yielding to evidence, of the
conscience smitten by truth, of the heart taken captive by the
omnipotence of love--appeared for the worship of the world. Our Saviour,
in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, inaugurated, so to speak,
the dispensation of the spiritual, "The hour cometh, and now is,"--there
is the moment of instalment, when the great bell of time might have
pealed at once a requiem for the past and a welcome to the grander
future, "when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and
in truth." Requiring spiritual worship, it was natural that God should
have "built up a spiritual house," wherein he should dwell in statelier
presence than in "houses made with hands." Hence there is now rising
upon earth, its masonry unfinished, but advancing day by day, a spiritual
temple more magnificent than the temple of Solomon, costlier than the
temple of Herod. "Destroy this temple," said the Saviour to his
wondering listeners, "and in three days I will raise it up." "Forty and
six years was this temple in building, and will thou rear it up in three
days?" "But He spake of the temple of His body." "What, know ye not
that _your_ bodies are the members of Christ?" Yes! believers everywhere
are stones in the spiritual house, broken perhaps into conformity, or
chiselled into beauty by successive strokes of trial; and wherever they
are, in the hut or in the ancestral hall, in the climates of the snow or
of the sun, whether society hoot them or honour them, whether they wrap
themselves in delicate apparelling, or, in rugged homespun, toil all day
for bread, they are parts of the true temple which God esteems higher
than cloistered crypt or stately fane, and the top stone of which shall
hereafter be brought on with joy.

The second representation of a believer's character is _holiness_, "a
_holy_ priesthood." In the Jewish dispensation the word was understood
to mean no more than an outward and visible separation unto God; the
priests in the temple and the vessels of their ministry were said to be
ceremonially "holy." But more is implied in the term as it occurs in the
text and kindred passages than a mere ritual and external sanctity. It
consists in the possession of that mind which was also in Christ Jesus,
in the reinstatement in us of that image of God which was lost by the
disobedience of the fall. You will remember numerous scriptures in which
holiness, regarded as the supreme devotion of th