selves with God! His ways alone are the ways of peace. How often have those that seemed to be the most gay confessed, when they became religious, that they were, before, the most wretched; as Colonel Gardiner declared that, amid all the prosperity of his vicious career, he had often envied the existence of a dog! Have you never known what bitterness is attached to forgetfulness of God? And what a wretch must he be who cannot bear to converse with himself to whose peace it is essential that he should expunge from his thoughts his soul and his Maker, as an encumbrance and a nuisance!

Will you lose any thing by religion? will it not favour you in a temperate pursuit of business and pleasure, and keep you from a thousand injuries? In the Bible you will find, not a melancholy and terrifying intelligence, but a discovery of the only happy God, as the Father who would gather his straying children by his Son, their Saviour. Be assured, the very sorrows and severities of religion only prepare the way for its blessings. Come, then, to God, by Jesus Christ, and you shall find rest. "The Spirit and the bride say, come; and let him that heareth, say come; and let him that is athirst, come; and whosoever will, let him come, and partake of the water of life freely!"

XLII.

THE CHRISTIAN'S PREFERENCE OF HEAVENLY RICHES.* HEBREWS, X., 34: For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance.

[Preached at Bridge-street, Bristol, Lord's Day evening, August 8, 1824.J

It is a mark of the true religion, by which it is distinguished from false systems, that from the first it has met with opposition and persecution. False religions have risen and grown up in silence; they disturbed no prepossessions, and thwarted no passions of mankind; they were congenial with the tempers, manners, and pleasures of the age. The religion of Christ had a different reception; contradicting human nature in so many ways, it became from the first an object of hostility; and the prediction of its author was amply verified, that his disciples should be "hated of all men for his name's sake." The first persecutors that appeared against the apostles were the Jews; the record of their opposition is given in the New Testament. It is probable that, but for them, Christianity might have escaped in that age, and have been confounded with Judaism, which was tolerated as one among the superstitions of the empire. Influenced, probably, by

From the notes of the Rev. T. Grinfield.

this hope, and willing to give themselves every advantage with the Jews as well as pagans, the primitive Christians conformed, as far as they allowably could, to the Jewish rites, and made as gentle a transi tion as possible from the Mosaic to the Christian mode of worship, retaining for a time, from prudential motives, several of their former peculiarities. But the Jews were not to be thus pacified at Thessalonica, Berea, Philippi, and other places, they excited the pagan magistrates to sanction a persecution of the new sect, which they hoped to crush in its infancy. The Epistle to the Hebrews, addressed chiefly to Christians converted from Judaism, is full of consolations adapted to persons placed in such afflicting circumstances. In no part of Scripture are the powerful and exalted comforts of the gospel more copiously applied. And these animating views are of perpetual and universal value. Though the circumstances of the Church, in the present age, are widely different from those here adverted to, who does not perceive that the instructions and admonitions given by the apostle must be highly beneficial in every case of trial? Indeed, we must make it our constant object to regulate our sentiments and our conduct, on every occasion, by the maxims and examples presented in Scripture.

I proceed to call your attention, first, to the particular trial, as mentioned in the text, which those early Christians sustained; secondly, to the temper of mind with which they received it; and, in the third and last place, to the conviction and hope by which they were supported under it.

I. With respect to the first point; the trial they were called to en dure, mentioned in the text, was imprisonment and the spoliation of their property. It is unnecessary to say that these are great afflictions. You can all understand the misery that must attach to the violent invasion of your freedom and of your possessions. You know that such are among the heaviest sufferings, of an external kind, that human nature can experience; and that they require the highest degree of fortitude to sustain them with patience. But these were, in all probability, very frequent sufferings among those first disciples of Christ. Those who were so commonly martyred would be continually subjected to bonds and rapine. Persecutors, who did not stop at the lives, would never spare the possessions, of their victims: especially when we recollect that, in acting thus, they were impelled by two powerful incitements at once they gratified their hatred of the religion, while they indulged their desire of plunder: what was lost by one party, would be so much gain to the other; and, no doubt, multitudes grew rich by this authorized rapacity. When Christianity began to attract the attention of the civil power, and became the subject of laws and edicts, a system of confiscation was enacted. It may be said, indeed, that the amount of the property thus sacrificed was not great in proportion to the number of the sufferers; since the Christians of the first age were in general of the poorer and humbler class but if many were poor, some also were rich; and let it be remembered that even where the loss was smaller, the sacrifice was

:

really as great; the difference was to the gainers, not to the sufferers; the poor man could only lose his all; and he would feel his privation the more deeply, as that little all was the hard and slow earning of his labour, the accumulation of industrious years. This, then, is the evil to which the text alludes.

II. In the next place, I notice the temper of mind with which this trial was sustained; this is expressed by the apostle in two points of view: "Ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and ye took joyfully the spoiling of your goods." "Ye had compassion of me:" he does not mean to say, merely, that they pitied him, sympathizing as silent spectators of his afflictions; but he means that they were actual fellow-sufferers, and sharers with himself of the same calamities: "ye felt the same that I felt, by your own similar experience." They exhibited a Christian generosity, crowned with a divine devotion; they remembered their fellow-sufferers, and forgot their own sufferings. And, what is much more remarkable, "ye took joyfully the spoiling of your goods." Simply to acquiesce unmurmuring in such a dispensation of Providence as this; not to be driven by it to dissemble; not to flinch from an honourable adherence to truth, might have been thought all that could be expected of human nature. But "joyfully" to meet the severest of circumstantial distresses, rendered the more severe by its cruel injustice, this is an elevation which Christian piety only can ascend! It will be allowed by all that this was at least a very singular temper. When the harvest is suddenly blasted, which has been reared with long care and toil, the utmost we expect in the labourer is patient resignation; no one for a moment thinks of joy. A degree of attachment to property is the dictate of nature and reason; and it is accompanied with the most beneficial influences; it operates as an incentive to industry and invention; it gives life and energy to society, which would sink (without that stimulus) into perfect languor and indolence: where nations have attained a high state of power and refinement, the passion for wealth has often become so strong that, in the ardour of acquiring and accumulating new possessions, national avarice has too frequently trampled upon justice, and forgotten the sanctity of its professed religion. This shows that the loss of wealth is considered by mankind as a loss of the first magnitude; and this, because wealth is the principal instrument of com manding all things besides. How, then, did these first converts to the gospel come to take thus joyfully the spoiling of their goods? How are we to account for so strange a feature of character, such an utter reversal of our nature? This leads me to notice, in the third place,

III. The principle which cherished and maintained this divine temper: "knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance;" not taking this prospect upon probable testimony, but relying on it as a certain reality, a matter of the firmest conviction. Those early believers in Christ had not merely heard the doctrine of immortality and heaven; its anticipation lived and glowed in their hearts; they tasted by their faith the powers of the world to come; they realized an invisible and eternal state of bliss, in

the presence of God and Christ, of angels and their departed brethren; the hope of heaven was enthroned in their souls; displacing every temporal, transient, sensible object from its hold upon the affections; eclipsing the glories of the present world; and absorbing the whole mind in love to God; desire of his favour and felicity; a holy longing to be found in Christ, clothed with his righteousness, and filled with his Spirit! They felt within themselves (as the apostle implies) the fullest evidence and demonstration of their eternal prospects; they felt their close alliance to God and heaven his love was shed abroad in their hearts by the Spirit which He had given them, and made them, amid all their tribulations, rejoice in the hope of the glory of God! They had no need of any one to assure them of their blessed destiny; no need of arguments to convince them of its reality: Christ within them was the hope of glory; the sense of God's love reigned in their souls, producing a joy far above the world, alike above either its joys or its sorrows! They fed upon the hidden manna; they possessed the new name which no man knoweth but he that receives it; they were placed above all earthly trials!

The treasure which they anticipated in heaven, and of which the clear anticipation raised them so high above mortality, is described by the apostle in two characteristics: as "better," and as "enduring."

1. In how many respects this heavenly substance is "better" than any that is of an earthly nature, the time would fail me to point out; and, after all, our views of its superior excellence must be extremely inadequate and obscure. But,

(1.) It is better, in as much as earthly substance is merely the instrument of enjoyment; while heaven is enjoyment itself, essential felicity. The very name of wealth, which the apostle here employs, "substance," can be applied to temporal property merely in an accommodated meaning; it is strictly applicable only to celestial riches. Besides which, the instrument itself is uncertain in the success of its operation; it often fails; the greatest riches are unable always to purchase enjoyment or ease; there are cases in which no wealth can obtain a drop of water to cool the tongue tormented with thirst, or prevent the horrors of famine: cases, how many, in which the state of the mind or the body may frustrate all the powers of opulence. But heaven, my brethren, is not an instrument of fruition; heaven is a state, an element of full, permanent, ineffable, and absolute joy, in the immediate presence of the Father of spirits, in the light of the Divine countenance, at the fountain of all beatitude, the river of eternal pleasures, the fulness of uncreated bliss! As divines are accustomed to say that intuitive knowledge, which instantly perceives its objects without a dilatory process of induction, is preferable to the gradual perception of truth, as attained through a chain of reasoning; so to possess happiness as a state, to live in it as an element, is preferable to a condition in which happiness is attained by instruments. So much better is the "substance" of heaven than that of earth.

* υπαρξις, essentia.

(2.) Again: earthly objects have no power to satisfy the mind; they cannot tranquillize the heart: on the contrary, by an unhappy tendency, they enlarge the desires which they gratify; they inflame the passions which they indulge; nor can they ever fill the vast vacuity which they are condemned to leave in an immortal mind. In their pursuit, the pleasure is allayed with much intermingling pain : the care of acquiring and keeping wealth is allowed by all to be full of anxiety. But the enjoyments of eternity are of another nature; they satisfy the soul: from the moment of death or the resurrection, the spirit of the saint is placed in a state of complete felicity: no longing to rise higher is admitted in that state, nor the least apprehension of declining from the present height: the dominion of uncertainty and change is forever left behind: it is a happiness fixed as the eternal heaven in which it dwells; consummated by the certainty that it is allotted to its possessor never to be recalled! an eternal increase of enjoyment, which some have supposed, enters not (I confess) into my conception of heaven: we cannot but regard it as a state, from the first entrance, of complete satisfaction.

(3.) Earthly treasure can only enable its possessor to surround himself with superfluous pomp, to "walk in a vain show :" it can only gratify the taste and imagination, or catch the applause of the multitude it has no power to come into contact with the soul; none to calm the perturbations of conscience, heal the corrosions of remorse, or give comfort to the dying bed wealth cannot meet the requisitions of the heart, it cannot impart purity to the affections; it can shed no mental grace or joy, nor let in the light of hope upon eternity; it leaves the mind as exposed as ever to all the terrors of judgment and the wrath of God! But heavenly riches illuminate the understanding, pacify the conscience, and fill the heart with unutterable joy. "The good man is satisfied from himself;" he is admitted to the communion of saints and angels; he dwells in love, he dwells in God, and God in him!

(4.) The wealth of this world can never, by its nature, become truly our own. We may identify ourselves with it, and seem as if we were enlarged by our possession; but this is merely a fiction of the imagination we must at least shrink back into our proper selves, and feel that our possessions are utterly separate from our souls. Whatever our circumstances, we are left unaltered in our moral state, our spiritual reality. But the riches of eternity are part of ourselves ; they may be said to enter within the veil, into the hidden man of the heart: they qualify us to become habitations of God, by his Spirit: knowing (as it is read by some) "that in yourselves you have a better substance."

2. In the next place, this is also an enduring substance. Temporal wealth (as you need scarcely be reminded) is extremely transient. The rich man never knows how soon the voice may be heard, "Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required; then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?" But he that is not rich unto God can retain nothing after death, to protect or sustain him in the presence of his Judge: he must depart from all his possessions