prepared. Let our conduct now be such, as we may then look back upon with satisfaction; and let us labour so to pass the waves of this troublesome world, that when we enter upon the valley of the shadow of death, "the bow may be seen in the cloud," even the well founded hope of a glorious immortality!

SERMON XI.

THE NECESSITY OF SUBORDINATION AND UNION

IN THE CHURCH OF CHRIST.

1 COR. xii. 4.

Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.

IN the Church of Christ there have always been divisions. In later days, indeed, the separations have grown wider and more calamitous; and practical holiness has often been lost sight of in vain contentions about theoretic distinctions. Charity, that "more excellent way" of which the apostle speaks in this part of his Epistle, has been forgotten, and strifes, rather than godly edifying, have been ministered by what was intended to be a law of peace, a rule of well-tempered feelings, and quiet practice. I speak not

here of such divisions as amount to the crimes of schism, heresy, and an absolute falling off from the Church of Christ. These are consequences which must necessarily follow the promulgation of a law of absolute truth, and, however much to be deplored, are not to be avoided, and need not be wondered at; but I speak of such divisions as are found to exist amongst those who, in the main, say the same things, hold the same faith, and walk by the same rule-divisions often acknowledged by themselves to arise from points which are non-essential, though they give as much ascerbity to the feelings of the contending parties as if life and death depended on the issue of the contest.

Now this disputatious and discontented spirit has always been too prevalent in the Church of Christ. These unseemly rents, though they extend not to the foundation, have always been too visible not to deform the walls of our holy temple. It ought to be, and was intended by its Founder to be, a building well cemented and

polished throughout; so that they who went round about it to tell its towers and mark well its bulwarks, might detect no symptoms of decay from the lapse of time, or injury from the hands of its enemies: but very different is now, and ever has been, the state of its external defences, as well as the works within. Selfish feelings, private interests, narrow views, agitate the bosoms of its garrison, from the highest to the lowest member; and instead of keeping the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, every man looks on his own things, and not on the things of others; till what was meant to be a society of mutual and united action, becomes, as it were, an assemblage for the purpose of mutual discomfort and disturbance.

It was against these jarrings and jealousies that our Lord and his apostles cautioned the Church with more than usual earnestness-with an earnestness proportioned to the calamitous nature of the error, and our perpetual liability to fall into it. On examining that most so

lemn and most important charge which our Saviour gave to his apostles when he took his final leave of them in this world, (as it is minutely recorded in the Gospel of St. John 1), we shall find that the main scope and burden of it is to impress on their minds the absolute necessity of union-of laying aside all rivalry, all jealousy of each other, of acting together with one heart for the furtherance of one purpose, just as the members of a body obey one impulse, and act together harmoniously and spontaneously in obedience to the will that guides them. They were to be one, even as the Father and the Son were one, they were to love each other, even as the Father and the Son loved

See, especially, the 18th chapter, in which, by the emblematic lesson of washing the feet of the apostles, he teaches them emphatically the doctrine of mutual submission, and that none should assume any superiority over the others in the discharge of the important task to which they were appointed; in the prosecution of which, superior as they were to the rest of the Church, they were all to be on terms of perfect equality.