needed, freely-offered, all-sufficient, soul-saving mercy. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way. Why, when God is willing to forgive and forget, why, when he has sent his Son to seek you, and sends his Spirit to plead with you, why should you per ish? Reject salvation, and you must perish. For, though unbelievers and the wicked are after a fashion serving God, it is as the rod which a kind father reluctantly uses to chasten his son, and which, when it has answered its purpose, he breaks in two, and casts into the fire.

IV. Since Christ hath made all things for himself his people are emphatically called to consecrate themselves, and their all, to his glory.

To this duty you are called, by the obligations of both a natural and spiritual creation; by your descent from the first, and also from the second Adam. To live, to watch, to work, to suffer, and to sacrifice both for Him who, loving us, spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, and for Him also who, loving us, washed us from our sins in his own blood, is our plain bounden duty; let me rather say, for duty is a cold word, should be our daily and supreme delight. I do not say that it is plain sailing to heaven. I do not say but that the duty we owe to Christ may and shall expose us to what the world accounts and what flesh and blood feel, to be pain? Be it so! What pains Jesus endured, what sacrifices he submitted to for us!

Besides, how should it make us take suffering joyfully to think that it is those who are crucified with him on earth that shall be crowned with him in heaven. None else. They win in this game that lose. They live in this warfare that die. If we be dead with

him, we shall also live with him; if we suffer, we shall also reign with him. He that loseth his life shall find it.

Surely, if there be such things as true, tender, sacred, eternal obligations, they bind those who, to speak the plain truth, but for Christ had been suffering hell's intolerable torment, had never even hoped to set foot in heaven. What owest thou thy Lord? You cannot tell that. Therefore be your money millions or mites, be your talents ten or two, be your hearts young and green, or seared and withered, lay them at a Saviour's feet. Let his glory be your glorious aim! Raised far above the common objects and base pursuits of the world, this is an end worth living for. A life such as that, elevating and ennobling the humblest lot, shall command the regards, and fix on a man the gaze of angels. Lofty ends give dignity to the lowest offices. It is, for instance, an honest, but you would not call it an honorable occupation, to pull an oar; yet if that oar dips in a yeasty sea to impel the life-boat over mountain waves and through roaring breakers, he who has stripped for the venture, and, breaking away from weeping wife and praying mother and clinging children, has bravely thrown himself into the boat to pull for yonder wreck, and pluck his drowning brothers from the jaws of death, presents, as from time to time we catch a glimpse of him on the crest of the foaming billow, a spectacle of grandeur which would withdraw our eyes from the presence even of a queen, surrounded with all the blaze and glittering pomp of royalty.

Take another illustration, drawn from yet humbler life. Some years ago, on a winter morning, two children were found frozen to death. They were sisters. The elder child had the younger seated in her lap, closely folded within her lifeless arms. She had

stripped her own thinly-clad form to protect its feebler life, and, to warm the icy fingers, had tenderly placed its little hands in her own bosom; and pitying men and weeping women did stand and gaze on the two dead creatures, as, with glassy eyes and stiffened forms, they reclined upon the snow wreath-the days of their wandering and mourning ended, and heaven's own pure snow no purer than that true sister's love. They were orphans; houseless, homeless beggars. But not on that account, had I been there to gaze on that touching group, would I have shed one tear the less, or felt the less deeply, that it was a display of true love, and of human nature in its least fallen aspect, which deserved to be embalmed in poetry, and sculptured in costliest marble.

Yes; and however humble the Christian's walk, or mean his occupation, it matters not. He who lives for the glory of God, has an end in view which lends dignity to the man and to his life. Bring common iron into proper contact with the magnet, it will borrow the strange attractive virtue, and itself become magnetic. The merest crystal fragment, that has been flung out into the field and trampled on the ground, shines like a diamond when sunbeams stoop to kiss it. And who has not seen the dullest rain-cloud, when it turned its weeping face to the sun, change into glory, and, in the bow that spans it, present to the eyes of age and infancy, alike of the philosopher who studies, and of the simple joyous child who runs to catch it, the most brilliant and beautiful phenomenon in nature? Thus, from what they look at and come in contact with, common things acquire uncommon glory.

Live, then, “looking unto Jesus," live for nothing less and nothing lower than God's glory; and these

ends will lend grandeur to your life, and shed a holy, heavenly lustre on your station, however humble it be. Yes. A man of piety may be lodged in the rudest cottage, and his occupation may be only to sweep a street, yet let him so sweep a street, that, through the honest and diligent doing of his duty, God is glorified, and men are led to speak and think better of religion, and he forms a link between earth and heaven. He associates himself with holy angels. And, though at a humble distance, treads in the footsteps of that blessed Saviour, who, uniting divinity to humanity, as our Maker made all things for himself, and, as our brother man, whether he ate or drank or whatsoever he did, did all to the glory of God; and doing so, left us an example that we should follow his steps. Go and do likewise. Glorify God, and you shall enjoy him. Labor on earth, and you shall rest in heaven. Christ judges them to be the men of worth who are the men of work. Be thy life then devoted to his service. Now for the work, hereafter for the wages; earth for the cross, heaven for the crown. Go thy way, assured that there is not a prayer you offer, nor a word you speak, nor a foot you walk, nor a tear you shed, nor a hand you hold out to the perishing, nor a warning you give to the careless, nor a wretched child you pluck from the streets, nor a visit paid to the widow or fatherless, nor a loaf of bread you lay on a poor man's table, that there is nothing you do for the love of God and man, but is faithfully registered in the chronicles of the kingdom, and shall be publicly read that day when Jesus, calling you up perhaps from a post as nican as Mordecai's, shall crown your brows before an assembled world, saying, Thus it shall be done to the man whom the king delighteth to honor.

Christ in Providence.

By him all things consist. - COLOSSIANS i. 17.

God's work of providence is "his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing of all his creatures and all their actions." It has no Sabbath. No night suspends it, and from its labors God never rests. If, for the sake of illustration, I may compare small things with great, it is like the motion of the heart. Beating our march to the grave, since the day we began to live, the heart has never ceased to beat. Our limbs grow weary; not it. We sleep; it never sleeps. Needing no period of repose to recruit its strength, by night and day it throbs in every pulse; and, constantly supplying nourishment to the meanest as well as to the noblest organs of our frame, with measured, steady, untired stroke, it drives the blood along the bounding arteries, without any exercise of will on our part, and even when the consciousness of our own existence is lost in dreamless slumbers.

If philosophy is to be believed, our world is but an outlying corner of creation; bearing, perhaps, as small a proportion to the great universe, as a single grain bears to all the sands of the sea-shore, or one small quivering leaf to the foliage of a boundless forest. Yet, even within this earth's narrow limits, how vast the work of Providence! How soon is the mind lost in contemplating it! How great that Being whose hand