essential spirit of Christian Piety here, and the foretaste of eternal blessedness hereafter. O may God pour such a stream of Godliness and Gladness into our hearts! CHAPTER III. SPIRITUAL AWAKENING. As we cannot appreciate the worth of Christianity in general unless we consider the actual condition and wants of human nature, to meet which Christianity was vouchsafed; so neither shall we be prepared to acquiesce in the Scripture statements concerning the process by which the life of Christianity usually manifests itself in the individual soul, unless we have fixed our attention on some of the broader features of our natural state of mind, and have thus convinced ourselves of the extent of the transformation that we need, in order to become new creatures in Christ Jesus. We must duly estimate the natural Indifference, Ignorance, Alienation, Dread, and Despondency of the human mind in relation to God, before we can duly estimate either the necessity or the worth of that spiritual Awakening, Illumination, Regeneration, Peace, and Hope, which the influences of the Holy Ghost produce. Let us therefore now devote ourselves to the consideration of these particulars in detail. And First let us speak of Spiritual AWAKENING. Men are naturally indifferent to God; this is the first broad fact of our fallen condition which the slightest observation may convince us of. They need therefore as the first step to Salvation to have their attention awakened to Him; this is the conclusion of Reason from the observation of that fact. this Awakening of attention is the work of God; this is the Assertion of Scripture with respect to the supply of that need. And All our observation and experience testify to us the first broad Fact of our condition, that man is naturally indifferent to God. It is only by degrees that we gain any conception of God and of his relation to us, and of the infinite importance of that relation to our welfare; and without some knowledge of these truths there can of course be no interest in them. We are to God-all of us in childhood, many of us through youth and manhood, and many, alas! yet longer still, yea even throughout their lives-we are to God as the infant to its parent; deriving from Him our being; fed and warmed and nourished by His care; watched over by His never-sleeping eye; and guarded and sustained by his ever-extended arm; but yet unconscious of Him; occupied only with the gifts, unknowing or heedless of the Giver; and even when we do awake to the fact of His Existence, yet possessing no distinct impression of our dependence on Him; still less of our responsibility to Him; still less of the awful certainty that all our happiness, of body and of soul, for time and for eternity, hangs only on His favour. And who knows not how this early indifference, arising from our natural unacquaintance with God, is strengthened and made habitual by our subsequent indocility and dulness with respect to spiritual things! The term "God" may indeed soon become familiar to us (often too familiar !); his attributes and character we may perhaps be able to state out in words :-but the Ideathe reality-where is it felt! What are its influences? How far does it live within us? The world and the things of the world first lay hold of the attention and preoccupy the heart; and we know from Scripture testimony (we know it equally from experience and fact) that where the love of the world is, there is not the love of God; "for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world." The very objects circumstances and occupations which, as means and steps of consideration, are capable of leading up the thoughts to God and bringing Him before the mind, come crowding so importunately round us, that they exhaust our attention on themselves as ends, and interpose a veil to hide, instead of a transparent medium to reveal, the Deity. We are immersed in so thick an atmosphere steaming up from earth, that we cannot see the very sun from which that earth derives its life and light, and round which it revolves. Nay, even suppose that some few rays of light gleam in upon us and excite some momentary warmth, and that when we think of God we feel some interest in Him, still I must ask, how much, how often, how deeply, do men really think of God and feel this interest in Him? Do they not "hear and talk of Religion," (to use the words of Jeremy Taylor,) "but as of a dream, and does not Religion make such impression as is the conversation of a Dreamer, whence they awake to the business of the world?" Have our religious thoughts the life the force the interest which is possessed by the slightest circumstances that affect our personal, our social, our political well-being? What, I would ask of many of my readers, has been the amount of Influence upon you exercised by the Idea of God in any given day or week; through all the hours and minutes of which you have been held in life by God, fed by God, blessed by God, have lived and moved and had your being in God? How much have you |