ourselves with unbounded and glorious confidence on such as we think well of-an error soon corrected: for we soon find out, too soon! that men and women are not what they seem. Then comes disappointment; and the danger is a reaction of desolating and universal mistrust. For if we look on the doings of man with a merely worldly eye, and pierce below the surface of character, we are apt to feel bitter scorn and disgust for our fellow-creatures. We have lived to see human hollowness: the ashes of the Dead Sea shore; the falseness of what seemed so fair; the mouldering beneath the whited sepulchre: and no wonder if we are tempted to think "friendship all a cheat-smiles hypocrisy -words deceit ;" and they who are what is called knowing in life contract by degrees, as the result of their experience, a hollow distrust of men, and learn to sneer at apparently good motives. That demoniacal sneer which we have seen, ay perhaps felt, curling the lip at times, "Doth Job serve God for nought?"

The only preservative from this withering of the heart is Love. Love is its own perennial fount of strength. The strength of affection is a proof not of the worthiness of the object, but of the largeness of the soul which loves. Love descends, not ascends. The might of a river depends not on the quality of the soil through which it passes, but on the inexhaustibleness and depth of the spring from which it proceeds. The greater mind cleaves to the smaller with more force than the other to it. A parent loves the child more than the child the parent; and partly because the parent's heart is larger, not because the child is worthier. The Saviour loved His disciples infinitely more

His disciples loved Him, because His heart was infinitely larger. Love trusts on-ever hopes and expects better things, and this, a trust springing from itself and out of its own deeps alone.

And more than this. It is this trusting love that makes men what they are trusted to be, so realizing itself. Would you make men trustworthy? Trust them. Would you

make them true? Believe them. This was the real force

of that sublime battle-cry which no Englishman hears without emotion. When the crews of the fleet of Britain knew that they were expected to do their duty, they did their duty. They felt in that spirit-stirring sentence that they were trusted and the simultaneous cheer that rose from every ship was a forerunner of victory-the battle was half-won already. They went to serve a country which expected from them great things: and they did great things. Those pregnant words raised an enthusiasm for the chieftain who had thrown himself upon his men in trust, which a double line of hostile ships could not appal, nor decks drenched in blood extinguish.

And it is on this principle that Christ wins the hearts of His redeemed. He trusted the doubting Thomas; and Thomas arose with a faith worthy "of his Lord and his God." He would not suffer even the lie of Peter to shake His conviction that Peter might love Him yet; and Peter answered nobly to that sublime forgiveness. His last prayer was in extenuation and hope for the race who had rejected Him-and the kingdoms of the world are become His own. He has loved us, God knows why: I do not; and we, all unworthy though we be, respond faintly to that love, and try to be what He would have us.

Therefore, come what may, hold fast to love. Though men should rend your heart, let them not embitter or harden it. We win by tenderness: we conquer by forgiveness. Oh, strive to enter into something of that large celestial Charity which is meek, enduring, unretaliating, and which even the overbearing world cannot withstand for ever. Learn the new commandment of the Son of God. Not to love, but to love as He loved. Go forth in this spirit to your lifeduties: go forth, children of the cross, to carry everything before you, and win victories for God by the conquering power of a love like His.

REALIZING THE SECOND ADVENT

JOB xix. 25-27.-"For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me."

THE hardest, the severest, the last lesson which man has to learn upon this earth, is submission to the will of God. It is the hardest lesson, because to our blinded eyesight it often seems a cruel will. It is a severe lesson, because it can be only taught by the blighting of much that has been most dear. It is the last lesson, because when a man has learned that, he is fit to be transplanted from a world of wilfulness, to a world in which one Will alone is loved, and only one is done. All that saintly experience ever had to teach resolves itself into this, the lesson how to say affectionately, "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." Slowly and stubbornly our hearts acquiesce in that. The holiest in this congregation, so far as he has mastered the lesson, will acknowledge that many a sore and angry feeling against his God had to be subdued, many a dream of earthly brightness broken, and many a burning throb stilled in a proud resentful heart, before he was willing to suffer God to be sovereign in His own world, and do with him and his as seemed to Him best. The earliest record that we have of this struggle in the human bosom is found in this book of Job. It is the most ancient statement we have of the perplexities and miseries of life so graphic, so true to nature, that it proclaims at once that what we are reading is drawn not from romance but life. It has been said, that religious experience is but the fictitious creation of a polished age, when fanciful feelings are called into existence by hearts bent back in reflex and morbid action, on themselves. We have an answer to that in this book. Religion is no morbid fancy. In the rough

rude ages when Job lived, when men did not dwell on their feelings as in later centuries, the heart-work of religion was manifestly the same earnest, passionate thing that it is now. The heart's misgivings were the same beneath the tent of an Arabian Emir which they are beneath the roof of a modern Christian. Blow after blow fell on the Oriental Chieftain: one day he was a father—a prince—the lord of many vassals and many flocks, and buoyant in one of the best of blessings, health; the next, he was a childless, blighted, ruined man. And then it was that there came from Job's lips those yearnings for the quiet of the grave, which are so touching, so real; and, considering that some of the strongest of the Elect of God have yielded to them for a moment, we might almost say so pardonable: “I should have been at rest-where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. There the prisoners rest together they hear not the voice of the oppressor. Wherefore is light given unto him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter of soul-which long for death, but it cometh not, and dig for it more than for hid treasures— which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave?" What is the book of Job but the record of an earnest soul's perplexities? The double difficulty of life solved there, the existence of moral evil-the question whether suffering is a mark of wrath or not. What falls from Job's lips is the musing of a man half-stunned, half-surprised, looking out upon the darkness of life, and asking sorrowfully why are these things so? And all that falls from his friends' lips is the commonplace remarks of men upon what is inscrutable, maxims learned second-hand by rote and not by heart, fragments of deep truths, but truths misapplied, distorted, torn out of all connexion of time and place, so as to become actual falsehoods, only blistering a raw wound. It was from these awkward admonitions that Job appealed in the text. He appealed from the tribunal of man's opinion to a tribunal where sincerity shall be cleared and vindicated. He appealed from a world of confusion, where all the foundations of the earth are out of course, to a world where

all shall be set right. He appealed from the dark dealings of a God whose way it is to hide Himself, to a God who shall stand upon this earth in the clear radiance of a love on which suspicion's self cannot rest a doubt. It was faith straining through the mist, and discerning the firm land. that is beyond. "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.” We take two points :

I. The certainty of God's interference in the affairs of this world.

II. The means of realizing that interference.

God's interference, again, is contemplated in this passage in a twofold aspect: A present superintendence-"I know that my Redeemer liveth." A future, personal, visible interference-"He shall stand at the latter day upon the

earth."

I. His present superintendence.

1. The first truth contained in that is God's personal existence. It is not chance, nor fate which sits at the wheel of this world's revolutions. It was no fortuitous concourse of atoms which massed themselves into a world of beauty. It was no accidental train of circumstances which has brought the human race to their present state. It was a living God. And it is just so far as this is the conviction of every day, and every hour, and every minute

"My Redeemer liveth"-that one man deserves to be called more religious than another. To be religious is to feel that God is the Ever Near. It is to go through life with this thought coming instinctively and unbidden, "Thou, God, seest me." A life of religion is a life of faith: and faith is that strange faculty by which man feels the presence of the invisible; exactly as some animals have the power of seeing in the dark. That is the difference between the Christian and the world. Most men know nothing beyond what they see. This lovely world is all in all to