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of service, and with all the warmth of our heart promise to serve Him from our youth upward to the utmost of our power? What are the best pleasures, the best promises, the best professions of the world, compared with the promises of God in Christ? The world passeth away with all worldly things.

I pray you therefore to choose the good part, and not turn back. I pray you to serve your Saviour from your youth. Should your heart sink as the trials of a very strict and very holy life rise before you, then remember that you will not be left to fight alone. This is the very benefit of Confirmation, the very object of its appointment, that we might get strength, that we might obtain the effectual succour of the Holy Ghost, that we might be sustained by that great Ally in the day of battle, who can quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one, and shield our souls from his venomous spears.—If God be for us, who can be against us?

JOHN HENRY PARKER, OXFORD AND LONDON.

Tracts for the Christian Seasons.

TRINITY SUNDAY.

ALL the days of our life are to be spent in the service and worship of our God, and we must ever worship Him as Three in One, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Yet we have a day especially set apart for remembering this divine mystery in His eternal being, that we may think of it so far as He shall enable us, and learn what we can of the meaning of what He has made known to us concerning Himself.

For this name of Trinity, or Threeness, as it is sometimes found in Old English, signifies to us, not only that the being of God is of a mysterious and hidden kind, and beyond the reach of our understanding, but also that He has been pleased to make Himself known, in part at least, and so far as we could bear, to us His creatures. For in that we say three, we distinguish one from another, and shew that we know something

of each of those blessed and adorable Persons. It is no small wonder that we are able to do so; but since it has pleased the everlasting Son of God to take our flesh upon Him, and to be one of us, it is but fitting that this other wonder should follow, and that we who are by adoption the brethren of the only-begotten Son, should know who He is, and who is His Father, and have communion with the Spirit of the Father and the Son.

And therefore when He had finished His ministry on earth, and had gone through all those mysteries of His Incarnation, His Nativity, His Passion and His Resurrection, and was just about to ascend where He was before, and to return to the glory which He had before the world was, He gave His Apostles a commission to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Thus did He fix upon His Church for ever the name of the ever-blessed Trinity, and print it on the brow of each one of us as a seal and mark of our profession, that we belong to God, to this God, the true God, maker of heaven and earth, now known to His creatures under this adorable Name, of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Thus are we different from all those who were left to feel after Him in darkness, if so be they might find Him, and who could only assure themselves that there was some great hidden Power that made and governed the world. We know not only that the Father dwelleth in light unapproachable, but also that the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him, and that the Spirit of the Father and the Son witnesseth of Him on earth. And therefore, when we have gone through the history of the manifestations of God in His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and in the descent of the Holy Ghost upon His disciples, we keep yet another festival, to sum up all that we have learned in giving glory to God for the whole of His great and various revelations of Himself, and acknowledging, with saints and angels above, the blessed and holy Trinity.

And in so doing we are reminded of a portion of Christian truth which we might perhaps otherwise bear too little in mind, namely, that the whole dispensation of our Lord's becoming Man, and suffering for us, and rising again in our nature, and reigning over us in the Spirit, and finally coming to purify His Church by the last judgment, and take it thus perfected to

Himself, has its end in bringing us into perfect communion with the unseen and eternal Godhead. This is what St. Paul sets before us when he says, (1 Cor. xv. 25-28,) "He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For He hath put all things under His feet. But when he saith, all things are put under Him, it is manifest that He is excepted, which did put all things under Him. And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all." This is not meant as if God the Son should then be lower than the Father, or as if there could be any change in the eternal relation between those Divine Persons, but that the kingdom of the Son of God as Son of man, which is now a kind of exception in the whole kingdom of God, because sin is mixed up with obedience in it, and God bears with it for His sake, this kingdom, I say, shall be taken into perfect union with the everlasting kingdom of the Almighty, in which He is truly obeyed, even that heavenly kingdom into which nothing can enter that defileth.

This is what we mean, and what we ought to

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