washes the other. But how when your neighbor needs your assistance? why then your hand must help to wash his, and all will go well and happily. Understandest? The good Lord will have it that we assist and help each other with the gifts we have received. Thus shall one hand wash the other.

When avarice and covetousness apply the proverb, it comes from the school of Satan; for then avarice and covetousness, expect the assistance of an elephant for the help of a fly. And must you seek help, and the villain say, yes, but one hand washes the other? Friend take to the door and fly; for he will entangle you as the spider does the fly, only letting it fall after he has drawn out of it the life-blood. Guard thyself, or thou wilt fare no better.

If any one has served you well and unselfishly, write it into your heartone hand washes the other-and do not be an ungrateful man, as there are some in all positions and places, who forget what things an honest man of God has done, and how he has drawn them amid embarrassment.

THE SEASON OF LENT.

BY A FRIEND OF THE GUARDIAN.

The English word Lent, the same as the German Lentz, is of AngloSaxon origin, and means spring. Lent is the spring-fast, or the long fast that comes in the spring of the year. In the Roman Catholic Church, the most remarkable feature of the season, when the earth is wont to arise from her bed of ice, wash her face and put on her new, beautiful garments, was and still is, the contemplation of sin-sin as laid upon the heart of the blessed Saviour, and sin, as living and working in our own hearts-accompanied with partial abstinence from food, and acts of charity. This idea governed the services of the Church. It filled the minds of old and young. It influenced family and social life. Hence it came that the ruling notion of spring was that of a period of humiliation, penitence and fasting; and the old English name for the season, a part of the natural year, was applied to the spiritual work, or to the season of fasting, prescribed by the Church, a part of the ecclesiastical year.

According to Richardson, Wachter enumerates four different etymologies of the word lent: 1, from length, because at this season of spring the days lengthen; 2, from lenitas, because then the air becomes mild, or lenient; 3, from glentzen, to shine or glisten, because it is the most brilliant or beautiful season; 4, from the Dut. lenten, to dissolve, because the severity of winter is then dissolved.

This solemn fast begins forty-six days before Easter, on the middle day of the week, Wednesday, when it was customary, in ancient times, to sprinkle ashes on the heads of those who were sentenced, by the Church, to do penance. From this ancient custom, the day is called Ash-Wednes

day-a name which the day still retains, although the custom is no longer in vogue.

Sunday is always a festival, never a fast, because it is the weekly celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Easter is the anniversary of the resurrection. It is the Sunday on which, once a year, the Church celebrates the victory of all victories-the day on which the Church, the body of Christ, triumphs in Christ, and with Christ, over death and hell. Each succeeding first day of the week, or Sunday, is a memorial of Easter triumph and Easter joy. For this reason the six Sundays, occurring during the season of Lent, are not counted as fast days, but only the six days, or the working days, of each week. Thus, from AshWednesday to Saturday, before Easter, we get a period of forty days of humiliation, fasting and prayer.

The great Reformation of the sixteenth century was a protest, not against the right and the true, but against the wrong and the false, in the Roman Catholic Church. It sought to retain the truth in the form of sound doctrine and godly living, and to reject only errors in doctrine and Church government, and the evil which had attached itself to customs which, in themselves, are good and proper. The idea of the Trinity, of the incarnation of the Son of God, and of the resurrection on the third day, underlie and pervade the life of the Protestant no less than that of the Roman Catholic Church. So do regeneration, repentance, faith and worship. Faith in the resurrection of Christ is Protestant as well as Romish. Sorrow for sin, and the penitent contemplation of our Lord dying on the cross, are Protestant as well as Romish. So is the devout observance of Easter and Good Friday; and so is suitable preparation, by humiliation and prayer, for such observances.

The Reformed Church does not protest against the necessity of selfrecollection, of reflection on the fall, on depravity, on broken resolutions and personal unworthiness and guilt. She does not protest against the penitent confession of sin and the believing contemplation of the sufferings of Christ; nor against the necessity and propriety of preparing the mind and heart for the awful grandeur of the Cross and the Resurrection. The Reformed Church only protests against the external rules and regulations which the Church of Rome prescribes for the observance of Lent, and against the abuses of the season, which have grown up in the course of time and receive her sanction.

The Reformed Church neither commands nor prohibits the observance of Lent. The great festival of Easter has been solemnly observed during the entire period of her history in Europe, and in America, also, by the large majority of her congregations. The custom is formally acknowledged and approved, by Classes and Synods, as being proper and important. A custom prevailing for so long a time, and in nearly all her congregations, has come to have the force of law-of law in fact, though not in form. This law is the existence of a general judgment among ministers and laymen, that warrants and sanctions the formal celebration of the resurrection of our Lord from the dead.

Lent is the period of preparation for Easter, and bears the same relation to the celebration of Easter that the advent season bears to the celebration of Christmas. To celebrate Christmas properly, it is necessary to contemplate, in advance, various facts connected with and bearing upon the In

carnation. The hearts of the people are thus fitted to rejoice with the true joy of an intelligent faith in the Word made flesh, when Christmas morning ushers in the anniversary of the Son of God as the babe of Bethlehem. In like manner does Easter involve the propriety of Lent. To say the least, the profound regard and earnest love of the Reformed Church for the festival of Easter, would not endure the prohibition of Lent. On the contrary, this regard and love for Easter implies a corresponding regard, though not developed nor expressed, for the season set apart for humiliation, fasting and prayer. Whether generally observed at present or not, is of no account. It is generally felt that an inward and close connection exists between Easter and Lent. The faith which leads to the formal celebration of the one, begets a sense of the propriety of the other. And in the course of time this connection will manifest itself. The slumbering sense of propriety will develop itself in practice.

No law will be enacted requiring the observance of Lent. No specific regulations will be adopted in regard to abstinence from particular kinds of food. Just as there is no law commanding the observance of Christmas, Good-Friday and Easter. There is a deeper force at work in the Church than any external rule could be. That force is true faith in the person of Christ, as the sum and life of Christianity-faith in the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ as the essential constituents of the Gospel. In the degree that such true faith in Christ and His Church strikes its roots deeper into the general mind, will the existing connection between Easter and Lent-between the celebration of the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and a season of humiliation and prayer-be seen and acknowledged.

Such, at least, is the legitimate tendency of an enlightened and living faith. The season of Lent is an integral part of the Church year. It belongs to that order of human life which is governed and pervaded by the life of Christ.

THOUGHTS FOR GOOD FRIDAY.

BY THE EDITOR.

In the creed the article of Christ's suffering follows immediately upon the article of His birth: "Born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate." This is strictly according to the order of events as they actually occurred in the life of our adorable Saviour.

Two reasons appear why His sufferings and His birth are thus brought together in the Creed:

1. His entering into our nature in the way of conception and birth involved suffering. He was holy, and our nature, which He through His conception and birth assumed, was a fallen and depraved nature; and hence the union must bring Him into contact with the penalties and pains incident to that nature which He assumed. The true human nature in Him could not be assumed out of the false nature, the depraved nature, the un

nature without such conflict, struggle, and severely contested victory as must have carried suffering with it. The pure could not come out of the impure without the spiritual throes of a birth.

2. His sufferings actually began immediately upon His birth. As we, whom He came by His holy life, to lift out of our death and misery, are born in sin, so He had to begin His life by feeling our sorrows pressing upon His holy life. He had to carry His own holy divine-human life through the burden, the penalty, and the pains which were inherent in that human life which He assumed; for He was made of a woman, made under the law.

Thus, then, for a double reason may we say, as in one breath: bornsuffered. This being the true relation of His birth to His sufferings, it is highly important that in all our meditations upon the sufferings of Christ, we should keep in mind this significant fact-and connect His sufferings with His birth.

This, we think, is often overlooked by Christians, both in their theological and practical contemplations of our Saviour's passion. There is a disposition in our minds and hearts to make all His sufferings-at least all those in which we are interested for the purposes of faith and salvation-cluster around the close of His life. It is true His sufferings there reached their highest point-they ended there in an intensity of anguish and agony which an archangel cannot fathom! But they did not begin there they were not all there.

His closing sufferings were not only intense, but also crowded together. They came treading upon each other. The garden--the Judgment hallthe cross! It was wo upon wo! Herein lies the reason why the meditations of our hearts settle there. No wonder that we, impelled by a peculiar tenderness of love, choose the mournful shades of Gethsemane-follow Him as He is scourged, and bears His cross-and, when we behold it erected bow in its shades, and with humble gratefulness sing,

"Here will I hide my blushing face,
While His dear cross appears;
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt mine eyes to tears."

What a width, what a depth, what a power has here the stream of our Saviour's love! But to sit and view from this point only, and not connect this with the past, would be like sitting upon the bank of a mighty river just where it pours into the ocean, and suppose that we take in by that view all that belongs to the stream. Such a view would be very inadequate. We must rather follow the stream back into all its branches and primary tributaries, by the combined force of which alone the stream receives its volume at that point, where it pours its aggregated flood into the grand ocean.

This is a natural mistake. When a friend of ours dies, our deepest sympathies are enlisted by those sufferings which cluster around his last hours; and after that friend has gone to where they weep no more, and we, in those hours which memory consecrates to the departed, call him to mind, and think of the sufferings from which he is so happily released, we find that to us it seems as if all that he suffered was in connection with the last struggle-all our thoughts of his sufferings cluster around the death scene.

Could all the

But is this a just, a full, a true picture? Certainly not. sufferings of his whole previous life, as they extend back to his cradle, be gathered into the same space of time, how vastly greater their sum!

In like manner we have an inadequate picture of our Saviour's sufferings, when we confine them, in our meditations, to his last hours.

In our most excellent symbol-the Heidelburg Catechism-we are rightly instructed on this point. Here we are asked the question: "What dost thou understand by the word 'suffered?" and we are taught to answer thus: "That all the time he lived on earth, but especially at the end of His life, He bore, in body and soul, the wrath of God against the sins of the whole human race."

Here it is correctly stated, that though His sufferings at the end of His life were specially marked, yet those sufferings extended over "all the time He lived on earth."

We are not only taught, that His suffering extended thus back over the whole of His life to His birth; but also that those sufferings were part of that satisfaction which he made, by suffering, for our sins. Not only at the end of His life, but all the time he lived on earth, He bore the wrath of God against the sins of the whole human race. There was virtue in those drops of blood that fell from His wounded feet, and side, and hands, and head on the cross; but also in those drops of sacred sorrow which oozed from His body in the Garden-in those tears of sympathetic grief which fell from His eyes at the grave of Lazarus, and on the brow of Olivet. Those tears! The strongest evidences of His humanity! How near he comes to us in His tears! Here the heart instinctively exclaims, "Surely He has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows."

There is a passage (Heb. v. 7.) which, by its very indefiniteness as to the time when the sufferings to which it alludes took place, opens to us a world of sorrow and suffering, of which no page makes record. Speaking of Christ as our High-priest--priest and sacrifice-the writer says of Him: "Who in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that he feared; though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered."

These sufferings are said to have been, IN GENERAL, in the days of His flesh. That there is not reference to His last sufferings merely seems to be plain from the last clause, in which it is said that He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. Which implies that obedience succeeded the sufferings, and that they prepared Him for it-trained Him for obedience unto death.

This also corresponds with another passage (Heb. ii. 10): "For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through suffering."

Such passages, open to us a view into what may be called, the secret history of His sufferings!

We commonly say that Jesus wept twice-at the grave of Lazarus, and on Olivet. But are all his tears recorded? Did his most intimate friends see them all? They saw him, in general, as one "Despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;" and twice they saw him weep, and recorded the moving events; but who followed him through