ment, the children of My love." My brethren, if God means this by itif, by the special providences which have preserved for you the Patriarchal sabbath, the Jewish holy-day, the Christian's feast of praise, He does thus lovingly appeal to you every Sunday; then it is strange treatment of God that any of you should be utterly thoughtless about Him throughout its hours. If there is a God, and if we are His creatures, it is a great delusion, an awful folly, to forget and ignore HIM. There are hundreds of millions of our fellow creatures who have no clear notion of a God, who have deified each other and themselves, and who offer the most willing sacrifice to the most worthless objects. We mourn over and pity them—we long to rend the veil which hides the awful oneness of creation from their view- -we tremble at their fate. But what is to be said of the millions of Englishmen who say they believe in one holy, living, eternal Creator, the God of all spirits, the Father of mercies, but who never recognize His claim upon them, never tremble at His word, never try to lisp His praise?

(2). The first day of the week is full of the memories of redemption. Insignificant and rebellious creatures of God, knowing, but not doing His will; seeing, but not feeling His divinity; believing, but not obeying His requirements; exposed to sin, and not avoiding the evil of it; certain of death, but not prepared for it-we should have been utterly undone, we should have been without God and without hope in the world, if He, in His incomparable love, had not voluntarily delivered us from the empire of sin, and screened us from

the fiercest darts of death. The creation of the world is a baffling and sublime thought-the redemption of it is still more so. Now the redemp

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tion of man from sin and death dates from, and centres round, an event that was enacted upon our earth. He whose heart was charged with the destinies of the world-He who was the embodied hope of mankind, the incarnate love of God, and the repre sentative of all our need-He who carried all our sorrows-was livered for our offences," was dient unto death," and "Himself took our infirmities," at length "died, and was buried." Yet if that were all, if the grave of Jesus had been for ever sealed, the hopes of our race would never have emerged from it. But the jubilance of angels over our rescue, and the words "He is not here, but is risen," have been pealing over the ages ever since the moment when those hours of awful suspense consummated-hours during which our world, which had become the grave of the manifested God, had rolled darkly and awfully along its destined way. Yes, "the first day

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of the week" has been ever since that wondrous morning the glad memorial of the fact that once when sin and death were carrying the hearse of human souls slowly on to the depths of hell they that bare it stood still; that then there was a great earthquake, and the Prince of Life arose in His majesty to quell for ever after all the power of the destroyer. Now, as the firstfruits of them that sleep, He stands by the deserted sepulchre, the accepted Patron and Priest of humanity. "The first day of the week" is a perpetual utterance of the great fact, "that Christ died for our sins, and

rose again from the dead on the third day, according to the Scriptures." As the light of the Sunday morning steals over the world it awakes in millions of hearts the Divine remembrance that Christ is risen from the dead-that God has accepted His own sacrifice for sin-that past sin need no longer be a barrier between us and God-that, all sinful as we are, we may begin at once to adore His unfathomable love, we may forsake our sins and find mercy. Has the sacrificial death of Christ no interest for you? Has the glorious resurrection of Christ no fascination for you ? Have you no sins that need forgiveness? Has death no terrors ? In that grim enemy, which lurks and hovers over your home, which has snatched your wife from your bosom, your children from your grasp, and which will most assuredly, ere long, bring you to the house appointed for all living, can you see nothing but a debt of nature, nothing but a coffin, nothing but welcome rest for your jaded limbs? Is there no need in your heart, no hunger there, no hidden pain, no secret sin from which you know you cannot deliver yourself? Then I tell you, that the first day of every week throughout Christendom is crowded with the mighty memory and grand assurance of ONE who can, who will, and who does deliver. It dawns, week after week, with a holy smile; it peals round about you that great thunderpsalm of the universe, "Glory unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood;" it pursues you with infinite compassion; it lays you under incalculable obligation. Oh, my brethren, is it to go on pleading with you year after year, and

find you, at the end of a life spent in this Christian country, as men who never heard that the gates of death have been unsealed, as those who never knew that sin can be forgiven or condemnation annulled?

(3). "The first day of the week" is the great memorial of the giving of the Holy Spirit of God to man; of that day when the union between God and man was made more certain and real than it had ever been before, when on the day of Pentecost the great proofs were given to assembled thousands that the most stubborn prejudices could be overcome, the most obdurate hearts softened, the most awful sins pardoned, the most abandoned lives renewed. We are reminded not merely of what God did when He raised His Son from the dead, but of what He did when He sent Him once again to bless us, in turning away every one of us from our iniquities. It reminds us, consequently, that He is still here by His Spirit, constantly making men holy, and bringing sinners to Himself.

The Sunday is the memorial of the beginning of that great work in human nature by which it becomes like Christ, and is made one with God— the incarnation of the Holy Ghost. Whenever the Lord's-day dawns upon the Christian Church, God seems to say, "Prepare again, oh My people, for a renewal of My love, for a new vision of My glory, for a new baptism of My Spirit, for the tongue of fire, for the establishment of My covenant with man!" To-day God comes with ten thousand of His holy ones; to-day pride is melted into penitence, hypocrisy tears off his mask, the broken spirit finds mercy, the wicked

man forsakes his way, and all God's people shout for joy. If that is the real meaning of the Sunday, have you, my brethren, no interest in these high memories, these unearthly hopes? Are you so contented with the world that you can do without its Ruler and Lord? so satisfied with the past that you crave no pardon? so brave in the view of death that you want no deliverer? so holy that you seek no sanctification? These holy memories are not confined to any narrow class of thought. They are the memories of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He who despises them must risk a great deal-must be dispensing with and putting from him his greatest chances for eternity; for, observe, it is equivalent to his saying, "It matters very little whether I am a creature of God or not! whether Christ died for me or not! whether I quench, or sin against, the Holy

Ghost or not!" It seems very much like going up to God and saying, "O God, I can do without Thee!"-like looking into the sepulchre of Jesus, and saying, "I care not whether He rose from the dead or not!"—and like some wild, melancholy, daring blasphemy against that spiritual power and love which can and does make all things new. * * * *

"Remember the Sabbath-day, to keep it holy." 66 Hallow God's Sabbaths." Be "in the spirit on the Lord's-day." Thus, I am convinced, every day will be happier, every care will be lighter, every friendship will be sweeter; and when the Sundays of this world have melted into the great day of the Lord, you will find that the Lord's-days of earth were the dawnings of that immeasurable light and blessedness which shall neither be darkened, nor eclipsed, nor extinguished for ever and ever.

WHAT did David mean, when he said, "My sin is ever before me?" And what do others mean when they utter the same expression? First, the man who thus speaks charges the blame of his sin wholly upon himself. There is no hope for a man so long as he is striving to lay the burden of his sin somewhere else than on his own conscience, and to think that any one is to blame rather than himself. David did not say, for example, as many do, "It is my nature, and I could not help it." Now if man's nature were at all analogous to that of the flower, and if sin were

as much an inevitable and uncontrollable property of his nature as colour or fragrance is of the flower, then there would be some ground for the statement, that when he sins he is compelled to sin. Or if there were nothing in man but instincts, blind, self-executing instincts, such as we see in the animal creation; instincts which by a pre-established affinity seek out their appropriate gratifications; instincts to which no moral character can be attached, whether they assume mild forms, as in the dove, or savage forms, as in the tiger; then man would lie outside the

circle of moral obligations, and all his actions would be right. Instinct

would impel him in everything, and he would be as much in character when he slew his fellow man, as when he delivered him from death. But who will venture calmly to accept this as a true description of man? So far from his life being the outworking of instinct, there is perhaps no organized animal that has so little of instinct as he. It was needful that instincts should have but little sway in him, because he was to be the possessor of reason, conscience, and will.

If any one, then, seek to defend his sin upon the plea, "Such is my nature," he is forgetting that he is using the word "nature" in a sense which is utterly wrong. He is claiming fellowship with the brutes that perish. But in which of them is found the sense of freedom? In which of them is found the aspirations, present at times in the hearts of most men, after a nobler and purer life? In which of them is found the struggle, between the inclinations or passions, and the royal behests of conscience? In which of them is found that agony of remorse, which often makes existence to man a burden too great to be borne ? Which of them has the consciousness, that somehow he is acting a part, immeasurably beneath the destiny which he was made to accomplish?

I know of none. The lion is never seen to retire into a solitary place, to repent over the sins he has committed in the lives he has destroyed. Contrition never folds the wing of the eagle, nor dims the eye which gazes on the noontide sun. Nor would such feelings, such aspirations, such

remorse ever find place in man, if sin were the direct product of the nature he received from the hand of God. There is not a tear he sheds over sin, nor a struggle he experiences with temptation, nor a conception, however transient and imperfect, that he forms of the possibility and the duty of his leading a nobler life, which does not teach him that his nature is not made for sin, and that in sinning he is resisting and not obeying the will of God.

Again, David did not strive to parry off the charge of sin by casting the blame of it on circumstances. Now it will not be denied that there is a great diversity in the circumstances which surround men, nor will it be denied, that our judgments of the degree of criminality which attaches to an action, ought to be graduated according to the nature of the circumstances in which it has been committed. Of course no circumstances can be pleaded as justifying sin. When a sin can be justified it ceases to be sin. But surely few will be found so hardy as to affirm that crimes committed in Christian and heathen lands are equally heinous and culpable. In their outward forms they may seem to be the same; but He that judgeth righteously will not fail to distinguish between him that knew his Master's will, and him that knew it not. A corresponding diversity in the criminality of actions will be seen to exist even in Christian lands; for I presume no one will visit with the same severity and condemnation the vices which abound among the neglected population of our large cities, and the vices which are committed in the higher regions of society, where education in all its forms has had full

commit our sins. What is the precise nature of his agency in all cases it is difficult to tell. But we know that it is not such as to compel us to sin. He may allure, he may seduce, he may solicit, he may tempt, but he has not a coercive power over the human will. "Why hath Satan filled thy heart to lie unto the Holy Ghost?" said Peter to Ananias; and the very form of the question implies that Satan might have been prevented from filling the heart, that we have the key of our own door, that we may either open it or keep it closed. And so sacredly are our rights preserved, that even our Saviour represents Himself as not forcibly breaking into the human soul: "6 Behold," He says, "I stand at the door and knock.” Now, dear brethren, there is no hope for a man until all these glozing, palliating, dissimulating expedients are abandoned. Man is never prepared to eschew sins if he is not prepared to acknowledge them. long as we can plead for them we shall commit them. We are full of excuses now. We are rich in them when we are poor in every good thing. Yes we can find pretexts when we can find nothing else. But there is no hope for us until we have come forth from beneath every tree of the garden, and every hiding place, and have said, because feeling the truth of the confession, "My sin is ever before me."

play. The heathenism which broods with its lurid shade over some parts of our country, is almost as helpless as that which is found in India itself. The conscience, torpid in a high degree, has felt no quickening touch of Divine truth. Unfamiliar with anything but sin, it lies quiet and uncomplaining in the midst of the most debasing practices. It wants light-God's own light-the light of His Word and Spirit, before it can fitly discharge its function as the monitor of the soul. But in no case do circumstances justify sin; and the soul is far more the master of circumstances than their slave. I will not deny, that there are times when the assault of circumstances upon human virtue is of special severity and strength. I will not deny that our principles have their testing seasons. It is well that in a world like this they should have. Such seasons make heroes or reveal them. Such a season came to Joseph, when he fled from the snare of the vile enchantress. Such a season came to Moses, when he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter. Such a season came to Daniel, when the den of lions with a good conscience was better than the palace with an evil one. The circumstances which tried the faith of these men were strong, but they sought and received the help of Him who was Almighty, and they stood firm as the everlasting hills. Nor does David ever seek to throw the blame upon circumstances. He says, "My sin is ever before me."

Again, he does not, as far too many are prone to do, refer his crime to the influence of Satan. He has sins of his own, but he does not

So

A man's sin may be said to be before him, when he sees it in its true character as an offence against God. Sin is a many-sided thing. You may regard it as it affects the body, or as it affects the soul; as it affects our fellow creatures, or as it affects the Creator. Many form their