will be your faith, this the regeneration of your love, and this the token of your new connection with God.

Allow no artificial questions of before and after to detain you here, as debating whether Christ, or the Spirit, or the faith, or the new born love, must be first. Enough to know that, if your faith is conditioned by the Spirit, so is the victory of the Spirit conditioned by your faith; that here you have all these mercies streaming upon you, and that nothing effectual can be done, till your faith meets them and they are revealed in your faith. Enough to know that, if the faith is to be God's work, it is also to be your act, and it can not be worked before it is acted. Let Christ also be your help in this acting of faith and this receiving of God, even as he set himself to give it in his conversation with Nicodemus; going directly on to speak of himself and the grace brought down to sinners in his person, declaring that, as Moses lifted up the brazen serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. He brings the divine love down to this most wondrous attitude, the cross, that we may there drop out our sin, and receive into our faith the love, the God of love expressed. And therefore it is represented that Christ ever stands before the door and knocks for admission, with a promise that, if any man open the door (which is faith,) he will come in and sup with him. Christianity is God descending to the door to get admission; this is the grand philosophy of the incarnation. God is just what you see him here, and he comes to be revealed in you as he is presented before you. Thus received, you are born again, born of God. A new love enters, God enters, and eternal life begins.

Shall he enter thus with you?

are there that ought to hear this call.

How many of you

And no one of you

is excluded. You may have come hither to-day with no such high intention. Still the call is to you. If you ask who? how many? when? all, I answer, all, and that to-day. Do you not see a glorious simplicity in this truth of regeneration! How beautiful is God in the light of it, how deep in love Christ Jesus and his cross, how close, in all this, comes the tenderness and winning grace of your God! No matter if you did not think of receiving him, are you going to reject him? Is it nothing to be so exalted, so divinely ennobled? Have you fallen so low that no such greatness can attract you?

Then be it so. Have it as confessed that, when you saw the true gate open, you would not enter. Go back to your sins. Plunge into your little cares, fall down to your base idols, creep along through the low affinities of your sin, make a covenant with hunger and thirst, and hide it from you, if you can, that you was made for God, made to live in the consciousness of Him, as a mind irradiated by His spirit, quickened by his life, cleared by His purity. But if you can not be attracted by this, let it be no wonder, call it no severity, that Christ has not opened heaven to you. No wonder is it to him, even if it be to you, and therefore he says, whispers it to you kindly, but faithfully, as you turn yourself away,-"Marvel not that I said unto you ye must be born again.

VII.

THE PERSONAL LOVE AND LEAD OF CHRIST.

JOHN X. 3.-" And he calleth his own sheep by name and leadeth them out."

IN this parable, Christ is a shepherd, and his people are his flock. And two points, on which the beauty and significance of the parable principally turn, are referred to in the text, which might not be distinctly observed by one who is not acquainted with the peculiar manner of the eastern shepherds. They have, in the first place, a name for every sheep, and every sheep knows its name when it is called. And then the shepherd does not drive the flock, as we commonly speak, but he leads them, going before. To these two points, or to the instruction contained under these two analogies, I now propose to call your attention.

I. He calleth his own sheep by name. As we have names for dogs and other animals, which they themselves know, so it was with the castern shepherds and their flocks. This fact is shown historically, by many references. It is to this, for example, that Isaiah refers when he represents the Almighty Creator as leading out the starry heavens, like a shepherd leading his flock;-Lift up your eyes and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number; he calleth them all by names. The shepherd in this view is not as one who keeps a hive of bees, knowing well the hive, but never any particular

bee in it, but he has a particular recognition of every sheep, has a name for every one, teaches every one to know that name and follow at the call. This also is signified in the words that immediately follow,-The sheep follow him, for they know his voice,-words that refer, not so much to the mere tones of his voice, as to the fact that he is able, as a stranger is not, to call the names they are wont to answer as their own.

Under this analogy stands the tender and beautiful truth, that Christ holds a particular relation to individual persons; knows them, loves them, watches for them, leads them individually, even as if calling them by name.

In this respect, the parable is designed to counteract and correct, what has in all ages been the common infirmity of Christian believers;-they believe that God has a real care of the church and of all great bodies of saints, but how difficult is it to imagine that he ever particularly notes, or personally recognizes them. They know that God has a vast empire, and that the cares and counsels of his love include immense numbers of minds, and they fall into the impres sion that he must needs deal with them in the gross, or as noting only generals, just as they would do themselves. They even take an air of philosophy in this opinion, asking how we can imagine that so great a being takes a particular notice of, and holds a particular and personal relation to, individual men. There could not be a greater mistake, even as regards the matter of philosophy; for the relation God holds to objects of knowledge is different, in all respects, from that which is held by us. Our general terms, man, tree, insect, flower, are the names of particular, or single specimens, extended, on the ground of a per- ́ ceived similarity, to kinds or species. They come, in this

manner, to stand for millions of particular men, trees, insects, flowers, that we do not and never can know. They are, to just this extent, words of ignorance; only we are able, in the use, to hold right judgments of innumerable particulars we do not know, and have the words, so far, as words of wisdom. But God does not generalize in this manner, getting up general terms under which to handle particulars, which, as particulars, he does not know. He is not obliged to accommodate his ignorance, or short ness of perception, by any such splicing process in words. His knowledge of wholes is a real and complete knowledge. It is a knowledge of wholes, as being a distinct knowledge of particulars. Indeed, whatever particulars exist, or by him are created, he must first have thought; and therefore they were known by him, as being thought, even before they became subjects of knowledge in the world of fact. Holding in his thought the eternal archetypes of kinds and species, he also thought each individual in its particular type, as dominated by the common archetype. So that all things, even things most particular, are known or thought by him eternally, before they take existence in time. When he thinks of wholes or kinds therefore-of society, the church, the nation, the race, he knows nothing of them in our faint, partial way of generalization, but he knows them intuitively, through and through; the wholes in the particulars, the particulars in the wholes; knows them in their types, knows them in their archetypes, knows them in their genesis out of both; so with a knowledge that is more than verbal, a solid, systematic, specific knowl edge. Nay, it is more,-a necessary, inevitable knowledge; for the sun can no more shine on the world, as in the gross, without touching every particular straw and atom with his