THE PARACLETE IS THE COMFORTER.

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things, to discern between the evil and the good, and enable us to overcome even as He overcame. That blessed Spirit will take of the things of Christ and show them unto us. The mystic Paraclete will be to us both Advocate and Comforter. He will be our Advocate; for we know that the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. He, moreover, will be our Comforter. The dispensation of the Gospel is that of glad tidings,—a dispensation of happiness and comfort. "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people," is evermore the trumpet-cry addressed by the Spirit to the evangelists and teachers, who should ever seek to be sons of consolation. So, too, the Saviour has taken to Himself the words of the prophet:* "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." The same prophet, in words of unearthly beauty and pathos, declares : "The Lord shall comfort Zion: He will comfort all her waste places; and

* Isaiah lxi. 1-3.

214 "TAKE NOT THY HOLY SPIRIT FROM US."

He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.' These words receive their glorious accomplishment in the dispensation of the Eternal Spirit, the Holy Ghost the Comforter. When He sends abroad the dew of His grace, in the noblest sense the "desert blossoms like the rose," the moral wilderness becomes an Eden, and the desert of life the garden of the Lord.

O Father, save Thy children-we are Thy children yet-from the doom of those who will withstand the Spirit's gracious influence, who will despise Thy infinite tenderness, love, and pity, and will harden their hearts against Thee! O Spirit of the living God, that didst brood upon the face of the waters, and from the darkness and confusion didst evoke light and order, shine down on our confused and darkened minds, and bring us into the light and liberty of the sons of God! May we be led by Thee evermore, as the children of our heavenly Father! Lead Thou us into the Higher Life, into the Better Land, into the Vision of God!

* Isaiah li. 3.

CHAPTER III.

THE THOUGHTS OF THE HEART.

WE all speak of the outward and inward man, and are conscious of the vast difference between what we are and what we seem. A man rarely appears in the same light to different persons, and must indeed appear under very varying lights to himself on varying times and occasions. This is the result of the disguises, the complications, the inconsistencies, of character. Coil within coil, layer beneath layer, disguise within disguise; so it is, that beneath appearances the real nature lies concealed from the world and from ourselves. The thoughts of our heart are the material from which is woven the tangled texture of our lives. There is the still laboratory, whence the issues of life proceed; there the silent battle-field where the great contests of life are fought.

This mystic, hidden region lies perfectly open to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. There is something very awful, very wonderful, in this. God is one who takes cognisance of our thoughts and searches our hearts. Whatever may

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THE SINFULNESS OF THE HEART.

be the theories and refinements of mental science, there is one very wide and sweeping generalisation, which we know is true-that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Nothing which we know of God can be more great and awful than this, that He concerns Himself with our thoughts. Nothing can be a greater proof of the truth and holiness of our religion than that such should be the case. Very fitly do we breathe the prayer, on the threshold of the celebration of the great mystical rite of our faith, " Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of Thy Holy Spirit."

If we analyse our thoughts, if we arrest the processes of our mind for the purpose of examination, if we search below the surface for the springs of our daily life, we often gain a self-revelation of both a very awful and a very curious kind. We detect the weakness and the vanity against which the moralists and satirists have always plied their shafts, and which have always afforded abundant matter for either weeping or laughing philosophers. We often hear the human heart spoken of as something naturally good, and hear derided, as a figment of theologians, that the heart is naturally evil. Such will least of all be the feeling of those whose heart God has touched. They will have learned to recognise that deceit and wickedness of which He speaks. How often to them does the heart seem as a cage of wild and unclean creatures, polluting where they