O WHAT a Saviour Christ is, who can meet our guilty yesterdays and meet our helpless to-days, and can care for the future—yet to us unknown—that stretches between us and death, judgment, and eternity, and who can crown and seal with His judicial sentence all He did as Saviour in preparing us for appearing before the Great White Throne!
Divine and human natures are infinitely distant, but in the Son of God they are in one person—no longer at a distance—and united in such a way as implies no diminution of His glory and blessedness as the eternal Son of God. How sweet, also, to Christ His being in human nature, that He might be a brother not only in name to His people, but might act towards them a brother’s part! What joy was this to the love of Christ! Oh! give up your hard thoughts of Him.
O, friends, do not trifle with things which are of eternal moment to you, to yourselves, to your very selves. Put not Gospel truths into your toyroom, where you keep the things with which you make sport. Let them not be in your memory only as things on which you may lay hand, that you may use them in speculation or controversy. And let them not lie by as you deal with things which you reckon worthless. Unused truth is abused truth, and the God of truth shall yet take vengeance for your abuse of what He loves.
I would advise you, if you would acquaint yourself with Popery, to study your own heart; and, in order to protection, trust none but the Lord, and no teacher but His blessed Spirit.
O, thou mother of harlots (Popery), there is more effectual prayer against thee in the shrieks of the millions thou hast delivered over to the great murderer who retains thee for the work of slaying souls, than there is to shield thee from destruction in all the devotions of which thy polluted altars and thy dark cloisters are the scenes. The millions thou hast ruined curse thee in the pit. The thousands thou hast martyred cry by their blood for thy destruction. They shall be heard, and thou shalt yet be laid low.
Universal danger, vaguely apprehended, and universal love, vaguely dreamt of, make up what is now-a-days too often regarded as sufficient in order to conversion. From this flimsiness turn aside, if you would not be deceived to your ruin.
O that we were wise to prize our privileges, and to acquit ourselves of our high responsibility! The blessing of the Most High is what Scotland needs. This alone could make her truly rich. This alone can save her from her perils. This alone could have made her what she once became, and secured the continuance of her prosperity. Whatever may betide her in the age next to come, I love to think of her, on some bright future day, emerging with all the nations of the earth from the darkness and the storms of ante-millennial times into the brightness and the calm of many ages of blessedness, receiving on her bosom the light of heavenly favour and the dew of heavenly grace, till a verdure, richer than ever clothed her, shall cover her all over, and fruits of righteousness shall grow throughout all her borders, such as are befitting the very garden of the Lord.
The blossom which began to bud in Eden, continued to expand, till, in the birth at Bethlehem, the first form of the promised fruit appeared.
O, if I have ever learned that “it is impossible for God to lie,” it was while looking on Him who hung upon the tree, bowing His head and giving up the ghost. The sinner shall verily die, because God hath so declared; and here is a death in which the fulfilment of God’s threatening is seen in the deaths of a countless multitude summed up in the dying of Him who undertook to be their substitute.
Blessed are they who shall be taken out of the sin and trouble around them here, that they may enter into the peace which nought on earth can for ever disturb, and nothing which they bring with them shall prevent them from enjoying. Spiritual decline, in the midst of an outward calm, may still for a season advance, but it will prove to be, as it has always done, the fore-runner of judgments such as shall cause the stoutest heart to quail. O to be at home ere this visitation shall have come! But it were better to be content with whatever the Lord has been pleased to appoint.
Often, as one after another of the “righteous” and “merciful” has been taken away, have I gone with the mourning prophet to weep in the vineyard from which the summer fruits had disappeared. In the measure in which I could not mourn for those who had “entered into peace” was I disposed to be sad, on my own account, and for the sake of my Church and country. I am not conscious of a tendency to indulge in causeless sorrow, nor of being prone to forecast what is gloomy in the future. It is only when constrained to be thus affected that I tremble with fear in prospect of what is coming. No events have ever caused in my heart more of this sadness, and of this fear, than the deaths of well-known saints and servants of the Lord. The removal of these has left a blank in the present on which only a tearful eye should rest, and is an omen of evil in the time to come before which every heart should tremble.
How little sorrow of heart do any of us feel for “the hurt of the daughter of our people,” and especially for the dishonour cast upon the Son of God! How easy it is for us to endure to see thousands around us rushing onwards to everlasting misery as they pass in contempt by the Cross of Christ! O, how little do any of us value and profit by the Gospel! Our barrenness, what a shame! Our carnal ease, what a reproach! Our selfishness, how guilty! Our prayerlessness, what a sure sign of deadness!