who answer to the call that would arouse them, but they answer, in fact, unconsciously.  We cannot tell for ourselves or others any way by which our souls shall certainly be saved, in spite of carelessness; or any way by which, carelessness shall be overcome necessarily; all that can be done is, to point out how it may be overcome, by what means the soul may be helped in its endeavours; not how those endeavours and holy desires may be rendered needless.

Thus, then, we may gain Christ to visit us at our own homes and in our common callings, when we are returned to them.  And that difference which I spoke of as existing between us, that some of us are waiting for Christ’s call to a higher field of action, while others are engaged in that sort of duty which will last their lives, I know not that this—­though it be often important, and though I am often obliged to dwell on it—­need enter into our considerations to-day.  Rather, perhaps, may we overlook this difference, and feel that all of us here assembled—­those in their state of earliest preparation for after duties; those to whom that earliest state is passed away, and who are entered into another state, in part preparatory, in part partaking of the character of actual life; and those also whose preparation, speaking of earth, only, is completed altogether, who must be doing, and whose time even of doing is far advanced—­that all of us have in truth one great call yet before us:  and that, with respect to that, we are all, as it were, preparing still.  And for that great call, common to all of us, we need all the same common readiness; and that readiness will be effected in us only by the same means,—­if now, before it come, Christ and Christ’s Spirit shall, in our homes and daily callings, be persuaded to visit us.

LECTURE XXVI.

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WHITSUNDAY.

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ACTS xix. 2.

Have you received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?

It appears, by what follows these words, that the question here related especially to those gifts of the Holy Ghost which were given, in the first age of the church, as a sign of God’s power, and a witness that the work of the gospel was from God.  Yet although this be so, and therefore the words, in this particular sense, cannot to any good purpose be asked now; yet there is another sense, and that not a lower but a far higher one, in which we may ask them, and in which it concerns us in the highest degree, what sort of answer we can give to them, I say, “what sort of answer;” for I think it is true of all Christians that, in a certain measure, they have received the Holy Ghost.  Not only does the doctrine of our own, and I believe every other, church, concerning baptism, show this:  but it seems also necessarily to follow, from those words of St. Paul, that “No man can say that Jesus