It is a beautiful rule which a pious servant of God has given us in the following words :

"If sickness, want, or dire mischance

Are down upon thee poured,
Fall on thy knees, and ask at once,
What means Thy message, Lord?

And if, my child, thou humbly take
His answer to thy heart,

Be sure that He will quickly make
Thy troubles all depart."

If the soul in such a case inquires uprightly, it will not tarry long for an answer. An answer is generally given, and comes in clear and intelligible terms. And what is its drift? In nine cases out of ten it is at some devil of pride which has crept into the heart that the rod of God has been aimed.

I can say with truth that many a sick-bed has been to me as a diet of worship, and many a sick-chamber as a holy temple. As I lay in silence and inquired of the Lord, What dost Thou say? I obtained an answer, and always such an one as showed that, however terrible His frowns, there was a loving heart concealed behind. Usually it was some vain imagination, some high thought, which the heavenly Husbandman had in His eye; and so I was enabled to hold a sacred colloquy with Him, and my soul was at peace. In truth a sickbed is generally the place where the blessing of the Christian faith becomes specially manifest. While in the heart of a child of the world sickness breeds obstinacy, pride, and discontent, and so eventually, when it has passed away, leaves no fruit, the contrary happens with the child of God. In his hours of languishing the mysteries of God's love and the unsearchable depths of His wisdom are properly disclosed. Such a silent sick-room sets a man once more loose from the world and its attachments, and from all courtship of human favour and human praise, and sends him back into life with a new and single eye.

Alas! I am conscious to myself how subtly and deceitfully

self-love can creep back into a heart which has been sanctified by faith; therefore it is that I fervently pray, "Keep me in safety, O Lord, and let not my last state be worse than my first. Behold, I myself implore of Thee to humble me. That is for Thee an easy task. Let me become like Nebuchadnezzar, an object of scorn and insult to all mankind, rather than fall into pride, and thereby lose Thee, who art my dearest portion. For hast Thou not declared that Thou dwellest with those only who are of a humble and a contrite heart?"

How stealthily proud self contrives its light and gifts to vaunt!
The Lord we thank and praise so long as He does what we want.

His ways, when they are straight and smooth, all just and right we call,
And only murmur and complain when hardships on us fall.

But, Lord, Thou canst abase the proud: Thou from his throne on high Didst thrust the King of Babel down among the brutes to lie.

Then did he own Thee God alone, and, humbled in the dust,

Confessed that all Thy works were truth, and all Thy ways were just.

32.

Of is Fulness have we all received.

What means this throbbing at my heart,

So blissful and so new?

As if there were some open part,

And heaven were breaking through.

'Tis even so; close not the door,

And a whole ocean in will pour.

JOHN, i. 16. "And of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace."

GAL. ii. 20. "I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me:

and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me."

EPH. ii. 8, 9. "By grace are ye saved through faith; and

B

that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast."

EFORE I had learned the nature of grace, I paused at this saying of the apostle, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me;" and I asked myself, What strange fancy of the Jewish Rabbi is this? Does he really imagine that the Messias, who has been exalted to heaven, is now living in him? Yet true it is, that He who ascended up on high, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father, did likewise continue to abide with His followers upon earth, and has become the life of their life. Nor is this merely, as when we say to a friend, I still have thee in my heart-meaning thereby, in my remembrance; for if it were so, how could the Saviour have told His disciples, "I go away, and come again unto you"? Or how could He have prayed "that they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us; that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me; and the glory which Thou gavest me I have given them, that they may be one, even as we are one"? Could He have said, "Where two or three are met together in my name, there am I in the midst of them," if the phrase "in my name" signified nothing more than in remembrance of me? No doubt, to remember the Lord is to stretch out a hand towards Him. But the Lord must fill it. And this is done when, along with the Father, He takes up His abode in His children; when in His glorified humanity He draws near to the souls which seek Him; and, finally, when in the celebration of the holy sacrament He makes them partake of and feed upon Him.

Moreover, neither does this oneness with the Lord consist in thinking in accordance, or, in other words, being of one mind, with Him. That was not the way in which He Himself was one with the Father; and yet He said, "That they may be one, even as We are one." No; the relation may rather be thus expressed :

1 1 John, xvii. 21, 22.

My Lord, He is the light, and I

The ray which forth He sends ;
How close the union, then, in which
Each with the other blends !

This, no doubt, is a matter which ought not to be lightly
uttered. We should speak of it with our face in the dust. It
is the deepest mystery of condescension. The apostle ex-
presses it in language which, had he not put it into our mouth,
none of us but must have trembled to repeat. He says,
"We
are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones; "1 and
these are words which penetrate to the very marrow. We feel
that there is in them a mystery-a thing which, to the world,
cannot but appear mere foolishness, just because it is so pro-
found a wisdom in the sight of God. Oh, how high must have
been the esteem of the Eternal for man, although so poor a
creature, seeing that He did not disdain to unite him in mar-
riage with His only-begotten Son! His purpose to do this He
announced so early as in the days of the prophets; for hear His
words by the mouth of Hosea: "I will betroth thee unto me
for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and
in judgment, and in loving-kindness, and in mercies."? If,
however, the Lord merge Himself so thoroughly into those who
are His, as that He becomes our flesh and blood, how can we
possibly present Him with anything of our own? All is, then,
merely effused out of us, just as it had previously been infused
from Him into us. According to the rhyme

The whole works of the Church by night and day,
The action of her living Head display.

He has exalted us to honour, and made us kings and priests unto God and His Father. 3 But as the Word declares, "The four-and-twenty elders* cast their crowns before the throne, and say, Lord, Thou art worthy to receive glory, honour, and

2 Hosea, ii. 19.

3 Rev. i. 6.

1 Eph. v. 30. 4 The Old Testament priests were divided into twenty-four classes, and the four-and-twenty elders here mentioned are their antitype, and represent the whole priestly generation of Christians.

power."1 Who can comprehend the full depth of this homage, that does not know the mystery of the Lord's marriage with the souls intrusted to His care? Among all who have ever borne His name in genuine faith, there is not one who would not feel it to be blessedness to cast his crown in the same way before the throne; and this he would do, not from a sense of duty, but prompted by the inward exigence of his soul. It would be his felicity; and to those who are members of His flesh and of His bones it cannot possibly be otherwise.

. Hence, also, the clearer the Christian's recognition of his union with the Lord, the more freely can he speak of what the Lord has enabled him to accomplish, be the things ever so great.

'Twas grace that did it all, he says,
And claims not for himself the praise.

He who still hesitates to speak of his own works, shows thereby that in what he does he thinks too much about himself; whereas the man who is firmly rooted in the article of grace, and who constantly bears about with him the consciousness of being one of the Lord's members, relates only the doings of the Lord when he is relating his own. Would a child have any sense of self-conceit when telling with a light heart all the fine things which he had purchased with the money given him by his father? There is a passage in which the Apostle Paul avers, "I would not dare to speak of any of those things, if Christ had not wrought them by me, to make the Gentiles obedient by word and deed." 2 He did not hesitate, as many scrupulous people do, to say great things of himself, and bluntly avers, "I laboured more abundantly than they all."s To this, however, he appends in plain terms, " Yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me." And no doubt upon every occasion of his boasting the same idea was present to his mind. The rule, however, is, that the soul does not usually think much of its own work, unless it happen that some one calls it 2 Rom. xv. 18-Luther's vers.

1 Rev. iv. 10, II.

31 Cor. xv. 10.