This it is upon which we base our conviction that there will be hereafter a spiritual worship. We hear much respecting the "advancement of humanity;" if it meant only this, that there is a law in us rising to perfection, the question would not be worth doubting; but when we are told that the Creator has interested Himself in His creation, we know that the day shall come when the "true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth."

II. The nature of Spiritual worship. Now, what we mean by "worship" is the highest reverence of the soul; adoration, awe; it may be, even, vague devoutness: "Ye know not what."

It

There is a vast difference between a man's creed and his worship. It is not merely what a man professes to reverence that constitutes worship. Moreover, to be spiritual, worship must be intelligent. It must be higher than mere words. It is possible for a Trinitarian to call Christ God, and worship mammon. is conceivable that a Unitarian theologian may in word-I say conceivable-deny even the Deity of Christ, and yet, like the son in the parable who said "I go," and went not, that he may have learned to give Him the whole reverence of his soul: "Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven."

Again, it is not a thing which a man can decide, whether he will be a worshipper or not; a worshipper he must be: the only question is what will he worship? Every man worships—is a born worshipper. It is nonsense to say he does not believe in a God. Before what is greater than himself man bows instinctively. The feeling of devoutness is instinctive. Look at the child when he first enters the Church of God, how his soul seems filled with the grandeur of the service, how he tries to join his voice with the praises that are being uttered. It is man's necessity that he must love. He may call himself an infidel if he will, but he must worship something-it may be perchance himself, or the Rights of Man, or even Reason.

1. Once more, the new worship of God is to be a universal worship: “Neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall men worship the Father." Are we, then, to understand by this that the difference between the old and the new worship is merely that the

one is localized and the other not? [Observe there was a use of space and place before the Father was known.

Zeus of Olympus
Nay, the distinc-

and Jove of the Capitol compared in effects.] tion is not that; what is meant here is that it is not in Mount Moriah or Mount Gerizim only, but everywhere, that we are to worship the Father. The distinction is between exclusive and universal worship. The time was coming when the question where would be felt to be unimportant.

A mistake is sometimes made, and it is said that local worship is here forbidden, that worship in a place is not spiritual worship, and that we must go into the temple of Nature to worship the Father in spirit. We are told that the everlasting hills are pillars far more grand than the pillars of the Church, and that the sky above is far more glorious than the roof of the most splendid cathedral. This is certainly a truth to be insisted on; Nature is the temple of God, and he who refuses to worship there refuses to worship as our Redeemer did. There is in the worship in the temple of Nature something elevating and grand; we feel ourselves higher than the Nature we contemplate, and so our pride begins to rise; and when we come back from it to worship among men, we find that we had been forgetting humanity, and the family of spirits congenial to us. Therefore do not fly to Nature for spiritual worship. We must content ourselves with a worship far less grand, but quite as true, and more humble.

2. Again, the new worship of God must be worship "in spirit." This truth the better men among the Jews had gradually seen. The later prophets had clearer and higher notions of worship than their predecessors. This we see from their notion of sacrifice: “Lo, I come to do Thy will, O Lord;" and, again, "He hath showed thee, O man, what is good, . . . and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" They recognized that all true life is worship: "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."

...

3. Lastly, this spiritual worship consists in the worship of truth. ... When we are told to worship the Lord in truth, it means the correspondence between acts and laws. . . . In spiritual life there are certain laws, obedience to which is truest worship. God dwells in the humble and contrite heart; to fear God, to be humble, and to love God, that is the spiritual worship of God.

XIV.

THE CONVICTION OF SIN IN THE MIND OF PETER.

Brighton, November 10, 1850.

"When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord."-Luke v. 8.

THIS is one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, interviews of the Apostle Peter with the Redeemer. It was rendered memorable by the miraculous draught of fishes which attended it. It is worthy of observation that the last recorded interview of our Lord with the same apostle was marked by a set of circumstances precisely similar. In both cases Peter had toiled all night, and had been unsuccessful, and at last was relieved by miracle. In this case evidently there was much that was symbolical and which prefigured so that the heart might understand many thingsthe future spiritual success of Peter, and also the unstinted exuberance of the loving-kindness of God, and the utter powerlessness of unaided human effort.

We have, moreover, a specimen of the Redeemer's teaching. He taught by actions; He was Himself the Word, the expression of the mind of God; every action was itself a word. His miracles had a voice, and His life was, as it were, a magnificent monument sculptured over with hieroglyphics which can only be understood and interpreted by him who has the key, which is the spirit of God. Now the advantage of this symbolic teaching was twofold:

First, it was a living thing. Our Master came into this world, not to be merely a signpost on which the way was written, but to be "the way " itself; not to be the teacher, but "the truth." And similarly, for the same reason, there is a special power in symbolic teaching. Sacraments have in them, as they say, more of grace than sermons or mere words. It is possible for a minister to say, "You are all God's children," but it is not possible to say it with so much force as is expressed in the sacrament which represents

that fact. It is possible for a minister to say, "Ye are all brethren," and yet it is impossible for him to state it thoroughly with all that eloquence which is found in this instituted fact of Christ. By this institution rich and poor, great and small, master and servant, kneel together at the same table as brethren. It is possible for the minister to say that everything here is sacred, but he cannot say this as powerfully as it is said in that same sacrament: it is impossible for him to tell out this truth as it is told in our Master's institution, according to which the commonest elements and actions are taken and consecrated to be the most sacred symbols of His religion.

In the next place, this symbolic teaching saves us from dead dogmas. The words of Christ are living words; they speak to the imagination and the heart rather than to the intellect. For example, our Master took bread and said, "This is my body;" let the imagination and the heart feed upon that, and then you will feel that these words were such that no others could have been substituted for them; but let the Romish commentator come with his intellect, and force it into literalism, and demand that you should receive only the external meaning of these words, and then a glorious figure is turned into mere logic, and the life of the thing is gone. Again, our Redeemer here, by a significant act, proclaims to Peter many things on which his heart may feed-the loving-kindness of God, the powerlessness of man, and the success of the Gospel; but let the commentator come and force upon it a literal meaning, and its true life is gone; the poetry of it has fled -for all the highest truth is poetry. The life of Christ is the noblest poetry, the actions and words of Christ are poetry; with that the mind intensely elevated labors, without power of expressing it in words adequate, and therefore must find for itself figures; just as God is obliged to speak to us by the symbols of this universe, and just as the universe tells us of the beauty of God; but try to express in words the beauty, majesty, and love, and it will all fail. So in the words of Christ there is a something forever beautiful, but it is a beauty too refined for the mind to grasp; therefore these acts of Christ remain forever full of a meaning which can never be exhausted; these words it is our privilege to find each time we look into them as fresh and new as if they had never been interpreted before.

Our thoughts to-day will branch off into these two divisions:

I. The meaning and object of this miracle.

II. The effects produced by it on Peter's mind.

I. This miracle, more than all others, taught God's personality. Brethren, at the bottom of all things here there is a law. Now it is the tendency of habit to look upon law, and see nothing below it. We gaze upon this great world of God and see nothing below the vast mass of laws by which it is governed; then a miracle breaks the continuity of these laws by a higher law. For let it not be fancied that a miracle is a contradiction of these laws, it is simply an interruption. It may be the ordinary law that a man under certain circumstances of sickness shall die; but if the hand of God be placed beneath that man to save him, there is, if you will, an interruption, but no contradiction. For what is a law? A law is merely the expression of the will of God; a law is God in action there must be a will before there can be a law. God is imminent in this world; He is the life of all that is. The birds move and migrate unerringly from place to place, guided, as we say popularly, by instinct; let us rather say guided by the law of God. Certain fishes are found in deep water, others in shallow, to each of which they are guided by an impulse, and that impulse is God. Had Peter let down his net as usual, and without a promise received success, doubtless the will of God would have been working just as much as in the other case; but when in obedience to a voice Peter let down the net, and in exact agreement with the prediction his net was filled with fishes, then Peter felt that the words he had formerly used were inadequate, and that the "laws of chance" were false, for from this he learned that there is a living will. And this is the meaning and intention of every miracle, to break through the tyranny of the words "law" and "nature."

II. We pass on now to consider the effects produced on Peter. These centre themselves in one sentence; the effect ended in the production of a sense of sin—“Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." Now, this was not mere wonder, nor was it curiosity or surprise; it was the sense of personal sin. His heart was bursting with the feeling, “I am a sinful man, O Lord.”

In this division of our subject we find these two branches: first, the cause of this impression; and, secondly, the nature of the sense of sin itself.