hood truth. He can not make sin blessed, nor annex hell to innocence. Law moves on its majestic course irresistible. If His chosen Son violates law, and throws Himself from the pinnacle, He dies. If you resist a law of the universe in its eternal march, the universe crushes you, that is all. Consider what law is, and then the idea of bloody vengeance passes away altogether from the sacrifice. It is not "an eye for an eye," and "a tooth for a tooth," in the sanguinary spirit of the old retaliatory legislation. It is the eternal impossibility of violating that law of the universe whereby penalty is annexed to transgression, and must fall, either laden with curse or rich in blessing.

The second idea which it behooves us to master is that of the world's sin. The Apostle John always viewed sin as a great connected principle-One; a single world-spirit-exactly as the electricity with which the universe is charged is indivisible, imponderable, one, so that you can not separate it from the great ocean of fluid. The electric spark that slumbers in the dew-drop is part of the flood which struck the oak. Had that spark not been there, it could be demonstrated that the whole previous constitution of the universe might have been different, and the oak not have been struck.

Let us possess ourselves of this view of sin, for it is the true one. Separate acts of sin are but manifestations of one great principle. It was thus that the Saviour looked on the sins of His day. The Jews of that age had had no hand in the murder of Abel or Zacharias, but they were of kindred spirit with the men who slew them. Condemning their murderers, they imitated their act. In that imitation they "allowed the deeds of their fathers;" they shared in the guilt of the act which had been consummated, because they had the spirit which led to it. "The blood of them all shall come on this generation.' It was so, too, that Stephen looked on the act of his assassins. When God's glory streamed upon his face, he felt that the transaction going on then was not simply the violence of a mob in an obscure corner of the world, it was an outbreak of the great principle of evil. He saw in their act the resurrection of the spirit of those who had "resisted the Holy Ghost" in their day, slain the prophets, opposed Moses, crucified "the just one," and felt that their genuine descendants were now opposing themselves to the form in which Truth and Goodness were appearing in his day.

It is in this way only that you will be able, with any reality of feeling, to enter into the truth that "your sins nailed

Him to the cross CC that the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all;" that He died "not for that nation only, but that also He should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad." If, for instance, indisputable evidence be given of the saintliness of a man whose creed and views are not yours, and rather than admit that good in him is good, you invent all manner of possible motives to discredit his excellence, then let the thought arise, This is the resurrection of the spirit which was rampant in the days of Jesus; the spirit of those who saw the purest goodness, and rather than acknowledge it to be good, preferred to account for it as a diabolical power. Say to yourself, I am verging on the spirit of the sin that was unpardonable, I am crucifying the Son of God afresh.

If in society you hear the homage unrebuked-Honor to the rich man's splendid offering, instead of glory to the widow's humble mite-if you see the weak and defenseless punished severely for the sins which the great and strong do unblushingly, and even with the connivance and admiration of society-if you find sins of frailty placed on the same level with sins of pride and presumption-or if you find guilt of any kind palliated instead of mourned, then let the dreadful thought arise in the fullness of its meaning-I allow the deeds of those days-His blood shall come upon this generation. My sin and your sin, the sin of all, bears the guilt of the Redeemer's sacrifice. It was vicarious-He suffered for what He never did. "Not for that nation only, but that also He should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad."

To conclude: estimate rightly the death of Christ. It was not simply the world's example-it was the world's Sacrifice. He died not merely as a martyr to the truth. His death is the world's life. Ask ye what life is? Life is not exemption from penalty. Salvation is not escape from suffering and punishment. The Redeemer suffered punishment, but the Redeemer's soul had blessedness in the very midst of punishment. Life is elevation of soul-nobleness-Divine character. The spirit of Caiaphas was death: to receive all, and give nothing to sacrifice others to himself. The spirit of Christ was life: to give and not receive to be sacrificed, and not to sacrifice. Hear Him again: "He that loseth his life, the same shall find it." That is life: the spirit of losing all for love's sake. That is the soul's life which alone is blessedness and heaven. By realizing that ideal of humanity, Christ furnished the life which we appropriate to ourselves only when we enter into His spirit.

Listen: Only by renouncing sin is His death to sin yours -only by quitting it are you free from the guilt of His blood -only by voluntary acceptance of the law of the Cross, selfsurrender to the will of God, and self-devotion to the good of others as the law of your being, do you enter into that present and future heaven which is the purchase of His vicarious sacrifice.

X.

REALIZING THE SECOND ADVENT.

"For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me. Job xix. 25–27.

THE hardest, the severest, the last lesson which man has to learn upon this earth, is submission to the will of God. It is the hardest lesson, because to our blinded eye-sight it often seems a cruel will. It is a severe lesson, because it can be only taught by the blighting of much that had been most dear. It is the last lesson, because when a man has learned that, he is fit to be transplanted from a world of willfulness to a world in which one will alone is loved, and only one is done. All that saintly experience ever had to teach resolves itself into this, the lesson how to say affectionately, "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." Slowly and stubbornly our hearts acquiesce in that. The holiest in this congregation, so far as he has mastered the lesson, will acknowledge that many a sore and angry feeling against his God had to be subdued, many a dream of earthly brightness broken, and many a burning throb stilled in a proud, resentful heart, before he was willing to suffer God to be sovereign in His own world, and do with him and his as seemed to Him best.

The earliest record that we have of this struggle in the human bosom is found in the Book of Job. It is the most ancient statement we have of the perplexities and miseries of life, so graphic, so true to nature, that it proclaims at once that what we are reading is drawn not from romance but life. It has been said that religious experience is but the fictitious creation of a polished age, when fanciful feelings are called into existence by hearts bent back in reflex and morbid action on themselves. We have an answer to that in this book. Religion is no morbid fancy. In the rough, rude

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ages when Job lived, when men did not dwell on their feelings as in later centuries, the heart-work of religion was manifestly the same earnest, passionate thing that it is now. The heart's misgivings were the same beneath the tent of an Arabian Emir which they are beneath the roof of a modern Christian. Blow after blow fell on the Oriental chieftain. One day he was a father-a prince-the lord of many vassals and many flocks, and buoyant in one of the best of blessings, health; the next, he was a childless, blighted, ruined man. And then it was that there came from Job's lips those yearnings for the quiet of the grave which are so touching, so real; and, considering that some of the strongest of the elect of God have yielded to them for a moment, we might almost say, so pardonable: "I should have been at restwhere the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. There the prisoners rest together: they hear not the voice of the oppressor. Wherefore is light given unto him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter of 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?"

What is the Book of Job but the record of an earnest soul's perplexities? The double difficulty of life solved there, the existence of moral evil-the question whether suffering is a mark of wrath or not. What falls from Job's lips is the musing of a man half-stunned, half-surprised, looking out upon the darkness of life, and asking sorrowfully why are these things so? And all that falls from his friends' lips is the common-place remarks of men upon what is inscrutablemaxims learned second-hand by rote and not by heart, fragments of deep truths, but truths misapplied, distorted, torn out of all connection of time and place, so as to become actual falsehoods: only blistering a raw wound.

It was from these awkward admonitions that Job appealed in the text. He appealed from the tribunal of man's opinion to a tribunal where sincerity shall be cleared and vindicated. He appealed from a world of confusion, where all the foundations of the earth are out of course, to a world where all shall be set right. He appealed from the dark dealings of a God whose way it is to hide Himself, to a God who shall stand upon this earth in the clear radiance of a love on which suspicion's self can not rest a doubt. It was faith straining through the mist, and discerning the firm land that is beyond. "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.” We take two points:

I. The certainty of God's interference in the affairs of this world.

II. The means of realizing that interference.

God's interference, again, is contemplated in this passage in a twofold aspect: A present superintendence—“I know that my Redeemer liveth." A future, personal, visible interference" He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.”

I. His present superintendence.

1. The first truth contained in that is God's personal existence. It is not chance, nor fate, which sits at the wheel of this world's revolutions. It was no fortuitous concourse of atoms which massed themselves into a world of beauty. It was no accidental train of circumstances which has brought the human race to their present state. It was a living God. And it is just so far as this is the conviction of every day, and every hour, and every minute-"My Redeemer liveth" that one man deserves to be called more religious than anoth

er.

To be religious is to feel that God is the Ever Near. It is to go through life with this thought coming instinctively and unbidden, "Thou, God, seest me." A life of religion is a life of faith and faith is that strange faculty by which man feels the presence of the invisible; exactly as some animals have the power of seeing in the dark. That is the difference between the Christian and the world.

Most men know nothing beyond what they see. This lovely world is all in all to them: its outer beauty, not its hidden loveliness. Prosperity-struggle-sadness-it is all the same. They struggle through it all alone, and when old age comes, and the companions of early days are gone, they feel that they are solitary. In all this strange, deep world they never meet, or but for a moment, the Spirit of it all, who stands at their very side. And it is exactly the opposite of this that makes a Christian. Move where he will, there is a Thought and a Presence which he can not put aside. He is haunted forever by the Eternal Mind. God looks out upon him from the clear sky, and through the thick darkness-is present in the raindrop that trickles down the branches, and in the tempest that crashes down the forest. A living Redeemer stands beside him-goes with him-talks with him, as a man with his friend. The emphatic description of a life of spirituality is: "Enoch walked with God:" and it seems to be one reason why a manifestation of God was given us in the flesh, that this livingness of God might be more distinctly felt by us.

We must not throw into these words of Job a meaning which Job had not. Reading these verses, some have dis