vine person distinct from the Father and the Son, called the Holy Spirit.

We have frequently, in this pulpit, avowed our ignorance concerning the nature of the divine essence, if I may be allowed the expression. We have often declared, that we can determine nothing concerning God, except what we are obliged to know from the works he has created, and from the truths he has revealed. We have more than once acknowledged, that even those truths, which we trace from reason and revelation, are as yet very imperfect; and that the design of the Scriptures, when speaking of God, is less to reveal what he is, than the relation in which he stands to us. Hence I conceive, that the utmost moderation, and deference of judgment; and, if I may so speak, the utmost pyrrhonism, on this subject, is all that reasonable men can expect from the philosopher, and the divine.

When we find in the Scriptures, certain ideas of the Godhead ;-ideas, which have not the slightest dissonance to those afforded by his works ;-ideas, moreover, clearly expressed, and repeated in a variety of places, we admit them without hesitation, and condemn those, who, by a false notion concerning propriety of thought, and precision of argument, refuse their assent. Now, it seems to me, that they fall into this mistake, who refuse to acknowledge, in the texts we adduce, a declaration of a Divine Person.

I shall cite one single passage only from the sixteenth chapter of the gospel by St. John; When he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will guide you into all truth; for he shall not speak of himself; but

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whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak and he will show you things to come. He shall glorify me ; for he shall receive of mine, and shew it unto you. I ask here, whether this propriety of thought, and precision of argument, of which the persons we attack make a profession, I had almost said a parade, obstruct their perception of three persons in the words we have read? If so, can it obstruct their perceiving the Father, to whom all things belong; the Son, who participates in all things which belong to the Father: the Holy Spirit, who receives those things, and reveals them to the church? I ask again, whether this propriety of thought, and precision of argument, can understand an action of Providence, by what is ascribed to the Holy Spirit? And whether, without offering violence to the laws of language, they can substitute for the term spirit, the words action and providence, and thus paraphrase the whole passage; "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit, when this action of Providence is come, even this action of Providence, it will guide you into all the truth; for it shall not speak of itself; but whatsoever it shall hear, that shall it speak for it shall receive of mine, and shall show them unto you." We frankly confess, my brethren, nothing but the reluctance we have to submit our notions to the decision of Supreme Wisdom can excite an apprehension, that a distinct person is not set forth in the words we have cited. And, when it is once admitted, that the Holy Spirit sent to the church is a divine person, can they, on comparing the words of our text with those we have quoted, re

sist the conviction, that the same Spirit is intended in both these passages?

In the class of those, who, under a pretext of not admitting imaginary, mysteries, reject such as are reall we arrange those divines, who deny the agency of this adorable person on the heart, in what the apostle calls unction, seal, and carnest: those supralapsarian teachers, who suppose, that all the operation of the Holy Spirit on the regenerate, consists in enabling them to preach; that he does not afford them the slightest interior aid, to surmount those difficulties which naturally obstruct a compliance with the grand design of preaching. The Scriptures assert, in so many places, the inefficacy of preaching without those aids, that no doubt can, in my opinion, be admissable upon the subject. But if some divines have degraded this branch of Christian theology, by an incautious defence, to them the blame attaches, and not to those who have established it upon solid proof. Those divines, who, by a mode of teaching much more calculated to confound, than defend, orthodox opinions, have spoken of the unction of the Spirit, as though it annihilated the powers of nature, and as though they made a jest ;-yes, a jest, of the exhortations, promises, and threatenings addressed to us in the Scriptures :-Those divines, if there are such, shall give an account to God for the discord they have occasioned in the church, and even for the beresies to which their mode of expounding the Scriptures has given birth.

You, however, brethren, embrace no doctrines but those explicitly revealed in the Scriptures;-you

who admit the agency of the Holy Spirit on the heart, unsolicitous to define its nature-You, who say with Jesus Christ, the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth, John iii. 8.— You, who especially adınit, that the more conscious we are of the want of grace, the more we should exert our natural gifts; that, the more need we have of interior aids, the more we should profit by exterior assistance, by the books we have at hand, by the favourable circumstances in which we may providentially placed, by the ministry which God has graciously established among us! Fear not to follow those faithful guides, and to adopt precautions so wise; under a pretext of reducing metaphors to precision, never enfeeble their force; and, under a plea of not admitting imaginary mysteries, never reject the real. This was our second rule.

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And here is the third. In addresses to society in general, what belongs to each should be distinguished.

St. Paul here addressed the whole church: but the whole of its numerous members could not have been in the same situation. Hence, one of the greatest faults we commit in expounding the Scriptures, and especially in expounding texts which treat of the agency of the Spirit, is, the neglecting to distinguish what we had designed. This is one cause of the little fruit produced by sermons. We address a church, whose religious attainments are very unequal. Some are scarcely initiated into knowledge and virtue; others approach perfection; and some hold a middle rank between the two.

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address to this congregation certain general discourses, which cannot apply with equal force to all; it belongs to each of our hearers, to examine how far each argument has reference to his case.

Applying now to the words of our text the general maxim we have laid down; you will recollect the ideas we have attached to the terms used by the apostle, to express the agency of the Holy Spirit on the heart. We have said that these terms, unction, seal, earnest, excite three ideas. And we can never understand those Scriptures, which speak of the operations of the Holy Spirit, unless those three effects of the divine agency are distinguished. Every Christian, has not been confirmed by the Spirit of God in all those various ways. All have not received the threefold unction, the threefold seal, the threefold earnest. To some, the holy Spirit has confirmed the first, availing himself of their ministry for the achievement of miracles, or by causing them to feel that a religion, in favour of which so many prodigies had been achieved, could not be false. To others, the second confirmation was added to the first; at the moment he carried conviction to the mind, he sanctified the heart. With regard to others, he communicated more; not only persuading them that a religion, which promises celestial felicity, is true; not only enabling to conform to the conditions on which this felicity is promised, but he also gave them foretastes here below.

II. and III. I could better explain my sentiments, did I dare engage in discussing the second part of my subject, to illustrate the nature, and prove the