It is possible your baptism may have been an act of hypocrisy; you may perhaps have been immersed, ir token that, like as Christ laid down voluntarily on the cross the whole body of sin, an acceptable offering to the Father, so you in baptism, finally discarded, and offered up the passions, lusts and appetites, properties of the flesh, as the only offering which you could make; you may perhaps have hypocritically performed the ceremonial or exterior of immersion, you may have scrupulously rendered unto God the visible pledge or token without ever having seriously and decidedly determined to die to sin and rise again to righteousness. If so, your baptism has been but an idle piece of impertinence, hateful and odious to him whom you mock and insult. But if your baptism had in it any solid meaning, and you were not guilty of the grossest inconsistency and insincerity, it is quite impossible that you should not live after the spirit. For no man, who is the slave of sin is in Christ or belongs to him.

And what is it to be in Christ and Christ in .. you, but to be dead as to the body, as Christ is, and alive as to the spirit likewise as Christ is ; the death of the body signifying and being the life of righteousness? Jesus Christ was raised .. from death to life by God through the spirit of

God that was in him; that is, his mind or spirit was in all points conformable unto, or the same with, the spirit or mind of God; and so, shall we be raised from death through the same spirit; that is, we also, if our spirit be conformable to or the same with the spirit or mind of Christ, or with the spirit or mind of God, we also shall find, that the body which we in sincerity and truth freely sacrificed in baptism is spiritualized or made righteous, and shall be raised again from death, through that spirit, or mind, which dwelleth in us, and is conformable to his spirit or mind, or the spirit or mind of God. As our prospects were formerly circumscribed within the boundaries of this fleshly tabernacle, we seemed to owe some service and attention to the flesh, but now that our prospects are extended beyond the grave, and we are become heirs of immortality, we owe absolutely nothing to the flesh, and if we pay any thing to the flesh, it is not on its own account, but in subserviency, and with a view to the paramount interest of the spirit, we are no longer debtors to the flesh to live after the flesh.

For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die, if.. ye live in base subserviency to the passions, and as if ye were mere creatures of a day, insensible to that glorious futurity, unveiled to your eyes in these latter days by Christ; if your pur

suits are mean and little answering to the narrowness and circumscribed character of your views and expectations, brief and contemptible shall be the term of your unprofitable career, your body is sold to sin, and no one shall redeem it from death.

But if by that spirit which influences your mind, that spirit which was in Christ making him to hunger and thirst after righteousness, that spirit which accords with, or is identical with the spirit of God, if by that spirit, which supported Jesus, and ultimately raised him to life, if by that spirit now identified with your own reason and good sense, strong in its control over the flesh, and over the lusts and appetites thereof, you do kill the deeds of the body, that is take from all those deeds their soul, their animating principle selfishness; and if you substitute in the place of this animating principle of life in the flesh, that which is the animating principle of righteousness, or life in the spirit, viz. faithfulness to your Maker and Saviour; then shall you be as the sons of God, you shall live, as many of you as are led by that spirit. which was in Christ, and which proved him to be the son of God.

For as many For as many of you as are.. led by the spirit of God, as many of you as are led by that spirit which was in Christ, are the sons of God even as Christ was son of God, so are ye sons of God.

Your relation to God I have for the purpose of illustration compared to a servitude; but in point of fact it is not a servitude, you are not called a second time like your forefathers to a condition of servitude replete with terror; the condition into which you are now raised is divested of that spirit of fear on the one side, and that arbitary spirit on the other, which are characteristic of servitude, and is distinguished by that love and fidelity of which a son only is capable, that indulgent consideration and confidential trust which a father only can bestow.

If the honor of being adopted into the family .. of God be above comprehension we are nevertheless sufficiently assured of the fact, even by the testimony of that spirit within us, which we took into our hearts when we were baptized into Jesus, of which we are internally conscious; rejoicing as we do in the love of God, affectionately rejoicing with all mankind as our brethren, all with ourselves jointly recovered to our common parent; we are sufficiently assured of the fact I say even by the testimony of that spirit which we have taken into our characters, which as the spirit of the universal family of mankind reconciled to, and reinstated in the love of the universal parent crieth out Abba, Father. Ye are my brethren, said Jesus Christ, if ye do whatsoever I command

That ye

you; and what is his command? love one another. If our spirit then is conscious of this love, we have within us the testimony that we are his brethren, and therefore that we are as he is, sons of God; in this assurance the spirit of love that is in us is confirmed by that holy spirit which said of him whose brethren we are, "Thou art my beloved son, this day have I begotten thee."

But if we are sons, we are heirs, heirs of God .. and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him, if we die with him; I mean, if we have in the sight of God the merit of dying with him, for God considers us as doing, what we stand faithfully pledged to do should he require it, if we suffer with him I repeat that we may likewise be glorified with him, if our baptism into his death were a sincere and faithful consecration of ourselves to God, and not a mockery.

And shall we shrink from a participation with Christ? Raise your mind to the glory with which his sufferings were crowned, be- .. lieve me there is nothing we suffer here, that shall not be amply coinpensated to us when we shall see him in his kingdom, and be made like unto him. For the glory that shall then be .. revealed in us is that consummation to which the hopes of created man are earnestly directed,