old." And this truth and this mercy are briefly comprehended in those few words of the beloved disciple: "The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin."

But we must not leave the widow of Zarephath in her affliction; God did not. We give you the result of it in the sacred historian's own language. Elijah "said unto her, Give me thy son. And he took him out of her bosom, and carried him up into a loft, where he abode, and laid him upon his own bed. And he cried unto the Lord, and said, O Lord my God, hast thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son ?" And again he "cried unto the Lord, and said, O Lord my God, I pray thee let this child's soul come into him again. And the Lord heard the voice of Elijah, and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived. And Elijah took the child, and brought him down out of the chamber, and delivered him unto his mother and Elijah said, See, thy son liveth. And the woman said to Elijah, Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the Word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth."

THE PHARISEE AND THE PENITENT.

Preached 4th Sunday after Trinity, 1861.

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'And one of the Pharisees desired him that he would eat with him. And He went into the Pharisee's house, and sat down to meat."-Luke vii. 36.

THE fame of Jesus had spread abroad, and great numbers of people had gathered together to see and to hear Him.

Human nature, unenlightened by the Spirit from above, is in all ages the same. In every congregation at the present day, as at the time when Jesus was preaching in Judæa, the tempers dispositions and moral circumstances of the hearers vary. There are the careless, and the ungodly, and the reprobate, and the hardened; with eyes, yet seeing not; with cars, yet hearing not; the visible judgments of God and the audible threatenings of His wrath making no impression upon them. The unhappy spirit of unbelief, so hopeless in the condemnation it brings with it, which, when the Eternal Son of God was upon earth, ascribed His miracles of healing and mercy to the agency of evil spirits, has its counterpart in the scepticism so rife among ourselves, which openly denies or secretly dis

believes His very being and atonement, now that He is returned into heaven. The warning and admonition are still applicable to ourselves, "Blessed is he who shall not be offended in me." Persons come to churches now as they did to synagogues formerly, less in the spirit of humility to learn, than in a captious and censorious disposition to cavil and criticise and contradict. Among such no wonder that the preacher fares now, as the Baptist and the Saviour once did. When we proclaim the boundless mercies of the Lord, we are said to give encouragement to sin; when we warn of the terrors of a coming judgment and of a future world, we are said to harden the hearts of men, or to drive them to despair. To some, however, God be praised! it may still be said, "Blessed are your eyes, for they see and your ears, for they hear."

Jesus had just concluded His discourse to the multitudes with the words, "Wisdom is justified of all her children, when "one of the Pharisees desired Him that He would eat with him. And He went into the Pharisee's house, and sat down to meat." It was great condescension in a rich and proud Pharisee to invite the lowly Jesus to enter his house and sit down at his table. But although this ruler of the Jews had thus asked the Saviour of the world to dine with him, he had at heart no kindly feelings towards Him. Solomon had long since exposed the real character of such hospitality as Simon's, "Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats. For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he eat and drink, saith he to thee, but his heart is

not with thee." There was the Redeemer of the world sitting at Simon's table, but Simon's heart was not with Him. The same Almighty Being offers Himself as a guest at the tables of us all, however dainty or however humble our fare may be. "Behold," He says, "I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me." But how seldom do we open the door, and invite Him in! and even when we do, how seldom is the heart with - Him! almost never, until that heart has first been pierced through with many sorrows-pain, sickness, bereavements, disappointed hopes, yearnings and longings for the absent, mournings and weepings for the dead; or else those secret and hidden and sore trials and conflicts and troubles of the soul which none others may see or know of. If I were to look about for one whose heart is really with his God and his Saviour, it would not be among the high and the rich and the prosperous, on whom the bounty of Providence is every year bestowing some new object of desire, some fresh source of gratification. It would not be among the healthy and the strong and the vigorous and the unafflicted, of whatever age or class of society. For I should fear that the heart of all such would be too full of the pleasures or the business of this little life to have any room for the thought of better and more enduring things hereafter. But I should go to the suffering and the sorrowful, whether among the high or the low the rich or the poor, whom some of the merciful chastisements of the Lord had made contrite and humble; who

had been forced to feel and to confess the unsatisfying character of all earthly enjoyments; and made, sorely against the will of the natural man, to look away from the body to the soul, from the things of this world to the things of God, from that which is here to that which is to be hereafter. I should not go even to a Job, while "his children were about him, and the rock poured him out rivers of oil"; so much as I should endeavour to learn wisdom and holiness from him, when fallen from his high estate, his children dead, his substance gone, and himself smitten with sore disease.

But we return to the room where Simon and his company were assembled. There was an unbidden guest in that room whose heart was with Christ, although Simon's was not. "Behold, a woman in the city, who was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping, and began to wash His feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment." She was one of the afflicted of whom I was speaking just now. Unhappily, in addition to this, (but how often is it so!) she had brought her affliction, her many sorrows on herself. Hers had been a course of sin. She had given her young days to guilty indulgence. She had been one of those whom Solomon describes so forcibly, so painfully, as "the strange woman, even the stranger who flattereth with her words; who forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forgetteth the covenant of her God. Her house inclineth unto death, and her