shall touch the shores of that distant land, sing in the fulness of your spirit-Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, and good will to man. Be touched, like your high priest, with a feeling of their infirmities. Dwell in your thoughts, on their lost estate; see them as the great Shepherd did, wandering from the fold; until your heart bleeds and breaks with pity. This will animate and sustain you amid difficulties. You can bear them for the sake of the miserable, for yours will then be pity tender and sustaining, like that of the patient mother by the couch of her suffering child. This will make you gentle and forbearing and patient, even with a mother's tenderness, and keep you from crushing the bruised reed, or quenching the faintly-kindled wick. This will speak in heavenly eloquence from your very countenance, and melt the gates of brass in the hard heart of man. This will give you errands to the mercy-seat, and arguments before it. This will nerve you to your work, when a relaxing climate would tend to unnerve you. This will be treading in the footsteps of the Great Missionary.

Let me say again— That the example of Christ is the missionary's encouragement. You leave all for those you would save; so did he. You mean to identify yourself with them in every thing but sin, to bear their infirmities and share their sorrows; so did he. You are acting on the great principle, that to save from overflowing evil, the good of the universe must be diffused, not concentrated; so did he. You are going to men, and not waiting for them to come to you ; so did he. You are going to seek and to save that which is lost, according to the measure imparted to you of the Father; so did he. And you are not only laboring like Christ, but also for him and with him. He is seeking these very souls. He once did it in person. Now he does it by his Spirit and by his people. But his interest is no less now, than when his sacred feet were traversing the land which your feet shall traverse, to save the perishing sheep of Israel's fold. You are going like him to pray in Gethsemane; but he spares your ascent to Golgotha and the tree. Go, dear brother, moisten with your tears for man the soil which he moistened when he thought of the lost. Go, assured not only that you are seeking them for Christ, but that he is seeking them by you and with you. Urge that, much, and with much faith in your prayers; it will prevail for many a blessing.

Let us conclude by saying-That persuasion to believe in

.

Christ is the missionary's great work. To effect this, he must commend himself to the conscience. Through an awakened conscience, man learns his need of Christ. Go then, dear brother, speak to the sleeping conscience of man. Let not your attention be fixed upon his peculiarities, his specific qualities as an individual man or his more general features of national character, his theories of philosophy and religion; but meet him as a man, as a lost man; nay, as one that knows he is lost. If your attention is drawn only or chiefly to his corporeal miseries, his social degradation, his intellectual privations, you will incur the danger of diverting his and your attention from that which should arouse your profounder sympathies and all his slumbering energies of conscience. You must indeed attempt the amelioration of his intellectual and social state; but guard vigilantly against letting either your or his anxieties and efforts terminate there. When you have to meet him as the philosopher of another school, you may be discouraged at the sincerity and obstinacy, nay perhaps, plausibility with which he can confront you. But when you meet him in the winning strength of a deep sympathy; you the lost and recovered, he the lost and perishing man; then you are in your strongest attitude, he is in his most defenceless. The missionary must speak from deep experience to the consciousness of guilt often stifled, never annihilated in the impenitent bosom; to a conscience often stifled, often cheated, never tranquilized by his vain superstitions. Speak, my brother; now in thunder, now in the still, small voice. So God speaks in nature and in grace. Man will understand you, when you whisper to his conscience. Yet you may awaken resistance. The light is painful to them that love darkness. And false philosophy, and false religion and practical unbelief will all be resorted to, to shield the conscience. And yet your great work is to bring home on the soul of each man the conviction that he is lost. Trouble yourselves little and others still less with theories of human depravity. They may be important. They have their place. But whatever else they do, they do not awaken the conscience. And if I mistake not, more of them have lulled, than have awakened it. The facts of depravity and conscience are two of the ultimate facts, to be taken as theological axioms. God has not proved the existence of either, but simply asserted it. And so may we, both on his testimony and on men's very consciousness.

And yet if your brethren entertain themselves with theorymaking, or deem their theories important; do not therefore separate from them; only you yourself be given to the work of saving the lost. Perhaps one of the mightiest elements of ministerial power, is the deep conviction on the soul, of the lost condition of man. It must give fervor and frequency to prayer, and tend greatly to produce a conviction in others. Your hearer may be proud and powerful in his philosophy, he may be self-complacent in his creed and ceremonies. But whisper to his soul of seasons of shame and self-reproach and fear which forebodes impending doom, and he cannot deny, he cannot argue; for he feels that he is dealing with Truth and with God. In your public addresses, deal with the conscience and you will imitate the greatest preachers. Study the sermons of Elijah to Ahab, of Nathan to David, of Peter to the thousands at Jerusalem, of Paul to Felix. There you find no flattery of human nature, no general descriptions of virtue, but guilt and condemnation described as pertaining to them all. Feel that man is lost; that guilt and condemnation and spiritual poverty belong to every child of Adam. Proclaim that, on the house-top and in the closet. Man may not have thought of it, but when you suggest it, he sees that it is truth. Give him exalted views of human dignity and worth, not as it is, but as it was and may be. Solve the strange perplexity of every man's experience; tell him what you know of former conflicts and present conquests; of noble aspirations after heaven and sordid attachments to earth; of desires to please God and determinations to please self. Speak to his love of happiness; he will understand you. And as you solve the mystery to his astonished soul, as you describe the symptoms of his spiritual malady, as you point him to the balm of Gilead, and the great Physician, life of hope may begin to infuse itself into his soul. Again I say, your great employment is to bring the individual souls of men to Christ. Be not diverted from this; be not satisfied short of success in this. If you must do other things, con. sider them collateral and subordinate to this. Your glorious commission is, to seek and save the lost. Be filled, be fired with the spirit of that commission. May you, and may the church, and all of us who announce the gospel, be more and more filled with that glorious object the recovering to immortal spirits the lost image of God, and guiding the perishing to an almighty Saviour. May the Spirit be poured from

- a new

on high, until the whole church sees and feels that these facts are now of chief importance - man is lost, and the Son of God is seeking him; man is lost, and the Son of God is come to save him; man is lost, and the church is commissioned to go forth in the might of faith and prayer to his salvation. To save the lost! To-night we talk of it, as children talk of the affairs of empires; we see through a glass darkly; our conceptions are low and limited. To save the lost! Tell us, ye damned spirits, what it means. Tell us, Son of God, what it means; what stirred thy soul in godlike compassion to seek the lost? Tell us, ye ransomed and ye faithful spirits who never sinned-tell us, eternity -what is this mighty work of gospel missions? Tell us, O Father, tell thy churches; tell thy ministers; until every slumberer awake, every energy be aroused, and the way of life be pointed out to a perishing race!

7*

CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY.

BY

REV. WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, D. D.

And he said unto them, let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also: for therefore came I forth. - MARK 1: 38.

It is ever delightful to the Christian, that he can trace in the way, along which he journeys, the footsteps of his Saviour preceding him. The labors, the sorrows and the joys of his course all become hallowed, when it is seen that the Master has first partaken of them. The cup of affliction is less distasteful to the believer, because our Lord has himself drunk of its bitterness, and left on the brim a lingering fragrance. In prayer, he approaches to God with greater confidence, because he names as his intercessor, one who himself prayed while upon earth, with strong crying and tears, watched all night in supplication on the lone mountain side, and bowed to pray, beneath the olives of Gethsemane, with the bloody dews of anguish on his brow. And the preaching of the word derives its highest glory from the fact, that He who descended into the world to become its ransom, was himself a minister of that Gospel he commissioned others to preach. In the words before us we have Christ's own testimony, that the very purpose of his coming was to preach from town to town of his native land. Jesus Christ was, therefore, a Home Missionary. To this end, blessed Saviour, “camest thou forth." To thy servants, who have at this time for the like purpose gathered themselves together, wilt thou not then give thy presence and favor, Head of thy Church as thou art, Master of all her assemblies, and the only effectual teacher of all her pastors and evangelists?