that you are leaving self behind. "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me."* You have left sins and lusts behind. "Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any more with idols?" You leave the love of the world behind; "for if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him."+ Thus you see what a positive thing repentance is: the mere crying and tears, though an important and necessary part of it, is a very elementary part indeed. It cries after God, fastens itself on thoughts of God; it "presses toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus;"§ it "yields itself unto God;"|| vows itself to lifelong consecration and surrender. "From darkness you come into light;" "from the bondage of corruption to the glorious liberty of the children of God;"¶ from death to life; from condemnation to the state of justification, in which the handwriting is cancelled and cross-scored by the blood of the Lamb. "He that hath the Son hath life;" "** and as heirs of such an inheritance you carry yourself like strangers, "Looking for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God."†† You are not ashamed to confess in whose steps you follow on. "Jesus, my all, to heaven is gone, Just this point is the conclusion of our text. They (that is, the true penitents here spoken of) say, "Come, let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual cove * Matt. xvi. 24. + Hos. xiv. 8. 1 John ii. 15. § Phil. iii. 14. Rom. viii. 21. ** 1 John v. 12. ++ Heb. xi. 10. nant that shall not be forgotten." It is at this last point that many draw back. The three former stagesgoing and weeping, seeking the Lord, asking the way to Zion, with their faces thitherward—oftentimes are preliminary to this last; they are intended to be so: but it is not so always; for this is the final step by which the soul commits itself irrevocably and for ever to God and Christ. Having wept over sin, having unquenchable longing for God, having asked the way, and set its face, as its everlasting portion, steadfastly Zionward, it feels it can now do no other. It vows and resigns itself to that heavenly lover, whose love, for depth and truth and self-devotion, infinitely surpasses the most rapturous devotion of the most intense human love. A young man who perished in the foundering of the ill-fated steamer "London," had been requested by his minister just before he sailed to use daily a prayer he had given him. He shouted to some one who was in the boat, "If ever you reach the land, tell the minister that I have used the prayer he gave me every day, and now can say, 'My Beloved is mine, and I am His.'"* And what does that mean, but the very same thing that is meant by this covenant "never to be forgotten; viz., by the Spirit's seal of sonship on my soul, I know that I am His, and I resign myself to Him, rejecting, renouncing the claims of sin, self, and the world. I am yielded wholly in body, soul, and spirit; not that I, a frail, sinful child of dust can add anything; but He who calls, let Him use me as the meanest vessel of service in His great house. He accepts, sets value upon this free-will offering. It is all of His condescending grace; my changeful, restless being Cant. ii. 16. I bring to find rest in the unchangeable Saviour. I subscribe with my own hands, I affirm as my own deliberate act and deed, vows subscribed for me in my baptism. What is confirmation but this act of binding yourself by a covenant for ever to God in Christ? It is this to which the Church of Christ in this land, in your Lord's name and behalf, invites her young members. She would have you regard it as one of the most solemn steps in your life; one therefore most thoughtfully and prayerfully to be entered upon : mourning like returning Israel over past backslidings, follies, sins; asking the way to Zion in that awakened and inquiring spirit which marks the young disciple; making your way "through the press to Jesus," that His healing touch may make you perfectly whole; and then, with mind made up to offer Him the poor yet acceptable tribute of your hearts and lives, "Thine for ever! Saviour, keep These Thy frail and trembling sheep; Let us all Thy goodness share. Lead us, Lord, from earth to heaven." *Mark v. 27. XXIV. The Chastisements of the Godly, God's Warning to the Ungodly. LUKE xxiii. 31. "For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?" UR Lord, throughout His whole passion, stands before us in the character of a Priest. At some few moments He stands before us in the light of a King. Again we see Him as a Prophet. It is in this aspect of His character and work that He presents Himself to us in the text. It forms the conclusion to the sorrowful utterance in which our Lord addressed Himself to the weeping and wailing women that followed Him, as He went forth out of the gate of Jerusalem, like the accursed sin-laden victim under the law, bearing the reproach of that human nature whose brotherhood and suretyship He had assumed. The former part of this prophecy of our Lord we considered on Good Friday, from the words, "Daughters of Ferusalem, weep not for me; but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.' I tried to show how these words were chiefly borrowed from Old Testament prophecy, the sphere and element in which our * Luke xxiii. 28-30. blessed Lord continually lived and dwelt; "the garment He always had upon Him, the robe He was always girded withal." Agonizing and appalling as the scene was that was then enacted before their eyes, yet He gently rebukes their grief as being indiscriminating, and therefore misapplied. It lay on the surface, and showed a want of penetration into the heart and reality of things. They wept for Him as they might for any anguished and innocent sufferer. They perceived not the causes which lay at the root of that which was now going on before their eyes, and the incalculably grave issues which hung upon it. While the great bulk of our Lord's words to the women of Jerusalem, and the main stress of their significance, bore upon the Jewish people and their future, the proverbial sentence with which it closes was intended, probably, to be wider in its reach, and to have a more general bearing, so as to speak a pointed meaning to ourselves also. It has been a much discussed and controverted sentence; but expositors are now pretty nearly agreed as to its sense, which is arrived at both by what the context requires, and by manifestly parallel passages of the Word of God, which help greatly to illustrate and enforce it. When I spoke of the future of the Jewish people, I meant their whole future until now, not merely the near approaching destruction of their city. As has been often shown, the predictions of the fortunes of Jerusalem and the Jews had a very singular and marked accordance with the actual event. Their fortunes were unparalleled and unique in character. Many cities of the world had been hopelessly overthrown; many nations had decayed and perished, and their very names passed out of the muster-roll of |