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breath of worldly lusts-and remember that the iceberg must be broken by the hammer of truth, and the snow-wreath melted by the torch of the eternal Spirit. Let him scrutinize the darkened chambers of his soul, and consider that those gloomy caverns must be lighted up with scintillations from the Rock of Ages, and effluence from the brightness of the holy place. Let him peer into the blackened sky which curtains all his view, and think that all those clouds must be dispelled before the Sun of Righteousness can rise-and that the misty, dim horizon which now is filmed by the vapours and mists of earth-must be spanned and painted with the rainbow-tints of heaven-let him feel that every proud unholy feeling must be strangledthat every haughty aspiration must be humbled that harshness must be turned to brotherhood, and coldness must be changed to love-let him feel that unbelief must die, and faith leap upward from the ashes of its urn-and then, perhaps, he will feel his insufficiency for these things, and cry "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

But, while he dwells upon the difficulties which oppose him, let him also dwell upon the aid which can support him. The promise of our blessed Lord to His disciples, was, "I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you," and when He went away, He promised that He would pray the Father, who should give us another Comforter, to abide with His children for ever. And He has kept His word; that Comforter has come, and stands now waiting for admission to our hearts, bearing in His hand the balm for all their sorrows, the cataplasm and panacea for all diseases-He has come to cheer the sorrowful, and to hold the drooping head of the weary and the heavy laden-He has come to help the fainting pilgrim to bear His Master's crossHe has come to point the sinner to the Lamb of God-He has come to bear the brunt of all the conflict for us, and to sheath our yielding faith in the panoply of celestial proof-He has come to strike the fetters from the devil's captives, and help them lift their ironed hands to Heaven. Come, then, O Spirit of the living God, and let the dew-drops of Thine influence distil upon my drooping faith-unveil thy lovely face, and woo me with the sweetest wizardry of all Thy charms-take up Thy

kingly sceptre, and subdue the surges of my soul-enthrone Thyself within the temple of my heart, and bid its darkness flee before the brightness of Thy rising-lift up Thy mystic spell, and let me feel upon my fevered brow, the spray of the cool fountain of the water of life-and thrilling through my raptured being, the pulses of the liberty wherewith Christ has made me free!

LAST WORDS.

DOVE always attach a strong interest to the last words of those whom we have loved and lost. We treasure up a parting smile or dying whisper as a precious legacy of love. In reverting to the friend whose memory fondly lingers in our thought, we generally associate last words and farewell scenes with our most loving recollections. And it is round the scene where the last pressure of the hand was felt, where the last gentle word was uttered, and the last gesture of affection signed farewell—before mortality was swallowed up of life—that our dearest sympathies entwine, and our fondest memories cluster. The echoes of a death-bed are more eloquent and abiding than the memoirs of a whole life, and vibrate like some plaintive music through the heart's most sensitive and yielding chords, when other sounds have long since faded in the distant past.

If, then, we can revert with so much fondness to the last words of earthly friends, with how much greater interest should we contemplate the dying utterances of our blessed Lord? There are no words which human lips have uttered which contain so great a weight of love as those which sounded from the cross. We never lost a friend one half so true as He who spoke the prayer, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

We sometimes hear survivors, in speaking of those whom they have lost, recal the incidents of their former intercourse together, narrate the hundred instances of endearment which have passed between them, educe from every little circumstance of close companionship a delicate memento, and a touching recollection, but at length declare that, though so intimate and so familiar with the friend whom death has beckoned from their side, they never knew how much they loved, until they lost their old associate. Some feeling similar to this naturally creeps over

the mind in reading and pondering the history of our blessed Redeemer. We feel the bonds of attraction tightening more and more at every step we take. We accompany Him throughout His thorny course, and, as each act reveals a stronger love for us, so do we cling closer to His side. Just as the signs of His deep sympathy for man become more marked and prominent, so does our confidence increase, and our affection deepen. We find ourselves hanging, as it were, more fondly on His arm by the grave of Lazarus than in the wilderness after His temptation; we love Him better, so to speak, when He fed the five thousand, and when He bade the lame rise up and walk, than even when He preached upon Mount Olivet to the astounded Jews. We love Him better still when He walks upon the water, and when He stills the tempest. We love Him yet more strongly as we watch Him praying in Gethsemane, with the bloody sweat clinging about His majestic brow. But it is not until His work is done that our affection is complete; and not until He bows His head, and cries, "it is finished," do we realise to the full His claim upon our love; not till the prayer, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," has parted from His dying lips, do we fully estimate our interest in His.

We have said our love for Christ increases the more we know Him. But have we not said too much? Ought we not to have rather said that, if our love for our earthly friends seems greater who have died from us, much more should our love for our great Redeemer increase, now that He has died For us. Is it not rather true of us, as it was of His faithless disciples of old, that we have accompanied Him pretty constantly to the threshold of His trials, but when danger threatened and death confronted, we have all forsaken Him and fled? Or, it may be, that worse than this is true of us, and that we have numbered ourselves amongst the cruel Jews who nailed the Lord of life and glory to the cross, who spit upon and buffeted Him, who mocked His agonies, and who put Him to an open shame. It may be true; it IS true that we have all sinned against Him, it is true that our sins have helped to rear that cross, to plant that crown of thorns, to drive those nails, and to thrust that rankling spear.

And it is therefore true that it is for us that this prayer

ascended up to Heaven, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

As soon as the Saviour uttered these words he entered upon a new character, and commenced the discharge of fresh functions. He had come to earth as a Redeemer, and to pay a price which should entitle Him to perpetuate the efficacy of His atonement. When that price had been paid, and that title purchased, He rose to heaven as an intercessor, an authorised, a licensed mediator between God and man, the standing counsel of the human race, his brief drawn in letters of His own blood, and endorsed by the pen of satiated justice. A commissioned advocate before the Eternal Majesty, His credentials sealed with the crimson of His dying love, stamped with the fiat of unerring truth, and accepted in the chancery of the Heaven of Heavens.

Man must have needed an intercessor ever after he first lapsed into sin, and Christ was, doubtless, pleading our cause long before He came into the world to die. He then pleaded with God to forbear towards mankind, on the strength of His purposed redemption, and became, on our account, a sort of debtor to Divine justice. But He had never avowedly assumed His mediatorial reign. He had never become before angels and men, the days-man, the great pleader of the human cause. Dumb symbols figured forth the payment of the great account which was to ransom man, and mysterious ceremonials mutely pointed to the grand transaction which was to lay the basis of His plea, and form the burden of His loving argument. The blood of bulls and of goats dimly pictured forth the blood which was to take away sin; the flame of the altar, and the incense of the sacrifice feebly foretold the nobler and the worthier immolation of the Son of God. The hooded priests performed the mystic rites, which spoke a weird and unknown tongue, and kneeled before the bright shekinah, little dreaming the reality to which it pointed. The intercession was whispered in heaven, just as the redemption was only shadowed upon earth. But when that redemption had been offered, when psalmists had strung their harps, and sung and died; when prophets had pronounced their oracles, and shown forth their visions; when the voice had died away which cried in the wilderness, "Prepare ye the way of the

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