RELIGION was never so prominent or popular as at the present day. It meets you in the most unexpected forms, places, and times. No doubt, much is real and saving. But we question whether any man who knows the grace of God in truth, is satisfied with the aspect and tendency of this religion. In quarters which tend towards Rome, it is the religion of imagination, captivating, superstitious, and showy. In others, which sympathize with the German school, it is the religion of intellect; intellect is its subject and object; and to the standard of the intellect its mysteries are pared down. In other quarters, again, religion is not much more than excited feeling and evanescent emotion.

For our own part, we discern many symptoms which appear unhealthy and unpromising. We see too little of consciencework in the religion of our time. It lacks inward conflict,-it has but little wrestling with sin in the soul,-people seem to endure the pangs of the new birth, as if unconscious,―there is little of that desperate, realizing struggle with the powers of sin and hell, of which our bible-taught fathers felt and said such solemn things. It lacks the bones and sinews of hardier times. It is a different thing from that masculine godliness which flourished in the age of the Apostles, or even the Reformers and Puritans of our own country. There is much speaking for God, but with faltering tongue; profession is spread over a wider surface, but it lacks power, depth, peace. Some deplore it in their restless aching of heart; others settle down in chronic heaviness, and bondage that grows hopeless; and some scorners say, that the gospel itself is at fault: it has lost the power of former days, and needs to be better adapted to this earnest age.

Among great gospel truths, none is more commonly mistaken than Repentance. It is the very key-stone of the arch of spiritual Christianity. If that be loose, a man's faith and hopes must all totter. If that be safe, the whole masonry of personal religion, built of living stones, will stand firm and immovable under the pressure of temptation or trouble, and

outlast the convulsions of death.

Why is repentance necessary? What is repentance? What is its proper place in the way of salvation? To the first

question we answer:—

(1.) Repentance is necessary, because the word of God everywhere demands it.-We find repentance typified in the ritual of Moses, taught in the book of Job, illustrated in the historical books of Samuel, Kings, Ezra; it finds devotional utterance in the Psalms, and it is urged by the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi. Then, repentance was the burden of the preacher's voice, who thundered his warnings against sin and everlasting perdition in the ears of listening multitudes who flocked to the wilderness of the Jordan. It was the subject-matter of the Lord's own ministry, and was exemplified by His matchless chapter of soul-awakening parables, the fifteenth of St. Luke. It enriched, everywhere, the writings and teachings of the apostles. It is heard in the deep tone of warning that lingers on the ears of the Seven Churches, and through them it speaks to us, "I will come to thee quickly, and remove thy candlestick out of its place, except thou repent." Thus, if we examine the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, we find everywhere that repentance forms an essential element of bible-teaching.

(2.) Repentance is necessary, because God has a controversy with men about sin.-The law of God is broken. We do not now go into the fact. It is admitted. Blame must lie somewhere; either on God, for making a law too holy and exacting, or the blame of wilful and wicked disobedience must lie upon the sinner's head. We know well where the blame lies. We bow our heads in conscious guilt before the righteous condemnation of God. We have no just ground of complaint before God. The confession falls from our guilty lips, Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done evil in thy sight, that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and clear when thou judgest.' If this great controversy between God and man is ever to end, and peace to be restored, concession must be made on the part of the offender; and that concession is repentance. Man must put himself in his proper place-abased, prostrate, penitent, before the throne of God.

(3.) Repentance is necessary; for without it,the glorious Gospel of the blessed God will never be desired or received." The whole need not the physician.' The self-righteous seek no reconciliation. Impenitence ensures the rejection of the

Saviour's message. Impenitence can neither glorify the Divine justice in punishing, nor the Divine mercy in sparing. The impenitent man stands upon his rights. He justifies himself, excuses, extenuates. He sets his virtues against his vices, proposes his own terms of peace, and protests against the wrong-doing of sending him to eternal destruction, while so many, worse than he, find acceptance. He proudly takes his place among "the ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance.' Thus, without repentance, no man will ever be willing to seek or receive pardoning mercy, as the free gift of God in Christ Jesus. "Every species of religion," says Thomas Scott, "in which repentance does not form a prominent part from first to last, is justly to be suspected; nay, certainly to be condemned as unscriptural and destructive.'

What is the repentance which is unto salvation?

(1.) We need not spend much time in negative definitions. It is not the penance of the Roman Catholics, which Archbishop Sandys says "standeth upon three feet-confession, contrition, satisfaction." It is not the hazy and obscure element of regret which modifies the "earnestness" of a more liberal school. It is not merely the experience of babes in Christ, which the advancing saint outgrows and leaves behind. It is not the grey twilight of Christianity which is soon lost in the noonday of assured faith, as some revivalists would lead us to think. Repentance is nothing superficial, or transient, or external. It is not bodily, but spiritual; not spiritual only, but transforming; not partial and temporary, but it pervades the whole man, and is permanently enduring,-"Old things pass away, and all things become new."

Then, what is repentance?

(2.) The Greek (ueravota) gives half the definition; at least it supplies the genus. Repentance is a change of mind. But a change about what? We answer, it is a change of mind about God, His character, government, will. It is a change of mind about sin, its evil, baseness, guilt, origin, prevalence, issue. It is a change of mind about myself, my personal standing before a holy God,-born in sin, vile by nature, every day omitting and doing what I ought not, and adding in many ways to the sins of others: in fact, repentance is a change wrought by the Holy Spirit upon the entire man,-what he is, what he thinks, what he feels, what he does, what he ceases to do,-in his relation to God, and the soul, and salvation,-all is changed.

We very much like the definition given by Scott, accurate and comprehensive; it is," Repentance is a change of judgment, inclination, affections respecting sin immediately, accompanied, preceded, or followed by a change of judgment. inclination, and affection respecting God and His law,-Christ

and His Gospel,—ourselves and our conduct, this world and the next." (i. 230.) To open this a little :

(a.) Repentance is a change in the judgment which a sinful man forms on the great concerns of his eternity. Opinions on spiritual things, which have swayed him hitherto, are brought to the scale and chart of truth, and examined anew. This is set forth as the work of the Holy Spirit, in the Lord's great discourse upon the Comforter in the sixteenth of St. John: "When He is come, He shall reprove the world of sin." All men have their opinions about sin. Partial, and false, and distorted opinions they are. Many, indeed, come to the selfdeceiving conclusion, "that they have no sin." "The truth is not in them." But when He comes, the Spirit of truth, the supreme Master of the soul, "to whom all hearts are open," He goes over the proof again, shows with authority where the error lay, detects these wrong and self-righteous conclusions, and brings the man, by clear conviction, to acknowledge and bewail his manifold sins and iniquities.

"Lord, I am vile, conceived in sin,

And born unholy and unclean."

(b.) These sound convictions of sin are oftenest produced by going into details. In that great indictment, the third of Romans, where St. Paul arraigns the Jewish and Gentile world before the bar of God, he made specific charges against them (πроnτiаσаμεlа Tаvтая) to prove that they are all under sin. Commencing with sins of the mind and heart, "there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God;" he describes their condition as lapsed and gone,-" gone out of the way and become unprofitable;" then charges them with total failure in the purpose for which God made them, "there is none that doeth good, no, not one;" then follows the dark catalogue of their accumulated iniquities: sins of the throat, tongue, lips, mouth, are dwelt upon with reiterated significance; deeds of murderous violence are pursued by "swift feet," while "their ways" are strewn with the victims of "destruction" and wide-spread scenes of "misery;" wilful ignorance of the "way of peace," and proud contempt for God and his displeasure, complete his condemning proof. It is thus by the citation of facts, and presenting them in strong array of testimony, that the apostle proves all to be under sin, "that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God." One specific sin, of deep and unparalleled malignancy, was also charged on the Jews by Peter,-" Him ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." The strong fabric of Paul's self-righteousness was demolished when, by the heavenly vision, the crime of persecuting Jesus

was brought home with irresistible conviction. In like manner,
the social infidelities of her past years, brought forcibly to
recollection, sent back the Samaritan woman a convicted
penitent, urging her companions, "Come, see a man that told
me all that ever I did." Thus the Holy Spirit produces con-
viction by reviving, minutely and in detail, the memories of
forgotten sins,-"I will reprove thee, and show thee the
things that thou hast done.” The sinner is then said to
possess his sins,"--and a shameful possession he finds them.
(c.) In repentance the Holy Spirit convinces the man how
great an evil sin is. Hitherto he has regarded it lightly, as a
venial thing. It never troubled him. But now he sees things
in a different light. The Spirit, that great revealer of Christ,
and of the works of the devil which Christ came to destroy,
has laid the lesson before the man's soul for his serious con-
sideration. "Know, therefore, and see, that it is an evil thing
and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God, and my
fear is not in thee." (Jer. ii. 29.) Now he is learning what
sin is in the sight of God. "All these are things that I hate,
saith the Lord." (Zech. viii. 17.) By what providential chas-
tisements God may see fit to illustrate and enforce these lessons,
we cannot say. But every true penitent feels and confesses
that he acted like one infatuated, if not insane; so headstrong
and heedless was his addictedness to sin. "Thou hast done
evil as thou couldst." The Saviour's prayer for the forgiveness
of his murderers strongly testified their blind misconception of
sin's evil," they know not what they do." Visited by the
convincing Spirit of God, these dark clouds of ignorance and
falsehood are dispelled; solemnized by such discoveries of evil,
hitherto unknown, he exclaims in abasement and terror of
soul-"Thou hast set our misdeeds before thee, our secret
sins in the light of thy countenance."

(d.) In repentance, the Spirit follows up these convictions, by unveiling the future, and showing what sin must hereafter lead to. The great sentence of God's righteous judgment is pronounced with a solemnity which silences every excuse,-"The soul that sinneth, it shall die." The sentence falls upon the awakened conscience like a thunderclap from the heavens. Driven from his refuges of lies, arraigned, convicted, "his mouth is stopped," "he has the sentence of death in himself;" he feels as if the vials of God's wrath were beginning already to be poured out, the "poison whereof drinks up his spirit;" the image of the angel of death, "whetting his glittering sword," and "his hand taking hold of judgment," seems to haunt his troubled mind, and ever breaks his peace. God's arrow has not merely grazed the surface, but pierced his heart with a wound deep and incurable, yea-" thine arrows stick fast in me, and thy hand presseth me sore." And many an awakened