vil can
help it, never both in one and the same pulpit; never both in one and the
same sermon; and never both in one and the same minister. You have all
heard of the difficulty the voyager had in steering between Scylla and
Charybdis in the Latin adage. Well, the true preacher's difficulty is
just like that. Indeed, it is beyond the wit of man, and it takes all
the wit of God, aright to unite the doctrine of our utter inability with
the companion doctrine of our strict responsibility; free grace with a
full reward; the cross of Christ once for all, with the saint's continual
crucifixion; the Saviour's blood with the sinner's; and atonement with
attainment; in short, salvation without works with no salvation without
works. Deft steersman as the devil is, he never yet took his ship clear
through those Charybdic passages.

One thing there is that I must have preached continually in all my
pulpits and expounded and illustrated and enforced in all my
lectureships, said Emmanuel, and that is, my new example and my new law
of _motive_. My own motives always made me in all I said and did to be
well-pleasing in My Father's eyes, and at any cost I must have preachers
and lecturers set up in Mansoul who shall assist Me in making Mansoul as
well-pleasing in My Father's sight as I was Myself.

'For I am ware it is the seed of act
God holds appraising in His hollow palm,
Not act grown great thence as the world believes,
Leafage and branchage vulgar eyes admire.'

Motives! gnashed Diabolus. And he tore his last card into a thousand
shreds and cast the shreds under his feet in his rage and exasperation.
Motives! New motives! Truly Thou art the threatened Seed of the woman!
Truly Thou art the threatened Son of God!--Let all our preachers, then,
preach much on motive to their people. The commonplace crowd of their
people will not all like that preaching any more than Diabolus did; but
their best people will all afterwards rise up in their salvation and
bless them for it. On reformation also, let them every Sabbath preach,
but only on the reformation that rises out of a reformed motive, and that
again out of a reformed heart. And if a reformed motive, a reformed
heart, and a reformed life are found both by preacher and hearer to be
impossible; if all that only brings out the hopelessness of their
salvation by reason of the guilt and the pollution and power of sin; then
all that will only be to them that same ever