as He spake of old. He will lift up the light of His countenance upon you. He will say to you asking for forgiveness, "Go thy way, thy sins are forgiven thee." He will say to you praying for more light, more grace, more purity, more faith, "Be it unto thee, even as thou wilt." He will say to you in the hour of the soul's conflicts and strifes, in the storm and tempest of newly-awakened or revived conviction of sin, "Be still! be at rest."

"Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

III.

FAITH.

"God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (St. John iii. 16).

The second of the "COMFORTABle Words."

IN the Address immediately preceding the present, I dwelt on Repentance as one of the conditions of worthy Communion, and as the very first requisite of worthy Communion. Repentance precedes Faith in the order of grace. We do not believe savingly until we have repented truly; for this reason, that the work of Jesus is not and cannot be so realised as to be apprehended and appropriated until and unless we first realise the need of this Atonement. We must be brought to a humbling conviction and abasing consciousness of personal guilt, before the "Great Salvation" wrought for us by Jesus Christ can be understood and appreciated. I trust I have already made this so clear, that to dwell any further upon it were but needless repetition. Where true Repentance is experienced there cannot but arise in the mind a sense of demerit. Just in proportion as we realise the love of God in Christ toward us, we realise our unworthiness of that wondrous love. As we feel ourselves guilty and yet beloved, the thought of a love

manifested toward us "while we were yet sinners," is almost overpowering. The Evangelist himself is at a loss for language in which to express his sense of it. "God so loved" is the limited and yet limitless expression of a love boundless, fathomless, inexhaustible. Inasmuch, then, as a sense of unworthiness of that love is the "first-fruit," so to speak, of true Repentance; as the conviction of the greatness of that undeserved love invariably and uniformly, I believe, accompanies "godly sorrow" for sin, so it is the most becoming feeling with which we can approach the Lord's Table. This sense of unworthiness, if it have its root in a true view of sin, in that view which God the Holy Ghost gives us of sin, will bear the flower of Faith. It is the feeling which should bring us to Holy Communion. It is the last which should deter us from communicating at that Holy Table where Christ, as the propitiation for sin, is "evidently set forth." And so, consistently with the evangelical view of Repentance, we find its necessity preeminently enforced. It stands in the very forefront of the conditions of worthy Communion. In every instruction or admonition connected with the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the need of Repentance is insisted upon as the prime condition on which the grace or blessing is conveyed. And confession of sin the most self-condemning, self-accusing, precedes, on our part, those assurances of forgiveness and acceptance which have no meaning and no real comfort until we have felt the burden of our unforgiven sin, and the awfulness of an unreconciled state. It is, it must be, first evening and then morning,

and we may apply the Christian Poet's words to this spiritual experience which, like the light of heaven, is unvaried and uniform.

""Tis first the good and then the beautiful,

Not first the beautiful and then the good:
First the rough seed, sown in the rougher soil,
Then the flower-blossom, or the branching wood.

"Not first the glad and then the sorrowful,
But first the sorrowful and then the glad.
Tears for a day; for earth of tears is full,

Then we forget that we were ever sad."

-BONAR.

For surely there must be some blessing beyond this Repentance something to which Repentance leads, something to which it is preparatory. If it be true that humbling conviction of personal sinfulness must be felt before we can appreciate the blessing of pardon, where that sinfulness is felt the pardon awaits the contrite. As the shadow on the sun-dial tells us of the sun, as light lies behind the lurid thunder-cloud, so to the soul, sin-convicted and sin-stricken, there comes the revelation of infinite, exhaustless love. And what but love could have moved the Father to give His only Son for us? What but love could have constrained Him to give Himself for us? The love of God is from everlasting, for God is love. God has loved us from all eternity. The death of Christ does not make God more loving towards His creatures than He has ever been; for this were to make Him changeable. The death of Christ is a special manifestation of that love: it is yet further

evidence and proof of the love of God, Who gave Himself for us, that we might not perish everlastingly. And He Who would have all men to be saved, Who willeth not the death of a sinner, but that all men should repent and be saved, is ready and willing, and waiting to forgive, to receive, to save all that believe in Him. So we find this to be the second condition of worthy Communion, "that we have a lively faith in God's mercy through Christ." The "benefit" is declared to be great "if with a true, penitent heart and lively faith we receive that Holy Sacrament." We are bidden to "draw near with faith." When the consecrated elements are administered we accompany the individual administration with these familiar words-" Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on Him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving." The prayers which follow are the expression of a lively faith in the benefits of Christ's Passion; and all throughout the Office of Holy Communion, faith on the part of the recipient is made a condition of worthy participation in its privileges. It is not that faith saves us, for that would be to make a Saviour of our feelings. All that faith does is to enable us to apprehend and appropriate the benefits of Christ's Passion, personally and individually to our own souls. We can do nothing in the matter of our salvation beyond what is already done for us. It is for us to repent and to believe, because salvation is ours, not by works, nor yet by praying, but by believing. Hence we find Faith essential to worthy Communion. It can have no value apart from faith.

C