SPIRITUAL-MINDEDNESS.

ROMANS viii. 6.

"To be spiritually minded is life and peace."

(For Whit-Stay.)

WE have come again to the great day in the Christain year, which is set apart for the commemoration of the descent of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost. Very refreshing to every devout mind are these annual festivals. We are reminded by them of great truths, and precious blessings; and who does not know and feel that life is apt to become a dull round of cares and duties, and that Religion itself may become a mere routine of formal observances, if there be nothing of a special kind to animate our faith from time to time, and recall our wandering thoughts to the first principles of the doctrine of Christ?

Without exalting these occasions unduly, as they do who think to make up for carelessness at other times by double seriousness or by extra devotions,

we may yet see a wisdom and propriety in connecting certain seasons with particular facts in the Gospel history, and giving to each of our Christian anniversaries its own lesson, and litany, and hymn of praise.

Yet is there something very solemn, too, in these occasions when they come upon us. For the day is

something, though not so much as the sacrifice of our convenience or our interest, in return for the favour thou hast designed for us. This we acknowledge by begging that thou wilt hold us excused, that thou wilt accept our apologies for absenting ourselves, and not strike us off from the roll of thy acquaintance."

Now is not this, brethren, an exact representation of the attitude which is assumed towards religion by a very large portion of the Christian community? They are by no means insensible to the honour and privilege of having the Gospel invitation addressed to them. They by no means wish to break with the Divine Entertainer. They know that the time will come-the time of sickness, of sorrow, of death, of judgment—when God's favour may be of importance to them, when they would eagerly avail themselves of His invitation. They are sensible, too, that He might justly be angry at the way in which they treat His summons to come to Him. They know that they are not doing as He has a right to expect of them, when they are living so much for their own gratification or convenience, and so little for His honour. They do not therefore do their own will rather than His without a something which answers to the "I pray thee have me excused;" a formal acknowledg ment of His claim upon them, such as consists in attendance at church, perhaps even at the Lord's Table, family and private prayer, subscriptions to charities, and other outward observances. These are not so much aids and expressions of their religion, as apologizings for their irreligion-the courtesies (so to say) whereby they hope to reconcile the retaining of God's favour in order to their future advantage, with

wants, and implored the blessing, and conclude, therefore, that it has come, or will come. Often they have listened devoutly to the benediction which speaks of the "communion of the Holy Ghost "" in connexion with the Saviour's grace, and the Father's love; and words that have such a familiar sound many suppose must carry with them some real blessing, of which, in common with a thousand more, they have their share. But, alas! they do not bring the matter home to themselves, as men should do who have so much at stake. They make no question of their own individual conversion to God. It is an assumed thing that, as they have fellowship with the saints, they are walking with them heavenward. According to their notions, all but flagrant sinners are safe. Even the men who cherish pride, and adopt the world's code of morality, and live avowedly to please themselves, if only they observe holy seasons and wear some form of godliness, are presumed to need nothing more than some increase of sobriety or seriousness, which advancing years, or a last sickness, may well supply.

Now, against this soul-destroying delusion we must protest in God's Name. The fact is, while one man lacks this, and another that,-while some men's sins are naked and open so that their neighbours know them and talk freely concerning them, and other men, in their own secret consciences, stand condemned for faults which as yet they have covered up and kept from prying eyes,-the general defect is want of spirituality, deadness of heart towards God, habits of self-pleasing which contradict the very

3 2 Cor. xiii 14.

to by a superior: here I am looked up to by all, my will is paramount, my orders are law, I have not even an equal."

Yes, brethren, at the richer and greater man's table (for such we must suppose it to have been) this landed proprietor must have sat down with many others as wealthy and as important as himself, and must have felt that he was honoured rather than conferring honour. On his own estate, surrounded by his own dependents, it was otherwise; as the position was a novel, and therefore an exciting one to him, he preferred it in the vanity of his heart to the other.

Thus religion is distasteful to many persons as compared with worldly sources of satisfaction, because it brings them into the presence of One before whom they are dwarfed into insignificance, if not degraded into vileness. It does not acknowledge their superiority to its laws, or recognize their standards of importance, or badges of distinction. Subordinately indeed to its own real standards, it by no means refuses its sanction to many of the conventional ones of this world, but every attempt to set the latter above its own it rebukes and humiliates.

My brethren, if you hold your worldly advantages, whatever they be-whether station, wealth, honour, success, domestic happiness, or any other-if you hold and use them otherwise than as received of God; if you have greater satisfaction in the contemplation of your own acquisitions, than of the goodness, and riches, and glory of God; if, not your membership with your brethren under Christ your common Head, but your pre-eminence above them in this or that respect, is the ruling principle of your

intercourse with them; if, when you look around you, you are more reminded, in whatever way, of your own interests and your own importance than of the interests of Christ's Church and the honour of Christ Himself; if, when the poor share your goods, they share them, as regards your own feeling, more as indebted to your liberality than as fellowguests at the table of the supreme Dispenser of. bounty, to whom you and they are alike beholden for all; and if, moreover, you account and deal with this present life more as if it were an estate in which you have an abiding interest than a guest-table at which you are seated one hour and gone from it the next : in all or any of these cases you have your representatives in him who made the excuse, "I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it."

II. And who are they of whom he is a figure whose plea was, "I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them?" Here is the man of activity and enterprise, whose life is no idle, useless one, of mere complacent contemplation of his worldly position, but one of energetic endeavour to improve it. He looks after his own affairs, and does not trust them to subordinates; so that, as riches increase, they bring with them the additional sweetness which proverbially belongs to bread earned by one's own

exertions.

Now here, you may say, is something more like a reasonable excuse. "Business before pleasure" is the ruling maxim here, and the excuse is couched in terms which seem to intimate a consciousness that its sufficiency could not well be disputed. The assertion, "I must needs go, I am under a necessity to