the woman has disappeared, and the hardy resolution of the Man, with more than manly daring, is found in her stead. This is the "patience" for us to cultivate: To bear and to persevere. However dark and profitless, however painful and weary, existence may have become; however any man, like Elijah, may be tempted to cast himself beneath the juniper-tree and say, is enough: now, O Lord!"-life is not done, and our Christian character is not won, so long as God has anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do.

"It

Patience, however, has another meaning. It is the opposite of that impatience which cannot wait. This is one of the difficulties of spiritual life. We are disappointed if the harvest do not come at once.

Last Tuesday, doubtless, you thought that all was done, and that there would be no more falling back.

Alas! a little experience will correct that. If the husbandman, disappointed at the delay which ensues before the blade breaks the soil, were to rake away the earth to examine if germination were going on, he would have a poor harvest. He must have "long patience, till he receive the early and the latter rain." The winter frost must mellow the seed lying in the genial bosom of the earth: the rains of spring must swell it, and the suns of summer mature it. So with you. It is the work of a long life to become a Christian. Many, O, many a time, are we tempted to say, "I make no progress at all. It is only failure after failure. Nothing grows." Now look at the sea when the flood is coming in. Go and stand by the seabeach, and you will think that the ceaseless flux and reflux is but retrogression equal to the advance. But

look again in an hour's time, and the whole ocean nas advanced. Every advance has been beyond the last, and every retrograde movement has been an imperceptible trifle less than the last. This is progress; to be estimated at the end of hours, not minutes. And this is Christian progress. Many a fluctuation many a backward motion with a rush at times so vehement that all seems lost; but, if the Eternal work be real, every failure has been a real gain, and the next does not carry us so far back as we were before. Every advance is a real gain, and part of it is never lost. Both when we advance and when we fail, we gain. We are nearer to God than we were. The flood of spirit-life has carried us up higher on the everlasting shores, where the waves of life beat no more, and its fluctuations end, and all is safe at last. "This is the faith and patience of the saints."

It was because of the second of these requirements, Meditation, that I was anxious we should meet on Sunday next for an early communion, at eight o'clock. I desire that the candidates may have a more solemn and definite communion of their own, with few others. present except their own relations and friends. In silence and quietness, we will meet together then. Before the world has put on its full robe of light, and before the busy gay crowd have begun to throng our streets, before the distractions of the day begin, we will consecrate the early freshness of our souls untrodden, unhardened, undissipated-to God. We will meet in the simplicity of brotherhood and sisterhood. We will have communion in a sacred meal which shall exhibit as nearly as may be the idea of family affec tion. Ye that are beginning life, and we who know

something of it,-ye that offer yourselves for the first time at that table, and we who, after sad experience and repeated failure, still desire again to renew our aspirations and our vows to Him,-we will come and breathe together that prayer, which I commended to you at your confirmation,-" Our Father which art in Heaven-lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

III.

JACOB'S WRESTLING.

CONFIRMATION LECTURE.

GEN. Xxxii. 28, 29. "And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. And Jacob asked him, and said, Tel: me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.'

THE Complexion of this story is peculiarly Jewish. It contained three points which were specially interesting to every Jew in a national point of view. It explained to him why he was called Israelite. It traced the origin of his own name, Israelite, to a distant ancestor, who had signally exhibited religious strength, and been, in the language of those times, a wrestler with God, from whence he had obtained the name Israel. It cast much deep and curious interest round an otherwise insignificant village, Peniel, where this transaction had taken place, and whicn derived its name from it, -Peniel, the face of God. And, besides, it explained the origin of a singular custom, which might seem a superstitious one, of not suffering a particular muscle to be eaten, and regard ing it with a kind of religious awe, as the part in which Jacob was said by tradition to have been injured by the earnest tension of his frame during this

struggle. So far all is Jewish, narrow, merely of local interest. Besides this, much of the story is evidently mythical.

It is clear at once that it belongs to that earlier period of literature when traditions are preserved in a poetical shape, adapted to the rude conceptions of the day, but enshrining an inner and a deep truth. To disengage this truth from the form in which it is encased, is the duty of the expositor.

Now, putting aside the form of this narrative, and looking into the heart and meaning of it, it will become apparent that we have no longer anything infantine, or Jewish, or of limited interest, but a wide truth, wide as human nature; and that there is before us the record of an inward spiritual struggle, as real now in the nineteenth century as then; as real in every earnest man as it was in the history of Jacob.

We take these points:

I. The nameless secret of Existence.

II. The revelation of that secret to the Soul.

The circumstances which preceded this event were these: More than twenty years before, Jacob had been guilty of a deliberate sin. He had deceived his father; he had over-reached his free-spirited, impetuous, open-hearted brother Esau. Never, during all those twenty years, had he seen the man whom he had injured. But now, on the point of returning to his native country, news was brought to him of his brother's approach, which made a meeting inevitable. Jacob made all his dispositions and arrangements to prepare for the worst. He sent over the brook Jabbok first the part of his family whom he valued least, and