The Unchanging Name

“Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.” — Heb. xiii. 8.

All is changing here. Life is a kaleidc scope, made up of shifting forms: — new scenes, new tastes, new feelings, new associations; — an alternation of cloud and sunshine, tempest and calm. Its joys are like the airy bubbles on the stream, tinted with sunlight: we touch them — they are gone! TVe have to tell of vacant seats in our sanctuaries — vacant seats at our home-hearths — the music of well-known voices hushed. Often just when we imagine we have at last obtained a stable footing, the scaffolding gives way, the prop on which for a lifetime we had been leaning fails, and we feel ourselves out amid the pitiless storm.

But is there nothing stable amid all to is mutability? — nothing secure and abiding amid these fleeting shadows? Yes! Jesus is without any variableness. Eighteen hundred years have rolled by since He left our world. The world has changed, but He is to this hour the same. “We can follow Him through all His wondrous pilgrimage of love on earth. We can behold Penitence crouching at His feet, and sent away forgiven; — Sorrow tracking His footsteps with tears, and sent away with her tears dried and her wounded spirit healed; — Pain and Sickness pleading with jDallid lip and wasted feature; and Pisease, at His omnipotent mandate, taking wings to itself and fleeing away! And Ho who IS now on the Heavenly Throne is” that same Jesus.^’’ His Ascension-frlories have not changed His changeless heart or alienated His affections. In Him we have a Rock which the billows of adversity can not shake. The spent fury of the chafing waves may reach us, — no more; and this only endearing the security and value of the ahiding Refuge!

Hoy, often does God rouse the storm to drive us from all creature confidences to the only stable One! How often does He poison and pollute the stream to lead us to seek the everlasting Fountain-liead! We may have lost much; but if we have found Thee, O blessed Jesup, we possess infinitely more than we have forfeited. “We can glory in the persuasion that nothing can ever separate us from Thy love. Our best earthly friends, a loolc may alienate; — an unintentional word may estrange, — the Grave must sunder. But ‘’^the LOKD liveth and blessed he my J^ocJc, and let the God of my silvoiion he exalted “What Thou hast been “yesterday” — yea, from everlasting ages — Thou art this day, and Thou shalt be for ever and ever! “We can look to the Bow of Thy promise3 and behold all of them in Thee “yea and amen T Thou art addressing: us from Thy Throne in glory — that Throne spoken of in Revelation as encircled with” the rainbow of emerald” (the emblem of peryC’ tuity), and laying, ‘’ Fear not, I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore 1” “Because I live, ye sliiill live also!”