She holds up reproachfully before our view the sullied flowers of the Spring-she points us to the blushing sisters of the Summer, and the sighing matrons of the Autumn—she rends in twain the hazy veil which chill November hangs before her weeping face, and snatches off the pall that black December throws over the bier, and in the voices of the months and seasons of the bygone year she calls upon us all as we stand upon the margin of its eternal grave, with all its irrevocable opportunities and chances, to shed a tear for 1858. - True A Tear! There are many reasons wherefore we should shed it. Those to whom the last twelvemonths have been most kind to whom they have brought prosperity and joy-whose comforts and delights have been multiplied by its generous hand-these owe to 1858 the passing tribute of a tear. gratitude would scarcely begrudge so simple a libation on the urn of the good old year. Let each look back upon it let us all recount its incidents. There are some, perhaps, who sat here in 1857 as bachelors and spinsters, who are by this time man and wife. They owe it to each other—to their mutual affection—to weep over the death of the kind season that cemented such a tie. And 1858 has placed in many parents' arms another reprint of themselvesthe infant voice of new-born wrestlers in the strife of human existence has been heard for the first time this year in many a household. Probably there are not a few happy men present here who have this year invested capital in the purchase of a cradle, or who have made arrangements for blocking up the pavement, on the first fine day, by means of a perambulator. The events which have necessitated these arrangements are memorable epochs in a lifetime: they are circumstances easily conceived than described," but still they are not easily forgotten. And the year that has brought to any man the inestimable blessing of a cradle and a perambulator, and especially a baby to put into them, demands a tear of grateful valediction as it flies away for ever. Let us express the hope, in passing, that the favoured parent whose quiver bids fair more shortly to become full of these "little circumstances," may not find them turn out "circumstances over which he has no control." All of us, however, in taking a retrospect of the season which has made its flight, can call around us scenes both of light and shade. With some the one has predominated, while with others the latter has been in the ascendant. But whatever has been the general complexion of our lives, or the detail of this part of our history, there is not one of us but has been guided both in going out and coming in-has been watched and guarded, and preserved, by a wise Beneficence and a providential love. In our backward glance we may be called upon to look through a vista of gloom relieved with only here and there a glimmering ray of hopeful torchlight. Pain and affliction have flitted like tormenting spectres across the path of many. Trouble and distress have frowned on others, while over the roofs of not a few the shadow of Death has brooded, and bereavement has spread out her pall of grievous clouds. The voice that spoke in happy accents from the lips of the bright-eyed little boy, whose flaxen curls were his doting mother's pride, a few short months ago, is now hushed beneath the churchyard sod, and his little sister has exchanged her dress of lively blue for a drapery of sombre black, and she comes back disconsolate from the garden, and almost breaks her parent's heart by crying "O call my brother back to me, I cannot play alone: The summer comes, with flower and bee, Where is my brother gone?" O yes-"twere long to tell and sad to trace" the graver and more tragic passages in the chapter of the book of Time that is just closing on us- to think of all the green mounds that the stern earthworm Death has thrown up in every churchyard-to read the myriad epitaphs which the pencil of the past has written on a thousand monuments—and to lay bare to view the smarting gashes which his sickle has inflicted on the hearts of those who yet remain behind-this were a task too gloomy - but still these are reflections that must wring from many eyes A Tear for 1858. But what it most becomes us all to do just now, is honestly to look back upon the past, and ask ourselves how we have spent it. If it has been sad, how much of the sadness has been of our own making, the offspring of our own transgressions? If it has been happy, how often have we blessed the kind Giver of it all, for sending sunshine to illuminate our path? O don't you remember, now that they are almost all broken-don't you remember the resolves with which you entered on this closing year? Can you not recal to mind the firm determination of a mended life, and the steady resolution with which you began your pilgrimage? And now, just ask yourself how many of those resolutions you have kept,-how much of all that good intent you have. carried out into practice? And if the retrospect should call a blush of shame into your cheek, let that blush lead you to reflection, let that reflection lead you to repentance, and let that repentance lead you to prayer. I do not want to suggest to you the resolutions with which you should begin the coming year: I shall leave that for our next meeting; but I would fain intimate to you the spirit in which you should reflect on the season which is gone. The bells which chimed upon our ears this morning seemed to my mind to toll the passing bell of 1858. O let us who are spared to see it to its grave, contrast our own deserts with all our mercies; and as we think with gratitude upon the favours, and with penitence upon the sins, which have marked our course this year, let the reflection bring us in heart and spirit to our knees before the throne of God: let us bless His name for all His goodness: let us crave His pardon for all our iniquities, and we shall find grace to help in time of need, so that we can begin our journey through another year with hearts made light with a sense of pardoned sin; and looking upon Conscience once again with smiling and propitiated face, we can commence a fresh epoch on the calendar of time more devoted to the service of our God, and less liable to be beckoned from His ways. But let us 41 remember that it is not the whimperings of a sort of artificial and evanescent regretfulness that can wash out what is evil on the blotted tablet of the past, but it is the blood of Christ alone that can cleanse us from our sins. It was blood and water that issued from the Redeemer's wounds when the barbed spear was plunged into His side, and so it must be blood and water to which we must look for cleansing from our guilt,—the water of our own contrite tears and the blood which fills the fountain open for our sins. The one must lead us to the other, and not until we hear the absolution whispered by the lips of Conscience to our spirits "thy sins are forgiven until the waves of our regrets subside beneath the "Peace, be still" of Calvarymust we dry the eye which pours forth these our tears, or cease the earnest outcry of importunate supplication, "Cast our sins behind Thy back, bury them in the depths of the sea!" Once more, before the shadows of this last Sabbath day of 1858 close round us never to return. once more, let these walls echo with a gospel overture. It will not be the first time, although it will be the last, that these sounds have been addressed to you—but if their earnestness and pathos have failed in former days to move you, O let them now, aided as they are by the solemn utterances of a dying year, have their effect upon you. You may not live to hear the parting counsels of another year. Eternity may have opened on you ere another year has closed-then hear the message while you may― that it is a faithful saying and worthy of al! acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners-look upon the vision while you may, before the veil of an eternal oblivion falls upon it—the vision of a crucified Redeemer-the vision of an open door and an open fountain-and the vision of a beckoning Spirit and an inviting Bible beseeching you to come, and calling upon whomsoever will, to take the water of life freely. O let us all revert to the "Old Story" once again, for it is, after all, the starting post and goal of all our race. However far you may have drifted from ithowever much your besotted indifference may have ignored, or your rash presumption may have despised it, there is another chance for all for the trembling hands of this dying year, which ere another week will be wrapped in its funeral shroud for ever, are holding up before your eyes the cross of a Crucified Redeemer; and its lips, so soon to close in an eternal silence, and its eyes anon to droop in an unwaking sleep, are appealing like the old herald in the wilderness to every cold and frozen heart-" Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world! O that another year may find multitudes who now hold in abeyance these vital things-casting in their lot Iwith the followers of the Lamb. O that the legacy which is left by 1858 to all of us may be a legacy of grace-grace to direct our steps into the way of peace-grace to lead us to glory, honour, and immortality, and eternal life! May many who now look contemptuously on the services of the sanctuary-ere long be glad when they say unto them let us go into the house of the Lord-and exclaim as they help to swell the hymns and praises of His courts, "How amiable are thy tabernacles O Lord of Hostsmy soul longeth, yea, even fainteth, for the courts of my Godmy heart and my flesh cryeth out for the living God." Make known Thy work, O God! in the midst of the years—in the midst of the years make known—and let us ere long feel the warm suffusion and behold the genial glow of that bright millennial day when all our voices shall uplift the anthem, "Glory to God in the highest, and on the earth peace and good will to man ;" and when, under the reviving radiance of the perfect day, the wilderness shall become glad, and the solitary place shall blossom into a fruitful plain-when all that opposes the Saviour's peaceful empire shall be repelled and beaten down, and the warriors of the Gospel shall take their stand upon the ruined bulwarks of the devil's citadel, and, unfurling the blood-stained banner of the cross before an emancipated world, shall raise the key-note of the ascription which fills the mouths of all who are triumphing in the liberty wherewith Christ has made them free, Hallelujah! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! |