trace one form, to be overcome by one memory. All else is as if it did not exist, you go through with it mechanically; there is coming and going, excitement and repose, a development of new schemes, an abandonment of old habits; life is a kaleidoscope, ever rearranging its forms and hues; but it is all the same to you. You are too sick at heart to care for any part of it; if it forces itself on you, it is, you think, a cruel impertinence, which would break in on the secret suffering of your wounded spirit.

And it may be that to this is added a new and distinct trial. You have led a busy life, and public gossip has made free with your doings, with your motives, with your character. While your home was still peopled by those whom you loved, it mattered little. You shut your front door on the ill-natured world out in the street, and you found around your fireside those who could understand you; you found intelligence, justice, sympathy. But now the vacant chambers of your home echo the voices. of the world abroad; they might seem to be in secret understanding with each other. For the old gossip goes on with its varied petty malignity, settling down upon your life, as the flies settle on a weary or sick animal, which, with a presentiment of approaching death, has no longer the heart and vigour to shake them off. In past days you would not have cared; you would have taken refuge in an affection, which reflected the verdict of your honest conscience. But now you are unmanned; you do care, you cannot help it. Every malignant insinuation, every cruel misconstruction, every ingenious caricature, leaves a separate wound; you exclaim with the Psalmist, "Mine enemies are daily at hand to swallow me up." "They came about me like bees;" "In mine adversity they

a Ps. lvi. 2.

b

b Ib. cxviii. 12.

a

rejoiced, and gathered themselves together: yea, the very abjects came together against me unawares, making mouths at me, and ceased not. With the flatterers were busy mockers, who gnashed upon me with their teeth."

"a

Brethren, this is no new experience. It has been so in all ages; it is an ever-recurring episode in the history of the human heart. You are only experiencing what hundreds of thousands have gone through before you. But what is the purpose of Him Who has thus laid His hand upon you? What is the true meaning of this desolate home, of this wrecked and wounded life, of those illnatured voices, of this general sense of misery and failure? Believe it, my friend, all this should wean you from this world, and should suggest another. Your true home is not desolate; your true life is not wrecked and wounded; you need not be at the mercy of the world's ill-nature; you need not abandon yourself to a sense of woe and ruin. The Infinite Being Who made you for Himself does not share any of those vicissitudes which belong to all created life; and He would fain comfort you. In rising to Him, in burying your sorrows in His fathomless Love, in forgetting the hard tongues of men, while you listen to the murmured whispers of the Eternal Charity, you, too, may say, "Lord, Thou hast been our Home from one generation to another."

Or, since this day last year, some of those who hear me may be conscious of a great fall from God. Until then, there had been many faults more or less grave, but no deliberate offence; no looking God in the face, and resisting Him. Since one fatal hour all has changed. The light heart, the bright eye, the open countenance, the simple integrity of purpose, are no longer yours. a Ps. xxxv. 15, 16.

You carry about with you a wound which you dare not probe; it is festering in secret; it threatens to infect your whole spiritual being with corruption and death. You cry, "My loins are filled with a sore disease: and there is no whole part in my body. I am feeble and sore smitten: I have roared for the very disquietness of my heart." a

And yet there is this cheerful feature in your case, that you do not shut your eyes to it. The worst of all states is to have fallen away from God and not to know it. You, at least, are not under an illusion. You are not now admiring, petting, extolling a false self which your friends have made for you. You see your true self, as it is before God; wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked." You have plucked away the tinsel coverings of life; you see the skeleton below. The old illusions of your self-love now seem to you a dreadful irony. Perhaps you are shocked at the falsehood and emptiness of the years which led you up, through a forest of illusions, to your fall. It seems as if all was lost; as if nothing could be saved out of the wreck within; as if love, joy, peace, prayer, had for ever vanished; as if your despair in the presence of the recognized truth must practically lead to the same end as is reached by others through indifference to or forgetfulness of deadly evil.

No, brethren, it is not so. This sore conscience, like a sore body or a sore heart, only more completely and effectually, should lead you back to God. He is the Refuge, not only of the sorrowful and the sick, but also, and pre-eminently, of the repentant sinner. He has left you in no doubt as to how He will meet you, if you turn to Him. He is waiting at the gate of Paradise with the best robe and the fatted calf. His Eternal Son, Incarb Rev. iii. 17. c St. Luke xv. 22, 23.

a Ps. xxxviii. 7, 8.

nate and Crucified for you, is a pledge of His forgiveness. In the Sacrifice offered on Calvary you have a warrant of pardon. In the Heart of Jesus you may find a Refuge for the aching miseries of the past. "If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous; and He is the Propitiation for our sins."a You have only to join the great company of penitents which, mingling with the sick and the sorrowful, cries from age to age at the foot of the Cross, "Lord, Thou hast been our Refuge from one generation to another."

Brethren, we have been only looking backward; let us look onward, for one moment, into the future. Where shall we be-you and I-on the last day of the new year? Shall we be in health, or in sickness? Shall we be in bright spirits, or weighed down by sorrow? Shall we be still in the land of the living, or shall we, too, have followed the many who have gone on before us into the kingdom of the dead? How little can we anticipate the answer to these questions! It is as utterly beyond us as are the events of a future removed from us by an interval of a thousand years. What can we do but fall each on his knees this night, and cry to the Great Author of our Existence, "Lord, 'my time is in Thy Hand.' Thou canst dispose of me as Thou willest; and I desire, in my weakness, to cast myself upon Thee; to associate myself with that great company of Thy servants to whom Thou hast been and art an Eternal Home; to find in Thy Strength, Thy consolations, Thy Pardon, that which will lift me above the changes of this mortal life; to learn to say with all my heart and soul and strength, Lord, Thou art my Refuge in time and in Eternity"!

b

રી I St. John ii. 1, 2.

b Ps. xxxi. 17.

ON

SERMON XVI.

DARK VIEWS OF LIFE.

(SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS.)

ECCLES. XI. 4.

He that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.

N the last Sunday in the year it is not easy to decide at once how to employ our thoughts to the best advantage. For, on the one hand, this Sunday falls within the Christmas week, when Christians would desire to be occupied, so far as may be, with the Love and Mercy of our Divine Saviour, as shown in His taking our nature upon Him that He might redeem us men from sin and death. On the other hand, the last Lord's Day in the year is a natural landmark, which catches the eye of all men who think seriously of the lapse of time. It suggests healthy and solemn thoughts which do not come, at least, so readily on other days, and which have a work to do in us as we pass along the road which leads to another world. How are we to decide between the claims of the Great Festival and the claims of the last hours of the dying year? The best decision is to choose some ground common to both of them, if we can do so; and this, in a measure, I hope to show, is secured by the maxim, "He that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.' The drift of this saying is plain enough if we look at the

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