CHAPTER II.

TIMES AND SEASONS.

TIMELINESS marks all the works and ways of God. Truth has its seasons and the kingdom of God has its periods.

The kingdom of heaven, says our Saviour, is as a grain of mustard seed, the least of all seeds, but when it is grown it is one of the greatest of plants, tree-like, in which the birds of the air may rest themselves and build nests for their young.

At the right time the seed of the kingdom is ripened and dropped into the earth, along the banks of the river of the waters of Life. And the sown-seed knows the spring-time, and snuffs the sunshine and chowers bursting its prison shell, it sends down its roots for moisture and strength, and sends up its stem for light and air; and comes out in spring freshness and beauty. It has also its summer time when it ripens is fruits, and its autumn for filling the garners.

This is true of every child of God of every

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church of Christ upon earth, and of the whole church militant collectively taken. Revivals may have been a novelty in the days of Enos, when men first began socially to call on the name of the Lord; but from that day to this they have been the law of the Kingdom. Times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord may have taken Abel by surprise, at that first altar of God at the east gate of Eden, as they evidently did take Cain by surprise, making him gnash his teeth upon Abel as the murderers of all martyrs have done. But they were understood to be the order of God's economy in the days of the apostles, and indeed in every age of the world.

Great periods have been marked by great revivals, and great revivals have been characterized by the developments, each one of some one great truth made prominent and powerful, in its application to the experience and life of the church.

The great truths which now have their unchangeable position in the faith and formulas of the church, have been born into the world one by one, and one by one have taken their positions in orderly array in the great family of truths. Like children they have come crying into the world, and like warriors in battle, each has had its own way to fight. Like Damascus blades, each has been tried and tempered in the fire and under the hammer of controversy, and like the martyr throng above, they have all come up to their permanent place in the bright

galaxy of truth through much tribulation, with their robes made white in the blood of the slain.

The great foundation truth-the unity of God the alpha of all theological science and of all saving knowledge, had its battle of ages with polytheistic idolatry, but has finally driven its enemy into the dark corners of the world, and if appearances may be trusted, will soon drive it out of the world altogether. And the great top-stone of truth, the head of the corner, the trinity of God, is yet in its conflict, and is yet to be more clearly understood though already it has battled its way to its place in the faith and holds it in triumph against the assaults of every enemy, while shoutings of Grace! Grace! unto it go up from all true believers.

It would be a work to enlarge the largest heart, and expand the most liberal mind, if it were done as it deserves, to sketch truthfully and graphically the biography of each one of the great evangelical truths comprising the faith. Each one has a life and times of its own, and in comparison the lives and times of men even the greatest of men would dwindle into insignificance. Indeed the historical prominence of the great men of the church from Abel and Enoch down to Whitefield and Wesley and Edwards, comes from the fact of their being each one the representative - the embodiment the incarnation, of some one great truth of revealed religion, in some stage of its development,

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just, as Newton and Copernicus were the representatives of astronomical principles.

two great ones - the

Revelation had its stages old and the new, with many minor ones marking them both; though in the new the various stages were crowded into the time of a single generation, whilst in the old many generations sometimes intervened.

Then when revelation was completed, and given complete to the world, no more to be added, nor anything subtracted, upon pain of God's curse, even then, since that, the development and application of the several truths revealed, has been also by stages. Each in its own time and each in its own way.

The question may have arisen already and if not there is no reason to shrink from raising it now - why — if it is true that the experimental apprehension of the principle of sanctification by faith is the privilege of all—why has the fact not had greater prominence in the past? Why have eighteen centuries been allowed to roll away before it is brought distinctly and prominently before the mind of the church?

The answer is, that until now the time has never come for it. Now is the time. That it is no new thing, practically, is clear. Abel doubtless understood it practically, at least, and was made strong for martyrdom by it. Enoch lived in it, and was

translated, taken bodily to heaven without death by it. Noah built his ark, in the faith of it, and outrode the flood by it; and Abraham in the power of it forsook the home of his birth and dwelt amongst strangers, and waited patiently for the fulfilment of God's promise, and then himself, at the command of God, was in act to put the knife to the throat of Isaac, the son of promise, counting God able to raise him again from the dead. Prophets, and apostles, and reformers, and the great and good of every age have exemplified it. It is nothing new. And yet, until now, the time has never fully come to give it the prominence which now it is destined to take and to hold in the future history and progress of the Kingdom of God in the world.

It is now only three hundred years since the Bible itself was exhumed from its burial places in convent cells and library alcoves, and freed from its cerements of the dead languages, torn from it by the hand of the reformers, and put in its dress of living speech, and sent forth upon its great mission to the world.

And it is only one hundred years since the great truth of the new birth, as a distinct experience, the privilege of all, began to receive its full power of application to the heart and life of the church. And yet both were just at the opportune moment.

It is beautiful to mark the times and occasions of truth in its connection with the orderly march of