tribulations, "The Lord reigneth;" that there is no chance, no accident; that all is right, and all must resolve itself into the greatest glory to Him that reigns, and into the greatest good of the subjects that obey.

God has been ruling and reigning ever since the world had a being. Merle D'Aubigné has made the remark- a remark which I tried several years ago to illustrate,—"God is in history; and all history has its unity, because God is in it." Read Macaulay, or Alison, or D'Aubigné-ever recollecting at the commencement and the close of every chapter, "The Lord reigneth"-and you will see that where they are faithful, they are simply witnesses to the grand and the blessed fact.

Let us review some instances. In one of the Gospels it is stated, "A decree went out from Cæsar Augustus, that the whole world should be taxed." That was an ordinary political decree; every one, as the effect of it, we are told in Luke ii., went to his own city to be taxed. We can see nothing in that decree at first glance-nothing seemed more ordinary. But when we come to compare the fact that Cæsar commanded with a prophecy that God had written, we find Cæsar's decree, accomplishing Cæsar's end, was really subserving God's great purpose, and that it was by this decree of the heathen ruler that Mary and Joseph went to their own city, and that the ancient prophecy was fulfilled, "Thou Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of

Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting."

At the day of Pentecost, nothing was more accidental apparently to the world than that there should be a vast assemblage of Jews at Jerusalem. On that very occasion the Holy Spirit was poured out, and they that came to make market learned what Christ had done; the merchants from the ends of the earth went back from the scene bearing merchandise more precious than gold and pearls; and the result of that Pentecostal effusion in the midst of the vast congress that had come together upon mere matters of business, was, that the Gospel was carried forth from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth; and nations that had never heard it before, heard and received, and welcomed the joyful sound.

On a subsequent occasion the apostle Paul was so persecuted by the Scribes and the Pharisees, that he was seized as a criminal, cast as a prisoner into a gaol; his life was threatened; in sheer despair he appealed from the inveterate fury of the priests to Cæsar, who swayed the imperial sceptre; and they were constrained, contrary to their will, to send Paul on a long, a weary, and a wintry voyage, to the great metropolis of the world.

Now, at first blush nothing could be more accidental. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Scribes did not wish to send him to Rome: it seemed, too, when he left Judea, that he abandoned the congre

gation where his ministry had been blessed, to go to a heathen one, where he had no reason to expect a blessing at all. But what was the result? Paul preached at Rome, first in his own hired house, to a few reckless Roman soldiers; but byand-by, the shopmen on the streets, the tradesmen in the Forum, the orators in the courts-even they of Cæsar's palace, the high officers of state-came into contact with this eloquent but obscure and detested Christian Jew; and the result of that appeal from the persecution of the Scribe to the protection of Cæsar was, that the Gospel spread through every part of the metropolis of the world, and hundreds of thousands heard of Christ who never could have heard of him under any other circumstances. The effect and influence of this opportunity lay here:- a truth made known at Rome could never stop there. Rome at that day was the whispering-gallery of the wide world; a new light there radiated to Ultima Thule, and to the most distant parts of the globe; a new doctrine promulgated in the capital was sure to be heard of over all the provinces. Accordingly, we find from history that the actual result was, that this accidental persecution of Paul by the Jews, this accidental appeal to Cæsar for protection, this accidental escape from shipwreck, this accidental appearance in the midst of Rome, was the means of kindling a light that was not soon extinguished, and of circulating that Gospel which otherwise had been restricted to very narrow and puny limits.

What must be the inference from this? The Pharisee hated, the Apostle appealed, the winds wafted the ship; but the Lord reigned, and regulated, and ordered all.

Soon after this, a poor, obscure, and miserable man, descended of a broken-down family, reduced to beggary, came into public notice in Rome. His name is recorded in history as Constantine, the first Christian emperor. In one of his battles he saw, either in imagination or in reality, a cross of unearthly splendour blazing in the firmament; and he read on the cross, where the two pieces of wood were fastened together, v roúr vixa-"In this overcome," or, "In this gain the victory." He embraced Christianity from this wonderful apocalypse -he proclaimed what formerly he persecuted-he forced it on his soldiers, a course that we cannot approve, but which was nevertheless followed by many practical and remarkable results; for the cross of Christ, the very synonyme of all that was detested, was emblazoned on the imperial Labarum; and the name of Jesus, no more the detested Nazarite, came to be the glory of princes and the light of the palaces of the greatest empire of the earth.

Soon after this we find a thousand years of dense and deplorable darkness lighted on broad Europe; and all the nations of the earth, notwithstanding the light that had burst from Palestine, were involved in a darkness so deep that it could almost be felt; and the only and the incidental lights in

the midst of it were the few and far between convents, that learning oftener than piety had constructed, to be the last retreats of the literature and the science of the world. The Church of Rome will say, "Then you make the admission that medieval convents were the retreats of medieval learning." I make the admission; but the fact that they were the retreats of learning is a proof that learning must have been previously persecuted. Why need a retreat, if she had not an oppressor? And who were the great persecutors of learning? Just the Popes of Rome; and for a person to put out the sun, if he had the power, and in the darkness that follows light a few gas-lamps, and then coolly tell us that we are indebted to him for the only light we have, is only an ingenious way of disguising and concealing the first great crime that was perpetrated. For the same Rome that kindled the few lights in the convents had previously put out the Sun of Righteousness shining from the firmament upon the world. During this black night, so dark and so disastrous that it seemed as if God did not reign, we shall yet find, in the midst of the darkness permitted as a penalty, lights breaking out, still revealing the truth, "The Lord reigneth." In the course of that dark era, the Mahometan brought into Europe lights that the Romanist, to his deep shame, almost, if not altogether, had quenched. Constantinople fell the Greek literati in that capital were scattered throughout Europe-Greek learning came to be