CHRIST manifests not Himself fully to the world. He never meant to do it. He never will do it, till he comes to judgment. GOD, we are told, “will have mercy on whom He will have mercy, and whom He will He hardeneth.” These awful words do not mean what some attempt to make out of them—that there is an arbitrary election to salvation, and so for all others an inevitable destruction. They mean rather that while His mercy is ready to flow, and is always flowing, if you desire it, you must go to the fountain for it. GOD is under no necessity to save all men. We do not confer a favour on Him by consenting to be saved. His glory will be manifested in destruction as in salvation. He desires to save us. He will save us, and rejoice in our salvation, if we seek to be saved: but if we are rebellious, or indifferent, if we will not comply with the conditions on which only He will manifest His best presence to us, then we must not complain, if He makes good His declaration, and proves it by withholding Himself from us, that whom He wills (and in what way He wills) on them He has mercy, and all others, though He long bears with them, and gives them much time and opportunity for conforming to His will, yet is He content, yea, determined to leave them in their hardness, to confirm them in their hardness, because they will not be softened in the way which He has chosen to prescribe. Oh! my brethren, do not suppose that it is the weakness, the impotence of Christianity, the frustration of the will of GOD that is demonstrated in the world’s ungodliness, in the perdition of so many immortal souls. No! It is rather the power of Christianity to keep its own for its own: it is the glorious vindication of the sovereign will of Jehovah to save whom He will; it is the corroboration of CHRIST’S word, that none should come to the Father but by Him; it is the terrible, deliberately-inflicted punishment of those that will not come unto Him that they might have life; it is the manifestation, so to speak, of His non-manifestation: “If ye will not love me, holding my commandments and keeping them, then you cannot be loved of My Father, and so cannot be loved of Me, and I will not manifest myself to you.”