of righteousness is risen with healing under His wings!

What were the doctrines which so captivated the apostle that he exclaimed, "I am not ashamed of this Gospel?" Of the author, Jesus, we can say all that Rousseau was constrained to admit, all Napoleon attested-more than the most gifted of mankind have been able to proclaim. But, in addition to all this, He has risen upon our hearts with quickening and comforting rays like the light of the morning, as the Sun of righteousness, and we feel no desire and we see no reason to be ashamed of Him; on the contrary, we glory in His cross, and would crown him Lord of all. His doctrines are the rays of His glory. Let us study these first in reference to man; secondly, in reference to nature; thirdly, in reference to God.

Man is not now as he was. Nobody will pretend to say that we were originally made sufferers, any more than that we were made sinners. Sin and suffering go together; and if we were not created sinners in Paradise, we were not made sufferers there. Eve never had a headache, still less a heartache, till she ate of that forbidden tree, or, translated into words the true and moral meaning of the act, till she broke the law of God. Now intellect is weakenedconscience disturbed, and the heart disquieted. Old age bows down man to the dust, and the death-frost strikes down the infant.

If we turn to external nature, nobody can say she is now as she was. It is at present a composite

of sunshine and shadow-of quiet and disturbanceof reproduction and decay-of good and bad. Threefourths of the earth are covered with the desert sea; a large part of the remaining fourth is cursed with barrenness, and every part is now and then rocked by the earthquake, or scarred by graves, or defaced by battle-fields. Daily, indeed hourly, it receives into its reluctant bosom the dearest and the earliest dead; in words replete with meaning, "all nature groans and travails in pain," waiting for that predestined emancipation which shall be hers and ours, when the bride has made herself ready, and the sons of God are complete in number and character. God is denied or forgotten far and wide in the very world He has made. Human nature has lost the just idea of God; and man, without the teaching of the gospel, is ignorant of his relation to God. We may not take the fanciful imaginations of poetic sceptics as the light of nature; these are the refracted rays of Christianity. The ancient Greek peopled the earth and the sky with deities of his own, exquisitely embodied in marble; the ancient Roman plundered prostrate nations of their gods in order to enrich his Pantheon; the Persian adored the noonday sun; and the barbarous Hun made his sword his god, and knelt before the brightest steel as the best representative of deity. God was seen dimly in this eclipse. All feel God is, but none without revelation know what God is. An atheist is impossible; there may be the practical atheism of sensual indulgence; but

there is no such thing as genuine intellectual atheism. There is a God; but what is that God to us? Will He crush us, or will He bless us? is He omnipotent love, or omnipotent hate? will He pardon my sins, or will He punish me? will He punish all? if not, whom will He spare? will He save all? if not, whom will He not save? These questions are very shortly uttered, but they are of intense interest and of difficult solution. Where shall we find an answer? I open this blessed book. From its gleaming page I can speak of man, of nature, and of God in most consistent, clear, and encouraging terms. Man fell in Adam, but as a believer he is restored in Christ; wherever a sinner lives a Saviour is found; wherever sin has struck its mark there salvation is freely offered ; wherever Sinai stands, over against it is Mount Calvary; immortality has risen on mortality like a sunrise on night. Eternal life stands overhead an unsetting star; and the kingdom of heaven is now opened to all believers. Death is accounted for in all its aspects-sin is explained; and the perplexed and tangled phenomena of nature are solved. Sorrowing sisters of Bethany, Rachel weeping for your children because they are not-your separations are temporal, your reunion is eternal. Eyelids closed to the light of day shall open again. Ears deaf to the accents of affection shall hear again glad voices and old familiar tones. Hearts cold and still in the grave shall yet be warmed with celestial fire.

The spell of death is dissolved-the seal on the

sepulchre is broken. Light shines on the griefs of the living and on the graves of the dead, and the desert places of the human heart already begin to blossom as the rose.

The gospel alone explains all; it alone casts light upon all. I am not ashamed of the gospel of

Christ.

Nature, too, is out of sorts; its whole head is sick, its whole heart is faint; but nature is not a castoff and abandoned thing. Those bursts of summer which in some favourable seasons we feel are memorials of a Paradise that has passed away; but also the prophets and earnests of a brighter Paradise yet to be. The splendour of a summer sky, the music of woods, the beauty of gems, the fragrance of flowers are left us to keep our hearts from despair, and to preserve open the way from Paradise lost for the return of Paradise regained. Earth will be restored, and rise with the royal race that are on its bosom. Emancipated from the curse, it will drop its ashen garments, and put on its Easter robes of glory and of beauty; no tear to dim her eye, and no stain or scar upon her brow. Its groans will end in hallelujahs, its very deserts shall rejoice, and its solitary places shall blossom even as the rose; and that wild wailthat plaintive minor we now hear, shall be transposed into the major key, and shall swell into that glorious jubilee in which God reigns, nature is restored, and man is forgiven.

Such is the revelation of truth, such are the inti

mations of heaven respecting what is about us, behind us, and before us.

God also is revealed in all His glory; not the granite deity of the Stoic, nor the Allah of the Moslem, nor the diffused vapour of the Pantheist, but a Person, a Father, our Father, our Father in heaven. His love throbs along every line of the parable of the prodigal son. He is seen there coming down to save, pardoning, taking home, rejoicing. The doctrines of the gospel are apples of gold in network of silver. It tells me of my sins, but only to let me see how they may be forgiven. It tells me that the gleaming sword is sheathed in the scabbard, and its edge no longer turned against me; that Sinai's fires are quenched; that the cherubim appointed to guard the gates of Paradise against all intrusion, and to repel the renegade and the apostate race, are turned into angels of mercy, ministering to them who are the heirs of salvation. Where, and in what land or language, are not the triumphs of this religion? Visit the pillows of the dying, the vigils of the sick, the hovels of the poor, the houses of the dead, and see how many hearts it has composed to suffer, how many spirits it has strengthened to triumph. What a blessing, a shower of blessings, has this gospel been to individual hearts, to nations, to the world. Let Christianity be universal as the air we breathe, reaching to all heights, descending to all depths, and enclosing all space, and the whole world will be transformed, and all things will be made new. The French nation-so courteous