sence of his glory with exceeding joy;" to do far more than restore those mental and spiritual powers

which have been hitherto, at the best, so imperfect

and so frail to capacitate you for serving Him eter༡༥༠༠་ཡ་

nally with unwearied devotion and pleasure un

abated to endow the spirit with such celestial har

ལས་

mony and vigour, that it shall ever ardently will whatsoever its perfected nature can render, of adoring service to its Author and Redeemer,—and shall ever be as entirely capable, to effect, with unremitting and delighted energy, all the services it wills.

ff«h, ༈ ྃ

1

Forget not, since you always know, and often feel, the connexion between the infirmities of the spirit and those of a corruptible and mortal framethat the perfection of this divine healing will be felt and owned, in its coming victory over corruption and mortality; when those prophecies, once obscure, "I will ransom from the power of the grave: oh grave I will be thy destruction," shall receive their bright fulfilment; and the inherent weakness of the

natural body" be exchanged for that glory of the spiritual," which pain and death can never more

botopd

assail.

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Meditate on this heavenly cure of all which now humbles, depresses, and excruciates our ruined nature, the spirit healed of sin and woe, the mind and body rescued from their sad communion ¢91} Gi] of anguish and debility; the whole renovated crea

4

ture "made meet for an inheritance in light," there to dedicate immortal health and blessedness to Him whose "perfect gifts" they are. Think how criminal it were to disbelieve, and how blameable as well as unhappy it is to despond, when “ God, who cannot lie, hath promised;" promised that though weariness and helplessness and agony, as well as death, may intervene, yet the hour of healing is at hand; when the spirit shall be filled with "power and love," the body raised to unchangeable vitality, the whole creature endued with faultless similitude to the Possessor and Giver of all bliss.

It is exceedingly difficult no doubt, for you, under existing depression, to conceive and anticipate, and above all to appropriate to yourself personally, this glorious change. But though your hold on it be ever so faint and distrustful, you cannot, I hope, renounce it. With reference both to that ultimate and perfect cure, and to intermediate alleviation and relief, you are bound to remember and to venerate his words who said on a different occasion,"with men it is impossible, but not with God, for with God all things are possible."

XIII.

ON DISTRUSTFUL ANXIETY FOR THE COMING OF CHRIST. A NEW YEAR'S OR ANNIVERSARY MEDITATION.

HAS not our impatient weariness, or timorous distrust, too often echoed, inwardly, that taunt of scoffers,—“ Where is the promise of his coming?"

From their tone and spirit indeed we painfully recoil: yet the same question which they urge in flippant mockery, our hearts may whisper unawares in silent sadness. When the infidel derides our dearest expectation, we know his "wish" is "father to that thought;" and yet our own misgivings, condemned and combated by faith, may be his secret allies.

We muse cheerlessly on the ages that have rolled away, the many corruptions and declensions of the Christian cause, the slowness of its genuine triumph since those years of infant strength, when it bruised,

as in its cradle, the serpents of idolatry; on the unchanged aspects of the natural world, where all things continue as they were;" on the tardy or even questionable amelioration of the moral. In such a mood of gloomy retrospection, must we encounter with new pain those reckless "sports" of sceptics which are "death to us" and to all solid hope: the wretched speculations by which, while they pro-| fess to liberate, they would, in fact, lay waste; and just for the sake of levelling the fences of our narrow way," would make a trackless desert to loiter and to perish in, without even the far-off vision" of a better land. "As with a sword in our bones" these "enemies" of holy truth "reproach" us, "while they say daily," as in the old time before us," where is thy God?"

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But surrender nothing either to their cold railleries or your own anxious musings. There remains a spoken and recorded word of promise. Ex-1 ceeding broad" are the attestations it has since! acquired; and far other echoes revive, and far other voices respond to it, than those either of levity or despondence. The Saviour in whom we have trusted assured both his adherents and his adversaries of his future majestic advent; in figures and in explicit statements; personally and by the word both of angels and apostles. "I will come again and receive you to myself" was the language of his

affection on the solemn eve of parting: and when He appeared in glory to his exiled servant, with new admonitions and predictions for the suffering churches, "behold I come quickly"-" surely I come quickly"

ચ

was the message at once of warning and of love. S The lapse of centuries indeed has long since taught the church, that its terms must not be inter† preted by the narrow measure of our days or gened rations: but each century has meanwhile affixed, or enlarged, some vast historic seal, on the divinity of the record which contains it. "The bands who would "rob" us of our only real wealth, do but vainly declare the "pearl of great price" in our shrine of scripture to be spurious, till they can break or obliterate those seals of heavenly truth which are set upon the shrine itself by the broad and far-extending annals of the church and of the world.

These extrinsic confirmations of the precious promises," we should sometimes review: nor will the task be laborious. board quibo 9

With a glance you can revert to that empire of the first Cæsars, where a splendid starlight of intellect did but adorn, without dispelling, the shades of atheistic and idolatrous darkness which brooded and mingled over its wide regions, fostering all deadly" fruits. We see the sudden "day-spring from on i high" shedding on those realms a rapid moral illu

I

mination; and-where philosophy had been all but