which the Highland minister taught the Highland kitchenmaid, "Lord, show me myself,"-" Lord, show me Thyself," must be first offered and answered before we know the value of the water from the Smitten Rock. Then, no doctrine, however true,-no difficulty, however perplexing,-will keep the longing, thirsting, yearning soul from crying, "Give me this water." Can fancy picture a man, with a burning thirst upon him, putting away the cup of water from his lips till he had settled the question whether it was intended for him, or whether he had the strength to drink of it? Let him take and drink, and live. Then, and only then, will he fully know by the results that it was for him, and that the same Lord who put it to his lips gave the strength to partake of it.

Unconverted sinner, we want to have no controversy with you. We have never known an unsaved one argued into salvation. We would rather pray that God the Holy Ghost may deepen anxieties in your soul, and give you such views of Jesus that you shall be compelled to cast yourself at His feet, whatever may be the consequences. Then and there He will cause the well-spring in your soul to spring "up into everlasting life." Then you can know, as you never before could, that He loved you with "an everlasting love." Then you can join your testimony to that of thousands

"I heard the voice of Jesus say—

Behold I freely give

The living water; thirsty one,

Stoop down, and drink, and live.

I came to Jesus, and I drank

Of that life-giving stream;

My thirst was quenched, my soul revived
And now I live in Him."

TRANSFORMATION:

A SERMON.

BY

THE REV. JOHN KAY,

ARGYLE PLACE UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CONGREGATION,

EDINBURGH.

"The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon; they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass, with reeds and rushes."—ISAIAH xxxv. 1, 2, 7.

THE magnificent language of this prophecy, apart, even, from its spiritual significance, is calculated to arrest the attention, and to command the admiration of every reader. From the first sentence to the last, it breathes the spirit of truest and loftiest poetry. It is not one sentence here, and another there that has caught the sacred influence, but every sentence seems bathed in light and glory, till, at last, the triumphant shouts, and the glad songs, and the everlasting joy of Jehovah's ransomed ones, fittingly close the ever-swelling pæan, and all sorrow and all sighing flee away. The question, Who are these "ransomed ones of Jehovah ?" demands that we look with some degree of minuteness into the context, if we would discover the true meaning and application of the passage.

This thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, be it observed, goes along with the thirty-fourth, as forming one prediction, divided into two parts. In the last-mentioned, the judgments of God are denounced upon the men of Edom, and the terrible doom of that

guilty land is foretold. In the day of Judah's affliction, the descendents of Esau had rejoiced with an inhuman and unnatural joy over the daughter of Zion. When the men of Babylon might possibly have spared the city, whose inhabitants had been carried away into an apparently hopeless captivity, the Edomites had cried "Rase, rase it, even to the foundation." The account which is given by the prophet Obadiah of the malice shown by the hereditary foes of Israel, leaves no ground for wonder that the Almighty should threaten to pour out upon them the vials of His wrath. "The Lord hath a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Idumea." The transition from the thirty-fourth to the thirty-fifth chapter is, as if one passed out of the dark night, illuminated only by the fitful lightning-flash, into the clear light of a summer day, in which all nature seems to be in harmony with joy and with gladness. "The winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come." The joy rises out of the fact that God has delivered His Israel; that He has cast up for them a highway, and that they who were lately sitting in sadness by the streams of Babel, have returned to the Jerusalem which they "set above their chiefest joy."

Let any one, after reading the exegesis of the text, read once more the glowing words which stand at the head of this discourse, together with the other glorious things mentioned throughout the chapter, and say, if the mind feels satisfied by the statement, that the return of the Jews from the Captivity of Babylon is all that is brought before us by this magnificent prediction. Does it not seem as if the language were far in excess of such a meaning—as if it were too glowing and too highly wrought for an event which, however interesting to the Jewish nation, cannot be said to have the same interest for us? The light hovers for a while round the City of David, with its reconstructed temple and its re-instituted worship. It projects upon the page of history the figure of one with a stout heart who says "I am doing a great work, and I cannot come down." But it does more: leaving all these in the background, it travels on through the centuries, and makes luminous the plain of Bethlehem, and shines like a halo round the head of One who is the glory of His people Israel, and who utters the word and performs the deed which "makes all things new." The prophecy before us is one of those in which the so-called secondary meaning is, in truth, the primary here, if anywhere, "the first is last, and the last is

first." The spiritual takes precedence of the natural, and the fulfilment is to be looked for, not in a remnant of Israel returning to the land of their fathers, but in those grand gospel times whose glory forms the woof of that marvellous web of prophecy whose spirit is the testimony of Jesus. It is, in fact, none other than the "old, old story" of humanity, cursed and blasted by sin, but, in the exercise of a compassion that is fathomless, blessed, and saved, and dignified by the Cross of Calvary. A nobler theme for poet's lyre never existed; and the words that seemed at first so full of glory, are all too feeble to tell of the Transformation into which the angels of God desire to look.

I.—The sad condition of the localities on which the Gospel of Christ is intended to operate.

"A

Let us gather into one cluster all that is said of them. wilderness," "a solitary place," "parched ground," "thirsty land,"

a habitation of dragons." With the exception of the last-mentioned, all the desolation seems to turn upon the absence of one element-water. The wilderness and the solitary place are in this condition; for there is no refreshing stream, no spring, no well in the desert. The ground is parched and thirsty, because all water fails; and as far as the eye can reach, there is nothing but one continuous expanse of arid sand. Neither vegetable nor animal life can exist amidst the dreary wastes: all is desolation and barrenness. What simile could so vividly depict the moral barrenness and desolation, whether of the individual breast, or of the world at large, apart from the glorious Gospel of the blessed God? What a wilderness the heart is, that has not God dwelling in it! How solitary the soul is that has no Christ for its inmate and its King! You may surround it with all that might be supposed to give pleasure, and to add a charm to hnman lifewealth without stint, honours without number, influence without a challenge; but still the desolateness remains unchanged, and life itself becomes a burden, and the sigh of the weary heart will ever be "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The idea of "solitariness" may seem to disappear when this word "habitation" comes into view. But what an habitation it is! "An habitation of dragons." That, and that only, was wanting to complete the picture the foul serpent brood, with their huge encircling folds, prepared to crush the life out of every creature that may cross their dreaded path.

To a heart which has within it that "well of water springing

up into everlasting life," there is no sadder scene than the unutterable desolateness of these moral wastes presented by hearts that are unchanged. To know and to feel assured that it needs only the presence of Jesus to make these hearts inexpressibly happy, and to turn the wilderness into a smiling garden of the Lord; and yet to mark how the Prince of Life is kept standing without-what can be sadder than that? To know that these dragons, lurking in the walls, are the only inmates of what might be a splendid temple for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God; to have the certainty that, unless they be dispossessed, they will utterly devour the life of the soul in which they have effected a lodgment—is it not enough to make one take up the burden of the son of Hilkiah, and say, "O that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" The hot blast of the simoom sweeps over the heart, all solitary, all parched; and everything that has life droops, and withers, and dies, and the wilderness becomes a region of death, and the God of Life looks down upon a world of poor dead souls, where reigns the "abomination of desolation."

What is true of the individual, is equally true of the aspect presented by the world at large. Let one but think of the great unreclaimed wastes of heathendom, and mark how all the higher life for which man is fitted stagnates there. The sensual pleasures which engross the attention utterly sap all moral energy, and cruelty of the most bloodthirsty kind reigns supreme. Far as the eye can reach, the barrenness of spiritual death broods over the scene. Nature may, with prodigal hand, have lavished such store of external beauty upon these "desolate" parts of the earth, that the contrast between the luxuriant life of the lower orders of existence and that of man only becomes the more marked. The feathery palm-tree waves above the scene, but 'the tree of life" is not known: the sun shines with unclouded splendour, but "the Sun of Righteousness, with healing in His wings," has never risen there: the stars stud the midnight sky like jewels in dark ebony setting, but "the bright, the morning star," nowhere appears: the rivers flow past banks of living emerald, but "the river of the water of life" is wanting; and hence, where everything is beautiful, while every scene charms and ravishes the senses, man alone is vile.

It may perhaps be imagined that the one element which is wanting to turn all this desolation into smiling fertility is