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conversed with him for some time chiefly on religious topics. Another gentleman saw him, and read to him the 121st Psalm-a psalm to which his mother had been partial, and which had been the means of comforting our brother in his afflictions and perils. Mr. Walker spoke to these gentlemen of the presence of the One Friend who was always with him. They took their leave, promising to see him the next day. But it was not permitted that they should see him alive again. During the night a quartermaster often visited him. The sailor looked in at his berth a little before three o'clock on the Monday morning. Mr. Walker had told the man he did not need him. On his visiting his berth ten minutes later, he found that his patient had ceased to breathe. His eyes were closed, his hands were clasped on his breast. He placidly lay as he had fallen asleep in Jesus. He finished his course on the 21st of December, 1874, aged thirty-six years. Though no earthly friend had accompanied him to the valley of death, to do the last kindly offices and witness his departure, his end had been easy and peaceful. "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord."

According to usages at sea, a canvas hammock was prepared, in which the body was sewn with something heavy placed at the feet to cause it to sink. At seven o'clock on the same morning on which he died the ship's officers and some of the passengers assembled round the corpse, which was placed on a board with one end resting on the rail. The steamer was stopped, and the doctor, officiating as chaplain, commenced the burial service. When he read, "Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God, of His great mercy, to take unto Himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the deep," the corpse was launched over the side to find its way to the well-nigh fathomless depths of the Indian Ocean, there to wait the resurrection morn when the sea shall give up its dead.

In conclusion, we present an extract from a letter of the Rev. J. Ogden to Mrs. Walker, and which may be taken to represent the thoughts and feelings of those who had known our departed brother, and who submissively mourn that he should in middle life, and from prospects of great usefulness, be taken from our midst and die afar off on the sea. Mr. Ogden writes :-"It is strange that one such as he should have been removed in the prime of his life. He had qualities that were capable of making him extensively useful. The generous warmth of his heart won for him the deepest and most lasting affection, and I shall ever treasure his memory with sorrowful interest as among the most precious things which God in His goodness has permitted me to know. It seems a very sad thing for

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him to have passed away amid the ocean solitude. Yet the way to Heaven is as bright and sure from the sea as from the land, and the ashes of God's ransomed ones can sleep as peacefully and as safely under the waves of the sea as in the graves watered by the tears of fond and loving friends."

On Sunday the 31st of January, the Rev. J. L. Shawcross, Independent Minister, of Aluwick, preached to a crowded and deeply. affected congregation in Bondgate Church the funeral sermon of their late beloved minister, from Acts xiii., 36-" After he had served his own generation, by the will of God he fell on asleep."

J. M. C.

CHRISTIAN PERFECTION.

SECOND PAPER.

PERFECTION, absolutely considered, does not admit of degrees. need not, however, for this reason be thought of as restricted to what is infinite. Absolute and infinite are not interchangeable terms, and though the former is no doubt implied in the latter, the latter is not therefore implied in the former. It is true the phrase "The Absolute" is applicable only to God, or rather to that selfexistent and eternal Something underlying and conditioning all phenomena, which in the language of philosophy is male to stand for Him; but absolute, as a determining adjective, expressing measure and quality, is capable of a great variety of applications. Its essential meaning, as a Latin participle, is, first, free, loosed, whether morally or physically; and then, finished, completed, perfected, in relation to any object whatever. It is hence possible to employ it in many ways, and to employ it in describing the very highest order of excellence, really or ideally, without implying for the object so described anything but the most definite limitations. We may say of a man who has nothing but his own will to consult that he is absolutely free. We may say of creatures below him that want nothing, so far as we can judge, to fill up the total measure of their being, that they are absolutely perfect. Single individuals may be improved up to a certain point; but that point attained no further progress is possible. There is for each an archetypal perfection, which constitutes a definite limit that it cannot overstep. Each has a fixed and determinate nature, a fixed and determinate function, with, at the same time, a fixed and determinate measure of actual capability within its own sphere. This is true of things living and things not living, from the commonest rock to the most exquisite crystal, from the lowliest moss to the stateliest cedar, from the scarcely sensitive zoophyte to the wonderfully endowed and almost infallibly skilful beaver and bee. For these a reaching forth to some

thing nobler and better-a further development, a higher function, a greater utility-is not so much as conceivable. There is in them no ascertainable deficiency, no obvious or suspected imperfection; they are complete, finished, what the Creator at the beginning pronounced them to be-truly and wholly "good."

This, however, cannot now be said of man. Nor even at the first could it have been said of him in the same unlimited and absolute sense. From the very moment of his creation he must have been distinguished from other creatures in this, that an endless future lay open before him, with a possibility of endless development and progress. Though always the same, he must nevertheless have been never the same, the difference being that he had attained, and was destined still further to attain, to something higher and better. To remain stationary at one point, however advanced, would have been impossible. His nature would have impelled him ever onward and ever upward. His desires and hopes would have led him to seek for wider horizons and even for new hemispheres; and unless he had found them he would have failed in his most essential happiness and wellbeing. Absolute perfection, therefore, could not even then have been predicated of him.

Yet perfection there was. Nothing was wanting to the total sum of man's powers, and nothing to their complete and orderly exercise. Even his capability of progress was a distinct element of his perfection, while yet the perfection itself could never be wholly final. At what condition of maturity, so to speak, he was created we may never know; the kind of trial to which his freedom was subjected seems to point to a degree somewhat below the one commonly assigned to him. It is tolerably certain that he was not the resplendent and miraculously gifted being fashioned by the warm and fertile imagination of Dr. South, in one of the most eloquent pieces of writing in our language. Still it remains true that he was created in the image of God, and that this image included, with whatever else and no doubt much else-not alone the sinlessness, but also the essential rectitude of all the powers of his soul. He was hence not only pronounced by the Creator, with the rest of His creatures, "good," but also, in virtue of the additional and higher goodness bestowed upon him, "very good."

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But this goodness he has not now. The abuse of his freedom dimmed the image of God at the very first, and dimness gradually deepened to almost obliteration. There is no other consistent theory, no other intelligible account of the historical introduction of sin into our world. Even this does not solve the whole mystery, but it brings us as near to a solution as human reason or human faith can get. Man had, what he still possesses, the fearful power, if he pleased to use it, of opposing his Maker. He could deliberately resist His will, though of course at the cost of an overwhelming and tremendous penalty. What he could do he did, and the penalty caine upon him by irresistible necessity. The penalty was twofold-death and degradation; death by immediate sentence of law, enforced by the sovereign authority of God, and degradation by inevitable loss of

South's Sermons. Sermon II., "Man created in the image of God."

moral dignity and honour. All perfection, both present and prospective, was thus at an end. Left to his own resources, man had no power of self-restoration. He could not regain the height from which he had fallen; he must rather continue to fall ever lower. The punishment of his sin was an immutable necessity. If there was any escape from it, the way to this must be made by Him with whom the infliction of the punishment rested as an imperative obligation; it could not be made by the sinner himself. Besides, if it could, there was still the sin, in its natural effect on the conscience and the heart. This was not to be dealt with by a mere act of remission. An effort of will, were that conceivable, would have as little power over it as would a like effort on the part of a merciful physician over a virulent and fatal disease. And sin became and is a disease. It is not an act only, but that which the act always and inevitably leaves behind. There is poison in it as well as a sting. The soul becomes infected by it, and so in fact does the body; and this infection, once received, can be expelled by no human means, but is transmitted onward, according to the ordinary law of generation, with the nature in which it resides.

Now the question is, How far is it possible to remedy the evil thus existing ?-how far is it possible to restore man to a condition answering in some virtual and substantial way to his primitive perfection? To restore him to what he precisely was, whether in position or in nature, is of course not possible. He can never again, at least in the present life, converse with God in a paradise on which no blight has fallen. He can never again look up to Him as one who has known nothing of guilt, nothing of condemnation, nothing of sin. Nor in truth need he now regret the impossibility. However the mystery may be explained, the fall was not the defeat of the Divine purpose with respect to our world. It did not cause the shadow on the dial of time to move backward by one single degree. It was a tremendous evil in itself, and a sore and sad degradation to our race, but it became the occasion nevertheless for the providing of some better thing for us. What then is this better thing, and to what extent may it now be enjoyed? Is it possible to effect for man a deliverance so complete from the evil that has taken possession of him that he shall, in Apostolic phrase, and in the fullest meaning of the words, be "made free from sin," and so "perfect, even as our Father which is in heaven is perfect"? And if so, in what manner is this great work to be accomplished?

To the former of these questions we are permitted to answer, through the exceeding grace of God, directly and explicitly in the affirmative. The original purpose of redemption, if redemption be supposed at all, could contemplate nothing less than this. It could not have been intended that evil should triumph, or should persistently maintain its hold in any way. Whether the introduction of sin into the world could have been prevented or not, it is not given us to say, but a complete and final conquest over it must have been anticipated from the beginning. As a matter of fact this complete and final conquest was actually provided for, and at a tremendous cost. "For this purpose was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil." For the

same purpose was the Spirit poured out from on high, that He might render effectual, in the case of every one that should believe, what had been mercifully and comprehensively intended for the whole race. What are called the "works of the devil" by one Apostle are called the "works of the flesh" by another. They are individual affections and individual acts, and to be destroyed at all they must be destroyed individually in the hearts and lives of those whose works they

The Gospel cannot operate generally, except as it operates particularly. Its message is addressed to each person singly and alone, and its purpose is accomplished only so far as "the works of the devil" it came to destroy are destroyed personally in him. A partial destruction would leave him but partially free, and would therefore leave the Gospel but partially successful in its contemplated result.

But the question is answered best perhaps on the ground of religious privilege and duty. What is possible and practicable may, one should think, be readily and certainly inferred from what we are expressly required to do and to be. Now it needs but the smallest acquaintance with Holy Scripture to see that an experimental knowledge of Divine things is there placed before us as an attainable possession, which can mean nothing less than the very perfection of which we have spoken. Let any one take the Epistles of St. Paul and St. John, and consider, not only particular expressions in chosen places, but the general strain and purpose of their teaching, and he will find it impossible to evade the conviction that they contemplate for believers, and indeed demand of them as an imperative obligation, nothing short of entire purification from sin and maturity in personal holiness. But if single passages be selected, where the argument of the Apostle presses onward to its conclusion, or where his eager thought seeks at once for full and decisive expression, then the fact becomes abundantly and even superfluously clear. Take the following as examples.

In 2 Cor., vi., St. Paul, with singular boldness and energy of language, warns the Corinthians against all contact and fellowship with evil and with evil-doers. His course of thought seems to be this. He first beseeches them that they receive not the grace of God in vain, enforcing this admonition by suggestions arising out of his own apostolic labours and sufferings. Returning to his primary exhortation, he then urges them, in order to give it practical effect, to separate themselves entirely and universally from the unbelieving and ungodly world, and to do this for the very obvious reason that light can have no communion with darkness, that Christ can have no concord with Belial, that the temple of God can have no agreement with idols. And then, finally, having encouraged them to the performance of this duty by exceedingly great and precious promises, he concludes thus (the first verse of the seventh chapter being logically the last of the sixth): "Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God." Now what is this but a demand for entire sanctification? What is it but an earnest exhortation to Christian perfection in its two distinctive elements of purgation from all defilement and attainment to complete and perfect holiness? And how shall this demand be rendered

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