momentary pang. We see Christians in this world acquiesce in the will of God when that will is singularly painful. This is an earnest and approximation here to what will be hereafter: our conclusion in the New Jerusalem will be, "He hath done all things well."

What delight will it be to meet Adam and Eve, Noah and Abraham, the good and the great, the pure of heart, and the holy of purpose, and converse with them on scenes and transactions in which they played, all so momentous, and many so brilliant a part; when the chasms of history shall be filled up, and its perplexities unravelled, and its difficulties explained, and night rolled away from the long and then luminous chain that extends from the first man to his last descendant upon earth, and from our first conviction to our final joy!

Such a prospect should influence us in the formation of our friendships upon earth. We ought to seek the circle of our friends in the circle of Christians. We should found our friendship, not mainly on identity of taste or pursuit, but mainly on Christian character. Baxter says, "The expectation of loving my friends hereafter, principally kindles my love to them on earth. If I thought I should never know them, and consequently never love them, after this life is ended, I should number them with temporal things, and love them as such; but I now converse with pious friends, in a firm persuasion that I shall converse with them for ever. I take comfort in the loss of the dead or absent, believing I shall shortly meet them in heaven."

This expectation should also influence yet nearer and dearer relationships. "Be not ye unequally yoked with unbelievers," is an exhortation that extends its echoes far beyond the grave. To such your adieu at death is an eternal one; no present rank is an equivalent for such a calamity-no advancement of worldly interest can prove a compensation for the blasting of bright hopes, and the poisoning of mental peace, still less for the agony of endless separation.

This prospect should make Christians labour for the conversion of their immediate relatives, "warning every man, and teaching every man, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus." Next to the salvation of our own souls is the duty of

saving the souls of our relatives; and if we are the saints of God, we shall feel this duty to be pleasure and privilege together.

How fitted is this prospect to help us to live in concord, unity, and peace with all that love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and truth! The expectation of meeting in the future those we disputed with on earth, should lead us to feel less bitterness and alienation of spirit, and to speak in less acrimonious and unbrotherly words; to attach less weight to minor differences, and to give weightier expression to our common love, and life, and truth. It is "the night" that blinds our eyes to the excellences of a brother, distorts his faults, and dims our perception of our own; and when that night shall be rolled away, we shall see with amazement, if not with regret, how hollow and insignificant were the questions about which we spoke so often unadvisedly with our lips, and how weighty were the truths and bonds which we valued highly in our hearts, but sinfully failed to express and glory in, in our intercourse with each other!

It becomes us, in such prospects, to wean our affections more and more from things now seen. We love the town, the village, the city, in which dear friends dwell, for the sake of the inhabitants. These are day after day being separated the one from the other, and all from us: they precede us to take possession of the "rest," and to preoccupy the New Jerusalem. Hence cach spot loses daily its charm, each early home every year its attractions: the present becomes more blank, the future grows in our estimate, as it is peopled with the objects of our love. Let our heart and our treasure be in heaven. "Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; and every man that hath this hope in him, purifieth himself even as He is pure."

"A few short years of evil past,

We reach the happy shore,

Where death-divided friends at last

Shall meet to part no more."

238

LECTURE XVIII.

FAITHFUL AND TRUE SAYINGS.

"And he said unto me, These sayings are faithful and true: and the Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to show unto his servants the things which must shortly be done."-Revelation xxii. 6.

THIS book closes, as it began, with solemn attestations to the truth and grandeur of the theme with which it is replete. The first ten verses embody the attestation and evidence of its inspiration; from the tenth to the sixteenth verse, we are presented with encouragement to study and to understand it; and in the remainder of the chapter, the Apocalypse, and, perhaps, the whole New Testament, is guarded from substraction, addition, or mutilation. In this verse, it is plainly the same angel that speaks, who made the revelations that precede. If it should be asked why angels are employed in so great and responsible an office, we answer, God works by means and ministers in this dispensation. The laws of creation-winds, and rains, and sunbeams as well as the angels whom he commissions from his throne, are the agents of his purposes, as well as ministering spirits to the heirs of salvation. An angel was employed to smite the hosts of Sennacherib; and another was commissioned to breathe in the face of the first-born of Pharaoh; and on this occasion, another angel is commissioned to talk with John and show him the things which must shortly come to pass. In any case, God can work with, or without, or above, or against means. But he is not less glorious in power when he is pleased to work by means. The testimony which is here enunciated-viz. "These sayings are faithful and true”—is given, no doubt, lest the very magnificence and splendour of the vision of the New Jerusalem, and the glory in which it lies, should appear too dazzling to the ordinary eye, and provoke skeptical rejection where cordial ac

ceptance was designed by the Spirit of God, or lest it should appear too good to be thought true. Christ himself is called "Faithful and True;" the gospel also is elsewhere called the "faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptance." Christ is the gospel personated, and the gospel is Christ unfolded.

The heathen oracles of old were full of equivocation and falsehood; they gave forth their responses only to deceive: but these sayings are true as Christianity itself, and worthy of acceptance as the oracles that contain them. Are not these sayings faithful?"Unto Him that loved us, and washed us in his blood, and made us kings and priests unto God, even the Father, be glory!" No less faithful and true is the saying, "Be faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." Faithful, also, and worthy of adoption as our song, is this saying: "Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty: just and true are thy ways, thou king of saints. Who shall not fear

thee, and glorify thy name? For thou only art holy." And again: "Blessed are the dead from henceforth which die in the Lord; for they rest from their labours, and their works do follow them." The present condition of the seven churches of Asia answering to the prediction pronounced many years before; the reward, or punishment, alighting upon each as God had declared it; the woes enunciated in the seven trumpets, let loose from the seals, and poured out from the vials, have all fallen at the appointed time, and proved to the most incredulous, that the sayings of God are faithful and true. And ever as the prophecies effloresce into performances, the evidence of the faithfulness. and truth of these sayings becomes more and more vivid. The rush of time, which wastes and weakens all earthly things, brightens and brings out the sayings of this book. Man's works die: God's words endure for ever. All man calls great, perishes: all that God pronounces true, abides. We must build little on the one-we may rear the superstructure of our eternal hopes upon the other. What is true of the sayings of this book, is no less true of the whole word of God. The state of the descendants of Shem, Ham, Japhet, and Ishmael, as verified by facts obvious to the world-the molten bricks and desolate ruins of Babylon, where the nettle and the brier grow undisturbed,

and the cry of the screech-owl and the wild beast is heardTyre, with its rocks, on which the fishermen spread their nets— Jerusalem, in which every nation except the Jew has a home-the Jews themselves, trembling and scorned fugitives in all lands

are the fulfilment of prophecy, the performance of promises, the evidence that God's sayings are faithful and true. How satisfying is this fact! We rest our knowledge of the unseen, our hopes of the future, our acceptance with God, our sense of safety, not upon the wavering results of conjecture, probability, or human syllogisms, but upon the everlasting word, the faithful and true sayings of God. Our religion is not a result which man reasons out, but a revelation which God makes known. It is not a discovery made by man, which man can expand, but a revelation that comes down from heaven, which man can neither add to nor may subtract from. Let us be thankful for that blessed book which contains these sayings of God that book which has changed the aspect of the world, and left upon the current of the ages impressions that can only be effaced by the last flame. It is still the breath of the good, the joy of the pious, the hope of the desponding. It has exalted the poor, broken the shackles of the slave, dotted the wide earth with temples like the sky with stars, arched the tombs of the dead with the rainbow of hope, and made the paths of the pious living more smooth and beautiful. It has turned the war-whoop of the savage into the voice of psalms, and supplanted the clang of battle and the confused noise of war by the chimes of mercy and of peace. Each of these sayings is a precious pearl, and the Bible is the sea whose floor is covered with them; and he that dives deepest and oftenest, brings up the greatest number to the light of day.

It is added, "The Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to show unto his servants the things which must shortly come to pass." The Lord God of the prophets is none else than the Lord Jesus Christ, as is plain from the 16th verse of this same chapter: "I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright and morning star.” And were there no other evidence, this alone would prove the supreme