in the cup of your life that God does not see in his wisdom to be most expedient, in his love to be most beneficent, therefore I can never despair! Glorious thought! consolatory truth! there is a needs be for that great loss, for that keen and poignant grief, for that wasting and pining sickness. There is a needs be for the entrance of death into the happiest home, and for the ascent from your fireside of the most beloved and cherished ornament and glory of it. Give me that one thought, that God's love, infinite love, love that does not falter, and never fails, has decreed this, whatever it be, for me; that his wisdom, infinite wisdom that cannot err, has seen it to be necessary, and that a presence that nothing can resist superintends its action; then whatever tribulation I have to pass through, I know it was prepared and arranged from everlasting ages, and that it is as necessary that I should have that ache, and experience that loss, and feel that gnawing sorrow in my heart, that pining sickness in my frame, that bitter prescription laid at my door, as that God should have loved me, and Christ should have died for me, and the Bible should have been written to teach and instruct me. Let us take this truth home to our hearts, carrying it into life's troubles and life's griefs, into our sorrows and our losses, and then we

shall be able to say, "The cup that my Father"-true

of the meanest Christian here as it was of Christ—“ The cup that my Father has given me to drink, shall I not drink it? Father, not as I will, but as thou wilt. Our Father in heaven, thy will be done on earth even as it is done in heaven." Such will be the feeling of a Christian in passing through the tribulations on every wave of which there is inscribed, luminous and legible, a needs be. If we have to pass through tribulation it is one of the proofs that we are in the right way home. That man who is walking on a smooth and beautiful road on which no tempest beats, where there are no rocks, nor broken stones, nor crookedness, nor cold, nor weariness, nor want, ought to ponder well, if not retrace his steps, for the presumption is the

strongest possible that he has lost the way to heaven, and that he has taken a wrong road. But, on the contrary, when the winds beat upon you, when the frosts chill you, when the rough road wounds the feet, the weary feet that tread it, when the rains descend, and thousands of troubles crowd around you and threaten to overwhelm you, take heart, lift up your heads, let not your hearts be troubled; do not despair; yours is the seal and the signature of God, the mark that you are marching on the road that leads to Immanuel's land, and in the midst of that great tribulation, spoken of in the 7th chapter of the Apocalypse, which culminates in a glory that shall never die and in an inheritance that shall never pass away. This thought lightens trouble and sweetens our experience of it, for it is the way to our Father's house, and we are on the road to a kingdom of glory.

If we feel that we are thus on the road that leads to heaven, that thus lifts us into the kingdom of God, let us hasten on. A traveller is always in a hurry to get home. What would you say of that traveller who was so charmed with an inn he found by the way, or so pleased with the flowers that blossomed on the road-side, that he spent all his time in enjoying the hospitalities of the one or in admiring the beauty of the other, thinking nothing of his happy and his distant home? Or what would you think of that person who, setting out by train to Edinburgh from Euston Square, is so delighted with the refreshments at Stafford that he stops there too long, and the train leaves and he loses his journey home? You would say his heart was not at the end of his journey. So with him who is delighted with the charms, the pleasures, and amusements of life, in themselves legitimate and proper, but in the excess and idolatry of them most pernicious and destructive. So that man gives evidence that his heart is not where Christ is who is so charmed with the inn, so pleased with the refreshments of the midway station, that he tarries there, and loses for a day, for a year, it may be for ever, the route that leads to heaven.

Let us then learn, first, to expect tribulation. It is the law of our Christian profession: "through much tribulation we must enter into the kingdom of God.” Secondly, let us learn to judge that we are in the way, the right way, by the troubles that beset us in it; and third, let us while in that way draw down consolation, and comfort, and hope, from God, who has assured us that though no tribulation for the present seemeth joyous, but rather grievous, yet afterwards it worketh out the peaceable fruits of righteousness; that if we suffer with him we shall also reign with him. Then let troubles come, let storms beat; let each future year be to each of us individually, socially, nationally, laden with worse troubles than we have yet witnessed, with heavier trials than any under the shadow of which we have yet passed; yet we know it is not chance that acts thus. We know all is accomplishing the mission, embodying the mind and fulfilling the purpose of our God. Not a tempest sweeps through the earth that is not needful; not a trouble breaks upon the shores of a human heart that is not necessary. If so, let us take heart and rejoice that we are in the road that leads upward to God, that we bear the signature of his children, and if children then heirs of God and jointheirs with Christ. Throughout all the journey that yet remains may the Spirit of God confirm our hearts, may he strengthen us to continue in the faith; and in the midst of the greatest tribulations through which we may have soon to pass may he open in each of our hearts a living spring of living water springing up even into everlasting life; till when the years of this world are ended-and each year brings us nearer to its close -we may find it is only transference to a brighter and a better, to a kingdom that never can be moved.

LECTURE XXXIII.

HELP HERE.

THE upper and under world have ceaseless intercourse by the new and living way. Angels come down in shining troops, and encamp around the people of God. "Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation ?”— HEBREWS i. 14.

MODERN theology too much ignores the truth recorded here. Is there then any communion between heaven and earth? Have the redeemed in glory any sympathy with the redeemed that are on earth? Has the church militant directly or indirectly any actual relationship to the church triumphant that is above? These are anxious questions. As friend after friend passes into the shadow of the grave; as near and dear relatives ascend, in obedience to the invitation, "Come up higher;" instinctively our hearts follow them to the heavenly rest; and we long to know-it is an instinct we cannot help-if their love to us is as warm as our remembrance of them. Is the gulf between heaven and earth like the gulf between heaven and hell, impassable? Do those who fill the choirs of the blessed hear, or know, or see us, or in any way sympathize with us who are in the cold crypt of the church below? It is a very common notion that the world of redeemed spirits and the world of Christians struggling upon earth are at the antipodes of each other, that the blessed in heaven are too happy to think of us they have left behind them, and that we have little to do with them; as if they would not condescend to look back, however earnestly and lovingly we look after them; that a great gulf is fixed between us, which

none can pass. Is it so ? Is there proof in Scripture that it is so? One text would settle the whole controversy, and solve the difficulty. This is certain, angels descend from the choirs of the blessed, and minister to the company of the suffering; those angels return from their ministry to the choirs of the happy; and can we suppose they will be silent on what they have seen and to whom they have ministered below? When Adam and Eve were sent forth from Paradise, their retreating footsteps left all a wilderness behind them that was a garden before, they lost the favour, and forfeited the presence of God. But did God give them up? did he forsake them? They cut, as it were, the mooringchains that fastened earth, the old earth, to the continent of heaven; and having done so, a deep sea, impassable and awful, rolled between them. Did God cease to have any correspondence with them? Did he let them go in their aberration from him without hope and without the pledge or the promise of reunion? The very reverse. First he told them, "The woman's seed shall bruise the serpent's head;" and that solitary promise, like a bright star upon the brow of night, irradiated their footsteps as they went forth into the world's desert, to fertilize its soil with the sweat of their brow, and to water its flowers with the tears of their weeping eyes. A smile of God irradiated the sacrifice of Abel. God condescended to walk, literally to walk, with Enoch and with Noah on the face of the earth. Abraham gave hospitality to heavenly visitants in his patriarchal tent upon the plains of Mamre. Lot also entertained angels. And as if to show that the reunion of what had been dissolved was partially restored, he showed to Jacob as he slept in the desert a ladder, gangway, or pathway, between heaven and earth; and on this the angels of God ascending and descending; and Jacob discovered when he woke that, having lain down in a lonely desert, he had really been sleeping at the gates of heaven. When our Lord came, he said that this patriarch's vision is not the vision of an hour, but a permanent fact; he says: "Hereafter shall