rupted working of natural laws. But the hungry and the naked are among us, and the law has not supplied their need. What now? Prayer and the miracle! To those who go about the streets with thin lips murmuring "food" and "raiment," the Great Teacher speaks: "Is it food that ye need? Behold the fowls of the air; for they sow not, neither do they reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Is it raiment that ye need? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" Here is comfort unspeakable for those who have no meal in the barrel nor oil in the cruse. This is what faith sees in the Mount of Vision:

It may not be your way,
It may not be my way,
And yet in his own way
The Lord will provide.

II. And here is strength, also, for such as are passing through the deeper troubles of life, who are moved to cry, "All thy waves and thy billows are gone over me!"

The law in this case is that which the Stoics formulated and the materialistic evolutionists of

our time emphasize, namely, "What can't be cured must be endured." The question is between the operation of that law and the proverb, "Man's extremity is God's opportunity." Is it true that God is "a strength to the poor and to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall"?

It was this problem which Job answered when, sitting amid the ruins of his prosperity, forsaken by his friends and tortured with physical pain, he cried, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!"

This was the truth which God revealed to Daniel when, faithful in the teeth of danger, he said, "My God hath sent his angel and hath shut the lions' mouths that they have not hurt me," to which the chronicler adds, "No manner of hurt was found upon him, because he believed in his God."

And this was the vision which came to Paul after a life spent in perils oft by land and sea. A dim-eyed, pain-racked prisoner in chains, he found it possible to say, "I know him whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day!"

This truth of Providence is the last and crowning vision of faith. None but those who have climbed the mountain of sacrifice and built the altar of Jehovah-jireh can sing:

Pain's furnace heat within me quivers;
God's breath upon the fire doth blow;
And all the heart within me shivers
And trembles in the fiery glow;
And yet I whisper, "As God will,"

And in his fiercest fires hold still.

III. The climax of this truth is realized in times of spiritual distress. For, when all is said, the deepest longing of the average man is a spiritual longing, which expresses itself on this wise, "What shall I do to be saved?"

The law here is, "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap;" and, "The soul that sinneth it shall die." The question is between that law and the Gospel, which is the highest expression of special Providence; its terms being, "God can and does interpose to save a sinner from the shame, the bondage and the penalty of sin."

The key to the vision in Mount Moriah is in the words of Christ: "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad" (John 8:56). The Gospel was what Abraham saw in the Mount of God. A man of like passions with other men, a conscious sinner, having within a certain fearful looking-for of judgment, and desiring to know, above all things, how God can be just and yet the justifier of the ungodly, he found his answer in a foregleam of the atonement. He saw

Christ afar off!

In the outline of this narrative we behold a wonderful parallel to the story of the Cross.

As

Abraham set out in the early morning with Isaac his son to go unto the mount of sacrifice, so did Christ come in the fulness of time to become a whole burnt-offering for sin.

It is written that in the three days' journey from Beersheba to Mount Moriah "they went both of them together." So went the Father and the Son together all the way to Calvary. It was not three days but thirty weary years of journeying toward the altar of sacrifice; and all the while Jesus could say, "I am not alone; the Father is with me."

In the grief that burdened the heart of Abraham we discern a faint figure of the Father's pain in parting with his only-begotten Son. There are those who say, "God cannot suffer, because he hath neither body, parts nor passions." But who shall thus hang the plummet or lay the measuring line to the word "so" in the saying, "God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son"? The message that came to Abraham was like a merciless beating upon his heart-strings: "Take now thy son -thine only son-Isaac, the son of laughter-thy son whom thou lovest-and offer him!" The night while he pondered on that needs-be must be measured over against the eternity in which God contemplated the giving of his only Son. And there is a terrific suggestion of heroic grief in the fact that Abraham carried in one hand the knife and in the other the brazier. Inasmuch as there was no escape from the necessity laid upon him, it behooved him thus to face it.

And observe also the acquiescence of Isaac, who "bare the wood of the burnt offering." So Christ gave himself. During all the years of his ministry he was under the shadow of the Cross. His life's journey was over Via Dolorosa. He knew what awaited him; he "set his face steadfastly" toward it.

The agony of the hour when the final revelation was made to Isaac is passed over in silence. It was on the third day when Abraham said to his servants, "Tarry ye here while I and the lad go yonder." Then somewhere as they climbed the mountain path, Abraham said, (Oh, who shall tell the heart-breaking sorrow of it?) "My son, thou art the lamb for sacrifice! It must needs be!" So at the gateway of Gethsemane Jesus said to his disciples, “Tarry ye here, while I go yonder:" and passing into the deeper shadows of the Garden he faced the full, final, overwhelming announcement of the necessity that was put upon him. He was not alone in that supreme hour; the Father was with him. All that was human in him cried out against the cup of purple death that was pressed to his lips: "O my Father, if it be possible, let this pass from me!" Then came the great, final surrender, "Thy will be done!" Thus he was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.

But here the similitude breaks down. There is, indeed, no analogy to any of the great mysteries of faith: none for the Trinity; none for the Incarnation; none for the Atonement. The object-lesson