A NEW HEART.

Make you a new heart and a right spirit.-Ezekiel xviii. 31.

T

HESE were the words which the Lord, through the

lips of the prophet, addressed in mingled tones of warning and encouragement to the rebellious house of Israel; but they are words fitted to the ears and to the souls of communities and individuals in all times. They break upon us to-day. Each of us may interpret them according to his own need and condition. "Make you a new heart and a new spirit.

Let me proceed to observe, in the first place, that this is an exhortation which, in one form or another, every man needs to hear. There are a great many theories, my friends, which are rendered almost superfluous by actual facts, and it is sad to think how much of our theorizing—of our religious theorizing especially -is practically useless, and worse than useless-how much of it is mere waste and hindrance, because we do not theorize and work at the same time; but our theorizing prevents our working. Here is a man who has to cross a river. There is no difficulty in crossing

-the bridge is there-it is plain and palpable; but he stops to speculate how the bridge could have been erected-how it could span the river-and he goes still deeper into subtilties, and speculates how it is possible that he has the power of crossing it, and all the while neglects the work before him in theories that amount to no practical value, if they ever could be decided.

Now here is a simple, practical work set before a man—to make himself a new heart and a new spirit. So far as man's own immediate action is concerned, there is little reason why he should perplex himself with controversies or questionings about human ability and total depravity. I do not say that the truth or falsehood of these theories is not an important consideration. The truth or falsehood of any theory is important that bears upon spiritual realities, and colors all our views of God and life and duty. This is the value of doctrinal truth. Not that it gives us intellectual or logical consistency; not that it constitutes a sharp-edged system with which we can win a controversy; but it is valuable because of the great truths it clears up, and the different stand-points from which we may look upon God, our own souls, our own relations, possibilities, and powers. But I say no man need trouble himself long with theories, so far as his own immediate duty is concerned, in this demand for practical action; for whether he be tainted with Adam's sin or not, he is a sinner; whether he be totally depraved or not, there is enough

over-balancing evil in him, enough of wrong affections and triumphant sin, to excite him to endeavor to make for himself a new heart and a new spirit.

So this exhortation before us is no mere historical saying, fossilized in the past-bound up with the history of the rebellious Jews. It is a living word, and speaks at this very hour, vibrating from heaven throughout every soul: "Make you a new heart and a new spirit."

Another question may be disposed of, when we consider how practical this appeal is, and that is the question of, Who makes a new heart? Do you make it, or does God make it? Now a little further back in this same book of Ezekiel, we find God's agency brought pre-eminently forward, when He says: "I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh." Now here, as almost everywhere else, we find two poles to one truth, one referring to God, and one to man, but the moment we come to act, they are reconciled. If one warms into earnest effort upon the idea of having a new heart and a new spirit, the two conditions of God's agency and man's agency will melt together. If he stand still in cold, barren speculation, he freezes to death. God does something, and you have something to do in this achievement of making a new heart and a new spirit. The Apostle puts the two agencies close enough together, I think, when he says "Work out your own salvation,

for it is God that worketh in you to will and to do." Now there is no more difficulty about the theory of making a new heart, or entering upon a religious life, than there is about anything else, the moment we enter earnestly into action. But it certainly seems a very perplexing and discouraging procedure to keep urging a man to turn from evil, and get rid of his bad habits and affections-to make himself a new heart and a new spirit-and then to add that he can do nothing for himself, but must wait the breath and influence of Godmust wait until God gives him a new heart and spirit. As I said last Sunday, so I take occasion to say now, that I verily believe that one reason why people stand aloof so much from the religious life, from entering heartily and earnestly into it, is the fact that it has been presented in such a vague and perplexing way, and encumbered with so many speculations; so that we have really a kind of preaching which urges upon men the great guilt of their sin and their alienation from God, and then tells them that they can do nothing of themselves. And I repeat this is all borne away by the simple condition, that a man must be in earnest in re

And it is a mistake

gard to this new heart and spirit. to suppose that God is not glorified when we dwell upon the point of human action. When we say you can make a new heart and a new spirit, it is a great mistake to suppose that we take the glory from God. For whence come all good desires and all right actions? They proceed from God, and from Him alone. And so

do all strength and all ability. One of the greatest intellectual errors into which a man can fall, is the habit of ignoring the divine in the common, and looking for it only in the special and unfamiliar, not to see God in the ordinary machinery of action, not to behold Him in ordinary processes; but if something strange bursts upon us, something not in accordance with the usual course of events, then to recognize the divine. It is not the thing itself, its utility, its beauty, its power, that stamps it as divine-only its strangeness.

You see in this tendency the danger that we are apt to encounter. The moment we can discover the law of the event, the moment we find it taking its place in the order of natural sequence, it becomes no longer divine; and so, by-and-by, all nature becomes atheistic. There was a time when almost every phenomenon in nature was unaccounted for, and everything was called divine; but as fast as its law was discovered, and it took its place in the order of natural sequence, the thing was no more divine; that only which was mysterious and unknown being placed in that category. And so as the torch of investigation advances farther and farther into the realms of nature's laws, men could limit the divine and at length eliminate it from all things. No, my friends, the truest philosophy is that which recognizes everything as divine; that sees in all laws, in all constituted order, in the flow of common events, in the movements of familiar things, the Divine hand, the Divine presence and power, just as much as in the