" God is a living and a present God. If His people on earth (where alone they can) have forgotten God, even the Father in heaven, and ceased to walk in the light of a risen and ascended Lord-so owning the gracious presence of the Spirit-they may, as men, have wrecked themselves and their circumstances in time; but God is God still, and in Him is their hope.
"And here (I take it) a question arises, 'How are we to get on in this state of things?' We cannot walk as though there had been no wreck: the vessel, if not in atoms, or gone even into the separate pieces of which it was formed, is not what it was, or what God made it at first; neither would it become us, as those connected with the sin of marring it, to deny this. Moreover, God is not now walking in that path. His testimony is not now in the unshattered church of Pentecost; but it is in grace and mercy, shown in a people preserved, spite, and in the midst, of the wreck. To make the wreck, or the perception of it, the centralizing point, were madness and sin. If the mercy of God in preserving in Christ Jesus, and entire separation from the sin (moral and spiritual) around, are our solace -' The obedience of faith' will solve all our difficulties."
B.