forming tide, and turns the prisoners of the law into the freemen of Christ, and the aliens and strangers that crouched and trembled around Sinai into the sons and heirs of God with Jesus Christ. Christ crucified was not to make God love me, but it was to enable God's love to reach me. It was not the creation in God of a love that was not, but the presentation of a channel for the outpouring of a love that eternally was. Thus we see that if there is any obstruction between God and us, it is not on God's part. There is no repressive decree driving me before it to everlasting ruin in spite of my volition. If we perish, we perish selfruined.

This great truth, Christ and him crucified is meant to be the religion of all the ends of the earth, and for all generations of mankind. Every religion that is purely human is fitted for man in certain conditions of civilization, and certain latitudes and longitudes of the globe. Judaism is utterly impracticable beyond the limits of Palestine. Hindooism would be impossible in England, and we know that Mahometanism belongs to a warm climate; but if we compare with all false religions scriptural Christianity, we shall find that whilst they have the element of place and clime, this is adapted to all climes, grows amid the Polar snows, ripens under equatorial suns, goes down, like the atmosphere, to the lowest, and rises, like the same atmosphere, to the highest, and embraces in its ample and beneficent folds the most civilized and savage of mankind. This religion is not the religion of externals, nor of circumstance. It penetrates every position in which man can be placed, finds its way to the innermost recesses of the soul, and receives hospitality in

the heart of human nature itself. It came from God, and to God it goes again, carrying its trophies with it. God gave Christ crucified, and by Christ crucified we can reach God. We need not read much history to know that the most gifted intellects, that the noblest minds, that men weighty with the profoundest erudition, have been the very first and humblest to pay homage to Christ crucified. Sir Isaac Newton, who stands amidst all that is greatest, unequalled in intellect, was a lowly worshipper of Jesus, humbly trusting in Christ crucified as the foundation of his hopes.

This is the only truth that will stand us in stead at that hour which must approach us all. But when that hour comes, let us not fear it; for what is death to a Christian? It is just the great Master saying, "Workman, your work is now done; come and reap the blessed wages of grace that are beyond." What is death to a believer? Exchange, not extinction. And he who has the best home that this world's sun can shine upon, if he holds fast Christ crucified, has a brighter, happier, and more enduring one, when time and things seen and temporal shall be no more.

But how do we become interested in this great truth? I answer, we have nothing to do but just to accept as fact, and to act upon the fact, that Christ has borne our curse, and that we are now for ever and irrevocably free.

Shall I try to persuade you, reader, to embrace this great truth? Is it possible that one needs to persuade you to believe such good news? I should not be called upon to persuade a person to accept £1000; how is it that one finds it difficult to persuade men to receive what they cannot live happy or die safely without?

This beautiful religion dawns in the shape of a nuptial benediction at Cana, and it comes down to make the grave ring with the accents of the resurrection and the life in England, when we part with the near and the dear. This religion comes to rejoice with them that do rejoice, as well as to weep with them that weep. Your sunny hours never will have their brightest sunshine without Christ, and your saddest ones will be sad indeed, in which you know not him, whom to know is present peace and everlasting joy.

Lastly, the result of this belief will be a holy life; for our anxiety will ever be, "How much owe I to my Lord?" And the answer will practically be,-I owe to love him with all my heart, and to serve him with all my strength; I long for that blessed day, when I shall see him as he is, and love him as I ought.

V.

"It is Finished."

THE voice that uttered these words said at the commencement of our world, "Let there be light, and there was light." By him were all things made, and without him was not anything made that was made. His first accents were the completion of the earth, his last accents on the cross were the completion of its redemption. In the first we have the evidence of Almighty power; in the last words that he uttered on the cross, we have the evidence of Almighty and redeeming grace! The hands that made the world were nailed to a cross, that that world might be redeemed. He who was its Maker is now its Redeemer.

When he uttered these words, he taught that the work assigned him by his Father was now finished. He could say now with an emphasis with which he had not said it before, "I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. I have filled up the outline sketched by thyself in all its fulness. There is nothing left to be endured that sins may be forgiven, nothing to be done that God may be glorified, and that the sinner may be justified, acquitted, and accepted in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment. What a blessed and a

glorious thought! Jesus endured all the agony, and left to us the legacy of all the joy; he finished the sacrifice, and bequeathed to us only the joyous commemoration of it; there is nothing to be done that can entitle to heaven that he has not done; there is nothing to be endured by us by way of expiation, that he has not endured! The grand distinguishing peculiarity of scriptural and evangelical religion is this, that the price of our salvation has been paid, the gates flung open, and the password of the universe offered to every man.

These words are those of one who was more than man. When you and I lie down upon the last bed, and our bodies shall go the way of all the earth, and our souls the way of all spirits, we shall be constrained to say, "We have done much that we ought not to have done, and we have left undone much that we ought to have done, and we have finished nothing perfectly that we ever undertook. Unfinished thoughts, purposes, aims, resolutions, lie like scattered wrecks everywhere within us and about us." But when Jesus died, he left nothing unfinished. His exclamation was the language of infinite and absolute truth, "It is finished." He never thought a thought that was not infinitely pure; he never did a deed that was not infinitely perfect; he never spoke a word that was not infinitely true; he never was anything but the Holy, Holy, Holy One, who inhabiteth the praises of eternity. Therefore he could say what we never can say, "I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do." He had no sin to ask forgiveness of; he had no omission to ask pardou for. He had finished all, exhausted all, and left nothing for us to do in the way of expiation, on the one hand, or in the way of obedience for justification on the