There is a pathetic poetry that hangs like a silvery mist around our youthful years, and as we advance on in life, little things that occurred in our early experience, take on through memories soft, light, large and glowing forms, like the huge red appearance of the sun or moon when they hang low on the horizon. This accounts largely for that style of conversation which glorifies the most common place events and things in the distant past, to the disparagement of much better things that are in the present. An instance of this kind can be found by mingling with old sailors on a steamship, who spent their early years in a sail vessel, and hear them speak in the most glowing terms of the grand old times when sail ships had the first place on the sea; and in contrast, speak with abusive reproach of modern steamships, as ugly iron tubs. In the several sea voyages I have taken, I have been amused to hear both officers and sailors speak in this manner, lauding the sail ships of the past in contrast with the iron steamers of the present. This is to be accounted for, partly by the principle above referred to, of the poetry that envelopes our first experiences, and partly by the ignorant prejudice in the human mind against progress, and a clinging to old things and customs simply because they are old; and partly by that wretched depravity in the human heart, which finds a grim comfort in grumbling at things in general, and especially at the developments of a genius or wisdom that surpasses our own. Now, strange to say, we find all these characteristics manifested in religious matters as we push on in our spiritual navigation, and come to change our mode of travel from the sail ship to the steamboat type of life. As on the deck of most any ship, you will find an old tar ready to find fault with the steamship, and loud in his praises of those good old days when he was a lad furling the sails of a clipper merchantman, so in every church you may find some plodding professor of religion who grumbles profusely at everything connected with sanctification, with the preaching of holiness, or the baptism of the Spirit, or the life of perfect trust, or divine healing, or the glorious return of our dear Lord to conquer and reign on earth, or the demands for foreign missions, or the singing of full salvation songs, or the holding of special conventions for the deepening of the spiritual life, speaking disparageingly of all these modern steps in religion, and constantly praising those good old times when people knew nothing particularly about the Holy Ghost, when they used to have occasional revivals which never interfered with the use of tobacco, or the drinking of a little toddy, or the sweet privilege of getting angry and giving the offending party a piece of your tongue. In fact, multitudes who are well nigh frenzied with modern progress in material and commercial things, turn out to be the most ignorant and stolid objectors to all progress in spiritual religion. Long centuries ago God spake unto Moses, saying, ''Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward." That command is still running on through the present moment, and so in order to increase our speed in our journey and avoid the deluge of calms and headwinds, we must leave the sail ship type of life and get on board of the steamer. Just as the wind is a type of the Holy Spirit in the grace of regeneration, so fire and water are scripture types of the Holy Spirit in purifying and empowering the soul in the sanctified life.

1. We must remember that a steamboat is not simply a development or an evolution out of a sail boat, which clearly symbolizes that the grace of sanctification is not an outgrowth, or an evolution of pardon, or the new birth. While the sail boat and the steamer are both vessels for travel and commerce, and of the same outward form, with the same general features, and for the same uses, yet in their interior structure, and in their moving power and in their capacity of there are great differences. In a like way there are similarities in outward life, and law, and service, between the justified and sanctified state, but as to the inner forms of motive, and force, and capacity, there is considerable difference. The steamboat is a creation, a product of invention, of manufacture, and not a happening of chance, or a result of growth. There is a peculiar fascination in many minds for the theory of gradual, slow and everlasting development, as applied to everybody and everything in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, but this fascination is largely due to that corruption in the human mind which loves to believe what is false. The natural man loves a lie, especially when the lie accommodates his selfish interests. The theory of evolution is Satan's rain-bow charm which he has hung over the colleges and the pulpits of these last days, because it does away with the supernatural, and the instantaneous in salvation, and in Christ's blood, and in the action of the Holy Ghost, and accommodates all the natural sinful propensities of the human mind. Evolution glorifies nature and denies Christ, magnifies culture and despises the blood of Jesus, worships human thought and blasphemes the Holy Spirit, prates loudly of holy living but utterly denies the Divine Creation of holiness of heart out of which the life must flow. Just as the steamboat cannot evolve itself from a sail ship, no more can a Christian evolve a state of pure love, of perfect victory over sin and self, out of a state of mixedness of moral character from the natural roots of bitterness in his heart. The steamboat must be specially constructed for a specific end, and every part of its machinery adjusted in harmony with each other, and with the sea, and the elements, and the work to be accomplished. So the blessed structure of a soul in holy love must be under the direct power of the omnipotent Saviour, and He who originally formed the soul must cleanse it, and impart the hidden, swift and delicate mechanism of motives, intentions, prayers, desires and zeal, which are adapted to the production of a humble, blameless and useful life. Also, as the machinery and motive power in a steamboat must be adjusted to the sea, and storms, and tides, so must the sanctified believer have in him by the gift of the Holy Spirit, a type of spiritual life adjusted to meet all difficulties, and overcome opposing forces, and triumphantly cross the ocean, accomplish its mission, and land its cargo in the port of heaven. In the transition from the sail to the steamboat, the iron shaft that moves the wheels takes the place of the masts, which represents the spirit of obedience in the soul; and the wheels take the place of the sails, which represent faith, and the chains and iron rods on the steamer take the place of ropes on the sail ships, which represent the earnest prayers of a consecrated believer. Thus all the parts of a sail ship are perpetuated In the steamer in a different form, and so all the parts and principles of a justified believer are carried forward in the sanctified state, in deeper and stronger forms.

2. Let us now consider the peculiar kind of power that propells the steamboat, in contrast with the form of force that impelled the sail ships. It is the same Saviour and the same Holy Spirit that works in the believer in a life of pure love, as wrought in him in a feebler and more mixed religious life before; but divine power in the higher state is acting in a different degree, and hence is set forth under a different type. It is the union of fire and water that produces steam, which is one of the greatest forces known in the material world.

We had occasion in a previous chapter to expatiate on the enormous and incalculable forces of the air, but now we have to consider other kinds of energy still more amazing in their results. The power of water in running machinery has been known and utilized from the earliest generations, and the force of water in a rushing current, or a falling weight, is beyond ordinary imagination. The falling of a great wave in a storm at sea on the deck of a ship, has been so powerful as to sweep away wheel-house, and masts, and seamen, overboard. The force of water rushing over the falls of Niagara is sufficient, if it could be utilized in every part, to run the machinery of a nation and accomplish the work of hundreds of thousands of horses and men. But what shall be said of the power of fire, that amazing energy stored up in the heat of the sun, and that manifests itself in the lightning bolt, the electric current, and that unmeasured ocean of summer heat, that causes every living plant to grow, and that is incessantly lifting millions of tons of water in the form of evaporation from the surface of seas and lakes and rivers. Now, only think of the union of these giant forces, of water and fire, in the production of steam. The power of steam was never utilized for mechanical purposes till about the middle of the nineteenth century, and in the space of fifty years it has been so harnessed and set to work as to accomplish more than all the hundreds of millions of men on earth could have accomplished in a century. The power that lifted the top of Mt. Pelee thousands of feet in the air, and carried it in the ocean, burning up a city with forty thousand population, was the power of steam generated by the water emptying down and coming in contact with the hidden fire under the mountain. This is the power that moves the steamship, the type of the sanctified believer. Is it not singular that the power of God filling the believer on the day of Pentecost should correspond precisely with the energy of steam. The scriptures do not say that the wind was in motion in the upper room, but that "there came a sound from heaven like the sound of a rushing mighty wind,'' and the ''sound" filled the house. There may have been a downward rush of air, but the word says it was the sound like a wind, and this sound was produced by the descent of fiery tongues, which, like a shower of rockets, came roaring from heaven and lighted on the heads of about a hundred and twenty praying Christians. Then, we are told, they were all filled with the Holy Ghost. This word "filled" should be more properly rendered "overflowed." The idea is that of a river in a freshet overflowing its banks, or of a water vessel being filled and overflowing, which clearly sets forth the Holy Spirit under the type of water. Thus the Holy Spirit came on them as a fire, and filled them to overflowing like water, and they at once, under the power of divine steam, the product of heavenly fire and water, began to speak, and rejoice aloud and move out of the room, and down in the open streets, pouring forth on the astonished multitude celestial shot and shell, and hot streams of testimony, and reproof, and exhortation, like liquid lava from the craters of a hundred volcanoes.

The miracles wrought in commerce by steam in the past fifty years, have their counterpart in the religious miracles that have been wrought by the Holy Ghost, in the great revival of scriptural holiness during the same time. If you have ever made a special study of God's providences, both in the church and in the world, you doubtless have been startled with the coincident movements of things in the spiritual and material departments. All down through history every invention of science, every great discovery, has occurred about simultaneously with some great religious awakening, or some struggle for national liberty, or freedom of conscience. This was true at the discovery of gun powder, of the mariner's compass, of the art of printing, of the discovery of America, which occurred about the time of Luther's reformation, and the discovery of steam power soon after the great Wesleyan revival in England, and just about the time foreign missionaries began to go to the heathen, as if the steamship and the missionary to go on it should be twin born; and a little later came the telegraph, and the utilizing of electricity, just about the time of the starting of the great holiness movement, that designed of God to prepare a chosen people for the coming of the Lord. What can be more helpless than a steam engine without fire or water, and before the day of Pentecost the timid Apostles went quietly to their place of daily prayer, with enough grace to keep them from sinning and in the path of obscure obedience, but perhaps the laughing stocks of the proud rulers who had killed their Leader, and now looked upon them as poor, weak fanatics, that could never disturb the slumbering grandeur of ecclesiastical tyranny any more. But when these weak men were filled with divine steam, they became like giant locomotives, rushing with irresistible might through a crowded city, shaking the very earth, a terror to their foes, and drawing a long train of consequences after them. In order to accomplish the work of Christ in the earth, we not only need all the natural faculties and gifts belonging to the soul by virtue of our creation, and we not only need to have our sins washed away, and the conscience made pure, but we need to be taken into perfect union with the Lord Jesus and filled with the person of the Holy Ghost and endowed with the same courage, love, humility, perseverance, impartiality, and the same fearless charity that was in Christ. We marvel at the hidden force in steam that drives a ship large enough to be an iron city, with thousands of tons and thousands of passengers, through the waves of the sea at twenty-five miles an hour; and yet that amazing power is feeble in comparison with that divine steam, the double gift of Pentecost, of water and fire, that hides in perfect believers, and drives them on in self-abnegations, through poverty, scorn, proscription, isolation, loveliness, prisons, flames, ostracism, temptation, weakness of body, perplexity of mind; always cleaving to Jesus, always choosing holy sorrow to sinful pleasure, always praying, always hoping, and in every storm keeping their prows toward the harbor of the New Jerusalem. These souls are the true ships, and freighted with cargoes of heavenly gold.

3. Another contrast between the sail boat and the steamer is, that the motive power is so much more hidden in the latter than in the former. The sails on a ship are much more taking to the natural eye than the hidden force of steam down in the body of the ship, and so there is something in the mixed life of an unsanctified Christian, in those displays of the self-life, far more captivating to the natural mind, than the deep secret energy of a soul that is crucified with Jesus, and that seeks in all things not to display self, but to bear fruit unto God. A person who should see a steamboat in motion, but having no knowledge of the hidden apparatus in the engine room, would be puzzled to even imagine what could make it go. In the same way, people who know nothing of the life hid with Christ, and the secret power of the Lord, cannot imagine what strength it is that pushes onward a few unearthly and unaccountable people, right against what the world considers the very best and wisest things.

It is amusing to read what the newspapers say, and the accounts of unsaved church members give, of persons who are filled with the Holy Spirit. They speak of them as being "magnetic,'' or "hysterical," or "eloquent," or "insane," or "cranky," and oftentimes use descriptive terms of such persons that are opposite and contradictory, because they are only guessing out of their carnal wit, at the character of a spiritual force beyond their range, and have no more knowledge of these spiritual ships that are propelled by the hidden power of the Holy Ghost, than a wild Indian has of the strange force that propells the giant steamboat up a great river, past the hills and valleys of his hunting grounds. To such an Indian the steamboat is a strange, wild creature, from some far away white man's world; and in just as true a sense, the spirit-filled Christian, under the baptism of fire, who steers straight on for God through the world, is regarded by the unregenerate natives of earth, as a wild, unaccountable character, who is haunted with a celestial dream, that renders him unmanageable and impracticable with the things of time and sense. A life of true holiness is mainly an interior life. Conversion effects mostly the outer life, and sanctification effects mostly the inner life. I do not mean to say that conversion does not marvelously change the inner life, or that sanctification does not appear in much fruit in the outer life, but that mainly conversion changes the outer, and true holiness as manifesting itself in consciousness, has its greatest effects in the hidden life of the soul. The analogy we are now tracing will serve to illustrate this truth, for while the sail ship displays its moving forces above deck, the steamer hides its moving forces below the deck. This is why a life of pure faith has so few charms to worldly church members, it is too hidden from the approbation of men, from visible and tangible success, and requires a humility of heart, and a life of secret prayer, which utterly crucifies the natural vanity of the mind, and the love of display. Now that we have gotten thoroughly launched upon our spiritual voyage, we shall have occasion to try the different kinds of vessels that go by steam, and each of them will be found to serve our purpose in unfolding the various types of saints.