fly from our hand, and then hurry back with its spoil. One night it was so friendly, it took its cherished food without retreating ; and now we could have taken that sickly bird within our heart. We dreamed that all would yet be well-we yet would hear its joyous voice. But in the morning my poor lark was dead. We then saw that weakness had constrained it to come near even one it dreaded; that had health and vigour come again, it would have fled us as before. And many a time since then, these dead larks have said to me-"Man in health dreads God, and seeks to fly where sinful pleasure leads; if, when he comes to die, he be constrained, like us, to take assistance from the hand he fears (not loves), believe his nature still remains the same."

You tell us that grace is the ground of final separation; but I have no grace, what then shall I do? Let God Himself answer that question. "If any man lack, let him ask of God, that giveth to all liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him," James i. 5. "And the Holy Spirit, and the bride of Jesus Christ (true, loving hearts) say, Come; and let him that heareth say, Come; and let him that is athirst come; and whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely," Rev. xxii. 17. What shall you do? Be in the way. There are paths in which Jesus Christ often walks there are times when He delights to heal. When He was on earth, seldom did He go to the diseased; they came, or were brought to Him; seldom did He bless until the sufferer besought His aid. Those who staid away, or would not ask, He left alone, while none who came and sought were sent unblessed away. So is it still. The Holy Ghost does not communicate religious knowledge, though He acts upon it, and makes it effectual for salvation. So get that germ of life; it is within your reach. Give up that novel this moment-that idiotic, sentimental, folly-feeding periodical, that will never put a farthing in your pocket, nor a solid idea in your brain; that will unfit you for this life; that will make you only a dreamy, discontented, envious, indolent wretch, while you live, and spread horrors before your entrance into eternity. Read your Bible. Abandon that incessant hunting for pleasure from companions, from parties, from strolling, from ball-rooms, music saloons, and the million delusions society has created to enable it to forget God, its death, and future life. Take an hour each day alone with your heart, in presence of Him before whom you must stand, whether willing or not. Oh! be manly. Feel that the poor heart needs as much attention as the decaying body of dust-that it is shameful to decorate the outside, while the soul within is vile, unwashed, diseased, covered with filth and rags. Keep the Sabbath day. Keep company with those who will help you in your feeble efforts towards a better life, and especially-ask from God.

But what will you ask from God? Pardon for past sin, and strength to do better in the time to come? No; you must ask for more than these. Jesus Christ does not limit you. He leaves it

entirely to yourself. He says, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you," Matt. vii. 7. Ask, then, of God, at once the greatest blessing, for it includes every other. Ask to be made a son or daughter. When you receive the spirit of adoption, God will deny you nothing; and so long as you realize your sonship, you will deny God nothing-you will count the yoke of Jesus easy, and His burden very light. Unless you ask for joy in religion, you cannot grow or persevere. So long as you get more satisfaction from a newspaper, or interesting books, than from the Bible, the Bible will be unread. So long as the company of your friends is more agreeable to you than that of God, you will forget God. So long as wife, or child, or business, or any earthly attraction, draws stronger than the joy that binds you to Jesus Christ, Christ will be shut out. Christians must begin to recognize this truth, if the church is ever to revive, if the world is ever to be reformed. We must have more joy from God than the world can give, if we are ever to be faithful to God. Ask, then, at once to be made a son or daughter of God, and for a taste of that "joy unspeakable," (1 Pet. i. 8.) which made the primitive Christians face death in every terrible form-which would have made them go through a fire the whole length of the world, to reach the bosom of the God they loved. You say you cannot ask so much at once; that when you have served God for several years, you may have the courage thus to pray. Trust not in a delusion. Though you were to begin to-morrow to be the most devoted Christian on earth, and labour in His cause, with unflagging zeal, for a hundred years, you would be a greater sinner then than at this moment. Every day of these hundred years you would commit some sin, which, added to your present guilt, would swell the sum of your iniquities. "But I cannot ask so much, for my past life has been-oh! I would not like to tell it to any." Did you not notice the emphatic words we quoted from James i. 5-" upbraideth not?" How the heart could linger on these words for ever! Ask at once to be made a son. He says He will not upbraid you. Are you a backsliding Christian, for the first, second, tenth, or twentieth time?-you feel you can never lift up your head, your iniquities have so carried you away, against remonstrances of weeping grace, and frowns of conscience. Come back at once. Ask Him for joy; yes, for joy; He will not upbraid you. Are you a sinner, polluted with every possible sin? Though all the sins of the human race were on your single head, ask to be made a son; He will not upbraid you. Are you old and hoary in vile transgressions? Ask for the heart of a child; He will not upbraid you. Every man, woman, and child in the world-rich and poor, ignorant and learned-ask from the God that giveth liberally, and He will not upbraid you. Since He knows the natural fear and distrustfulness of the human heart, He has sworn by Himself-we have His oath-that He will not

upbraid us. We quote His amazing words-"As I live, saith the Lord God, none of his sins that he hath committed shall be mentioned unto him that turneth from his evil ways unto me," Ezek. xxxiii. 11, 16. Believer! in all your wanderings, let this thought bring you back-"He will not upbraid me.' And when in death you may for a moment despond, as memory takes a retrospect of the past, as in the weakness of that hour the accuser of the brethren tries to frighten the heart he cannot hurt, banish every fear, silence conscience, strike dumb the devil, triumph over earth and hell alike, by resting on this thought-"I have His oath, He will not upbraid me. Soon shall I meet Him on that other shore, but no frown awaits me-He will never upbraid me."

At the laymen's weekly meeting we must now and then touch on the final separation, but let it be gently done. Let no harsh expressions be employed when referring to our demoralized, irreligious people. If the speakers will look into their own heart, they will be tender to their fellow sinners, however vehement they may be against the sins which enthrall them. All are sinners— those with the double nature, as well as those with the single. "There is not a just man on earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not," Eccl. vii. 20. We have asked the members of the church and all men to pray for the spirit of adoption, and the realizing of their sonship, that a double blessing may be obtained; strength and joy to themselves, and compassion for their fellowmen. Christian experience abounds in paradoxes. One is, "When I have least sin of my own, when I am most holy, then have I greatest pity for my brother man sunk in sin." It is only those who feel they are safe in Christ, who have the true love to mankind. A stranded vessel is on the rocks, and within sight of land. Her deck is crowded with passengers, whose thoughts about individual safety prevent the outgoing of sympathy for each other. Who pity the unhappy passengers? Those who stand in safety on the shore. So, if we would have true and strong compassion for a world in danger, we must stand on Jesus Christ, and feel we are secure upon that rock. We must pray for more grace, for it alone is truly compassionate. The Christian who does not love his brother man, brother man of every class and clime, has little grace indeed, or rather he has none. In the Old Testament, and in the New one, there is an utterance sublime, Godlike sublime, in sympathy for man. Both are the voices of sweet, holy grace. Moses, who, in the olden times, possessed the greatest share of grace, when interceding with God for his rebellious brethren, thus poured out his love-"Yet now, if thou wilt not forgive their sin, blot me I pray Thee out of Thy book," Ex. xxxii. 32. And Paul, the unequalled-because in him grace wrought mightily-(Col. i. 29) has expressed his compassion for man in words before which we stand in wonder. "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ, for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen accord

ing to the flesh," Rom. ix. 3. The world will not believe that grace is full of tender pity. It yet shall have a proof. We would rather see it now than then, for only in this life can pity lift the fallen up. It is here that grace should show its compassion-and it here would be shown, if grace were in the hearts of the members of the church. At that final day, when each spirit shall be reunited to its body, then undecaying, incorruptible, immortal; when each redeemed soul shall be filled with grace, every eye shall be moist with tears, every eye from that of the compassionate Redeemer to the least of His saints, on beholding the separation between the evil and the good. Grace shall then weep for the lost, but weep never again; for when the lost depart to their own place, God shall wipe away all tears from His children's eyes, once and for ever.

It is a point so nearly akin to what we have been speaking of, that we cannot pass on without a reference to it-we mean "The eternity of punishment." It is a subject we would rather say nothing about, but when infidels in the church grasp it as a weapon for their purposes, we must use it for the benefit of man. Our belief on this point may be expressed in these two propositions:

1st. That the punishment of the lost consists principally, almost entirely, in being subject to moral evil. That the sufferings of the doomed arise but to a very small extent from the physical disadvantages of that place we call hell.

2nd. That the punishment will exist as long as moral evil exists.

1st. "That the misery of the wicked after death springs from being under the tyranny of moral evil." We naturally are fond of beauty. When a young man of twenty years we travelled the whole way on foot from Glasgow to Windermere, that we might drink in beauty a whole summer's day (the only time we could spare), by gazing on that charming lake. The year before, we had visited on foot the finest scenery of our own native land. Passing the Trosachs, we had stood entranced at the first glimpse of Loch Katrine-a lovely maiden blooming in her youth, her English rival being that same maiden with the riper charms of wife and mother. Delighting as we do in beautiful scenery, we have no liking for that dreary abode below. Still, under the profoundest conviction of our reason, and the deliberate choice of our heart, we affirm we would rather dwell for ever in hell with the soft, sweet sunshine of the love of God upon our heart, and the joy of loving Him in return, than without that love received or reciprocated, reside for ever in a palace on the shore of Windermere. So convinced are we that moral evil alone is man's enemy, that in the sight of that God who at this moment is gazing on my heart, and watching every word as I now write it down, the God before whom I shall stand in judgment with the rest of my race, to answer for

the deeds done in the body, I declare I would rather eternally be in the dreariest spot in hell, provided moral evil were out of my heart, and kept out of my sight, than be for ever in heaven with moral evil in my soul. Eternal God, bear witness that I write the truth. Disposer of my destiny, rather give me hell with overflowing grace within my soul, than heaven without Thy love to memy love to Thee.

Whether there be a lake of fire or not, is a point we would dispute with no one. We believe that light of some description will be required, and that very probably the source of that light is the sulphureous lake of fire. There was fire at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; the doomed plain still attests that fact. We do not believe that God will put men into the lake, but we are sure they will cast each other in. There is no conceivable cruelty that the hateful heart of man cannot inflict. What infernal atrocities has man not committed on his brother man. On that day when "the Lord cometh out of His place to punish the inhabitants of earth for their iniquity, when the earth shall disclose her blood, and no more cover her slain" (Is. xxvi. 21); when the bloody deeds of time shall glare on the sky of eternity, what eye can bear that sight? From the hour that Cain slew his brother, earth has been desolated by the demon soul of man. What does the eye behold on running down the page of history, but blood, blood, blood. What does the ear hear but the shouts of the infuriated combatants, the shrieks and groans of millions murdered in war. Was it hell that taught man to flay his brother alive, his poor brother taken captive in war, to spin out agony in every form, till kindly death dismissed the tortured victim to repose; to rip the womb from whence man draws his life, and slaughter the unborn before its parent died (2 Kings viii. 12); to dash the infant's head for sport against the stones, and with exulting laugh at tottering age, dye hoary locks with life's warm blood? Who that remembers the siege of Jerusalem under Titus; the Roman gladiatorial shows; the persecutions of the primitive Christians under Nero, Domitian, and Dioclesian; the Spanish Inquisition; the modern popish persecutions of the protestants; the Spaniards in Mexico; the streets of Paris during the first French Revolution; the American Indians' treatment of captives; the even more diabolical tortures inflicted in the East from time immemorial, can doubt that there have been men in the past who would throw their fellowmen into a lake of fire. The inquisitor, who could unmoved order and behold the long drawn agony of fire, or cord, or water drop, could chain his victim to the depths of hell's sulphureous lake. Has man improved? Has time, or philosophy, or increasing knowledge, or science, or even religious profession, made the deeds of the past impossible in the present? Is that a hut of human skulls I see? Is that a slave slow roasting at the stake these Southern ladies look upon? Is that a minister of Jesus Christ or