which is either one with the faith spoken of by St. Paul or its immediate offspring. It cannot be that spirit of obedience to the commands of Christ, by which the soul dwelleth in him and he in it, (1 John, iii. 4.) and which our Saviour himself announces as a being born again. And this indispensable act, or influence, or impregnation, of which, as of a divine tradition, the eldest philosophy is not silent; which flashed through the darkness of the pagan mysteries; and which it was therefore a reproach to a Master in Israel that he had not already known; (John iii.) — this is elsewhere explained as a seed which though of gradual developement, did yet potentially contain the essential form not merely of a better but of an other life; amidst all the frailties and transient eclipses of mortality, making, I repeat, the subjects of this regeneration not so properly better as other men, whom therefore, the world could not but hate as aliens. Its own native growth, however improved by cultivation, (whether through the agency of blind sympathies or of an intelligent self-interest, the utmost heights to which the worldly life can ascend,) the world has always been ready and willing to acknowledge and admire. They are of the world; therefore speak they out of the heart of the world, and the world heareth them.'"

And hence then, you perceive, it follows in the second place, that this Inward Life must spring from a Divine source.

For, the depths of the human spirit, who can penetrate, and who can influence but He who is its maker and sustainer? What we ourselves perceive of our own minds in the moment of self-consciousness is not one millionth part of that vast store of conceptions, and those innumerable trains of thought which, far below the ken of inward contemplation are ever living and effective in the soul; seething, as it were, in its unfathomed depths, and causing, every instant, changes sudden and extensive in the surface waves which we behold. And the laws of those changes, the causes which are thus in constant operation, who can calculate, and who can alter? To work effectually, therefore, upon our own spirits by our own unassisted skill and force is far beyond the power of man. We may catch a glimpse of some of the more general laws of thought, we may conjecture the existence of manifold concurrent causes, we may learn by long experience what we must avoid and what pursue upon the whole;-but who can touch the heart? Who can discover the secret spring that sets in motion all its complicated and inexplicable workings? Who can supply the regulator which controls and harmonizes them? Who but God who

searcheth the heart and trieth the reins, and worketh all in all?

Besides, the rise of Piety in the heart takes place, not as a mechanical effect, but as a living growth. Even in cases where it seems to dawn the most suddenly on the consciousness and on the world, it has been a growth. And to this growth, not ourselves alone but all persons and all circumstances without intermission have contributed. Any one condition of mind at any one moment is the product of the circumstances of that moment, multiplied into all its preceding conditions. And who is the arranger of those circumstances, and who forms the ground and life of those conditions, but the God in whom we live and move? The blessed principles and feelings of true religion do not then first begin to be, when our attention is engaged by them; the moment of their birth into the consciousness is not the moment of their generation in the soul. The seeds thereof have been thrown in from time to time by the ever-working providence and grace of God; they have long been buried in the clods of the earthly nature; they have been secretly impregnated by the allpervading Spirit of life; they have expanded silently and unsuspected; they put forth timidly their delicate shoots; often they are met and nipped by the chilling blasts of an uncongenial world, and

they shrink again into themselves; till some more favourable moment is vouchsafed them; a gentler air breathes over them; they burst through every remaining obstacle, they press up through all the superincumbent weight of earthliness; and there they are, discoverable now by the downward glance of meditation, perceptible to the mind that ponders on itself, and gladdening with their young and tender verdure the admiring soul. All growth, in mind as in nature, must be mysterious and independent of ourselves. We can perceive only that things have grown: we have not eyes to trace them in their growth.

"Who ever saw the earliest rose
First open her sweet breast?"

And who can chronicle the growth of friendship, and the buddings of affection? Do we not awake to the perception of them as if some sudden light had only now revealed to us sentiments which in the very moment of their revelation we feel to be familiar with, and which, therefore, we do not so much discover as recognize within us?

And just so is it with the dawn of Piety in the mind. We feel it to be in us, yet not of us. It bears upon itself the stamp of heavenly origin. We confess with St. Paul that it "has pleased GOD

to reveal his Son in us." We cry in the words of Jesus, "Blessed art thou, my soul, for flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto thee, but thy Father which is in heaven." And we exclaim with the Apostle, " O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! For of Him and through Him, and to Him are all things, to whom be glory for ever and ever, Amen!"

And this then is the truth which Scripture expresses so emphatically when it declares; "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit." * "Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures." + "We have received, not the spirit of the world but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God." "As many as received him to them gave he power to become the Sons of God, which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." §

And so the Bishops and Fathers of our church. "Holy we cannot be," says Bishop Andrews, " by any habit, moral or acquisite. There is none such

* John iii. 8.

+ James i. 18.
§ John i. 12, 13.

$ 1 Cor. ii. 12.