But ah! every one of you'who are dancing with the covered paces of death, in the strange woman's first hall, let me break your spell; for now I shall open the doors of the last ward. Look! Listen! Witness your own end unless you take quickly a warning!

Ward of Death.-No longer does the incarnate wretch pretend to conceal her cruelty. She thrusts-ay! as if they were dirt-she shovels out the wretches. Some fall headlong through the rotten floor, -a long fall to a fiery bottom. The floor trembles to deep thunders which roll below. Here and there jets of flame spout up, and give a lurid light to the murky hall. Some would fain escape; and flying across the treacherous floor, which man never safely passed, they go, through pitfalls and treacherous traps, with hideous outcries and astounding yells, to perdition! Fiends laugh! The infernal laugh, the cry of agony, the thunder of damnation, shake the very roof and echo from wall to wall.

Oh that the young might see the end of vice before they see the beginning! I know that you shrink from this picture; but your safety requires that you should look long into the ward of Death, that fear may supply strength to your virtue. See the blood oozing from the wall, the fiery hands which pluck the wretches down, the light of hell gleaming through, and hear its roar as of a distant ocean chafed with storms. Will you sprinkle the wall with your blood? will you feed those flames with your flesh? will you add your voice to those thundering wails? will you go down a prey through the fiery floor of the chamber of death? Believe then the word of God: "Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death; . . . avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away!"

I have described the strange woman's house in strong language, and it needed it. If your taste shrinks from the description, so does mine. Hell, and all the ways of hell, when we pierce the cheating disguises and see the truth, are terrible and trying to behold; and if men would not walk there, neither would we pursue their steps, to sound the alarm and gather back whom we can.

"For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and he pondereth all his goings. His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins. He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray" (vers. 21-23).

These are the grand reasons why men should take heed to their ways. Will you allow God, yea, compel God, to look upon impurity? Should no respect be paid to the divine observer?

He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity with the least degree of allowance or approbation; why, then, force it upon his attention, and smite him in the eyes as with a sharp weapon? The end of evil is disastrous to the evildoer himself. He binds himself with cords he cannot rend. He makes a fool of himself, and a slave, in the very act of grasping his prizes and quaffing his delights. The bad man shuts his eyes, and supposes he has escaped hell, simply because he cannot see it. How great a fool may man become! Yet this fact, universally allowed, would seem to go for nothing as a moral appeal. The heart drags the whole nature down to death. Knowledge alone cannot save the soul. Herein is the miracle of grace! Here is the triumph of omnipotence! Come, my Lord, my God, my Saviour, and take charge of me. Never leave me to myself. Thou alone bringest light, and without thee all is darkness. Thou knowest the meaning of temptation; how persistent, how subtle, how sudden, how tremendous! Why should it be so? Is not everything a tribute to the mystery and grandeur of human life? Woman ruins man or saves him. She is sorceress or saviour. God of heaven, pity young men and save them. Death lies so close to life. ship, and thy grace is sufficient for us. be itself a prayer!

We are thy workmanLet our very weakness

Chapter vi. 6-11.

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: so shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man."

A SECULAR SERMON ON FORESIGHT.

REATION is full of teachers.

CR

There are indeed " sermons running brooks." It is a

in stones, and books in the mistake to imagine that men can learn only from the highest ; there is learning in the lowest as well. "Praise" may be found even in the mouth of the "suckling." God has written a lesson upon the minutest works of his hands. Everything represents thought. The infinite variety of his creations is but the expression of the infinite aspects of his mind. The facets of the diamond throw back differing flashes to the sun; and all God's works are facets, which burn, each with a singular glory. All is eloquent. All is music-music in form, or music in motion. All light teaches; all beauty persuades; all life inspires. We are now to gather around an insect. The busy ant is to be our minister. Instead of looking upward we are to look downward. could listen to an angel are to incline our ear to an ant.

We who

The great lesson which the ant teaches is foresight; the duty of rightly improving the passing hour, the wisdom of making the best of our opportunities. Some people appear to be utterly destitute of foresight. They cannot see the very next gate that is to be opened. They have no grasp of the day, the week, the month. They enjoy breakfast, and trust for dinner. They get the vicious notion that other people should work for them; and that, somehow, things will turn out all right. Now all wise people anxiously study the doctrine of inferences. They look 5

VOL. XIII.

upon one action as bearing upon another. Their lives are practically logical. Their behaviour is a chain of reasoning.

The faculty of foresight, the power of doing something for the future, is a faculty most divine. Rightly educated and developed, it gives man peculiar elevation, and invests him with commanding influence. He who sees farthest will rule best. Foresight is not to be confounded with distrust. There is a loose and light-headed theology which says: "Let to-morrow mind its own business, God will make all right." That is not faith, it is presumption; it is not philosophy, it is nonsense; it is not repose, it is the laziest indolence.

The wise exercise of foresight makes life pleasant. The man who cannot see through two moments is always in a hurry, is never calm, is always jostled and pushed by an invisible crowd; he sees a spectre where he might hail a friend; he cringes as a serf where he might dictate as a baron.

This foresight makes life pleasant by economising time. Time is golden. Moments cannot be weighed by carats. Hours glitter with a light purer than the ray of rubies. One man finds no hours in the day; another finds twenty-four, and makes them forty-eight and while midnight flings its solemn message over a sleeping town the wise man says to his God: "Thou deliveredst unto me a day, behold I have doubled its breadth of gold!"

This we find in our intercourse with men-that the man who has least to do takes most time to do it in, and that he who has most to accomplish is up hill long before the sluggard has saddled his lazy ass. Our greatest men have ever been the severest economists of time. The coxcomb spends time at the looking-glass which the philosopher spends over the inkhorn. While the pedant has no time to teach a child, great statesmen are teaching Homer to talk English. The ill-trained girl whose impoverished intellect is a lineal descendant of Pharaoh's leanest kine cannot find time to go to the Sunday-school, while one of our Lord Chancellors was never late at his Sunday class through eight-and-twenty years! Men grow very poetical about sunset who have never a single word to say about sunrise! Men have

cruelly rejected the Esau of morning, and flattered the Jacob of evening. Poor slighted sunrise! The West has many laureates, the East remains unsung. And yet not unsung. Work is its poetry; labour is the harp on which its praise is harped; and the moral monuments which industry has piled shall live when the palaces of the Cæsars have crumbled, and even the pyramids of the Pharaohs are the shadows of an unremembered past.

Foresight renders life pleasant by systematising duties. System is success. Some persons have no power of systematising. They are clumsy; their fingers are all thumbs, and all their thumbs are upon their left hands. This is true among men and women alike. A slatternly woman is tormentor enough for any man who loves order. She has many clocks, but no time. She rocks her duties to sleep, and then imagines she has discharged them. She puts off every engagement, and discounts all her purposes at a ruinous percentage. So also with the man of no system. He frets himself to death, and perishes not alone. Procrastination binds him hand and foot, and takes him out to be maddened by the laugh of triumphant enemies. He keeps books, but they are all waste-books. He has ledgers, but they are blank. He is always going to do something, but never does it. He moves, seconds, and carries resolutions every day; that is, he moves them off to one side, and carries them into oblivion! The men in the Church who do least are generally the men of leisure. They have only time to cross their legs beside a pleasant fire and criticise other people. They sleep long, that they may have vigour to grumble long. Half poisoned with wine, and half melted with fire, they have no apprehension of the possibilities of life. They dread noise because it is unfavourable to dreams, and their only objection to sleeping is that they have to waken again! Every Church is more or less cumbered with such men,-men of rapid tongues but leaden feet.

Foresight renders life pleasant by diminishing difficulties. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. The man who sleeps on fine days is sure to complain most loudly in wet weather. Fore