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Though a popular and prevalent, it is a false or at least very defective form of Christianity, which, if personal salvation is attained, or supposed to be attained, is indifferent to the interests of truth, the welfare of the Church, and the public cause of Christ. The more profoundly we are interested in, and the more sensibly we are assured of our own salvation, the better fitted are we for being, and the more likely are we to be "valiant for the truth upon the earth." We should seek that God would do good unto Zion —

I. IN THE WAY OF INCREASING THE NUMBER OF HER GENUINE CONVERTS. It is not in the number, or wealth, or worldly influence of her nominal members, but in the number of true believers, "called and chosen and faithful," loving the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and truth, who are found within her pale, that her strength and stability and beauty consist. In proportion as she is destitute of these latter, may Ichabod — the glory is departed — be written on her brow. It is they alone, of all her members, who show forth the transforming power of Divine grace, and the condescension of Divine love, and who reflect the purity of her glorious Head.

II. IN THE WAY OF CAUSING THE GRACES OF THE SPIRIT TO FLOURISH IN HER TRUE MEMBERS. It would be a token for good were believers generally constrained to long for the reviving influences of the Spirit, as the chased roe pants for the cooling stream, or as the parched ground thirsts for the refreshing shower — were they in the same frame of mind as the Spouse in Canticles when she cried, "Awake, O north wind, and come thou south: blow upon my garden that the spices may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits."

III. IN THE WAY OF ENABLING HER TO BE FAITHFUL TO HER LORD. And this faithfulness we shall only notice here as it bears upon her testifying for His truths, preserving the purity of His ordinances, and enforcing the laws of His house. According as she fulfils or fails in fulfilling these functions, does she prove faithful or faithless to her high mission as "the pillar and ground of the truth," and as a witness for God in the world.

IV. IN THE WAY OF HEALING HER DIVISIONS. These are her weakness, her shame, her sin. The armies of Israel are spending in intestine conflict that strength which is needed against, and which would powerfully tell upon, their common foes.

V. BY EXTENDING HER BOUNDARIES. There are still many "dark places of the earth," which are "full of the habitations of horrid cruelty." There are hundreds of millions of our race sitting in the shadow of moral and spiritual darkness and death, athwart which a beam from the Sun of Righteousness has never shone. They are perishing for lack of knowledge. In darkness they live, in darkness they die, and to the blackness of darkness at death they descend. So long, however, as this is the case, the promise of the Divine Father to His Son shall not be fully performed, "I will give Thee the heathen for Thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession" — numerous predictions of Scripture shall remain unfulfilled — and the Church shall not have attained her destined and promised position of glory in our world. But all these events shall yet take place, however impossible they may now appear to the eye of sense. Every obstacle to this — physical, political, ecclesiastical, or moral — shall be removed. In asking these blessings from God for Zion, we should do so in a spirit of entire dependence upon Him for their bestowal; under a sense of personal unworthiness; in a spirit of resignation to the Divine will; from a supreme desire for the Divine glory; and under a deep sense of personal obligation to active exertion on our part, in order to their being obtained.

(Original Secession Magazine.)

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KJV: Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of Jerusalem.

WEB: Do well in your good pleasure to Zion. Build the walls of Jerusalem.