heart the Lord has touched with great love to souls. He learns that myriads are perishing in distant lands. That oppresses him with the weight of a personal woe; he takes his life in his hand and hastens away to tell the perishing of a Saviour. Now, in his work of faith, and labour of love, that man is dealing, let us suppose, with two of the youth of a dark-souled land. He is pressing on the conscience the claims of God, on the understanding his truth, and on the heart his love; but against all these appliances one of the two is stout-hearted, and steeled. There is no room in his soul either for the Spirit of God or his truth. Some idol has erected his temple there, and that idol, however hideous, is worshipped with the devotedness which is due only to God over all. Hence the heart is shut and fortified against the truth; hence the God of truth is rejected and disowned. The whole man is pre-occupied. The affections are engrossed by a worthless or revolting thing; and as there was no room in the dwellings of men for the Saviour when he came to earth, there is no room in the soul of that man for truth, though it brings salvation and the fulness of joy in its train. The secret of the whole is, that the heart is not impressed; it is never touched, and it therefore repels the approaches of Him who is love, as the granite rock repels the spray of the ocean.
CONSCIENCE ASCENDANT.
CONSCIENCE
ASCENDANT. But the case is different in regard to the other of the two: conscience in him feels the power of the truth; it cannot deny the charges which are brought against it; nay, it repeats and enforces them every one, and then begins the struggle for the control of the heart. Though the conscience be convinced, the heart may not be surrendered, and in consequence of that, a pain, an absolute distraction is sometimes produced—it has been described as the plucking out of a right eye.
THE CHANGE.
Now, when does that struggle cease? When is that soul really surrendered to the supremacy of God? It is when the truth finds its way to the heart, and is planted there by the Spirit who revealed it. As long as it remained only in the conscience, it stimulated, it roused, it agitated, it produced only commotion or woe; or, in the understanding, it instructed or delighted; THE
CHANGE. but when the truth of God passed through the conscience into the heathen heart, the whole man was speedily captured. There was now the willing mind, there was now the pliant disposition. Idols were now abandoned. The Son of God was rejoiced in, and he who before had carried the badge of his idol on his very brow, as if to glory in his shame, now felt all the degradation of bowing down to an idol at all. The strongest earthly affection—that of a mother to a cherished son—might obstruct the path which led from idols to God, and other woes might come on the believer; but his heart had owned the majesty of truth, whatever it might entail. Truth, the truth of God, had taught him that there is something stronger, deeper, and more constraining than even the love of a mother to a son—namely, the love of the Saviour to the saved, and their love to Him in return—and thus, that soul, amid sorrows which are agonizing to flesh and blood, chooses the better portion. Like one who is truly wise, that man, lately so dark and idolatrous, now prefers the love of God to the love of a creature—and that is Christianity in the heart. That is religion taking the helm of life. That is truth occupying the citadel of the soul. That is God enthroned. That is conscience obeyed. That is reason re-occupying the sphere from which it was banished at the fall. That is the promise fulfilled, “A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.”
Or contemplate another example of Christianity in the heart, as the root and fountain of all that is lovely and of good report in the life.
INQUIRY.
Another man has gone with no less love to souls than the former, to win some of the far-fallen Jews to the Saviour. In that work he encounters insult upon insult, and everything but Christian faith, and Christian hope and love, would there faint and fail. INQUIRY. He also is surrounded by crowds of inquirers or objectors—let us select two for their contrast. One of them is full of hereditary hatred to the truth as it is in Jesus; and that very name which is to the Christian a strong tower, is to that dark-souled man a provocative to wrath and spiteful passion—And why? Because that heart is pre-occupied. That man has never once seen the presented truth, so thick is the veil which blinds him; he has never once felt its power, so hard is the incrustation which envelopes his heart. The love and pity, as well as the holiness and truth of God, are shut out from his soul, for the repugnance and the recoil of the heart drive them utterly away. He thus furnishes another example of the fact, that there does not exist in all the world, a more intense antagonism than that of man’s polluted heart to the pure truth of God.
But the other of the two inquires—he is willing at least to ascertain what a Christian is. He listens, and the great truth which is the basis of all personal religion—conviction of sin in the sight of God—begins to be felt. Whether Christianity be true or not, that man discovers, from his own Hebrew Bible, that he is a sinner. He perceives that Judaism, even in all its glory could not take away sin, and much less now when it is worn out, or not the shadow or the echo of its former self. In that state of soul, that man comes nearer to Jesus of Nazareth than he had ever done before. He reads; he marks; he inwardly digests; he begins to pray. The Redeemer’s history now becomes full of meaning. “He was despised, and we esteemed him not”—“He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities”—“The Lord has laid on him the iniquities of us all”—“They shall look on him whom they have pierced”—These, or texts like these, now begin to be seen in the light which the Spirit of God sheds on them, or felt in the power which that Spirit imparts to truth, and they flash upon the earnest man’s mind with a meaning which he never saw before.
THE JEW, A CHRISTIAN.
THE JEW,
A
CHRISTIAN. That man now begins, then, to feel that the truth is just what he as a sinner needs; and in the train of that, it begins to take possession of the heart. It gives a new tone or a new colour to his life. By securing the command of the heart, it converts a Jew into a new creature in Christ. He begins to glory in what was once a stumbling-block, the Cross; or to be ashamed of what was once his glory, his self-righteousness; and as the aspect of the earth when the sun is shining in the radiance of day is different from its aspect when midnight reigns, that man’s soul is different now from what it lately was. Christianity is in the heart; and as the blood is propelled from the heart to the extremities, spreading life and activity as it flows, truth, the truth which the Spirit teaches now circulates through the whole inner man, reducing everything there to the obedience that is in Christ. The waste places are cultivated. The spiritual fabric is founded, and the great Master-builder will in due time perfect the whole.
THE HOME HEATHEN.
THE HOME
HEATHEN. Or, without referring either to Heathen or to Jew, we might select some two in our own favoured land for a contrast. We might picture an assembly of men met in the house of God to worship the King Eternal, Immortal, and Invisible, and single out two of the worshippers to illustrate religion in the heart; and let us thus single out two. They worship side by side. They hear the same voice—they listen to the same gospel, the same appeals to the conscience, the same lessons for the understanding, the same glad tidings for the heart. They are pointed to the same Saviour, and are equally told of his power and his willingness to save. Redemption now, and not to-morrow—redemption perfect and complete, without waiting for any supplement from man—redemption for “the ungodly,”1 and not for those who have already repented; in a word, salvation freely, salvation immediately, and salvation completely, is offered or pressed on the notice of each of the two, according to the Word of the Eternal.
THE WAYWARD HEART.
THE
WAYWARD
HEART. But amid this affluence of mercy, this plenitude of love, one of them continues indifferent, hardened, and without God. Every new appeal is resisted, and so thickens the incrustation which has gathered round the heart. All within is dead and cold. Religion brings no joy. It seems a system to fetter, and not to emancipate; and as that man cannot both sin and be a Christian, his heart continues shut against the influence which would separate him from his sins. The secret of all this is, that that heart is still the victim