While

is the one Purifier and Educator of men. life, large, free, royal life-life that can manifest what is most divine in God, after the image of Him who is His image-life is the key to the rest of heaven.

66

Sermon xvi.

The Everlasting Joy.

Everlasting joy shall be unto them.”—Isaiah lxi. 7.

IN my last discourse I considered the nature and conditions of the heavenly rest-the rest of the human spirit in a world which is capable of being the theatre of its developed life. A spirit rests only in the full sweep of its orbit around the Being who is its sun. In order to complete the subject which I have treated in these pages, I must speak now of the springs of its everlasting joy. The advent of the Lord opened these springs of everlasting joy for man. To share His life is to share His eternal joy. But here we taste that joy but sparingly. The Christian life is less a being than a becoming; we are growing up into Christ; we are learning to live in Him. The world and the flesh have their springs of pleasure, and tempt us to their Marahs. Who can say with the Psalmist, "All my springs are in Thee?" We find bitter waters where we looked for joys unspeakable; warned, we seek the true fountain, and some

foretaste of the everlasting joy of the blessed uplifts our hearts. But we pore with intense earnestness over the words which picture the joys of the future; we pant with passionate longing for the fruit of the tree and the draught of the river which were shown to the seer of the Apocalypse the vision of which, in all ages, has lit with hope man's wilderness life. The joy is there. "Everlasting joy unto them."

Let us consider what are its springs. I shall dwell on three-the three chief satisfactions-the purest springs of joy for the human spirit, intellect, and heart.

I. The inward harmony, the perfect order of the being, the concert of every faculty and every force in the fulfilment of the will of God. That is the peace of God-the perfect peace. More exquisite is it to the imagination of the racked and tormented spirit which is in arms "against a sea of troubles," and a host of rebellious powers, than is the haven to the mariner stormtossed on the dark rough ocean, or

"To those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef,"

the vision of peaceful and blessed home.

God, my Redeemer! There is but one redemption possible for man-restoration to the rule of his rightful King. The redeemed man is the governed man; the man who has re-found the

King who can evoke his loyal passions, and control and direct his manifold powers. This rule, the rule of his true King, has been lost to him through sin. This supreme, complete control of his being heaven will restore. The inward strife is the real

agony of the spirit. Let a man be at peace within, at one with himself and God, and worlds have no power to harm or torment him. He may slumber calmly as the Lord on that pillow, drenched with the spray of the storm-through the fiercest shocks of the wildest tempests; give him inward unity, he is at rest; God's rest, God's peace, reigns within. "Who is he that shall harm you if ye be the followers of the good One?" But who is at one with himself? Who that is in earnest about the Divine life does not utter and re-echo that most profound and pregnant of prayers, "Unite my heart to fear Thy name?" Now it is all at war. There are hostile camps within me, and deadly strifes. Flesh and spirit, mind and conscience, heart and reason, all jangled and at discord; each contending fiercely for the supreme rule of my spirit, and rending my very being in sunder by their mad war. They have broken loose from their true monarch, and have fallen under a tyrant, who exaggerates their discords and inflames their hate.

The tyrant is simply the wrong king; the king

who commands no reverence, kindles no loyalty, constrains no obedience, quickens no love; the king whom the revolted powers have accepted as lord in the tumult of passion, but who wields no authority, and makes no order in the distracted state. The wildest and most desperate endeavours have been made by the earnest in all ages to reduce the confusion to order, the discord to concord, or even the semblance of it. Simeon Stylites was at work on the problem up there upon his pillar; St. Bernard there, fainting with exhaustion and vigil in his cell: they said, as myriads of brave hearts have said, it is worth while to endure all this, which would drive the dullest and most patient of brutes to seek the exodus of suicide, ay, and far more than this, if by the maceration of the flesh the seeming even of unity may be realized within: it is worth while to torture the flesh as no demon of cruelty ever ventured to torture a fellow, if it can be tamed into submission; if the spirit may be restored to its rightful supremacy, even by the murder of that flesh which was given into its bosom to live with it as its bride.

But no force of will ever compacted this unity: nor can the maiming or crippling of our being in any province or organ, be the way into the peace of God. To find the king of the whole being