nations, and acknowledge no will, no rule of conduct, but his alone. My brethren, how is this with you? Never can you be saved by Christ, if you be not under the yoke of Christ. Are there any who refuse so to be? He calls them his enemies. "Those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring them hither, and slay them before me." (Luke xix. 27.) Inquire, then, of yourselves, Am I thus yielding myself to the Lord? Is his law that by which I am ordering my spirit and conduct? "Lord," said the proud persecutor, the instant that divine grace touched his heart, (and it is the language of every heart into which divine grace finds entrance,) "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" Reflect, for a moment, what is the bliss of angels and archangels; those happy spirits, that excel in all the glory of holiness and goodness. From age to age they "do his commandment, hearkening to the voice of his word." (Ps. ciii. 20.) And are they without understanding? Is there meanness in their spirits? Is it any small excellence in Jehovah that brings those exalted beings, themselves radiant in glory, on their faces before God? O may the Lord affect our minds with these considerations! May he dispose us to yield ourselves to his authority, and from our inmost souls to say, "Hallowed be thy name, thy will be done."

(2.) They separate themselves from an evil world. From the beginning, ever since men began "to call upon (or rather, to be called by) the name of the Lord," has a distinction existed between the church and the world,-the sons of God and the sons of men. (Gen. iv. 26, and vi. 2.) See note 12. But it was more peculiarly marked in God's separation of Israel, as a people, to himself. "Get thee out of thy country," said he to Abraham, the father of that people, "and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee." He could not serve God acceptably, but by breaking connexion with all that had hitherto been dear to him. When he arrived in Canaan, "by faith he sojourned in it as in a strange country;" he confessed himself "a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth," who had no wish to settle in it. When Jacob, in after times, went down into Egypt, Joseph, though high in the court of Pharaoh, studiously avoided the promotion of his brethren, and so the blending of his people with the Egypt tians. "When Pharaoh shall call you, and shall say, What is your occupation? ye shall say, Thy servants' trade hath been about cattle from our youth." And why say so? "For every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians." (Gen. xlvi. 33, 34.) Thus he took effectual means, pursuant to the purpose of God, for drawing a line of sepa

;

ration between the Egyptians and Israel. Follow them in their history; this feature of it is still the same. They must go out of Egypt to sacrifice and in the wilderness they receive of God, statutes, and ordinances, which were expressly intended to be a "wall of partition" between them and the nations. "I am the Lord your God, which have separated you from other people. . . And ye shall be holy unto me, for I the Lord am holy: and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine." (Lev. xx. 24, 26.) Accordingly, God, by the mouth of Balaam, selects this as characteristic of them. "Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations." (Numb. xxiii. 9.) And, to this very hour, amidst all the vicissitudes of that extraordinary people, has this prophecy been accurately accomplished.

The same is true, in a still higher sense, of God's spiritual people. Whatever was once their connexion with a world that "lieth in wickedness," they are now distinguished from it, in the whole tenor of their pursuits, and current of their affections. They accord not with its sentiments; they have no longer a relish for its pleasures; they affect not its society, its honours, its wealth, its grandeur. They will have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them, whatever be the specious names

We

under which their deformity may be veiled. Do any ask, What has wrought the change? answer, Belief of the truth. "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." They believe, what others will not, that "if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." (1 John ii. 15.) That the "friendship of the world is enmity with God." (James iv. 4.) That "Christ died for us," for this very end, "that he might deliver us from this present evil world.” (Gal. i. 4.) O that men who call themselves Christians, yea, some who surname themselves the people of God, would consider this! It was not the heathen world, but the Jewish world, unconverted professors of the true religion, of which Jesus testified "that the works thereof were evil." (John vii. 7.) And this testimony is equally true of the Christian world, so called; the great mass of which have nothing of Christianity beyond the name and outward forms of it. Their ways, and God's ways, are as opposite as light and darkness, Christ and Belial, heaven and hell: the two are utterly irreconcileable. "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."

Further, the child of God believes a "judgment to come," of this world, when "the wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the people that forget God;" (Ps. ix. 17;) and, therefore, knowingthe terrors of the Lord, like Noah, he is busied, not

as others, with eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, but in working out his own salvation: like Lot, he flees out of Sodom, content to leave all he once valued behind;-to lose his life (as men count it) in this world, if he may but find it in life eternal.

But it is not only, or chiefly, the warnings and threatenings of God, that prevail with the Christian to forsake the world. He has heard that gracious voice of God speaking to him in his word, and saying, "I will be to you a God." And this promise he is persuaded of, and has embraced. This does more than drive him-it draws him with cords of love-attracts him from those "dry places" in which hitherto he has been 'seeking rest and finding none," and gives him rest in God. Once let God be known in this sweet character, and the world has lost its ascendancy for ever: and therefore the infinite wisdom of God, ever grounding his precepts upon motives that shall be sufficient for obedience, first sets this blessedness before us, "I will dwell in you, and walk in you, and will be your God," and, then, knowing his advantage, (so to speak,) he presses home upon us that reasonable appeal, "Wherefore, come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing." (2 Cor. vi. 17.)

And this, let me observe, presents the character