PREFACE

This Epistle bears no name of author, or designation of church. But it needs neither. In every sentence we can detect the Authorship of the Holy Spirit, and feel that it has a message, not to one age, but to all ages, not to one community, but to the universal Church.

We do not therefore discuss questions which are amply treated in every commentary, but set ourselves at once to derive those great spiritual lessons which are enshrined in these sublime words.

And probably there is no better way of vindicating the authority of the Pentateuch than by showing that it lay at the basis of the teaching of the early Church, and that the Book of Leviticus especially was the seed-plot of New Testament Theology.

There are two strong tendencies flowing around us in the present day: the one, to minimise the substitutionary aspect of the death of Christ; the other, to exaggerate the importance of mere outward rite. To each of these the study of this great Epistle is corrective.

We are taught that our Lord's death was a Sacrifice. We are taught also that we have passed from the realm of shadows into that of realities.

These chapters are altogether inadequate for the treatment of so vast a theme, but such as they are, they are sent forth, in dependence on the Divine Blessing, in the fervent hope that they may serve to make more clear and plain to those who would find and enter it, the Way into the Holiest of all.

CHAPTER 1: THE WORD OF GOD

GOD, Who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son." (Hebrews 1.1-2).

What word could more fittingly stand at the head of the first line of the first paragraph in this noble epistle! Each structure must rest on Him as foundation, each tree must spring from Him as root; each design and enterprise must originate in Him as source.

"IN THE BEGINNING - GOD," is a worthy motto to inscribe at the commencement of every treatise, be it the ponderous volume or the ephemeral tract. And with that name we commence our attempt to gather up some of the glowing lessons which were first addressed to the persecuted and wavering Hebrews in the primitive age, but have ever been most highly prized by believing Gentiles throughout the universal Church.

The feast was originally spread for the children of the race of Abraham; but who shall challenge our right to the crumbs?

In the original Greek, the word "God" is preceded by two other words which describe the variety and multiplicity of His revelation to man. And the whole verse is full of interest as detailing the origin and authority of the Word of God, and as illustrating the great law which appears in so many parts of the works of God, and has been fitly called the law of variety in unity.

That law operates in Nature, the earliest book of God. No thoughtful man can look around him without being arrested by the infinite variety that meets him on every side. "All flesh is not the same flesh; . . . there are celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one; and the glory of the terrestrial is another. . . . One star differs from another star in glory."

You cannot match two faces in a crowd; two leaves in a forest; or two flowers in the woodlands of spring. It would seem as if the moulds in which natural products are being shaped are broken up and cast aside as soon as one result has been attained. And it is this which affords such an infinite field for investigation and enjoyment, forbidding all fear of monotony or weariness of soul.

And yet, amid all natural variety, there is a marvellous unity. Every part of the universe interlocks by subtle and delicate links with every other part. You cannot disturb the balance anywhere without sending a shock of disturbance through the whole system. Just as in some majestic Gothic minster the same idea repeats itself in bolder or slighter forms, so do the same great thoughts recur in tree and flower, in molecule and planet, in tiny atom and man. And all this because, if you penetrate to Nature's heart, you meet God.

"Of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things." (Romans 11.36). "There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God Who works all in all." (1 Corinthians 12.6). The unity that pervades Nature's temple is the result of its having originated from one mind, and having been effected by one hand, the mind and hand of God.

That law also operates throughout the Scriptures. There is as great variety there as in Nature. They were written in different ages. Some in the days of "the fathers"; others at "the end of these days" for us.

In the opening chapters, under the guidance of the Spirit of God, Moses has embodied fragments of hallowed tradition, which passed from lip to lip in the tents of the patriarchs; and its later chapters were written when the holy city, Jerusalem, had already been smitten to the ground by the mailed hand of Titus.

They were written in different countries. These in the deserts of Arabia, those under the shadow of the pyramids, and others amid the tides of life that swept through the greatest cities of Greece and Rome.

You can detect in some the simple pastoral life of Palestine, in others the magnificence of Nebuchadnezzar's empire. In one there is the murmur of the blue Aegean; and in several the clank of the fetters in the Roman prison cell.

They were written by men belonging to various ranks, occupations, and methods of thought. Shepherds and fishermen, warriors and kings, the psalmist, the prophet, and the priest; some employing the stately religious Hebrew, others the Aramaic patois, others the polished Greek.

There is every variety of style, from the friendly letter, or sententious proverb, to the national history, or the carefully prepared treatise, in which thought and expression glow as in the fires -- but all contributing their quota to the symmetry and beauty of the whole.

And yet, throughout the Bible, there is an indubitable unity. What else could have led mankind to look upon these sixty-six books as being so unmistakably related to each other that they must be bound up together under a common cover?

There has been something so unique in these books that they have always stood and fallen together. To disintegrate one has been to loose them all. Belief in one has led to belief in all. Their hands are linked and locked so tightly that where one goes all must follow.

And though wise and clever men have tried their best, they have never been able to produce a single treatise containing that undefinable quality which gives these their mysterious oneness; and to lack which is fatal to the claims of any book to be included with them, or to demand the special veneration and homage of mankind.

The world is full of religious books, but the man who has fed his religious life on the Bible will tell in a moment the difference between them and the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

The eye can instantly detect the absence of life in the artificial flower, the tongue can immediately and certainly detect the absence or presence of a certain flavour submitted to the taste, and the heart of man, his moral sense, is quick to detect the absence in all other religious books of a certain savour which pervades the Bible, from Genesis, the book of beginnings, to the Apocalyptic announcements of the quick coming of the King.

And in the possession of this mysterious attribute, the Old and New Testaments are one. You cannot say there is more of it in the glowing paragraphs of the Apostle Paul than in the splendid prophecies and appeals of the great evangelic prophet, Isaiah. It is certainly in the Gospels, but it is not less in the story of the Exodus.

Throughout there is silence on topics which merely gratify curiosity, but on which other professed revelations have been copiously full. Throughout, there is no attempt to give instruction on science or nature, but to bend all energy in discussing the claims of God on men. Throughout, the crimson cord of sacrifice is clearly manifest, on which the books are strung together as beads upon a thread.

And throughout, there is ever the subtle, mysterious, ineffable quality called Inspiration, a term which is explained by the majestic words of this opening verse, "God, having spoken of old to the fathers, has at the end of these days spoken to us."

Scripture is the speech of God to man. It is this which gives it its unity. "The Lord, the mighty God, has spoken, and called the earth." The writers may differ; but the inspiring mind is the same. The instruments may vary; but in every case the same theme is being played by the same master-hand. We should read the Bible as those who listen to the very speech of God. Well may it be called "the Word of God."

But the Scripture is God's speech in man. The heavenly treasure is in vessels of earth. "He spoke to the fathers in the prophets. . . He has spoken unto us in His Son." It is very remarkable to study the life of Jesus, and to listen to His constant statements as to the source of His marvellous words.

So utterly had He emptied Himself, that He originated nothing from Himself, but lived by the Father, in the same way as we are to live by Him. He distinctly declared that the words He spoke, He spoke not of Himself, but that words and works alike were the outcome of the Father, who dwelt within. Through those lips of clay the eternal God was speaking. Well might He also be called "the Word of God"!

And here the words of the prophets in the Old Testament are levelled up to the plane of the words of Jesus in the New. Without staying to make the least distinction, our writer tells us, under the teaching of the Spirit, that He who spoke in the one spoke also in the other.

Let us then think with equal reverence of the Old Testament as of the New. It was our Saviour's Bible. It was the food which Jesus loved, and lived upon. He was content to fast from all other food, if only He might have this. It was His one supreme appeal in conflict with the devil, and in the clinching of His arguments and exhortations with men.

And here we discover the reason. The voice of God spoke in the prophets, whose very name likens them to the up-rush of the geyser from its hidden source.

As God spoke in men, it is clear that He left them to express His thoughts in the language, and after the method, most familiar to them. They will speak of Nature just as they have been accustomed to find her. They will use the mode of speech whether poem or prose which is most habitual to their cast of thought. They will make allusions to the events transpiring around them, so as to be easily understood by their fellows.

But, whilst thus left to express God's thoughts in their own way, yet most certainly the divine Spirit must have carefully superintended their utterances, so that their words should accurately convey His messages to men.

In many parts of the Bible there is absolute dictation, word for word. In others, there is divine superintendence guarding from error, and guiding in the selection and arrangement of materials, as when Daniel quotes from historic records, and Moses embodies the sacred stories which his mother had taught him beside the flowing Nile.

In all, there is the full inspiration of the Spirit of God, by whom all Scripture has been given. Holy men spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, . . . searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify" (2 Tim. 3.16 ; 2 Pet. 1. 20, 21; 1 Pet. 2.2).

We need not deny that other men have been illuminated, but the difference between illumination and inspiration is as far as the east is from the west. Nor do we say that God has not spoken in other men, or in these men at other times, but we do say that only in the Bible has God given the supreme revelation of His will, and the authoritative rule of our faith and practice.

The heart of man bears witness to this. We know that there is a tone in these words which is heard in no other voice. The upper chords of this instrument give it a timbre which none other can rival.

The revelation in the Old Testament was given in fragments (or portions). This is the meaning of the word rendered in the Old Version sundry times, and in the Revised divers portions. It refers, not to the successive ages over which it was spread, but to the numerous "portions" into which it was broken up. No one prophet could speak out all the truth. Each was entrusted with one or two syllables in the mighty sentences of God's speech.

At the best the view caught of God, and given to men through the prophets, though true, was partial and limited. But in Jesus there is nothing of this piecemeal revelation. "In him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." (Colossians 2.9). He has revealed the Father. Whosoever has seen Him has seen God, and to hear His words is to get the full-orbed revelation of the Infinite.

The earlier revelation was in many forms. The earthquake, the fire, the tempest, and the still small voice - each had its ministry. Symbol and parable, vision and metaphor, type and historic foreshadowing, all in turn served the divine end, like the ray which is broken into many prismatic hues. But in Jesus there is the steady shining of the pure ray of His glory, one uniform and invariable method of revelation.

Oh the matchless and glorious Book, the Word of God to men - to us, revealing not only God, but ourselves, explaining moods for which we had no cipher, touching us as no other book can, and in moments when all voices beside wax faint and still, telling facts which we have not been able to discover, but which we instantly recognise as truth; the bread of the soul, the key of life, disclosing more depths as we climb higher in Christian experience. We have tested you too long to doubt that you are what Jesus said you were, the indispensable and precious gift of God.

CHAPTER 2: THE DIGNITY OF CHRIST

"Who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. Being made so much better than the angels." (Hebrews 1.3-4).

In these few lines we can but lightly touch on the majestic titles which a loving and adoring heart here heaps around the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. The theme might well engage a seraph's tongue!

Yet our hearts may glow with ardour of the same nature, if not of the same amount. And perhaps we may be conscious of elements of rapture which the sons of light may never know, because of His near kinship to us. "My heart overflows with a goodly matter: I speak the things which I have made touching the King" (Psalm 45.1).

SON. --- " He has spoken to us in His Son." God has many sons, but only one Son. When, on the morning of His resurrection, our Lord met the frightened women, He said, "I ascend unto My Father and your Father, and My God and your God." But, as He used the words, they meant infinitely more of Himself than they could ever mean of man, however saintly or childlike. No creature-wing shall ever avail to carry us across the abyss which separates all created from all uncreated life.

But we may reverently accept the fact, so repeatedly emphasised, that Jesus is "the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father" (John 1.18). He is Son in a sense altogether unique.

This term, as used by our Lord, and as understood by the Jews, not only signified divine relationship, but divine equality. Hence, on one occasion, the Jews sought to kill him, because He said that God was His own Father, making Himself equal with God (John 5.18). And He, so far from correcting the opinion - as He must have done instantly, had it been erroneous - went on to confirm it and to substantiate its truthfulness.

The impression which Jesus of Nazareth left on all who knew Him was that of His extreme humility, but here was a point in which He could not abate one jot or tittle of His claims, lest He should be false to His knowledge of Himself, and to the repeated voice of God.

And so He died, because He affirmed, amid the assumed horror of His judges, that He was the Christ, the Son of God. "He counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God." (Philippians 2.6). It was His right.

His dignity is still further elaborated in the words which follow. He is THE BEAM OF THE DIVINE GLORY, for so might the word translated effulgence be rendered.

We have never seen the sun, but only its far-travelled ray, which left its surface some few minutes before. But the ray is of the same constitution as the orb from which it comes; if you unravel its texture, you will learn something of the very nature of the sun; they live in perpetual and glorious unity.

And as we consider the intimacy of that union, we are reminded of those familiar words, which tell us that though no man has seen God at any time, yet He has been revealed in the Word made flesh. We hear our Master saying again the old, deep, mysterious words: "I and my Father are one. We will come and make our abode." (John 10.30; 14.23). And we can sympathise with the evening hymn of the early Church, sung around the shores of the Bosphorus:

He is also THE IMPRESS OF THE DIVINE NATURE. The allusion here is to the impression made by a seal on molten wax; and as the image made on the wax is the exact resemblance, though on another substance, of the die, so is Christ the exact resemblance of the Father in our human flesh. And thus He was able to say, "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14.9).

The Life of Jesus is the Life of God rendered into the terms of our human life, so that we may understand the very being and nature of God by seeing it reproduced before us, so far as it is possible, in the character and life of Jesus. These two images complete each other.

You might argue from the first, that as the ray is only part of the sun, so Christ is only part of God, but this mistake is corrected by the second, for an impression must be coextensive with the seal.

You might argue from the second, that as the impression might be made on a very inferior material, so Christ's nature was a very unworthy vehicle of the divine glory, but this mistake is corrected by the first, for a beam is of the same texture as the sun. Coextensive with God, of the same nature as God, thus is Jesus Christ.

He is, therefore, superior to angels (verse 4). Lofty as was the esteem in which Hebrew believers had been wont to hold those bright and blessed spirits, they were not for a moment to be compared with Him whose majestic claims are the theme of these glowing words.

He surpasses them in the glory of Divine Nature. Turn to Psalm 2 - one of the grandest miniature dramas in all literature. Probably composed concerning some marked episode in the reign of David, there is a glow, a sublimity, in the diction which no earthly monarch could exhaust. We are not, therefore, surprised to find the early Church applying it to Christ (Acts 4.25).

In reading it, we first hear the roar of the mob and the calm decision of the throne; and then our attention is centred on Him who comes forward, bearing the divine autograph to the decree which declares Him Son. Nothing like this was ever said to angel, however exalted in character or devoted in service. It is only befitting, then, that the unsinning sons of light should worship Him; and as we hear the command issued, "Let all the angels of God worship Him," we are still further impressed by the immense distance between their nature and His.

Do we worship Him enough? During His earthly life He was constantly met by expressive acts of homage, which, unlike Peter in the house of Cornelius, He did not repress. The almost instinctive act of the little group, from which He was parted on the Mount of Olives in His ascension, was to worship Him (Luke 24.52).

And no sooner had He passed to His home than there burst from the Church a tide of adoration which has only become wider and deeper with the ages. The Epistles, and especially the Book of Revelation, teem with expressions of worship to Christ. And the death-cries of martyrs must have familiarised the heathen mind with the homage paid to Christ by Christians.

Of the worship offered Him in catacombs, or in their secret meetings, amongst dens and caves, paganism was necessarily ignorant. But the behaviour and exclamations of the servants of Jesus, arraigned before heathen tribunals, and exposed to the most agonising deaths, were matters of public notoriety.

Some years ago, beneath the ruins of the Palatine palace, was discovered a rough sketch, traced in all probability by the hand of a pagan slave in the second century. A human figure, with the head of an ass, is represented as fixed to the cross; while another figure, in a tunic, stands on one side, making a gesture which was the customary pagan expression of adoration. Underneath this caricature ran the inscription, rudely written, Alexamenos adores his God. But what a tribute to the worship paid in those early days to our Saviour, amidst gibes and taunts and persecution!

The hymns which have come down to us ring with the same spirit. Pliny writes to tell the Emperor that the Christians of Asia Minor were accustomed to meet to sing praise to Christ as God. As each morning broke, the believer of those primitive days repeated in private the Gloria in Excelsis as his hymn of supplication and praise: "You only are holy, You only are the Lord, You only, Oh Christ, with the Holy Spirit, are most high in the glory of God the Father."

The early Church did not simply admire Christ, it adored Him.

Is not this a great lack in our private devotions? We are so apt to concentrate our thoughts on ourselves, and to thank for what we have received. We do not sufficiently often forget our own petty wants and anxieties, and launch down our tiny rivulet, until we are borne out into the great ocean of praise, which is ever breaking in music around the person of Jesus.

Praise is one of the greatest acts of which we are capable, and it is most like the service of heaven. There they ask for naught, for they have all and abound, but throughout the cycles of glory the denizens of those bright worlds fill them with praise.

And why should not earthly tasks be wrought to the same music? We are the priests of creation. It becomes us to gather up and express the sentiments which are mutely dumb, but which await our offering at the altar of God.

Let a part of our private and public devotion be ever dedicated to the praise of Jesus, when we shall break forth into some hymn, or psalm, or spiritual song, singing and praising Christ with angels and archangels and all the hosts of the redeemed. On that brow, once thorn-crowned, let us entwine our laurels. Upon that ear, once familiarised with threats and scorn, let us pour the fullness of our adoring devotion. So shall we gain and give new thoughts of the supreme dignity of the Lord Jesus. "You are worthy to receive ... honour."

CHAPTER 3: THE GLORY OF CHRIST'S OFFICE

"He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name." (Hebrews 1.4).

Apart from Scripture, we would have been disposed to infer the existence of other orders of intelligent and spiritual beings besides man. As the order of creation climbs up to man from the lowest living organism through many various stages of existence, so surely the series must be continued beyond man, through rank on rank of spiritual existence up to the very steps of the eternal throne. The divine mind must be as prolific in spiritual as it has been in natural forms of life.

But we are not left to conjecture. From every part of Scripture come testimonies to the existence of angels. They rejoiced when the world was made, and they are depicted as ushering in with songs that new creation for which we long. They stood sentries at the gate of a lost paradise; and at each of the twelve gates of the New Jerusalem an angel stands (Revelation 21.12).

They trod the plains of Mamre, and sang over the fields of Bethlehem. One prepared the meal on the desert sands for Elijah, another led Peter out of gaol and a third flashed through the storm to stand by the hammock where the Apostle Paul was sleeping (Acts 27.23,24).

But in the mind of the pious Hebrew the greatest work which the angels ever wrought was in connection with the giving of the law. The children of Israel received the law "as it was ordained by angels" (Acts 7.53, R.V.). It was necessary, therefore, in showing the superiority of the Gospel to the Law, to begin by showing the superiority of Him through whom the Gospel was given, over all orders of bright and blessed spirits, which, in their shining ranks and their twenty thousand chariots, went and came during the giving of the decalogue from the brow of Sinai (Psalm 68.17).

It is not difficult to prove the Lord's superiority to angels. It is twofold: in Nature and in Office.

In Nature "He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they" (verse 4). In verse 7, quoted from Psalm 104.4 (R.V. marg.), where they are distinctly spoken of as messengers and ministers, they are compared to winds and flames, winds for their swiftness and invisibility, flames because of their ardent love.

But how great the gulf between their nature, which may thus be compared to the elements of creation, and the nature of that glorious Being whom they are bidden to worship, and Who is addressed in the sublime title of Son! (Hebrews 1.6; Psalm 97.7.)

In verse 14 they are spoken of as ministering spirits, "sent forth to do service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation" (R.V.). This liturgy of service is a literal fact. When struggling against overwhelming difficulties, when walking the dark, wild mountain-pass alone, when in peril or urgent need - we are surrounded by invisible forms, like those which accompanied the path of Jesus, ministering to Him in the desert, strengthening Him in the garden, hovering around His cross, watching His grave and accompanying Him to his home.

They keep pace with the swiftest trains in which we travel. They come unsoiled through the murkiest air. They smooth away the heaviest difficulties. They garrison with light the darkest sepulchres. They bear us up in their hands, lest we should strike our foot against a stone.

Many an escape from imminent peril; many an unexpected assistance; many a bright and holy thought whispered in the ear, we know not whence or how - is due to those bright and loving spirits.

"The good Lord forgive me," says Bishop Hall, "for that, amongst my other offences, I have suffered myself so much to forget the presence of His holy angels." But valuable as their office is, it is not to be mentioned in the same breath as Christ's, which is set down for us in this chapter.

He Is The Organ of Creation. "By whom also He made the worlds." To make that which is seen out of nothing, that is creation: it is a divine work; and creation is attributed to Christ. "By him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in earth." "All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made" (Colossians 1.16; John 1.3).

But the word here and in 11. 3 translated ‘worlds’ means ‘ages’. Not only was the material universe made by Him, but each of the great ages of the world's story has been instituted by Jesus Christ.

When genius aspires to immortality, it leaves the artist's name inscribed on stone or canvas: and so Inspiration, "dipping her pen in indelible truth, inscribes the name of Jesus on all we see - on sun and stars, flower and tree, rock and mountain, the unstable waters and the firm land; and also on what we do not see, nor shall, until death has removed the veil - on angels and spirits, on the city and heavens of the eternal world."

This thought comes out clearly in the sublime quotation made in verse 10 from Psalm 102. That inspired poem is obviously inscribed to Yahweh. "You, Yahweh, in the beginning have laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands." But here, without the least apology, or hint of accommodating the words to an inferior use, it is applied directly to Christ. Mark the certainty of this inspired man that Jesus is Yahweh! How sure of the Deity of his Lord! And what a splendid tribute to His immutability!

Mark how the Epistle rings with the unchangeableness of Jesus, in His human love (13.8), in His priesthood (7. 24), and here in His divine nature (vv. 10-12).

We live in a world of change. The earth is not the same today as it was ages ago, or as it will be ages on. The sun is radiating off its heat. The moon no longer as of yore burns and glows; she is but an immense opaque cinder, reflecting the sunlight from her disk. Stars have burnt out, and will. The universe is waxing old, as garments which from perpetual use become threadbare.

But the wearing out of the garment is no proof of the waning strength or slackening energy of the wearer. Nay, when garments wear out quickest, it is generally the time of robustest youth or manhood. You wrap up and lay aside your clothes when they have served their purpose; but you are the same in the new suit as in the old.

Creation is the vesture of Christ. He wraps himself about in its ample folds. Its decay affects Him not. And, when He shall have laid it all aside, and replaced it by the new heavens and the new earth, He will be the same for evermore.

With what new interest may we not now turn to the archaic record, which tells how God created the heavens and the earth. Those sublime syllables, "Light, be!" were spoken by the voice that trembled in dying anguish on the cross. Rolling rivers, swelling seas, waving woods, bursting flowers, carolling birds, innumerable beasts, stars sparkling like diamonds on the pavilion of night - all newly made, all throbbing with God's own life, and all very good. But, mainly and gloriously, all the work of those hands which were nailed helplessly to the cross, which itself, as well as the iron that pierced Him, was the result of His creative will.

He Is The God of Providence. "Upholding all things by the word of His power" (verse 3). He is the prop which underpins creation. Christ, and not fate. Christ, and not nature. Christ, and not abstract impersonal law.

Law is but the invariable method of His working. "In Him all things live, and move, and have their being." "By him all things consist." (Acts 17.28; Colossians 1.17). He is ever at work repeating on the large scale of creation the deeds of His earthly life. And if He did not do them, they must be forever undone.

At His word rainwater and dew become grape-juice; tiny handfuls of grain fill the autumn barns, storms die away into calm, fish are led through the paths of the sea, rills are sent among the mountains, and stars are maintained in their courses, so that "not one fails."

All power is given to Him in heaven and on earth. Why, then, are you so sad? Your best Friend is the Lord of Providence. Your Brother is Prime Minister of the universe, and holds the keys of the divine commissariat. Go to Him with the empty sacks of your need. He will not only fill them, but fill them freely, without money and without price, as Joseph did in the old story of the days of the Pharaohs.

He Is The Saviour of Sinners. "He purged our sins." We shall have many opportunities of dwelling on this glorious fact. Jesus is Saviour, Redeemer, and the High-Priest. This is His proudest title; in this work no angel or created spirit can bear Him rivalry. In the work of salvation He is alone. No angel could atone for sin, or plead our cause, or emancipate us from the thrall of evil.

But notice the finality of this act. "He made purging of sins " (see Greek). It is finished, forever complete, done irrevocably and finally. If only we are one with Him by a living faith, our sins, which were many, are washed out; as an inscription from a slate, as a stain from a robe, as a cloud from the azure of heaven.

Gone as a stone into the bottomless abyss! Gone, never to confront us here or hereafter! "Who is He Who condemns? It is Christ that died, yes, rather, Who is risen again, Who is even at the right hand of God; who also makes intercession for us" (Romans 8. 34).

He Is Also King. And on what does His kingdom rest? What is the basis of that Royalty of which we constantly sing, in the noble words of the primitive Church? "You are the King of Glory, 0h Christ." It is a double basis.

He is King by right of His divine nature. “Your throne, O God, is for ever and ever." Well might Psalm 45 be entitled the poem of the lilies, as if to denote its pure and choice and matchless beauties. It celebrated the marriage of Solomon, but, after the manner of those inspired singers, its authors soon passed from the earthly to the heavenly, from the transient type of the earthly realm to the eternal and imperishable realities of the divine royalty of Christ.

He is also King as the reward of His obedience unto death. “He became obedient to death, even the death of the cross, wherefore, God also has highly exalted Him" (Philippians 2. 8,9).

Satan offered Him sovereignty in return for one act of homage, and Christ refused, and descended the mountain to poverty and shame and death, but through these things He has won for Himself a Kingdom which is yet in its infancy, but is destined to stand when all the kingdoms of this world have crumbled to dust.

As Christ emerged from the cross and the grave, where He had purged our sins, it seemed as if words were addressed to Him which David had caught ages before: "The LORD said to my Lord, Sit on my right hand, until I make Your enemies Your footstool" (verse 13; Psalm 110. 1). This is the interpretation which the Apostle Peter, in the flush of Pentecostal inspiration, put on these words (Acts 2. 34). And, accordingly, we are told, "He was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God " (Mark 16. 19). "He sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high" (verse 3).

"He sat down." Love is regnant. The Lamb is in the midst of the Throne. Behold His majesty, and worship Him with angels and archangels, and all the throng of the redeemed. Prostrate yourself at His feet, consecrating to Him all you are and all you have.

Comfort yourself also by remembering that He would not sit to rest from His labours in redemption, and in the purging away of sins, unless they were so completely finished that there was nothing more to do. It is all accomplished; and it is all very good. He has ceased from His works, because they are done; and therefore He is entered into his rest.

And that word "until" is full of hope. God speaks it, and encourages us to expect the time when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power; and when death itself, the last enemy, shall be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15. 24-26).

CHAPTER 4: DRIFTING

"We ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip." - (HEBREWS 2. 1).

SALVATION is a great word, and it is one of the keywords of this Epistle. Heirs of salvation (1.14), so great salvation (2.3), Captain of salvation (2.10), eternal salvation (5. 9), things that accompany salvation (6.9), salvation to the uttermost (7.25), and His appearance the second time without sin unto salvation (ix. 28).

Sometimes it is salvation from the penalty of sin that is spoken of. The past tense is then used of that final and blessed act by which, through faith in the blood of Jesus, we are forever placed beyond fear of judgment and punishment; so that we are to the windward of the storm, which spent itself on the head of our Substitute and representative on Calvary, and can therefore never break on us. "By grace have you been saved through faith" (Ephesians 2.8, R.V).

Sometimes it is salvation from the power of sin. The present tense is then employed, of the long and gradual process by which we are set free from evil, which has worked itself so deeply into our system. "To us who are being saved the word of the cross is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1.18, R.V). Sometimes salvation from all physical and other evils is implied. The future tense is then summoned into requisition, painting its splendid frescoes on the mists that hang so densely before our view, and telling us of resurrection in our Saviour's likeness and presentation in His home, faultless, with exceeding joy. "We know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as he is" (1 John 3. 2). "Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent; the day is at hand" (Romans 13. 11).

In the above passage the word "salvation" includes the entire process, from its beginning to its end; though perhaps it is especially tinctured with the first thought mentioned above. And if we follow out the figure suggested by the rendering of the first verse of this chapter in the Revised Version, we may compare salvation to a great harbour, past which we are in danger of drifting through culpable neglect.

"We ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that were heard, lest haply we drift away from them." "How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation!"

CONSIDER GOD'S SCHEME OF SALVATION AS A GREAT HARBOUR. - After a wild night, we have gone down to the harbour, over whose arms the angry waves have been dashing with boom of thunder and in clouds of spray. Outside, the sea has been tossing and churning, the cloud bank driving hurriedly across the sky, the winds howling like the furies of olden fable. But within those glorious walls, the barks which had put in during the night were riding in safety; the sailors resting, or repairing rents in sail and tackle, whilst the waters were unstirred by the storm raging without. Such a refuge or harbour is a fit emblem of salvation, where tempest-driven souls find shelter and peace.

It is great in its sweep. Sufficient to embrace a ruined world. Room in it for whole navies of souls to ride at anchor. Space enough for every ship of Adam's race launched from the shores of time. “He is the propitiation for the whole world." "Whosoever will."

Already it is becoming filled. There a vessel once manned by seven devils, a pirate ship, but captured by our Emmanuel, and at her stem the name, Mary of Magdala. And here one dismasted, and almost shattered, rescued from the fury of the maelstrom at the last hour; on her stem the words, The Dying Thief. And there another, long employed in efforts to sap the very walls of the harbour, and now flying a pennon from the masthead, Chief of Sinners and Least of Saints. And all around a forest of masts, "a multitude which no man can number, of all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues."

It is great in its foundations. The chief requisite in constructing a sea-wall is to get a foundation which can stand unmoved amid the heaviest seas. The shifting sand must be pierced down to the granite rock. But this harbour has foundations mighty enough to inspire strong consolation in those who have fled to it for refuge; the promise, and as if that were not enough, the oath, of God (Hebrews 6.17, 18). Hark, how the storm of judgment is rising out there at sea! "If the foundations be destroyed, what shall the righteous do?" (Psalm 11.3). Fear not! there is no room for alarm. The waves may wash off some mussel-shells, or tear away the green sea-lichen which has encrusted the mouldings on the walls, but it would be easier to dig out the everlasting hills from their base than make one stone in those foundations start.

It was great in its cost. By the tubular bridge over the Menai Straits stands a column, which records the names of those who perished during the construction of that great triumph of engineering skill. Nothing is said of the money spent, only of the lives sacrificed. And so, beside the harbour of our salvation, near to its mouth, so as to be read by every ship entering its enclosure, rises another column, with this as its inscription: "Sacred to the memory of the Son of God, who gave His life a sacrifice for the sin of the world."

It seems an easy thing to be saved: "Look to me, and be you saved." (Isaiah 45.22). But we do not always remember how much happened before it became so easy - the agony and bloody sweat; the cross and passion; the precious death and burial.

It has been great in its announcement. The Jews thought much of their Law, because of the majesty of its proclamation. Spoken from the inaccessible cliffs of Sinai, with its beetling crags, its red sandstone peaks bathed in fire, while thunders and lightnings, thick clouds and trumpet-notes, were the sublime accessories of the scene.

It was the authorised belief also among the Jews that the Law was given through angels (Deuteronomy 23.2 ; Acts 7.53; Gal. 3.19 ; Hebrews 2.2). And the thought that these strong and sinless beings were the medium of the Almighty's will served, in the eyes of all devout Hebrews, to enhance the sanctity and glory of the Law.

Compared with this, how simple the accessories of the words of Jesus! Spoken in sweet and gentle tones, falling as the soft showers on the tender grass, and distilling quietly as the dew, not frightening the most sinful, nor startling little babes, they stole as the melody from silver bells, borne on a summer wind into the ears of men. The boat or hill slope His pulpit, the poor His audience,the common incidents of nature or life His text.

But in reality there was a vast difference. The announcement of the Law was by angels. The announcement of the Gospel was by the Son. If the one were august, what must not the other have been! If the one were made sure by the most tremendous sanctions, what should not be said of the other! Proclaimed by the Lord, confirmed by Apostles and eyewitnesses, testified to by the Almighty Himself, in signs and wonders, and gifts of the Holy Spirit. How dare we treat it with contumely or neglect?

Or, if we do, shall not our penalty be in proportion to the magnitude of our offence? "If the word spoken through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward, how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?" "Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that were heard, lest haply we drift away from them."

It will be great in its penalties. The tendency of our age is to minimise God's righteous judgment on sin. It seems to be prevalently thought that, because our dispensation is one of love and mercy, therefore there is the less need to dread the results of sin. But the inspired writer here argues in a precisely contrary sense. Just because this age is one of such tender mercy, therefore sins against its King are more deadly, and the penalties heavier.

In the old days no transgression, - positive, - and no disobedience, - negative, - escaped its just recompense of reward; and in these days there is even less likelihood of their doing so. The word spoken by the Son is even more steadfast, i.e. effective to secure the infliction of the punishment it announces, than the word of angels. My readers, beware! "He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses; of how much sorer punishment shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden under foot the Son of God!" (10.28,29).

THE DANGER TO WHICH WE ARE MOST EXPOSED. - "Lest haply we drift away" (2.2, R.V.). For every one that definitely turns his back on Christ, there are hundreds who drift from Him. Life's ocean is full of currents, any one of which will sweep us past the harbour-mouth even when we seem nearest to it, and carry us far out to sea.

It is the drift that ruins men. The drift of the religious world. The drift of old habits and associations; which, in the case of these Hebrew Christians, was setting so strongly toward Judaism, bearing them back to the religious system from which they had come out. The drift of one's own evil nature, always chafing to bear us from God to that which is earthly and sensuous. The drift of the pressure of temptation.

The young man coming from a pious home does not distinctly and deliberately say, "I renounce my father's God." But he finds himself with a set of business associates who have no care for religion; and, after a brief struggle, he relaxes his efforts and begins to drift, until the coastline of heaven recedes so far into the dim distance that he is doubtful if he ever really saw it.

The business man who now shamelessly follows the lowest maxims of his trade was once upright and high-minded. He would have blushed to think it possible for such things to be done by him. But he began by yielding in very trivial points to the strong pressure of competition; and when once he had allowed himself to be caught by the tide, it bore him far beyond his first intention.

The professing Christian who now scarcely pretends to open the Bible or pray came to so terrible a position, not at a single leap, but by yielding to the pressure of the constant waywardness of the old nature, and thus drifted into an arctic region, where he is likely to perish, benumbed and frozen, unless rescued, and launched on the warm gulf-stream of the love of God.

It is so easy, and so much pleasanter, to drift. Just to lie back, and renounce effort, and let yourself go whither the waters will, as they break musically on the sides of the rocking boat. But, ah, how ineffable the remorse, how disastrous the result!

Are you drifting? You can easily tell. Are you conscious of effort, of daily, hourly resistance to the stream around you, and within? Do the things of God and heaven loom more clearly on your vision? Do the waters foam angrily at your prow as you force your way through them?

If so, rejoice! but remember that only divine strength can suffice to maintain the conflict, and keep the boat's head against the stream. If not, you are drifting. Hail the strong Son of God! Ask Him to come on board, and stay you, and bring you into port.

AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION. "How shall we escape, if we neglect?" The sailor who refuses lifeboat and harbour does not escape. The self-murderer who tears the bandages from his wounds does not escape. The physician who ridicules ordinary precautions against plague does not escape. "How then shall we escape?"

Did the Israelite escape who refused to sprinkle the blood upon the doorposts of his house? Did the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath-day escape, although he might have pleaded that it was the first offence? Did the prince who had taken the Moabitess to wife escape, though he bore a high rank? Did Moses and Aaron escape, though they were the leaders of the people? No! None of these escaped. "Every transgression and disobedience received its just recompense of reward." "How then shall we escape?"

Is it likely that we should escape? We have neglected the only Name given under heaven among men by which we can be saved. We have added contumely to neglect in refusing that which it has cost God so much to give. We have flouted His only Son, our Lord; and our disrespect to Him cannot be a small crime in the eye of the Infinite Father. "How shall we escape?"

No, if you neglect (and notice, that to neglect is to reject), there is no escape. You will not escape the storms of sorrow, of temptation, or of the righteous judgment of God. You will not escape the deserved and necessary punishment of your sins. You will not escape the worm which never dies, nor the fire which is never quenched. Out there, shelterless amid the rage of the sea, or yonder, driven to pieces on the rocks, you will be wrecked, and go down with all hands on board, never sighted by the heavenly watchers, nor welcomed into the harbour of the saints' everlasting rest.

Chapter 5: "WHAT IS MAN?"

"We see Jesus, ... crowned with glory and honour." {HEBREWS 2.5-9).

IN the first great division of this treatise, we have seen the incomparable superiority of the Lord Jesus to angels, and archangels, and all the heavenly host. But now there arises an objection which was very keenly realised by these Hebrew Christians, and which, to a certain extent, presses upon us all. Why did the Son of God become man? How are the sorrows, sufferings, and death of the Man of Nazareth consistent with the sublime glories of the Son of God, the equal and fellow of the Eternal?

These questions are answered during the remainder of the chapter, and may be gathered up into a single sentence. He who was above all angels became lower than the angels for a little time, that He might lift men from their abasement, and set them on His own glorious level in His heavenly Father's kingdom, and that He might be a faithful and merciful High Priest for the sorrowful and tempted and dying.

Here is an act worthy of a God Here are reasons which are more than sufficient to answer the old question, for which Anselm prepared so elaborate a reply in his book, "Cur Deus Homo?"

"What is man?" Those three words in verse 6 are the fit starting point of the argument. We need not only a true philosophy of God, but a true philosophy of man, in order to right thinking on the Gospel.

The idolater thinks man inferior to birds and beasts and creeping things, before which he prostrates himself. The materialist reckons him to be the chance product of natural forces which have evolved him, and before which he is therefore likely to pass away. The pseudo-science of the time makes him of one blood with ape and gorilla, and assigns him a common origin with the beasts. See what gigantic systems of error have developed from mistaken conceptions of the true nature and dignity of man!

From all such we turn to that noble ideal of man's essential dignity, given in this sublime paragraph, which corrects our mistaken notions, and, whilst giving us an explanation that harmonises with all our experience and observation, opens up to us vistas of thought worthy of God.

MAN AS GOD MADE HIM. The description given here of the origin and dignity of man is taken from Psalm 8, which is doubtless a reminiscence of the days when David kept his father's sheep, even if it were not composed on that very spot over which in after-years the heavenly choirs broke upon the astonished shepherds "abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night."

Turn to that Psalm, and see how well it expresses the emotions which must well up in devout hearts to God as we consider the midnight heavens, the tapestry work of His fingers, and the spheres lit by the moon and stars, which He has ordained. How impossible it is for those who are given to devout reflection to come in contact with any of the grander forms of natural beauty, the far-spread expanse of ocean, the outlines of the mountains, the changing pomp of the skies, without turning from the handiwork to the great Artisan, with some such expression as the apostrophe with which the Psalm opens and closes: "0h LORD, our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth."

At first sight, man is utterly unworthy to be compared with those vast and wondrous spectacles revealed to us by the veiling of the sun. His life is but as a breath; as a shadow careering over the mountainside; as the existence of the aphides on a leaf in the vast forests of being.

What can be said of his character, sin-stained and befouled, in contrast with peaks whose virgin snows have never been defiled, with sylvan scenes, whose peace has never been ruffled, with silvery spheres, whose chimes of perfect harmony have never been broken by discord? Four times over is the question asked upon the pages of Scripture, "What is man, that You are mindful of him?" (Psalm 94.3; Job 7.17, 20; Psalm 8.4; Hebrews 2. 6).

Yet it is an undeniable fact that God is mindful of man, and that He does visit him.

"Mindful!" There is not a moment in God's existence in which He is not as mindful of this world of men as the mother of the babe whom she has left for a moment in the next room, but whose slightest cry or moan she is quick to catch. "I am poor and needy, yet the Lord thinks on me." "How precious are Your thoughts to me, 0h God!" (Psalm 40.17; 139.17).

"Visiting!" No cot is so lowly, no heart so wayward, no life so solitary, but God visits it. No one shall read these lines, the path around whose heart-door is not trodden hard by the feet of Him who often comes and stands and knocks. We speak as if only our sorrows were divine visitations. Alas for us, if it were only so! Every throb of holy desire, every gentle mercy, every gift of Providence, is a visitation of God.

But there must be some great and sufficient reason why the Maker of the universe should take so much interest in man. Evidently bigness is not greatness. A tiny babe is worth more than the tallest mountain, and an empress-mother will linger in the one room where her child is ill, though she forsake the remainder of her almost illimitable domain. What if earth shall turn out to be the nursery of the universe!

The true clue, however, to all speculation is to be found in the declaration by the Psalmist of God's original design in making man: "You crown him. ... You made him to have dominion. . . . You have put all things under his feet" (Psalm 8.5, 6 R.V.). Nor was this lofty ideal first given to the Psalmist's poetic vision. It had an earlier origin. It is a fragment of the great charter of humanity, which God gave to our first parents in Paradise.

Turn to that noble archaic record, Genesis 1.26-28, which transcends the imaginings of modern science as far as it does those legends of creation which make the heathen literature with which they are incorporated incredible.

Its simplicity, its sublimity, its fitness, attest its origin and authority to be divine. We are prepared to admit that God's work in creation was symmetrical and orderly, and that He worked out His design according to an ever-unfolding plan. But science has discovered nothing as yet to contradict the express statements of Scripture, that the first man was not at all inferior to ourselves in those intellectual and moral faculties which are the noblest heritage of mankind.

"God created man in His own image" (Genesis 1.27). - There we have the divine likeness. Our mental and moral nature is made on the same plan as God's, the divine in miniature. Truth, love, and purity, like the principles of mathematics, are the same in us as in Him.

If it were not so, we could not know or understand Him. But since it is so, it has been possible for Him to take on Himself our nature - possible also that we shall be one day transformed to the perfect image of His beauty.

"And God said, Have dominion" (Genesis 1.28). - There you have royal supremacy. Man was intended to be God's vice-regent and representative. King in a palace stored with all to please him, monarch and sovereign of all the lower orders of creation.

The sun to labour for him as a very Hercules, the moon to light his nights, or lead the waters round the earth in tides, cleansing his coasts, elements of nature to be his slaves and messengers; flowers to scent his path, fruits to please his taste, birds to sing for him, fish to feed him, beasts to toil for him and carry him.

Not a cringing slave, but a king crowned with the glory of rule, and with the honour of universal supremacy. Only a little lower than angels because they are not, like him, encumbered with flesh and blood. This is man as God made him to be.

MAN AS SIN HAS MADE HIM. "We see not yet all things subjected to him" (Hebrews 2.8 R.V.). His crown is rolled in the dust, his honour tarnished and stained. His sovereignty is strongly disputed by the lower orders of creation.

If trees nourish him, it is after strenuous care, and they often disappoint. If the earth supplies him with food, it is in tardy response to exhausting toil. If the beasts serve him, it is because they have been laboriously tamed and trained, whilst vast numbers roam the forest glades, setting him at defiance. If he catch the fish of the sea, or the bird of the air, he must wait long in cunning concealment.

Some traces of the old lordship are still apparent, in the terror which the sound of the human voice and the glance of the eye still inspire in the lower creatures, as in the feats of lion-tamer or snake-charmer. But for the most part anarchy and rebellion have laid waste man's fair realm.

So degraded has he become, that he has bowed before the objects that he was to command; and has prostrated his royal form in shrines dedicated to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. It is the fashion nowadays to extol heathen philosophy; but how can we compare it for a moment with the religion of the Bible, when its pyramids are filled with mummies of deified animals, and its temples with the sacred bull!

Where is the supremacy of man? Not in the savage cowering before the beasts of the forest; nor in the civilised races that are the slaves of lust and sensuality and swinish indulgence; nor in those who, refusing to recognise the authority of God, fail to exercise any authority themselves.

"Sin has reigned," as the Apostle says most truly (Romans 5.21). And all who bow their necks beneath its yoke are slaves and menials and cowering subjects, in comparison with what God made and meant them to be.

Do not point to the wretched groups surrounding the doors of the pubs and bars in the metropolis of the most Christian people of the world, and regard their condition as a stain on the love or power of God. This is not His work. These are the products of sin. ‘An enemy has done this’.

Would you see man as God intended him to be, you must go back to Eden, or forward to the New Jerusalem. Sin defiles, debases, disfigures, and blasts all it touches. And we may shudder to think that its virus is working through our frame, as we discover the results of its ravages upon myriads around.

MAN AS CHRIST CAN MAKE HIM. "We behold Jesus crowned with glory and honour" (verse 9). "What help is that?" cries an objector; "of course He is crowned with glory and honour, since He is the Son of God."

But notice, the glory and honour mentioned here are altogether different from the glory of Hebrews 1. 3. That was the incommunicable glory of His deity. This is the acquired glory of His humanity.

In John 17 our Lord himself distinguishes between the two. In verse 5, the glory which He had with the Father as His right before all worlds. In verse 24, the glory given as the reward for His sufferings, which He could not have had unless He had taken upon Himself the form of a servant, and had been made in the fashion of man, humbling Himself, and becoming obedient to the death of the cross, "made a little lower than the angels, because of the suffering of death; crowned with glory and honour, that He, by the grace of God, should taste death for every man" (Phil 2.7, 8; Hebrews 2.10).

This is the crown wherewith His Father crowned Him in the day of the gladness of His heart, when, as man, He came forth victorious from the last wrestle with the Prince of Hell. All through His earthly life He fulfilled the ancient ideal of man. He was God's image, and those who saw Him saw the Father. He was Sovereign in His commands.

Winds and waves did His bidding. Trees withered at His touch. Fish in shoals obeyed His will. Droves of cattle fled before His scourge of small cords. Disease and death and devils owned Hs sway. But all was more fully realised when He was about to return to His Father, and said, in a noble outburst of conscious supremacy, "All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth."

"We behold Him" Behold him, Christian reader! The wreaths of empire are on His brow. The keys of death and Hades swing at His girdle. The mysterious living creatures, representatives of redeemed creation, attest that He is worthy. All things in heaven and earth, and under the earth, and in the seas, worship Him, so do the bands of angels, beneath whom He stooped for a little season, on our behalf.

And as He is, we too shall be He is there as the type and specimen and representative of redeemed men. We are linked with Him in indissoluble union. Through Him we shall get back our lost empire. We too shall be crowned with glory and honour.

The day is not far distant when we shall sit at His side-joint-heirs in His empire; comrades in His glory, as we have been comrades in His sorrows; beneath our feet all things visible and invisible, thrones and principalities and powers, whilst above us shall be the unclouded empyrean of our Father's love, forever and forever. Oh, destiny of surpassing bliss! Oh, rapture of saintly hearts! Oh, miracle of divine omnipotence!

CHAPTER 6: “PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERINGS"

"It became Him, for Whom are all things, and by Whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings." (HEBREWS 2.10).

THERE is no book which can stand the test of sorrow and suffering as the Bible can. Other books may delight us in sunny hours, when the heart is gay; but in dark and overcast days we fling them aside, and eagerly betake ourselves to our Bibles. And the reason for this lies in the fact that this Book was born in the fires. It is soaked with the tears, either of those who wrote or of those addressed.

Take, for instance, this Epistle. It was intended to solace the bitter anguish of these Hebrew Christians, who were exposed to the double fury of the storm.

In the first place, there was the inevitable opposition and persecution to be encountered by all followers of the Nazarene, not only from the Gentiles, but especially from their fellow-countrymen, who accounted them apostates.

Next, there was the pain of excommunication from the splendid rites of the Temple, with its daily service, its solemn feasts, its magnificent ceremonial. Only those amongst ourselves who from childhood have been wont to worship in some splendid minster, with its pealing organ, full-voiced choir, and mystery of architecture, arresting and enchaining every sense of beauty, but who have felt constrained to join the worship of an obscure handful in some plain meetinghouse, can realise how painfully those who were addressed in these words missed the religious associations of their early days.

And then this suffering, thorn-crowned, dying Messiah! It seemed almost impossible to realise that He was the Christ of national desire. The objections that baffled the faith of the two travellers to Emmaus arose in almost irresistible force: "The chief priests and our rulers have crucified Him, but we trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel" (Luke 24. 20).

No attempt is made in these words to minimise the sufferings of Christ. That were impossible and superfluous. He is King in the realm of sorrow; peerless in His pain; supreme in His distress. Though earth be full of sufferers, none can vie with our Lord in His.

Human nature is limited. The confines of its joys or sorrows are soon touched. The pendulum swings only hither and thither. But who shall estimate the capacity of Christ's nature? And because of it, He could taste the sweets of a joy beyond His fellows, and of sorrow so excessive as to warrant the challenge: "Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, with which the Lord has afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger." (Lamentations 1.12).

If it be true, as Carlyle says, that our sorrow is the inverted image of our nobility, how deep must the sorrow have been of the noblest of our race! Well may the Greek liturgy, with infinite pathos, speak of His "unknown sorrows."

Shall the sufferings of Christ cause us to reject Christ? Ah, strange infatuation! As well reject the heaven because of its sun, or night because of the queenly moon, or a diadem because of its regal gem, or home because of mother.

The sufferings of Christ are the proudest boast of the Gospel. He himself wears the insignia of them in heaven; as a general, on the day of triumph, chooses his choicest order to wear upon his breast. Yes, and it was the deliberate choice of Him, "for Whom are all things, and by Whom are all things " - and Who must, therefore, have had every expedient at His command - that the path of suffering should be His Son's way through our world.

Every track through creation is as familiar to Omniscience as the tracks across the hills to the grey-haired, plaided shepherd. Had He wished, the Father might have conducted the Son to glory by another route than the thorny, flint-set path of suffering. But the reasons for this experience were so overwhelming that He could not evade them. Nothing else had been becoming. Those reasons may be stated almost in a sentence.

Our Father has on hand a work greater than his original creation. He is "bringing many sons unto glory." The way may be rugged and tedious, but its end is glory. And it is the way along which our Father is bringing us; for, since we believe on the Son, we have the right to call ourselves sons (John i. 12).

And there are many of us. Many sons, though only one Son. We do not go solitarily along the narrow way. We are but part of a multitude which no man can number. The glory of which we have already spoken, and into which Jesus has entered, is not for Him alone, but for us also. "Many sons" are to be His joint-heirs; reigning with Him on His throne, sharing His unsearchable riches and His everlasting reign.

But all these sons must tread the path of suffering. Since the first sin brought suffering to our first parents, and bloodshed into the first home, there has been but one lot for those who will live Godly. Their road leads to glory; but every inch of it is stained with their blood and watered by their tears. It climbs to Hermon's summit; but it descends immediately into sombre and devil-haunted plains. It conducts to the Mount of Olives, with its ascension light; but it first traverses the glades of Gethsemane, the wine-press of Golgotha, the solitude and darkness of the grave.

What true soul has not its wilderness of temptation, its conflicts with Sadducees and Scribes, its hour of weariness and watching, its tears over cities full of rebellious men, its disappointments from friends, its persecutions from foes, rejection, agony, friendlessness, loneliness, denials, trial, treacheries, deaths, and burials? Such is the draught which the noblest and saintliest have drunk from the golden chalice of life.

Foreseeing our needs, our Father has provided for us a Leader It is a great boon for a company of pilgrims to have a Great-heart; for an army to have a captain; for an exodus to have a Moses. Courageous, sagacious, and strong leaders are God's good gifts to men. And it is only what we might have expected that God has placed such a One as the efficient Leader at the head of the long line of pilgrims, whom He is engaged in bringing to glory.

The toils seem lighter and the distance shorter; laggards quicken their pace; wandering ones are recalled from by-paths by the presence and voice of the Leader, who marches, efficient, royal, and divine, in the van. 0h heirs of glory, weary of the long and toilsome march, remember that you are part of a great host, and that the Prince, at the head of the column, has long since entered the city - though He is back again, passing as an inspiration along the ranks as they are toiling on.

Our Leader is perfect. Of course this does not refer to His moral or spiritual attributes. In these He is possessed of the stature of the perfect Man, and has filled out, in every detail, God's ideal of manhood. But He might have been all this without being perfectly adapted to the work of leading many sons through suffering to glory.

He might have been perfect in character, and desirous to help us, but, if He had never tasted death, how could he allay our fears as we tread the verge of Jordan? If He had never been tempted, how could He succour those who are tempted? If He had never wept, how could He staunch our tears? If He had never suffered, hungered, wearied on the hill of difficulty, or threaded His way through the quagmires of grief, how could He have been a merciful and faithful High-Priest, having compassion on the ignorant and wayward?

But, thank God, our Leader is a perfect one. He is perfectly adapted to His task. His certificate, countersigned by the voice of inspiration, declares Him fully qualified.

But this perfect efficiency, as we have seen, is the result of suffering. In no other conceivable way could He have been so effectively qualified to be our Leader as He has been by the ordeal of suffering. Every pang, every tear, every thrill, all were needed to complete His equipment to help us.

And from this we may infer that suffering is sometimes permitted to befall us in order to qualify us to be, in our poor measure, the leaders and comforters of our brethren, who are faltering in the march. When next we suffer, let us believe that it is not the result of chance, or fate, or man's carelessness, or Hell's malevolence, but that perhaps God is perfecting our adaptability to comfort and succour others.

Are there not some in your circle to whom you naturally betake yourself in times of trial and sorrow? They always seem to speak the right word, to give the very counsel you are longing for; you do not realise, however, the cost which they had to pay ere they became so skilful in binding up gaping wounds and drying tears.

But if you were to investigate their past history you would find that they have suffered more than most. They have watched the slow untwisting of some silver cord on which the lamp of life hung. They have seen the golden bowl of joy dashed to their feet, and its contents spilt. They have stood by ebbing tides, and drooping gourds, and noon sunsets; but all this has been necessary to make them the nurses, the physicians, the priests of men.

The boxes that come from foreign climes are clumsy enough, but they contain spices which scent the air with the fragrance of the Orient. So suffering is rough and hard to bear, but it hides beneath it discipline, education, possibilities, which not only leave us nobler, but perfect us to help others.

Do not fret, or set your teeth, or wait doggedly for the suffering to pass; but get out of it all you can, both for yourself and for your service to your generation, according to the will of God.

Suffering educates sympathy, it softens the spirit, lightens the touch, hushes the tread. It accustoms the spirit to read from afar the symptoms of an unspoken grief. It teaches the soul to tell the number of the promises, which, like the constellations of the arctic circle, shine most brilliantly through the wintry night. It gives to the spirit a depth, a delicacy, a wealth of which it cannot otherwise possess itself. Through suffering He has become perfected.

His sufferings have purchased our pardon. He tasted death for every man. But His sufferings have done more in enabling Him to understand experimentally, and to allay, with the tenderness of one who has suffered, all the griefs and sorrows that are experienced by the weakest and weariest of the great family of God.

So far, then, from rejecting Him because of His sorrows, this shall attract us the more quickly to His side. And, amid our glad songs, this note shall predominate: "It behoved Christ to suffer." "In the midst of the throne, a Lamb as it had been slain."

CHAPTER 7: THE DEATH OF DEATH

"Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the Devil; and deliver them, who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." (HEBREWS 2.14-15).

WE fear death with a double fear. There is, first, the instinctive fear shared also by the animal creation, for the very brutes tremble as the moment of death draws near. Surely this fear is not wrong. It is often congenital and involuntary, and afflicts some of God's noblest saints, though doubtless these will some day confess that it was most unwarrantable, and that the moment of dissolution was calm and sweet and blessed.

It is a growing opinion among thoughtful men that the moment of death, when the spirit passes from its earthly tabernacle, is probably the most painless and the happiest moment of its whole earthly story. And if this be so generally, how much more must it be the case with those on whose sight are breaking the glories of Paradise!

The child whose eyes feast upon a glowing vista of flower and fruit, beckoning it through the garden gate, hardly notices the rough woodwork of the gate itself as it bounds through; and probably the soul, becoming aware of the beauty of the King and the glories of its home, is too absorbed to notice the act of death, till it suddenly finds itself free to mount and soar and revel in the dawning light.

But there is another fear of death, which is spiritual dread at its mystery. What is it? Whither does it lead? Why does it come just now? What is the nature of the life beyond? We see the movements on the other side of the thick curtain which sways to and fro, but we can distinguish no form. The dying ones are conscious of sights and sounds for which we strain eye and ear in vain.

We dread its leave-taking. The heathen poet sang sadly of leaving earth and home and family. Long habit endears the homeliest lot and the roughest comrades. How much more the true-hearted and congenial - it is hard to part from them. If only we could all go together, there would be nothing in it. But this separate dropping-off, this departing one by one, this drift from the anchorage alone! Who can deny that it is a lonesome thing?

Men dread what lies after death. “The sting of death is sin." The sinner dreads to die, because he knows that, on the other side of death, he must meet the God against whom he has sinned, and stand at His bar to give an account and receive the due reward of His deeds. How can he face that burning glory? How can he answer for one of a thousand? How can mortal man be just with God? How can he escape Hell, and find his place amid the happy festal throngs of the Golden City?

Many of man's fears were known to Christ. And He knew that they would be felt by many who were to be closely related to Him as brethren. If, then, He was prompted by ordinary feelings of compassion to the great masses of mankind, He would be especially moved to relieve those with whom he had so close an affinity, as these marvellous verses unfold.

He and they are all of one (verse 11). He calls them brethren through the lips of psalmist and prophet (verse 12). He takes His stand in the assembled Church, and sings His Father's praise in its company (verse I 2). He even associates Himself with them in their humble childlike trust (verse 13).

He dares to accost the gaze of all worlds, as He comes forward leading them by the hand (verse 13). Oh, marvellous identification! Oh, rapturous association! More wondrous far than if a seraph should cherish friendship with a worm! But the preciousness of this relationship lies in the fact that Jesus will do all He can to alleviate that fear of death, which is more or less common to us all.

But in order to do it, He must die. He could not be the death of death unless He had personally tasted death. He needed to fulfil the law of death by dying, before He could abolish death. Our David must go into the valley of Elah, and grapple with our giant foe, and wrest from him his power, and slay him with his own sword.

As in the old fable Prometheus could not slay the Minotaur unless he accompanied the yearly freight of victims, so must Jesus go with the myriads of our race into the dark confines of the tomb, that death might do its worst in vain; that the grave might lose its victory; and that the grim gaoler might be shown powerless to hold the Resurrection and the Life.

Had Christ not died, it might have been affirmed that, in one place at least, death and sin, chaos and darkness, were supreme. "It behoved Him, therefore, to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day." (Luke 24.46) And, like another Samson, carrying the gates of his prison-house, He came forth, demonstrating forever that light is stronger than darkness, salvation than sin, life than death.

Hear His triumphant cry, as thrice the risen and ascended Master exclaims, "I died, and lo, I am alive forevermore, and have the keys of Hades and of death." (Revelation 1.18). Death and hell chose their own battleground, their strongest; and there, in the hour of His weakness, our King defeated them, and now carries the trophy of victory at His girdle forevermore. Hallelujah!

But He could only have died by becoming man. Perhaps there is no race in the universe that can die but our own. So there may be no other spot in the wide universe of God seamed with graves, shadowed by the outspread wings of the angel of death, or marked by the plague-spot of sin.

"Sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all" (Romans 5.12). In order then to die, Christ must take on Himself our human nature. Others die because they are born; Christ was born that He might die.

It is as if He said: "Of you, 0h human mother, must I be born; and I must suffer the aches and pains and sorrows of mortal life; and I must hasten quickly to the destined goal of human life; I have come into the world to die."

"Forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same, in order that through death He might destroy Him that had the power of death, that is, the Devil, and deliver them, who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage."

BY DEATH CHRIST DESTROYED HIM THAT HAD THE POWER OF DEATH.

Scripture has no doubt as to the existence of the Devil. And those who know much of their own inner life, and of the sudden assaults of evil to which we are liable, cannot but realise his terrible power. And from this passage we infer that that power was even greater before Jesus died.

"He had the power of death." It was a chief weapon in his infernal armoury. The dread of it was so great as to drive men to yield to any demands made by the priests of false religions, with their dark impurities and hideous rites. Thus timid sheep are scared by horrid shouts and blows into the butcher's shambles.

But since Jesus died, the devil and his power are destroyed. Brought to naught, not made extinct. Still he assails the Christian warrior, though armed from head to foot; and goes about seeking whom he may devour, and deceives men to ruin. Satan is not impotent though chained. He has received the wound which annuls his power, but it has not yet been effectual to destroy him.

His power was broken at the cross and grave of Jesus. The hour of Gethsemane was the hour and power of darkness. And Satan must have seen the Resurrection in despair. It was the knell of his destiny. It sealed his doom. The prince of this world was judged and cast out from the seat of power (John 12.31; 16.11). The serpent's head was bruised beyond remedy.

Fear not the Devil, 0 child of God, nor death! These make much noise, but they have no power. The Breaker has gone before you, clearing your way. Only keep close behind Him. Hark ! He gives you power over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you (Luke 10.9). No robber will pluck you from your Shepherd's hand.

BY DEATH CHRIST DELIVERS FROM THE FEAR OF DEATH.

A child was in the habit of playing in a large and beautiful garden, with sunny lawns; but there was one part of it, a long and winding path, down which he never ventured. Indeed, he dreaded to go near it, because some silly nurse had told him that ogres and goblins dwelt within its darksome gloom. At last his eldest brother heard of his fear, and, after playing one day with him, took him to the embowered entrance of the grove, and, leaving him there terror-stricken, went singing through its length, and returned, and reasoned with the child, proving that his fears were groundless.

At last he took the lad's hand, and they went through it together, and from that moment the fear which had haunted the place fled. And the memory of that brother's presence took its place. So has Jesus done for us!

Fear not the mystery Of death! Jesus has died and shown us that it is the gateway into another life, more fair and blessed than this life in which human words are understood, and human faces smile, and human affections linger still. The forty days of His resurrection life have solved many of the problems, and illumined most of the mystery.

To die is to go at once to be with Him. No chasm, no interval, no weary delay in purgatory. Absent from the body, present with the Lord, One moment here in conditions of mortality; the next beyond the stars.

Fear not the loneliness of death! The soul in the dark valley becomes aware of another at its side, "You are with me." Death cannot separate us, even for a moment, from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. In the hour of death Jesus fulfils His own promise, "I will come again and take you unto myself." (John 14.3). And on the other side we step into a vast circle of loving spirits, who welcome the newcomer with festal songs (2 Peter 1.11).

Fear not the after-death! The curse and penalty of sin have been borne by Him. Death, the supreme sentence on sinners, has been suffered for us by our Substitute. In Him we have indeed passed on to the other side of the doom which is justly ours as members of a sinful race. Who is he that condemns? It is Christ that died, yes, rather, that is risen again." (Romans 8.34).

Death! How shall they die who have already died in Christ? That which others call death we call sleep. We dread it no more than sleep. Our bodies lie down exhausted with the long working day, to awake in the fresh energy of the eternal morning, but in the meanwhile the spirit is presented faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.

CHAPTER 8: CHRIST’S MERCIFUL AND FAITHFUL HELP

“We have a merciful and faithful high-priest in things pertaining to God." (HEBREWS 2.17).

DO you wonder that your Lord was tempted and sorrowful? It is indeed the marvel of eternity, and yet not so marvellous, when we consider the beings whom He elected to succour, help, and save, and of whom each of us is one.

Had He chosen to lay hold of fallen angels, with a view of raising them from their lost estate, He would without doubt have taken upon Himself their nature, and descended into the pit; identifying Himself with their miseries, and paving, by His sufferings, a pathway across the great fixed gulf which intervenes between their lost estate and Paradise.

But verily He took not hold of angels, but of the seed of Abraham, and had no alternative therefore but to assimilate Himself in all points to the nature of those whom, in infinite mercy and grace, He brothered.

There are two things you need, reader; and not you only, but all men, reconciliation, and succour in the hour of temptation. These instinctive cravings of the soul are as mighty and as irrepressible as the craving of the body for sleep or food, and they are as evident amid our luxury and refinement as in primeval forests, or beside the historic rivers of antiquity - the Nile, the Indus, the Euphrates.

To meet these two needs, men have constituted one of their number a priest. That word has an ominous sound to our ears, because it has been associated with immoralities and cruelty. The world has never seen more unscrupulous or rapacious tyrants than its priests, whether of Baal or Moloch, of Judaism or the Papacy.

All through the ages it has seemed impossible for men to receive power in the spiritual realm without abusing it to the injury of those who sought their help.

Study the history of the priesthood, which murdered Christ because He threw too strong a light upon its hypocrisies and villainies, and you have the history of every priestcraft which has darkened the world with crime, and saturated its soil with the blood of the noblest and saintliest of men.

And yet the idea of the priest is a natural and a beautiful one. It is natural for men who are conscious of sin barring their access into the presence of a holy God, and demanding sacrifice in order to make peace, to say to one of their fellows, "Our hands are stained with blood, and grimed with toil, our garments spotted with pollution and dust, our lives too busy for us to spare time for those rites which alone can fit the sinner to stand before the eye of God. Do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, prepare yourself by holy rite and vigil and fasting from sin, so as to be able to stand in the presence-chamber of the All-Holy; and when you have acquired the right of audience with Him, speak for us, atone for us, make reconciliation for our sins; and then come forth to us, succouring and blessing those who cannot attain to your position, but must ever struggle as best they may with the strong, rough, bad world in which they are doomed to live."

This seems the underlying thought behind the vast system which has built temples in every land, reared altars on every soil, and constituted a priesthood amid the most degraded as well as the most civilised races of mankind.

And there is great beauty in the work and ministry of a true priest. Not always engaged in the darker work of sacrificing flocks of fleecy sheep, by which alone, in those rude days, the cost of sin could be computed; the true priest would have other, and, perhaps, more congenial work.

He would be the shepherd of the timid souls around him, listening to confessions whispered over the heads of the dumb victims, feeling compassion for erring and wayward ones, comforting those who were passing through scenes of sorrow, till faces shadowed with tears began to gleam with holy light; arresting the proud hand of the oppressor, as Ambrose did in lawless days, to rescue the poor from the mailed blow. Never studying self-interest, never consulting ease or pleasure or gain, never resting while one poor wanderer was away in the snowdrift or on the wild.

Yes, and more, he would be the spokesman of souls, praying for those who did not pray for themselves, praying for those who knew not what or how to ask, interceding for the whole race of man. Ah! how often must such a one have been compelled by the pressure of the burden to go apart from the busy crowds to some lone spot, that he might pour out before God the long litany of need and sorrow and temptation which had been poured into his heart. Lovely ideal, ah, how seldom realised!

All this is Jesus Christ, and more. Words fail indeed to say all that He is in Himself, or all that He can be to those that trust Him. And it is because of this that He is able to give such blessed help to all who need it. Let us consider that help.

IT IS SOVEREIGN AND UNEXPECTED HELP.

Angels fell. Once they were the peers of heaven. They sang its songs, plucked its flowers of amaranth, and drank its tranquil bliss. They loved its King, and served Him, like the sunbeam, with unpolluted brightness and unswerving direction. But, alas! they fell from heaven to hell. And for them there is no help, so far as we can learn. "God takes not hold of angels."

But He has set His heart upon us, the poor children of dust, the creatures of the transient moments of time, who had fallen by the same sin of self-will. Here is a theme for meditation! We cannot pierce the mystery, or understand its full import. But we may, with wondering faith and joy, accept the chalice, brimming with unmerited, unexpected, undeserved grace, and drain its draughts of bliss.

IT IS HUMAN HELP.

" Made like to his brethren." The peculiarity of this phrase testifies to Christ's pre-existence and glory, and indicates how great a stoop on His part it involved ere he could be like man. He had to be made like man, He was not like man in the original constitution of His being.

We cannot solve the mystery of the holy incarnation. And yet the thought of it has never been quite foreign to the heart of man. Many a Greek and Hindu myth rested on an instinctive craving for the presence of God in human flesh, which became parent to the belief that such a thing had been, and might be again. Even in the highlands of Galatia, the most ready explanation of the miracles of Paul was that the gods had come down in the likeness of men.

But though there be such a profound mystery resting on this subject, yet the union of the Almighty with a human life is at least not more incomprehensible than the union of a spiritual, unmaterial principle, as the soul, with a material organism, as the human body. When the secrets of our own nature have been unravelled, it will be time enough for us to demand of the Almighty that, when He assumes our nature, He should disrobe Himself of all mystery.

How exquisite is the arrangement that God's help should come to us through the Son of Man; that our Helper should shed true human tears, and feel true human pity, Jew though he was, child of the most exclusive and intolerant of peoples, yet the humanity which is greater than Judaism makes us oblivious to all else than that He is our Brother.

IT IS HIGH-PRIESTLY HELP.

The full meaning of this phrase will appear as we proceed. It is sufficient to say here, that all that men have sought to realise in human priesthoods, but in vain, is realised with transcendent beauty in Him. Nor is there any way of weaning men from the human priesthoods which deceive, but to present to them the all-glorious, immaculate priesthood of Christ.

It is of little use only to denounce the priests that are coming back to Protestant England through a thousand covert channels, or the people who go to them. There is a craving in their heart which impels them. It is of no use to fight against nature.

But satisfy it, give it its true nutriment; supply its wants with reality, and it will be content to drop the false for the true, the paste diamond for the Golconda pebbles, the human for the divine.

Men must have a priest; and they are going back to the mummeries of Rome, because there has been too scanty a presentation in our pulpits of the priesthood of Jesus.

IT IS MERCIFUL AND FAITHFUL HELP.

When we are in need, we want help wedded with mercy. The patient in the infirmary does not like to be treated as a broken watch. Oh that he were at home again, to be nursed by the soft hands of his mother, which ever feel so skilful and gentle and soft! We need merciful help, which does not upbraid, is not in too great a hurry to listen, and gladly takes all extenuating circumstances into account. Such mercy is in the heart of Jesus.

And His help is ever faithful, too. This word has a fine tint of meaning, almost lost in our translation, giving the idea of one who runs up at the first cry of distress. He neither slumbers nor sleeps. He watches us with a gaze which is not for a moment diverted from us. He sees us through the storm. He sits beside the molten metal. He will help us right early i.e. when the day breaks.

You may be bereft of all power of consecutive thought, unable to utter a single intelligible sentence, frantic with agony and remorse, but if you can only moan, He will instantly respond. "He will be very gracious to you at the voice of your cry."

IT IS HELP BASED ON RECONCILIATION FOR SIN.

Sin is one of the greatest facts in our history. It is impossible to ignore it. You cannot explain man unless you take it into account. For this the world has been covered with the apparatus of sacrifice; and the cry has rung in a monotone of despair, "How shall man be just with God?"

But Jesus met the demands of conscience, echoing those of a broken law, when on Calvary, as High-Priest, He offered himself as victim, and made an all-sufficient, satisfactory, and complete sacrifice for the sin of the world.

Burdened one, groaning under the load of sin, remember that He bore your sins in His own body on the tree. Approach the holy God, reminding Him of that fact, and daring on account of it to stand unabashed and accepted in His sight.

IT IS SYMPATHETIC HELP FOR THE TEMPTED.

" Them that are tempted." Within that circle we all stand. Each is tempted in subtler, if not in grosser, forms, in extraordinary, if not in ordinary, ways. You have been trying, oh, so hard, to be good, but have met with some sudden gust, and been overcome.

Tempted to despair! Tempted to yield to Potiphar's wife! Tempted to become a brute! No dawn without the fowler's snare! No day without its sorrow! No night without its noisome pestilence! No rose without its thorn!

Do we not need succour? Certainly; and He is able to succour the tempted, because He has suffered the very worst that temptation can do. Not that there was ever one symptom or thought of yielding, yet suffering to the point of extreme anguish, beneath the test.

Oh sufferers, tempted ones, desolate and not comforted, lean your heads against the breast of the God-Man, Whose feet have trodden each inch of your thorny path, and Whose experiences of the power of evil well qualify Him to strengthen you to stand, to lift you up if you have fallen, to speak such words as will heal the ache of the freshly gaping wound. If He were impassive, and had never wept or fought in the Garden shadows, or cried out forsaken on the cross, we had not felt Him so near as we can do now in all hours of bitter grief.

Oh matchless Saviour, on Whom God our Father has laid our help, we can dispense with human sympathy, with priestly help, with the solace and stay of many a holy service; but You are indispensable to us, in Your life, and death, and resurrection, and brotherhood, and sympathising intercession at the throne of God!

CHAPTER 9: A WARNING AGAINST UNBELIEF

"Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God." - HEBREWS 3.12.

THE contrast between the third and fourth chapters of this epistle is very marked. The former is like a drear November day, when all the landscape is drenched by sweeping rain, and the rotting leaves fall in showers to find a grave upon the damp and muddy soil. The latter is like a still clear day in midsummer, when nature revels in reposeful bliss beneath the unstinted caresses of the sun. There is as much difference between them as between the seventh and eighth chapters of the Epistle to the Romans.

But each chapter represents an experience of the inner Christian life. Perhaps the majority of Christians live and die in the third chapter, to their infinite loss. Comparatively few pass over into the fourth.

Yet why, reader, should you not pass the boundary line today, and leave behind forever the bitter, unsatisfactory experiences which have become the normal rule of your existence? Come up out of the wilderness, in which you have wandered so long. Your sojourn there has been due, not to any desire on the part of God, or to any arbitrary appointment of His, or to any natural disability of your temperament; but to certain grave failures on your part, in the regimen of the inner life.

The antipodes of your hitherto dreary experiences is Christ, the unsearchable riches of Christ, to be made a partaker of Christ. For Christ is the Promised Land that flows with milk and honey, in which we eat bread without scarceness, and gather the grapes and pomegranates and olives of rare spiritual blessedness.

WILDERNESS EXPERIENCES. Never did a nation occupy a prouder position than the children of Israel on the morning when they stood victorious on the shores of the Red Sea. The power of the tyrant had been broken by a series of marvellous miracles. The chivalry of Egypt had sunk as lead in the mighty waters of death.

And as the sun rose behind the mountains of Edom, and struck a flashing pathway across the burnished mirror of the sea, it revealed long lines of corpses washed up to the water's edge. Behind, Egypt left forever. Above, the fleecy cloud, chariot of God, tabernacle for His presence. Before, the Land of Promise.

Many a man was already dreaming of vineyards and olive yards, and a settled home, all of which lay within two or three months' easy march.

But of those six hundred thousand men, flushed with victory and hope, two only were destined to see the land flowing with milk and honey; and these not until forty weary years had slowly passed away.

And what became of all the rest? Alas! their carcasses fell in the wilderness. Instead of reposing in some family burying-place in the Land of Promise, their bodies were taken up one by one and laid in the desert waste, the sands their winding-sheet, the solitude their mausoleum.

It took forty years for them all to die. And to accomplish this there must have been a high percentage of deaths. How dreary those incessant funerals! How monotonous the perpetual sounds of Oriental grief moaning through the camp! What wonder that Psalm 90, written among such scenes, is so inexpressibly sad!

The wilderness experience is emblematic, amongst other things, of unrest, aimlessness, and unsatisfied longings.

Unrest. The tents were constantly being struck to be erected again in much the same spot. Theirs a perpetual weariness, and they were not suffered to enter into God's rest.

Aimlessness. They wandered in the wilderness in a desert way; they found no city of habitation.

Unsatisfied longings. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them.

But how typical of the lives of many amongst ourselves! Life is passing away so swiftly from us, but how unideal! How few Christians seem to have learned the secret of the inner rest! How many are the victims of murmuring and discontent, or are bitten by the serpents of jealousy and passion, of hatred and ill-will!

The almost universal experience tells of broken vows and blighted hopes, of purposeless wanderings, of a monotony of failure. Always striking and pitching the camp! Always surrounded by the same monotonous horizon, sand, with here and there a palm tree! Always fed on the same food, till the soul loathes it! Life passes away amid fret and chafing disappointment and weariness of existence, till we say with Solomon, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

One of the scourges of the desert is the sandstorm, when the hot wind is laden with light powdery dust, which finds its way into eyes and mouth and lungs, penetrating the clothes, stinging the skin, and making life almost unbearable. An apt illustration of the small annoyances, the petty irritations, the perpetual swarm of gnat-like stings, which invade our most comfortable circumstances, and make us question whether life is worth living.

Then there is also the mirage. When from afar green glades seem to attract the weary traveller, who, as he reaches them, finds his hopes deceived and his thirst mocked. Emblem this of the disappointments to which they expose themselves who are ever seeking for some earthly good to mitigate the hardships and sorrows of their life, instead of seeking the fellowship and blessed help of the living Christ. They travel forward, thinking at every step that they are nearing an oasis in their desert march; but, as they approach, the fabric of their hopes fades away into the air.

"We are made partakers of Christ." These words may either mean that all believers together partake of the fullness of Jesus, or that they all partake with Him of the fullness of God. "Heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ."

But whichever be the true rendering, the thought is inexpressibly helpful. Jesus Christ is our Promised Land, and our Joshua to lead us thither. He gives us rest. In Him are orchards and vineyards, and all manner of precious things. His comfort for our sorrow; His rest for our weariness, His strength for our weakness, His purity for our corruption, His ever-present help for our need. Oh, blessed Jesus, surely it is the wonder of heaven that we make so little of You!

THE CAUSE OF THE WILDERNESS EXPERIENCE.

They could not enter in because of unbelief. See how unbelief raises a barrier which shuts us out of blessing. A fortune may have been left you, but if you do not believe the intelligence and apply for it, you will not profit by it. A regiment of angels may be passing by your home, with blessings in their hands that might enrich you forever, but if you do not believe the tidings that they are on the march, you will not go out to greet or welcome them.

A noble character may rear itself in the neighbourhood in which you live, or the society in which you move; but if you do not believe in it, you will derive no stimulus or comfort from its genial and helpful influence. So whatever Christ may be, and however near, He will be nothing to you unless you have learned to trust Him.

There are three conditions in which unbelief thrives with us, as with the children of Israel.

1) “They murmured”.

The first outbreak was in the wilderness of Sin (Exodus 16), within a few days of the Exodus. There was no bread. The provisions hastily brought from Egypt were consumed. They had their kneading-troughs, but no flour to knead. There was no organised commissariat.

"And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron in the wilderness, and the children of Israel said unto them, Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh-pots, when we did eat bread to the full, for you have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger."

The second outbreak was at Rephidim (Exodus 17). There was no water. The scanty desert brooks were heaps of scorching stones, and not a leaf of vegetation trembled in the burning sunshine. And again the sullen sounds of discontent were heard as the people muttered their belief that they had been brought out of Egypt to perish there.

But the most serious outbreak occurred shortly after they left Sinai (Numbers 13). The green hills of Palestine at last appeared in view, and spies were sent forward to search the land. After forty days they returned laden with luscious fruits; but they had a story to tell of the strength and fortifications of the Canaanites, which filled the people with dismay; and "all the people murmured against Moses and against Aaron, and said, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt."

"Yes, they despised the pleasant land, they believed not His word, but murmured in their tents, and hearkened not to the voice of the Lord. Therefore He lifted up His hand to them, that He would overthrow them in the wilderness" (Psalm 106.24-26).

A murmuring, complaining heart is one which has already commenced to disbelieve in the wise and loving lead of Christ, and in which unbelief will thrive.

2). "They departed from the living God." God is the Home and Source of life. From Him, as from a fountain, all things derive their being, strength, and beauty. If Israel had remained in living union with Him, there would have been no failure in their supplies, and there would have been sufficient grace to make the people calm and restful and strong amid these privations and difficulties.

But they departed from Him. They thought they could do better for themselves. They forsook the Fountain of living water, and went up into the hills to hew out for themselves broken, i.e. cracked cisterns, which could hold no water.

Of the Rock that begat them they grew unmindful; and so became as the desert tamarisk, which inhabits dull and uninhabited wastes, in contrast to the tree whose roots are fed by rivers, and whose arms shadow generations.

Let us ask ourselves whether there has been any declension in our heart-religion, less prayerfulness, less closeness in our walk with God, less enjoyment in the worship of His house; for, if so, unbelief is sure to manifest itself, as the fungus which grows fat on the damp and fetid soil. Unbelief cannot live in the sunlight of fellowship with God.

3). They failed to learn the lessons of the past. They did not deny the past. They would have told you with flashing eyes the wonderful story of deliverance. But they did not trust God's love and wisdom, they did not rely on His repeated promises that He would most certainly bring them in as He had already brought them out; they did not find in the past a guarantee that He would not fail nor forsake them.

At Sin they should have said, "He gave us these bodies with these appetites and needs: we may trust Him to provide them with food. 'Our heavenly Father knows that we have need of all these things'."

At Marah they should have said, "He gave us manna, surely He can supply our thirst."

At Paran they should have said, "God has promised to give us the land; and so, though the Canaanites are strong, and their cities walled to heaven, we will dare believe in Him." Instead of this they cried, "He smote the rock, and the waters gushed out; and the streams overflowed. Can He give bread also? Can He give flesh for his people?"

As we pass through life we should carefully store our hearts with the memory of God's great goodness, and fetch from past deliverances the assurances that He will never leave, neither forsake.

Has He conveyed us across the Atlantic to leave us to drown in a ditch? Has He been with us in six troubles to desert us in the seventh? Has He saved, and can he not keep? Has He redeemed us from hell, and can He not bring us to heaven?

If we would guard against unbelief, we should reinforce our faith by constantly recapitulating the story of God's past dealings, and thus, through the stream of memory, the uplands of our life will send their deposits of blessed helpfulness to reinforce us in our daily anxieties and perplexities. "The Lord has been mindful of us, He will bless us." "If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life."

You were happy in your childhood. Your early days were set in a golden frame. But dear ones have vanished, as the oak's shadow from the forest undergrowth, and you feel unprotected and lonely. But the God of your childhood will not be less thoughtful of you than in those happy bygone days.

You have stepped out on the waters, and as the storm threatens you, you almost wish yourself back, but He who was with you in the fair haven will be as near you when the winds rave and the waves lift up their voice.

You are on the point of exchanging the flesh-pots of Egypt for the new land of Canaan, with its blessed promise, and on the way, heart and flesh fail at the new and untried scenes that daunt and perplex. But He who delivered you from Pharaoh can shield you from Amalek; He who cleft the Red Sea will divide the Jordan.

INSPIRED CAUTIONS. " Take heed lest there be in any one of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God."

Unbelief is the child, not of the head, but of the heart. It is always well to know the source of disease, then the physician can attack it in its citadel. If unbelief were the creature of our intellect, we must needs meet it there with argument, but since it is the product of a wrong state of heart, of an evil heart, we must meet it there.

"This," says William Law, "is an eternal truth, which you cannot too much reflect upon, that reason always follows the state of the heart; and what your heart is, that is your reason. If your heart is full of sentiments, of penitence, and of faith, your reason will take part with your heart; but if your heart is shut up in death and dryness, your reason will delight in nothing but dry objections and speculations."

Guard against an evil heart. If the heart were in a right condition, faith would be as natural to it as flowers in spring, or as smiles on the face of healthy, innocent childhood. As soon as the heart gets into an evil state - harbouring sin, cherishing things which you would not excuse in others but condone in yourself, permitting unholy thoughts and desires to remain unchecked and unjudged, then, beware! for such a heart is no longer able to believe in God. Its head turns dizzy, its eyes are blinded, and it is in imminent peril of falling irretrievably.

Take heed, then. Watch and pray. Examine yourselves whether you be in the faith. Prove your own selves! Expose yourselves to the searching light of God's Spirit. Cultivate the honest and good heart.

Most of the infidelity of the present day arises from man's disinclination to retain God in his knowledge. More scepticism may be traced to a neglected prayer closet than to the arguments of infidels or the halls of secularists.

First men depart from God, then they deny Him. And, therefore, for the most part, unbelief will not yield to clever sermons on the evidences, but to home thrusts that pierce the points of the harness to the soul within. "Keep your heart beyond all keeping, since out of it are the issues of life."

Guard especially against heart-hardening. Hard hearts are unbelieving ones, therefore beware of ossification of the heart. The hardest hearts were soft once, and the softest may get hard. The chalk which now holds the fossil shells was once moist ooze. The horny hand of toil was once full of soft dimples. The murderer once shuddered when, as a boy, he crushed a worm. Judas must have been once a tender and impressionable lad.

But hearts harden gradually, like the freezing of a pond on a frosty night. At first the process can be detected by none but a practised eye. Then there is a thin film of ice, so slender that a pin or needle would fall through. At length it will sustain a pebble, and, if winter still hold its unbroken sway, a child, a man, a crowd, a cart will follow. We get hard through the steps of an unperceived process.

The constant hearing the truth without obeying it. The knowing a better and doing the worse. The cherishing of unholy things that seem fair as angels. The refusal to confess the wrong and to profess the right. All these things harden. Beware of the deceitfulness of sin! Take heed to yourselves! Exhort one another daily.

Guard against a fickle heart. This is the sin which this epistle especially opposes. There are many around us who eagerly embrace a novelty, but when the stress comes, as it always does, like the settling of a house, there is a slackening off. We must hold fast our boldness and the glorying of our hope steadfast to the end. We can only become partakers of Christ if we hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm to the end.

We should see not only to our own heart, but to the heart of our brethren; and exhort one another daily, watching over each other, and seeking to revive drooping piety and reanimate fainting hope.

Let us take heed to these things today. Now is God's time. The Holy Ghost says, ‘Today’. Every day of delay is dangerous, because the hardening process becomes more habitual.

Today restore what you have taken wrongfully, adjust a wrong, promote a right. Today renounce some evil habit, some unhallowed pastime, some unlawful friendship. Today reach out after some further realisation of the fair ideal which beckons you. Today leave the wilderness forever, and enter by faith the Land of Promise.

CHAPTER 10: THE GOSPEL OF REST

"There remains therefore a rest to the people of God." - (HEBREWS 4.9)

THE keynote of this chapter is Rest. In the second verse it is spoken of as a gospel, or good news. And is there any gospel that more needs preaching in these busy, weary days, through which our age is rushing to its close, than the Gospel of Rest?

On all hands we hear of strong and useful workers stricken down in early life by the exhausting effects of mental toil. The tender brain tissues were never made to sustain the tremendous wear and tear of our times. There is no machinery in human nature to repair swiftly enough the waste of nervous energy which is continually going on. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that the symptoms of brain tiredness are becoming familiar to many workers, acting as warning signals, which, if not immediately attended to, are followed by some terrible collapse of mind or body, or both.

And yet it is not altogether that we work so much harder than our forefathers, but that there is so much more fret and chafe and worry in our lives. Competition is closer. Population is more crowded. Brains are keener and swifter in their motion. The resources of ingenuity and inventiveness, of creation and production, are more severely and constantly taxed. And the age seems so merciless and selfish.

If the lonely spirit trips and falls, it is trodden down in the great onward rush, or left behind to its fate, and the dread of the swoop of the vultures, with rustling wings, from unknown heights upon us as their prey, fills us with an anguish which we know by the familiar name of care.

We could better stand the strain of work if only we had rest from worry, from anxiety, and from the fret of the troubled sea that cannot rest, as it moans around us, with its yeasty waves, hungry to devour. Is such a rest possible?

This chapter states that such a rest is possible. "Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest." Rest? What rest? His rest, says the first verse, my rest, says the third verse, God's rest, says the fourth verse. And this last verse is a quotation from the earliest page of the Bible, which tells how God rested from all the work that He had made.

And as we turn to that marvellous apocalypse of the past, which in so many respects answers to the apocalypse of the future given us by the Apostle John, we find that, whereas we are expressly told of the evening and morning of each of the other days of creation, there is no reference to the dawn or close of God's rest-day, and we are left to infer that it is impervious to time, independent of duration, unlimited, and eternal, that the ages of human story are but hours in the rest-day of Yahweh, and that, in point of fact, we spend our years in the Sabbath-keeping of God.

But, better than all, it would appear that we are invited to enter into it and share it, as a child living by the placid waters of a vast fresh water lake may dip into them its cup, and drink and drink again, without making any appreciable diminution of its volume or ripple on its expanse.

What is meant by God resting? Surely not the rest of weariness! "He faints not, neither is weary." Though He had spread forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance, and had invented ten thousand differing forms of being, yet His inventiveness was as fresh, His energy as vigorous as ever.

Surely not the rest of inactivity. "My Father works hitherto," said our Lord. "In Him we live, and move, and have our being." True, He is not now sending forth, so far as we know, suns, or systems, or fresh types of being. But His power is ever at work, repairing, renewing, and sustaining the fabric of the vast machinery of the universe. No sparrow falls to the ground without Him. The cry of the young lion and the lowing of the oxen in the pastures attract His instant regard.

"In Him all things consist." It was the rest of a finished work. He girded Himself to the specific work of creation, and summoned into being all that is, and when it was finished He said it was very good, and at once He rested from all His work which He had created and made.

It was the rest of divine complacency, of infinite satisfaction, of perfect content. It was equivalent to saying, "This creation of Mine is all that I meant it to be, finished and perfect. I am perfectly satisfied. There is nothing more to be done. It is all very good."

This, then, is the rest which we are invited to share. We are not summoned to the heavy slumber which follows over-taxing toil, nor to inaction or indolence, but to the rest which is possible amid swift activity and strenuous work, to perfect equilibrium between the outgoings and incomings of the life, to a contented heart, to peace that passes all understanding, to the repose of the will in the will of God, and to the calm of the depths of the nature which are undisturbed by the hurricanes which sweep the surface, and urge forward the mighty waves.

This rest is holding out both its hands to the weary souls of men throughout the ages, offering its shelter as a harbour from the storms of life.

But is it certain that this rest has not already been entered and exhausted by the children of men? That question is fully examined and answered in this wonderful paragraph.

The Sabbath did not realise that rest (verse 3). We cannot prize its ministry too highly. Its law is written, not only in Scripture, but in the nature of man. The godless band of French Revolutionists found that they could not supersede the week by the decade, the one-day-in-seven by the one-day-in-ten. Like a ministering angel it relieves the monotony of labour, and hushes the ponderous machinery of life, and weaves its spell of rest, but it is too fitful and transient to realise the rest of God.

It may typify it, but it cannot exhaust it. Indeed, it was broken by man's rebellion as soon as God had sanctified and hallowed it. Canaan did not realise that rest (verse 8). The Land of Promise was a great relief to the marchings and privations of the desert. But it was constantly interrupted, and at last, in the Captivity, broken up, as the forms of the mountains in the lake by a shower of hail.

Besides, in the Book of Psalms, written four hundred years after Joshua had led Israel across the Jordan, The Holy Spirit, speaking by David, points onward to a rest still future (Psalm95.7).

Surely, then, if neither of these events has realised the rest of God, it remains still, waiting for us and all the people of God. "There remains, therefore," unexhausted and unrealised, "a Sabbath-keeping to the people of God."

And there is yet a further reason for this conviction of God's unexhausted rest. Jesus, our Forerunner and Representative, has entered into it for us. See what verse 10 affirms: "He that is entered into his rest; " and who can he be but our great Joshua, Jehovah-Jesus? He also has ceased from His own work of redemption, as God did from His of creation. After the creative act, there came the Sabbath, when God ceased from His work, and pronounced it very good. So, after the redemptive act, there came the Sabbath to the Redeemer.

He lay, during the seventh day, in the grave of Joseph, not because He was exhausted or inactive, but because redemption was finished, and there was no more for Him to do. He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on High, and that majestic session is a symptom neither of fatigue nor of indolence.

He ever lives to make intercession; He works with His servants, confirming their words with signs; He walks amid the seven golden candlesticks. And yet He rests as a man may rest who has arisen from his ordinary life to effect some great deed of emancipation and deliverance, but, having accomplished it, returns again to the ordinary routine of his former life, glad and satisfied in his heart.

Nor is this rest for Christ alone, but for us also, who are forever identified with Him in His glorious life. We have been raised up together with Him in the mind and purpose of God, and have been made to sit with Him in the heavenlies, so that in Jesus we have already entered into the rest of God, and have simply to appropriate it by a living faith.

How, then, may we practically realise and enjoy the rest of God ?

( 1) We must will the will of God. So long as the will of God, whether in the Bible or in providence, is going in one direction and our will in another, rest is impossible. Can there be rest in an earthly household when the children are ever chafing against the regulations and control of their parents? How much less can we be at rest if we harbour an incessant spirit of insubordination and questioning, contradicting and resisting the will of God!

That will must be done on earth as it is in heaven. None can stay His hand, or say, What are You doing? It will be done with us, or in spite of us. If we resist it, the yoke against which we rebel will only rub a sore place on our skin, but we must still carry it. How much wiser, then, meekly to yield to it, and submit ourselves under the mighty hand of God, saying, "Not my will, but Yours be done!"

The man who has learned the secret of Christ, in saying a perpetual "Yes" to the will of God; whose life is a strain of rich music to the theme, "Even so, Father", whose will follows the current of the will of God, as the smoke from our chimneys permits itself to be wafted by the winds of autumn, that man will find rest to his soul.

We must accept the finished work of Christ. He has ceased from the work of our redemption, because there was no more to do. Our sins and the sins of the world were put away. The power of the adversary was annulled. The gate of heaven was opened to all that believe. All was finished, and was very good.

Let us, then, cease from our works. Let us no longer feel as if we have to do aught, by our tears or prayers or works, to make ourselves acceptable to God. Why should we try to add one stitch to a finished garment, or append one stroke to the signed and sealed warrant of pardon placed within our hands?

We need have no anxiety as to the completeness or sufficiency of a divinely finished thing. Let us quiet our fears by considering that what satisfies Christ, our Saviour and Head, may well satisfy us. Let us dare to stand without a qualm in God's presence, by virtue of the glorious and completed sacrifice of Calvary. Let us silence every tremor of unrest by recalling the dying cry on the cross, and the witness of the empty grave.

We must trust our Father's care. "Casting all your care upon him, for He cares for you." Sometimes like a wild deluge, sweeping all before it, and sometimes like the continual dropping of water, so does care mar our peace. That we shall some day fall by the hand of Saul, that we shall be left to starve or pine away our days in a respectable workhouse, that we shall never be able to get through the difficulties of the coming days or weeks, household cares, family cares, business cares, cares about servants, children, money; crushing cares, and cares that buzz around the soul like a swarm of gnats on a summer's day, what rest can there be for a soul thus beset?

But, when we once learn to live by faith, believing that our Father loves us, and will not forget or forsake us, but is pledged to supply all our needs, when we acquire the holy habit of talking to Him about all, and handing over all to Him, at the moment that the tiniest shadow is cast upon the soul; when we accept insult and annoyance and interruption, coming to us from whatever quarter, as being by His permission, and, therefore, as part of His dear will for us, then we have learned the secret of the Gospel of Rest.

We must follow our Shepherd's lead. "We which have believed do enter into rest" (verse 3). The way is dark, the mountain track is often hidden from our sight by the heavy mists that hang over hill and fell, we can hardly discern a step in front. But our divine Guide knows.

He who trod earth's pathways is going unseen at our side. The shield of His environing protection is all around; and His voice, in its clear, sweet accents, is whispering peace. Why should we fear? He who touches us, touches His bride, His purchased possession, the apple of His eye. We may, therefore, trust and not be afraid.

Though the mountains should depart, or the hills be removed, yet will His loving kindness not depart from us, neither will the covenant of His peace be removed. And amid the storm, and darkness, and the onsets of our foes, we shall hear Him soothing us with the sweet refrain of His own lullaby of rest: "My peace I give to you. In the world you shall have tribulation, but in me you shall have peace."

CHAPTER 11: THE WORD OF GOD AND ITS EDGE

"The Word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." (HEBREWS 4.12).

WE all have to do with God. "Him with whom we have to do." You cannot break the connection.

You must do with Him as a rebel, if not as a friend, on the ground of works, if not on the ground of grace, at the great white throne, if not in the fleeting days of time. You cannot do without God. You cannot do as you would if there were no God. You cannot avoid having to do with Him, for even though you were to say there was no God, doing violence to the clearest instincts of your being, yet still you would breathe His air, eat His provender, occupy His world, and stand at last before His bar.

And, if you will pardon the materialism of the reference, I will follow the suggestion of my text, and say that the God with Whom we have to do has eyes. "The eyes of Him with whom we have to do."

"You are a God Who sees" was the startled exclamation of an Egyptian slave girl whose childhood had been spent amid the vast statues of gods who had eyes with faraway stony stare, but saw not. And she was right. "The Lord looks from heaven; His eyes behold, His eyelids try, the children of men."

Those eyes miss no one. " There is not any creature not manifest in His sight." The truest goodness is least obtrusive of itself. It steals unnoticed through the world, filling up its days with deeds and words of gentle kindness, which are known only to heaven. And herein it finds its sufficient reward. It prays behind closed doors, it exercises a vigorous self-denial in secret, it does its work of mercy by stealth.

Thus the great blatant world of men, with its trumpets and heralds and newspaper notices, knows little of it, and cannot find the nooks where God's wild flowers bloom in inaccessible heights for His eye alone.

But the Father sees in secret. The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous. His eyes run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is perfect toward Him. Do you want guidance? Look up! those eyes wait to guide by a glance. Are you in sorrow? They will film with tears. Are you going astray? They shall beckon you back, and break your heart, as they did Peter's. You will come to find your heaven in the light radiated by the eye of God, when once you have learned to meet it, clad in the righteousness of Jesus.

Unconverted reader, remember there is no screen from the eye of God. His eyes