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beauty. There (2) are the best and noblest spirits of all lands and times ;-patriarchs, prophets, kings, psalmists, apostles, martyrs, poets, teachers, and workers. There (3) are some of our nearest kindred and friends who once walked with us the path of life and now dwell within the veil"; these we hope, we long to greet again that we may renew the fellowship which death has interrupted. 2. The future is so near to us. Perhaps only a few weeks or even days divide us from "the silent land"; perhaps that "waiting shadow" stands but a few paces from us! 3. The future is so large, so great. The ancients, whom the light of revelation had not visited, thought that the future would be something less than the present, -dim, shadowy, uninviting. We, to whom Christ has spoken, believe it will be transcendently more: that it will either be shadow deepened into darkness itself, or light intensified to unimaginable glory.

II. UNDERSTAND THE PARABOLIC CHARACTER OF THE VISION. We do not suppose that the description, given at the end of the chapter, of the "holy city" with its gates, its pearls, its measurements, is intended to be taken literally: the true thought is that the city of God will be a place of exquisite beauty, of transcendent glory. By the new heavens and the new earth (of the first verse), we understand an entirely new environment, a complete change in the conditions of our life, including the removal of all that is painful and confining, and the bestowal of all that is fair, helpful, and inviting: new engagements, new studies, a new basis of social life, new economical arrangements, &c., &c. Similarly, we do not understand that there will be " no more sea" in the literal sense, that "old ocean' itself, with all its grandeur, will disappear for ever from our view and from our hearing; but that those conditions of which it is suggestive, and which would mar the heavenly life, will be found no more. Let us then

III. APPRECIATE ITS ACTUAL SIGNIFICANCE. There is one thing of which it certainly is not meant to be significant. We are not to gather that there will be no more mystery. Notwithstanding all that we now know about the sea, it remains unfathomed and unexplored. It is the type of the unknown. And this will be an abiding element in our life, in whatever part of God's great domain we may be living. We shall always be surrounded by the vast and the illimitable.

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There will always be more to investigate and to discover. The time will never come when we shall not stand, reverently and eagerly, before the wonderful, the unexplained; we shall always confront that which will impress us with the finitude of man and subdue us with the infinitude of God. The words of the text signify that-1. There will be no more unrest. The sea "cannot rest." It is always in motion if its billows do not plunge proudly, they do break quietly on the strand; if we do not hear the roar we do listen to the wash or the whisper of its waves-its tide is always coming in or going out. It is the picture of restlessness in the soul. The man who is pursuing the path of reckless crime or of shameful vice is himself pursued by the silent but swift footstep of penalty, and there is no rest for him. The man who is seeking satisfaction in lawful but unspiritual delights finds no inward rest; for "all the rivers" of earthly good may run into the sea of the spirit made for the Infinite God, but they cannot fill it. The Christian man, indeed, does find rest unto his soul; to him Jesus Christ speaks peace; in his heart is pure abiding joy. But he lives in a world where trouble dwells and even abounds. Into the most well-guarded home, into the best fortified heart there will come vexation, disappointment, perplexity, agitation. Into that blessed home which John saw in sacred vision trouble does not enter; thence all cares and burdens are evermore excluded. In the heavenly world "there is no more sea,"-no more spiritual unrest. 2. There will be no more storm and no more wreck. When the gale becomes a storm, when the fierce winds of heaven treat our skill with scorn and toss our largest vessels in the air, and when the ship strikes a rock and sinks into the sea, then we have an awful spectacle, a terrible incident that fills us with fear and sadness. But the worst storms are those which assail our human hearts, and the saddest wrecks are those of human character and human life. When the tempests of temptation beat upon the soul, and when a fair life that had been full of promise is wrecked and ruined, there is disaster indeed that may well "make the angels weep." In the peaceful shelter of that celestial haven these storms do not break, these wrecks are all unknown. The soul that has begun its heavenly course will still pursue it from age to age; it will be a course of constant progress, of unfailing peace and joy; no change of

elements will threaten it;

it will strike no rocks there is no more sea. 3. There will be no more separation. There are few words that are fuller of sad thought than this: to be separate from God, -that is sin; to be separated from one another, that is sorrow. John, in Patmos, must have felt the separating character of the sea; it divided him from his spiritual kindred, it kept him away from his sphere, from his holy and happy labours. Many things separate us;-distance, social distinctions, intellectual tastes, moral principles, discords. How welcome the country where alienation is an unknown experience, where love is never changed to cold indifference, where fellowship is unbroken, where there is "no more sea,"-no more separation!

1. Anticipate that blessed time by cherishing the spirit of Christ; by loving as He loved, with an affection that cannot be broken, an attachment that triumphs over everything that tends to divide or even to weaken it. 2. Be preparing for the new heaven and the new earth. These will be the surroundings of those who will be ready for them. He, and he only, will be at home there who is at home with Christ now, who walks with Him the path of life.

SEXAGESIMA SUNDAY.

HE THAT IS TRUE.

position; cruelty, or dishonesty, or indulgence, that refuses to recognize as Divine the wisdom that assails it, these things have such a counteracting influence that they prevail over the truth: they stifle it and slay it. Under their malign power, the judgment of men is altogether perverted; good is seen as evil, and evil is regarded as good. Thus it came to pass that even that Divine Lord who had the right to say that "He was the Truth' (John xiv. 6) was spoken of as a deceiver. If not altogether wrong, as these Pharisees were, may we not be allowing ourselves to be partially blinded and misled. Are we giving to the true teachers and faithful leaders of our time all the confidence and the honour they deserve? Are we rejecting some valuable lessons as false which we should be admitting to our minds and illustrating in our lives? If the light that is in us is darkness, if our judgment is perverted and gives wrong decisions-how great that darkness is! (Matt. vii. 23.)

II. THE UTTER FALSITY OF THE PHARISAIC CHARGE. No conceivable accusation could be more completely the reverse of the truth than this. It is indeed true that our Lord's very faithfulness to His mission obliged Him to disappoint many hearts: He who came to redeem the human race from sin and death was necessitated to take a wholly different course from that expected by those who were

Ir pains and even shocks us to think that men could speak of our Lord in such terms as these. Before our minds He stands as the absolutely True and Faithful One, and to attribute deliberate deception to Him is profanity itself. The fact that the Pharisees thus referred to Him when they addressed themselves to Pilate may well remind us of-

I. THE EXTENT TO WHICH SIN CAN DISTORT AND MISLEAD. How came these men to think and to feel thus about Jesus Christ? How could they watch His course, witness His beneficent works, listen to His fearless and faithful words, and arrive at the conclusion that He was false ? It was because sin "blinds the eyes" and distorts the judgments of men. Prejudice, that will not see things as they are, but as it is determined to see them; pride, that is resolved to acknowledge anything rather than that itself is in the wrong; self-interest, that unscrupulously rejects everything that might undermine or injure its own

NO. II.-VOL. I.-THE THINKER.

very profoundness perplexed many minds. Had Jesus Christ limited or levelled His utterances to the comprehension of all those who heard Him, He could not possibly have been the Great Teacher at whose feet all ages and races will gladly sit. But He was so far from deceiving any that He sacrificed much that men hold dear in order that He might be true. How true He was we see when we regard Him as- -1. One who foretold the future. He predicted His own sufferings and death, and He died upon the cross. He declared that after He had been killed He should rise again the third day; and on the third day, spite of the sealed stone and the Roman watch, He rose. He foretold the impending fall of the sacred city, and it fell. 2. One that taught Divine and eternal truth. The teacher is often tempted to convey that which he knows will be palatable, rather than that which is true and wholesome. But this Christ did not. He taught that God required of us much more than those who were reputed

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to be holy men were offering to Him; that He is not to be satisfied with our formal ceremonies or our mechanical worship; that He demands of us spiritual sacrifices; that He looks upon the heart and asks of us our filial affection and our cheerful service. Christ made known to men the indispensable conditions of acceptable service: that we must approach Him in a spirit of full self-surrender; that we must be prepared to take up our cross daily and follow Him; that we must be ready to act as if we even "hated" our nearest kindred, if that should be the price of loyalty to Himself. It is no deceiver who speaks to us in this strain; it is the True One Himself. 3. Our Divine Master. He makes great claims upon us. He asks of us our implicit trust, our constant and deep affection, our unwavering obedience, our unhesitating and patient submission, our loyalty to the last. He asks of us, indeed, nothing less than our very selves. He offers much to us in return: He offers (1) provision for all our necessities (Matt. vi. 33); (2) His lasting friendship; (3) His presence with and within us in the person of His Holy Spirit; (4) That which will much more than compensate us for anything which we sacrifice at His desire or in His cause (Mark x. 29, 30). Does He keep His word? Is He found to be a deceiver, or is He proved by long experience to be true? Ask those who have taken Him at His word and trusted themselves to Him most fully; ask His most devoted and self-sacrificing disciples. The Christian cottager, who in his humble home and with his simple fare has lived a happy life in the love and service of Jesus Christ; the incurable inmate of the hospital or the asylum, whose long affliction has been lightened by the felt presence and sympathy of the Divine Friend; the persecuted disciple, whose prison walls have been familiar with praise as well as prayer, or who has felt a keen delight in being wounded in the cause of his Divine Redeemer; the multitudes of Christian men and women whose uneventful lives have been made sacred, useful, happy, because they have been devoted to the service of a beloved Master, these will all testify that Jesus Christ is true, fulfilling His word of promise, meeting their deepest necessities, sustaining and satisfying their souls.

1. Are we diligently learning of the true Teacher? 2. Are we proving by our own happy experience the faithfulness of this gracious Master?

QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY.

IN GOD'S IMAGE.

In the image of God made He man.-GEN. ix. 6.

THE text and context are directed against the taking of human life, and in the latter clause of the sixth verse the value of human life is grounded upon the sacredness of human nature: "For in the image of God made He man." We have then to consider

I. THE NATURE AND THE CHARACTER OF GOD. To be made in God's image we must share-1. His spiritual nature. In Old Testament Scripture we read of God as "the God of the spirits of all flesh" (Num. xvi. 22); and we have that great, illuminating word of our Lord, "God is a Spirit" (John iv. 24). Most plainly, repeatedly, under heaviest penalties, the Jews were forbidden to make any visible representation of Deity; they were to banish utterly from their minds the false and demoralizing thought that God was, in any respect, material, tangible; they were to think of Him as the invisible, immaterial, Eternal One. We, inheriting the truth they were so carefully taught, and having learned of Christ, know well that God is a Spirit, that God is Mind, Intelligence, Will; not a mere presence, or power, or influence, but a Divine One, One who thinks, knows, absolutely comprehends, sees all things and all beings as they are; One who feels, who is affected by all that He sees; who feels either a Divine satisfaction, gladness, blessedness, or a Divine grief, sorrow, regret; One who feels for and with His children. 2. His perfect moral excellence. To be in God's image is to possess His character as well as His nature. Taught by both Testaments, and learning of that Holy One who came to live on earth the life which God loves in heaven, we know what this is: that (1) God hates all that is wrong, false, impure, unjust, unkind, all that injures, saddens, degrades; that God hates this with perfect holy hatred, that He is decisively against it, that to Him it is utterly and infinitely offensive: that (2) God loves all that is good, true, pure, just, and generous; that He is drawn towards it, is working for it, is delighted to see it in His children, is Himself illustrating it in all His relationships in every part of His universe.

II. OUR HUMAN PARTICIPATION. As God is, so man was when God made him; so man still is in the Divine purpose; so he one day

will be in fact and truth. 1. Man as he was first made, and was meant to be. Man, like God, is a spirit; he is not a finely adjusted mechanism, whose place and whose movements depend on the powers that act upon him and the circumstances that surround him. He is one that acts and determines for himself. Man is not flesh and blood he has these things; they are his, but they are not himself. Our bodies are our home for the time being; they are a wonderfully constructed and perfectly adjusted organ or instrument, but they are not ourselves. We are in the image of God; we are mind, intelligence, will, a thinking, perceiving,

loving, rejoicing spirit. Man, like God, has a constitution and capacity which fits him for hating with thorough abhorrence everything that is false and wrong, and for shrinking from and shunning it in his experience; for loving with deep and strong affection all that is good and pure, kind and true, and for pursuing and practising it in every sphere in which he moves. But we have to look at-2. Man as he became under sin. The question is being diligently and earnestly discussed,—Has man fallen from a high estate, or has he been toiling up from a much lower one; is he a fallen angel, or an intelligent, refined, educated animal? In this inquiry two things, among others, have to be taken into account. One is that human history does not tell of any community that has risen without the uplifting action of some power from without it; the other is that it is only too painfully apparent

that sin and vice degrade and deface. Under the dominion of sin, man fell so far and sank so low that the image of God became almost effaced; his nature embruted, his character debased. When we look at man at his worst, whether we regard him in selfish and vicious luxury or in cruel and naked barbarism, we may well ask what lineaments of the Divine are to be discovered there. 3. Man as Christ is restoring him. The truth which He taught, the life He lived, the death He died, the Gospel He charged His Church to preach,this is changing the face of the world, it is restoring to mankind the image of God. That Gospel has been sadly obscured and even painfully travestied, but it has been an uplifting and transforming power. Where it has been proclaimed in its purity and in its integrity, it has been found to be "the power of God unto salvation," and has given promise of an essentially new world. We are being "renewed in the spirit of our mind," are "putting on the new man which, after God, is created in righteousness" (Paul); we are becoming "partakers of the Divine nature" (Peter); we are becoming, in the words of our Lord, and in the sense in which He used them, children of our Father who is in heaven." Therefore-1. Let us see that our life is the sacred thing which it was intended to be, and which, in Christ, it may and will become. 2. Let us cherish the ambition to make the lives of others as sacred and as happy as relationship to Jesus Christ will make them. WILLIAM CLARKSON, B.A.

"the

THE GRACIOUS CALL.
ISA. lv. 1-13.

1. THE Invitation. The Old Testament and the New alike say, Come. "The Spirit and the Bride say, Come." Prophets, Apostles, and, above all, the Redeemer Himself invite a weary, heavy-laden, thirsting, hungering world to come to the Fountain of Life, to the Bread from heaven. Physical needs are put as figures for spiritual want.

2. The Rebuke. The reproof, delicately but forcefully expressed in the second verse, is against the folly of men who lavish money

verses is evidently to David and the covenant which Jehovah had established between Himself and the chosen nation which David had brought to its proud place as a victorious people.

The great gift of God to the world is His Son. He proclaimed himself as a Witness. He came out from God; so that all He said about God and the Divine purposes is the testimony of a true and faithful witness. He is also a Leader. He goes before His disciples in the path of obedience and self-sacrifice, and says, Come, follow Me. Christianity is foremost in all the best advances that civilization makes. He is a Commander. He spoke not as the Scribes in His earthly ministry, not with hesitation, nor for the sake of sect or school, but with authority-an authority which His own majestic character enforced.

4. The Call to Paganism. The desire of all nations is for just the religion which the Jewish-Christian revelation discloses. No kindred, people, or race will be satisfied until it has " run unto" the Saviour and acknowledged Him and His truth. The West, with its vigorous, aggressive forms of activity, must run toward, not away from, the Redeemer, if it would be safe in all its splendid movements of intelligence and of power.

5. "Seek, and ye shall find." As the loadstone flies to the magnet, so ought the human soul, with unresting eagerness, to press toward the life and love of God. If it has sinned, the fact of sin to be forgiven should only add wings to its returning flight as it comes penitently to Him who longs to forgive.

6. Contrast between God and Man. It is very natural for us to project our human notions upon the Divine mind, making our ways His ways, our thoughts His thoughts. The fact is that the Infinite is utterly beyond human power to conceive. We have a little knowledge of Him, for He has condescended to our low estate. There is wonderful repose for the human heart as it settles with profound conviction upon the comforting doctrine of Divine sovereignty.

type comes from above. It is the word of God that is the fructifying power. It will not fail to accomplish the glorious work of salvation. Men grow weary and disheartened; the Word lives on, works on in its own resistless way. Substitutes for the Word are often tried; but these, when the tests of human experience come upon them, are "like the chaff which the wind driveth away." The Word of God abideth for ever.

8. The Joyful Victory. The last two verses of the chapter have the cadence, the imagery, the antithetical force of a masterpiece in sacred poetry. There will be a mighty triumph by-and-bye. Joy and peace will reign instead of misery and war. Even the dumb hills will be vocal with the echoing gladness that will fill the air.

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O blessed prophecy! We will wait and work and hope and pray that the time may be hastened when "thorns" and "briers' shall be plucked out of human hearts for ever, and the earth, with all its fulness, shall be the Lord's. (William E. Huntington.) THE chosen people caught the spirit of Babylon. They were enamoured of its attractions, innoculated with its ambitions, and after a little were enchained by its commercial fetters. It was the money-getting spirit in every case which was dominating. The large idea of God which had filled their minds in Jerusalem had shrivelled to insignificant proportions, while the commercial spirit had expanded in disproportionate ratio.

I. The Proclamation. God approaches men along the avenues of their customary travel. The ringing proclamation in this fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah bears this same mark. It is a manifesto to those whose lives in one way or another were consumed with the spirit of barter. The proclamation is the reflection of their pursuit. "Come and trade with me," is really the invitation. "I want to sell something; do you be my customer. The wares which I offer are not displayed in the shop windows of the world, but in material, in finish, in value they are not to be compared even with all the things thou couldest desire. The stock, moreover, is so large that whoever he may be, from the low, degraded Jew, mixing the mortar for Babylonian buildings, up to the Jew driving his sharp bargains in the world of trade, even to the scholastic who transcribes the parchments which shall be the light of posterity-whoever he may be, every one may come and buy. You are now spend