from us, saying, But his flesh was not such as ours in its properties and propensities; otherwise he were a sinner, both original and actual, as we are. By which declaration the glory of God in bringing his wit out of his creation, the glory of Christ in becoming our brother, to do this, and the glory of the Holy Ghost to serve him in the doing of it, are all subverted; and pure Manicheism is introduced, the doctrine of a good and an evil principle flowing side by side in the church-the one incapable of putting the other down, and therefore both having equal origin and authority; and holiness in our flesh is declared to be impossible, because Christ's flesh had to be changed in order to work it; and unholiness is sanctified; and to overcome the flesh is declared to be impracticable; and God is dethroned, and Christ is unmanned, and the Holy Ghost is set at nought; and the devil is enthroned, and sin hath an omnipotency, and poor mortals must sin on to the end. Such are the principles that produce the Laodiceanism, and keep it up. The Lord is striking a blow at the root of it, by maintaining the true flesh of Christ: whether the church will give heed to him, or to the fables of the doctors, God only knoweth.

This state of indecision and intermixture between the flesh and the spirit, arising out of the Manichean doctrine, that the Spirit of Christ is able only to make a debate with but not to suppress the flesh, produceth a shortcoming in every article of faith, and in every act of religion; and makes men to be neither natural nor spiritual, but a strange compound of both. They know enough to believe that without Divine help they can do nothing; but they are doubtful whether there be help for them in God; and so with their mouth they speak one thing, and with their life they speak another. They pray for recovery in sickness: if it be granted them in answer to their prayers, they give not glory unto God, but unto the means which have been effectual; and if it have been effected without means, they ascribe it to the influence of nervous sensibility, and think it a very daring thing to ascribe it unto God. They pray for faith in the word of the Gospel, which saith, "Believe, and thou shalt be saved;" and if God grant to any poor sinner faith therein, and he rejoiceth for the consolation, behold they are offended that

he should be so ready to rejoice, or that he should rejoice at all till he have received evidences in himself upon which to rest his faith. They send out missionaries to preach to the heathen; and they pray that God would guide them on their way; but if they presume to follow the guidance of God in any thing, without submitting it to a company of men residing here at home, they are blamed and turned out of the service. They profess to believe in the ordinances and sacraments of the church: but if a minister speak to them in Christ's name and authority, they are offended; or if they be addressed as the saints and holy ones, the redeemed and regenerate of the Lord, they are sore offended. They profess to believe in a Trinity; but if the offices of the Divine Persons, and the Unity of the Substance be set forth, they loathe it as mysterious and unprofitable speculation, yea daring intrusion into things above and beyond the knowledge of man. The same of the Incarnation, and the two natures of our blessed Lord; of the work of the Holy Ghost in his human nature; of the nature of his holiness in the flesh, as the form and manner and source of our holiness; of his work in the Spirit to endow the members of his body with supernatural powers in earnest of their inheritance; of his coming in judgment, and the establishment of his kingdom ;-these, and all the other doctrines of our faith, if they be entreated with any largeness, or exhibited with any distinctness, or insisted upon as necessary to salvation, do beget such offence and vexation in the hearts of men as make it really a very great undertaking to open them, and a very great temptation to have them in the state of dry and unmeaning names. This lukewarmness to the truth, as it is in Jesus Christ, ariseth from the heed which is given to the expedient and the sensible. Common sense and usefulness have supplanted the teaching of the Spirit, and the glorifying of God.' He goes too far; he mystifies the truth; he is not simple; there is no making out his meaning.' These, and such other expressions betray in the church, the strong resolution, not to understand more than what is necessary, for the world's daily transactions. I wonder really if they can lay their hand upon their heart, and say we understand the Gospel by John, or the Epistles of Paul, or any other part of Scripture which hath to do with God, and with Christ, and with

the principles of the faith. And if they say, we do not: I would ask again, How can you think your condition a good and a safe one? Did God set all this forth in order that it might be known, or remain unknown? And whether is it more seemly in the sight of God that you should labour to enter into the truth, or labour to keep it from you. If you think there can be progress in sanctification, without progress in the knowledge of the truth, you utterly deceive yourselves, and contradict the method of the Lord, which is thus expressed: "Sanctify them by thy truth: thy word is truth."

Such was the evil condition of the Laodicean church, and such is the evil condition in which I believe that part of the Protestant church, called Evangelical, is now found; not cold, not hot, but lukewarm; a confusion between faith and sight, an intermixture of duty with expediency, a submitting of God's word to the tribunal of man's judgment,-in one word, an accommodation of eternal truth to present advantage. In spiritual things, it is exactly what in natural things brought about the destruction of the nations of Canaan, after Sodom had been given for an example; and what is remarkable, it is judged in the very sanie language. After enumerating the mixture and confusion which they had wrought, and exhorting the Israelites to beware of the like, it is added, “That the land spue you not out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you" (Lev. xviii. 28). So in the case of the Laodicean, or last state of the church, towards which I think we are now verging, it is as threatened by the good Shepherd: "So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev. iii. 16). This brings us to the consideration of the second part of the charge, which is 2. The Punishment proper to this Offence.

I can look upon this threatening as signifying nothing less than utter rejection, even as we find Laodicea at this time subsisting in a state of wretchedness, far from God, and any earthly consolation, ever vexed with earthquakes, in the midst of barrenness and misery; in somewhat such a state as the region of Sodom is described to be. It is very remarkable how, both in the Epistles of Peter and Jude, where the character of the Christian apostasy is de

scribed, as it was then shewing itself, and should be exhibited to full view before the coming of the Lord, both these inspired Apostles do refer to the sin of Sodom, and of the angels which kept not their first estate, as the counterpart and warning of the sin and judgment which should be consummated in the church (2 Pet. ii. 4-6; Jude 6, 7). Of this I have been led to think a good deal at various times; and, if I err not, God hath given me to understand the matter. If, as was thought both by certain of the Jewish and Christian fathers, and as I feel disposed to think, the intermarriage of the sons of God with the daughters of men, which produced the Deluge, did really consist in an act of seduction by the angels of the daughters of men for which purpose they left their proper habitation, and came down to the earth, and tempted woman through the flesh with angelic beauty, as heretofore Satan had tempted woman through the desire of divinity; then am I able to understand how it should be the exact counterpart of apostasy in the Christian church. For we who are baptized into Christ do thereupon become the sons of God, being regenerate of the Holy Ghost, which is the inward grace, whereof the washing with water is the outward sign: thenceforth we are called with the high calling of Christ, risen with him, seated in his dignity, and honoured with his name. We are not carnal but spiritual; not of this world, but chosen out of this world, to be the heirs and inhabitants of the world to come. There is as wide a difference between us and the children of the world as between incorruption and corruption, between life and death, between heaven and hell. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God." For us therefore to return unto the flesh which we buried with Christ in baptism, and to the world which we then renounced as a sinful doomed thing, and to the devil against whom we undertook as the enemy of God and man, for us to despise this the hope of Christ's calling, these the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and to return again to the enjoyments of the flesh and of the world, is truly to realize and exemplify the thing which is written aforetime for our leaving of the sons of God intermarrying with the daughters of men. It is to leave the spiritual and celestial estate of holiness

and glory whereto we have attained, and to sink back into the fearful pit and the miry clay, from the which we have been taken. It is only to be likened to the most disgusting of all things in the bestial world, as saith Peter, "It is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is returned to his own vomit again; and, The sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire" (2 Pet. ii. 22). The same confusion of things which God hath separated, brought Sodom to its end, and the nations of Canaan. The Christian church he hath separated, from this world lying in wickedness, by uniting it to the risen body of Christ, and baptizing it into the hope of the eternal kingdom; choosing us in Christ as a substantial part of him from the beginning of the world, and preparing for us a kingdom, and constituting us his kings and priests, and heirs; all which boundless grace setting at nought, and withstanding the Holy Spirit, we sink and degrade ourselves into that world which is separated unto hell, and prefer unto the fellowship of God and Christ, the fellowship of those men, for whom is reserved the fire of hell prepared for the devil and his angels. And therefore it is that these two instances: the sin of the angels, bringing on the destruction of the heavens and the earth, which then were, by water; the sin of Sodom, bringing in its destruction by fire, are presented as the two types of the sin of the Christian apostasy, bringing on the judgment of the world at the coming of the Lord. And as the land is said to have spued out the nations of Canaan, Christ threatens here to spue the Laodicean church out of his mouth. While the deliverance of Noah by the ark, and of Sodom by the visit of the angel of judgment, are represented as the assurance to Christ's faithful spouse, that he will de liver her, in that fearful day of the fiery judgment of the heavens and the earth which now are.

The evil case of the Laodicean church standeth in the attempt, to bring the church and the world into alliance with one another, and when God shall have sufficiently striven against this profane and monstrous union, he will doubtless reject the church with horrible loathing, and return to it no more for ever. It proceeds from losing sight of the true doctrine of the church, her separateness unto Christ by election of God, for the end of being his