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I. As Head of his church, our Lord Jesus Christ is the life of its members.

You do not need to be anatomists to know that, as the head is the highest, it is the noblest, most impor‐ tant part of our whole frame. Seat of the senses and shrine of the soul, it is more than any other part connected with life and its various functions. From this great source and centre of vital power the other organs draw all their energies. Paralyze those nerves which connect them with the brain, as the wires of the telegraph connect the different stations with the electric battery, and their powers are gone, instantly gone. Their functions cease; the eye has no sight; the ear no hearing; the lips no voice; the tongue tastes neither sweetness in honey nor bitterness in wormwood; the strong arm of labor hangs powerless by the side; nor is there power left to lift a foot, though the lifting of it were to save your life. The whole machinery of this wonderful frame stops, like that of a mill when you shift the sluices, and turn the water off its dashing wheel. Indeed so intimately connected are the head and the body, that one cannot exist without the other. In her freaks, no doubt, Nature does produce strange monsters, which, though deficient, some of this and some of that part, contrive to live; and it is marvelous to see what formidable lesions the body can suffer, of what valuable members it may be maimed, and yet survive. But the loss of the head is the loss of life. Death descends on the knife of the guillotine. A bullet whistles through the parting air, the lightning flashes, the sword of the headsman gleams in the sun, and-there is a corpse! before the eye has winked, the man is dead, stone dead.

In illustrating the doctrine and figure of my text, this leads me to remark

1. As head of his church, Jesus Christ, by means of the connection which grace establishes between him and the believer, maintains our spiritual life. Without me, he says, ye can do nothing. As all our wishes, words, and works, however they may be expressed in looks, and sounds, and bodily movements, are born in the brain, there is not a good wish we ever formed, a good word we ever spoke, a good work we ever did, but Christ was its fountain-head. Separated from him, a believer were no better than an eye plucked from its socket, a cold, dead hand severed from the bleeding arm.

Suppose that, by some strange chance, this connection were dissolved, what a deadly paralysis would seize the soul! There are few sights more pitiful than to see a man of robust strength, of eloquent lips, of eagle eye, of majestic port, of stalwart step, by a stroke of paralysis suddenly turned into a poor, stammering, tottering, impotent object, whom the touch of a child can prostrate in the dust. Yet he is only a feeble image of what we should become were the gracious communications of the Holy Spirit suspended. Deprived of the strength I draw from Christ, I could not stand a buffet from Satan's hand. How should I be able to endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ, or fight the good fight of faith? However strong the hand of faith had been, it would now shake like an aspen leaf; and, now but the wreck of other days, gone were my power to sing the praises of God, gone my power to walk, or run in the way of his com mandments. And this impotency, whether it spread

over our souls like a creeping palsy, or came with the suddenness of a stroke, were but the dismal prelude to eternal death.

I have supposed, for illustration's sake, that the connection were dissolved, but, blessed be God! that cannot be. "They shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand." With such an assurance from his lips, how may we say to Jesus, Thou hast set my feet upon a rock? Standing on its sunny summit, far above the surging waves of doubt and fear, what hinders us to exclaim with Paul, I am persuaded that neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor power, nor things present, nor things to come, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate me from the love of God, which is through Jesus?

2. As head of his church, Jesus Christ is the source of our spiritual life. We must not confound the means of life with its first cause. The chamber in Shunam, where a pious woman had lodged the man of God, presents us with a fair and striking picture of what we may do in communicating the blessing of spiritual life to a soul dead in sins. Let us in fancy open the door, and, with feelings of awe and wonder, enter that room where Elisha, having left the mother below, has shut himself up with the cold, unconscious corpse. The dead boy is lying in the prophet's chamber, and on the prophet's bed; as if, like a drowning one who catches a passing straw, the poor woman had thought, when she laid him there, that there might be something not only sacred, but life-restoring, that clung to the walls.

which had been hallowed by the good man's prayers. He gazes fixedly and fondly on the pale placid countenance; and having waked up his tenderest affections. for the little dead creature he had often carried in his arms, and kissed, and blessed, Elisha turns from the lifeless clay to the living God. He kneels beside the dead. He prays for the dead. And in prayers a mother may hear, as, with beating heart, she sits silent, and listening, and hoping below, he pours out his very soul to God. The prayer ceases. It has been heard. The prophet knows it; and now rises to employ other means, nor doubts of their success. As one who, seeking another's conversion, brings the truth in himself into kindest, closest contact with that other's soulsoul to soul, and heart to heart, Elisha brings his own life as close to the dead as possible. Love revolting at nothing, he takes the corpse into his arms. He stretches himself upon the body; he puts his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands. The living heart of the prophet beats against the dead heart of the child, knocks there to waken it; he all the time pleading with God, entreating with tears that hang on the lashes of those closed eyes and bedew the pallid face of death. We know not how long the dead lay in the embraces of the living; but pains and prayer had their sure reward. A step is on the floor. The mother catches it. She starts. The door opens. "Gehazi," cries the prophet, a summons rapidly followed by the glad com. mand," Call the Shunammite." Hope sounds in that voice; joy leaps in her heart. She hastens up, she rushes in. He points her to the smiling boy, saying,

Take up thy son, as with delirious joy and open arms she bounds across the floor to lock him in her embraces.

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Thus, simply as a medium or link which connects the living with the dead, a believer may be the means of communicating life. But the life which Christ gave you was his own. Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich." What Elisha did not, and could not do in that chamber for the child, our Saviour did on the cross for us. He died that we might live. He poured out his soul unto death. To fill our veins with blood, he emptied his own. He stretched himself out upon the cold corpse of a world to communicate life, and, while communicating it, expired. He breathed life into the dead, but it was his own. If any vital heavenly fire burns in you, it was Christ who kindled it; for the spirit life came not, like the natural, through father and mother, flashing, as an electric spark, from the first man along the linked chain of successive generations. Not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God, that life came when Christ impressed his kiss of love on death's icy lips, just as that of Adam came from his Maker, when, stooping over the clay model of a man, God breathed into its nostrils the breath of life. And as, by his death, which was a satisfaction for sin, Jesus Christ purchased our life, by his life he now maintains it; so that, as the life of a pregnant mother is the life of the babe within her, his life is. ours. Is the connection between these two so intimate, that she might address her unborn, saying, Because I live, thou livest also? Well, Jesus says more; he says, Because I live, ye shall live also. That mother may die. Hope has strewed her withered blossoms on a grave where the rose and the rose-bud lie buried together; and death, coffining the babe in a dead

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