that the whole of the life of God is the sacrifice of self. God is Love; love is sacrifice to give rather than to receive the blessedness of self-giving. If the life of God were not such, it would be a falsehood to say that God is Love; for, even in our human nature, that which seeks to enjoy all, instead of giving all, is known by a very different name from that of love. All the life of God is a flow of this divine self-giving charity. Creation itself is sacrifice the self-impartation of the divine Being. Redemption, too, is sacrifice, else it could not be love; for which reason we will not surrender one iota of the truth that the death of Christ was the sacrifice of God-the manifestation once in time of that which is the eternal law of His life.out

If man, therefore, is to rise into the life of God, he must be absorbed into the spirit of that sacrifice — he must die with Christ, if he would enter into his proper life. For sin is the withdrawing into self and egotism, out of the vivifying life of God, which alone is our true life. The moment the man sins, he dies. Know we not how awfully true that sentence is, "Sin revived, and I died"? The vivid life of sin is the death of the man. Have we never felt that our true exist ence has absolutely in that moment disappeared, and that we are not?

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I say, therefore, that real human life is a perpetual completion and repetition of the sacrifice of Christ "all are dead; " the explanation of which follows, "to live not to themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again." This is the truth, which lies at the bottom of the Romish doctrine of the mass. Rome asserts that in the mass a true and proper sacrifice is

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offered up for the sins of all that the offering of Christ is forever repeated. To this Protestantism has objected, vehemently, that there is but one offering unce offered an objection in itself entirely true; yet .the Romish doctrine contains a truth which it is of importance to disengage from the gross and material form with which it has been overlaid. Let us hear *St. Paul: "I fill up that which is behindhand of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for His body's sake, which is the Church." Was there, then, something behindhand of Christ's sufferings remaining uncompleted, of which the sufferings of Paul could be in any sense the complement? He says there was. Could the sufferings of Paul for the Church in any form or correct expression be said to eke out the suf ferings that were complete? In one sense it is true to-say that there is one offering once offered for all. But it is equally true to say that that one offering is valueless, except so far as it is completed and repeated in the life and self-offering of all. This is the Christian's sacrifice. Not mechanically completed in the miserable materialism of the mass, but spiritually in the life of all in whom the Crucified lives. The sacrifice of Christ is done over again in every life which is lived, not to self, but to God.

Let one concluding observation be male selfidunialy self-sacrifice, self-surrender! Hard doctrines, and impossible! Whereupon, in silent hours, we sceptically ask, Is this possible? is it natural? Let spreacher and moralist say what they will, I am not here to sacrifice myself for others. God sent me here for happiness, not misery. Now, introduce one i sentence of this text of which we have as yet said noth

ing, and the dark doctrine becomes illuminated-"the

Self-denial, for the self-sacrifice for its

love of Christ constraineth us." sake of self-denial, does no good; own sake is no religious act at all. If you give up a meal for the sake of showing power over self, or for the sake of self-discipline, it is the most miserable of all delusions. You are not more religious in doing this than before. This is mere self-culture; and selfculture, being occupied forever about self, leaves you only in that circle of self from which religion is to free you; but to give up a meal that one you love, may have it, is properly a religious act no hard and dismal duty, because made easy by affection. To bear pain for the sake of bearing it has in it no moral quality at all; but to bear it rather than surrender truth, or in order to save another, is positive enjoyment, as well as ennobling to the soul. Did you ever receive even a blow meant for another in order to shield that other? Do you not know that there was actual pleasure in the keen pain far beyond the most rapturous thrill of nerve which could be gained from pleasure in the midst of painlessness? Is not the mystic yearning of love expressed in words most purely thus, Let me suffer for him?

This element of love is that which makes this doctrine, an intelligible and blessed truth. So sacrifice alone, bare and unrelieved, is ghastly, unnatural, and dead, but self-sacrifice, illuminated by love, is warmth and life; it is the death of Christ, the life of God, the blessedness and only proper life of man.

VIII.

[Preached June 30, 1850.]

THE POWER OF SORROW.

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2 CORINTHIANS Vii. 9, 10. Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye might receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death."

THAT which is chiefly insisted on in this verse is the distinction between sorrow and repentance. To grieve over sin is one thing, to repent of it is another.

The apostle rejoiced, not that the Corinthians sorrowed, but that they sorrowed unto repentance. Sorrow has two results: it may end in spiritual life, or inspiritual death; and, in themselves, one of these is as natural as the other. Sorrow may produce two kinds of reformation: a transient, or a permanent one ---än alteration in habits, which, originating in emotion, will last so long as that emotion continues, and then, after a few fruitless efforts, be given up a repentance which will be repented of, or, again, a permanent change, which will be reversed by no after thoughtr a repentance not to be repented of. Sorrow is ini itself, therefore, a thing neither good nor bad; its value depends on the spirit of the person on whom it falls. Fire will inflame straw, soften iron, or harden

clay; its effects are determined by the object with which it comes in contact. Warmth develops the energies of life, or helps the progress of decay. It is a great power in the hot-house, a great power also in the coffin; it expands the leaf, matures the fruit; adds precocious vigor to vegetable life; and warmth, too, develops, with ten-fold rapidity, the weltering process of dissolution.

So, too, with sorrow. There are spirits in which it develops the seminal principle of life; there are others in which it prematurely hastens the consummation of irreparable decay. Our subject, therefore, is the two-fold power of sorrow.

I The fatal power of the sorrow of the world.

II. The life-giving power of the sorrow that is after God.

I The simplest way in which the sorrow of the world works death is seen in the effect of mere regret for worldly loss. There are certain advantages with which we come into the world-youth, health, friends, and sometimes property. So long as these are con tinued we are happy; and, because happy, fancy our selves very grateful to God. We bask in the sunshine of His gifts, and this pleasant sensation of sunning ourselves in life we call religion; that state in which we all are before sorrow comes, to test the temper of the metal of which our souls are made, when the spirits are unbroken and the heart buoyant, when a fresh morning is to a young heart what it is to the skylark. The exuberant burst of joy seems a spontaneous hymn to the Father of all blessing, like the matin carol, of the bird; but this is not religion; it is the instinctive utterance of happy feeling, having as little