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the hand of our suffering Christ, and then at the hand of the believing sinner. Now, Jesus took the judgment, and every soul who will take the advantage of it-appropriate it that soul, believing, is, on the authority of God, a saved soul. "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

Beloved, these are marvellous times.
What conversions!

God is work

!

ing everywhere. How many and of sinners of all sorts. And they still multiply. Look at one who, on his own showing, often raised his hand against his mother, but is now saved; look at another, whose hand became suddenly palsied over the mystic cards, and when carried to his room exclaimed, "Oh, my God, if my servant were not here, I would cry for mercy." ." Again; look at another, mingling in polite society, with everything but God; full of pleasure, so-called, but arrested, alarmed, led to the cross, saved. And another, a peer of the realm, who, for more than eighty years, was a rebel against God; in his old age his wife, lately converted, with tears consulted as to his salvation; by advice, she opened a meeting in her own drawing-room, and while the Gospel was being preached, the aged peer heard the truth which reached his soul; and on his dying bed sent this message to his former associates among the nobles, "Tell them I have lived without God, but have now found Jesus; God saved a poor, miserable sinner, and He can and will save all who believe."

These, and thousands more, are from the lanes and cities of these Gentile times. Rejected by Israel, He receiveth sinners. And now, from out of our wanderings amidst the highways and hedges of our ignorance and sin, He seeks out the wanderers for His house-the starving for His feast. With divine efficacy of grace He brings the wanderers in compels us to His board. The Holy Ghost reveals Jesus-His grace,

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unsaved. You have no delight in the Lord. You have never seen the Lord God merciful and gracious. I remember the two coverings of the tabernacle. There was the gorgeous cloth of blue, mingled with gold, covering the place where God's holiness, God's righteousness, God's grace, God's love all reigned for the salvation of Israel. I remember what was over the cloth of blue and gold. There was the badger-skin over it. The ordinary eye-the stranger the foe outside never saw that inner garb of cloth of blue, and adorning of gold. Do you understand this?

What I want to say is, that the carnal mind, the natural man, the sinner in his sin, has never seen the Lord Christ. Oh, sinner, have you to-day seen the Lord passing by, "forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin," by no means clearing, but saving the guilty, through not clearing the Son of His own love? Oh! let me, through the Word, throw back the outer covering from over the glory of the Lord, and reveal to you the Lord Himself-Jesus, who gave His life a ransom for the guilty.

Ah, poor desolate one, how tenderly I could address you. You are saying, "Some have all they want, and I have nothing; nothing in my domestic circle; I am not happy in my nearest ties, I am not happy in my home, or in my children, or in my business, or in my profession; I am not happy in my religion even; I feel as if marked of God to be destitute and desolate." Ah, poor sinner, if thou wert the Queen, and without the Lord, thou wouldst not be happy. Thou fanciest if thou wert happy in thy business, home, and children, thou wouldst be happy indeed. But it is not so. It still would be-" There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked; none, none. But behold the Son of God as dying for the wicked, and the wicked, on believing, have at once a ground of delight, and are no longer treated by God as such.

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I have said I do not like additions to the Word;

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forbearance! Ah, if He were here, how would He speak? He would not use exuberant trope or eloquent measure; He would not speak in words of mere noise or turbulence; not in furor of delivery, or in levity of soul, but in calmness and intelligence, in sobriety and earnestness of soul. He would not speak of hell in a careless way, or of heaven as of a light thing. How He would compel you, and with what love, what tenderness, what long-suffering, spending a whole day at the well of Jacob, with a poor Magdalene sinner; and what unselfishness; even on the cross, when He might have said, "Do not speak to me, the nails are in my hands, my mouth is full of clotted gore and noisome gall; don't speak to me in my agony.' But no; with a mind at leisure from itself, even in that dark hour, with what a calm irresistible force He turned to the poor malefactor at His side, and said, "This day shalt thou be with me in paradise." In Christ's stead!-as it were His representative-doing the will of the Father, in the power of communion, as He; delighting in drawing out the affections of sinners towards God, even as He; and towards Himself, for, as flowers open to the unveiling of the sun, so do our affections open to the Lord when He Himself is unveiled. Ah, then, with what a sense of reality in the soul does He make known the riches of His grace, the wonders of His love.

May the Lord bless you; the blessed Spirit of God awaken the unawakened, and comfort the awakened! May He show you God reconciled, Christ as having died, the fountain of His blood as opened for our

ADDRESS XII.

HOW TO HAVE PEACE.

"I create the fruit of the lips; Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near."-Isaiah lvii. 19.

It is not to give any explication of these words that they are now chosen, but simply to show that it is God, and God alone, who is the root or source of true peace.

You have been singing, beloved, “A mind at perfect peace with God;" and I would like to tell you how we get a mind at perfect peace with God. We get it, first, by knowing what God is to man, or to one who is afar off-a sinner in his sins; and, secondly, by knowing what God is to the new man, or to one who is near. On these grounds, we may know what "perfect peace with God" is; or, in other words, we may know it by believing what God is to the sinner; and what He is to the believer. Or, if you put it still otherwise, we get it by knowing Him in His aspect towards the first Adam, and by knowing what He is to us in the last Adam. Oh, that God, beloved friends, may now give me an abundant utterance for His truth, and give you the understanding heart!

God is love than I now

Let us dwell, then, for a little, on what God is to man; to you, as a natural man-a sinner. towards the sinner. When I was younger am, I used to think that, towards the sinner, God was simply and only austere; that He was simply and only a Judge, and that His justice was still inevitably against me as a sinner. I had an idea that the Lord Jesus Christ loved the sinner; and that it was a belief in His cross that gave rise to the love of God to the sinner; that, in fact, God only loved us when we loved Him. But the truth is, that the love of God, and the grace of God, lie at the root of the cross, and not the cross at the root of them. A friend lately said to me, "When I heard you speak of the love of God to the sinner, it gave quite a new turn to my whole life. I had been for years reading books, hearing sermons, and seeking to obtain peace in my soul, that I might have the love of God; but when I saw His love to the sinner, as revealed by the cross, that it was God Himself who was at the foundation of things, the alone source of a plan to save the sinner, and to save him wholly, in consistence with righteousness, and holiness, and perfectness, my life became a new life." And now, knowing and believing this love of God to the sinner, that friend is with us to-day, singing, as we have done, “A mind at perfect peace with God." Ah, not as an after state of mind in God, but millions of millions of ages ago, He loved us; and, that He may save us, He formed His own estimate of the blood; saw that it met every demand of holiness, of justice, and of righteousness. It was God who, in His own eternal grace, beheld our nature as the elect nature. I say the elect nature-for such it is elected by Him as that in which He would manifest His riches, and in which He Himself would dwell. There is the sinner, there are angels; but the sinner was the farther removed from God. Like a mighty surgeon, who discriminates and says, "Such is a case

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