stand identified with Him in this world, must be holy. He cannot lend the sanction of His presence to that which is unholy or impure. Those who enjoy the high privilege of being associated with God are solemnly responsible to keep themselves unspotted from the world, else He must take down the rod of discipline, and do His strange work in their midst. "Be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord."

"Thou canst not stand before thine enemies, until ye take away the accursed thing from among you. In the morning therefore ye shall be brought according to your tribes; and it shall be, that the tribe which the Lord taketh shall come according to the families thereof; and the family which the Lord shall take shall come by households; and the household which the Lord shall take shall come man by man."

This, surely, was coming to close quarters. The sinner might seek to persuade himself that discovery was impossible; he might cherish the fond hope of escaping amid the many thousands of Israel. Miserable delusion! He might be sure his sin would find him out. The self-same Presence that secured individual blessing, secured with equal fidelity the detection of the most secret individual sin. Escape was impossible. If Jehovah was in the midst of His people to lay Jericho in ruins at their feet, He was there also to lay bare, in its deepest roots, the sin of the congregation, and to bring forth the sinner from his hiding-place to bear the penalty of his wickedness.

How wondrous are God's ways! First, the twelve tribes are summoned, and the transgressor might deem himself far removed from detection. But one tribe is

nearer; the very household is actually singled out; and, last of all, "man by man!" Thus, out of six hundred thousand people, the all-searching, keenly penetrating eye of Jehovah reads the sinner through and through, and marks him off before the assembled thousands of Israel.

"And it shall be, that he that is taken with the accursed thing shall be burnt with fire, he and all that he hath; because he hath transgressed the covenant of the Lord, and because he hath wrought folly in Israel. So Joshua rose up early in the morning, and brought Israel by their tribes, and the tribe of Judah was taken. And he brought the family of Judah: and he took the family of the Zarhites: and he brought the family of the Zarhites man by man; and Zabdi was taken; and he brought his household man by man; and Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, was taken."

"Our God is a consuming fire." He cannot tolerate evil in the ways of His people. This accounts for the solemn scene before us. The natural mind may reason about all this-it may marvel why the taking of a little money and a garment from amid the spoils of a doomed city should involve such awful consequences, and entail such a severe punishment. But we have to remember that the natural mind is utterly incapable of understanding the ways of God. And not only so, but may we not ask the objector, How could God sanction evil in His people? How could He go on with it? What was to be done with it? If He was about to execute

judgment upon the seven nations of Canaan, could He possibly be indifferent to sin in His people? Most assuredly not. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore will I punish you for your iniquities." The very fact of His taking them into relationship with Himself was the ground of His dealing with them in holy discipline.

It is the very height of folly for men to reason about the severity of divine judgment, or the apparent lack of proportion between the sin and the punishment. All such reasoning is false and impious. What was it that brought in all the misery, the sorrow, the desolation, the sickness, pain, and death-all the untold horrors of the last six thousand years? What was the source of it all? Just the one little act- -as man would call it— of eating a bit of fruit! But this little act was that terrible thing called sin-sin against God! And what was needed to atone for this? How was it to be met? What stands over against it as the only adequate expression of the judgment of a holy God? What? The burning in the valley of Achor? Nay. The everlasting burnings of hell? Nay; something far deeper and more solemn still. What? The cross of the Son of God! The awful mystery of the death of Christ! That terrible cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Let men remember this, and cease to reason.

NONE BUT CHRIST.

O CHRIST! in Thee my soul hath found,
And found in Thee alone,

The peace, the joy, I sought so long-
The bliss till now unknown.

I sighed for rest and happiness,
I yearned for them not Thee;
But while I passed my Saviour by,
His love laid hold on me,

I tried the broken cisterns, Lord,
But ah! the waters failed!

E'en as I stooped to drink they'd fled,
And mocked me as I wailed.

The pleasures lost I sadly mourned,
But never wept for Thee,

Till grace the sightless eyes received
Thy loveliness to see.

Now, none but Christ can satisfy,
None other name for me!

There's love, and life, and lasting joy,
My Lord, in only Thee.

B. E.

HOW TO STUDY SCRIPTURE.

(AN EXTRACT FROM A LETTER.)

Ir is a very difficult thing for any one to attempt to prescribe for another the proper method of studying scripture. The infinite depths of holy scripture, like the exhaustless resources that are in God, and the moral glories of the Person of Christ, are only unfolded to faith and need. This makes it so very simple. It is not cleverness, or intellectual power, we need, but the artless simplicity of a little child. The One who indited the holy scriptures must open our understandings to receive their precious teaching. And He will do so, if only we wait on Him in real earnest

ness of heart.

But we must never lose sight of the weighty fact, that it is as we act on what we know that our knowledge shall increase. It will never do to sit down like a bookworm to read the Bible. We may store our intellect with biblical knowledge, we may have the doctrines of the Bible and the letter of scripture at our finger-ends, without one particle of unction or spiritual power. We must go to scripture as a thirsty man goes to a well; as a hungry man goes to a meal; as a mariner goes to a chart. We must go to it because we cannot do without it. We go, not merely to study, but to feed. The instincts of the divine nature lead us naturally to the word of God, as the new-born babe desires the milk by which he is to grow. It is by feeding on the word that the new man grows.

Hence we may see how very real and practical is this question of how to study scripture. It is intimately connected with our entire moral and spiritual condition, our daily walk, our actual habits and ways. God has given us His word to form our character, to govern our conduct, and shape our course; and therefore, if the word has not a formative influence, and a governing power over us, it is the height of folly to think of storing up a quantity of scriptural knowledge in the intellect. It can only puff us up, and deceive us. It is a most dangerous thing to traffic in unfelt truth; it superinduces a heartless indifference, levity of spirit, insensibility of conscience, perfectly appalling to people of serious piety. There is nothing that tends so to throw us completely into the hands of the enemy as a quantity of head knowledge of truth, without a tender conscience, a true heart, an upright mind. The