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in goods, and have need of nothing." O ye brethren of mine, fellow-labourers in the vineyard of Christ, fellowservants in the household of God, hear the voice of your good Shepherd, and see his hand in those trials which are ready to come upon you, in the prospect of which ye are even now in dismay. When he shall arise, O ye shepherds of Britain, and smite your corn, and your wine, and your oil, whether by the word of civil government or by the hand of lawless violence; when your barn floors shall be consumed by the midnight incendiary, and your houses shall be rifled at noon-day by your much neglected people, take it in good part, take it as the chastisement of your own and your fathers' want of watchfulness over the land, of your own and your fathers' unfaithfulness to God and to the Head of the church. Be zealous; serve God, and kiss the Son. Be faithful; at length cease from your wine and your strong drink; cease from your pleasant and cieled houses; cease from your academical groves, and recesses of studious ease; gird up the loins of your minds; take into your hands the shepherd's crook, and go forth and feed the flock of his pasture. Be done, be done with your pulpit essays, your tasteful compositions, your learned disquisitions: stir up the elements of human heartedness, and speak from the heart, to the hearts of the people; awake, awake the Holy Ghost within you, and plead for God; lift up your voice aloud like a trumpet, and sound an alarm. Go in, go in, among the infuriated people, and divert, with words of truth and grace, the tempest of their indignation. Go in, go in, to the rich men of your flocks and parishes, and require it of them, as they would be saved, to dispense bread to the hungry, and clothes to the naked; go in, go in, ye heads of the church, unto the nobles, and princes, and monarch of the land, and tell them of the nation's condition in the sight of a holy God. Why sit ye silent in your palaces, why throng ye the gates of ambition, why court ye the possessors of preferment; why this self-seeking when the name of Jesus. is ready to be rejected, and the very covenant of the land to be broken. O but, if ye will not bestir yourselves; if ye will not arise to the help of the Lord against the mighty; if ye will not now listen to the voice of wisdom, crying aloud in the street; if ye will not be zealous and repent,

then also will he "laugh at your calamity, and mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind."

I have a solemn conviction, which daily groweth upon my mind, that the churches in these lands are about to be cast into the furnace of affliction, because the rulers of the church are unfaithful to their trusts, and from promoting truth and godliness, have for a long time set their faces against the servants of truth and godliness, and taken in hand to promote friends and favourites; men of family, and men of respectability, men of mere learning and natural endowments. And I perceive discipline perverted in the church, to the vexation and hindrance of the truth, as it is in Jesus Christ, to the discountenance, and discourage. ment, and prohibition of those who are faithful in the same. I perceive withal that the servants of the Most High God, whom the authorities of the church are troub ling and tormenting, watching and suspecting, and in all ways dishonouring, have learned a deeper lesson of reverence for authorities ecclesiastical and civil, than the Reformers possessed, and that they will not resist the power, nor carry themselves insubordinate thereto. And what then remaineth? If religion is not to perish in the land, there only remaineth one thing possible to be done; which is, that God should profane his own ordinance, as I believe he will do; that he should cast down these selfseeking dignitaries, and subvert these evil authorities; that he should take away their houses and lands, and all in which they prided themselves, and, having weakened their hands, let forth his imprisoned truth, and send his heralds of salvation from their closed parishes, through the length and breadth of the land, to save whom he will save from the general wreck. Through these only true churchmen, these only true dignitaries, the men who can face king and nobles, and furious people, he will build again the walls of Zion, if rebuilded they are to be. Be zealous, therefore, and repent, ye slothful shepherds of Great Britain and Ireland; for there is a day of glory at hand to the faithful, a day of dishonour to the faithless. O ye builders in the house of God, both you and your works are ready to be cast into such a furnace as no counterfeit can withstand, no stubble, nor hay, nor wood,

but only silver and gold, and precious stones. Come then come all ye poor ministers of religion, and ye rich ones, be ashamed of your riches, and come, come buy honour of him, fine gold tried in the furnace, that ye may be rich. Remember these words of the Lord, "As many as I love I rebuke and chasten; be zealous therefore, and repent." 6. The Appeal and Attitude of Love.

We come now to the most tender and pathetic part of this, and of all the epistles, expressed in these words: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me (iii. 20). It might be made a question whether this verse belongeth properly to the second or the third division of the epistle; to Christ's charge to the angel, or to the Spirit's promise unto all. The language of it is not personal, like that of the preceding verses; but general, like that of the verse which follows after: and for this reason we might prefer to connect it with the Spirit's promise, rather than with Christ's charge. On the other hand, it wanteth the constant introduction of the words, "to him that overcometh," which in other cases hath put the mark between the second and third parts of each epistle; and this reason, as well as its natural and beautiful sequence to the former parts of the charge, hath determined me to treat of it under this head of our Lecture.

The expression, "Behold I stand at the door," carrieth the mind back to several parts of Scripture. First, to that famous exhortation of James concerning the latter days, wherein woe is denounced upon the rich men of the earth, because they had heaped up riches to the impoverishing of the poor; yea, and gathered them together by grinding the faces of the poor, and holding back from them the proper reward of their labour, whose groanings under oppression, the cry of whose wants, and the pleading of whose rights were entering into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Meanwhile his representatives upon the earth, his stewards, the rich and the noble, instead of imitating his pity and compassion, or fulfilling the obligations which possessions and riches entail upon men, do live in pleasure and in wantonness, and nourish their hearts as in a day of slaughter;- yea, condemn and kill the just, though he

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maketh no resistance. In such a time, answering in most of its features to this time, and in its ecclesiastical features well answering to the character of the Laodicean church, the brethren are called upon to be patient, until the coming of the Lord, and over again are exhorted to be patient and establish their hearts," for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh." And again, lest their hard and evil plight should sour and embitter their temper, and lead them to smite one another, he exhorteth him in these words: "Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned. Behold the Judge standeth before the door (James v. 7). I cannot peruse this sketch of the Apostle James, which is expressly said to be for the last days, without being fully convinced that the original is now under our eyes, in these days in which we live; when the accumulations of wealth are enormous, and the masses of abject poverty are likewise enormous, beyond the example of any former time of the Christian church. Such an evil state of things may be found in the history of Rome, during the reign of the Cæsars, and in Persia before the Grecian conquest, and is still to be found in heathen lands; but the Gospel was given to do away with that as well as the other maladies of society; and behold the love of riches hath prevailed over the Spirit of the Gospel. Christendom, and especially this island, is come into the very condition from which the precepts and institutions of the church were intended to keep mankind. In every city you have the quarter of palaces, and the quarter of hovels; and the pulpit is silent against such iniquity and rich men say, It is my own; and the servant of God dare not answer, Thou speakest a lie, it is God's. And so they drop their shillings and their pounds into the lap of charity, when they should drop their hundreds and their thousands. Yea, verily, I will speak the truth, the richest and noblest congregations in this city are the least charitable. And are they the richer for it? No, but the poorer. It goes to gratify vanity and lust; it goes to keep up pomp and state; it goes to feed fat the heart for a day of slaughter. Ah me! there will be such a day of reckoning upon rich London as will pay off the scores of a century. The two extremes will meet, and the vilest of its people will yet revel in the palaces of its nobles. And

what do we, we watchmen of the city? Why do we not speak out? Because we love feasting and getting, and ourselves figure our little part amidst the circles of fashion and assemblies of gaiety. Oh what a sin! and God also will reckon with us, and it is near for to come, and the Judge standeth at the door.

Another passage forcibly brought to my mind by the expression," Behold I stand at the door," is written in the xiiith chapter of the book of Mark, where the Lord having set forth in order a large discourse concerning his coming, concludeth it with an exhortation to watch; which he enforceth by a short parable, containing, as I think, the original of the language in our text. "For the Son of Man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch. Watch ye therefore; for ye know not when the master of the house cometh; at even, or at mid-night, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning. Lest coming suddenly, he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch (Mark xiii. 34-37). Christ having been long absent from his church, doth to the Laodicean, or last stage of it, present himself again, and knocks for admission into his own house, "Behold I stand at the door and knock;" but the servants of the house have all betaken themselves to eating and drinking, and revelling and fighting in their cups, saying one to another, Behold the Lord delayeth his coming. And so the porter is found off his post, and the whole house in disorder, little dreaming whose knock it is they hear, no, nor hearing it even ; and there he standeth and knocketh, for loth is he to break open the house and consume them in his hot displeasure. He will rather stand and lift up his voice and make it to be heard, that some, haply wiser and more faithful than the rest, may come and welcome him back again to his rightful habitation. Once he came unto his own, and his own received him not; again shall he come unto his own, and his own shall not be ready to welcome him. There is however a season, during which he will stand waiting and knocking, as it were lingering upon the confines of creation, and sending through its regions shrill and loud summons to prepare for his coming. The sea

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