"God was able of those stones
to raise up children unto Abraham." Therefore is this ever a spiritual
succession--in the hands of God alone; and they are here called the
God-born, coming into the world variously qualified; sometimes
baptized with the spirit which makes them, like James and John, the
"Sons of Thunder," sometimes with a milder spirit, as Barnabas, which
makes them "Sons of Consolation," sometimes having their souls
indurated into an adamantine hardness, which makes them living
stones--rocks like Peter, against which the billows of this world dash
themselves in vain, and against which the gates of hell shall not
prevail. But whether as apostles, or visitors of the poor, or parents
of a family, born to do a work on earth, to speak a word, to discharge
a mission which they themselves perhaps do not know till it is
accomplished--these are the Church of God--the children of the Most
High--the noble army of the Spirit-born! Opposed to this stands the
mighty confederacy called the World. But beware of fixing on
individual men in order to stigmatize _them_ as the world. You may not
draw a line and say--"We are the sons of God, ye are of the world."
The world is not so much individual as it is a certain spirit; the
course of this world is "the spirit which now worketh in the children
of disobedience." The world and the Church are annexed as inseparably
as the elements which compose the atmosphere. Take the smallest
portion of this that you will, in a cubic inch the same proportions
are found as in a temple. In the ark there was a Ham; in the small
band of the twelve apostles there was a Judas.

The spirit of the world is for ever altering--impalpable; for ever
eluding, in fresh forms, your attempts to seize it. In the days of
Noah, the spirit of the world was _violence_. In Elijah's day it was
_idolatry_. In the day of Christ it was _power_ concentrated and
condensed in the government of Rome. In ours, perhaps, it is the _love
of money_. It enters in different proportions into different bosoms;
it is found in a different form in contiguous towns; in the
fashionable watering place, and in the commercial city: it is this
thing at Athens, and another in Corinth. This is the spirit of the
world--a thing in my heart and yours: to be struggled against, not so
much in the case of others, as in the silent battle to be done within
our own souls. Pass we on now to consider--

II. The