refreshment, and these are for a season denied: and you are in heaviness, deep overwhelming anxiety and sorrow; your sins vex you. They have taken away your Lord and you know not where they have laid Him.

Haste after Him then indeed, by prayers, by watchings, by tears, by humiliation and by mercies; by lonely and deep communion with yourself and with His Word; haste after Him eagerly, earnestly. But yet bide His time, wait till He reveals Himself. Wait till He calls you by name, testifies that He has forgiven you, that you are His and He yours. And then still wait, think not to enter into all blessedness, or to be perfect at once. "Touch Me not," He said even to Mary Magdalene. He has work for you yet to do, as He had for her. You have yet to receive Him, and to announce His name and power. You have yet perhaps to toil in heaviness and in darkness, but with the memory of His absolution and the expectation of His coming, to console and strengthen you.

Therefore be not too hasty for spiritual consolations and joys: many, by looking too much after these prescnt rewards, have even missed the eternal recompense. They have been disappointed in religion. Desiring always to be touching Jesus,

to be full of the unutterable gladness of such assurance and communion, they have rushed away into some wild extravagance, some delusion of Satan transformed into an angel of light. Or else they have grown discouraged at the labours, and the patience, and the waiting required of them; at the tasks which Christ by His word or by His ministers has assigned to them as the proper evidence of their repentance, and the necessary preservatives of their first love. They have gradually fallen from their earnestness and fervour, and declined and drooped until they are ready to die.

Let this then be the first rule which we draw from our Easter commemoration. Let us in the spirit of the true penitent, that is, in deep tearful thankful love, believe and resolve that we must seek, and search, and haste after Christ, as it were while it is quite dark, with all our heart and with all our strength. On the other hand, let us equally believe and resolve that we must wait in perfect patience for the fulfilment of His coming, for the spiritual blessings, the resurrection joys, the heavenly consolations, which He has in store, and which He yearns to bestow on all His poor penitents.

So shall we neither miss Him when He comes,

nor presume to think that we need watch no more. We shall be always crying after Him in light and in darkness, in care and in trouble; we shall always be devoted to the work which He appoints us; we shall hear His voice when He calls us; we shall rejoice in His revelations when He shews Himself to us in His resurrection

power within us, and then forthwith rise up and renew our haste; and so forgetting that which is behind, and reaching forward toward that which is before, we shall press toward the mark for the prize of our high calling in Christ Jesus, even the perfect and eternal union with Him in heaven.

JOHN HENRY PARKER, Oxford and LONDON.

Sermons for the Christian Seasons.

SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EASTER.

COMMUNION WITH CHRIST IN HOLY SCRIPTURE.

ST. LUKE Xxiv. 32. Did not our heart burn within us, while He talked with us by the way, and opened the Scriptures?

THERE is one communion with Christ in solitude. When we are alone, when our hearts are withdrawn from the world, when in such hours we are trying and judging ourselves, when we are mourning over our sins, over our backwardness and deadness, when to relieve ourselves of these heavy burdens of shame and sorrow, we are seeking and searching after Christ with many tears, with all our heart and soul, with earnest eager haste, and at the same time with patient humble watching and waiting, then He reveals Himself to us in the comfortable sense of our forgiveness and reconciliation, in the revival and refreshment of our drooping hearts. When in devout meditation we bring Him as it were near to us, and

SERM. 39. NEW SERIES.

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seem to behold Him, and to have Him before us, when we hear His voice and hold converse with Him, then have we communion with Christ in solitude.

There is another communion with Christ in society. I do not mean in common or general society, but in the dear and intimate society of good and holy friends, in sincere and devout conversation on holy subjects. We may commune with Christ in our own hearts. We may commune with Him in the society of godly and earnest companions. We may commune with Him in the devout study of holy Scripture.

Let us consider what light is thrown on this subject in the next appearance of our Lord, after that to the holy women, the Magdalene first and the other women afterwards, which is re'corded and described in the Gospels, that to the two disciples going to Emmaus; which we considered in another respect on Easter Tuesday.

As they walked they talked together of those things which had happened. They communed one with another and reasoned concerning Jesus of Nazareth, and how they had trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel.

Now as they thus communed and reasoned one with another, they found no solution or expla