The Reconciler

And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself. — COLOSSIANS i. 20.

salutations that pass between man and man differ in different countries. Boaz, for example, goes out to see his reapers. The field is flashing with sickles; the tall corn is falling to the sweep of young men’s arms, and to maidens’ songs; and gleaning on behind them come widows, and orphans, and little children, all made welcome to share the bounties of providence and the fulness of a good man’s cup. A busy, joyous, crowded harvest-field, where brown labour plies her healthful task in a bright autumn day, is one of the most pleasant scenes a man can look on; though now-a-days we not only miss the gleaners, but also that kindly, pious intercourse between master and servants which lent a peculiar charrn to Bethlehem’s harvests. Boaz moves on from band to band, and, as each stops to do him reverence, he says, The Lord be with you, and, meet reply to such pious and courteous language, they answer, The Lord bless thee. Without undervaluing the progress which the world has made since then, in arts and science, in wealth and the more general diffusion of the pleasures and comforts of life, surely it has not been all gain. It is difficult to look back without some regret on those happy days when children played, and no ragged orphans pined, in the streets, when manners were simple, and people were guileless, and the rich were kind to the poor, and the poor did not scowl upon the rich, and nobody was trodden on or neglected, and no wide yawning gulf separated the highest from the lowest classes of the community.

The ordinary salutation of the East, however, was one of peace. It is so still. Seated on his fiery steed and armed to the teeth, the Bedouin careers along the desert. Catching, away in the haze of the burning sands, a form similarly mounted and similarly armed approaching him, he is instantly on the alert; for life is a precarious possession among these wild sons of freedom. His long spear drops to the level; and grasping it in his sinewy hand he presses forward, till the black eyes that glance out from the folds of his shawl recognise in the stranger one of a friendly tribe, between whom and him there is no quarrel, no question of blood to settle. So, for the sun is hot, and it is far to their tents, like two ships in mid-ocean, they pass; they pull no rein, but sweep on, with a “Salem Aleikum,” Peace be unto you. Like their flowing attire, the black tents of Kedar, the torch procession at their marriages, this salutation is one of the many stereotyped habits of the East. Throughout the Holy Land and the neighbouring countries, the modern traveller hears the old salutation, fresh and unchanged, as if it were but yesterday that David was a fugitive in the wilderness of Paran, and sent this message to that rude, surly, niggard churl, with whom Abigail, “a woman of good understanding, and of a beautiful countenance,” was unhappily mated, Peace be both to thee, and peace be to thine house, and peace be unto all that thou hast.

Beautiful as this custom is, like the fragrant wall flower that springs from the mouldering ruin it adorns, it sprung from an unhappy condition of society. Why peace? Because frequent wars, sudden irruptions of hostile tribes, made the people of these lands sigh for peace. Hence their habit of expressing their kindly feelings to each other in the wish that they might have peace; a blessing which many had not. and which they who had might not long enjoy. War does not take us unawares. We see the black storm-cloud gathering before it bursts; and by prudent policy we may avert it, or, if it be inevitable, prepare bravely to meet it. But this curse of humanity, this dreadful scourge fell on the villages and cities of these countries with the suddenness of the seasquall that strikes the ship, and, ere time is found to reef a sail or lower a boat, throws her on her beam-ends, and sends her, crew and cargo, foundering into the deep. Look at the case of Job; camels, cattle, sheep, and servants gone, he is reduced in one short day from affluence to the most abject poverty. One morning the sun rises in peace on Abraham’s tents; and ere noon or nightfall they are ringing with cries to the rescue; in wild confusion children are crying, women are weeping, and men are arming; there is hot haste to mount and away; and, with two hundred retainers at his back, Abraham scours the country, raising it as he goes, to deliver Lot and his family from the hand of the spoilers. Three days ago, David and his followers left Ziklag, sweet peace brooding over the quiet scene; and where is Ziklag on their return? They come back, but not to happy homes; they are silent, a mass of smoking ruins; no wife hastens to embrace her husband, no child runs to climb its father’s knee; the red-handed spoiler has been there; their mountain nest has been harried; and, appalled at the desolation, these stout hearted men burst into frantic grief, weeping till, as the Bible says, they can weep no more. Looking at these scenes, it is easy to understand how the most kind and common greeting in such countries was, Peace be unto you.”

Though the practice would ill accord with our conventional manners, that have often more of art than of nature, I think, considering the day, the place, the pur pose of the assembly, it were a beautiful and appropriate thing, when ministers and people meet in the house of God, to meet after the manner of Boaz and his people; the minister, on appearing in the pulpit, saying The Lord be with you, and the people responding The Lord bless thee. Our vine and fig-tree are good laws, a free government, a home around which the sea throws her protecting arms, and a stout people who fear God and honour the king. Thus preserved from the fears of those countries, we have not learned their fashions. Yet when we ransack these sunny lands for gay flowers to adorn our gardens, why should we not transplant some of their beautiful habits? While others introduce offensive novelties into the pulpit, as if the gospel required such wretched aids, he would follow the footsteps, and give utterance to the spirit of Jesus, who, boldly breaking the ice of our cold customs, should meet his people on the morning of the blessed Sabbath with his master’s salutation, Peace be unto you.

With these words our Lord, on returning from the grave, accosted his disciples. Nor on his lips were they mere words of course, the ordinary courtesies of life. How well did they suit the occasion! The battle of salvation has been fought out, and a great victory won; and in that salutation Jesus, his own herald, announces the news to an anxious church. Passing into that upper room which holds it, passing through the barred and bolted door which protects it, he suddenly appears among them. He has fulfilled the anthem with which angels sang his advent, and ushered him into this distracted, guilty world. Though he had to recal her from heaven, where she had fled in alarm at the Fall, or, rather, had to seek her in the gloomy retreats of death, he brings back sweet holy Peace to earth. And hastening to tell them the good news, the glad tidings of great joy, he proclaims it in the words, Peace be unto you. He shows them his hands, with the nail-marks there; he uncovers his side with the spear-scar there; and when the disciples are gazing through streaming eyes on these affecting love-tokens, his heart swells, fills, overflows with tenderness, and, as if he could never tire of saying it, nor they of hearing it, he bends over them to say again and again, Peace be unto you.

Suppose that, instead of descending, like dews, in those gracious but silent and unseen influences of the Spirit, that people should pray for and preachers should trust to, our Lord were to come in person, appear in a visible form, and reveal his glory to every eye, how would he address us? I believe that he would bring from heaven the very salutation which he brought from the grave. As he looked around on those he had purchased with his blood, and renewed by his grace, I can fancy him breaking the deep silence, and stilling the heartthrobbings, and dissipating the sudden terrors which such a vision might produce, with the old gracious words, Peace be unto you. And what a load would that take off some hearts; what a calm, like his voice on Galilee, would it impart to some troubled minds; what a gracious answer would it bring to some earnest prayers! To hear his own voice, however, to behold his blessed face, to be assured of forgiveness from his own lips, these are joys reserved for heaven. Yet with strong, though childlike faith in exercise, the next best thing is to be assured, as we are assured in my text, that peace has been made, and that God, for the purpose of reconciling us to himself, has made it through the blood of Christ’s cross.

I. The text implies that by nature man is at enmity with God.

So says the apostle Paul. Nor is it possible to lay down that doctrine more clearly or more strongly than he does in these remarkable words, “The carnal mind is enmity against God.” He does not say that it is in a state of enmity. Not at all; for states and frames may undergo change, and are variable as wind or weather. As God is love, so the carnal mind is enmity; this being so much the nature, essence, element of its existence, that if you took away the enmity, it would cease to be; enmity being the breath of its life, the very marrow of its bones. From such a view of the heart, from so hideous a picture some start back; they hesitate to believe it, while others plainly, indignantly deny it. Pointing us to a beautiful, sweet, angel-like child, as, with open brow and unclouded face, it bends at a mother’s knee, and, lifting its little hands to heaven, repeats from her gentle lips its evening prayer, they ask who can fancy that creature to be enmity against God? True. But who would fancy, as it twines its arms around a mother’s neck, and kisses her, and sings itself asleep on her loving bosom, that the day can ever come when it will stab that bosom, and these little hands will plant wrongs sharper than a dagger in her bleeding heart? Yet that happens. And many things else happen that you would never fancy. The purple bells of the nightshade change into poisonous berries; the cold, dull flint sends out sparks of burning fire; the viper that lay quiet in the “bundle of sticks” is aroused by the heat, and leaps from the flames to fasten on an apostle’s hand.

Sins, like seeds, lie dormant till circumstances call them into active existence. Aware of that, Satan knew right well what he was saying when, in reply to God’s praise of his servant Job, he said with a sneer, “Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast thou not made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.” And so the good man had done, but for restraining grace. What a burst of pent-up passion, like the fiery eruption of a volcano, breaks the seven days’ awful silence, “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived; let that day be darkness. Why died I not from the womb? Why did the knees prevent me? Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul; which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures; which rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they can find the grave?” Here Job curses the day that he was born; and he who curses God’s providence has to take but another step, and he curses God himself. But that a divine arm had borne his burden, but that a divine hand curbed his passions, that woman, raging like a bear bereaved of her whelps, would have had no occasion to reproach him for his tame submission. No. He had vented curses, if not as loud, perhaps, like the river where it flows sullen and black, more deep than hers; and, standing side by side over a grave big with bodies and with griefs, they had raised their hands together against the heavens, and flung back their life at him who had embittered it. But for the grace of God Job had been no pattern of patience. And let the grace, which both sustained and restrained him, be withdrawn from any of us, and our natural enmity and corruption would break out after such a fashion as would astonish ourselves, shock the ears of the public, and lead many to hold up their hands to exclaim, Lord, what is man!

This enmity is a doctrine into which the believer does not need to be reasoned. He feels it. He reads its evidence elsewhere than in the Bible; he reads it in his own heart. He, who knows himself, knows it. Breaking out like old sores, the sins of heart, and speech, and conduct, by which it makes itself manifest, are his daily pain, and fear, and grief. Other soldiers have easy times of peace, when swords rust idly in their sheaths, and the trumpet sounds but for parade. Not he. There is never a day but he has to fight this enmity to the holy will and sovereign ways of God. His life is a long battle and a hard battle; and, like a soldier tired of war, though true to his colours, he often wishes that it were over, as, overcome of evil, and vexed with him self, he throws himself on his knees to cry, Create in me a clean heart, 0 God, and renew a right spirit within me, Be merciful unto me, 0 God, be merciful unto me, Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

This enmity is a thing, whose existence is taken for granted in the language of my text; for what need can there be to make peace between God and man if they are friends already? Does not the making peace between two nations imply that they had been standing to each other in the relation of antagonists, not of allies? Not friends require to be reconciled, but foes. When, with tabard and trumpet, royal heralds proclaim the peace, and cannon roar, and church-bells ring, and bon fires blaze, and bright illuminations turn night into day, in that darkened house, where the shouts of the crowd fall heavy on a widow’s heart, who clasps her children in her arms, or where a father and mother are weeping over a bloody lock of their soldier boy’s hair, they know too well that war went before the peace, a tempest of blood and carnage before that dear-bought calm. When, therefore, my text says that peace was made, it implies that, though unequal antagonists, more unequally matched than if a presumptuous worm, which I could crush with one stamp of my foot, should raise itself up to bar my path and to contend with me, God and man stood face to face, front to front, in opposition the one to the other. I pray the sinner to think of his madness in contending with God. The issue is not doubtful yonder, where the chaff and the whirlwind meet, or the blast and the autumn leaves meet, or the potsherd and the potter meet; where the unmasfed, rudderless wreck meets the mountain-billow that lifts her up, and whirls her crashing on the reef, around which next moment there float but some broken timbers. Nor is it doubtful here. Throw clown, I pray you, the weapons of your rebellion; down on your knees; yield yourselves to the love of Christ; kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way; for, who has an arm like God, or who can thunder with a voice like his? Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth, but woe to the man that striveth with his Maker.

Animated by fierce despair, man would fight on. and fight it out to the last. If God is only set before me in the attitude and act of cursing, I believe I should curse back again. Such is our nature; and he is as ignorant of philosophy as of the gospel, who expects to conquer my enmity by the terrors of the law, or by any other argument than the love of God. But does God appear as reciprocating our enmity, as the enemy of man? No; not even when he condemns him. To suppose so were a great mistake, were to do base wrong to a gracious God. I know that some have painted him in dark, and gloomy, and repulsive colours, imputing to the Supreme Being their own vengeful and malignant passions; but that terrible spectre, who has a better claim than Death to be called the King of Terrors, is not the God of the Bible, is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is not He in wrhose name I call on the sinner to come to the throne of grace, and throw himself with confidence at the feet of mercy. I cannot deny that God condemns, but I deny that he ever condemns willingly. He does not hate the sinner, though he hates his sins. He loves him; he loves you. And if that judge is not considered the enemy of the pale, guilty, trembling wretch, on whose doomed, sunken head, with a voice choked by emotion, and eyes dropping tears that leave no stain on the judge’s ermine, reluctant he pronounces the terrible sentence of death, is God to be considered the enemy even of him whom, after years of long suffering, he condemns to perdition? No. He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. The man who is damned has been his own enemy. And should such, which God forbid, be your awful fate, I warn you that it will be the bitterest thought of hell, that God sought to be reconciled to you and you madly refused. Give me a voice loud enough to reach the ends of the earth, and I would raise it to proclaim that God is not willing that any man in that wide world should perish, but that all should come to him and live. Do men perish? Hear the reason, Ye will not corne to me that ye might have life. Would you be saved? listen to these gracious words, Him that cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.

II. God desires to be reconciled to his enemies.

He did me wrong; if there are faults on both sides, he was the first in the transgression; therefore, if we are to be reconciled, he, not I, must be the first to make advances! Such, if you ever undertook the too often thankless, and sometimes perilous office of a mediator between friends whom differences had estranged, you know to be the law which man lays down. Man stands upon his dignity. He talks loftily of his honour, and what he calls justice to himself and the interests of society. The injured says of the injurer, and each generally thinks not himself but the other such, He is to come to me, I am not to go to him. Indignant at the proposal of anything that wounds his pride, he spurns it away, asking, Am I to stand at his door in the humble attitude of a suppliant, to appear as if I were the injurer, not the injured? You may tell him that he who conquers himself, wins the victory; you may tell him, that he who ruleth his own spirit is greater than he who taketh a city; you may tell him that it is noble to make the first advances. No, he says, I will not meet him even halfway; let him come and acknowledge his offence; I will not refuse my hand, but he must ask it; I am willing to bury the quarrel, but he must dig the grave. Strange terms for those to insist on who know the grace of God, and how our own great debts are for given! If God had so dealt with us, we should have gone to hell, every one of us. Yet such are commonly the lowest, easiest terms on which man agrees to treat with man. And I have known a mother sternly refuse to grant a daughter the forgiveness she asked even on her knees. Come with me into that woman’s cottage when she has received her summons to a bar, where she herself, as well as all of us, will need forgiveness. Her last hour is come; and though in the dim light of a candle which we hold to her face, it looks firm and stern even in a dying hour, we think surely she will relent now, arid afford some hope, however faint, that the spirit that forgives goes to be forgiven. Putting kind neighbours aside, I bend over that ghastly form, and in the awful presence of death, put her to the trial. There is no relenting. It is no time for speaking smooth things; a soul is at stake; and in half an hour she will be in hell or heaven. She has been plainly told, that unless she forgives, she cannot be forgiven. Jesus hanging for sinners on the cross, and praying, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do; God entreating the guilty to return to his bosom, and stooping in love over his bitterest enemies, these are set before her, but in vain. The tree falls as it leans, as well as lies as it falls. God may forgive, not she. And, when sent away, as it were, by a voice saying, She is joined to her idols, let her alone, I left these horrors, and stepping out into the calm night, raised my eyes to the spangled sky, how pleasant it was to think of the contrast between our Father there and that iron mother, and how natural it was to exclaim with David, Let me fall into the hand of the Lord; for his mercies are great; and let me not fall into the hand of man. Many a star studded the night’s dark vault, but I thought none looked so bright and beautiful as the blessed promise, Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.

My ways are not as your ways, neither are my thoughts as your thoughts, saith the Lord. How strikingly and blessedly is that illustrated in the peace restored between God and man! Who is the first to seek reconciliation here? Does God stand upon his dignity, his honour, the justice of the case? If ever any might, it was He. But did the great God sit aloft on his imperial throne, surrounded by holy angels, saying, Let these sinners come to me; the offence was theirs, and the humiliation must be all their own? No. He takes the humiliation to himself, and might be supposed to be the injurer, not the injured. Veiling his majesty, and leaving heaven to seek our door, he stands there, knocks there, waits there; nay, with an infinite kindness and condescension, he goes down, as it were, on his knees, beseeching us, as if it were a favour done to him, to be reconciled. “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.” How hard are your hearts, if you can resist such love!

Some talk as if we were saved just because Christ paid our debt, representing God’s share in the transaction as little else than that of a severe, stern, unrelenting creditor, who takes no interest in his imprisoned debtor beyond letting him out when the surety has taken up the bond. Is this true? Is it fair to God? True? It is utterly false. Salvation flows from a higher source than Calvary. It has its fountain, not in the cross of the incarnate Son, but in the bosom of the eternal Father. These hoar hills with their time-furrowed brows, that ocean which bears on its face no mark of age, those morning stars which sang together when our world was born, these old heavens, are not so old as the love of God. It dates from eternity. Eternal ages before the Law was given, or broken, or satisfied, he loved us. The central truth of the Bible, that on which I lay the greatest stress and rest my strongest hopes, is this, that God does not love us because Christ died for us, but that Christ died for us because God loved us. I do not disparage the work of Christ; far be such a thought from me. Yet Christ himself is the gift of divine love, the divine expression of our Father’s desire to be reconciled. The Lord of angels hanging on a mother’s bosom, the Creator of heaven and earth bending to a humble task, the judge of all standing accused in the place of common felons, the Son of his Father’s love nailed amid derision to an ignominious cross, death rudely seizing him, the dark grave receiving him, we owe to the love of God. God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. What love do we owe him who so loved us!

III. To make our peace with God, Jesus Christ laid down his life.

I have seen one who had roughly reckoned up the cost of the gems, the rubies, pearls, emeralds, diamonds, that studded the golden arches of an earthly crown, stand astonished at its value. And yet, in point either of cost or brilliancy, what is that to the crown any ransomed beggar or saved harlot wears in heaven? Imperial diadems are nothing to the crown of glory. In the sanctuary balances a saint weighs heavier than a sovereign. And there is more value in the crown of a redeemed infant, one of these little ones, than in all the glory of all the holy angels. A word made them, lie said, and it was done; heaven was full of them. But to make a saint, he who never left his throne to make or save an angel, descended on our world in the form of a servant, and, more amazing still, hung dead on a cross in the form of a sinner. The price of our pardon was no thing less than what the apostle calls the blood of God. He was made sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. To restore peace, and open up a way of reconciliation, to save us from the perdition of that bottomless pit, Jesus took our sins upon him, and poured out his soul unto death. An ancient historian tells us that, at the siege of Babylon, Darius condemned to the cross three thousand captives. Another relates howr, when Alexander inflicted long-threatened vengeance on Tyre, he crucified two thousand prisoners, and that crosses stood on her bloody shores thicker than ship masts in her crowded harbour. And when the Roman let fly his eagles against Jerusalem, Titus, measuring out to the Jewrs the mea sure they had meted to Jesus, gave them crosses enough, “good measure, pressed down and shaken together, and running over.” A spectator of the scenes, the dreadful, tragic scenes, amid which Judah’s sun set in blood for ever, tells that wood was wanting for crosses, and crosses were wanting for bodies. Yet had Babylon’s, Tyre’s, Jerusalem’s, all these crosses been raised to save you, and on each cross of that forest, not a man, but a dying angel hung, had all heaven been crucified, here is greater love, a greater spectacle. God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Purchasing our peace at such a price, God has done more for you and me than for all the universe besides. Creator of earth and heaven, he threw suns from his hand like sparks shot from the fire, and, as a potter turns off clay vessels from his wheel, he fashioned the worlds, and sent them away spinning in their orbits; but here is a greater work. If Nehemiah’s words were ever specially appropriate to any lips, it was to those that maintained unbroken silence amid the taunts and insults of the cross. When they cried, If thou be the Son of God, come down from the. cross, I do not know that our Lord so much as felt the insult, that in that hour it troubled him. It might be but a pebble flung into a storm-tossed ocean, adding nothing to the turmoil, nor so much as felt amid the roar and swell of breakers. It might be but the sting of a miserable insect on the cheek of one who bestrides in battle a fallen friend, his shield ringing with blows, and his flashing blade sweeping down the foe around him. It might be but a feather added to that mountain burden of sin and wrath beneath which Christ’s great soul was bowing; yet, had it pleased our dying Lord to answer the taunt, I can fancy him bending from the cross to say, “I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down;” I have a world to save, therefore I cannot save myself; without shedding of blood is no remission. Poor scoffer! no cross for me, no crown for thee.

Well may we say with Moses, I wrill turn aside, and see this great sight. What spectacle so wonderful, so affecting? Behold, how he loved us! Around that cross let faith fling her eager joyful arms. Embrace it. Oh! clasp it with more than a lover’s ardour; in life and death, cling to it like a drowning man, whom the waves cannot tear from his hold.

In making our peace with God, Christ had a great work to do. It is finished; and ours, like his, closes not save with life. We may sometimes think of an aged Christian as one seated on the bank of Jordan in the serene evening of a holy life, waiting the summons, looking back on the world without a regret, and forward into eternity without the shadow’ of a fear. We fancy him, by the eye of faith, piercing the thick mists that hang over death’s dark flood, and, as he descries the “shining ones “walking on the other shore, we fancy him stretching out his eager arms and crying, Oh, that I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly away and be at rest!” But the picture is more beautiful than true. In working out their salvation with fear and trembling, in carrying forward, through the help of the Holy Spirit, the work of sanctification, God’s people will feel the need of watching and working to the very end. The corn shakes when it is ripe; the fruit drops when it is mellow; the Christian dies when his work is done. I see him, as a soldier, dying in harness, fighting on to the very last gasp; as a servant, he may be found, up to the very hour of his Master’s coming, putting the house in order. Though the more work done now, the less there is to do at a less suitable time, it occasionally happens that the death-bed of the believer is the scene of his hardest fight, and of Satan’s fiercest temptations. Nowhere has the roaring of the lion sounded more dreadful than in the valley of the shadow of death. And it is sometimes with sin as with the monster of the deep, when to the cry, “Stern all,” the men who have buried their lances in its ample sides, seize the oars, and pull rapidly out of the sweep of that tremendous tail that beats the ocean till it sounds afar, and churns the blood-stained waves into crimson foam. Men of undoubted piety have found sin’s dying to be sin’s hardest struggles. It happens with the kingdom of heaven as with a city the violent take by force; the hardest fighting may be in the breach, the battle may rage fiercest where the city is entered, and just when the prize is to be won.

We can leave the cares of our death to God; our business is with present duty. Our work is not finished, while with some of us it may be little more than begun. And I may address the most advanced and aged Christian, in God’s words to Joshua, Thou art old and well stricken in years, and yet there is much land to be possessed. Sin has still more or less power over you, and it should have none; your corruptions have suffered a mortal wound, but they are not dead; your affections rise upward to heaven, yet how much are they held back by the things of earth; though your heart turns to Christ, like the compass needle to the pole, how easily is it disturbed, how tremblingly it points to him; your spirit has wings, yet how short are its flights, and how often, like a half-fledged eaglet, has it to return to its nest on the Rock of Ages; your soul is a garden where Christ delights to walk when the north and south winds blow, to exhale its spices, yet with many lovely flowers, how many vile weeds grow there. With a great work to do, and little time to do it, and that little most uncertain, there is much need to work, the Spirit aiding, heaven helping us. Work, work while it is called to-day, looking for your rest in heaven. Oh, how far short is our holiness of the holiness of heaven. So much imperfection, so many infirmities cleave to the best of us, that I sometimes think that a change must take place at the moment of death second only to that at the moment of conversion. There is much sin to be cast off, like a slough, with this mortal flesh. Saw we the spirit at its departure, as Elisha saw his ascending master, we might see a mantle of infirmity and imperfection dropped from the chariot that bears it in triumph to the skies. I have thought that there must be a mysterious work done by the Spirit of God in the very hour of death to form the glorious crown and copestone of all his other labours; and that, like the wondrous but lovely plant which blows at midnight, grace comes out in its perfect beauty amid the darkness of the dying hour. How that is done I do not know. It takes one whole summer to ripen the fields of corn, and five hundred years to bring the oak to its full maturity. But He at whose almighty word this earth sprung at once into perfect being, with loaded orchards, and golden harvests, and clustering vines, and stately palms, and giant cedars, man in ripened manhood, and woman in her full-blown charms, is able in the twinkling of an eye, ere our fingers have closed the filmy orbs, or we have stooped to print one fond last kiss on the marble brow, to crown the work his grace began. With him one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years are as one day. He shall perfect that which concerneth you. He shall bring forth the headstone thereof with shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it. Now, THEREFORE, UNTO HlM THAT IS ABLE TO KEEP YOU FROM FALLING, AND TO PRESENT YOU FAULTLESS BEFORE THE PRESENCE OF HlS GLORY WITH EXCEEDING JOY, TO THE ONLY WISE GOD OUR SAVIOUR, BE GLORY AND MAJESTY, DOMINION AND POWER, BOTH NOW AND EVER, AMEN.