she followed Him to Calvary's fatal top, and clung around the cross on which He died-she left Him not even in His death, as she had followed Him through life, and even at His empty tomb she lingers ever lovingly and constant, still pining for the presence of her God. "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him." And her lips were the first to proclaim His resurrection to His Father and our Father, to His God and our God.

There may be some who are disposed to say this is not the Gospel. It, confessedly, does not point directly to the cross, but it may teach us to be tender-hearted, and to forbear towards, and love one another; and these few familiar sentences will have done at least more good than harm, and will not have disgraced this holy day on which they have been uttered, if they help to soften and warm one hard and cold heart to dispel one angry thought, to heal one quarrel, to draw closer the members of one family, or to make us think more kindly of each other. It was not a lesson too small for the great Apostle of the Gentiles to inculcate, "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you."

But there is another and a higher lesson to be derived from the subject we have treated. We have been confining our attention, chiefly to the inculcation of mere earthly graces, but the text carries with it the old but ever new story of the cross. The example of woman has been held up as an object of respect, as well as imitation. Man once followed that example, and through it, overwhelmed the world in sin. Let him follow it again, and bear that sin to the cross of Christ. He followed her to the tree of Eden-let him follow her also to the tree of Calvary -he tasted with her the poisonous juice of the fruit, let him taste also with her the balm of Gilead-he took of the leaves which laid bare the wound of sin, let him take, too, the leaves of the tree which are for the healing of the nations. Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near. Be not content till you have found the cross, and joined the groups who throng around it. Be careful for nothing so that you win Christ, and if you have anything to complain of, let vour only lamentation be, until you find deliverance, They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him."

66

Red, White, and Blue:

A LECTURE

BY THE REV. A. MURSELL,

IN THE

FREE TRADE HALL, JANUARY 10TH, 1858.

LEARNED divines, of the good old school, used to be very particular about dividing their sermons properly, so that "firstly, secondly, and thirdly" might fall into their appropriate places. A sermon without three divisions, and about thirty subdivisions under each of them, would be regarded as a flagrant outrage upon the human understanding, and a violation of all laws, human and divine; and the man who ventured to preach it would be branded as an apostate or a heretic without the smallest scruple. I can imagine the delight with which one of these venerablelooking old fellows, whose portraits form the frontispiece of magazines who are always represented as wearing no collar, and with a capacious double chin-would have seized upon such a subject as that which is to engage us this afternoon. Ready divided into three distinct heads-"firstly, my brethren, we shall consider the red; secondly, the white; and thirdly, the blue;" and then the old boy would have racked his brains for all the red things in the world, from the setting sun down to pickled cabbage; and all the white things, from the snow clad mountain to a clean night-shirt; and all the blue things, from the slumbering ocean to his own nose in frosty weather.

Now, as I cannot make any pretensions to being anything like a sage, and as there is not a particle of what is venerable in my composition, of course it would be gross presumption to attempt to imitate such an illustrious example as the one I have mentioned in the discussion of this title. Still I cannot refrain

K

from so far forgetting myself as to analyse these three colours, and to trace their individual development, separately, whenever it suits my purpose in this address to do so. All three may occasionally be seen in the human countenance, under different circumstances. For example-if a gentleman gets into a crowded omnibus, and crushes a lady's petticoat in sitting down, she will turn very red. If this self-same lady, in taking a ramble through the fields, finds herself chased by a raging bull, she will turn very white; and, if she takes a sail across the channel, in squally weather, to the Isle of Man, she will probably turn very blue. Put a person in a rage, and he grows red; frighten him out of his wits, and he grows white; ask him to subscribe to a charity, and he grows blue. The human nose, apart from any other feature, will exhibit all these various tints. After dinner, and port wine and brandy-and-water, it looks red; flatten it against a pane of glass, and it will become white; leave it exposed to the wind at Christmas, and it turns blue. Babies at six weeks old exemplify all these colours. When they are tucked up in the cradle at night they are red; when they have just subsided from a fit of crying they are white; and when they have choked themselves by imbibing sustenance too greedily they grow blue. A schoolboy may probably have observed these three hues all merging, rainbow-like, into one another on his own flesh, after being caned at school. I know I have often. Just where the end of the cane came swinging round the fleshy part of your arm, or any other equally unprotected part, there will be seen a beautiful streak of red; where the thick end came in contact with your ribs, there will be a delicate tinge of blue; and these will merge into the natural white of the skin, as though Sir Joshua Reynolds himself had mixed the colours. A cruel man's wife, or a drunkard's daughter, could doubtless exhibit a specimen of this interesting tri-colour. Upon her bosom, gashed by the knife, or torn by the ruffian's claws, the red stain mingles with the marble white, like the blood of a dead warrior gurgling on the snowy plain; and on her tearful and appealing brow there is the blue scar all livid and throbbing, where, in his pleasant playfulness, her lord and master has dashed his gentle fist, or thrown a quart pot which he was too tipsy to carry to his lips. Put a country lad, a poor seamstress, and a half-pay officer altogether, and there you have the red, white, and blue represented by human nature. flush of the pure breezes on the rustic's cheeks makes them as red as a new chimney pot; the close work-room and the late hours have bleached the poor girl's face white enough; and

The

high feeding, hard drinking, and doing nothing, have made the gallant officer as blue as an apoplectic lobster. These national tints might be represented by parcelling out the human race in threes. For example: you have only to imagine a soldier, a bridesmaid, and a policeman in company, and you have the red, white, and blue at once; or a beadle, a clergyman, and a charity boy, and you have them again. Or a judge, a lawyer, and au alderman, and there they are again. Only let fancy ring her changes with reference to these colours on the human race, and you will find the bells almost imperceptibly chiming out

"Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue!"

I need not take you into the fields to look for them clustering among the wild flowers-I need not bid you look along the tangled hedgerows for the red geranium, the white meadowsweet, or the blue forget-me-not. I need not ask you to stand with me by the margin of the clear stream, and see the red dogrose by its bank, the white water-lily on its surface, or the blue hare-bell peeping into its tide, and winking like a maiden's eye in its glancing current. I need not clamber with you up the mountain-side to pluck the red heather, to admire the white pimpernel and lotus, or to scent the hyacinth and violet. I need not give you a leg over Lord Bumkin's garden wall, to see the red carnation and the peony, and the japonica, the white cyringa, privet, and the lily, or the blue convolvolus, pansy, and heliotrope. I need not get you into a scrape by bidding you plunder his lordship's orchard, to find the red apple, the white melon, or the blue grape; we all know we shall find our chosen colours in the fruits and flowers, and that the juices of the one and the fragrance of the other tell of the red, white, and blue.

Neither is it needful to go into the lands where birds of every plumage, and of various song, show all these colours forth. We know that we shall find feathered representatives of each and all, and that from the Arabian palm tree, and from the banyan tree of India, from the gnarled branches of our own guardian oak, from the thick tracery of the Norwegian pine, and from every bower and wood, and vocal copse and forest, a thousand little warbling voices blend to sound the praises of the red, white, and blue.

Then, what do we want with the red, white, and blue on a Sunday afternoon? There can be nothing profitable and serious made out of that; and it is a very unbecoming and undignified thing for any one who professes to be a minister of the Gospel to talk about it. Be it so. Macbeth said, "throw physic to

the dogs," and so say I about dignity. The dogs who prate so much about it are quite welcome to keep it for me; and if they find it still conducive to their dignity to bark and snap at you and me, I am sure I have no objection, if you have not. It is a consolation to know that when they try to yelp down these humble efforts to bring a lesson of humanity and a Gospel message home to a hard heart, it is not the Master of the House who sets them on.

But what have humanity and the Gospel to do with the red white, and blue? They do not seem very intimately connected, I must confess-but let us see if we can't squeeze a little Gospel out of them—and, as we find it first in order, we will begin with the Red. I read somewhere in my Bible these words, spoken by the Lord himself through His prophet: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow-and though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." Now, here we have the red and white all ready to our hand. But I am sorry to say that our first duty is to try to convince men that they are sinners -to make them believe that their hearts are clothed in scarlet stains-and red like crimson through iniquity. I can imagine any man here this afternoon, on my telling him that his heart is foul and reeking with evil and with sin, turning round upon mo and saying, "It's a lie! I am no worse than my neighbours— and am better than thousands round about me." That may be, but that's not the question. I don't ask you whether you are better or worse than another man; are you not a sinner before God? say you yourself are not quite free against, if the truth were known. beam out of your own eye, my fine fellow, and don't lay all the sin at my door, while you have a festering heap of it piled up before your own." If any one is disposed to retort in language such as this upon me, I can only say, God knows that I have sin enough at my own door, and God forbid that I should come here to set myself up as any better than my neighbour-and I declare to you, and before my God, that I do not address a single word of warning or of caution to you, that I do not also address to myself. In natural desires and evil tendencies, I put myself upon a level with the most debased and wretched criminal in the darkest gaol in England—and I know if I have been kept from doing deeds of cruelty, and committing gross outrages on the laws of God and man, it is no credit to me- -but all owing to the restraining grace of God. I know I am a sinner like yourselves; and I speak to you as a fellow-sinner-as a dying man to dying

the question is, are you or "Well, and if I am, I darefrom all these sins you rail Look at home, and take the