Now it is not a good thing for people to make many professions of affection, and I think a public teacher has something better to do than to parade such feelings before his audiences.  But there are exceptions to all rules, and I suppose I may venture to let my heart speak, and to say how gladly I come back to the old place, dear to me by so many sacred memories and associations, and how gladly I reknit the bonds of an affection which has been unbroken, and deepening on both sides through thirty long years.

Dear friends! let us together thank God to-day if He has knit our hearts together in mutual affection; and if you and I can look each other, as I believe we can, in the eyes, with the assurance that I see only the faces of friends, and that you see the face of one who gladly resumes the old work and associations.

But now, dear brethren, let us draw one lesson.  Unless there be this manly, honest, though oftenest silent, Christian affection, the sooner you and I part the better.  Unless it be in my heart I can do you no good.  No man ever touched another with the sweet constraining forces that lie in Christ’s Gospel unless the heart of the speaker went out to grapple the hearts of the hearers.  And no audience ever listen with any profit to a man when they come in the spirit of carping criticism, or of cold admiration, or of stolid indifference.  There must be for this simple relationship which alone binds a Nonconformist preacher to his congregation, as a sine qua non of all higher things and of all spiritual good, a real, though oftenest it be a concealed, mutual affection and regard.  We have to thank God for much of it; let us try to get more.  That is all I want to say about the first point here.

II.  Note the lofty consciousness of the purpose of their meeting.

‘I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift.’  Paul knew that he had something which he could give to these people, and he calls it by a very comprehensive term, ’some spiritual gift’—­a gift of some sort which, coming from the Divine Spirit, was to be received into the human spirit.

Now that expression—­a spiritual gift—­in the New Testament has a variety of applications.  Sometimes it refers to what we call miraculous endowments, sometimes it refers to what we may call official capacity; but here it is evidently neither the one nor the other of these more limited and special things, but the general idea of a divine operation upon the human spirit which fills it with Christian graces—­knowledge, faith, love.  Or, in simpler words, what Paul wanted to give them was a firmer grasp and fuller possession of Jesus Christ, His love and power, which would secure a deepening and strengthening of their whole Christian life.  He was quite sure he had this to give, and that he could impart it, if they would listen to what he would say to them.  But whilst thus he rises into the lofty conception of the purpose and