III. There can, however, be no question that the predominant tone of the passage is something higher than this: not ruled by the gloom of the dawn, but by its promise. It is full of the prophecy of the coming day; and every word is strictly appropriate to an exhortation -an exhortation never suspended-to the company of watchers who travel towards while they wait for the coming of the Lord. They are stimulated to believe in the certainty of the perfect day; to rejoice in the hope that it inspires; and to occupy themselves meanwhile with all holy preparation.

Knowing the time. The Christian church is appealed to as exercising a firm faith in the gradual consummation of the present dawn into perfect day. These words are a remembrancer: reminding these early travellers of the great secret which they know,-the most precious secret time has to disclose,-that the Lord is at hand, bringing with Him all and more than all their hope can conceive. The return of our Saviour-or, rather, His coming: for that is the scriptural word, as if His first appearance was but a transient visit-fills the entire New Testament with a glow that leaves no part dark, brightens into all but glory the dimness of the church's present vexation, and already almost swallows up death in victory. To know the time is to know this its greatest secret. But the apostle uses here an expression that occurs nowhere else: one which, without overstraining it, yields a very important truth. The coming of Christ will be to His church-to His mystical, spiritual people-the regular and peaceful consummation of a day already begun: the same light and no other, but raised into meridian glory. To the ungodly world a catastrophe, and to slumbering Christians a sore amazement, it will be to those who wait for His appearing what day is to the earthly traveller who waits for the morning. The elements of heaven are here; the dawn is the earnest as well as the pledge of the day; and all that will be needful for the redeeming of every pledge the Scriptures contain is the withdrawal of the veil, the appearing of the Sun in the heavens, the "showing Himself" once more to His people. The apostle's words do not permit us to think of the Christian world as being plunged into night again : 'the night cometh" is never spoken of the church; only of the term of every individual's probation. One of the most impressive, and also the most common, notes of the Christian community is this, that they wait for His Son from heaven. And, in every age, those are most in harmony with the Scripture and the earliest disciples, who regard that as the one great prospect and future of the church.

But "knowing the time" does not signify any precise knowledge of its limits-at least its future limits. We know the human beginning of the time; but are forbidden even to investigate its human end. We are shut up to faith, which must in all things rule until the vision of Christ shall begin the reign of sight. It has pleased the Lord to keep this secret from every age, even from that of His elect

apostles. The benefit of the uncertainty is one that every generation of His followers, from the first who saw His retreating glory, to the last that shall witness His second shaking of the heavens and earth, must partake. It is pure and simple faith. "All things continue as they were," was the cry of dawning unbelief; and that cry is not less shrill, and not uttered by fewer voices, because it is reinforced by eighteen centuries of added argument. Impatient credulity-the counterpart of that unbelief-cries, "Lo, here is the promise of His coming, or lo there!" But simple faith waits on in hope that makes no calculation. There is no necessary, secular cycle to be computed: His return depends on His own will. The natural day may be subject of most precise calculation: we may ascertain on every meridian how many moments are yet from the dawn to the noon. But here the apostle's figure once more fails: our Lord may brighten any hourfrom cock-crowing to the third hour and the sixth-into perfect day.

This being the common prospect, it is not wonderful that here, as everywhere, the Christian state is described as one of joyful hope. Nothing in nature is more beautiful and more symbolical of eager expectation than the dawn that proclaims, "The day is at hand:" the day itself that fulfils its promise cannot surpass its beauty. Here the figure is again, in a certain sense, insufficient: the day that we expect will be so glorious as to cause its early splendours to be forgotten. But the brightness is a great reality: the estate of Christ's watchers is one in which an enthusiastic hope may well predominate. To the company as such there is nothing but joy in the future: its present inheritance is a hope full of immortality, and that knows no night; for "in its pathway there is no death." And the individual Christian is taught to enter into the common hope. True that he has the cares of life, the conflict with evil, the fear of death, to moderate his joy. But he is taught and is "slow of heart to believe," if he is not effectually taught to look through all and over all these lower glooms of his prospect to the brighter horizon into which these things merge. He must lose his particular sorrow in the general joy. He is one of the company that shall receive the Lord. He has come into their fellowship, and shall be separated from them no more. It may be that he will not be one of those who never taste of death. His own particular day may be followed by a certain night. He may be, and probably will be, buried by the holy wayside. But that accident of his lot will not sever him from his companions. His spirit will be with them still, and his body shall be given back to him before the august meeting shall take place, in time to welcome the great consummation. Hence to the faith and hope of every believer in Christ the present life is the dawn of a perfect day.

But the apostle reserves for the last his solemn exhortation to prepare. And that exhortation is in harmony with the whole strain : "the day is at hand;" the pilgrims are travelling towards it; and

their preparation for it is twofold. On the one hand, they are bidden to anticipate the day in the holy decorum of their lives; and on the other, to be clothed with the only garment worthy of the day, the

Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

"Let us walk honestly, as in the day :" this one word "honestly " unites in itself every idea of dignity, decorum, and purity becoming the Christian day; in opposition to the degradation and unholiness of the night in which the flesh had its dominion of shame. Although the glory of the perfect day is not yet revealed, its purity is already present. The high ideal of Christian holiness is the living, through the effectual grace of God, under the light of a present heaven: under the eye of Him whose presence already throws the light of day around our souls. The holy "walk in the light, as He is in the light;" they "have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth them from all sin." This is their fellowship: while in all the houses of the Egyptians around them there is deep darkness, in all their dwellings there is light. They tolerate nothing in themselves that the light of day would rebuke. Hence it is the counterpart of this that they "make no provision for the flesh :" whatever provision they take for their heavenly journey, the flesh has no share in it. The sin adhering to their nature, the "old man" not yet dead, is an enemy whose hunger they do not feed, to whose thirst they do not administer drink, whose dying solicitations they regard not, but leave him to "perish in the way." But the supreme preparation—uniting all others in one-is the "putting on of the Lord Jesus Christ." In Him alone the dignity and purity of our nature meet: transformed into His character, we need nothing more to fit us for the holiest heavens; but nothing less will suffice His expectation at His coming. He will come "to be glorified in His saints," already the likeness in ten thousand reproductions of Himself; and they shall in turn "be glorified in Him." Hence the great business of the pilgrims is to occupy the precious moments of the morning in weaving into their nature the character of Christ, as the apparel of the eternal day. And if in faith that worketh by love-the love that "fulfilleth the law they diligently co-operate with the Holy Spirit, it will be His blessed function to see to it that before the Bridegroom cometh His Bride, and every individual soul that makes up her mystical Person, shall be found clothed in His spiritual perfection as with a "garment without seam, woven from the top throughout."

Beyond this we cannot go. This is the close and the secret of the whole exhortation to the pilgrims of the dawn. They have come up out of the night at the sound of His awakening voice; and have left their Egyptian darkness for ever. They are wrestling with the dangers of the morning, rejoicing in its partial satisfactions. But supremely and above all they are intent upon the coming day: "in their pathway there is no death," but they wait for the "more abundant life;"

they are full of trembling and solemn expectation of all that the day will pour out of its unfathomable mysteries. But the end of all their expectation is the Person of their Lord. And to prepare for Him by being like Himself is the sum of all their preparation.

W. B. P.

THE GOOD DEPOSIT:

A CHARGE DELIVERED AT THE ORDINATION OF SIXTY MINISTERS AT BRADFORD, YORKSHIRE, AUGUST 3D, 1864; AND PUBLISHED AT THE REQUEST OF THE CONFERence.

BY GEORGE OSBORN, D.D.

PERMIT me, my dear brethren, to offer you my sincere congratulations. You have reached the point to which many of you have for years been tending, the goal of your highest and holiest aspirations. We have seen with unutterable joy the fathers of some of you taking part in this solemnity. We have reflected with equal delight that other fathers look down from their bright abodes with heightened happiness on the transaction of to-day. We think how many a mother's prayers in the temple and in the closet are answered in what we have this day taken part in; and we cannot but rejoice with them, and with you, and with one another, on the accession to the work of the ministry of the Gospel of so large a number of men who are, we trust, counted faithful by the Lord. In this estimate of the work on which you have entered, you have the sanction of inspired authority: -"If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work." You have attained an honour which, if an angel could envy anything, he would envy you, but which angels are not permitted to share; an honour which proceeds directly from an enthroned Saviour in the bestowment of an office which He has instituted, and to the due fulfilment of which there is annexed that stupendous promise to which you have already listened:-the Lord Himself, if you be faithful in the service to which you are now admitted, will come forth and serve you! (Luke xii. 35-43.) An angel might be overwhelmed with the vastness of the reward that is thus brought within your reach.

I have no intention of bringing before you anything like a complete view of the duties, responsibilities, and encouragements of the Christian ministry. All I aim at is to present a few hints which may furnish you with matter for meditation, which will, I hope, be treasured in your memories, and be reflected upon as occasion may require. These hints are grounded upon 2 Timothy i. 14:-"THAT GOOD THING WHICH WAS COMMITTED UNTO THEE, KEEP BY THE HOLY GHOST WHICH DWELLETH IN US."

There has been "committed to " you this day, as you have already heard, the work and office of a Christian minister and pastor. And

in the phraseology of the form of ordination, and of the text now under consideration, there is reference to the idea of a deposit, a mutual deposit, between Christ and His servants. In a verse or two before the text, St. Paul speaks of what he had deposited with Christ: "I am persuaded that He is able to keep my deposit until that day." Here, in the fourteenth verse, he speaks of the deposit which Christ had intrusted to him; not of a trust or confidence which St. Paul had exercised, but of a trust which he had received. The trust which he had exercised was, as it must ever be, a purely personal and intransmittible affair; the trust which had been reposed in him was transmittible. The terms in which this trust was instituted show as much: "As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you." "As Thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world." (John xx. 21; xvii. 18.) The authority to transmit it forms a part of the commission of the Christian ministry; and, therefore, to Timothy himself the apostle says, in an early part of the following chapter, "The things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also." This office, so honourable in itself, so high in its origin, so solemn in the mode of its bestowment, you are now invested with. The work of a Gospel minister cannot be done by every member of the Christian church. That is a notion which has had its advocates in time past; and which it has been attempted diligently to revive in our own times. "All who know the Gospel are," it is said, "bound to preach the Gospel:" but though there is a sense in which this saying may be admitted to be true, the admission can never supersede the scriptural doctrine of the Christian ministry; of its necessity, of its Divine appointment, of its official character. It is not a mere profession which you may embrace of your own accord, and may follow as convenience permits, or inclination dictates; but a Divine calling which you cannot neglect but at the peril of your souls. It is a trust which is committed to you. You are allowed of God to be put in trust with the Gospel;" (1 Thess. ii. 4;) and while health and opportunity continue, this trust will oblige you. If you do not forfeit it by unfaithfulness, or if you are not incapacitated for the discharge of it by the dispensations of Providence, you must not fail in the exercise of it while life shall last. You must not part with it. You must not neglect it; you must not forsake it; for

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"Wealth, honour, pleasure, or what else
This short-enduring world can give."

To this office and public function you are now "separated." (Rom, i. 1.) It is henceforth to be the business of your lives. This " one thing" you are to "do," to drive the Gospel plough, and to mind nothing but the plough. You have it on the authority of the Lord of the harvest Himself, that He who hath put his hand to the plough, and looks back,-allows his attention to be diverted to secondary objects,