warmth of His love? You have apprehended Him as your
refuge; have you apprehended Him as your inward sanctity? You have gone
to Him as the source of salvation from the guilt and penalties of sin;
have you gone to Him, and are you daily growing in the conscious
possession of Him, as the means of salvation from the corruption and
evil of sin? He comes to make us good. What has He made you? Anything
different from what you were twenty years ago? Then, if not, and in so
far as you are unchanged and unbettered, the Gospel is a failure for
you, and you are untrue to it. The great purpose of all the work of
Christ--His life, His sorrows, His passion, His resurrection, His glory,
His continuous operation by the Spirit and the word is to make new men
who shall be just and devout, righteous and holy.

II. A second principle contained in these words, is that this moral
Renewal is a Creation in the image of God.

The new man is 'created after the image of God'--that is, of course,
according to or in the likeness of God. There is evident reference here
to the account of man's creation in Genesis, and the idea is involved
that this new man is the restoration and completion of that earlier
likeness, which, in some sense, has faded out of the features and form
of our sinful souls. It is to be remembered, however, that there is an
image of God inseparable from human nature, and not effaceable by any
obscuring or disturbance caused by sin. Man's likeness to God consists
in his being a person, possessed of a will and self-consciousness, and
that mysterious gift of personality abides whatever perishes. But beyond
that natural image of God, as we may call it, there is something else
which fades wholly with the first breath of evil, like the reflexion of
the sky on some windless sea. The natural likeness remains, and without
it no comparison would be possible. We should not think of saying that a
stone or an eagle were unlike God. But while the personal being makes
comparison fitting, what makes the true contrast? In what respect is man
unlike God? In moral antagonism. What is the true likeness? Moral
harmony. What separates men from their Father in heaven? Is it that His
'years are throughout all generations,' and 'my days are as an
handbreadth'? Is it that His power is infinite, and mine all thwarted by
other might and over tending to weakness and extinction? Is it that His
wisdom, sunlike, waxes not nor wanes, and there is nothing hid fr