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RELIGION IN THE HEART.

As years roll over us, and as our delusive expectations from earth and time slowly melt away, the complaint is very often heard that the world is growing worse. The truth is, that we are only then beginning to see the world in its true light. The visionary hopes which we once entertained have vanished, and the mirage is discovered to be neither a lake nor a stream. Perhaps we have had to eat the fruit of bitter disappointment or of blighted hope; and because our baseless anticipations have not been realized, we hasten to the conclusion that the world is fast sinking into hopeless corruption; that is, because the accounts which the Scriptures give have been found to be true, we are ready to suppose that the world is every year more and more distempered. Hence the peevishness of some—hence activities cramped—hence querulous complaints—hence, in a few cases, the very spirit of Ishmael, whose hand was against every man, while every man’s hand was against him.

SORROW AND ITS ORIGIN.

Against this, however, as against every form of error, we are carefully warned in the Word of God. “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this.”SORROW

AND ITS

ORIGIN. The truth is, they were not better—it is we that look at them from a different point, or try them by a different standard; in other words, we change. Our dreams have ended in the nothing whence they rose. We looked for only smiles and sunshine, and have had to grapple with very stern realities. We persisted in regarding this world as something very different from what the Word of God describes—a place where man’s only sure portion is grief; but have at length discovered that the Word of God is true. Hence our sorrow and disappointment; hence the morbid complaints, and the cheerless repinings of age not seldom succeed to the visions, the dreams, and the delusions of youth.

EXPLANATIONS.

But far from “saying that the former times were better than these,” we feel that never was there an age in which so much was done as in ours, to help forward the great cause of truth and the reclaiming of the world to God. EXPLANATIONS. We know that vice has been unmasked in most appalling forms; but that is because philanthropy has grappled with crime in its own dens, and dragged it into daylight, till thousands are revolted and appalled. We know that superstition is still trampling men in myriads into the dust, while the Word of God, and all that would elevate man from his deep degradation, is hated and put down wherever superstition has the power; but that is only because the systems which are antagonistic to the truth have been roused to more resolute efforts by the earnestness of the friends of man. And we know that oppression in many lands, is still goading multitudes to madness, immuring them in dungeons, or hurrying them to death; but that is only because the oppressor instinctively feels that the tide is rising which must eventually sweep him from his place.

PROOFS OF PROGRESS.

The struggles now made, then, to perpetuate the reign of bondage, and doom men to mental and spiritual vassalage for some centuries more, are symptomatic of a waning, not a waxing cause; and the philanthropist may accordingly rejoice. PROOFS OF

PROGRESS. Progression is the law of the universe; and all the powers of darkness cannot always, or long supersede it. If the bad be growing worse, the good are growing better, more strong, and more aggressive. They now realize their mission more than they did half a century ago. They are also more closely banded to promote it; so that, instead of joining in the cry that the former times were better than these, we are prompted to regard our day as signalized above most by its schemes of earnest philanthropy, its plans of mighty scope, and its luminous designs for gathering in the nations to the sway of the Prince of Peace. Now abideth faith, hope, and love, beyond most of the ages which are past: faith, which takes hold of Omnipotence, and therefore cannot be baffled; hope, which turns the future triumphs of the good and the true into present joy; and love, which exults in the prospect of man’s ultimate emancipation, according to the mind of God.

Meanwhile, all the crime beneath which our blighted earth is groaning, does not retard by a day the final completion of the eternal plan. Truth is spreading. Providence, hand in hand with grace, is slowly sapping the hoary systems which have long enthralled our race. Those who support the truth of God are more and more clearly ranged upon one side, and standing heart to heart in defence of the holy and the pure. Those who support error by oppression are more and more clearly ranged upon the other; and we need not feel more assured that the sun will rise in the firmament to-morrow, or that rivers will continue to hasten to the ocean, than that truth is slowly triumphing, and error gradually erecting its own funeral pile. Symptoms of these results appear equally manifest in the Church and in the world.

DOUBTS.

But in every department, men must labour for these ends. As God has given to every one his measure of power, he is to put it forth—or of light, he is to let it shine. The Christian indeed is pre-eminently a patriot. “Not one of us lives to himself;” and, in contemplating this subject, it has sometimes occurred to us to inquire whether the ministers of religion be sufficiently explicit, minute, and detailed in their lessons on the Sabbath. DOUBTS. Over thousands of congregations each recurring week, there are diffused from the pulpit, doctrines the most ennobling, allied, in many cases, to lessons the most cogent and pure. Line upon line is employed, if, by any means, some may be saved, and the truth of God carried, by the Spirit’s power, through the heart and the conscience to the hand and the life.

Withal, however, is there not reason to believe that there is still room for more precise and definite instructions than are sometimes conveyed? It is obviously one thing for a soul passively to acquiesce in a doctrine, and another thing to apply the truth to practice; to give it the control of the life, that man may be like-minded with God, and “pure as He is pure.”—There have been men in all ages who held a faultless creed, yet led a godless life; who would tithe their mint, their anise, and cummin, and yet forget the weightier matters of the law. There have been not a few who took rank in the Christian Church, who could not be trusted in the market-place. Some who had fallen into the hands of the public prosecutor, have, with all the indignation of injured innocence, resented it as an offence, when those who watch for the spiritual good of men ventured to prevent them from polluting the holy place. In one point of view, the world thus seems to be more careful or more high-toned than the Church; and that irresistibly suggests the question, Can a remedy be found for this sore evil? Without interfering for a day with the preaching of those doctrines which come from God as a light to guide us to Him, can aught be added to our present appliances, to rescue self-deluded men from their self-delusions, and at least render their number fewer in the different branches of the Holy Catholic Church?

THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES.

The times appear to be specially favourable for promoting such an object. THE SIGNS

OF THE

TIMES. It is a characteristic of our age, for which we have high reason to be thankful to God, that the spiritual welfare of man is largely regarded. It is now clearly seen that the true interests of one class are the true interests of all. It is no longer antagonism, it is co-operation; to a large extent, it is brotherhood and harmony; it is liberal things devised on the one hand, and rejoiced in upon the other, at least in the land in which it is our blessedness to live. Grave men in the Church, and powerful men in the State, are busy here; nay, royalty itself, does not disown the employment. The prince co-operates with the peer, and both together hold out the hand, not of lordly patronage—that is cold and repulsive—but of brotherly-kindness and love.

ENCOURAGEMENTS.

ENCOURAGEMENTS. We thus see at least the dawning of a state of things which has no doubt been too long retarded, to our shame; but which may be blessed by God, not to introduce an Utopia, or a golden age; not to roll away the need of labour, or the lot of suffering—these are component parts of man’s existence upon earth; but to soothe the sorrows, to dry the tears, and elevate the pursuits of those who might otherwise be woeworn and unfriended for life. In a word,

“The purple pride that scowls at wretchedness,”

is now scowled at in its turn, wherever the Word of God is free, and under its hallowing power, the brotherhood of man are becoming more manifestly brothers.

To help on these results, then, we would now try to bring sound doctrine into actual contact with men’s souls, that it may produce sound practice. “The form of sound words” is to be prized above every earthly thing, but unless these words lead to right actions, they leave us still in the condition of Chorazin and Bethsaida of old. We would therefore try to take the truth of God in our hand; we would go under its escort, to the places of daily business or daily toil, there to apply the simple but often searching maxims which came from heaven to guide men through life on earth to glory.—We need expect no permanent amelioration for man except through the power and the prevalence of truth, and every attempt to elevate his nature to its true dignity by any other means, is either the effort of an empiric or the deception of an impostor. The simple theory of human progression, the only and exclusive means of purifying man, is to make him like-minded with God again.

THE LABOURS OF SISYPHUS.

THE

LABOURS OF

SISYPHUS. Now, as the mind of God can be learned only from his Word, everything but that will prove as unavailing as the labours of Sisyphus—

“Up the high hill he heaves the huge round stone;”

but it recoils in spite of all his toil, and so will every effort to elevate fallen man apart from the truth of God. We decline no fair ally. Nay, we would invoke the aid of all that is salutary either for mind or body. But unless the truth sit at the helm, and preside over all; unless the mind of God become the mind of man, man is still a degraded being; he is ignorant alike of his chief end and his chief good. In short, permanently to benefit man either for time or eternity without the knowledge of God, is a task as hopeless as that of Adam when he tried to hide among the trees of the garden.—Along the mountain-sides of some districts in this land we see traces of the culture of former generations at much higher levels than cultivation now reaches; but, deserted now as unproductive, these patches are re-claimed by the heath or the furze: they furnish no food at least for the use of man; and are not these significant emblems of the attempts to cultivate man without the knowledge of his God? The sepulchre may be white-washed, or sin covered over and concealed; but all is impurity, all is moral deformity still, in the eye of Him who judges righteous judgment.

THE SOVEREIGN PANACEA.

THE

SOVEREIGN

PANACEA. We therefore take the Word of God as the grand rule, the sovereign panacea in our hand. We try to apply the system of mingled holiness, and mercy, and truth, and love, which is there disclosed, to guide the lives of mortals; and in prosecuting this design, the following is our plan. We try to show—

I. Christianity in the Heart; for, unless it is found there, we need not expect to find it anywhere besides.

II. Christianity in the Home. It must next appear there. Parents and children, masters and servants, or the employers and the employed, must all feel the genial or the curbing power of truth in their several places and relations.

III. Christianity in the Workshop—from which its influence has too long been banished.

IV. Christianity in the Market-place, the place of bargains and of busy trade.

V. Christianity in the Professions: 1. The physician; 2. The lawyer; 3. The divine.

VI. Christianity in our ordinary social intercourse; and,

Finally, Christianity, as the crown and glory of man’s existence upon earth.

THE WILLING WORKMAN.

Now, it is too manifest to require any discussion, that unless Christianity be planted in the heart, it cannot control the life. A religion merely for the hand has never done much for man. A creed which teaches us only to cleanse the outside of the cup, has never succeeded in elevating us far, or making us kindred either with the pure or the lofty. A mere collection of doctrines, though each be scriptural and sound, has never availed to restore man to happiness and God. Merely to do as our fathers did, or hold, however tenaciously, a mere ancestral faith, is not the process by which the evil that is in man can be corrected. The soldier who is dragged to the battle-field is not likely to become a hero. The man who is carried to a foreign land in chains, seldom becomes one of its benefactors. He who needs compulsion and the rod ere he will acquire even the rudiments of learning, is not likely soon to become a ripe scholar. THE

WILLING

WORKMAN. In every department, it is the willing mind, the earnest spirit, the hearty, zealous labourer, who achieves great results. The heart must be thrown into the pursuit, even though it were only some menial employment; and if that be not the case, then, however he may be engaged, man will either be disgusted and repelled, or doomed to drag a heavy chain amid his toil.

THE HEART UNMASKED.

And this is pre-eminently the case in religion. It is with Him who looks on the heart that we have there to do—as is the heart, so is our religion. A new heart is accordingly the first and the grand desideratum. All the heart is to be given to God, and till that be conceded, we have not done obeisance to the first and great commandment. The law of God is to be written on the heart, or in truth we never obey it. We may as well suppose that the ten commandments could guide the Hebrews, while these precepts were merely written on the tables of stone, far up amid the clouds of Sinai, as that the truth of God can profit, or illumine the soul, while it only floats in the understanding or the memory, without sinking into the heart. Nay, the thunders of Sinai, amid which the commandments were given, had scarcely died away, when the people who had heard them ceased to fear and quake—they set up a golden calf, and worshipped it as their God; and that forms one of the most instructive facts of history. THE HEART

UNMASKED. It seems incredible to the man who does not know the guile which lurks in the heart, but it sheds a full though a lurid light upon the soul, in the eyes of him who has been guided by the truth through the intricate mazes of iniquity which exist within us.

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD.

Or, far more than this. Ten thousand times ten thousand may possess the gospel as well as the law. Not merely the authority, the power, or the terrors of the Lord may be brought to bear upon their minds—His love, his pity, and compassion, may also be revealed, and entreaties the most touching, or invitations the most free, may be mingled with promises the most cheering, and all may be employed to induce us to profit by them, while the heart may continue proof against them all. TRUTH AND

FALSEHOOD. The truth of God may be no truth to us; His love in the Saviour may exercise no constraining power—and what is the reason? How are we to explain the fact that the mind of God has no control over the minds of myriads of men, so that countless favours are received without awakening one grateful response? The reason is, truth was never stamped upon the heart. It is not understood that with the heart man believes unto righteousness. The first and great commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy strength and mind,” is not felt, and not obeyed; and men, in consequence, often drink up iniquity with the very Word of God open before them, soliciting their hearts and their affections for their Lord. They have his Word, but it is perverted to light them on the way to a more certain ruin.

This is all abundantly plain. If we have ever given so much as one solemn hour to God, to eternity, and the soul, it must be manifest that until the affections be set on things above, all else is vain. The heart is the citadel of the whole man, and until that be on the Lord’s side, the enemy will find a stronghold there, from which no power on earth can dislodge him. Is a man living in a state of estrangement from God? Does the Heart-searcher know that that man is perpetrating sin and regardless of his soul? The explanation of all that is, that the heart has never been given to God. Christianity is not there. Truth is not there—its place is occupied by lies. The love of the Saviour is not there. The Word of God is a dead and a despised letter. The foundation of the spiritual fabric has never been laid. The first impulse heavenward has not been given. The Spirit of God is not honoured in the heart as the temple where he delights to dwell. Religion at the best is a cold and formal thing. It only decorates the exterior, like trappings on a hearse. God is not in such a man’s thoughts—Christ is not in his soul the hope of glory. The gulf between God and him is still a yawning void, and the eternal life which is placed within his reach is practically despised.

The illustrations of religion in the heart crowd upon us on every side. Let us contemplate a few, and place them in the way of contrast.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

ILLUSTRATIONS. There is a man whose heart the Lord has touched with great love to souls. He learns that myriads are perishing in distant lands. That oppresses him with the weight of a personal woe; he takes his life in his hand and hastens away to tell the perishing of a Saviour. Now, in his work of faith, and labour of love, that man is dealing, let us suppose, with two of the youth of a dark-souled land. He is pressing on the conscience the claims of God, on the understanding his truth, and on the heart his love; but against all these appliances one of the two is stout-hearted, and steeled. There is no room in his soul either for the Spirit of God or his truth. Some idol has erected his temple there, and that idol, however hideous, is worshipped with the devotedness which is due only to God over all. Hence the heart is shut and fortified against the truth; hence the God of truth is rejected and disowned. The whole man is pre-occupied. The affections are engrossed by a worthless or revolting thing; and as there was no room in the dwellings of men for the Saviour when he came to earth, there is no room in the soul of that man for truth, though it brings salvation and the fulness of joy in its train. The secret of the whole is, that the heart is not impressed; it is never touched, and it therefore repels the approaches of Him who is love, as the granite rock repels the spray of the ocean.

CONSCIENCE ASCENDANT.

CONSCIENCE

ASCENDANT. But the case is different in regard to the other of the two: conscience in him feels the power of the truth; it cannot deny the charges which are brought against it; nay, it repeats and enforces them every one, and then begins the struggle for the control of the heart. Though the conscience be convinced, the heart may not be surrendered, and in consequence of that, a pain, an absolute distraction is sometimes produced—it has been described as the plucking out of a right eye.

THE CHANGE.

Now, when does that struggle cease? When is that soul really surrendered to the supremacy of God? It is when the truth finds its way to the heart, and is planted there by the Spirit who revealed it. As long as it remained only in the conscience, it stimulated, it roused, it agitated, it produced only commotion or woe; or, in the understanding, it instructed or delighted; THE

CHANGE. but when the truth of God passed through the conscience into the heathen heart, the whole man was speedily captured. There was now the willing mind, there was now the pliant disposition. Idols were now abandoned. The Son of God was rejoiced in, and he who before had carried the badge of his idol on his very brow, as if to glory in his shame, now felt all the degradation of bowing down to an idol at all. The strongest earthly affection—that of a mother to a cherished son—might obstruct the path which led from idols to God, and other woes might come on the believer; but his heart had owned the majesty of truth, whatever it might entail. Truth, the truth of God, had taught him that there is something stronger, deeper, and more constraining than even the love of a mother to a son—namely, the love of the Saviour to the saved, and their love to Him in return—and thus, that soul, amid sorrows which are agonizing to flesh and blood, chooses the better portion. Like one who is truly wise, that man, lately so dark and idolatrous, now prefers the love of God to the love of a creature—and that is Christianity in the heart. That is religion taking the helm of life. That is truth occupying the citadel of the soul. That is God enthroned. That is conscience obeyed. That is reason re-occupying the sphere from which it was banished at the fall. That is the promise fulfilled, “A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.”

Or contemplate another example of Christianity in the heart, as the root and fountain of all that is lovely and of good report in the life.

INQUIRY.

Another man has gone with no less love to souls than the former, to win some of the far-fallen Jews to the Saviour. In that work he encounters insult upon insult, and everything but Christian faith, and Christian hope and love, would there faint and fail. INQUIRY. He also is surrounded by crowds of inquirers or objectors—let us select two for their contrast. One of them is full of hereditary hatred to the truth as it is in Jesus; and that very name which is to the Christian a strong tower, is to that dark-souled man a provocative to wrath and spiteful passion—And why? Because that heart is pre-occupied. That man has never once seen the presented truth, so thick is the veil which blinds him; he has never once felt its power, so hard is the incrustation which envelopes his heart. The love and pity, as well as the holiness and truth of God, are shut out from his soul, for the repugnance and the recoil of the heart drive them utterly away. He thus furnishes another example of the fact, that there does not exist in all the world, a more intense antagonism than that of man’s polluted heart to the pure truth of God.

But the other of the two inquires—he is willing at least to ascertain what a Christian is. He listens, and the great truth which is the basis of all personal religion—conviction of sin in the sight of God—begins to be felt. Whether Christianity be true or not, that man discovers, from his own Hebrew Bible, that he is a sinner. He perceives that Judaism, even in all its glory could not take away sin, and much less now when it is worn out, or not the shadow or the echo of its former self. In that state of soul, that man comes nearer to Jesus of Nazareth than he had ever done before. He reads; he marks; he inwardly digests; he begins to pray. The Redeemer’s history now becomes full of meaning. “He was despised, and we esteemed him not”—“He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities”—“The Lord has laid on him the iniquities of us all”—“They shall look on him whom they have pierced”—These, or texts like these, now begin to be seen in the light which the Spirit of God sheds on them, or felt in the power which that Spirit imparts to truth, and they flash upon the earnest man’s mind with a meaning which he never saw before.

THE JEW, A CHRISTIAN.

THE JEW,

A

CHRISTIAN. That man now begins, then, to feel that the truth is just what he as a sinner needs; and in the train of that, it begins to take possession of the heart. It gives a new tone or a new colour to his life. By securing the command of the heart, it converts a Jew into a new creature in Christ. He begins to glory in what was once a stumbling-block, the Cross; or to be ashamed of what was once his glory, his self-righteousness; and as the aspect of the earth when the sun is shining in the radiance of day is different from its aspect when midnight reigns, that man’s soul is different now from what it lately was. Christianity is in the heart; and as the blood is propelled from the heart to the extremities, spreading life and activity as it flows, truth, the truth which the Spirit teaches now circulates through the whole inner man, reducing everything there to the obedience that is in Christ. The waste places are cultivated. The spiritual fabric is founded, and the great Master-builder will in due time perfect the whole.

THE HOME HEATHEN.

THE HOME

HEATHEN. Or, without referring either to Heathen or to Jew, we might select some two in our own favoured land for a contrast. We might picture an assembly of men met in the house of God to worship the King Eternal, Immortal, and Invisible, and single out two of the worshippers to illustrate religion in the heart; and let us thus single out two. They worship side by side. They hear the same voice—they listen to the same gospel, the same appeals to the conscience, the same lessons for the understanding, the same glad tidings for the heart. They are pointed to the same Saviour, and are equally told of his power and his willingness to save. Redemption now, and not to-morrow—redemption perfect and complete, without waiting for any supplement from man—redemption for “the ungodly,”1 and not for those who have already repented; in a word, salvation freely, salvation immediately, and salvation completely, is offered or pressed on the notice of each of the two, according to the Word of the Eternal.

THE WAYWARD HEART.

THE

WAYWARD

HEART. But amid this affluence of mercy, this plenitude of love, one of them continues indifferent, hardened, and without God. Every new appeal is resisted, and so thickens the incrustation which has gathered round the heart. All within is dead and cold. Religion brings no joy. It seems a system to fetter, and not to emancipate; and as that man cannot both sin and be a Christian, his heart continues shut against the influence which would separate him from his sins. The secret of all this is, that that heart is still the victim or the dupe of lies. There is no Christianity admitted into it. The truth of God is kept far away from the centre of man’s being. Lest that truth should enter the heart, it is kept carefully guarded; it is crowded with worldly cares, or plunged into worldly follies, but left dreary and desolate as to all that is divine; the waters of Marah are never sweetened there; the soul is perishing with redemption in its offer; it is self-doomed to woe and to bitterness, while the Spirit of God through his Word is beckoning it to glory and to honour.

The other of the two worshippers, however, has found out that “one thing is needful.” He has listened to conscience. He has taken counsel with right reason. He has surrendered the heart to God, and that is the decisive moment when man’s name is written in the book of life. It is then that the kingdom of God begins to be within us, then that we learn both how wayward is the heart, and how mighty is the grace of God to subdue it. Light now radiates where all was dark before; joy is now felt where all was cheerless; and the new-born sensation of spiritual freedom brings a presage of the glorious liberty of the children of God.

CONTRASTS AND COLLISIONS.

And what renders it more needful to urge on this ascendancy of truth in the heart is, the opposition which it is sure to encounter in the world. While we sail down the world’s stream, we may glide pleasantly along, and need neither the canvass nor the oar; but the moment we attempt to stem it, the struggle and the conflict begin: we must either earnestly contend, or be carried down to ruin. CONTRASTS

AND

COLLISIONS. What is it that produces thunder? It is the meeting of contraries, or fire and water. What is it that produces the earthquake? It is a similar cause—the meeting of contraries, or substances which cannot quietly co-exist. What is it that occasions war, and massacre, and devastation? It is still a similar cause. It is passion in collision with passion. It is the tyrant seeking to oppress the free. It is ambition grasping at more and more, and trampling upon all who oppose its pleasure—and the same law obtains in religion. Why are God’s people often of all men the most miserable? Whence come persecutions? They come because holiness in the godly and sin in the world have come into collision. The will of God is opposing or protesting against the passions of men, and on that account there is war on the one hand, produced by inflamed passion on the other.

A church, a flock, for farther example, has long been afflicted with an unconverted ministry, and all is peaceful there, for all is spiritual death. But there comes a change. A converted ministry is raised up, and now begins the collision between spiritual life and spiritual death. Ere the truth get access to the heart, it must fight every inch of the way.

Or there is a family where, up to a certain period, all is unmitigated worldliness; not one soul is there alive to God.—But in His sovereign time one member is converted, and then perhaps begin the collision and the strife. The world resents the intrusion or the rebuke implied in spiritual decision; and if that heart will love God’s pure truth, it must zealously contend.

THE VICTORY.

Or there is an individual soul. It has long slumbered, as the world does, without God and without hope. No compunction has roused it, and no alarm been felt. But something at last occurs to disturb that false peace. Truth enters the conscience. It operates there like a visit from the living to the catacombs of Egypt, when the night-birds are disturbed in crowds, and threaten, by their multitudinous flutterings, to blind or to destroy the intruder. Thus, if truth will take possession of a heart for God, it must encounter and vanquish a thousand enemies. THE

VICTORY. In that conflict man needs the whole armour of God, for he has to fight the good fight of faith. His enemies may be those of his own household, or even his own heart; and nothing but the free Spirit of the living God can make man sure of victory in that contest.

THE NEW HEART.

Perhaps it is superfluous to occupy so much time in illustrating what is, in truth, so plain. Yet, as many overlook this plainness, it should be urged in line upon line, that if we would begin aright, we must begin at the heart, out of which flow the issues of life. THE NEW HEART. One of the most earnest prayers in the Bible is, “Create in me a clean heart, O God,”2 and one of its most emphatic or comprehensive promises is, “A new heart will I give you.”3 And would men learn that simple lesson, did they in their several places and relations as superiors, inferiors, or equals, seek to begin at the beginning, and have the heart right with God through the new-creating power of His Spirit, O how sweetly would the whole framework of society soon be adjusted! how surely would “all the building, fitly framed together, grow into an holy temple in the Lord!” The Church would be more pure. The world would not be so often cheered in its ungodly ways, by the example of men professing the truth, but holding it in unrighteousness, because they are destitute of Christianity in the heart, where it should ever reign as the unchallenged and unrivalled queen.—There are some ruins of ancient cities now buried deep under water. When the waves above them are calm, these ruins can still be seen, though centuries have rolled away since they were first submerged. Yet who would regard these waste places as the abodes of living men? Who would speak of them as the haunts of the happy? Nay, life has vanished from them; all that ever lived there have been for centuries destroyed. And, in the same way, the heart that is sunk in worldliness or saturated with what is earthly and sensual, is cut off from all communion with the living God; it is dead to holiness and Him.

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART.

THE

RELIGION

OF THE

HEART. We cannot glance at the lives of godly men without noticing the prominence which belongs to this subject of religion in the heart. Their first aspiration is for the friendship of God, and their next, their perpetual longing is to have the heart right with Him; “to keep the heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.” We open the life of one man of God at random. He says, “An inward sweet sense of divine things at times came into my heart, and my soul was led away in pleasant views and contemplations of them.” “The sense I had of divine things would often of a sudden kindle up, as it were, a sweet burning in my heart, an ardour of soul that I know not how to express.” “I was almost constantly in ejaculatory prayer wherever I was. Prayer seemed as the breath by which the inward burning of my heart had vent.” “My former delights never reached the heart, and did not arise from any sight of the divine excellence of the things of God.” “My heart panted after this, to lie low before God as in the dust, that I might be nothing, and God might be all; that I might become as a little child.” “Oftentimes in reading the Holy Scriptures, every word seemed to touch my heart; I felt a harmony between something in my heart and those sweet and powerful words.”4

WITNESSES.

Another says, “O God, impress more deeply on my heart thine exceeding great and precious promises, that I may perfect holiness in thy fear.” “Though God’s pure Word is presented to worldly men in ever such a variety of ways; though the provision be ever so daintily served up, none of them relish it at heart. As well might the preacher have the restless and ungovernable waves of the sea before him, and think to control them with the rod of Moses, or the words of Christ, ‘Peace, be still.’ ” WITNESSES. “In his earliest years he had many pure, tender feelings, and stirrings of his heart concerning God, and the texts inscribed on the church walls of his native town, from the Epistle to the Romans, concerning death, sin, righteousness, and the crucifixion, produced in him, as a mere child, emotions of great joy and peace, and left upon him very profitable and lasting impressions.” “How may I know that I am become an heir of heaven? How may I know that God is in me of a truth? When I have the earnest of the inheritance, that is, when I am habitually led by the Spirit of God, so as to walk in love, with my heart crying to him, Abba, Father! and listening to every whisper of his Holy Spirit.”5

WITNESSES.

WITNESSES. Another says, “My heart was utterly averse from spirituality. Sometimes, through the force of convictions, I was indeed brought for some time to aim at getting my mind fixed upon heavenly things, and kept on the thoughts of them; but my heart being still carnal, I weaned of this bent and of this forcible religion; it was intolerable to think of being always spiritual.” “I abominated the more gross breaches of all the commands, and disliked open sins. But, meanwhile, my heart was set upon the less discernible violations of the same holy law.” “Under a searching ministry, the Lord began to give me some discoveries of the more secret and spiritual evils of my heart. He carried me ‘into the secret chamber of imagery,’ to let me see what my heart did in the dark.” “Though sin might prevail, my heart was not with it as before; I found another sort of opposition made to it.” “I have looked on death as stripped of all things pleasant to nature. I have considered the spade and the grave, and everything that is in it terrible to nature; and under the view of all these, I found that in the way of God they gave satisfaction—not only a rational satisfaction, but a heart-engaging power attending it, that makes me rejoice.”6

One of the profoundest thinkers that ever lived has said, “There are only two kinds of persons who can properly be styled reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart, because they know Him; and those who seek Him with all their heart, because they know him not.”7

WITNESSES.

WITNESSES.—But it is needless to prolong such illustrations. Human nature, revelation, and daily experience, agree in testifying to the necessity of planting the truth in the heart of man, if it is to control his life. For that purpose the Spirit of God is sent to take the truth from the sacred page, where He himself has placed it, and stamp it on the soul. And O, what man consents to sacrifice, by keeping truth in the outer court as the Gentiles were kept in the outer court of the Jewish Temple! What holy joy! What hopes and consolations! What communion with God he forfeits! Or, how blind the world to its own best interests, when the truth is kept cold and shivering, apart from the soul and the heart! How would the woes of a groaning world be soothed—how would our biting and devouring of each other cease—how would swords be beat into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks, were truth enthroned in the heart, and suffered to control the life! A single sentence of that truth, honestly believed and obeyed, would soon revolutionize a world; and should not every Christian therefore be busy, earnest, and solemn, in spreading the truth; in seeking to have it planted deep in his own soul first, and then in the souls of all?

THE NEED OF ZEAL.

Moreover, the world is very solemn now, it is earnest and devoted; it is perfectly convinced, however baseless the conviction, that time is all in all. For example, mark that atheist. They who do not know the dark depths of man’s heart will not believe that a soul so monstrous can exist; but as if to prove the truth of the Word of God, a bold blasphemer has stood forth to deny God’s existence, and challenged Him to prove that the impious one was wrong, by striking him dead upon the spot. Or mark that knot of infidels. They are assembled to devise the means of spreading their poison, and import additional supplies from other lands, because the home growth is not sufficient. Or mark that group of papists. They are daily plotting the suppression of God’s truth, the enslaving of man’s soul, and deepening the darkness which already envelopes him. All, all are earnest, zealous, sanguine in the pursuit of evil—and shall they who hold the truth be alone lethargic, listless, apathetic? THE NEED

OF ZEAL. The infidel has been heard to declare, that if he believed what Christians profess to believe, he would be far more zealous than they. In truth, that infidel sees that the man whom the world stigmatizes as a religious enthusiast is the only consistent Christian. If I believe that every sin tends to eternal perdition, can I be consistent in my belief, if I do not repress sin by every proper means within my power? If I believe that none but Christ can save so much as one single soul, can I be consistent in my belief, if I am not ready to spend and be spent in winning souls to Christ? On that maxim the Christian indeed will act; and when that spirit is ascendant, we shall see far more done than has yet been attempted to soothe men’s sorrows, to dry men’s tears, and ease their aching hearts.