evangelical sermon but the evangelical Providence will take hold of that man, and wring him till he cry out, "I abhor myself in dust and ashes." When such sorrow overtakes a man it is like morning falling upon a traveller: it is not darkness, it is light; it is not imprisonment, it is deliverance; it is not limitation, it is an expansion and enfranchisement in divine rulership and dominion and sacred, holy hope. So when the Providence darkens around us, it is a cloud full of bright stars and suns. Let the outer enclosure fall off, and the shining orb will beam and burn upon our eyes in ample, genial summer.

There is a tremendous responsibility in returning an affirmative answer to the inquiry of the text. The nature and extent of that responsibility throws immeasurable doubt upon an audacious and profane affirmative. If a man were to say, "Yes, I have made my heart clean, and am pure from my sin," the first thing he would do would be to contradict the whole testimony of Scripture. Nowhere in the Bible is it allowed that any man can purify his own nature. Everywhere in the Scriptures the exact contrary is explicitly and emphatically laid down. We ought not to forego the testimony of Scripture lightly upon the easy affirmation of a man who in all probability has not taken into consideration the full signification of the terms which he employs when he declares himself pure and clean.

The next thing he does is to supersede the work of Christ. The declaration of the gospel is that the blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin; without shedding of blood there is no remission. The gospel declaration is that "if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The evangelical statement is, "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost." He therefore undertakes a very grave responsibility who testifies that without Christ he has solved the problem of purity and self-cleansing.

The next thing he does is to withdraw himself from all the cleansing, purifying agencies which constitute the redeeming ministry of the universe. He commits the sin against the Holy

Ghost the unpardonable sin. Why unpardonable? Because he comes out of the region within which the Holy Ghost operates. Were it possible for an owner of many fields to withdraw one of them from the influence of the sun, and the dew, and the living air, he would commit the unpardonable sin in that department of action. That is the unpardonable sin-getting away from, cutting the connection with, all spiritual agency, all redeeming power, all the mediatorial scheme of Christ, involving and including his life, his doctrine, his example, his atoning sacrificial death, his divine resurrection, his priestly intercession, and his great gift of the ever-pleading, ever-living, ever-renewing Holy Ghost.

Seeing then that so much responsibility would be incurred by returning an affirmative reply to the text, who will dare say Yes? Let God be true and every man a liar. Blessed are those who know the power and the painfulness of conviction of sin. Until we know what sin is we cannot understand the meaning of grace. Only he who has been plagued as with the torment of fire till his tongue, a blistered tongue, has been unable to ask for the one drop of water that would cool its fever and renew the sufferer's hope-only those who have known the hopelessness of that agony-are prepared for the Cross, the Christ, the Blood, the Gospel.

Are we trifling with little external terms and neglecting inner and spiritual realities? Are we debating etymologies when sin is drinking our blood, and leaving us withered, desiccated, at the Creator's feet? Begin to be wise by beginning to be selfrenouncing. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. There is no heaven along the line of self-hope, there is no pardon in the direction of self-trust. Could we see a man with condemnation written upon his own brow with his own hand, and the same word written upon his heart, upon his will, upon his understanding, upon his imagination-could we see a man who has written himself unworthy of God's light and God's love, we should see a soul in the right direction for receiving and appreciating the infinite gospel of the eternal God. May he who can give the hell of conviction bless us with the heaven of reconciliation!

PRAYER.

ALMIGHTY GOD, for every tone of hope in thy blessed word we praise thee, for our hearts are much cast down, and are in great pain and fear from time to time, so that we need some word from thy holy Book to touch our life in its shame, and to bring back the hope which we have sinned away. Thy word is full of light, the entrance of thy word giveth life to the heart. We have lost our first estate, and are no longer upright before God; we have sought out many inventions, every one of which has proved a deceit and a lie, so that we, who began in our own sagacity to give ourselves life, have utterly failed to do anything but aggravate our degradation and our shame. We come to the living for life, to the sun for light, to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for new creation, new manhood, new hope, for the purity which in itself is immortal, for the rest which is deep as the peace of God, and coming so, even along the line of thine own sweet welcome, thou wilt not say to our hearts one word to increase their discouragement or their distress. We live in thy Son, who died for us; we live by faith on the Son of God; we live, yet not we, but Christ liveth in us, and the life which we now live in the flesh is a life of faith, a mystery that is full of light a wondrous enjoyment beyond the expression of words. For every hope of immortality we bless the Lord alone. He made us, and not we ourselves, and it hath pleased him to make us in his own image and likeness. We mourn our sin, for therein have we found the truth of thy word, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The wages of sin is death; the soul that sinneth it shall die; we are all dead men; before the Lord we are as if we had never been, and thou, blessed Christ, Eternal Son of the Eternal Father, art come as the Resurrection and the Life to bring life and immortality to light, so that in thee we live again, and in thee we cannot die. This day we keep holy festival; we take the Bread and the Cup, which typify the body and the blood of Jesus Christ. We need such memories; we bless thee for such tokens of recollection and such simple helps on the wilderness way. These things remind us of Christ's presence here and Christ's great ministry. We would eat and drink after examination of our souls in the sight of God-not that we may find no sin there, but that we may find an earnest and simple desire that our sin may be washed away and our souls be thoroughly cleansed. We come before this table of memorial, not as perfect men, but as souls that trust in Christ, that renounce themselves and their sins, that look away from their own strength unto the omnipotence of the loving Saviour, as men who, having tried sin and found it wanting, come to Christ the living Lord, and cast themselves upon his finished work, as men who do not deserve to be pardoned, and who yet, by the grace of God, may be forgiven. Inasmuch as we come before thee in

living God, may our fire be kindled from the fire of the altar. Bless us in business, where it is almost impossible to be blessed, where lies are profits, where falsehood is canonized. Deliver us from double speech, from double meaning, from all manner of duplicity; may we be sincere, transparent, knowing that it is more needful for us to be good than that we should live. The Lord be with those for whom we ought to pray in special tenderness: be with the bereaved in their loneliness-oh, so cold, so cold! Be with those who are in great sorrow because of imminent calamity; thou knowest the power of the imagination, thou knowest how our enemy can operate upon our fancy and make great calamities out of small appearances; remember our frame, remember we are dust. Be with all the little children; they know not upon what scene they have come, they think of flowers and play and music and dance and revel of innocence; they know not that they are already in the enemy's land: to thy keeping we commend them; they will not be lost if thou canst save them, thou Shepherd of the universe. Come out from thy dwelling-place, O thou that inhabitest eternity, and seek us, and find us, and save us. We pray at the Cross, for there alone may men pray; we behold the dying Saviour; we pray at the open grave where the angels say concerning our loved One, He is not here, he is risen ; yea, we come to his seat of intercession and there pray, knowing that he will take up our supplication into his own great pleading and make it prevalent before the throne. The Lord help us, the Lord carry our burdens himself awhile, the Lord lead us, through many a dark place, into the land of the morning. Amen.

Chapter xx. 23.

"A false balance is not good."

FALSE BALANCES.

EXTS of this kind show the quality of the Bible.

TEX

No man

ce on equately represent contents of

the Book of God. When we say "Bible," what part of the Bible do we mean? There are many Bibles in one. It is possible to admire the Bible. Admiration is an offence to God. God does not seek admiration, he seeks worship. When we admire and praise the Bible we may be thinking of its comforts and promises, its minor music, its tender speeches to the heart. That is not the Bible; that is part of the great Book—an essential, beautiful, indispensable part, because it is fitted to the valley and the darkness, the pain and the restlessness of life: but it would be a poor Bible if it were a Bible of promise only. We must go into other books it we would know what the Bible is in its totality. The bad man must hate the Book of Proverbs; the low-lived business man never looks into the book that rebukes him, the book that knows his little tricks, the book that exposes 16

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him in every line. He wonders who wrote the Proverbs. is content to make it a historical question whilst he goes on with his low villainy. We think of the Bible as a Book of spiritual metaphysics, dealing with the unknown and the unknowable, the unthought and the unthinkable. The Bible does deal with these lofty subjects, but it also comes in and tests your yard-wand, saying, You thought this wand was thirty-six inches long, it is only thirty-five and a half. How glad we should be then if the Bible would deal with the unthinkable! Then we could be Agnostics in relation to it; but when it impertinently, with divine rudeness, takes up the yard-wand, what becomes of our little theory that "business is business, and religion is religion"? Not in the estimation of the Bible. We do not want men who talk so to know the Bible in any sense of patronising it; we do not want such men, we want them to be infidels. To have the Bible and disobey it is agnosticism; to cry, The Bible for ever! and never to practise its morality, is the direst, shamefullest atheism. We do not want such people to come to church unless they come in the spirit of penitence, the spirit of men who are ashamed of themselves and want to be better and to do better. This Book of Proverbs should be the business man's book: then he would sweat nobody, injure nobody; would help 'everybody; would say, The loaf of bread is mine to share with a man who has no loaf. The Book of Proverbs would soon make a new society. When the Bible is discussed, in what parts do men take refuge when they would oppose it? Why do they not go into those parts which they can understand and apply, . and wait until the other door is open? There is a good deal in the Bible that men might do, and whilst they are doing that they might be waiting in holy expectation for brighter visions, for widening horizons; meanwhile, what doth thy God require of thee, O man, but to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God? Begin there, and you will end there; you will sweep through an infinite firmament of thought, but you will come back to that in heaven. What more shall the bright souls do? It is a long way from the first note to the last in this great life-anthem, and yet the first note and the last are identical.

Texts like this throw responsibility upon the right parties.