all this discord
must be made. Man is to be made one with God, not by soaring
intellect, but by lowly love. It is the Spirit which guides him to all
truth; not merely by rendering more acute the reasoning powers, but by
convincing of sin, by humbling the man. It is the graces of the Spirit
which harmonize the man, and make him one; and that is the end, and
aim, and object of all the Gospel: the entireness of sanctification to
produce a perfectly developed man.

Most of us in this world are monsters, with some part of our being
bearing the development of a giant, and others showing the proportions
of a dwarf: a feeble, dwarfish will--mighty, full-blown passions; and
therefore it is that there is to be visible through the Trinity in us,
a noble manifold unity; and when the triune power of God shall so have
done its work on the entireness of our Humanity, that the body, soul,
and spirit have been sanctified, then shall there be exhibited, and
only then, a perfect affection in man to his Maker, and body, soul,
and spirit shall exhibit a Trinity in unity.

V.

_Preached June 2, 1850._

ABSOLUTION.

"And the Scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, Who is
this which speaketh blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God
alone?"--Luke v. 21.

There are questions which having been again and again settled, still
from time to time, present themselves for _re_-solution; errors which
having been refuted, and cut up by the roots, re-appear in the next
century as fresh and vigorous as ever. Like the fabled monsters of
old, from whose dissevered neck the blood sprung forth and formed
fresh heads, multiplied and indestructible; or like the weeds, which,
extirpated in one place, sprout forth vigorously in another.

In every such case it may be taken for granted that the root of the
matter has not been reached; the error has been exposed, but the truth
which lay at the bottom of the error has not been disengaged. Every
error is connected with a truth; the truth being perennial, springs up
again as often as circumstances foster it, or call for it, and the
seeds of error which lay about the roots spring up again in the form
of weeds, as before.

A popular illustration of this may be found in the belief in the
appearance of the spirits of the departed. You may examine the
evidence for every such alleged apparition; you may demonstrate the
improbability; you may reduce