Take the first thought, spirituality. They are lively or living stones, built up into a spiritual house. Any one who thoughtfully observes the successive ages of the world’s history, will not fail to discover that each generation of men has in some important particulars progressed upon its predecessor. There has been not only an accumulation of the treasures of thought and knowledge but an increase of the capacity to produce them. Hence in every age there has been a higher appreciation of freedom, a quickened enterprise of enquiry, the stream of legislation has refined and broadened in its flow, improvement has extended its acreage of enclosure, and principles proved and gained have become part of the property of the world. Our nature has had its mental childhood. The established laws of mind admit only of a gradual communication
of knowledge. It was necessary, therefore, that men should be first stored with elementary principles, then advanced to axioms and syllables, and afterwards introduced into the fellowship of the mystery of Divine truth. Hence any reflective mind, pondering upon the dealings of God with men, will discover a progressive development of revelation, adjusted with careful adaptation to the preparedness of different ages of mankind. In the first ages God spake to men in sensible manifestations, in visions of the night, by audible voice, in significant symbol. As time advanced the sensible manifestations became rarer, and were reserved for great and distinguishing occasions. From the lips of a lawgiver, in the seer’s vision, and in the prophet’s burden of reproof or consolation, the Divine spake, and the people heard and trembled. At length, in the fulness of time, the appeal to the senses was altogether discarded; the age of spirituality began, and in the completed revelation men read, as they shall read for ever, the Divine will in the perfected and royal word. And this progress, which appears through all creation as an inseparable condition of the works of God, present in everything, from the formation of a crystal to the establishment of an economy, is seen also in the successive dispensations
under which man has been brought into connection with heaven. You can trace through all dispensations the essential unity of revealed religion. There have never been but two covenants of God with man—the covenant of works and the covenant of grace; never but two religions—the religion of innocence, and the religion of mercy. Through all economies there run the same invariable elements of truth. The first promise contains within itself the germ of all subsequent revelation—the Abrahamic covenant, the separation of Israel, all the rites and all the prophecies, are but the unfoldings of its precious meaning. Sacrifice for the guilty, mediation for the far-off and wandering, regeneration for the impure, salvation through the merit of another; these are the inner life of the words, “the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head.” The gospel therefore was preached unto Abraham. Moses felt the potent influence of “the reproach of Christ.” David describeth the blessedness of “the man unto whom God imputeth not iniquity.” “Of this salvation the prophets enquired and searched diligently.” Christ was the one name of the world’s constant memory, “to Him gave all the prophets witness,” and from the obscurest to the clearest revelation all testified in tones which it was
difficult to misunderstand. “Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.” The patriarchal dispensation had no elaborate furniture nor gorgeous ritualism. The father was the priest of the household, and as often as the firstling bled upon the altar it typified the faith of them all in a better sacrifice to come. Then came the Jewish dispensation with its array of services and external splendour, with its expressive symbolism and its magnificent temple; and then, rising into a higher altitude, the fulness of time came, and Christianity—the religion not of the sensuous but of the spiritual, not of the imagination awed by scenes of grandeur nor bewildered by ceremonies of terror, but of the intellect yielding to evidence, of the conscience smitten by truth, of the heart taken captive by the omnipotence of love—appeared for the worship of the world. Our Saviour, in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, inaugurated, so to speak, the dispensation of the spiritual, “The hour cometh, and now is,”—there is the moment of instalment, when the great bell of time might have pealed at once a requiem for the past and a welcome to the grander future, “when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”
Requiring spiritual worship, it was natural that God should have “built up a spiritual house,” wherein he should dwell in statelier presence than in “houses made with hands.” Hence there is now rising upon earth, its masonry unfinished, but advancing day by day, a spiritual temple more magnificent than the temple of Solomon, costlier than the temple of Herod. “Destroy this temple,” said the Saviour to his wondering listeners, “and in three days I will raise it up.” “Forty and six years was this temple in building, and will thou rear it up in three days?” “But He spake of the temple of His body.” “What, know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ?” Yes! believers everywhere are stones in the spiritual house, broken perhaps into conformity, or chiselled into beauty by successive strokes of trial; and wherever they are, in the hut or in the ancestral hall, in the climates of the snow or of the sun, whether society hoot them or honour them, whether they wrap themselves in delicate apparelling, or, in rugged homespun, toil all day for bread, they are parts of the true temple which God esteems higher than cloistered crypt or stately fane, and the top stone of which shall hereafter be brought on with joy.
The second representation of a believer’s character is holiness, “a holy priesthood.” In the
Jewish dispensation the word was understood to mean no more than an outward and visible separation unto God; the priests in the temple and the vessels of their ministry were said to be ceremonially “holy.” But more is implied in the term as it occurs in the text and kindred passages than a mere ritual and external sanctity. It consists in the possession of that mind which was also in Christ Jesus, in the reinstatement in us of that image of God which was lost by the disobedience of the fall. You will remember numerous scriptures in which holiness, regarded as the supreme devotion of the heart and service to God, is brought out as at once a requirement and a characteristic of a Christian. “What manner of persons ought we to be in all holy conversation and godliness?” “Be ye holy, for I am holy,” “as He which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation.” “God hath not called us to uncleanness but unto holiness.” “Having these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.” And it is absolutely necessary that this grace should be cultivated if we would either fulfil the mission of our priesthood or abide in the Divine presence for ever. Holiness is requisite whether to see the
Lord or to walk before men unto all well-pleasing; and as living witnesses, transcripts of His holiness, enabled by his grace to maintain purity of heart and life, God has promised to establish those who put their trust in Him. Some Christians have been deterred from the search after this blessing of heaven by the mistakes of those who have endeavoured to expound it, or by the hypocrisy of those who have assumed its profession that they might the better sin. It is marvellous how many different views of it have at times obtained currency in the world. By some it has been resolved into a sort of refined Hinduism, a state in which the soul is “unearthed, entranced, beatified” by devout contemplation into a pietistic rapture; others have deemed that the best way to secure it was a retirement from the vexing world, a recreant forsaking of the active duties of life, as if it consisted in immunity from temptation rather than in victory over it. Others have placed it in surpliced observance or in monastic vow; an equivocal regard to patterns of things in the heavens which common men mistake for idolatry. Others again, reversing the old Pythagorean maxim, and wearing the image of God upon their ring, have expressed it by unworthy familiarity, a continual adverting to the gifts of
the spirit, and the experience of the soul in the flippancy of ordinary conversation, as did some of the fanatics of the Commonwealth. Others have represented it as a perpetual austerity, an investiture of our family circles with all the hues of the sepulchre, and a flinging upon the face of society the frown of a rebuking fretfulness, which would make the good of an archangel evil spoken of in this censorious world. But the scriptural holiness which believers long for, and which the Church is to spread through the land, is not a necessary adjunct of any or all of these. It is not the acting of a part in a drama, but the forth-putting of a character in life, the exhibition in harmonious action of the humble love and filial fear with which men “work out their salvation.” “A holy priesthood.” It is remarkable of this spiritual priesthood that it descends in no particular succession, nor limits its privileges to any exclusive genealogy. The holiness which is at once its distinctiveness and its hallowing comprehends and can sanctify all relations of life. Let the minister have it, and the love of Christ, his supremest affection, will prompt his loathing of sin and his pity for sinners; will fire his zeal and make his words burn, and will often urge him to cast himself upon the mercy-seat that his labours may
not be in vain. Let the merchant, or the manufacturer, or the man of business have it, and it need neither bate his diligence nor hold him back from riches; but it will smite down his avarice and restrain his greed of gold; it will make him abhor the fraud that is gainful, and eschew the speculation that is hazardous, and shrink from the falsehood that is customary, and check the competition that is selfish; and it will utterly destroy the deceptive hand-bill, and the cooked accounts, and the fictitious capital, as well the enormous dishonesties as the little lies of trade. Let this holiness actuate the parent, and in his strong and gentle rule he will mould the hearts of his children heavenward, and train them in the admonition of the Lord, until, a commanded household, comely in their filial love, they shall reverence their Father who is in heaven. Let the child be impressed with holiness, and he will have higher motives to obedience than he can gather from the constraint of duty or from the promptings of affection. Let the master be holy, and while he upholds authority he will dispense blessing. Let the servant be holy, and service will be rendered with cheerfulness, “not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God.” Let the man be holy, and vigorous health and