is truth incarnate. This is the crowning demonstration: God manifest in the flesh, not manifest in a book, but manifest in the flesh, and His life is the light of men. Leaving out of account all miracles, ancient or modern, the Christ looms up before all the ages as the unanswerable demonstration of the truth of Christianity. And tho the world seeth Him no more, yet so long as there is a Christian living, and Christ lives in him, we do not need miracles such as were performed upon the bodies of men in the long ago. Christian character is the demonstration that the world needs. And if to-day there is less faith in Christianity than aforetime, it is for the lack of men that worthily represent Christ. It is not the new science, it is not the new thought, it is not the higher criticism, it is not the errors discoverable in the Bible to which we must attribute modern infidelity, but it is the lack of the beauty of holiness in those professing to be followers of Christ. And what we want is not more apologetics, but more lives that need not to be apologized for.

The wonder of wonders is the Christly life, and it is of this "world's wonder" that I wish to speak to-night.

Wonderful is that Christly life in its origin. All life is wonderful. All the philosophers of earth will never pluck the heart out of the mystery of life, the life of the tiniest flower that blooms with a dewdrop in its heart, the life of the tiniest insect that floats and flutters in the sunbeam. Men have never yet fathomed with plummet line of scientific research the depth of life in anything that God has made.

But the life of Christ in the human soul is lifferentiated from every other form of life by the width of the whole heaven. Geologists as they upturn the rocky strata of God's elder revelation come at length to life's beginning, and if they be not mad, they say, as they pause at that first footprint of life, "This is God's footprint." Natural life dates away back many thousands of years. When life began I know not; but this I do know, that since man appeared upon this planet no new life has shown itself. Many forms of life have become extinct, but not one new form has been created, and if one such should appear, savants from all lands would gather wonderingly about it, as did the Magi about the infant Savior. All natural life is perpetuated and propagated; there is no new creation in this world, and has not been since

Adam looked up to God out of the Eden in which God placed him.

But here is a wonderful thing: the Christly life in the human bosom is not transmitted life, not propagated life, not life that dates back to the beginning of the creation. It is Promethean fire, fresh from the altar of God in heaven. It is not the rehabilitation of a life that was existent before; not the elevation and readjustment of the old faculties. This is the new theology that is all abroad, that enfolded within every human bosom there are the potencies and possibilities of noblest Christian development. And yet if there be any truth in Scripture the life that is imparted in regeneration is an absolutely new thing under the sun.

Natural birth is the beginning of natural life; spiritual birth is the beginning of the new life, the life of God in the human soul. And the very same forms are used in describing this beginning that are employed in describing the beginning of this world. "God said, Let there be light," and lambent light flashed over all the blackness of that chaotic mass; and then beneath the wings of the brooding Spirit life emerged upon this planet. So God, who in that old creation commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ. And that same brooding Spirit imparts a new spirit life down in the depths of the human soul. And over this new creation the morning stars sing together, and the sons of God shout for joy.

Wonderful is this life in its source; and wonderful is it in the transformations that it works.

I grant that these transformations are not so marked in the case of a little child that sweetly looks up from its mother's knees where it is bowed, and cries: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." Sweet, beautiful, blessed, natural childhood, even before the brooding Spirit imparts the germ of immortal life! And yet there is a change, even tho it be not strongly marked. And so in the case of a moralist who has been fairly decent all his life, who has been held in leash by the restraints that have surrounded him in a Christian home. The outward transformation may be scarcely perceptible, but here is Saul of Tarsus who is "exceeding mad" against the saints of God, and who hounds them to the death. His very name is

a terror, and his coming is like that of a ravening beast. This Saul of Tarsus, full of bloodthirsty zeal, sets out from Jerusalem and heads for Damascus. But when he enters the gates of Damascus, the lion has been somehow transformed into a lamb, and he meekly inquires the way to the house of an old Christian disciple by the name of Ananias, and desires humbly to know of Ananias what he must do to be saved. What is the matter with this man? What change has come over this man? Here is a wonder of wonders that has been wrought! Something has happened to Saul of Tarsus.

Here is a tinker of Bedford, profane and drunken, so drunken and profane that mothers hide their children away from him, and his name is a hissing and a by-word even in that wickedest of towns. Something has happened to John Bunyan the tinker. He has taken no Keeley cure; he has been through no reformatory; he has not been lifted to a higher life by any of the culture of a University Social Settlement. But he has been convicted of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment to come, and has cried out, "What must I do to be saved?" And he has heard the voice of Jesus say: "Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is none else." And John Bunyan is converted. What nothing else could do the grace of God has done in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

Does this sound to you like a fairy tale, like one of the goody-goody stories recorded in the impossible Sunday-school books? Yet you and I have seen cases just like this, where a man as utterly untamable as the demoniac of Gadara or a woman as thoroughly sodden in sin as that poor fallen one that crept to the Savior's feet when He was reclining at supper, and washed His feet with her tears and wiped them with her dishevelled hair-you and I have known men like that, and women like that who had sunk, as it were, full forty fathoms deep, and yet had been dragged up as one may say, by the hair of their heads by the hand of God. And these abandoned men and women have been transformed into ministering angels that with shining faces walked the world and breathed their benedictions upon the sorrowing sons and daughters of men. Here are wonders unmistakable, wonders indisputable, that have been wrought by the transforming power of the grace of God.

I knew a man who was a butcher-a butcher

in every sense of the word, for he butchered the English language and he butchered all life's sweet proprieties, and threatened to butcher the members of his own family-a drunken debauchee, who was shunned by all that saw him coming. And yet that man I saw converted in a moment, and he rose to his feet and shook off his chains and shouted, "Thanks be to God that giveth me the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

And in view of such transformations people of the world are led to wonder what has done it. Their old boon companion with whom they have had so many a drunken bout, who has so often joined them in the whirl of the giddy dance, the man who a while ago drank in iniquity as the ox drinketh in water-they wonder what has come over him. He has quit his old resorts, he has abandoned his old friends, and they say to themselves: "Oh, he won't hold out at that pace! What fun can he find in those funereal prayer-meetings, in that dreary routine of pious performances? He will come back to us in a little while." And with infernal ingenuity they set themselves to lure him back, or to shame him back. And if after all he holds out faithfully, they are immeasurably astonished, and they say, "Either he is a hopeless fanatic, or we are frivolous fools and are imperiling our souls."

"Great is the work, my neighbors cried,
And owned the power divine;
Great is the work, my heart replied,
And be the glory Thine."

Such transformations are occurring all about us and within us. Ispeak to hundreds of men and women who have felt the power of this redeeming grace, and who are ready to say, "He has taken my feet from the horrible pit and the miry clay, and set them on a rock, and established my goings, and put a new song in my mouth." And when one that once delighted in the ways of sin turns a shining face upon his old companions, and assures them that they need not pity him for he has given up nothing that is worth the having, and that he finds a sweeter satisfaction in the new life of God in the soul than in all the paths he used to tread, they are constrained to confess that here is something which passes all comprehension.

This Christly life is a wonder in the manner of its sustenance. We know something of how this body is nourished, and a large part of our life is employed in endeavoring to

meet its needs. We know something of the soul's necessities, and ten thousand intellectual sources of supply are available, and never were there more than now. But the spirit life that comes from God would starve in the midst of all the bountifulness of mere materialities and even intellectualities, and accordingly God has let down out of heaven prepared provisions for this new life-the purest milk and the strongest meat-for its refreshment and development. But the wonder of the world is how any man can thrive on such unsavory diet, upon what seems to them as dry as the fleshless and marrowless bones of Ezekiel's Valley of Vision. And yet to the Christian man these thoughts of God are sweeter than honey or the honeycomb.

Yea, and beside the Book there are secret ducts that come down from the everlasting throne and bring supplies direct from heaven. For Jesus has said, "If any man drink of the water that I shall give him, it shall be in him a well of water, springing up into everlasting life." An artesian well is this. And the water of an artesian well comes from the everlasting hills, and men see not the channels by which it flows down thence to spring up out of the depths of the renewed soul.

The Christian life is a wonder also in the secret and supernatural motives that impel it. Yonder is a balloon sailing majestically in the upper air, but sailing in a course directly opposite to that in which the wind is blowing on the surface of the earth, and we wonder, until we come to understand that at that high altitude there is another current and in that the balloon is moving. Or to take another illustration here is a mighty iceberg that towers colossal, glittering in the sun and heading toward the south in the very heart of the Gulf Stream that is sweeping toward the north. And you wonder until you come to know that the iceberg has its base away down in the depths-that the Gulf Stream is only surface water, but this iceberg from the north is really propelled by the sweep of a mighty Arctic current that is moving resistlessly toward the south. Oh, there are heights and depths in the Christian life that the world can never understand! And hence the world's wonder.

Here is the servant of the prophet Elisha. His face is white with fear, and he is crying out: "Oh, master, oh, master, what shall we do? The Syrians, the Syrians, they compass us around!" And he is crouching and cring

ing because of the Syrians. But presently his face is all aglow, his eye is bright with hope, and he fairly claps his hands in glee. He is looking at something yonder, and I strain my eyes, but I see nothing. And I ask, "Is the man mad? what is the matter with him?" The simple fact is, his eyes have been opened, and he sees the angels of God, and the chariots of God, filling the mountains round about. His eyes have been opened, but mine eyes have not, and hence the man seems to me to be beside himself. Paul was counted as a lunatic by Festus: "Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad." Why seems the great apostle mad? He answers: We look not at the things that are seen and temporal, but at the things that are unseen and eternal.

Oh, my hearers, if our eyes could but be opened to see the splendors of the celestial world, to see the angels that compass us about, we should cease to wonder that the early Christians took joyfully the spoiling of their goods; that when confronted by persecution and pain and peril, they said: None of these things move us, neither count we our own lives dear unto ourselves. Oh, my hearers, could you but see what the Christian sees with the eye of faith, then you would cease to wonder at the way he lives.

The Christian life a wonder? It is a wonder from beginning to end. It is wonderful in the ease with which it may be attained. Most things that are good for anything have to be won by long, patient, heroic endeavor; but this, the most precious of all things, may be had in a moment; in the twinkling of an eye the man is saved forever. That is the wonder.

A wonder is it in the completeness of its salvation for sin. The man's sins may be as scarlet, and yet they shall be blotted as the cloud is blotted from heaven's blue sky.

Wonderful in the peace that passeth all understanding, the joy that floods every channel of life, a joy unspeakable and full of glory.

Wonderful in the strength it gives to do duty, and the courage it gives to meet danger. Wonderful in the sweetness of the solace it imparts in life's darkest, saddest hours.

I have seen a Christian mother by the deathbed of her darling lift her hands to heaven, while her face beamed like an angel's, and have heard her say: "The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name

of the Lord." And I have seen many a triumphant Christian exodus. I remember one, as dear a friend as I have ever known on earth. When she had lain for a while in a stupor, her eyes half closed, and we thought that they were closed in their last sleep, all at once she opened them wide and the pupils dilated, and she raised her hands that had been helpless for hours, and stretched them out toward heaven, and said, "Precious! precious! precious!" and she was gone. Oh, the wonder of it! and the glory of it!

And the wonders upon wonders that lie beyond, when on the wings of immortality we sweep through the gates of glory and see the wonders everlasting!

Oh, my hearers, let not the wonders of the Christian life provoke incredulity as to its reality. The whole earth is full of wonders, and heaven has wonders greater still. Lay hold by faith of the Word of God and you shall know the truth by blessed experiment, and shall vigorously testify that the half has never been told.

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.-Isa. xxxv. 10.

LIKE songs in the night of sadness, like the sunburst on a stormy, weltering sea, like a rainbow of hope across the bosom of the tempest, are these magnificent words of Israel's sublimest prophet. We have heard them as the text at the funerals of godly men and sainted women. We have read them on the mossgrown stones of old graveyards, raising their pean over death up to the hills of immortality. They enchain the imagination and linger long upon the ear: "The ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." Every blessed phrase seems crowded with heaven, and thrilling with the hallelujahs of the redeemed. As we read them the spirit is filled with joy and feels already an "exceeding weight of glory."

The groundwork of this splendid burst of triumph and music is the return of the Jews from the hated captivity of Babylon. There they had endured a long night of heathen slavery. It was of themselves in that captivity that they said: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept when we remembered Zion." In all those seventy years the heart of the exiles still turned toward Jerusalem, and their homesick souls uttered that touching cry: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." And now they were being brought back by a

course of Providences like that wheel within a wheel, animated by a living spirit, which Ezekiel saw in his vision by the river Chebar. Their departure was not as the forced and reluctant withdrawal of the Moors from Grenada. It was not like the self-expatriation of our Pilgrim Fathers, leaving Europe for an unknown Western world. It was a second exodus from a hated bondage and a heathen toil back to their native land. Forty-two thousand Israelites marched out from the brazen gates of Babylon for their Judean home. By the decree of Cyrus, they bore with them those vessels of Solomon's Temple which had been carried off by Nebuchadnezzar, and which had adorned the blasphemous banquets of Belshazzar. Before the long procession of the people marched their four thousand priests. In their front rode a band of horsemen, playing on flutes and tabrets, accompanied by their two hundred minstrels and one hundred and twenty-eight Temple singers. As they passed outside the city and struck that desert road which stretches from Babylon up northwest to the mountains of Syria and Palestine, five hundred miles away, their ardent, tropical Jewish nature found vent in such a burst of joyous song as has never been elsewhere heard in history, save perhaps in that other triumphal strain, led by Miriam, which they sang over the hosts of Pharaoh buried in the Red Sea. They sang that their deliverance was like a dream, too good to be true. They called upon the palmtrees of the desert to clap their hands, and the distant mountain forests to answer back with shouts. They said the very stones would gather themselves out of the highway into

heaps beside the sandy track, that the feet of Israel might speed swifter on their course. To their excited imaginations the vast rivers of Mesopotamia through which they marched, and the waves of the Indian Ocean far to the south, were shouting them onward from their foaming crests. The wilderness and the solitary place was glad. The desert blossomed as the rose. Waters were breaking out of the flinty rock. The wild Bedouin robbers were to be restrained, and as in the immortal dream of Bunyan twenty centuries later, the lions were to be chained beside the way, that they and their little ones might pass in safety.

And thus, "with songs and joy upon their heads," they marched up the long slope from the low plains of Babylon to the rocky fastnesses of northern Israel. The first familiar object that would greet their eyes would be the lofty snow-capped peak of Hermon, towering above the mountains of Lebanon. The Scriptures and contemporaneous history tell us that as the seventy prophetic years of the Captivity drew near their close, all the Jews who had been left behind in Palestine were expecting the return of the exiles. Sentinels stood day and night on the outposts of Israel to discern their earliest coming. Beacons stood piled and ready to blaze when they appeared in view on every mountain top from Syria to Jerusalem, as they did in modern times to carry tidings across the mountains of the Tyrol. On the outer walls of the Holy City stood devout Jews by day and night, crying to Jehovah to rest not until He had brought back the captivity of His people and made Jerusalem a praise. And now the head of the column, toiling up the slopes of Mesopotamia, is seen by the sentinels on Mount Hermon. The signal fires blaze out. salem, standing tiptoe on Olivet, catches the far-off gleam, and proclaims to the cities of Judah, each on its hill around her, that the captives are coming home. She puts off the sackcloth she has not ceased to wear during all the years of the Captivity, and puts on the garments of gladness. Who can depict her joy? Or who can tell the rapture of the exiles as they gain the summit of the slope, and, gazing southward, catch the first sight of the walls, the towers, the city of Jerusalem? Not the historic ten thousand retreating Greeks under Xenophon, at their first sight of the Grecian sea; not the Crusaders of the Middle Ages, at their first view of the Holy City; not the armies of Napoleon, at the first

Jeru

sight of Moscow and the Kremlin, could have been transported by such enthusiasm.

Such were the magnificent pictures which lay in the foreground of Isaiah's prophetic vision. But his eye takes a higher life, and has a deeper insight. Under all this glorious imagery there arises on his soul a view of the Universal Church of God coming to the heavenly Jerusalem; "the ransomed of the Lord," of every kindred and tribe and tongue and age, returning and coming to the eternal Zion above, "with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads." And now let us turn to these still more inspiring visions. The first picture which arises upon our view is a sight of human souls in captivity. They are enchained by nature in the Babylon of this world's evil. In the British Museum there is a medal bearing the representation of a female bound and sitting beneath the branches of a palm-tree. Underneath the device is the inscription, "Judah in Captivity." It is a symbol of unsaved humanity. The whole world in its sad estate since that tremendous catastrophe we name "The Fall" lies "in subjection to the evil one," a harder than an Egyptian or a Babylonian bondage. We are bound by the evil tendencies which descend from the sinful father to the third and fourth generation; by our own wicked habits; by "the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life." Humanity is a Samson, eyeless and strengthless, grinding in the mills of the Philistines; a Prometheus, lashed to the rocks of suffering by the chains of habit and torn by the vultures of base desire. We are made captives within the unscaled iron walls of our physical senses; by the imperfect knowledge of spiritual truth even by our wisest, and by the inadequate feeling of its power; by false Christs, crying, "Lo, this way!" and "Lo, that way!"; by false philosophies and fear and doubt and priestcraft and superstitionat Athens raising an altar to the Unknown God and deifying lust and power and gold -in Egypt worshiping an ox and bowing down to stocks and stones and creeping things -at Rome arming a man with infallibility, and giving the keys of heaven to a corrupt priesthood-at Paris decreeing death to be an eternal sleep, and, in the sacred name of reason, careering in mad orgies around a halfclad wanton. Nation dashing itself against nation in perpetual wars! We are bound by the universal servitude to sin, from which, with the whole creation, we groan to be de