Jesus's sake. For God, who
commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts,
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the
excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us."

The mystery of Christ was revealed to all nations for the obedience of
faith. Paul says, the mystery of God's will was made known according to
his good pleasure which he purposed in himself, and that he was "made a
minister according to the dispensation of God which was given to him for
us, to fulfill the word of God, even the mystery which had been hid from
ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints. To whom
God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among
the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory, whom we preach,
warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may
present every man perfect in Christ Jesus." "Whereunto," he says, "I also
labor, striving according to _his working_, which _worketh in me
mightily_." From all that we have before us it appears that all things in
the gospel of Jesus Christ constitute, simply, "the ministration of the
Spirit written upon the hearts of New Testament apostles and prophets, or
teachers, by the Spirit of the living God, and that we have in their
preaching and teaching the rivers of living water, flowing out from the
throne of God to slake the thirst of a famishing world, and that all this
is attributable to the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them." Such being
the case, "the gospel is the power of God unto salvation unto every one
that believes." And in it Jesus Christ, the Sun and Lord, in the moral and
spiritual universe, shines forth with all his satellites as the light of
the world. The creative period is now past. The extraordinary efforts of
the divine Spirit are past. "The darkness is past and the true light now
shineth." The ordinary has taken the place of the extraordinary. What good
would it do to have a repetition of the extraordinary? Would it give us
another gospel, and confirm it by signs and wonders and divers miracles?
Would it give us another Christ? Would it give us other rivers of living
water? or another word of reconciliation? What good would be accomplished
by a repetition of the energies of the Divine Spirit, as they are known in
the history of the new creation? Do we need these to dispel t