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you must be born again—you must come into thorough newness of life, and not into a mere readjustment of habits and behaviour -you must die unto yourself, that you may live unto God." His work is thus fundamental. He will not attempt to do anything that is merely on the outside; he says that the very nature of man must be born again, and that until regeneration takes place, so-called "morality" is but a well-contrived device of selfishness. This is clearly a magnificent basis of life, supplying as it does eternal guarantees of purity and nobleness. In the absence of such a basis there can be no dependence upon the loudest professions of confidence and friendship; they must be taken for what they are worth, as very pleasant to the outward ear, but as liable to be blown away by the first cross wind which assails our popularity. On the other hand, where the heart has been born again, and as a consequence draws all the considerations which govern it immediately from the will of God, there must be incorruptible truth and invincible constancy. If we plead that when thrown entirely on our own resources we can develop a very beautiful life, the Holy Ghost says, "No; your results are artificial; they express study and contrivance on your part; they are rather a group of negations which attest a more or less severe discipline, they are not the natural outcome of a moral condition which cannot be changed by outward circumstances; you make clean the outside of the cup and platter, but the inside is full of rottenness and death." So the very morality which we boast may be, as already said, the last aggravation of our wickedness. Recollect how severe Jesus Christ was with the "righteous" men of his day; he never spared them; he never had one approving word for them; when they gathered up their ceremonial skirts and ran away from the path of the "sinner," he damned them with infinite condemnation as hypocrites, devourers, and whited sepulchres. This ministry of his is continued by the Holy Ghost,-" He shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you," and the ministry thus continued cannot cease until man throws down his artificial morality as a burden and a lie.

2. All hopes founded upon what are thought to be different degrees of sin must be abandoned. There are, of course, different degrees of crime, but the question does not turn upon crime at all.

DEGREES OF SIN.

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The murderer is undoubtedly a greater criminal than the pilferer; but the murderer is something more than a murderer, and the pilferer than a pilferer. The murder and the theft are accidental forms, nothing more. For all the purposes of criminal law it may be sufficient to classify men according to the mere accidents of their mischievous behaviour, so that punishment may be assigned with some degree of proportion to the shock which public feeling has sustained; but another standard must be set up when the offence is between man and God. "Would you send a murderer and a speculative sceptic to the same hell?" it may be asked. But stop! It is not the murderer, accidentally as such, that is sent to hell, nor the speculative sceptic, accidentally as such, that is shut out of heaven. The question is one of death, not of disease; of the heart, not of the hand. According to the teaching of the Holy Ghost it may be (even considering the question as one of degrees) that the heart through which has passed an unholy desire may be in a worse condition than the heart whose momentary passion has vented itself in murderous vengeance. There is an iniquity which is rolled under the tongue as a sweet morsel, a secret enjoyment of sin; and there are also moments in which is revealed to the soul a horrible possibility of sin where such possibility was least suspected, a revelation known only to the soul because too dreadful to be put into words and communicated to a stranger. The first time, in our sunny youth, we realised this awful possibility, can it ever be forgotten? It was only a shadow that swept over the heart, not a thing for words at all, yet the very memory of it chills us like the touch of death. Or it was a demand of the heart made at a time of festivity, it came upon us without warning, it made the heart bound as if it had been secretly touched with fire, in that moment we saw that our life is being daily spent on the edge of an abyss. Left to ourselves as a community of men, we can set up comparisons and contrasts, and actually shudder at enormities which secure for themselves a bad eminence; but introduced into the presence of God, and searched by the Holy Ghost, we feel that a look may be blasphemy and that unkindness may be cruel as murder. The thing to be understood is that sin is spiritual, and that it is to be judged spiritually, without reference to the vulgarity or noise which may make it socially noticeable.

3. Under such realisation of sin the work of Jesus Christ is seen in its true light. On this point some remarks have just been offered, but we may recur to it as the chief point in the discussion. Here it is emphatically true that “ they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick." The analogy will help us to higher truths. A man who has never known the agony of pain or the prostration of weakness may feel himself at liberty to treat very lightly the claims of men who follow the profession of medicine. From his own point of view he may feel himself entitled to sneer at such men, and may plead his personal robustness as an argument against their pretensions. He may, if of a narrow and obstinate nature, even go so far as to contend that other people might all be strong as he is, and consequently to withdraw his sympathy from them. But let that boastful and austere man awake to the fact that in his own body there is a slowly developing disease, painless in its early stages, but surely advancing upon his very life; let him come to the conviction that at any moment his pulse may cease, and instantly his attitude towards the medical profession may be totally changed. A new conviction has given him a new feeling and compelled him towards a new policy. Ask him the reason of the change, so complete and striking, which he has undergone, and at once he will justify himself by his new consciousness. Jesus Christ makes use of this very experience to throw light upon his own ministry: "I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance;" " They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick." Everything, therefore, is made to depend upon conviction. Where there is no conviction there will be no pressure of necessity. Where there is no thirst, who cares for the fountain? but in the desert, under an intolerable sun, who can calculate the value of a cup of cold water? Jesus Christ awaits the demands of spiritual necessity. He knows that the Holy Ghost will so torment the heart with a sense of sin as to compel the sufferer to pray for mercy, and at that point of anguish he will show himself to the Saviour of the world. Jesus Christ cannot work in the absence of conviction. When the physician lays his finger upon the strong man's pulse, the strong man smilingly anticipates an exclamation of surprise and congratulation; but when the pulse of the dying man is felt, it is amidst the silence of anxiety and fear. Tell the Pharisee that Jesus Christ died

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for him, and the man is shocked; but tell the sinner who knows the torment of remorse that the Son of God died to save him, and the statement becomes "the glorious gospel of the blessed God." Through his remorse he sees what he never could have seen through his philosophy. For years he may have vainly studied the Cross as a controversialist, in a moment he saw all its meaning when his heart was broken because of his sin. In the light of these reflections we may see how far removed from the region of mere controversy is such a doctrine as the atonement. It does not express a controversial result, so how can it be reached by controversial means? It came out of feeling-that is, out of the tender pity and love of God-and cannot therefore be understood but by the aid of feeling. The logician is out of his beat here. The broken heart will see farther than the keenest intellect. It is only for a moment now and then that any man really and truly sees himself, and such moments are times, not of equable and serene complacency, but of intense excitement and passion,-times of madness which the world cannot understand how, then, can a being who can see himself only now and then, see God always, and explain in easy words the sorrow and the grace of the Eternal? No man could bear the strain of continual conviction of sin. It kills him, that he may be made alive again by the Spirit, and ever afterwards he speaks of it as a memory rather than as a current experience. The agony upon the cross was soon past, and it could come again no more. It is so with this conviction which reveals the cross: however long the preparation, it is but momentary in the final pain, yet long enough to show sin, God, and salvation. This being so, the atonement cannot be dealt with in coolness and patience, like a problem which appeals but to one set of faculties; it must be seen at once, through the agony of broken-heartedness, or it can never be seen at all. Though soon seen it is never forgotten. It rules the life evermore. Fruits of the Spirit will attest by noble confirmation the reality of the Spirit's ministry. The anguish of the birth is forgotten so soon as the man is born, but the man has to live under discipline and to be the willing and grateful scholar of the Spirit to whom he owes

HIMSELF.

The conviction of sin is to be accompanied by the conviction of righteousness and the conviction of judgment,-accompanied by,

rather than followed, for these great spiritual quickenings and movements would often seem to involve many simultaneous experiences which are only in appearance separated by intervals of time. It may be taken that the convictive work of the Holy Spirit is one great act, describable, however, by a threefold effect, and that such work is initiated at once in all its complexity. Commentators have not found it easy to give a clear and satisfactory rendering of our Lord's words upon this subject, nor are we bold enough to hope that we can simplify what they have found it so difficult to explain. The meaning of the words would seem to be substantially this: The world has its own notion of wrong-doing; the world has its own notion of propriety, or justice as between man and man; the world has its own notion of moral differences, of right and wrong, of good and bad,-but when the Spirit is come, he will seize upon all these notions, and with convincing refutation will show them to be only names, to be superficial, shallow, altogether inadequate, fallacious, and misleading; having done this negative work, he will proceed to his affirmative mission, and in doing so he will replace the word "wrong-doing" with the word sin, the word "propriety" with the word righteousness, and the word "differences" with the word judgment; he will show the spiritual essence and reality, of which the world has but a dim and imperfect notion; he will throw the world into discontentment with all its own moral theories, and bring it to see that it has been mistaking appearances for realities; thus, negatively and positively, the Spirit will carry out a profound and vital work of spiritual conviction. But the point which is to be specially observed is that the convictive mission of the Holy Ghost is entirely identified with the name and ministry of Jesus Christ. The conviction, regarded simply as the result of spiritual argument, might have been accomplished in the very first ages of human history; it must, therefore, be something more than an intellectual conviction, and for its accomplishment it must have required every aid that is implied in the gift of the Son of God as the minister of salvation. Mark the statement and the reason: The Comforter will convince the world of sin—because they believe not on Me; the Comforter will convince the world of righteousness-because I go to the Father; the Comforter will convince the world of judgment— because the prince of this world is judged (is cast out), for for this