of outward virtue and beauty of character which may lead other people to say about a man:  ‘That is a good Christian man, at any rate,’ and yet there may be in the heart an all but absolute absence of any joyful assurance that we are Christ’s, and that He belongs to us.  So the two facts must go together.  Correspondence, the spirit of sonship which meets His taking us as sons, the faith which clasps the promise, the reception which welcomes bestowment, must be stamped upon the inward life.  For the outward life there must be the manifest impress of righteousness upon my actions, if there is to be any real seal and token that I belong to Him.  God writes His own name upon the men that are His.  All their goodness, their gentleness, patience, hatred of evil, energy and strenuousness in service, submission in suffering, with whatsoever other radiance of human virtue may belong to them, are really ‘His mark!’

There is no other worth talking about, and to you Christian men I come and say, Be very sure that your professions of inward communion and happy consciousness that you are Christ’s are verified to yourself and to others by a plain outward life of righteousness like the Lord’s.  Have you got that seal stamped upon your lives, like the hall-mark that says, ’This is genuine silver, and no plated Brummagem stuff’?  Have you got that seal of a visible righteousness and every-day purity to confirm your assertion that you belong to Christ?  Is it woven into the whole length of your being, like the scarlet thread that is spun into every Admiralty cable as a sign that it is Crown property?  God’s seal, visible to me and to nobody else, is my consciousness that I am His; but that consciousness is vindicated and delivered from the possibility of illusion or hypocrisy, only when it is checked and fortified by the outward evidence of the holy life which the Spirit of God has wrought.

Further, this sealing, which is thus the token of God’s ownership, is also the pledge of security.  A seal is stamped in order that there may be no tampering with what it seals; that it may be kept safe from all assaults, thieves, and violence.  And in the metaphor of our text there is included this thought, too, which is also of an intensely practical nature.  For it just comes to this—­our true guarantee that we shall come at last into the sweet security and safety of the perfect state is present likeness to the indwelling Spirit and present reception of divine grace.  The seal is the pledge of security, just because it is the mark of ownership.  When, by God’s Spirit dwelling in us, we are led to love the things that are fair, and to long after more possession of whatever things are of good report, that is like God’s hoisting His flag upon a newly-annexed territory.  And is He going to be so careless in the preservation of His property as that He will allow that which is thus acquired to slip away from Him?  Does He account us as of so small value as to hold