founded, and among them, therefore, the church at Philippi; at another time, the thought of death would present itself to his mind. But what then? Do we find his soul a prey alternately to fear and hope, to dejection and joy, as dependent on impressions received from outward changes and chances, as is the case generally with other men in a similar position? No; a prevailing tone of cheerful repose, and of submission to the will of the Lord, breathes through the entire epistle. We recognise a man, whose confidence rests on a foundation firm as a rock, independent of the alternation of events, and unshaken by any waves or storms. He is assured that the Lord, in one way or other, will carry him victoriously through those conflicts, to a glorious end. With joyous confidence he is ready to meet the termination of a life consecrated to one holy cause. He is conscious to have laboured not in vain, as a faithful preacher of the truth, which he sees producing fruit in the churches. These, like the church at Philippi, are the living monuments of a ministry devoted to the Lord,-the testimony, that he has purely preached the word of God the Lord,—his rejoicing before the Lord, on that day, when He will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, when much, that bears an imposing appearance here, will be exposed in its nothingness, and when much, that was mistaken and condemned by the world, will be acknowledged as His own by the Lord. The feelings of Paul, in this respect, are nobly expressed in the words of this epistle, where he says, " Yea, and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and (priestly) service of your faith, I joy and rejoice with you all. For the same cause also do ye joy and rejoice with me," (chap. ii. 17, 18.) The full import of these weighty words, we must seek to make clear. As the Lord Christ is the alone Mediator between God and the sinful human race redeemed by Him, all who believe in Him, enter into communion with Him, are freed from the world, which is alienated from God, and through Him are consecrated into one holy Church of God, and thus become one priestly race; in this relation, there no longer exists the distinction of priests and laics, but all through Him, and in communion with

Him, become, what He himself is, priests before His God, who is also their God, before His Father, who is also their Father; their whole life is a priestly vocation, as it is described by Paul, (Rom. xii. 1), a rational service, i. e., a spiritual service, one proceeding from the reason, from the spirit, wherein the whole spiritual life manifests itself as consecrated to God, as a sacrifice offered unto God; wherein, every inward and outward action, as done in communion with Christ, as performed in His name, as filled by His Spirit, as expressing His Holy Image, is the offering of praise and thanksgiving of the Redeemed, acceptable and well-pleasing to God. This being true of every action of every Christian in his own particular calling, Paul regards his calling as an apostle, as his peculiar priestly vocation, and the faith planted through him in the heathen world,-the Christian life of the Gentiles converted by him-as the acceptable sacrifice offered by him to God; and in this sense he speaks, in these words, of the "sacrifice and service" of the faith of the Philippians, offered by him to God. Further, as wine was generally poured out as a seal to the sacrifices, the so-called libation, and as he plainly foresaw that he would pour out his own blood in his priestly vocation of preaching the Gospel among the heathen, and would testify what he preached even in the face of death, and at last, by the testimony of his martyrdom, would seal what formed the vocation of his whole life; so, in this respect, he speaks of pouring out his blood, as the offering himself on this sacrifice. The apostle, therefore, is ready to meet so glorious an end of his labours with confidence and joy. Far from needing the consolation of others, he is enabled to invite the Philippians to rejoice with him. Uncertain, therefore, whether martyrdom would terminate his imprisonment, or whether his life would be preserved for further labours in advancing the kingdom of God on earth, his mind is prepared for both, and in either case submissive to the will of God,-the Lord's will was his will. The turn which events might take would be, to him, the appointment of the Lord, how his life could be made most subservient to His glory. He was divided between the longing

to be gone from the conflicts of this earthly life, to the peace of the heavenly home of the Spirit,-to depart from the land where the Lord is seen only by the eye of faith, to that, where, amid the society of the blessed, He exhibits Himself as the object of sight. Conscious, though Paul was, of communion with the Lord, he was yet far from feeling satisfied with what he had already attained. Not only did his many outward conflicts make him feel, that the land of peace promised to Christians and the object of his fervent longings, is not to be found here below; inward conflicts, also, through which the life of faith must pass, and harder far than those from without, were not unknown to him, conflicts in which even his Saviour, who cried out, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death," and, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" led the way. He had suffered much from the "thorn in the flesh," as he calls it, (2 Cor. xii.), which, like wounds, incessantly inflicted in the body by the prickings of a goad, ever accompanied him. Thus must he experience the weakness of man, a weakness the more felt by him, in contrast with the revelations of Divine glory, which, from time to time, were imparted to him. But thus was he to learn what is Divine and what is human,-what belongs to this, and what to the other life. Thus also was he to discover, that the land of heavenly peace, the object of the longing of every spirit which partakes of the Divine nature, is not to be found on earth. Although, as his life and epistle testify, Paul had made great advances in sanctification, he was yet far from desiring to make any distinction between himself and the number of sinners seeking their justification in Christ,—far from esteeming himself a sinless saint. He knew that he had still and ever to battle with sin, and to persevere in this conflict even to the end, if he were to stand before the Lord. We need only hear his own confessions; as, when writing to the Corinthians, he warns them against a false security: "I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection, lest by any means when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway," (1 Cor. ix. 27); wherein he describes his continual conflict with himself, lest, having been the means of leading others to salvation

through the preaching of the word,-whose effects, in virtue of its inherent Divine Spirit, are independent of the preacher, and productive of fruit unto eternal life, he himself should yield to temptations, and fall short at last of that object to which he had conducted others. The metaphor here used by the apostle was derived from the pugilistic contests of the ancients. He represents the body as the antagonist with which the pugilist contends. The presupposition here, therefore, is the continual antagonism of the body, which formerly served sin, to the Divine life in the spirit. Paul describes himself as one who, by constant efforts, renders his body, the vessel of sanctification which he has received, obedient to himself as the servant of Christ. This conflict with the body of sin, so far as in the body the whole outward life of man is exhibited, thus describes generally the entire contest which the spiritual man has to maintain with the fleshly, the new man with the old man, even in a Paul. Taught, therefore, by severe self-examination, he is far from supposing he has already attained the ends of Christian perfection; far, when he contemplates his own life, from building his confidence on it, as if it were one of perfect holiness, as he expresses himself so beautifully in the words of this epistle, "Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect," (chap. iii. 12.) Therefore Paul knew that the blessings pronounced by the Lord, "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled;" and "blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," were words which, even in him, were not perfectly fulfilled; but, rather, were still, in certain respects, words of a promise. Further, although Paul had risen to greater heights in the contemplation of Divine things than others of his own or of all time, although he had been deemed worthy of special higher revelations, over and above what was to form the subject of general preaching, and of deeper and higher views of the connexion of the visible and invisible world, he knew that all this was but fragmentary and partial, and still far from perfect knowledge, and that when this is given, all the higher views entertained in this life, all prophecy, and all speaking with tongues, will vanish. He

reckoned himself among those whose knowledge of Divine things was still but "seeing through a glass darkly," where much still remains mysterious, a knowledge which bears the same relation to that of eternal life, which the knowledge of a child bears to that of matured manhood. He knows that, once exalted to the contemplation of eternal life, the knowledge of Divine things he attained in this life would be cast off by him, as the natural man casts off the notions of his childhood. His lofty spirit, ardently desiring knowledge, longs to depart from the dim twilight of the earthly life of faith to the bright-shining light of heavenly glory, where our knowledge of God and the things of God will be inward and immediate-a vision of immediate presence—a knowing even as we are known. In all these respects, therefore, Paul felt in the depth of his soul, that the life of the Christian, as it subsists in faith now, can only subsist in hope of the future; without this assured view of the future, the whole Christian life appears in his eyes as endeavours without object—the pursuit of a phantom, the sport of delusion, as he himself says, "If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men the most miserable," (1 Cor. xv. 19.) For the life of other men is directed to the higher or lower aims which are to be attained in intellectual pursuits, or in the gratification of the senses, and which can actually be attained on earth; but the life of Christians, with all its conflicts, its efforts, its renunciations, refers to an object which has no truth, if it is not to be realised in the eternal life of the future. Hence Paul, from this point of view, reproaches the Corinthians with living in a boasted security, that they had lost the consciousness of the difference between this world and the next, between the conflict of earthly life and the triumph of eternal life, that they thought and acted as if already in possession of all their rights, as if already enjoying the perfect satisfaction of all their needs, as if no conflict from within or without any longer awaited them, and contrasts, in this respect, the very different life of the apostles: "Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us," (1 Cor. iv. 8.) They seemed to think and act, as if the kingdom of Christ in its plenitude had already come among them, as if, partaking in this, they had already