cious grace. By
believing, however, they meant, and were careful to explain that they
meant, not a mere intellectual assent to the truth of the facts, but
such an assent as drew with it the trust of the heart and the personal
surrender of the soul to Christ; or--to use language of somewhat later
origin--the individual _appropriation_ of the freely offered Saviour,
with all His fulness of blessing, pardon, and righteousness by His one
offering once offered, and renewal into His own image by the continuous
indwelling of His Holy Spirit.

[Sidenote: Infusion of a New Life.]

Such was the animating principle which gave power to the teaching of the
reformers in all lands, and which constitutes still the central article
of a standing or a falling church to all their true-hearted
successors--Christ crucified for our sins, raised again for our
justification, and now exalted to the right hand of the Majesty in the
heavens as Prince and Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sin
and all needed grace to those who thus believe in Him, and are brought
into union with Him. And the Reformed Church will never perish or decay
while it continues to set forth this Gospel, and is honoured by its
divine Head to bring it home to the hearts and consciences of men, with
the same power as its first teachers were honoured with in the brave
days of old. For it must never be forgotten, I repeat, that the
Reformation movement was not only the introduction of a more scriptural
and scientific method of exhibiting Christian doctrine, and simple
unfolding of its teaching as to man's fallen state and the remedy their
heavenly Father had in His love provided for them; not only the
reassertion of the supremacy of the written Word of God over human
traditions, as well as of the right of all Christian men and women to
have direct access to that blessed Word; not only the translation into
the vernacular--German, English, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian,
Spanish--and the circulation throughout Western Europe of that which for
ages had been to the Christian laity as a book that is sealed; but it
was also, above all this, the infusion of a new and higher life into the
churches. We fall short of a full comprehension of the movement if we
fail to recognise that the God of all grace and blessing was then
pleased to "send a plentiful rain to confirm His inheritance when it was
weary," to grant a second Pentecost to the church, to make the people
willing in t