and besides pours his flood around it and beyond it, touching other planets and emptying oceans of light inte the great formless void, so Christ has blessed the Church so far as it would receive His gifts, and then has poured His love around it and beyond it, where the statesmen have sat in council without any creed or any prayer.SWING.

Witnesses for Christ.

It will be much better for you to tell of the sweets of godliness than it will be to make riddles about the doctrine of it. Samson afterward made a riddle about his lion and the honey; and that riddle ended in fighting and bloodshed. We have known certain Christians spend their lives in making riddles about the honey and the lion, by asking tough doctrinal questions, which even angels can not answer. "Riddle me this," they say, and then it has ended in a fight, and brotherly love has been murdered in the fray. It is much better to bring your hands full of honey to those who are needy, and present it to them, that they may eat of it, than it is to cavil and discuss. No hurt can come of teuing what the Lord has done for your soul, and it will keep you out of mischief. Therefore, I would stir up all Christian people to continue from day to day exhibiting to needy sinners the blessedness of Christ, that unbelievers may come and eat thereof.

By doing this you will be blessing men far more than Samson could bless his parents, for our honey is honey unto eternity; our sweets are sweets that last to Heaven, and are best enjoyed there. Call upon others to taste

"THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS."-From the Painting by Morris

and see that the Lord is good, and you shall have therein much joy. You shall increase your own pleasure by seeing the pleasure of the Lord prospering in your hand. What bliss awaits useful Christians when they enter into Heaven, for they shall be met there by many who have gone before them whom they were the means of turning to Christ.-SPURGEON.

Christ as a Fact.

Above all other super-human ones He stands farthest from myth, and nearest to reality. Mark, then, the superiority of Christ as a fact. The Christian poet can not say, with the classic: "All I know of Thee is Thy name;" and they who erect an altar to Him can not write over it: To the Unknown God." The reality of Jesus is as definite, as undeniable, as the reality of Washington or Franklin. All the other incarnations belong to the atmosphere of legend. No twelve disciples gathered daily around the feet of Olympian Jove, nor of the beau tiful Apollo, nor of the gifted Minerva. No multitude gathered upon the mountain side to hear and see the Hercules and Aphrodite. If some crowd, acting in the historic period, in the days of language and words, had followed the Apollo along the streets of Jerusalem or Athens, and had even crucified him, then would the Christian Gospel confess a rival in the pagan pages. But it was the misfortune of all that Olympian group that there was no Judas to betray any one of them with a kiss, and no Pilate to order any one of them to the cross. They all lived outside the bounds of evidence, and hence

today appear only like the picture of the virtues or the graces-outward expressions of the inner soul.SWING.

Christ the Revelation of God.

Slowly, indeed, comes the redemption of the human race; but, notwithstanding this painful halting, looking back we behold Christ to be the turning point in the his tory of our earth. He was the revelation of a new God; the One who proves to be the true God, the only Lord and Father of us all. He was the revelation of a code of morals that makes the sages of old hang their heads in humility. He did not, like Seneca, teach virtue without being virtuous; nor was He content by being worse than the best, but better than the worst. All compro

mising, all comparative goodness, terminated at Nazareth. A sinful thought became a stain upon the soul, and the enmity that said "Thou fool" became a confessed ruin or sorrow in that heart. --SWING.

The Sermon on the Mount Was Needed.

Into what an empire did the Son of Man come! There was a vast state, which represented the world, to be reformed; there was a marvelous language to be the vehicle of the new truth; there was the decay of the Roman religious faith; there was a decadence of political and æsthetic forms of thought; there was a mental vitality remaining for new guidance; there was a condition of morals that demanded the Sermon on the Mount; there was a dark night setting in that appealed loudly for the mercy of Heaven. Two nations, the greatest that had