and, with these delusive hopes, the voice was silenced which repeatedly urged, "Thou shalt die, and not live."

The love of life is deeply implanted in the hearts of most of us; and God wills that the affections which He has given should find objects for their attachment in the relations and friends whom He has bestowed upon us. Granting this, our aim ought to be to love God above all; not to suffer the love of any earthly object so to engross our minds and occupy our thoughts that the higher concerns of heaven and eternity are shut out. We must seek to enjoy the good things of this world in that measure in which it has pleased God to bestow them, but be ever ready and willing to resign those possessions of which we are only the stewards, not the owners. Time, health, influence, riches, in whatever proportion they are lent to us, all are talents for the use or abuse of which God will call us into judgment. And as the faithful servant is described as watching for the return of his master, and ready to give up the charge with which he was entrusted, so must we seek to be ready whenever God calls us to give up our health, our worldly prosperity, or our lives, to his keeping. True resignation and conformity to God's will does not reconcile itself to God's appointments with the consideration, "there is nothing in this world to live for," and, therefore, I may submit to be taken away; but cheerfully recognizes in every event the hand of God disposing them as seemeth best to Him. To be able to say, "It is the Lord, let him do what seemeth him good," is that disposition of heart which we may rest assured is best pleasing to God; and happy will those be who, by his grace, attain unto it.

Hopes of recovery from his lingering illness were entertained by William Greenwood to within three days of his death. Suddenly the conviction seemed to press upon him that death was soon to be his portion. During the many days he had been confined to his house, he read, with apparent pleasure, the religious books and tracts that were lent to him. The nature of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, of which he had never partaken, was often explained to him; and, of his own accord, he asked an explanation of those words of St. Paul which are

frequently so little understood, and hinder many from communicating.

But the cares of this world, and the longing for recovery which seemed to pervade every thought and action, also spread an influence upon him which deterred him from receiving the Lord's Supper at an earlier period of his illness. "By and by," he said, "I hope I shall be better, and then I can go to church." But in the Church Service, neglected, alas, in days of health, he was not privileged to join in his later days!

The visits of the minister he always hailed with delight, and apparently paid much attention to his exhortations.

On the third day before his death, after passing a restless night, he became fully sensible that his days were numbered, and he then begged that the clergyman should be sent for, and told of his desire to partake of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. He received the Holy Communion, for the first and last time, on that day, and from that time gradually declined.

It is comforting to remember an expression he once used when urged to reflect upon his latter end: "I do think," he said, "far more than any one thinks I do.” May God, in his mercy, have accepted the returning sinner, and granted to him that pardon which the longforgotten Saviour died to procure for him. M.

JESUS, AND THE RESURRECTION.

ACTS xvii. 18.

"Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection."

THE place in which St. Paul met with this encounter from the wise men of the world was Athens, the noblest city of ancient Greece,-the city of a state distinguished for the extent of its political influence, for the effective operations of its armies abroad, and for its successful cultivation of the arts and sciences at home. But on all this worldly glory there rested the thick dark shroud of heathen superstition and idol worship. And especially at that very period, when the light of divine truth was

breaking forth from the boundaries of the Jewish nation, to visit and bless the Gentiles, was the urgent need of such a visitation most conspicuous in Gentile Athens. And while St. Paul awaited the arrival of his friends, Silas and Timotheus, "his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry." (ver. 16.) Accordingly, the blessed Apostle, full of zeal, and with a true missionary affection, sets himself, in the strength of his God and Saviour, to attack this stronghold of the prince of darkness. And yet, with all this fervent zeal, the servant of the Lord deals prudently; he does not rudely and rashly thrust himself into their high assemblies, but proceeds to argue with the resident Jews in their synagogues, and with the devout persons among them, and in the market daily with them that met with him. (ver. 17.) The novelty, however, of the Apostle's statements soon brought around him a considerable audience both of strangers and of Athenian citizens; the curiosity of both these being so notorious, that they are declared to have "spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing." (ver. 21.) "Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection." And now, my dear readers, without following out the narrative in which I find my text, I proceed to consider the sense and substance of Gospel preaching. It is "Jesus, and the resurrection." Jesus, the Saviour; Christ the anointed one; Emmanuel, God with us; the equal Son of the Everlasting Father, sent down from above to recover from utter ruin a guilty world. And most assuredly He, who was ever the most important and favourite theme of Old Testament prophecy, should be the pre-eminent and prevailing topic of the New Testament ministry; yes, verily, and according to the illustrious example of inspired prophets and apostles "we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God."

(1 Cor. i. 23, 24.) But, more expressly, we preach the eternal existence and Godhead of Jesus. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God." (John i. 1, 2.) This grand truth of Christ's proper deity forms the broad basis of all that influence which the Gospel assumes to exert upon the condition and character of fallen man. If Jesus is not God, He cannot be a Saviour; and if not a Saviour, then is our faith vain, and we are yet in our sins. But, blessed be God, Jesus Christ is to our faith the rock of ages-and this is the record of inspiration, "we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life." (1 John v. 20.) Again, we preach the manhood of Jesus, his perfect manhood, free indeed from all presence of sin, but full of sorrows and acquainted with grief. We declare his willing poverty and his low estate; his life of reproach and persecution; the bitterness of his enemies; his fasting and temptation; his agony and bloody sweat; his Cross and Passion; his death and burial. This history of affliction is the history of Jesus, and this we preach; setting forth especially the gracious design of all this hard endurance, "He suffered, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God." And when we come to consider the death of Jesus, with all its introductory and attendant circumstances of deepest affliction; when we see Jesus, the Son of man, the Son of God, lifted up on the cross, it is there that the preacher takes his favourite stand, proclaiming in the very words of the Gospel, that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin. That most precious blood is the fountain of blessed immortality to man: this, the substantial offering of the body of Jesus, is that propitiation for sin, of which all the various sacrifices offered according to the law of Moses were but types and predictive assurances. And therefore when we would preach sound comfort to the spirits of men, wounded by sin, it must be by arguments derived at once from the healing virtue and quickening power of the blood and

The

death of the Lord Jesus. Well does the Church of England in her glorious Litany plead at a throne of grace "the precious death of Christ:" surely it is beyond all price, a ransom infinite! and it was paid, simply because no other price in heaven and earth was sufficient. guilt of sin, never to be done away by the utmost efforts of the guilty, requires for its removal a perfect, a divine obedience rendered in our human nature. God and man in one person must combine to execute the work of mercy, and by the violent, yet most innocent, and therefore atoning death of Jesus, dying in our stead, pardon is obtained, and eternal life secured for guilty and dying men. "We preach Jesus Christ, the crucified," and that is but a cold, unfeeling, dead ministry that touches but sparingly this mainspring of the Christian hope.

Say, Christians, you who through grace are living by the faith of the Son of God, what was it that gave good effect to those wholesome fears and rising hopes which, together, marked your experience while passing from death unto life? What is it that chiefly makes you abhor sin?-what, that has extinguished your love of worldly vanities?-what, that wins your strongest affection in the scheme of salvation? - what, that makes you most resigned, and even well content under the afflictions of this present life?-in a word, what has constrained you to become Christians? Is it not the persuasive argument and mighty power of the death of Christ,-that power which, by the operation of God the Spirit, works in you faith, repentance, love, holiness, yea, every good word and work?

But I now turn to the resurrection of Jesus, as the second grand topic of gospel preaching. This event of Jesus rising from the dead the third day, not only crowns the evidence of man's immortality, both of body and soul, but also sets a most glorious seal to the mission and ministry of Jesus as the Saviour of the world. In this high capacity our blessed Lord had undertaken fully to answer and to satisfy every demand which Divine justice could make upon the sinner. For man himself was found insolvent; his uttermost farthing was gone and the sentence was, that he should for ever