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i You will not require much proof that the running the way of God's com

mandments follows the enlargement of the heart. We have observed already that the Psalmist was walking the way of God's commandments, and the object of his desires was a greater quickness or alacrity, so that his pace might be that of a runner rather than that of a walker. It must have ap peared from the whole tenor of our remarks, that an increased rapidity of advance is intended by the "running" of our text, the progress becoming swifter and swifter in proportion as the heart is enlarged. So that the running is supposed dependent on the enlargement. I do not imagine that the enlargement is one definite act, and the running one definite pace. It is clear, on the contrary, that the enlargement will be progressive, the heart continually expanding, and that at the same time the running will be accelerated, the velocity continually increasing. So that our only business is to prove to you that an enlarged heart will produce a readier and a more constant obedience. But the least reference to what I have already established will furnish evidence enough. The enlarged heart includes, as we have shown you, an enlarged understanding and an enlarged will. The enlargement of the understanding supposes you more disposed to follow only what is good. The former, therefore, is the same thing as our discerning more and more of the demands of God's law; the latter is the same thing as our determining to act on the discernment. But what is this, save in so many words an enlarged heart producing an ampler obedience? The understanding is enlarged, so that we see more of what is demanded; the will is enlarged, so that we resolve on conforming ourselves to those discoveries of the understanding. And if we both find out more and more of what is to be done, and more of the course which we ascertain to be right, then we are clearly advancing in the work of obedience. And if, yet further, both these results are to be traced to the heart's enlargement as a cause, who can avoid discovering the force of the connection-"I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart?" We will just add, that love, which we showed to be mainly productive of the enlargement, is in all cases the great spring of obedience. Let a man love God, and he will strive to obey God, not more from a principle of duty than from a feeling of delight. Oh! we do a vast wrong to religion when we represent it as a system which requires of a man that he should be perpetually and unflinchingly thwarting his desires. The desires, indeed, of the flesh; the desires which emanate from those remainders of corruption which weary and oppress the most righteous; to grow remiss in the thwarting all these, were to prove him a backslider; to grant them indulgence were to cast away allegiance. But are there no other desires which throb and glow in the breasts of the godly? Born again of an incorruptible seed, impregnated with celestial principles, equipped and freighted for immortality, have they no longings but these, which they are bound to repress; no burning and beating wish against which they are not bound to a war of extermination? But we will not give -harbourage to the thought that he who serves God can serve him only by mortification; we will not have piety thus invested with nothing but the sack-cloth; we put from us those representations of religion which exhibit its subject as always under constraint-as godly by force, and not by inclination. "Thy people shall be willing," was the prophetic pledge to the Messiah; and let the love of God be actually the ruling principle in the soul, and shall there not arise a willingness distinctly opposed to that doing of violence into which some would resolve the whole of religion? I must do violence to the love of the world; I must do violence to the love of the objects of sense; I must do violence to the love of ease, to the love of reputation, to the love, in general, of created good; but the trying thing, the desperate thing, is to do violence to the master principle; and the master principle in every renewed man's spirit is, or ought to be, the love of God. It is not the love of the world, otherwise he can never yet have separated himself from the world; it is not the love of things of sense, otherwise he is yet carnal, and the great change of conversion has still to be wrought. I do not indeed say that these principles will be altogether annihilated in the

converted and righteous individual. They will retain their existence, and often struggle, and that too very vehemently for the mastery. But neither of them can be the master principle, for conversion is the introduction of a new master principle into the soul-that new master principle is the love of God, and if the love of God be the master principle in a believer, then to obey God is to thwart the inferior principle and to gratify the superior. Therefore the pleasure must more than counterbalance the pain. We are safe in affirming-ay, and we hope there are many amongst you, whose experience can bear out the accuracy of the statement-we are safe in affirming, that he who glows with the love of God as his Creator and Redeemer, will be carried on by natural and delighted impulse, to the doing God's will, and that not as a servant dreading the lash of the task-master, but as a son rejoicing in the smile of a father. He will give himself to all the labours of a high-wrought obedience, and not as one driven, but only as one invigorated. He will run the way of God's commandments when God enlarges his heart. "Indeed," says an old divine, "the soul when enlarged by Divine love, runs in the ways of God as the sun in his course which finds no difficulty, but being naturally fitted and carried to that motion, he goes forth as a bridegroom, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.'

Such is the connection we propose to trace between the enlargement of the heart and the running the way of God's commandments. It is a connection which you can hardly fail to observe for yourselves. If you do not enter so fully into more philosophical descriptions of an enlarged heart, an enlarged understanding, and an enlarged will, at least you must all perceive how the affections, when once abstracted from earthly things and fixed on God, will prompt you to a more earnest obedience; and how, therefore the heart, if expanding to embrace the Creator, in place of contracting itself so as to hold only the creature, will cause the Christian to feel it his meat and his drink to do the will of his heavenly Father, and make him run with an ever increasing speed the race set before him by the gospel of Christ. We have nothing to add but the simple and earnest exhortation that you all aim at higher and higher degrees of obedience, and seek from God, who alone can confer it, that expansion of soul, which produces alacrity and constancy in duty. Be watchful, we beseech of you, that ye narrow not the heart by pouring into it the finite and the perishable. The heart, as we have shown you, has this mysterious property, that if occupied by the creature it will shrink and shrivel up till no bigger than its tenant-occupied by the Creator it will stretch, and delight, and dilate, till there are no bounds to its enlargement, since none to its occupant. We would therefore have you on your guard, ye who are professors of godliness, that ye do not contract the heart by centreing the faculties on things and beings of this earth; give those affections to God, and the heart is a globe, filled and expanded so that it mounts to the heavens; give them to the world and the globe lies shrunk and shrivelled on the ground, a sand-grain weight enough to keep it fast to the earth. And whenever ye find that your pace in obedience seems slackening, that ye walk less steadily and less uprightly than in by-gone days, that ye have reason to address to yourselves, with no small measure of anxiety and misgiving, the words of St. Paul to the Galatians-"Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth?"-then look, we beseech you, praying earnestly at the same time, that God will aid you in the search, "Search me, O God, and try my heart"-then look, we beseech you well to the heart: see whether it hath not been narrowed by the prostitution of its affections; for if the heart must be enlarged, if we run, must it not have been contracted, when we walked? "Keep," therefore, "the heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life."

THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH.

A Sermon

DELIVERED ON TUESDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 25, 1856,

BY THE REV. HENRY MELVILL, B.D.

(Chaplain in Ordinary to Her Majesty, and Canon Residentiary of St. Paul's,)

AT ST. MARGARET'S CHURCH, LOTHBURY.

"And the Lord said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord ?"-Exodus iv. 11.

THESE words were addressed to Moses, when the Lord appeared to him in Horeb, and commanded him to take a message to Pharaoh. An exile from Egypt, the future lawgiver feared to place himself in the power of his enemies, and was reluctant to undertake the commission. He knew, moreover, that the Israelites were degraded by slavery, and he thought that announcements in the name of the God of their fathers would be received either with the indifference of ignorance or with the opposition of idolatry, and supposing on every account that he should have no success in his endeavours to emancipate the oppressed, he strove by various reasons to excuse himself from the proposed undertaking. God wrought miracles in order to assure him; his rod became a serpent, and his hand, when thrust into his bosom, was leprous as snow. He was told that these miracles should be repeated, as signs to convince the Israelites of his commission, and that if they yet remained incredulous, he should take of the waters of the river, and pour them on the dry land, and the waters should be turned into blood. We might have thought that, furnished with such overpowering credentials, Moses would no longer have hesitated, but have gone boldly on to the execution of his task. Equipped with the power of working miracles, why should he fear to face either an insolent monarch or an ignorant people? Yet the possession of supernatural might did not satisfy Moses. There was one gift in which he felt himself deficient, and he did not think that other and rarer gifts made up the deficiency. So soon as God had assured him that he should authenticate his mission by miracles, Moses said unto the Lord, "O my Lord, I am not eloquent, but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." Moses felt that in standing before Pharaoh ; way might be made in bending the haughty king as much by the strength of language as by the power of miracles; he knew also that in stirring the energies of a long-enslaved people he would require a voice as well as an arm clothed with the thunder; and he felt that a multitude who might look with nothing but a stupid amazement on the exhibition of a prodigy, would start into action at the trumpet call of an indignant eloquence. Moses, then, did not desire what was unimportant or superfluous; his fault lay in not believing that God would take care to supply the deficiency. He did not sufficiently

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recognize or remember, that the power of speech is from the Lord, and that it is God alone who gives the eloquent tongue, as well as any other endowment, whether bodily or mental; and therefore God does not rebuke him by telling him that oratory was not necessary to the execution of his task; he simply refers him to the origin of speech, and thus, reminding him that he who summoned him to his work had words as well as miracles at his disposal, chides his faithlessness, and instantly removes his objection. "Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord ?"

Now, you will observe, that there are two great truths asserted in these words; the first the truth, that language is of Divine original; the second, that every case of inability to speak is of Divine appointment. We will take these truths in succession. If you were to set aside the information of the Bible, and then espouse some infidel theory on the origin of man, there is nothing which would so perplex you to account for as language. It is easy enough to understand how language is propagated; the child catches it gradually from the parents, and by an imperceptible, though most wonderful process, acquires the faculty of embodying its ideas in words. And as you go back, from generation to generation, you have no difficulty in conceiving the continued transmission; you suppose language travelling down to us, like the earth on which we dwell, a kind of heir-loom in the family of man. But if you ascend so far in your research, as to reach the commencement of the human race, what account do you have then to give of language? You may have been accustomed to consider it just as natural to man to speak as to walk; but this is a mistake. A child left to itself may learn to walk, but a child left to itself would never learn to speak; it would utter sounds, but it would never connect sounds with thoughts-it would never, that is, learn to express certain thoughts by certain sounds. It might invent some jargon of its own, but as to anything which should at all resemble even the elements of a language, and a system of sounds by which everything around us, should be classified and defined, you will never think that this could be found in the accidental babblings of infancy; and however you may seek to account upon natural principles for the origin of language, we still venture to say, that unless you receive the Mosaic account of the creation, there is no phenomenon so hopelessly inexplicable as language. We are sure, that if you will only ponder the phenomenon of language and the mystery of speech, you will find yourself driven from science to Scripture for anything that approaches a satisfactory explanation. It is, as we have already said, so much a matter of course that men should speak, that we treat it as no more surprising a fact than that they should see or hear. But it must be utter carelessness and want of observation, which can make us pronounce language innate. The question of the origin of language may never occur to you, but when once proposed, the more you examine it, independently of the Bible, the more will you be perplexed, and the more will you be confounded. We would not wish a better argument with which to press the infidel, who would bring into doubt the Mosaic account of the creation, than that which we thus fetch from the invention of speech. Unless it be supposed that God formed man at first, and gave him the organs of speech, ay, and then taught him their use, and furnished him with words by which ideas should be expressed, language is the most unintelligible of prodigies; and you may search the universe and find nothing which you may not account for without God, if you can shut out his agency from the introduction of speech; and it were a fine attack on the boldness of Atheism, if in the midst of an unbeliever's declamation, when he is advocating a wretched system of materialism, and striving to set off by the tinsel of a false rhetoric the nothingness and absurdity of his theories of chance, we should bear down upon him with the question of the text: "Who hath made man's mouth?" We should like, when with a prostituted reason and a perverted genius some disciple of scepticism is labouring to undermine the pretensions of Scripture, and affording what he calls philosophical explanations of the origin of all things-we should like to fasten him down to an inquiry

into the origin of that very power through which he is making an împression on his audience; and if he will tell us how it came to pass that he is able to speak, and if he will show us that the mightiest of our ancestry could have invented and handed down that faculty which in all its prowess he wields against his Maker, we will take him as our guide to elaborate the wonders, and follow him cheerfully across the waste of his speculations.

And there is Scriptural evidence of the fact, that God taught man language, or that the language first spoken was Divine in its origin. You will observe that so soon as man was created God spake unto him; and thus the first use of words was to communicate the thoughts of God. But the thoughts of God must have been communicated in the words of God, and man could not have understood God's words, unless he had been first taught them of God; so that when on the very outset of human existence you find conversation held between man and his Maker, you are forced to conclude, that since on no supposition could man in such a brief space have invented a language, the employed language must have been Divine, and Adam must have received from God the earliest intimations of speech. If we even allow what we con tend to have been incredible, that in process of time Adam would have made a language for himself, it is still evident that he required and that he used language long before he could have invented it. You are told that "when the Lord God had formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, he brought them unto Adam, to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called any living creature, that was the name thereof." In what manner can you understand this statement? To suppose that Adam gave names at random, employing words without reference to ideas, is clearly unwarrantable, for we should thus have, as we before said, not language, but jargon. To suppose, again, that he was acquainted with all the properties of the animals, and gave a name expressive of the idea, is as untenable a supposition as the former, unless you add the supposition of a Divine influence on his mind. The animals were only just created, and since he could not know their characteristics by experience, how otherwise could he know them than by revelation ? It seems, then, fair to conclude, that God instructed Adam as to the names which living creatures were to bear; so that the bringing to the first of our race the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air may have been giving him a lesson in language. Besides, if man had taught himself language, he must have had associates with whom to communicate. It is incredible, under any point of view, that he could have devised a medium of communication, when there existed no being with whom he could communicate; and yet Adam must have learned language before he had a help-meet. So soon as Eve was formed Adam said, "This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.' So that it was not from the association of man and woman that language arose; language preceded that association; and since man could speak language alone, we conclude that he must have been taught to speak directly of God.

And moreover, cannot we certainly gather from Scripture that God instructed the first man in religion? He placed him in a garden, which was nothing less than a glorious and beautiful temple, whose trees were sacramental and whose fruits were mysteries; and having formed Adam in his own image, he constituted him, as it were, high priest of the magnificent sanctuary, and appointed him as lord over the creation, to present his homage and to burn the incense of his loyalty. But if God instructed man in religion-and who will believe that man was thrown forth as an outcast, and left to grope painfully his way to acquaintance with his Maker?-if God instructed man in religion, must he not also have instructed him in language, so necessary to support intercourse between the Creator and the creature? Can we think that man was left to attain, by a tedious and difficult process, the power of expressing his feelings, ere the recesses of Paradise echoed with prayer, and the anthem of praise was heard from its bowers? Shall we not rather think, that so soon as man walked forth upon creation, and gazed on the loveliness of the sparkling earth, and beheld the canopy with which his dwelling place was arched, and marked on every side those impressions of power and goodness

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