tell you the part he is destined to play in the great crises of life. As I have said, they appear to be independent of the common hours. As if a man were lifted out from among the looms of time, above their rush and din, into the calm presence of the Eternal. It may be so. God has wondrous power to lift us out of ourselves, to set the naked spirit before His face; but the man has already settled it in his quiet years of wandering whether, like the Israel of the old generation, he shall sink down from that lofty height to grovel among the fleshpots, or whether that moment of vision shall lift his whole life nearer to heaven and to God.

And much of the work of these quiet hours will never appear on earth. It lies deep down in the very framework of the being; or is gathered as nourishment around its germ-the albumen of the seed of the everlasting future. Much discipline appears to be wasted even in God's elect pilgrims. Had we seen that host as they approached the term of their wanderings, I doubt if we should have estimated them as God estimated them-fit for a conquest and a kingdom. Much of the work was done in them, is done in us, where no eye sees it but God's. The deeper it lies, the less it often shows on the surface. The exterior habits of the life, and the customs of the dull, unheavenly world, may hide for awhile much of the fruit of

the long wilderness discipline from every eye but His. But let a great crisis come, let the trumpet sound for some great battle, let the giant hosts be marshalled to hold the entrance to the promised land, and then all earth, all heaven, shall see how much has been gained. The soul, braced by its obscure years of discipline, shakes off the tatters of its desert dress, and the tricks of its desert life, and stands erect, compact, with armour bright and trenchant sword, the resistless heir of the kingdom, the fell foe of the devil and his works. And then shall the way of God be justified by its issues—then shall the wisdom of God be magnified in His sons.

Would to God, brethren, that I could convey to you the earnestness of my conviction that these obscure moments are the parents of the ages; that when we least think it we are edifying our eternity. These are the tiny insects which, with constant toil, are building the structure of the palace of the soul. The finer touches, the higher expressions, may be impressed in the critical moments; but the great substance out of which the individual features grow, and of which they are the revelation, you are fabricating day by day in your daily marches on the common levels of life. I am persuaded that, were our senses fine enough, we should see how that ex

pression of feature which is the man's characteristic, runs through every atom of him; not otherwise is it with the expression of the higher life.

I have spoken of Israel here as a unity. I have but touched lightly on the fact that one generation perished, and another was trained in the wilderness for conquest. For the nation is a unity, and as a unity we are bound to treat it; it is the nation which is doctrinal to us. The nation was driven forth into the wilderness to its temptations; the nation was trained there for Canaan and rest. Each generation has those who fall and those who endure; and that means very largely, those who are reverent and those who are contemptuous of their daily lives. Despise the moments, young spirit, and the years will avenge it; and your carcase, when the wanderings are over, will lie and rot in the waste. Honour the moments, the years, the ages will reward it; and God will crown that faithfulness with the fadeless crown in the day of the manifestation of His sons.

Sermon xiv.

Pisgah: The Visions.

"And Moses went up from the plains of Moab into the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land."-Deut. xxxiv. 1.

GOD help us, if there is to be no open vision! no glimpses of what lies above and beyond the darkness and dulness of our world! The soul can live on little, but it must have its taste of the food of angels; it can hope against hope, but it must have its vision, however rarely, to refresh its sight. A path which never rises above the dreary level of its wilderness march, ends at last in madness or paralysis. It is the mountain summits which make "the pastures" bearable. If the common hours, the monotonous daily rounds, are building life's fabric as we have seen, these moments of vision add the head-stones of beauty and the touches of grace. The solid substance of the structure is the work of the busy, undistinguished moments; but the plan was drawn in some brief hour which concentrated the

thought and emotion of a lifetime, which other suns than that which quickens this world lighted, and other voices than those which make the hum of this world's business filled.

Neither the one

We belong to two worlds. nor the other completes our life. It is the action and reaction of their influences, the intermingling of their currents, which ministers to our vital progress. But if the one world claims us chiefly in quantity, and ninety-nine out of every hundred of our moments are given to undistinguished duty, the one in which we rise into the clear celestial atmosphere, and sweep the eagle eye of the spirit round the horizon of a wider world, is intense in proportion, and loads itself with some divine nectar wherewith to sweeten the bitterness of our common cup, or rather fills itself, like the face of Moses, with a glory which shines on in the glooms of the lower world. Who does not pity the man, with a pity from which it is hard to exclude a touch of scorn, who is content, if content be not too divine a name, to plod the millround with a constant brute-like regularity of motion; what men call a life of "action," if that is worthy of the name of action which is uncheered by vision, unlit by hope.

And whence is the hope to spring? If the daily trudge through the monotonous pastures be