useless. They have their place, but
'_in Christ Jesus_' they are nothing. Union to Him depends on quite
another order of facts, which may or may not exist along with
circumcision, or with baptism, or with the Lord's Supper. However
important these may be, they have no place among the things which bind a
soul to its Saviour. They may be helps to these things, but nothing
more. The rite does not ensure the faith, else the antithesis of our
text were unmeaning. The rite does not stand in the place of faith, or
the contrast implied were absurd. But the two belong to totally
different orders of things, which may co-exist indeed, but may also be
found separately; the one is the indispensable spiritual experience
which makes us Christians, the other belongs to a class of material
institutions which are much as helps to, but nothing as substitutes or
equivalents for, faith.

Keep firm hold of the positive principle with which we have been dealing
in the former part of this sermon, and all forms and externals fall as a
matter of course into their proper place. If religion be the loving
devotion of the soul to God, resting upon reasonable faith, then all
besides is, at the most, a means which may further it. If loving trust
which apprehends the truth, and cleaves to the Person, revealed to us in
the Gospel, be the link which binds men to God, then the only way by
which these externals can be 'means of grace' is by their aiding us to
understand better and to feel more the truth as it is in Jesus, and to
cleave closer to Him who is the truth. Do they enlighten the
understanding? Do they engrave deeper the loved face carven on the
tablets of memory, which the attrition of worldly cares is ever
obliterating, and the lichens of worldly thoughts ever filling up? Do
they clear out the rubbish from the channels of the heart, that the
cleansing stream may flow through them? Do they, through the senses,
minister to the soul its own proper food of clear thought, vivid
impressions, loving affections, trustful obedience? Do they bring Christ
to us, and us to Him, in the only way in which approach is
possible--through the occupation of mind and heart and will with His
great perfectness? Then they are means of grace, precious and helpful,
the gifts of His love, the tokens of His wise knowledge of our weakness,
the signs of His condescension, in that He stoops to trust some portion
of our remembrance of Him to the ministry of sense. But in compa