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THE LEPER'S PRAYER.

There are times when we

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write prayers for us or to pray with us. want longer communion with God; when he says, Come up to the mountain early in the morning and meet me on the top." And when we do not leave the mountain till the sun has just light enough in it to light us down the long stairway again, then we may need many words, and beautiful, quivering with sacred life, glittering with celestial beauty, musical with heavenly tunefulness -wondrous words, almost divine, as if they would totalise themselves into one verb. You have had such experience, you have been part of a multitude, and you have been suddenly turned out of it and made to stand alone before the Christ. Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together, let me say again; and let me further add, have hours and half-hours in which there is nobody with you in the sanctuary, when you are alone in it, yet not alone, for the Father is with you.

The leper teaches us a beautiful prayer. We will omit his own personal petition and put in our own-his introduction will do for any prayer. “Lord, if thou wilt." Every man has to fill up the form with his own cry. Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me strong: I am weak, I am a child of infirmity; my bones ache, my knees smite one another with feebleness and terror; I hardly live, my life is a burden or a pain-if thou wilt, thou canst make me strong. Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me happy. I am hardly ever happy; I dare not be happy, for fear a moment's gladness should bring back the pain with increased poignancy. I am as those who are afflicted and who dare not sleep because the waking again is intolerable agony. Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me rich nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.

Sorrow turns instinctively to the supernatural. I would not listen to a strong, robust, rude man talking to me about the supernatural. He knows nothing about it; he never needed it so far. as his bodily sensitiveness or necessity is concerned. Go and argue with the leper; tell him that the supernatural is not accessible, tell him to go to the ordinary physician, reason with him upon the vanity and the uselessness of religious expectation. Will he hear your prating? What is it that breaks through every argument in the time of its intolerable fire, its pain, its agony, its heart-ache? Go and tell the mother who is just lowering her one little child into the grave not to be religious, and not to say, My

God, my Father;" tell her to turn away her tear-filled eyes from the blue heavens, for there is no one there who cares for her agony fill her ear with atheistic polysyllables, and drag her back from the altar-and see what intellectual conquests you can win. Feeling is sometimes the very inspiration of life.

Argument can touch but a very little portion of me. Whatever leaves the heart untouched is barren, vexatious, and worse than useless.

Herein is a lesson to the young and strong of a kind that cannot now be very persistently urged. A child, thank God, is all laughter, and I would not punctuate its laugh with a single tear. Let the child laugh. The strong man, who never had a head-ache or heart-ache, who never knew what it was to toss upon the bed hour by hour, calling and crying for sleep,-what can he say to anybody? Ask the fat ox the way to heaven, and it will tell you as soon as can such a man say one true word about things that are above the clouds.

Sorrow never came into the world with the will of Christ. Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean. Certainly. Then leprosy never came with his will, sympathetically. Whenever you see a grave dug in the cold earth, it is something done against God's will. He never meant this green earth to have its bosom ripped that his children might be thrust into its darkness. We have put the earth to new uses; we have spoiled God's garden, and we have grown his flowers to decorate our dead. No tear ever comes into our eye with God's will. And yet observe that I put in the word sympathetically, and did so with a distinct purpose, because leprosy, sorrow, death, are here with God's will judicially -they are all his servants. He says in his kind heaven, where the summers are all stored for the earth, "I must not withdraw the leprosy, or they will go mad. I must not kill the fiery flying serpent, or they will swear with a more determined loudness. I must not withdraw the plague, fever, cholera, small-pox, blight upon the wheat fields and olive yards, or they will curse the night through as well as the day. I must keep the constables on the ground, I must thicken my policemen as to their numbers or quicken them as to their vigilance, or that crowd of men upon yonder little black earth will all go to perdition."

So these afflictions, leprosies, and divers diseases are God's constables, God's judicial sentences, God's safeguards, part of

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THE COMPASSIONATE PHYSICIAN.

God's disciplinary forces. Do you suppose you can drink every night and awake in the morning with a clear head? God puts something into your cup to prevent that. Do you suppose you can plunder and defile and then be as much at rest as if you had sacrificed and prayed? God takes care to put a dart through your liver, to touch you with an argument, and with the only argument you can understand. He does not meet you in the morning as your mother does, with a remonstrance, he meets you with a dart, he transfixes you with a spear, and says, "He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul, spoils the fine membrane, twists the holy aspiration, diminishes the divine capacity, debases the noblest elements of his manhood." You wondered how it was that your hand shook so when you wrote the letter. It was because of the debauch. It is not because you are growing an old man, but because you are a bad one!

"Jesus put forth his hand and touched him." Who else dare touch the leper? The touch was death. And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent and his head bared, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, 'Unclean, unclean.' All the days wherein the plague shall be in him, he shall be defiled: he is unclean, he shall dwell alone without the camp shall be his habitation." In the light of these old words read the text-" He touched him." The sunbeam can touch contaminations without defilement-who can touch pitch and not be defiled? Blessed Saviour-when did he say "No" to any prayer of the leprous, the blind, the broken-hearted, the bereaved, the penitent? It was not in him to say "No" to any of these. Many a "No" he gave in reply to Scribe and Pharisee and pompous suppliant who brought his own answer as well as his own prayer: he never said "No" to me when I said "God be merciful to me a sinner." He always gave me a new sheet of paper, and said, "Try again : do not blot this one, or you may never have another." I have taken it and blotted it all over and gone back with the old prayer, and got another sheet of paper, pure as the holiness that gave it. These are my reasons for believing in Christ. He is not the Son of God to me because some grammarian has forced him to that high eminence; he is God the Son because he has healed a heart no other physician could touch, and cleansed a sin which would have defiled and polluted

every river that ever flowed through the earth.

When the soul

has these experiences of the Saviour he does not need to have his Deity buttressed by any grammatical patronage.

Mark the wonderful consistency in this Man's procedure. find him saying in his sermon,

We

It hath been said by them of old

time, but I say unto you." Now in his action we find him re

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peating the same form. It hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not touch the leper, but I say unto you, I will touch him." He separates himself from others, yet he is consistent in the reasons of that separation.

"Tell no man." Jesus Christ did not think any miracle worth preaching. We trouble ourselves about the miracles, we ask ourselves hard questions about them, we go to the length of writing expensive books about them. Jesus Christ made nothing of them. "As for the miracle," he said, "do not name it. If you mention it at all, tell it in your own house, and do not let the news get beyond your own circle. I came not to convert the world by miracles; do not encourage the idea that salvation is part of a romantic scheme, one of a set of marvellous phenomena. I have come for other work: not to dazzle the imagination by the performance of miracles, but to charm and save the heart by the lamation of the kingdom of heaven. See thou tell no man so far as the miracles are concerned; so far as the doctrine is concerned go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." We have taken hold of this kingdom of heaven by the wrong end. We meet in classes to discuss the miracles,-we poor cold pieces of iron in which there is no fire, have met to consider the constitution of the sun. When will we be wise, and think not of Christ's miracles but of Christ's doctrines? When will we think of what he came to do with regard to the poor heart? That is the central business and that is the supreme joy of the Church.

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So then the sermon is already being turned to advantage by the people. "Ask, and it shall be given you." Did the leper overhear that? Was it told to the leper by some kind friend? Did he say, "I will put this great Speaker to the test-he said, 'Ask, and it shall be given,' I will ask him." He asked and he received. Now the other side must also be consistent. Christ also said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets :

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THE WILL MAde right.

I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." Jesus Christ says to the leper, "You have asked me in effect to prove the words, 'Ask, and it shall be given you' now I must ask you to prove the words, I am not come to destroy the law but to fulfil so go, show thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded." A wondrous and self-confirming consistency marks. this whole revelation, and those who have studied it most profoundly and lovingly are most deeply impressed with the perfectness of the literal and moral consistency of God's book.

A wonderful revelation, then, is now before us. This suffering and its removal are to be looked at in the light of two antagonistic wills. "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." There the creature's will becomes right. The moment the will of the creature becomes right, Jesus says, "I will be thou clean." Your will is wrong-trouble not yourselves with little intellectual inquiries and difficulties and enigmas; it is a waste of time, it is a mortal delusion on your part to suppose that you would be a good man and a holy saint if some little intellectual cobwebs were taken out of your head. Your will is wrong. Marvel not that I say unto you, Ye must be born again. When your will is right, you will find that God's will has always been on your side, on the side of your redeeming and healing and perfecting. He waits to be gracious: he can do nothing with a crooked will, he can do nothing with a perverse will, he can do nothing with a corrupt will, he can do nothing with a selfish will. When we come to him and say, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean," thus putting ourselves into his hands simply, lovingly, absolutely, his answer is immediate and complete. It is not therefore your intellect only that must be illumined and rectified: the work must be deeper: you must be born of water and of the Spirit; you must be washed in the laver of regeneration : "Marvel not that I say unto you, Ye must be born again.'

This redemption is not a question of mere intellectual satisfaction, still less of intellectual excitement or delight: it is a question of the will, the heart, the very source and spring of life. The work is not superficial, but profound: the work is not artificial, but vital the work is not external, but internal-after being internal it expresses itself in all exterior dignity and loveliness.