Repent, repent, and flee from the wrath to come!"

Thus all the livelong day, the mighty prophet, than whom no greater had ever trod the soil of this our unredeemed world, warns of approaching doom that ancient, that most guilty people. And as, with rapid modulation of voice, theme, and gesture, he sways obedient hearts to changing tones of hope, of fear, of departed glory, and of penitent remorse, what feelings swell within his own exalted soul?

Elated with success,

does he aspire to earthly grandeur? And how far comprehends he what or what manner of times the Spirit of Christ which is in him doth signify?

Too severe have been the rigors of his youth, too long passion interdicted, too long his communion clear with nature and with God therein, to permit his imagination now to be dazzled with any unsubstantial splendor of earthly pageantry.

As the prophets, his predecessors of yore, beholding events in space, but not in time, with vivid coloring, but without perspective, yielded themselves to bursts of divine inspiration, uttering words whose proportionate bearing on the present and the future they could ill define, foreshadowing events whose magnitude and dis

tance they could never harmonize, so are the mind and utterance of this precursor of the nobler strain of God's eternal word.

And when at eventide his voice is hushed, and sunset beams come slanting through the verdant arches, the solemn throng depart with silent pace, dispersing through those tranquil glades.

"One among us," they exclaim, "whom yet we know not? Messiah here? Concealeddisguised? Ah, then, what mighty moment is impending! when the great trumpet shall be blown, the ensign lifted, those fiery splendors dazzle every eye, and many come from north and south, and east and west, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven!"

With such earnest, believing, and rejoicing hearts, do a few there address themselves with penitence to prepare to meet their king and Lord. Others, less spiritual, give way to cavils, questions, doubts, and endless surmise. Interminable debates arise; involved prognostication; till night spreads over all her peaceful sable, and beneath the dusky arcades thousands lie wrapped in slumber, unconscious of the presence of their king. And the placid moon and her attendant stars gleam on the now calm bay of the Jordan, unbroken by a ripple, save far in

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mid-channel, where the wild stream sends up a hoarse murmur.

And yet there among them lieth one, clad in no royal apparel, girt with no cimeter, crownless, scepterless, unattended, and unknown, wrapped like the meanest in his muffled robe, his head pillowed at the root of a lofty palmONE whom in very deed they know not-One who, but yesterday, stole noiselessly across the sandy terraces outside this alluvial Eden, entered, unwatched, this assembly of Israel, wandered from point to point, observing all, himself all unobserved, and who now lies here at our feet.

May we, then, dare to tread the hallowed ground on which his head reposes? May we dare to look upon that serene and lovely face, half upturned to the moon, which shines flickering through the leaves? He sleeps. That thousands round us, whose dim forms and vaguely-revealed outlines we trace every where-that these should sleep here on the ground, subdued with all the brute creation equally into the image of death, this is naught strange; but to dare to look down upon this one being, as we hear his deep and regular breathing, to think where we have seen him heretofore, what we knew of him even then, and then to say he

sleeps, methinks I feel a strange and solemn awe upon me, mingled with a lively joy.

Blessed being! lowly in thy slumber! What joy thus to be permitted to steal near to thy repose! And when, perhaps, thine unclouded eye we might not dare to meet, what happiness to be permitted thus to gaze upon thy face-calm as death-dimly revealed in the changing twilight, in all its majestic loveliness of serene repose!

Here, at last, we feel we have found the being who can never leave us, whom we can never leave. Sleeping or waking, henceforth, in his joy and in his sorrow, in sickness or health, in city or in wilderness, by shore or on the deep, in life or in death, we say in imagination, what shall separate us from the side of this man whom we have found, upon whose face we once have looked!

And oh, without imagination—in the simple truth of our souls, what in life or in death, in time or in eternity, shall separate us from the side of that being who first looked on us! Let us, then, watch by him there the livelong night of his repose, the unsuspecting multitude around, the stars calmly holding vigil above, the unsleeping Jordan ceaselessly hurrying by.

Yea, even let us likewise watch the livelong

night of this dream-life, the slumbering dead around, the restless Jordan of time murmuring on to oblivion, heaven's starry sentinels above us, Jesus by our side; and when the morning dawns, awaking, we will sing, Thou hast redeemed us by thy blood, and made us kings and priests to God, and we shall reign with thee'