build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee. Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee the forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought. For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; nay, those nations shall be utterly wasted. The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir-tree, the pine-tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious. The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee, The city of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel. Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, so that no man went through thee, I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations. Thou shalt also suck the milk of the Gentiles, and shalt suck the breast of kings: and thou shalt know that I the Lord am thy Saviour, and thy Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob. For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, and for stones iron: I will also make thy officers peace, and thine exactors righteousness. Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise. The sun

shall be no more thy light by day, neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended. Thy people also shall be all righteousness: they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified. A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation: I the Lord will hasten it in his time.' The curse shall be lifted off man's heart. How great

must be that depravity which renders the motives, hopes, and fears of eternity absolutely inefficacious till they are applied by God himself! It must be an all but infinite curse that needs an Omnipotent hand in order to remove it. Fallen man has worshipped the things he made-turned his very vices into gods; and architecture has raised a pantheon for their reception, and poets have sung their depravity as sublime heroism. What a concentration of the curse was there in that one man, Voltaire!-a man to whom the love of man and the fear of God were a nullity; whose joy consisted in tearing from the human heart its best hopes, and from the social system its only cement; who gloried only in wreck; whose favourite weapons were sarcasm and lies. Experience, in his case, confirms the Divine testimony: "The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Inspiration has asked and answered the question, "Whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even from your lusts that war in your members?" Lands intersected by a narrow path abhor each other. Mountains interposed make enemies of nations, who had else, like kindred drops, been mingled into one. The curse lies sore and heavy on man's body. We need not enumerate the diseases "that flesh is heir to," or prove that these are the offspring of the curse. This body is now as often a hindrance as it is a help to the soul. Often is it a strong obstruction to communion with God; and by all of us it is felt to be the battlefield between heaven and hell.

The curse shall be lifted away from all places on which it now lies: it shall be no more on Ebal, nor on Jerusalem, nor upon Sinai. No Balak shall say, "Come, curse me Israel;" it shall no more be said, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus, let him be anathema;" nor, "If any man preach any other Gospel, let him be anathema." The offence shall be impossible, and the curse unknown! It shall no more be written, "Cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from

the Lord." Deut. xxviii. 16-19, shall be repealed; it shall no more be said, "Depart, ye cursed," for there shall be no more utter destruction. In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses, "Holiness unto the Lord ;" and in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord."

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Creation, at that day, shall lay aside the ashen garments which it has worn for many thousand years, and put on its Easter robes. It, too, has its regeneration : like some nurse of a royal child which it has reared, she shall be remembered and raised to dignity when he mounts his throne. The first Adam lost the garden, and inherited the wilderness. The second Adam took up the battle just where the first left off; and in the wilderness fought the foe, and won back Paradise for man; and a foretaste and earnest of final victory was presented in his wonderful works. Each miracle was a germ of Paradise, and triumphant evidence that all creation was soft and pliant in his hand. Each miracle was a foretoken, and forelight, and firstfruit of the restoration of all creation. When he healed the sick, that cure was a forelight of the sickless state. When he raised the dead, that act was a foretoken of the first resurrection. When he calmed the storm, there was seen a firstfruit of that everlasting calm which his priestly hand shall wave over all creation. That pierced hand of the Babe of Bethlehem shall seize the sceptre of the universe, and lay its touch upon the ocean's waves; and his word, like a resistless spell, shall go down to nature's depths and up to nature's heights, and hallow all space to be a temple of Deity. Earth shall become a glorious Gerizim; there shall no more be in it the common or the unclean; there shall be no more curse, for Christ was made a curse for us.

LECTURE XXIX.

THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS.

THE theme of the noble army of martyrs is so rich in hope and glory that I revert to it, in order more fully to depict it.

"After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb."--REVELATION vii. 9, 10. THE idea embodied in the seventh chapter of the Apocalypse is this, that the great mass of the visible church had become corrupt and apostate, and that out of the midst of it God was selecting the millennial church, sealing every member, and fitting him for glory, honour, and for immortality. If there be one lesson more striking than another taught in this blessed book it is that the visible church, stretching from the days of Augustine down to the days of Martin Luther, was not the true church, but the manifest apostacy; and that the true succession, the real apostolical succession, was not through priests and prelates in the Roman Catholic apostacy, but in true Christians, often hated, often proscribed and persecuted, but never extinguished; stretching from Augustine through the Waldenses in the west, the Paulicians in the east, till it merged in Luther and the Protestants of the Reformation, and spreads over the world at this day, increased and still increasing. If any one will read the most interesting sketch of Merle d'Aubigné, or will have recourse to authentic documents accessible to the learned, he will find that

those prelates who were princes, whose churches were cathedrals, whose worship was pomp, and splendour, and ceremonial, were not the true ambassadors of Christ; that they preached a gospel which was another gospel, not the Gospel of Christ Jesus; and that then and there, and during that eclipse, the true church, the woman in the 12th chapter, had fled into the wilderness-that the witnesses were buried in the dens, and caves, and sequestered nooks and deserts of the earth; and that then, as now, the world knew them not. It is a pity that any should pretend to trace the apostolical succession through prelates that carried the crozier in one hand and the sword in the other, through priests that preached no Gospel, and loved no Saviour, and opened no Bible, instead of tracing it through those meek but often martyred men who, when religion was a shame and the profession of it was death, still held fast amid the Cottian Alps, and have left their bones bleaching amid the Alpine mountains' cold. These were the true Christians, these the true succession; and very beautifully are they called in this very book "the witnesses." What is the original word for martyr ? Martyr," in the Greek, means simply "one that witnesses.' What is the meaning of the word Protestant? Protestor; "I protest;" pro, " for ;" testis, " a witness." The witnesses, therefore, described in the Apocalypse are the Protestants, the martyrs; those that testified from the commencement onward to the close; and when at the Diet of Spires the name Protestantes, witnesses, was assumed by Luther and those who were associated with him, unconsciously they vindicated in that name their inheritance of the descent of the witnesses of old, and stamped themselves that true and legitimate succession the commencement of which was at the cross on Calvary, the coronal of which is a crown of glory that fadeth not away.

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Whilst the great apostacy gathered bulk there took place a symbolic sealing, marking off the true church in the midst of the apostate church. I do not deny that there were Christians in the Church of Rome; I believe at this moment there are true Christians in it.