Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/249

Rh it the impress of the Divine Nature, it would renew continually in our souls the image of Him who created us, our Father, our Redeemer, our Sanctifier, make us more and more wholly His, more partakers of that Nature; and that we, having that "seal of upon our foreheads," (Rev. ix. 4.) and our hearts, the Angel of the bottomless pit should not have any power to hurt us, unless we allow it to be obliterated. The difference between the two interpretations, as before said, is this—the one would date his sealing from the time when any man ceases to oppose the workings of Holy Spirit (which might unobjectionably be called, though not by a scriptural phrase, the conversion of such an one); the other would look upon it as our Saviour's gift in His sacrament of Baptism, wherein all the gracious influences of  Holy Spirit, as well those which any of us contumaciously reject, as those which we at last admit, are pledged to us.

We may learn very much by all such instances, in which our own (as we suppose Christian) views differ from the teaching of Word; and, were we to watch all the instances in which (with a but half-acknowledged repugnance or distaste) we glide over statements of doctrine, or practice, or history, which are not in accordance with our state of feeling, we should learn far more, and become far completer Christians, than we now are. For then we should be indeed scholars, which we can hardly call ourselves, as long as we make these self-willed selections of what we will learn. Thus one, who looks upon the Lord's Supper as little more than a commemorative sign of an absent thing, passes lightly over our Saviour's words, "This is my Body." Another glosses over the doctrine of justification by faith. In these days we seem almost to have lost sight of the truth, that we shall be judged according to our works. Other's omit passages bearing upon the "godly consideration of predestination, and our election in ," (Art. xvii.); others, the possibility of our falling away from, and its great danger; and so again, the injunctions as to unceasing prayer, self-denial, non-requital of injuries, vain ostentation, or the glorifying of our Heavenly Father, are dispensed with without remorse, and read