but which seems actually to be multiplied by troubles; troubles appear to arise that Christian peace may spring from them; if "a dry place" occur, it is that waters may gush forth, not in streamlets, but in rivers.

Such is the fulness which there is in Christ; oh that none of you would think of slaking the soul's thirst at any other source! "the water," saith the Redeemer, “that I shall give him, shall be in him a well of water, springing up into everlasting life." And if fierce trials invade us, if earthly comforts wither, as withered the prophet's gourd, and, like Jonah, we seem left without shelter from the intolerable heat, what have we to do but turn to the Redeemer, that great High Priest, who can be "touched with the feeling of our infirmities ?" "Shadow of a great rock in a weary land," we have but to come within thy circuit, and "the sun shall not smite us by day, neither the moon by night." He who always stands, if we may use the expression, close by Christ, secures for himself that "all things work together for his good;" though, if he ever leave the Redeemer, if ever he be tempted to wander from his side, then it is with him, just as it is with the man who quits his place beneath the rock; he meets the heat in its intenseness; there is nothing to cool the air, and he has only himself to blame if he sink under the force, the unmitigated force, of the tempest.

But a rock is stationary, and we are pilgrims; we must be on the advance through the desert; and how can we be always standing beneath the rock? Ah, my brethren, do you not remember how St. Paul describes Christ, when speaking of the wanderings of Israel in the wilderness? "They drank of that spiritual rock that followed them,

and that rock was Christ." The rock goes with us; it is always as a wall to us; if we ever lose its shadow, it is because we stray beyond appointed limits, into forbidden ground; not because, in our necessary progress, we are forced to leave behind what gave refreshment and shelter. The believer cannot be where duty allows of his being, and yet be where Christ is not ready to be found at his side. The sun has only to be fierce, and the rock rises where there had seemed only an interminable plain. The privileges of a believer are not those of exemption from trouble and freedom from danger; but they are those of support under all affliction, and deliverance from all peril. Would there were a greater sense amongst us of the preciousness of the Saviour! We do not prize Him, we do not love Him, the thousandth part we ought. These, our cold hearts, give Him cold returns for his marvellous benevolence. O for a more ardent devotedness! O for more of spiritual thirst, for more of the feeling of faintness as "strangers and pilgrims upon earth!" We drink too much at polluted fountains, forgetting that all our springs are in Christ. But the thirsty, the fainting-and such we ought to be, such we are by profession-will they not daily value more, yet daily mourn that they value so little, "a man," "the man," who makes Himself as "rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land?"

LECTURE VII.

Che Bundredfold Recompense.

MATT. xix. 29.

*And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life."

THESE are the words of our blessed Redeemer; and they were called forth by an assertion and a question of St. Peter, "Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?" The Apostles had, for the most part, been taken from amongst the poor and illiterate in a worldly point of view, they had made no very considerable sacrifice, in abandoning their boats and nets, and devoting themselves to the service of one who "had not where to lay his head." But it is well worth your observing that Christ, in no degree, depreciates the amount of the sacrifice which had been made in his cause: his answer merely bears on the remunerating power of God, on the certainty that they who, for the sake of religion, gave up any thing which they loved, should find themselves, perhaps in the present life, undoubtedly in the next, immeasurably recompensed. There was something

almost of a complaining tone in the interrogation of St. Peter: he seems to magnify what had been surrendered, as though he were almost in doubt whether a thorough equivalent would ever be received. Christ immediately speaks of "a hundredfold," as if to scatter, and put to shame, the suspicion that a man could ever be eventually a loser by what he lost for God.

We wish to fasten on this reply of our Lord, as furnishing guidance for us in our endeavours to act upon men, and persuade them to give heed to religion. It will not do, constituted as men are, to enlarge to them abstractedly on the beauty of holiness, and on the satisfaction derivable from a conscience at rest. They are not to be persuaded that virtue is in any such sense its own reward, that it were better for them to be self-denying than self-indulgent, even if there were nothing to be brought into account but the amount of actual enjoyment. They feel, that, in asking them to be religious, we ask them to renounce some good, and endure some evil; and they demand, with some show of justice, that we rigidly prove to them that they shall be gainers by doing as we urge. And hence the theology which is likely to prevail with them-and certainly this is the character of the Scriptural theologyis one which insists much on "the recompense of the reward;" and which, whilst it gives no quarter to the pleasures of sin, and insists unreservedly on the not setting the heart on perishable treasures, plies them with representations of a heavenly kingdom, and dims the present by unfolding the radiance of the future.

We are assured indeed that no terms of reprobation can be too strong for the folly of the man who is deterred

from religion by the sacrifices which it exacts. But our assurance is not drawn from an opinion that the sacrifices are in themselves inconsiderable; but simply from the certainty, that, even in this life, these mortifications are more than counterbalanced by the comforts of religion, and that, in the next, they will be a thousandfold recompensed. The yoke of Christ is easy, and his burden is light: but nevertheless there is a yoke, and there is a burden. And when we read of taking up the cross, and following Christ; of forsaking all that we may be his disciples; of cutting off the right hand, and plucking out the right eye, which may offend; it were not easy to deny, that "if in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." It must therefore be right that, in dealing with men, we labour to convince them how immeasurably it will be for their advantage, notwithstanding the confessed sacrifices which obedience must entail, to hearken to the call which summons them to forsake all for Christ. We shall endeavour, on the present occasion, to set before you this fact under various, but all practical, points of view. Our subject of discourse may therefore be understood without further preface; we should perhaps only hamper it, were we to propose any methodical arrangement. We are simply about to illustrate the mode of dealing adopted by our Lord, when Peter seemed disposed to make much of the sacrifices which he had made for religion-not the mode of depreciating, or undervaluing those sacrifices; but that of magnifying the remunerating power of God-"every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake,