Many years ago, on a retired, quiet farm in the hills of New England, there lived a lonely old couple, who used to often weep in their solitude, and wonder why it was that their three sons should all have left them in their early manhood, and gone far away on the ocean, and chosen to be sailors. It was a problem especially sore to the old mother's heart, and one that she had tried to reason out a thousand times. One day a godly, intelligent minister was visiting that home, and the aged mother was speaking to him of that old problem, why all of her sons should have taken to a sea-faring life. The minister looked up on the wall and saw hanging there a large picture in bright colors, of a magnificent sail ship, with the canvas all spread, plowing its way gracefully through the bounding white-crested waves. Turning to the old lady, he said: ''There hangs the solution to your problem, as to why your boys became sailors." From their childhood they were accustomed to gaze on the picture of that beautiful ship, and their young imaginations leaped over the narrow boundaries of your quiet farm, and went soaring away with that ship across the mighty deep, and in fancy they walked the deck of that vessel, and spread those white sails, and pulled away on those ropes, and gazed o'er those blue waves, and visited many a foreign port, and heard the clatter of strange languages in other climes, until there was formed within them the passion for travel, and then came the fixed purpose to go out in the world, and from that time the walls of your humble home were too narrow, and the fence around your little farm was too low, to keep in their bounding desire to sail the wide seas."

Who can tell the power of pictures on a young imagination for woe or weal? The outward picture through the eye awakens an artist in the mind and heart, which, when aroused goes on duplicating, recombining, and making pictures of its own, more vivid and powerful than the outward picture which first awakened the dormant fancy. We cannot calculate what the effects would be, if we could have had from childhood, correct pictures of Bible history, of the biography of prophets, and angels, and of Jesus, or pictures of things to come, of hell, and Paradise, and the resurrection, and the reign of Christ on the earth, when the lion and lamb will play together on the meadows, and the earth filled with righteousness as waters cover the sea. God knows best, and the pictures of the Bible are painted for the eye of faith. It is a life of faith we are traveling, and let us, like those young lads from the hills of New England, bid farewell to terrestrial things, and take a large sail ship for a distant port in some sunny bay, in a far-away land.

In the previous chapter we took up the analogy of the sail boat as in a general way a type of the regenerated life, marking especially the transitions from legal works to a life in-breathed and wafted on by the breath of heaven. But there are many degrees of experience in a justified state before the believer enters the great life of sanctification. The sailship sets forth the very best mode of ocean travel before steamships were invented. So let us look at the justified state in its highest and strongest manifestation, previous to the inner work of heart purity.

1. The sail ship goes out on the ocean far beyond the sight of land, where its steering can no longer be guided by light houses, or lightships, or promontories, or any land signals; but only by the compass, and the heavenly bodies of sun, moon and stars. In like manner the believer who is fully established in justifying faith, finds he cannot rely for his spiritual guidance in faith, or experience, or practice, upon those religious sights and sounds and forms of fleshly wisdom, or mere church traditions, which are like headlands and lighthouses, that serve their purpose as dependences for the infant believer. In steering a sail ship, there must be one or more good compasses on board, perfectly adjusted to the loadstone center of the earth, which is not at the North Pole, as many imagine, but several points from it. But the compass must be so adjusted to this magnetic center, as to furnish the sailor a practically infallible guidance. This compass to the believer is the Holy Bible, verbally inspired, in perfect adjustment with the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom is all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. The welfare of the ship out at sea, depends on the perfect agreement of two magnets; the one is that enormous unexplored magnet inside the earth near the North Pole, and the other is the little magnet which swings with beautiful equipoise in its little box before the eye of the helmsman at the wheel. This same thing is exactly true of the safety of a believing soul, depending on the infallible harmony between the two great words of God, one is the eternal outspoken Word, from the bosom of the Father, that eternal Personal Word, who was in the beginning with God, and who was God, and apart from whom the Father never did and never will make any utterance, and who like the great magnet in the earth, is hidden in the unexplored depths of the Father, and is the magnet of all creation; and the other word is that which is written by inspired Prophets and Apostles, and constitutes the true compass for the believer in his spiritual navigation. As the compass points to the polar loadstone, so all scripture points to the Anointed Son of the Father.

Now, in our sail ship we must look well to this compass, and study its points, and get our eyes away from feelings, and whims, and religious demonstrations, and the influence of mere numbers, and creature surroundings, that used to guide us in our first conversion, and while we coasted near the land in the shallow waters of childhood grace. Another thing that a sail ship must have for its guidance at sea, is a knowledge of the heavenly bodies, the polar star, the Southern Cross, the planets, the great fixed stars, the variations of the moon, and knowing how to use the quadrant for solar observations. These celestial bodies may fitly represent those radiant holy characters, wrought out by Divine grace in past generations, and hung up in the sky of scripture, biography, and religious history, as single fixed stars, or whole milkyways of supernatural instruction. The Holy Spirit points us to Abraham as a star of faith; to Job, as a star of patience; to David, as a star of immense hearted love; to Paul, as a star of quenchless zeal, and to a whole blue sky full of others, and bids us take them as examples of prevailing prayer, as in the case of Elijah, or of faith, or of humility. So, while our sails are spread to the breeze and the ocean foams at the prow of our ship, cutting its way through the yielding waves of the passing days, let us get familiar with this galaxy of heavenly souls and gather many a lesson as to our spiritual latitude and longitude, for if our voyage is a successful one, we must learn and live over again the pure principles that made those shining saints what they were. Another thing a sail ship must have for its guidance at sea is a good log. This log is a little instrument so constructed in the form of a spiral wheel, that when it is thrown overboard and tied fast to the ship, by its revolutions on being drawn through the water, it will register the speed of the vessel, so that the captain can tell just how many miles or knots the ship travels in an hour. This log fitly represents the spiritual mechanism of our conscience, and the inward knowledge we have of our moral condition, and the progress we are making in prayer, in loving our enemies, in humility, in patience, and in gaining victories over difficulties. Thus the sail ship has a trinity of guidances out at sea, the compass, the heavenly bodies, and the log, and a fully justified believer has the three corresponding guidances, the word of God, the example of the saints, and the inward consciousness of the Holy Spirit, acting upon his heart and judgment.

2. The sail ship is especially constructed for deep water and long voyages, to be months at sea, and for the enduring of storms and the heavy shocks of breaking waves. It is true that the sail ship is not able to endure as much as a great modern steel steamship, but up to the amount of knowledge that ship-builders had before iron steamers were in vogue, these sail ships were the best possible of their kind. And so we are not considering as yet the strongest types of spiritual character, but the very best types of Christians who have not entered the condition of full sanctification. And like the gallant ocean clippers back yonder in the middle of the last century, the established justified believer is constructed for depth of draught in prayer and thought, and for a long voyage, without a thought of turning back, and has a purpose firmly set, to endure all trials, to encounter all storms or calms, to bear any vicissitude of the voyage, that it may gain the port of heaven.

3. The sail ship, under full canvas far off on the sea, is a thing of beauty, and moves with charming grandeur over the deep. One of these great vessels can never be seen to full advantage in a narrow river, or lying at the wharf, or in a pent up harbor. Its proper home is on the high seas and its playground the broad fields of liquid blue. When every sail is set under a stiff breeze and the sea is freshened with white-caps on the waves, and the spars swing and creak under the bending canvas, and the ship gently plunges through the brine like a big plough through a rolling prairie, and the jolly sailors sing at their tasks, that is the glory period of a sail ship's career, and seen under such circumstances it impresses the eye as a huge living creature, far more fascinating than an iron steamship low lying in the water, with only a trail of black smoke floating over its track. How few people on earth have e37^es to see the real grandeur of a Christian life that has launched out on a pilgrimage to a heavenly port. Like the sail ship, such a Christian is seen to his best advantage far out at sea, away from the narrow notions of men, or pent up policies of society, and the shallow waters of fleshly considerations. Out on the deep of God's providences, with every sail of faith catching the breath of the Holy Spirit, with every rope of prayer stretched in service, with every mast and spar gently bending in obedience to duty, the believer who may not be conscious of anything except the fact that he is pressing onward, presents to the eyes of angels, and to true spiritual discernment, an object of spiritual grandeur kindred to the sublimity of a full-fledged ship at sea. We must, however, draw the picture true to fact. In order to do this we shall have to consider some of the defects and limitations of the sail ship in contrast with the steamer, and these will illustrate very strikingly the limitations of the believer, at his very best estate, in the merely justified experience, as contrasted with the sanctified believer, impelled onward by the hidden baptism of fire. One of these defects is the very item last mentioned that the sail ship cuts a magnificent figure in the eye of the natural man, out of proportion to its real strength. In other words, the tall masts, the white sails, the graceful form, the multiplied ropes and spars, form a graceful picture, surpassing the steamship, but a picture out of proportion to its capacity in other directions. Now it is a singular fact that the strong, justified believer previous to his sanctification, cuts a much more handsome figure in the eye of the natural man, than a fully sanctified believer does of the same rank in life and society. The believer not fully sanctified still lives a mixed life, and every part of his experience and practice admits of a mixedness of the things of nature, and this mixedness of grace and nature, of the heavenly with the earthly, of the Holy Spirit with human philosophy of the Christ life with the self life, is always more pleasing to human perception and reason than to be purely spiritual and unmixed. I have known scores of instances where ministers and Christians were exceedingly popular with their churches and lauded as paragons of religious loveliness, while they had a good deal of the spread eagle of self mixed in with their piety, but who were in the language of the Prophet, frowned upon as ''speckled birds'' when they were purified from the carnal mind. Have you never noticed that the beautiful, sky-scraping, science delving, passion and poetry sermons of our unsanctified preacher, who mixes grace and nature, will call forth cloudbursts of applause, but when the same preacher got sanctified and poured forth a cataract of pure Bible truth unmixed with hifalluten and fleshly eloquence, the people at once thought the man had lost his ability and power. It was only because the magnificent sail ship had gone out of service and the steamship had taken its place.

Again the sail ship involves so much complicated labor. There are so many ropes, and masts, and spars, and so much manual labor, which cannot be done by machinery, and a great liability for the rigging to get tangled and torn in a storm. This is true of the best estate of a Christian life previous to its perfection in love. There is the mingling of so much human reason, and religious struggle, and so much liability for rent feelings, and torn tempers, and broken obedience, that it renders the voyage many backsets and defeats. Again, the sail ship has to tack and beat its way up against the current of headwinds. It can seldom steer very long in a straightforward direction, but must change the sails to every direction and intensity of the wind. Thus the unsactified believer can seldom pursue his course very long without having to vary his inward feelings, and views, and outward conduct, by the currents that beat against him. There is a lack of fixed, abiding, tranquil, ongoing movement in his life. This tacking of a sail ship against a head wind necessitates complex cyphering to find from the log what Speed the ship is making. What school boy has not heard of the dreadful bother in working a problem in logarithms? Well, this one of its meanings, to consult the log of a ship that sails for instance ten miles south, and twenty miles east, and twenty miles south, and ten miles southeast, and so on, for a day and night, to make the calculation of the zig-zag course, and find how many miles the ship has traveled in a straight line. There is something like this that puzzles the wit of a sail ship Christian, and he has much difficulty in striking the line of real growth in grace. Again, the sail ship is liable to be dismasted and capsized in a heavy gale, or to lie helpless in a dead calm, which fitly represents the imperfections of the unsanctified believer, whose very tallness and show in a mired, moral state, renders him a likely prey to cyclones of temptation, or a helpless victim to dead calms in religious experience, where his soul is at a standstill. So that notwithstanding all the advantages of the sail boat and the sail ship state of grace over the lower legal forms of religion, it yet has many limitations and hindrances, which will be done away with when we board the steamboat and take a higher mode of navigation.