depend on the clearness or fulness of its presentation. Every mind will apprehend it for itself. It is founded on tiiat analogy between the external and spiritual world, between matter and mind, which pervades all our forms of thought and language, and which is as- sumed and sanctioned in the Word of God. We borrow from the outward and visible world all the terms by which we express our mental acts and states. We attribute sight, hearing, taste, and feel- ing to the mind. We speak of the understanding as dark, the heart as hard, the conscience as seared. Strength, activity, and clearness, are as truly attributes of the mind, as of material substances and agencies. Dulness and acuteness of intellect are as intellio-ible forms of speech, as when these characteristics are predicated of a tool. Sin is a leprosy. It is a defilement, a pollution, something to be cleansed. The soul is dead. It needs to be quickened, to be renewed, to be cleansed, to be strengthened, to be guided. The eyes of the mind must be opened, and its ears unstopped. It would be impossible that there should be such a transfer of modes of ex- pression from the sphere of the outward and material to that of the inward and spiritual, if there were not a real analogy and in- timate i-elation between the two. A feeble or diseased mind is scarcely more a figurative mode of speech than a feeble or dis- eased body. The one may be strengthened or healed as well as the other. The soul may be jiurified as literally as the body. Birth and the new-birth, are equally intelligible and literal forms of expression. The soul may be quickened as really as the body. Death in the one case is not more a figure of sj)eeeh than it is in the other. When the body dies, it is only one form of activity that ceases ; all the active properties belonging to it as matter re- main. When the soul is dead, it also is entirely destitute of one form of life, while intellectual activity remains.
Such being the state of the case ; such being the intimate rela- tion and analogy between the niatei'ial and spiritual, and such being the consequent law of thought and language which is universal among men, and which is recognized in Scripture, we are not at liberty to explain the language of the Bible when speaking of the sinful state of men, or of the method of recovery from that state, as purely metaphorical, and make it mean much or little according to our good pleasure. Spiritual death is as real as corporeal death. The dead body is not more insensible and powerless in relation to the objects of sense, than the soul, when spiritually dead, is to the things of the Spirit. This insensibility and helplessness are pre- cisely what the word dead in both cases is meant to exT)ress. It is
692 PART ni. Ch. XIV. — vocation.
as literal in tlie one case as in the other. It is on the ground of this analogy that much of the language descriptive of the moral and spiritual state of man, used in the Bible, is founded. And the account given of the mode of his recovery from his estate of sin has the same foundation. As the blind could not open their own eyes, or the deaf unstop their own ears, or the dead quicken themselves in their graves ; as they could not prepare themselves for restoration, or cooperate in effecting it, so also with the blind, the deaf, and the dead in sin. The cure in both cases must be supernatural. It can be accomplished by notiiing short of al- mighty power. One grand design of Christ's miracles of healing was to teach this very truth. They were intended to teach the sinner that his case was beyond all creature-help ; that his only hope was in the almighty, and unmerited grace of Christ, to whom he must come and to whom he must submit. " As many as touched [Him] were made perfectly whole." Their cure was by no medicinal process. It was not a gradual work. It was not a change to be understood and accounted for by the laws of matter or mind. It was due to the simple volition of an almighty will. As there have been persons disposed to give the rationale of these cures ; to explain them on the theory of animal magnetism, of oc- cult forces, or of the power of the imagination, so there are those who prefer to explain the process of regeneration on rational prin- ciples, and to show how it is accomplished by moral suasion, and how it depends for its success on the cooperation of the subject of the work. This is not the Scriptural account. Our Lord said to the leper, I will ; be thou clean ; as he said to the winds, Be still. There is another view of the subject. As the Bible recognizes and teaches this analogy between the material and spiritual worlds, so it constantly assumes a like analogy between the relation which God sustains to the one and the relation which He sustains to the other. He has given to his creatures, the aggregate of whom con- stitutes nature, their properties, attributes, and powers. These are not inert. They act constantly and each according to its own laws. What we regard as the operations of nature, especially in the external world, are the effects of these agencies, that is, of the efficiency of second causes, which God has ordained, and which act with uniformity and certainty, so tiiat like causes always pro- duce like effects. God, however, is everywhere present with his creatures, not only upholding, but guiding, so that the effects produced, in the infinite diversity of vegetable and animal forms, are indicative of an everywhere present and everywhere active