blood of the Lamb, and completely covered with his righteousness; though even then some have thought the mantle will be lifted up for a little time, and the sins brought to light magnify the riches of the grace of God in pardoning them. But however it may be then, the Gospel, with its fulness of blessing, finds you, and addresses you as sinners who have, again and again, in thought, word, and deed, rebelled against God. Take the holy law; how readest thou? "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind, and strength." Then inquire with yourselves, "Have I done this? Have I loved the Lord my God-the Lord as my God-with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength? If I love God, since God is a Spirit, I must love him for his spiritual character. And what is that? He is holy: do I love him for his holiness? He is just : do I love him for his justice, for his purity, for his omniscience, for his power?" Then the law continues: "And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." How strict is this law! It requires us to love our neighbour as ourselves: then there is no room left in the law for all those selfish acts which man's notice cannot reach, and which man, therefore, pronounces innocent. If not satisfied yet as to personal sinfulness as a transgressor, take the commandments of God one by one: consider their meaning, their wide, spiritual, holy meaning, as explained by Christ himself; which meaning was not newly introduced by him, as some may imagine. The last of all the commandments, "Thou shalt not covet," gives a wide, and close, and spiritual meaning to all the others. If the commandment says, "Thou shalt not covet," then the desire to commit fraud, or injury, or unholiness, in any shape, is a trangression of the law: and what is that but sin?

Then, if you will but seriously consider, you will find that sin appears not only in the nature, but in the very actual life of every one amongst you. Our sins, we shall discover, are more in number than the hairs of our head. Were each of us to count, honestly and truly, all the sins we have committed, we should see the next Sabbath morning dawn on us before we finished the enumeration. Then how many have we forgotten; how many are occasionally by circumstances called to our minds! How innumerable must the whole mass of all our sins appear in the eyes of Him who has seen them all, to whom all things are open!

We have not yet reached the full extent of the wants and misery of man. Sin deserves condemnation. "The wages of sin is death:" "The soul that sinneth it shall die." This is no new law; it was given to Adam; it has been repeated again and again. We see the temporal part of the sentence fulfilled