universities, virtue is defined as that which is done. at the command of God, for the sake of an eternal reward. So, then, religion is nothing more than a calculation of infinite and finite quantities; vice is nothing more than a grand imprudence; and heaven is nothing more than selfishness rewarded with eternal well-being!

Yet this, you will observe, is a necessary step in the development of faith. Faith is the conviction that God is a rewarder of them who diligently seek Him; and there is a moment in human progress when the anticipated rewards and punishments must be of a Mahometan character-the happiness of the senses. It was thus that the Jews were disciplined; out of a coarse, rude, infantine state, they were educated, by rewards and punishments, to abstain from present sinful gratification. At first, the promise of the life which now is; afterwards, the promise of that which is to come. But, even then, the rewards and punishments of a future state were spoken of, by inspiration itself, as of an arbitrary character; and some of the best of the Israelites, in looking to the recompense of reward, seemed to have anticipated, coarsely, recom pense in exchange for duties performed.

The last step is that which alone deserves to be called Christian Faith. "Who is he that overcometh, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Christ?" The Jifference between the faith of the Christian and that of the man of the world, or the mere ordinary religionist, is not a difference in mental operation, but in the object of the faith; to believe that Jesus is the Christ is the peculiarity of Christian faith.

The anticipated heaven of the Christian differs from

the anticipated heaven of any other m distinctness with which its imagery is in the kind of objects which are ho apostle has told us the character of 1 hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 1 into the heart of man to conceive the God hath prepared for them that love glorious words are sometimes strangely r as if the apostle merely meant rhetori the conception of the heavenly world, a beyond all power to imagine or to paint. meant something infinitely deeper; the l is not only that which "eye hath not s which eye can never see; its glories a kind at all which can ever stream in fo on the eye, or pour in melody upon th ear, not such joys as genius, in its mos (here called "the heart of man"), can in ine; it is something which these sensu ours never can appreciate, bliss of altogether, revealed to the spirit of man of God,-joys such as spirit alone can you ask what these are? "The fruits are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gent ness, faith, meekness, temperance." Tha and therefore the apostle tells us that I "believeth that Jesus is the Christ," and that. What is it to believe that Jesus is t That He is the Anointed One, that H anointed life, the only blessed life, the divine for thirty years?-Yes, but if so life still, continued throughout all eternity believe that, you do not believe that Jesus i

What is the blesse Iness that you expect?- to have the joys of earth, with the addition of the element of eternity? Men think that heaven is to be a compensation for earthly loss. The saints are earthly-wretched here, the children of this world are earthly-happy; but that, they think, shall be all reversed,- Lazarus, be yond the grave, shall have the purple, and the fine linen, and the splendor, and the houses, and the lands, which Dives had on earth; the one had them for time, the other shall have them for eternity. That is the heaven that men expect, this earth sacrificed now, in order that it may be re-granted forever.

Nor will this expectation be reversed, except by a reversal of the nature. None can anticipate such a heaven as God has revealed, except they that are born. of the Spirit; therefore, to believe that Jesus is the Christ, a man must be born of God. You will observe that no other victory overcomes the world; for this is what St. John means by saying, "Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Christ?" For then it comes to pass that a man begins to feel that to do wrong is hell; and that to love God, to be like God, to have the mind of Christ, is the only heaven. Until this victory is gained, the world retains its stronghold in the heart.

Do you think that the temperate man has overcome the world, who, instead of the short-lived rapture of intoxication, chooses regular employment, health, and prosperity? Is it not the world, in another form, which has his homage? Or, do you suppose that the so-called religious man is really the world's con queror, by being content to give up seventy years of enjoyment in order to win innumerable ages of the

very same species of enjoyment? Ha made earth a hell, in order that eart be his heaven forever?

Thus the victory of faith proceeds stage: the first victory is when the quered by the future; the last, when t Sensual is despised in comparison of the Eternal. Then earth has lost its powe if all that it has to give be lost eternal faith is still infinite.

III.

[Preached Whitsunday, May 19, 1850.]

THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT.

1 CORINTHIANS Xii. 4. —“ Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit."

ACCORDING to a view which contains in it a profound truth, the ages of the world are divisible into three dispensations, presided over by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

In the dispensation of the Father, God was known as a Creator; creation manifested His eternal power and Godhead, and the religion of mankind was the religion of Nature.

In the dispensation of the Son, God manifested Himself to humanity through man; the Eternal Word spoke, through the inspired and gifted of the human race, to those that were uninspired and ungifted. This was the dispensation of the prophets; its climax was the advent of the Redeemer; it was completed when perfect Humanity manifested God to man. characteristic of this dispensation was, that God revealed Himself by an authoritative Voice, speaking from without, and the highest manifestation of God whereof man was capable was a Divine Humanity. The age in which we at present live is the dispensa

The