science, have mouldered to the dust, and no finger has traced an inscription to record them; great temples, cathedrals and churches have fallen, but this holy Levite still lives, and serves and worships where they once stood. Christianity still walks the world, and worships and loves, and builds other edifices more suitable to its greatness.

Again, let us look at its wonderful spread. This religion once spoke but one tongue; it now speaks in every tongue of the world, and every day is a continual Pentecost. Our holy faith crosses broad seas, climbs rugged mountains, and raises its fanes in every country. Its wing is not numbered amid polar snows, and it does not faint amid equatorial suns. It gains in speed and power, and the most accomplished of mankind are acknowledging respecting it, "Truly this is the finger of God."

And we predict from the past its progress for the future. Its works prove its Divinity; the prophecies in its bosom proclaim its own immortality. We see in every section of the Church proofs that this religion is the religion of God. The question was put to Jesus, "What works doest thou?" The same question may be put to Christianity, "What works doest thou?" I answer, it quickens the dead in trespasses and sins; it gives music to the ears of the deaf; it presents its magnificent panorama to the eyes that once were blind; it gives comfort to the mourner; conviction to the doubting; strength to the weak; and happiness, and the hope of an everlasting home, to all. This religion is the finger of God. For its progress, for its triumphs, for its universal spread, all obstructions are

removing, as if they heard the Baptist voice of Elijah, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord."

My dear reader, on whose side are we? In the coming crisis shall we be found, not thorns to be burned, but branches of the living Vine? Are our hearts renewed? Are we justified by a righteousness without us? Are we regenerated by the Holy Spirit? Is our religion a letter, a form, a pretence, a ceremony; or is it life, light, power, peace, joy in the Holy Ghost? Safe are ye whose refuge is the Lord. Let him who has not fled to that refuge remember that now is the accepted time. There is welcome in Jesus for all; the doors of the Refuge are open; come and live; and then neither life nor death shall be able to separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.

7

IV.

In Sunshine and Shadow.

STRANGE words are these, "Thou art a God that hidest thyself," in a Revelation. In order to explain them, it will be necessary to show that though there is a seeming, there is not a real contradiction. What is the Bible? It is called the Revelation, that is, a making known. God's Name is written in it. The Bible is, if we may so speak, his autograph; it is the only precious and purely divine relic that has floated down to our age. The Bible is the nearest and exactest portrait and likeness of God. All we can gather of God is there. If the Bible be a Revelation of God, Isaiah surely should have said, "Thou art a God that revealest thyself;" but instead, we read, "Thou art a God that hidest thyself." How then can God reveal and yet hide himself? How can he be light that we can see, and yet darkness that we cannot penetrate? How can his Book be a Revelation or an Apocalypse, and yet be a hiding or an Apocrypha? It is explained by seeing what God is.

God is infinite in all his attributes, character, and being; man by the very nature of his constitution is finite. The finite being cannot receive on the retina of his mind, if I may use the expression, all the magnificence and glory of an infinite Being. We all

know what an horizon is. It is a radius of some three or four miles, beyond which we cannot see, at the margin of which heaven and earth seem to meet. Man has a horizon. I may change my horizon-I may leave the point where I now stand-the margin of my present horizon may become the centre of the next; but I cannot extend the width of it, so long as things are constituted as they now are. Man's mind, too, has its horizon; there is a certain amount of light and space only that it can take in. God has no horizon. All space overflows with light and splendour before Him. All the secrets of deepest mines, all the nooks of the interior of the grandest cathedrals, all that is in the height or in the depth, is luminous, transparent, and comprehended by Him who is the circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere. I can easily understand that if I can only take into my mind a portion of the light, the immense mass beyond it must appear the darker by reason of the brightness of the portion that I now see. Because God reveals himself, therefore, God necessarily hides himself; for the greater the light of the portion that I do see, the darker and the blacker, by the contrast, must the space seem that stretches beyond it.

The greater the truths-like great mountains in sunlight-the longer and the darker are the shadows that they cast around them. Everybody who has pursued an investigation in science, literature, or politics, knows that he no sooner gets hold of one truth than he discovers a vast retinue of other truths looming from the dim and dark distance, so that the more he knows the more he sees remains to be known; and he who makes the greatest progress in the light that he has, is sure

to infer, far beyond it, a still greater amount of knowledge that yet remains to be ascertained. Sir Isaac Newton said, with all the humility of true genius, as well as of high Christianity, that he felt only like a man gathering pebbles washed by the spray on the seashore, whilst the great ocean rolled beyond unsounded, of whose depths and mysteries he knew nothing. In the experience of us all, every great truth that comes within the horizon that constitutes the limit of our sight, brings other truths with it, so that we have no sooner mastered one than another has to be explored, and that other brings more with it, till we can easily see that knowledge is infinite, and that man's progress, if he will ever learn, must be eternal. The brightest day ever lies between two nights; the brightest horizon is ever embosomed in the greatest darkness; and the more we know the more we see remains to be known: so that great Christians, like great intellects, must ever feel the most lowly and humble.

But we rejoice to know that our knowledge is progressive; that what we do not see of God's finger now, -what God does not allow to come within our view now, we shall see and know hereafter. I have not the least doubt that everlasting heaven will present a horizon ever advancing, and brighter objects ever filling it, and successive things and thoughts crowding in, ever new, instructive, and eloquent. I can conceive no happiness more intense, or more real, except the happiness of union and communion with God himself, than our ever learning, and yet never mastering all that is to be learned. God is the infinitely remote centre; everlasting happiness will be the eternal approximation to a centre that we ever near and never reach. There