nature and character are to the spiritual universe. There the apparent confusion is worse confounded. The death struggle of good with evil fills the universe with the clang of conflict; the wailing of the vanquished, the shouts of the conquerors, the moanings of misery, the desolations of war, are ever before the eye and the ear of the angels and of God. This earth, the darling of creation, is the scene of the deadliest discord. The good seem to be born into it but to suffer and to die. The battle seems ever to end in the victory of the evil one. Reformations, revivals, fade after a brief lustre, and the night rarely fails to be denser than before. Those who will live for man, to lead him, to teach him, to purify him, to save him, must die for man, and what becomes of their work; with whom can they leave it, to guard and complete it? Is not the battle of truth and virtue a losing one, is not night the essential atmosphere of this material creation? It emerged from night once, is it not settling down to night again? No! No! No! Thus saith the living God:-"O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid: say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God! Behold, the Lord God will come with strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him. He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs ·with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young." (Is. xl, 9-11.) There Isaiah rested, beyond that he could not carry it; there he must rest. The Lord liveth. "The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice." This is the one ultimate answer of the Bible to all the questions which perplex and bewilder the intellect of man, the one solution of the mysteries which baffle his heart. "Have faith in God." There are times when it is blessed to fall back and rest upon it, times when the intellect gives up in despair the effort

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to trace the methods of God's mysterious ways with creation and with man. "I cannot understand. It is all a wild sea of confusion, which becomes denser as I gaze. But I believe in Thee, O, my God! Lord, help Thou mine unbelief. There is a living God above, beyond, beneath, all this; there must be a solution somewhere. He knows what He does, and why; that knowledge shall content me. Resting on Him I can suffer and wait in hope, a hope deep-rooted as His own being; indestructible as His own life. Let that faith fail me, and all around me is darkness-horrible, profound." The utter darkness is that in which a mind and heart are buried, when faith fails to furnish the key to the mysteries of nature and of life. But let us have faith, let us hold fast to the living God, and a thousand tender voices round us at once burst forth to guide and cheer. Creation lives by faith unconsciously, and all her voices to our intelligent ear iterate and reiterate " Have faith in God." The heavens and the earth, the winds and tempests, the stars, the flowers, the fountains, the rivers, the great murmuring ocean, all join in the hymn of trust and hope, which to the believer becomes articulate, and fixes more surely his faith in God. If that be the deepest thing in a man's nature, if its roots reach where no fires of trial can reach them, where the keenest torments cannot search out and destroy them-that man is blessed. Blessed! though like Isaiah he has to reach his martyr's crown through a bloody and agonizing death. Isaiah, shut out from the present, compelled to leave that in the devil's hand awhile, wrote for the gloomy and dreary ages which he foresaw, when even the pious might fear that God had forgotten His promise and forsaken His world. And he spends a wealth of eloquence and earnestness unmatched perhaps in any literature, in painting the power and splendour, the truth and the faithfulness, of Him whom their faithlessness might be tempted to deny. (Read Is. xliii, 1--7.)

II. Have faith in God.

Yes! it is an easy exhortation, and soon said. But what do I know of God that I should trust Him? How know I that this awful being is not at the bottom of the confusion-that His will is not my suffering and death?

I have directed you to what I believe, what the Bible declares, is the one ground of the hope of man. This is the one sure rock on which man can plant himself. If his difficulties, sorrows, struggles, be not such that God and the development of God's counsel can help him out of them, there is no hope for him. But if his life and his hope be linked however feebly with God, then He must bear his servant on with Him in the path of his triumphal progress, and bring his battle and suffering to a victorious issue at last. But again, what do we know of God that we should trust Him? what aspects does He present to us? do they encourage or discourage the hoping against hope in Him? We have two sources of knowledgewhat He has said to, what He has done for, man.

1. His word.

There is something unspeakably sublime in the appeal in Isaiah xl, 26 :---“ Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth." It is Heaven's protest against man's despair. Nor is Isaiah the only sacred writer who utters it. There is something very strikingly parallel in Job. Here we have a desperate age and people, there we have a desperate man. And in both cases God's appeal is to the grand and stedfast order of the vast universe, which He sustains and assures. Read Job xxxviii.

It is difficult to discern at first sight the reason of this appeal. Where is the link of connection between stars and men; what comfort should the contemplation of the power and fixedness

of His purpose in creation, bring to one careworn, burdened, miserable, hopeless human heart? I believe that the link is here. God does not explain himself to the stars, He does to you. Why? why should He come forth to explain and justify Himself? why not continue to pursue His own course with you as with the creation, and leave it to explain and justify itself in time? Why? but because you are of more value than many stars. I believe that this was the substance of God's answer to Job. It was not the picture of God's glorious ways in the creation-though it helps us when brooding over our particular grief to look wide afield, and contemplate the excellent wisdom and loving-kindness of the Lord; but it was the fact that God so loved His servant as to come to him in person and paint the picture before his sight. Then Job's faithless cry was answered. “I cannot find Him," the sufferer cried, "before, behind, on the right hand, on the left, I search for Him, I feel for Him, but He is not there." And God came and stood before his face, and said; "I am here, it is more to me to explain and justify myself to thy agonized heart, my upright servant, than to listen to the choral hymns of the constellations, and to lead out on the wolds of space the troops of stars. And then Job had rest. God tells us, if words can tell, that all the hosts of heaven are attendant on the fortunes of mankind. They were made, they are sustained for man, and the unfolding of man's life. They all live that God's deep purpose concerning man may be accomplished. If Israel perish, if God's purpose, His sovereign purpose of redemption, which rules all other purposes, be frustrated, then this great universe has been created and sustained for æons of æons in vain. It seems that man's life-battle and life-work are but slight things and obscure, amidst the procession of the powers which carry on the vital activities of the great universe, which stretches out around him into the infinite on every hand; but God's word

affirms, with an emphasis, an intensity of reiteration and force which might carry conviction to the most sorrowful and despondent heart, that grand as are the interests involved in the order and procession of starry worlds, they shrink to nothing before the interest of the struggle of truth against lies, goodness against evil, in one individual human heart. God's works praise Him in all places of His dominion, but man can glorify Him. On the issues of man's life-the end of this deadly moral struggle, of which this world is the theatre-He has staked interest and hope of which creation has no measures; in truth He has staked the existence of His eternal kingdom on the results of this grand moral experiment, on the making a cosmos-a glorious spiritual immortal creation-out of the confusion and discord into which the devil has plunged the world. He has given us the right to say, so closely has He bound our moral interests with His own, that if He forgets His promises, if He forsakes His world, He forgets, He forsakes Himself. (Read Isaiah liv, 5-10; xlix, 13-18.)

God declares here that we are not only involved inextricably in the fulfilment of His deepest and most cherished counsels, but that we are needed to satisfy the yearnings of His Father's heart.

It is hard for the spirit to realise all that is meant by the fatherly love of God. To dare to appeal to a Being of such awful power, of such infinite elevation, as to a human parent; to confide to His ear as to a Father's, every aching want, every moan of pain, seems perilous presumption; and so we hedge round with respectful limitations and qualifications the great fact, the central fact, of human life, the Fatherhood of God. But God reiterates the word, and gathers around it all the associations which can strike the chord of filial love in our hearts. He will not have us limit it or qualify it. It is so essential that to limit or qualify it, is to limit or qualify Him. He declares His