undue attachment for money, I do not think I am covetous; and that is your real feeling. But let your money be swept away, let your property be destroyed, let some great loss overtake you, and fall upon your possessions like a thunderbolt, scattering and consuming all; and how is it then? You then feel that your heart deceived you when it told you that your attachment to this world's wealth was slight; and by the murmuring and the repining of that heart at its losses, you learn how deep, although how undetected, was your attachment to this world's good things. The heart deceives us as to our power of resisting evil. You hear the preacher say something against theatres, and you say, I have not the least disposition to be affected by this sin, or by that vice; and therefore, you say, I will go; I am not afraid to go; I am quite conscious that I shall not catch any harm. You see, first, what you do not exactly like. You think this is not so pure as you could have wished; but still, you think, it is the custom of the place; and ultimately you come to look upon things with perfect. complacency, from which you would have revolted before, and to admire sparkling remarks with double meanings, which once you would have instinctively shrunk from. And thus, the heart deceives you to enter, because you believe it is impregnable; afterwards it tells you how deceitful, as well as how depraved, it is. There is, we are told, above the thundering cataract Niagara, a broad and a placid stream, so beautiful and smooth, that a boat plied by oars or sails moves upon it as upon a calm lake. You may go lower down, and an oar will still manage the boat; but a little further down there is a point where an oar will fail, and where the voyager and his vessel will be carried irresistibly onwards, and dashed over the impetuous cataract, and both will disappear together. In other words, in all moral evil there is a point where you will resist, and where will you may resist successfully; but go beyond that pointplay with it dare, brave it — venture still, and you be borne into its vortex, and retreat will be impossible. Or, to suppose another case, you go into a gambling room. To a cautious adviser your answer is, I have no taste for gambling; I do not well know how to play cards; I have not the least temptation to speculate- no such thing. You see some one whom you call your friend, who is busily engaged in it. You watch him play, and you find him successful. You cannot see any great harm in shuffling a card, or in throwing a die; and though you have no liking for gambling, and not the least fear that you would risk any thing in it, you think it would be a very great amusement; and therefore, to wile away a few minutes, you sit down at the table; and ere the night is over you rise the desperate and the ruined gambler. Such is the deceitfulness of the human heart; it leads you to believe, first, that it is utterly incapable of this and of that impression: you give way, and you find that most unintentionally you have yielded to that which plunges you in irreparable and deplorable ruin. Sometimes, when you are told of all these things, you are very apt to say, as one said of old (2 Kings viii. 12, 13): "Hazael," speaking to Elisha, "said, Why weepeth my lord? And he answered, Because I know the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel: their strongholds wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword, and will dash their children, and wilt rip up their women with child. And Hazael said, But what, is thy servant a dog that he should do this great thing? And Elisha answered, The Lord hath showed me that thou shalt be king over Syria." And he did all that Elisha said; and yet his first instinctive feelings, suggested by the very deceitfulness of his heart. were, that such things are utterly impossible. I do not dwell longer upon this. Let us pray that all of us may possess the great preventive of, and the only antagonist to, the tendencies of a depraved heart, namely, the sure regeneration of the Holy Spirit of God. God alone knows the heart, God alone can change the heart. It is still true, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." A Christian is not the old vine from which one branch has been lopped off, a vessel of which one hole has been stopped up, leaving the element within to work itself out in some other channel; a Christian is one whose whole heart has been changed. In other words, regeneration is not a reformation of man, it is a revolution of man; it is an entire transformation of all the springs, and all the thoughts and fountains, of his being: so that all things have become new, and all old things are passed away. Make sure of this change: it is reality, not shadow. The subjects of this change will not venture on forbidden ground; they will not tamper with the evil that is seductive and perilous; they will learn to suspect far distant and even possible evil; and they will ever pray, what will be their safety in proportion as they realize it, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." May God thus change our hearts, for Christ's sake. Amen. 15* CHAPTER X. BAPTISM DOTH SAVE. "The heir of heaven, henceforth I dread not death; "The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us, (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.". -1 Pet. iii. 21. WE find it asserted by Peter, that Jesus preached to the antediluvians previous to the Flood the great truths of the gospel, which he afterwards came to seal and establish by his death. He did so, not immediately, but mediately by the instrumentality of Noah, "a preacher of righteousness," who preached to and reasoned with those who were threatened destruction by the approaching flood, whom he pressed to enter into the ark, and have instant safety. It is said, Jesus did so by his Spirit,-"By which Holy Spirit he went and preached." Thus we have Christ the Preacher, the Spirit the Inspirer of the message, and Noah the organ of its utterance, or the minister. "He preached," it is said, "to the spirits in prison." I need not state that some have argued that Christ descended into a region known by the unscriptural name of purgatory, and that there he preached to the inmates their approaching deliverance. But this is confoundling things that differ; for here it is stated that Christ merely went and preached to the antediluvians who were on earth in the days of Noah, and while they were on earth, but were in prison in the days of Peter. The historian, Peter, says they were in prison in his days; but the preacher, Noah, preached to them whilst they were yet existing in the flesh upon earth. These souls were in the flesh when Christ preached to them; these souls were in prison when Peter wrote concerning this fact. And any one who reads history must notice that two things are often predicated of the same party—the one true when the party spoken of was upon earth; the other true when the historian who records the fact wrote or recorded that fact. Now to found the doctrine of purgatory upon this is to misinterpret the passage altogether. Besides, there is a conclusive reply to any such inference in this, that purgatory, as defined by the Council of Trent, is for the souls of believers, who there, it alleges, are purified, and out of which they emerge to heaven. But those who perished by the Flood were unbelievers, and therefore, by the very definition of the doctrine, they never could have entered purgatory, and from thence emerged to heaven. Whatever doctrine, therefore, this text may support, it is not the doctrine of purgatory as held by the Romish Church. All that is here stated is, that there is a "prison," or a place of eternal woe, which was open in the days of Noah, was not closed in the days of Peter, and there is no record that it is closed now. But I have selected this passage as a sequel to my explanations of the history of Noah, in order to illustrate the meaning of that misapprehended, mistaken, and perverted thing, or rather sacrament or rite, which we call baptism. For some of the distinctions that I have drawn |