III. I hasten to +apply my subject to the Church,+ where the text finds illustration yet more pertinent and affecting. The Church is a community, organised, with special ends to be accomplished, and endowed with special capabilities and adaptations, yet having many points of resemblance to human society in general. All the members and all the officers of the Church are appointed and honoured of God to be co-workers with Himself, co-agents with the Holy Ghost, in the edification of the body of Christ. The pastor, not less in the study, when he gathers things new and old from holy books and common, than in the pulpit or in breaking the bread of the sacrament at the altar, or in the sick-chamber--all the subordinate lay ministries devoted to godly counsel, to faithful admonition, or to the management and conversation of the material interests of the Church--the pious mother nurturing up her children in God's love--the sufferer on a bed of languishing, giving forth blessed examples of patience and resignation and faith--the teacher of the Sabbath school--they who, in the Spirit, lift up our joyous songs of praise in the sanctuary--all who pray in the closet or in the congregation, are, and should be deemed, essential parts of that good, great system through whose wondrous, harmonious working God is pleased to renew and sanctify souls and train them up to be heirs of glory. Who, in this great co-partnership for honouring Christ, has any ground of complaint?--the foot, that it is not the head? the eye, that it is too feeble to do the functions of the brawny arm? the ears, that they cannot do the office of locomotion? Every part is indispensable. None can say which is most important in God's plan; and achievements, ascribed hastily to the eloquence of the preacher, often stand credited in the record kept above to the prayer of faith.--_Dr. Olin._ _MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.--Verses_ 17-24. _A Thorough Moral Transformation_-- +I. Contrasted with a former life of sin.+--1. _A state of self-induced mental darkness._ "Having the understanding darkened, . . . because of the blindness of their heart" (ver. 18). Infidelity is more a moral than a mental obliquity. The mind is darkened because the heart is bad. Men do not see the truth because they do not want to see it. The light that would lead to righteousness and to God is persistently shut out.