it, and sustain and refresh it, that you do not sufficiently use it. There ought to be in every baptized Christian, a gradual, steady, and even perceptible Christian progress. Our salvation ought to be ever nearer and nearer than when we believed, not only in the expectation of our complete adoption and removal to glory, but in our fitness for glory, and desire and hope of it. If we have the same evil tendencies, are as easily overcome by the same temptations, have the same dislike or imperfect taste for spiritual occupations, the same poor appreciation of religious privileges and hopes as we had a year, a month, a week ago, then assuredly our salvation stagnates, we are not using what GOD has given us, we are not yielding to, we are resisting His living influence! Grace, my brethren, is an useless gift, if it is to effect nothing: a time of probation is an idle space, if there is no trial. Faith is little entitled to be called “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” if it produces no spiritual conviction: and as for hope—what kind of anchor is it to the soul, if it is ever shifting, if it grasps nothing? If any man is in CHRIST, he is a new creature, that is, he is becoming a new creature, with new life, and powers, and energies, and tastes, and aims, and hopes. He will grow in grace if he has rightly received it, and in the knowledge and love of CHRIST. He will manifestly (at least to himself manifestly) be putting off the old man with his affections and lusts, and putting on the new man, which after GOD is created in righteousness and true holiness. He will endure trials more and more patiently, as seeing more clearly Him who is invisible. He will resist temptations more easily, and do good more consistently and gladly, and be more pained and more penitent after every sin. He will have a growing love of searching GOD’S word, and speaking to Him in prayer and praise, and receiving Him in Holy Communion. He will gradually be raised above the world, and will soar higher in imagination and affection and hope towards heaven. Each day will have witnessed some advance—or some more than recovery if there has been a relapse. And when the night cometh, the end of the day of attaining salvation, he will want but little to complete his resemblance to CHRIST, his pattern, and to perfect his salvation.