known words: "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring for ever the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb." Ps. xix. Thus the Lord was no wilderness to the souls of His people. The sentiment of Habakkuk was not new when he uttered it: "Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat, and yet I will rejoice," &c., chap. iii. 17, 18. "In a wilderness created by the violence of man, let God himself be left me, and I will joy in him." There was no exaggeration, and no boasting in all this. The saints of the Hebrew race were taught from the beginning to regard God Himself as their exceeding great reward (Gen. xv.), and even Jeremiah, whose eyes were as fountains of tears-so did he weep over the slain of his people-could say, "The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for him; to the soul that seeketh him." Lam. iii. 24. The Lord a wilderness to the souls of men! No. He is their one necessity. Give them the universe besides and they are poor. Give them Him amidst the wreck of worlds and they are rich. This is no high sounding theory, but a truth which experience has attested ten thousand times. Men, laden with wealth, have cried out-screamed out, we may say"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!" Men, stripped of everything by wicked violence, have shouted, jubilantly, "The Lord reigneth: let the earth rejoice." He is no wilderness to the souls of His people, but a Fountain of living waters, whose waters fail not. 2. The second idea which we associate with a wilderness is, that it is a place of storms and dangers. Travellers are always telling us tales of the perils they encounter in passing through lands which are either natural deserts, or which have become as deserts through the fall of empires and the absence of lawful power. Travelling along the shores of the Mediterranean, within the sight of Mount Carmel, one says, "The Arab robber lurks like a wolf among those sand heaps, and often springs out suddenly upon the solitary traveller, robs him in a trice, and then plunges again into the wilderness of sand hills and reedy downs, where pursuit is fruitless. Strange country, and it has always been so. There are a hundred allusions to just such a state of things in the history, in the Psalms, and in the prophets of Israel. A whole class of imagery is based upon them. Thus in Ps. x. 8-10, He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages in the secret places doth he murder the innocent. He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den: he lieth in wait to catch the poor: he doth catch the poor, when he draweth him into his net. He croucheth, and humbleth himself, that the poor may fall by his strong ones. ("Land and Book," 314.) In regions that are perfectly waste and uninhabited, but through which wayfarers must pass, those dangers by the hands of lawless men are all the more terrible. The gun and spear of the Ishmaelite are among the most formidable difficulties of modern travel. There are other dangers inseparable from the wilderness. Who has not read of the desert-storm, the simoom, and sirocco, more appalling in some aspects than the ocean-storm? All nature seems to take alarm at the signs of its approach. Even the cattle give expression to plaintive cries and other tokens of distress. The Arabs hide themselves as best they can till it is overpast. The sun becomes shorn of its beams, and looks red and heavy as it draws near. Then comes the hot wind, laden with a subtle and burning dust, which penetrates into all things. The atmosphere becomes exceedingly hot, and the air, from its noxious qualities, is breathed with difficulty. The shelter of a tent, with every possible precaution and safeguard, avails but little. The lungs are fired, and almost burned up; the mouth is parched; the skin is dried; a sense of universal feebleness prevails, and the pulse rises as in fever. The very life is in peril every moment. And when death ensues, the corpse becomes livid and black, like that of a person blasted by lightning. Such are the effects of the desert-storm! Such the perils of the desert! Is the wilderness, the place of such storm and perils, a true image of God? "Have I been a wilderness unto Israel? saith the Lord." No, Lord! No! "Thou art as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of waters in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." (Isa. xxxii.) "Thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall." (Isa. xxv. "Thou hast been as a wall of fire around thy people. Thou hast been their dwelling-place in all generations." 4.) Has God been a wilderness to you, my brethren, as a place of storms and dangers? On the contrary, has He not hid you in His pavilion in the time of trouble? Has He not been your very refuge and strength? So that you can sing with the Psalmist :-"I will love thee, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower. The sorrows of hell compassed me about; the snares of death prevented me. In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his holy temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears." Ps. xviii. 3. There is a third idea associated with the wilderness. The wilderness is a land of deceitful appearances and promises. You have heard of the mirage, the illusive appearance of pools and lakes of water, in places where water is most needed, but least likely to occur an appearance which is produced by the rays of the sun refracted by the heat of the burning soil. This optical illusion is often so perfect that even the experienced traveller finds it difficult to believe that he is not approaching an actual lake of transparent water. A traveller tells us that he once gave chase to a flock of gazelles on a plain south-east of Aleppo. The day was intensely hot, and the gazelles made direct towards a vast mirage, which covered the whole eastern horizon. "To me," he says, "they seemed to be literally leaping through the water, and I could see their figures below the surface and reversed with the utmost distinctness. No wonder they were deceived, for even their pursuers were utterly confounded. But the pursuit of the mirage is like chasing the rainbow, which retreats as you advance, and can never be overtaken." There is one passage in Isaiah which seems to refer to this deceitful phenomenon: "The parched ground shall become a pool." (Isa. xxxv. 7.) The term translated "parched ground" denotes not so much the parched ground itself as the simmering, tantalising, phantom of a lake which appears over the parched ground. And the promise is that the phantom shall become a reality, and the mirage shall become a lake indeed. Hear now the word of the Lord. "Have I been a wilderness unto Israel?" Shall we liken God to deceitful sands, which allure the traveller with the promise of water to quench his thirst, and then leave him to perish? Is it His manner to excite expectations and disappoint them, to make promises and not fulfil them? No, no! Joshua spoke the words of universal experience when he said, "Behold this day I am going the way of all the earth; and ye know in all your hearts and in all your souls, that not one good thing hath failed of all the good things which the Lord your God spake concerning you; all are come to pass unto you, and not one thing hath failed thereof." Josh. xxiii. 14. Satan made promises to our first parents which he could not fulfil. He was a wilderness to them. He made the mirage dazzle and glitter before their eyes, but when they came to it, it was nothing but burning sand. He practises the same deceit on their children to this day, and, in spite of disappointments without number, they believe him, and reap only vexation and But God is no wilderness to His people. He is true and faithful His word is never broken. He promised a Redeemer and redemption to sorrow. the ancients, and when the promise was fulfilled, the reality so far transcended expectation that it was acknowledged "that eye had not seen, nor ear heard, nor had it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things which God had prepared for them that love him." And when the redemption shall be perfected, and the redeemed shall assemble around the throne of God in heaven, there will not be one of all the mighty host who will not be prepared to join in the doxology:-"Unto him that hath done exceeding abundantly above all that we asked or thought, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus, world without end, Amen." The Lord a wilderness to Israel! No, no! His name is Love and Truth. "The smoothest seas will sometimes prove To the confiding bark untrue; The umbrageous oak, in pomp outspread, But Thou art true, Incarnate Lord, THE REV. JOHN JAMES WAITE. MR. WAITE belonged to an old family in Gloucester, where he was born on the 23rd of February, 1808. He lost his mother when he was eighteen months old; but her dying prayer for him, that "the Lord would make use of him for some good in the world," had a great power over him through life in stirring him up to try to leave the world better than he found it. Having a pious and respectable father, who was a deacon in the Independent Church in the city, he had early religious training and a good education; but, out of an eager thirst for knowledge, over-study produced total blindness at seventeen years of age. This heavy trial brought out much early piety; and with faith in God's care, he strove to make the best of his lot, and rise above its disadvantages as much as possible. He had books read to him on all subjects, delighting in mathematics, and the evidences of Christianity, which suited his strong reasoning powers. Church history convinced him of the evils of worldly rulers interfering in religion, and the duty of all Churches being free. He tried to be useful by teaching a Bible class, and giving addresses to village congregations. Taking a great interest in Christian missions, he gave lectures on the voice, the ear, the eye, and on sacred music, that he might send the proceeds to the Missionary Society. Invited to the missionary meetings held at Bristol in 1837, he made a public offer of a course of lectures on singing in Divine service, that any proceeds might go to the missionary fund. The offer was gladly accepted; and a crowd attended at Lodge-street Chapel when the organ was played by Dr. Hodges, the able organist of St. James's Church. His warm welcome decided him on settling in Bristol in 1838, when he married a lady of Hereford, who survives to mourn the loss of one of the kindest of husbands and best of fathers. The work begun about 1835, and made more public in 1837, for a benevolent purpose, he little thought would be the mission of his life for thirty years. As in some other cases, so it was in his, that he was preparing in quiet years for a life-work he knew not of; but when the time for the work had come, the man to do it was ready. As it opened before him he studied it more deeply. Convinced of the essential difference between a tune for a congregation and an anthem for a choir, he found he must provide a book of tunes without repeats or fugues, fit to express the feelings becoming to worship. Having gathered a selection by the help of friends, he published it, in 1842, by the name of the "Hallelujah," as expressing his one idea of psalmody for praising the Lord, This collection of 100 tunes and a few chants had an essay on the duty of praise, and the kind of music fit for it. With this book Mr. Waite held large classes in Bristol, and went to other places where he was invited. In this way he became known to the writer in 1842. As he went on, he had to encounter no little opposition from such musical people as precentors, organists, and choirs, who liked a monopoly of music too well to bear the thought of congregations being taught to sing by note, and were too attached to showy tunes to submit to a sacrifice of their pretty favourites without an effort to save them. The poor things, however, are gone into oblivion,—and there let them lie! The perseverance of an iron will with great good humour has had its reward. The pioneer of the revolution lived to enjoy his success. The reformation of our psalmody became an accomplished fact. Other fellow-workers followed, as appeared in the books of Curwen, Allon, Mercer, Hymns Ancient and Modern, the Weigh-house, the Bristol, and several others in England, Scotland, and Ireland, with only one exception, in the same admirable style. After laying the foundation of the improvement, Mr. Waite retired to Ilminster, in Somerset, where he spent three happy years in faithful pastoral labours, with occasional visits. Here also, with the help of Dr. Gauntlett's musical genius, he prepared the second part of the "Hallelujah ;" and when it was ready, in 1848, he yielded to the advice of his brethren in devoting himself entirely to the work he was eminently gifted for. Removing to Hereford in 1849, he had the first part revised by the same able master of harmony, and gave a brief account of his work in the preface at the end of 1850:-"I have now travelled 20,000 miles; lectured gratuitously to 100,000 persons, and conducted more than a third of them through a course of exercises; issued some 30,000 to 40,000 instruction books and Hallelujahs,' and contributed to psalmody classes and Sunday-schools books of the value of £1,300 or £1,400." His classes were held in sixteen counties, as well as in five districts of London, where two large aggregate assemblies united in |