How precious, in the next place, is this office of the Holy Spirit in prayer! He reminds us of promises that we can plead, of mercies that we have experienced; so that we can urge, as the Psalmist does in the 4th Psalm, the mercies received yesterday as reasons for new blessings to be received to-day. And how important is this office of the Holy Spirit in days of abounding error! Men come and state things so plausible, that we are almost constrained to say, I must have been "mistaken." It is very wrong, however, to suppose that, when a person gives an argument against the Bible which we cannot answer, we must, therefore, accept that argument; we are to lay it aside and say, "I cannot answer it; but I have not a doubt that it can be answered; I will ask those who know more than I do, and see whether an answer can be given or not." A very foolish man may ask a question that two wise men will require twenty days to answer. I must never think, because a plausible objection is stated, through the sophistry of which I cannot see, that therefore nobody else can see through it. It is not that the argument is sound, but that I am not enlightened. But when the Holy Spirit thus brings to our remembrance plain, simple truths in his own blessed word, by one of those texts we may repel the objector, as our blessed Lord repelled the tempter: "It is written; it is written; it is written." Thus the Holy Spirit is precious to us as our Remembrancer. John Newton, an excellent and accomplished divine, was a refugee from his home, far off; he was standing at the helm, tossed upon a tempestuous ocean, in the momentary prospect of a watery grave. A text flashed on his memory, he knew not how, we know now, and he knew before he

died, a text that his mother taught him when a child, listening to her- the most effective teaching of all; and that text was the secret of his salvation. No doubt it was the Holy Spirit that brought up that buried fragment, that cast new and holy light upon that almost faded flower; that brought to his recollection a truth long buried - but not dead, and it became a living seed, and grew up unto life eternal.

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VIII.

The Spirit the Source of Victory.

ZECHARIAH speaks of the erection of a material temple-tells us the decree of Heaven that it was to be completed, not by the resources of human power, nor by the expedients of human wisdom, however proper these might be as instrumentalities in their place, but by the direct and almighty power of the Holy Spirit of God. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."

What applies to a holy temple that has passed away, not one stone of which rests any more upon another, may be still more justly, I think, applied to that spiritual temple which is composed of living stones, resting on the Rock of Ages: the only Church in the universe that God truly consecrates, and the only Church, one stone of which shall never be removed.

Power is the thirst, the consuming thirst of millions of mankind. Conquest, one of its passions, has been long the aim and the maddening ambition of the nations of the earth. Many a conqueror has felt what one of old is recorded to have said, that he would rather be the first in the humblest hamlet, than be the second in imperial Rome. So strong is the instinctive

desire of fallen nature for power; so averse is it to anything that would lay low its power, and show that when strongest it is most weak; for it is "not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."

We need also to learn, that the very greatest power that man has attained, has been, at the best, signally precarious. It seems as if there were a certain tableland in human life, in which, like the highest lands amidst the Alps, covered with perpetual snow, it is impossible for life to exist. It seems that there is in human life a position, or power, or eminence, and rank, so perilous, that none can walk securely, and few can breathe at all. The snows of Russia are the sepulchre of a large army; the waters of the deep have buried many a proud navy; the tempest of a people's passions, generated in the sense of a people's wrongs, has often swept away dynasties and thrones a thousand years old. The warrior's sword, the statesman's budget, the banker's pen, have all in rapid succession exemplified in the history of the world, that they are destitute of all power when God is opposed to them, or they opposed to God; and that, after all, they are possessed of comparatively little power in compassing the great ends for which man is born into the world. We need to be occasionally placed in the presence of the great, the vast, and the sublime, that we may feel how little we are. It is well that we should experience painful failures, that we may learn by personal experience, what we will not learn from the prescriptions of Heaven, how weak is human power, how frail is all mortal might.

In the affairs of this world, the sentiment, "Not by

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might or by power," has been illustrated again and again. Battlements and bulwarks are not always a nation's strength; armies and navies are not always and everywhere the elements of certain victory; science, literature, civilization, do not always guarantee immortality to a people. All these have failed in succession; and the history of the state, like the history of the Church, contains many a chapter whose heading might well be, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts."

It is also a very singular fact, that infidels and persons opposed to everything like a sense of religion, have accepted, not these words, but their substantial sentiment as their deepest experience. Robespierre, who tried to work the world without God, was constrained, ere he closed the experiment, to say, "If there be not a God, we must invent one, for there is no power in man to carry on the world without him.” Napoleon, on entering Russia, told his marshals that in war fortune, or, translated into Christianity, God, has as much to do with success as ability; and, when returning as a refugee from Russia, his eagles trailing in the dust, he told the Abbé Dupré, "We are high in the morning, but we know not how low we shall be in the evening." Napier, the historian of the Peninsular war, says, "Fortune always asserts her supremacy in war; and often, from a slight mistake, such disastrous consequences follow, that in every age the uncertainty of war is a proverb." These did not know the full force of the language they uttered-it was, translated into the language of inspiration, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts." The acceptance of the truth, "Not by might or by