telling her soul how the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed; and under the picture is this legend, copied from the stone set up to her memory in an old Scottish kirkyard:

"Murdered for owning Christ supreme,

Head of His Church, and no more crime.
But for not owning prelacy,

And not abjuring presbytery,

Within the sea, tied to a stake,

She suffered for Christ Jesus' sake."

I treasure it, because when I look at it, it seems a type of a great host of women who watch and wait, tied fast to their fate, while the tide creeps up about them, but who rise as the waves rise, and on the crest of the last and loftiest are borne into the quiet haven, and hear the "Well-done! "

IV.

THE TWO HARVESTS.

ROM. vii. 4:"Fruit unto God."

IT has come to me, now that the last fruits of the year are being gathered, to say something to you of the lesson that lies within our harvest, touching the harvest of life. And I want to speak of it in the light of the suggestion that rises naturally out of my text, and try, if I can, to find what is fruit unto God. What is fruit to us, is a question not very hard to answer; but fruit to God, I propose to show, is unspeakably more, look at it as we will, than what is fruit to us.

And in doing this, I shall speak to you,

I. Of the vastness of his harvest compared

with ours.

II. Of its variety, and

III. Of its ripening.

First, then, we have to notice the difference

own measure.

every harvest-time brings home to us between our conception and that of the Divine Providence, of what is really good fruit in the measure of it It is at once quite evident, when we begin to look into it, that the gift of God in the harvest he ripens is so great, it can only be held in his We see it is not merely this granary of ours that is full; there is another granary besides this, in which a harvest is stored of seed for sowing, and bread for eating, to which this of ours is a mere handful, and all this is as good in its way, as the fruit and corn on which we have come to set such store. There are seeds so small that the human eye cannot see them, and fruits of the wilderness so manifold, as to far exceed, as yet, our power to find them out: they are scattered through all the zones of the world, from the Iceland moss in the Arctic circle to the palmtree under the line. The whole world outside our little storehouse is one great granary, "a house not made with hands," in which things aro laid up that are good, in one way or another, for all the families in the many mansions of the Maker and Provider, from whose full hand we are all fed. Our good fruit in this light is one thing, his

good fruit another; and so, as the heavens are higher than the earth, his thought of what is good must be higher than our own.

Whatever we may think of the thorns and thistles that came up outside Eden to curse the land, what he said was good, when he made the earth bring forth grass, and the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-trees yielding fruit after their kind, is good still; there has been no debasement of this Divine husbandry; no empty gra nary of God; no failure of the field. He tills for the multitude that cry to him for bread. I look up, at the end of the harvest that he has gathered, and the wonder and joy of it seem to me unspeakable. He crowns the year with his goodness to every living thing.

This is true again, when we turn from the vastness of this treasure to its variety. We get some sense of this from what we agree to call good fruit. We see how the corn differs from the apple, and the grape from the chestnut; how the plum can never be like the melon, or the walnut as the blackberry; and in this variety there is a blessing that could never be found, if the best of all the things God has given us could

have been selected for our sole use, and poured out upon us from his hand in the full measure of our wishes.

So I cannot find in my heart to condemn Israel for crying out against the manna, good as it seems to have been, and full of nourishment, when they found that was all they had; and then that they should look back longingly to Egypt, by and by, and hanker after the cucumbers and melons, the variety of the good fruit they had left in the old country; and then when quails came, that they should devour them with such eagerness as to . bring on a plague.

I do not find that with the heavenly manna there was any alteration in the human appetite: that remained as it always had been; it remained, therefore, to torment them; it was not in their human nature to be content with angels' food, so long as they were still in the flesh. And I have no idea of what was grown in Eden; but I know that if Eden did not grow such a variety in its harvests as this that now blesses all civilized men, it was not so good a place to live in, in some respects, as this city, and would not be so likely to satisfy the whole demand of our life. Let