ght?' may well be the utterance of the average
Christian. We might, with unbroken blessedness, possess Him in our
hearts, and instead, we have only 'visits short and far between' Alas,
alas, how often do we drive away that indwelling Christ, because our
hearts are 'foul with sin,' so that He

'Can but listen at the gate
And hear the household jar within.'

Christian men and women! here is the ideal of our lives, capable of
being approximated to (if not absolutely in its entirety reached) with
far more perfection than it ever has yet been by us. There might be a
line of light never interrupted running all through our religious
experience. Instead of that there is a light point here, and a great gap
of darkness there, like the straggling lamps by the wayside in the
half-lighted squalid suburbs of some great city. Is that your Christian
life, broken by many interruptions, and having often sounding through it
the solemn words of the retreating divinity which the old profound
legend tells us were heard the night before the Temple on Zion was
burnt:--'Let us depart?' 'I will arise and return unto My place till
they acknowledge their offences.' God means and wishes that Christ may
continuously dwell in our hearts. Does He to your own consciousness
dwell in yours?

And then the last thought connected with this first part of my subject
is that the heart, strengthened by the Spirit, is fitted to be the
Temple of the indwelling Christ. How shall we prepare the chamber for
such a guest? How shall some poor occupant of some wretched hut by the
wayside fit it up for the abode of a prince? The answer lies in these
words that precede my text. You cannot strengthen the rafters and lift
the roof and adorn the halls and furnish the floor in a manner befitting
the coming of the King; but you can turn to that Divine Spirit who will
expand and embellish and invigorate your whole spirit, and make it
capable of receiving the indwelling Christ.

That these two things which are here considered as cause and effect may,
in another aspects be considered as but varying phases of the same
truth, is only part of the depth and felicity of the teaching that is
here; for if you come to look more deeply into it, the Spirit that
strengtheneth with might is the Spirit of Christ; and He dwells in men's
hearts by His own Spirit. So that the apparent confusion, arising from
what in other places are regarded as identical being here conceived as
ca