Unfasten your

I stand at the door, and knock."* heart's door, long barred, cased with resolves as with steel, that only your bosom sin shall pass into its old Let the King be set on the throne And of the kingdom within your

home within you.

"All

of the kingdom! heart it shall be true, as it was true of Judah, the people of the land rejoiced: and the city was quiet, after that they had slain Athaliah with the sword."

VI. And oh! if you are trophies and monuments of His " dying love and rising power," think what blessings you are called to be (in the same strength) to others. "Owe no man anything, but to love one another." Set about discharging this debt at once, honourably, faithfully. If you can remember a sin that once ruled you, but it has been dragged out and slain, and the very recollection of the ghastly features of that sin, of its vile tyranny, its degrading corruption, scares you; then consider that member of your household, or that neighbour of yours, kept under chains and darkness by that sin, tortured and enslaved by that sin, that drunkenness, uncleanness, violent temper, that foul-mouthed abuse and ridicule of good books, and things, and men; yea, of that King of heaven and earth, "whose smile is heaven, whose frown is hell." Do not give that man up for lost. Watch for opportunities; wait to have them given. Be ready, hard though it be, to bear much hatred and opposition, to encounter many a frown, many a bitter disappointment, it may be. Do not be always in that man's debt by never trying to do a thing for him to set him right. Go forth in the strength of the Lord God! Rouse him, in God's name, to some notion of the horror of his position; * Rev. iii. 20. + Rom. xiii. 8.

of the worse than suicidal wrong he does his own soul. "He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul."* Let your tears over him, or at least your tender sympathy, your solemn beseeching remonstrance, leave you at least guiltless concerning your brother. Acquit yourselves of this debt, at least, before that man goes and witnesses against you at the bar of unerring justice; says of you, "That man lived next door to me; he heard the shouts of my drunken revels, heard the cries of my poor wife and terrified children, saw me stagger down the street, more like a fiend than a man-than a man made after the image of God, and he never said a word to me, or did the least thing to help me out of that slough of despond into which I had fallen." Oh! I pray for myself, dear brethren, I pray for you, that God of His mercy will be pleased to make us feel a deeper concern about perishing souls; that through us He may be pleased to show to some of "them that be in error the light of His truth, to the intent that they may return into the way of righteousness."

Two or three months since there was joy in the Madagascar capital. The late queen, Rasohery, was expiring. An uprising was expected to set up a rival queen in the place of her legitimate successor. It seemed desirable that in order to stem the course of the rebellion the dying queen should be brought to Antanarivo, three miles distant from where she then was. The English medical missionary in attendance forbade it. It could but hasten her end, and possibly destroy the one remaining chance of recovery. But the idol priests and worshippers were bent upon trying their magical skill. They would, with great

* Prov. viii. 36.

pomp and state, bring the idol Kalimalaza to the palace, and carry it in procession before the queen to the capital. The queen, who had long entertained secret doubts of the efficacy of the whole system of idolatry, showed on this occasion remarkable wisdom and boldness in confronting the idol priests, and discovering the hollowness and emptiness of their craft. The result was, she banished them the palace, and forbade their recall on any pretext whatsoever, and committed herself to the prayers of the Christian missionary. Upon her death her successor, for the first time in Madagascar history, excluded every idolatrous rite from her coronation. "It may almost be said," adds the missionary, "that the idols in Madagascar died a fortnight before the death of the late queen."

Facts like these, occurring in our own times, deserve our serious notice. They help us to see that this text, in its spirit, is still verified and attested afresh. They may encourage you in your own conflicts to remember Him who says of Himself, "I am He that liveth, and was dead, and, behold, I am alive for evermore."* It may not be so much any particular sin, any gross sin, so much as the evil principle generally within you, whose uprisings cause you much humbling and sorrow. When Luther cried in his distress, "My sins! my sins! it was not so much any known, indulged, sinful act, but the inborn corruption which he mourned over, as every enlightened soul does. "Do you mean it,” said Staupitz, the head of his order, "when you repeat it in the creed, I believe in forgiveness of sins'?" That thought for the time * Rev. i. 18.

the

brought him peace, and so to you may that full promise give peace: "He will turn again, He will have compassion upon us, He will subdue our iniquities: and Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.' The victory need not be a violent, sudden triumph, not a spasm of emotional victory, but a quiet, gradual, patient overcoming, under an influence which enables you daily and hourly to say, "Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."+

*Micah vii. 19.

+ I Cor. xv. 57.

XXI.

The Light and the Furnace, and the Grace which binds them.

ISAIAH XXXI. 9.

"Whose fire is in Zion, and His furnace in Jerusalem."

THE imagery in this chapter is striking, and the

language peculiarly forcible. It is supposed to have been written about three years before the destruction of Sennacherib's mighty host under the walls of Jerusalem. The panic with which those hosts. were stricken in the hour of their vaunting and exulting pride, and by which the flower of Nineveh's chivalry was laid low in that one night of shame and disaster, is not obscurely intimated in the verses before the text.

In the beginning of the chapter Hezekiah and his princes and people are warned against those perilous alliances with Egypt, which had always proved so fruitful a source of temptation to the Jews, and which had never failed in the end to work them much harm and loss, and cruelly to belie their fond expectations; however natural and reasonable it might appear on grounds of mere human policy that, under a sense of common danger Israel and Egypt should make common cause, and unite themselves to stem the course of those Assyrian hordes that bore down with such a whelming stream of conquest from the East.

The prophet, in the name of the Lord, fearlessly