not the police alone, but whole armies to keep the peace at home, and that some of our great towns have to be put into a state of defence internally to guard against sudden surprise and outbreaks of insurrection. The iron-plated bastions which we once needed for the defence of our bulwarks against foreign invasion, are well-nigh needed to ward off the domestic enemy, and to save our people from disastrous panic, paralyzing to our industry, and damaging to law, order, and morality. However exaggerated the dimensions of the evil may be; however pretentious the boasting, and baseless the schemes, of the enemies of peace, there is still much to humble our pride, to bring us in thoughtfulness and seriousness to repent of our national sins, our family sins, our heart sins. Yes, there is more than enough to bring the most true-hearted, most prayerful, earnest souls among us to mourn over our irreverence of heart; our neglect of secret prayer; our poor, cold family worship; our backslidings; our forgetfulness of past mercies, perhaps marked and special mercies; our unfaithfulness to high trust; the little way we have made in subduing besetting sins; the crosses we have shrunk from; the little self-denial practised; our want of devotion and regularity in the services of God's house; our little resistance to evil; the sad encroachments which the world's giddiness and gaiety have made in the place God should have in our hearts. Oh what will you do for these backsliding steps you have taken? How can you face Him who speaks to you as now through His appointed messenger, and inquires of you, what of those neglected sacraments, of those broken vows, of the times you have risen up and lien down, and no prayer? What of the ridicule you have made among your boon companions of solemn words spoken to you? what of the determined resistance made to the suggestions and promptings and pleadings of the good Spirit? Oh that this our evening Communion, our last evening of the year, might find you before God's altar, at the holy supper of your dying Lord! I would specially invite you, with all the solemnity and urgency of entreaty possible, to ask for, not your preparation, but that which God alone can give, and to come and break through delays, excuses, barriers; and weeping bitter tears of sorrow, vowing, not in your own strength, but His, to retrace these backward steps, to take your cross up again, which lies there dishonoured, trodden under foot; to doubt no more, nor think distrustfully of the all-sufficiency of your Saviour, and to say,— "Give me to read my pardon sealed And from Thy life to draw my strength, In all its height and breadth and length." Oh, rest not till that peace which a Saviour's blood has purchased is indeed your own; till the witness of the Spirit is with your spirit; till His sacred mark and seal is consciously realized. Oh, be all for Him, be whole for Him. Forget not His tears, His sufferings, His healing virtue, His bitter shame and cross, His expiring cry; forget not how He is engaged before the throne; forget not His certain and promised return. It is these things, even more than the torments of the lost; it is the death and sufferings of the Son of God, in which the power of His wrath is most clearly and fully manifested. The power of His wrath! What a view of it will be presented then, when "the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever!"* And yet I say that God's delivering up His well-beloved Son to the derision and shame of men, to desertion and anguish, to death and the grave, gives us to read the power of His wrath in more intensely legible characters, throws such a flood of glowing light upon it, as no other recorded scenes enacted, or to be enacted, before men and angels could possibly show, and may well lead us to say with the Christian poet, "And wilt Thou pardon, Lord, a sinner such as I, Although Thy book his crimes record of such a crimson dye? So deep are they engraved, so terrible Thy fear, The righteous scarcely can be saved-O where should I appear! My soul, make all things known to Him who all things sees, That so the Lamb may yet atone for thy iniquities. O Thou Physician blest, make clean my guilty soul, And me, by many a sin oppressed, restore and make me whole, I know not how to praise Thy mercy and Thy love, But deign Thy servant to upraise, and I shall learn above." *Rev. xiv. 2. V. The Melchisedec Priesthood: Its past Teaching. PSALM CX. 4. "The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec." THERE is perhaps no passage in the Old Testa ment which is so fully and expressly commented upon in the New Testament as this. Had we been left without the inspired comment, speculations would have been rife as to what a priest after Melchisedec's order could mean; and many curious views would doubtless have been propounded. Now, however, that comment has been added as a very blessed and fruitful source of meditation for our Easter season. May we be assisted by God's Holy Spirit in thus attempting to gather some of this manna of heavenly doctrine, that we may both lay it up before the Lord as a thankful memorial, and feed upon it to our refreshment in our wilderness travels. We must turn first to the original account of Melchisedec in Genesis xiv. We find that a great confederacy of Eastern nations had been formed to subdue and reduce to tribute the tribes by which Abram was surrounded in his desert home at Mamre. Chedorlaomer king of Elam was the head of this confederacy. This great horde from the East was now sweeping, like a tidal wave, resistless over the king and people with which Abram dwelt at peace; and he determines, like some feudal lord, to arm his retainers, and haste to the rescue of his comrades and allies. Though his forces are small, by skilful generalship, as well as prowess, he completely routs them, leads captivity captive; i.e., brings back those of whom they had made a prey and spoil; and in the pursuit makes a great slaughter of the kings and their hosts. Great are the rejoicings at the rescue thus obtained; great the thanks and plaudits with which the deliverer is welcomed back in triumph. Among the other kings there comes forth one more remarkable than the rest; conspicuous above his fellows for the singular way in which he is introduced, apart, by himself; and in terms quite different from those by which Abram's reception by the rest is expressed. Nothing of his antecedents is told us; nothing of his own history or that of his city and people; whether he came with the other kings, or forming a separate procession; but only his name, his city's name, his office, the symbolical priestly act which he performed, and the words he spake agreeing thereto. Out of the dark unknown of unrecorded history he steps forth, and stands before us in grand colossal proportions for a few short moments. The inspired historian caught the features and the kind of halo of glory which encompassed them; and then he retreats again into the same dark unknown. The curtain closes upon him; we see and hear of him no more for about a thousand years; and then in the grand strange words of the text he reappears. His name and office are fetched back again to us out of the haze of the distant past, out of the hoary antiquity of the patriarchal ages. He has brought his long-vanished, shadowy glory to illustrate His, whose glory, manifesting the |