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them into words, so are there men who can count upon their fingers the great dogmas of Christianity but cannot run them into musical utterance, or mass them into grand practical argument, or translate them into noble and beneficent life. They are weather-wise, letter-wise, and nothing more. Herein is the great difficulty of all-expanding revelation, and all-broadening and everenlarging and enlightening ministries amongst men. We cannot get them to understand that it is one thing to know the letters of the alphabet and a totally different thing to run those letters into words and those words into ample and eloquent sentences.

Jesus allows a certain amount of knowledge on the part of his interrogators, and then he mocks them as being only learned in the weather, skilled in the clouds, but having no eye to read the writing of the heavens. When you look upon the clouds you do not look upon the sky, when you look upon the sky you do not see into heaven, when you read letters you do not form words, when you pick out individual words you do not construct tuneful and inspiring sentences. Stop not short in your education, but get away from the letter to the word, from the word to the sentence, from the sentence to the meaning, from the meaning to the music, from the music to the Musician-God.

Jesus Christ's answer was more than a mockery, it was also a revelation of the great fact that we are surrounded by legible and visible providences in human affairs. "Can ye not discern the signs of the times?" We should not need miracles if we could rightly read events-that seems to be the spiritual doctrine of Jesus Christ he teaches us that we have a sign from heaven every day, and that we only need the seeing eye to behold its lustre and beauty. It is thus that the Son of God lays his claim upon our attention and confidence by the breadth and moral nobleness of his teaching. Whilst we with blatant curiosity and affected piety are wanting new signs and new tokens from heaven, he says, “God is revealing himself in all the processes of the age. in all the developments of civilization: you should read these things more carefully, and you would not be pining and sighing for other proofs and demonstrations of the divine finger."

Facts are lamps by which we should see God. The rapid and startling combination of events surprising the crafty by new conjectures and appalling the strong by unreckoned energies, are

signs of a power as beneficent as it is unlimited.

Ye can discern

the face of the sky, but can ye not discern the signs of the times? The little that we can do is mocked by the great which we cannot do-or a more cheering view is that the little we can do should be the stimulus to our attempts to still loftier and nobler discoveries. Can ye not discern the signs of the times? is a challenge and not a rebuke. Christianity always calls us to an interpretation of the events that make up the history of our own day. Daily journalism should be daily preaching: men who keep diaries should know that they are writing revelations from heaven. John Wesley was wont to say that he read the newspapers to see how God was governing the world. When journalism is honest without being pious, real and healthy without being sentimental, it will show us every day in its broad sheet a thousand signs from heaven.

Christianity therefore is a call to present day thinking. Venerable as it is with the colours of old time, it is yet modern in its sympathy with human aspiration and its control over human motive and purpose. Not ancient history but modern activity comes within the claim and sovereignty of Christian faith. The Church must modernize itself, and for ever be the youngest as well as the oldest of human institutions.

Jesus Christ in closing, which he to-day practically does, the great series of miracles with which we have now become familiar, and in pointing to the signs of the times as God's revelations and tokens amongst us, takes his stand upon the broadest and most indestructible ground. This is a noble finish to the miracles. Again and again we shall see in further reading, a wonderful work here and there, but practically as to their massiveness and consecutiveness, the miracles are closed in this reading. Jesus Christ in retiring from a series of mighty works says, "If you want more miracles, more signs from heaven, look at events, study the history of your own time, from a religious standpoint survey the great march of civilization, the conflict of interests, the battle of truth against error, light against darkness, and he who reads the signs of the times aright will want no more miracles of the kind now closed, for his own life will be a wonder, every event upon earth will be an interposition from heaven."

This is healthy teaching, this is robust, masculine talk. The

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THE SIGNS OF LIFE.

man who took this attitude was not afraid of his religion suffering from contact with material civilization and with public conflicts of all kinds. He was not only a God distant, infinite, impalpable and unnameable, but a Father in the household, watching all the family life, interposing in its succession of daily events and asserting himself with all the processes and developments of individual, social, and national life. This is a grand farewell. He is now about to be taken up from us into a loftier region of teaching, and before this intermediate ascension he says to us in broad noble speech, "Read the signs of the times, consider the events that are passing round about you, and you will have no further need for miracles and wonders of a kind to which you have now been long accustomed."

Let us learn then from Christ's answer that the events of the day are signs. The sign is always more than itself: the sign points to the thing signified. And let us also learn that these signs were meant to be studied. Jesus Christ would never refer us to unauthorized sources of thought and expression. God means his providences to be searched into, compared one with another, set in proper relation and succession. Have we the seeing eye? There is a shape in events; circumstances, occurrences, transactions are not unrelated stories, but they were meant to be put together to grow up into a holy temple unto the Lord, from the foundation to the loftiest pinnacle. Do not suppose that time is chaotic, look for the shape--when you cannot see the shape, look for the shadow. Your affliction means something, your disappointments have a purpose, your successes have a divine meaning, your opportunities are doors opened by divine fingers. Fool is he who thinks that every event is but a laden vehicle that turns out its contents every night, and passes on to bring other contents and to throw them into the same shapeless heap.

Read the signs of your own life. Throw the memory of the heart back to the time when you were young, little, poor, unknown, misunderstood, misjudged, assailed, nearly ruined, often sick, sometimes friendless. How doors opened, how friends came, how unexpected voices broke in upon the solitude of your despair, how little gleams and glints of light stirred in upon the darkness of your dejection-let the whole scene pass before your

inner vision, and you will want no miracles of a sensational, external, and striking kind. You yourself will be the miracle, and unless a man feels himself to be a miracle, all written and historical miracles will be but so many stumbling-blocks to his faith. If we preach the miracles only along the line of merely intellectual enquiry, all nature will seem to be against us, great laws of continuity will assail our faith in every approach it makes towards the conclusion; but if we ourselves, being miracles, preach the consideration of Christ's wonderful works, they will seem to be part of himself, almost parts of ourselves, and we will know them by a masonry of the heart which has no words which can adequately express the subtlety of its penetration or the grasp of its power.

Though the written revelation has closed and no more ink can be added to God's Bible, living revelation is continual. Woe untɔ that man who takes his ink-horn and dips his pen, with the hope of adding anything to the Book to which God himself has added the grand Amen; but joy to that heart, a Sabbath every day, light upon light till the whole life burns with a sacred lustre, who sees God in Providence, reads him in daily events, hears his going in every click of the telegraph, sees him walking upon the waters, and watches him bringing chaos into order, tumult into peace and

music.

A small event occurred afterward, a scene of blundering stupidity on the part of men who were nearest to him, and who ought to have heard the beating of his heart more clearly than others, but as we ourselves are making the same blunder every day, mistaking the letter for the spirit, the loaf for the doctrine, mixing up sacred and secular, and not able to distinguish the one from the otherwe had better not rebuke in terms too severe their stupidity, lest we inflict fatal wounds upon our own sagacity.

THE SILENT LOOKS OF CHRIST.

Mark xi. 11.

"And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, he went out."

HIS is one of the passages of Scripture that the reader may

arrested. The singularity of this act will not escape your notice now that the verse is read as a text. Jesus Christ entered into the city, and into the temple; merely looked round about upon all things, and went out. The comprehensiveness of this act will make you feel as if you were girt about with eyes. Jesus Christ entered into the city and into the temple, and looked round about upon all things. The great things, the things minute and obscure and comparatively worthless. If he thought it worth while to create the daisy, will it be beneath him to stop and look at the little beauty which he painted? We do not look upon all things. We look upon faces, surfaces, transient aspects of things; but Jesus looks into spirit, purpose, motive, heart, impulse, will, and all the secrets of that supreme mystery amongst us called human life.

The silence of this act will almost affright you. Jesus came into the city, looked round about upon all things, and did not say one word. That is terrible ! When men speak to me, I can in some measure understand what they are aiming at. But there are some looks, even amongst ourselves, that are mysteries; there are some glances shot from human eyes that trouble the beholder! Can guilt bear the lingering enquiring gaze of innocence? Does not the corrupt man fear the eye of the just man more than he would fear the lightning at midnight? May not that look mean so much, even if it be a look of unsuspicion and of entire ignorance, so far as the immediate circumstances are concerned? Yet