grain is poor and scant. Only a part of the time and toil that has been spent in ploughing and sowing and weeding is rewarded, and only a part of the aspiration of spring is brought to an end and made into a reality. Rain and storm, blight and mildew, cold and cankerworm, do their destructive work. What is the spiritual good of this disappointment and loss? It teaches us that there is a higher will than man's; that a man cannot boast of to-morrow, for he knows not what a day may bring forth. It is a school for patience and resignation, and the triumph of trust in God over adverse circumstances.

As the world in which we live is one of the books of God, so harvest is a page in that book, where we can trace His providence and power and His wise care for the higher life of the soul.

CHARACTER.

IV. THE PRINCIPLE OF HARVEST IS THE PRINCIPLE OF "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap”; that, not something else. He that soweth wheat shall reap wheat —not some other grain: and he that soweth tares shall gather tares-not a better kind of harvest. It is so in human character. He that soweth goodness shall reap goodness, and he that soweth evil shall reap evil. Anger, selfishness, pride, ambition, idleness— if a man yield to these things, it is the solemn law of retribution that they will grow in him and rush toward noxious blossom and fruit. There will be a harvest, and a fearful reaping it will be. He who has sown avarice will have to reap avarice; he will sink deeper and deeper into the slough of selfishness: he who has sown animalism, or worldliness, or falsehood, will reap accordingly. There is no escape from this law. "He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption." The other side is also true. Live nobly, be true and pure and meek, cultivate love and selfsacrifice, and these Divine qualities will expand into larger strength and fuller beauty and ripeness. "He that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life eternal." "Every man shall receive the things done in the body-the self-same thingsaccording to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad."

And now, passing from the present and looking into the far-off future, what do we hope for? Christ spoke of the harvest-home of humanity. Mankind, in this world, is like a vast field wherein

are sown both good seed and tares. As yet the wheat and the tares-good and evil-are growing together. So it must be. But in the end of the world the tares shall be uprooted by the angels of God, and bound together into bundles and be burned. Mankind, so long troubled and overgrown with the tares which an enemy hath sown, shall at last be cleansed, weeded of all evil. Only the good and true shall remain. Then shall be the harvesthome of the world, and God be all in all.

BRISTOL.

THOMAS HAMMOND.

THE PARABLE OF THE BLADE, THE EAR, THE FULL CORN.

"How important to know what to expect in reference to the growth of the seed of the Word, whether in the individual or in the community, to prevent Christians being scandalised when things turn out altogether contrary to expectation! None the less important is the parable, that it proclaims a truth men are slow to understand or be reconciled to; a fact whereof we have sufficient evidence in the way in which this portion of Christ's parabolic teaching has often been handled, The law of growth in the spiritual world not being duly laid to heart, has, therefore, not been found here; and the parable consequently has been misinterpreted, or rather scarcely interpreted at all. Few of our Lord's parables have been more unsatisfactorily expounded, as there are few in which a right exposition is more to be desired for the good of believers. It may seem presumptuous to say this, by implication censuring our brethren and commending ourselves. But a man's capacity to expound particular portions of Scripture depends largely on the peculiarities of his religious experience; for here, as in other spheres, it holds true that we find what we bring. Suppose, e.g., that the experience of a particular Christian has made him intimately acquainted with the momentous business of waiting on God for good earnestly desired and long withheld. The natural result will be an open eye for all Scripture texts, and they are many, which speak of that exercise, and a ready insight into their meaning. The case supposed is the writer's own, and, therefore, the parable now to be studied has been to him for many years a favourite subject of thought and fruitful source of comfort, viewed as a repetition in parabolic form of the Psalmist's counsel: 'Wait, I say, on the Lord.'”—A. B. BRUCE, D.D.

Germs of Thought.

The Gold God.

66 THE IDOLS OF THE HEATHEN ARE SILVER AND GOLD.”— Psalm cxxxv. 15.

IDOLATRY consists in giving to any object, whether animate or inanimate, the work of man's hands, or the work of the Divine hands, the love and worship which belongs to the Supreme Existence. "Thou shalt have no other God but Me." But to have Him means to love Him with all the heart, mind, and strength. The god of the man is the object he most loves. Hence gold is a divinity, and by no means an insignificant one, perhaps the chief.

I. The gold god is the most POPULAR of the gods. It is said that ancient Greece and Rome had not less than thirty thousand divinities, and that in modern heathendom, at present, their name is legion. But throughout this civilized world the gold-god reigns supreme. Tell me is there aught besides that engrosses so much of human thoughts, human affections, human plans, activities and time, as gold? Christendom, it is true, has throughout its mighty populations certain ecclesiastical buildings, in which the true and only God is formally and occasionally worshipped; but in well nigh all its private dwellings, in all its hours of life, the gold-god is worshipped with all the heart, mind, soul, and strength.

"Your god, your great Bel," says Charlotte Brontë, “your fishtailed Dagon rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how he governs.

he likes best-making marriages. old, the strong to the imbecile.

See him busied at the work

He binds the young to the He stretches out the arm of

Mezentius, and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred-secret hatred; there is disgust-unspoken disgust; there is treachery-family treachery; there is vice-deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions children grow unloving between parents who have never loved; infants are nursed in deception from their very birth, they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies. Your god rules at the bridal of kings; look at your royal dynasties! Your deity is the deity of foreign aristocracies-analyse the blue blood of Spain! Your god is the Hymen of France; what is French domestic life? All that surrounds him hastens to decay; all declines and degenerates under his sceptre."

"Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,

The signet of its all-enslaving power,

Upon a shining ore, and called it gold:
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,

The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings,
And, with blind feelings, reverence the power
That grinds them to the dust of misery;
But in the temple of their hireling hearts
Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn
All earthly things but virtue.”—Shelley.

And yet we here, in England, forsooth, send out men to the heathen in order to denounce and abolish idolatry. Surely a self-conceited superstition has blinded our eyes to moral congruities. The gold-god despatching his devotees through heathendom to destroy all other idols, that he may have no rival. Civilization everywhere multiplies the shrines, the altars, and the devotees of mammon.

II. The gold-god is the most MISCHIEVOUS of the gods. The ponderous wheels of Juggernaut's chariot have crushed millions, and their damning revolution still continues; Krishna, Moloch and other heathen divinities have tortured and destroyed their devotees, but is there a divinity in the long roll of idolatrous worship more ruthlessly cruel, more terribly destructive than the gold-god?

(1) How soul-debasing! It deadens the sense of virtue, blinds moral perceptions, seals up the social sympathies, manacles the moral faculties, and chains that soul made to wing the immeasurable regions of light and truth to a mere clod of dust. It is a law that the soul can never rise above its god.

(2) How peace disturbing! It keeps its devotee in a constant tumult. It breaks the harmony of families, disturbs the order of society, raises nations into war and bloodshed. "Midas," says Carlyle, "longed for gold and insulted the Olympians. He got gold so that whatever he touched became gold, and he, with his long ears, was little the better for it. Midas had insulted Apollo and the gods: the gods gave him his wish, and a pair of long ears which also were a good appendage to it. What a truth in these old fables!" Dr. John Harris, a dear old friend of mine, has thus written about this gold-god. "Gold is the only power which receives universal homage. It is worshipped in all lands without a single temple, and by all classes without a single hypocrite; and often has it been able to boast of having armies for its priesthood, and hecatombs of human victims for its sacrifices. Where war has slain its thousands, gain has slaughtered its millions; for while the former operates only with the local and fitful terrors of an earthquake, the destructive influence of the latter is universal and increasing. Indeed, war itself-what has it often been but the art of gain practised on a larger scale; the covetousness of a nation resolved on gain, impatient of delay, and leading on its subjects to deeds of rapine and blood? Its history is the history of slavery and oppression in all ages. For centuries, Africa, one quarter of the globe, has been set apart to supply the monster with victims, thousands at a meal. And at this moment, what a populous and gigantic empire can it boast! The mine with its unnatural drudgery, the manufactory with its swarms of squalid misery, the plantation with its imbruted gangs, and the market and the exchange with their furrowed and careworn countenances, these are only specimens of its more menial offices and subjects. Titles and honours are among its rewards, and thrones at its disposal. Among its counsellors are kings, and many of the great and mighty of the earth are enrolled among its subjects.