"L"

477. Laziness, unworthy of the Christian

Laziness never yet had communion with Christ. Those who walk with Christ must walk swiftly. Jesus is no idler or loiterer; he is about his Father's business, and you must march with quick step if you would keep pace with him. As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, are sluggards to active persons. Those who have much to do have no fellowship with gossips, who drop in to while away the hours with chat. Jesus has no fellowship with you, who care not for souls that are perishing. He is incessantly active, and so must you be if you would know his love. There is a fierce furnace heat beating upon everything to-day: men are toiling hard to hold their own, and Jesus must not be served by slothful hearts. I am sure that I err not from his mind, when I say to you, beloved, if you would know the Beloved fully you must get up early and go afield with him to work with him. Your joy shall be in spending and being spent for him.

478. Leaning on the Beloved

Believe me, no sacred work can long be continued with energy except in this spirit, for flesh flags, and even the spirit languishes except there be the constant leaning upon the Beloved. As for you, men of business, you with your families, and with your shops, and with your fields, and your enterprises, you will find it poor living unless you evermore lean on your Beloved in all things. If you can bring your daily cares, your domestic troubles, your family sicknesses, your personal infirmities, your losses and your crosses, if you can bring all things to Jesus it will be easy and happy living. Even the furnace itself, when the coals glow most, is cool and comfortable as a royal chamber spread for banqueting with the king when the soul reclines on the bosom of divine love.

479. Lethargy, Trouble Arousing from

Staying for awhile in the valley of Aosta, in Northern Italy, we found the air to be heavy, close, and humid with pestilential exhalations. We were oppressed and feverish—one's life did not seem worth a pin. We could not breath freely, our lungs had a sense of having a hundred atmospheres piled upon them. Presently, at midday, there came a thunder-clap, attended by big drops of rain, and a stiff gale of wind, which grew into a perfect tornado, tearing down the trees; then followed what the poet calls "sonorous hail," and then again the lightning flash, and the thunder peal on peal echoing along the Alps. But how delightful was the effect, how we all went out upon the verandah to look at the lightning, and enjoy the music of the thunder! How cool the air and bracing! How delightful to walk out in the cool evening after the storm! Then you could breathe and feel a joy in life. Full often it is thus with the Christian after trouble. He has grown to be careless, lethargic, feverish, heavy, and ready to die, and just then he has been assailed by trouble, thundering threatenings have rolled from God's mouth, flashes of lightning have darted from providence: the property vanished, the wife died, the children were buried, trouble followed trouble, and then the man has turned to God, and though his face was wet with tears of repentance, yet he has felt his spirit to be remarkably restored. When he goes up to the house of God it is far more sweet to hear the word than aforetime. He could not pray before, but now he leans his head on Jesus' bosom, and pours out his soul in fellowship. Eternity now exerts its heavenly attractions, and the man is saved from himself.

480. Life, A Frivolous

Some individuals appear to have a brain-case which was never properly filled. Like butterflies, they flit from flower to flower, but gather no honey. Look at the life of many in The West End, who pass all their existence in dressing and undressing, distributing bits of cardboard, riding in carriages, bowing and scraping, and eating and drinking. These notable do-nothings remind me of a set of butterflies flitting about a field of poppies. Nor are the poorer districts clear of such beings. Note the many fellows who go loafing from public-house to public-house, lolling and dawdling about from morning till night, as if they had nothing whatever to live for but to talk and booze. I hope that is not the case with any of you; if so, let me remind you that you may live in jest but you will have to die in earnest. You may waste this life in frivolity, but you will have to spend the next in eternal damnation. The moth may play, but the candle burns it, and then it suffers in earnest. You will come to be earnest enough when you wake up and find yourself condemned of God. Oh, if thou be a fool, or have been a fool up to this moment, may God sober thee, and make thee wise to number thy days.

481. Life Beginning in Trouble, Ending in Peace Have you not often seen a day which early in the morning was heavy with fog and rain? As it came on we waited patiently and anxiously, for we wished for fine weather; but those incessant drops of rain still fell. We looked to the wind quarter, and to the rain quarter, we looked with hope and then with fear, but the drops fell incessantly, and there seemed to be no chance of intermission; and yet ere noon has come we have seen the sun shining brightly, and we have heard the birds singing more sweetly, and it has been fair weather after rain. Take that morning as a prophecy to your doubting, poor troubled soul, of what your path in life will yet be.

482. Life, Changes in Our life is like an April day, the sunshine alternates with the shower; or like each day of all the year, the morning and the evening are needful to complete it. Quick on the heels of light treads the darkness, followed with equal haste by light again. The sun's rule, at this golden hour, is but temporary; he must abdicate in favour of the usurping stars, but they, in their turn, must give way before his lordly presence yet again. This world, which is our inn, owns to the sign of the "Chequers"—the blacks and whites are everywhere. We can be sure of nothing between here and heaven of the things which are seen; but of this we may be certain, that underneath all the outward change there is the immutable love of God towards his people, and that, after all, the change lies only in the seeming things, not in the things which truly are; for the things which are not seen are eternal, and changes come not there; it is but in the things which are seen that the change occurs. Let us set the less store by earth, because its fashion abides not. Let us prize heaven more, because it cannot fade.

483. Life, Human and Divine

What life was that which Father Adam conferred upon thy sons and daughters? Why, only life terrestrial, a bubble life, that melted and disappeared. But Jesus, as he comes again, will find none of his children dead, none of his sons and daughters lost; because he lives, they live also, for he is the everlasting Father, and makes those to have everlasting life who live and breathe through him.

484. Life, Frailty of

You stand over the mouth of hell upon a single plank, and that plank is rotten. You hang over the jaws of perdition by a solitary rope, and the strands of that rope are snapping one by one. Frailer than the spider's web is your life, and yet that is the only thing which divides you from a world of despair. The slightest insect commissioned by God's providence may end your unhappy life. You know not where, or when, or how disease may overtake you. Death often floats in the atmosphere of the house of God. He may be looking through those stony eye-holes. The skeleton monarch may be looking at and marking you as his prey. Could Xerxes stand here tonight, could he have a little Christianity mingled with his philosophy, then doubtless the tears he wept as he saw his army, and remembered that in fifty years all would be dead, were nothing to those he would weep as he remembered that thousands this day found within the walls of churches and chapels, and tens of thousands who are not found in any sanctuary, within less time than that will be not only dead but damned!

485. Life, Lengthy of, a Trial

I look with admiration upon brethren who have remained faithful to God for sixty or seventy years. It seems to me that the length of the Christian's life is, in itself, oftentimes a very severe trial. A man might stand at the stake and burn for a few minutes, but it is hanging up over a slow fire—who can bear that? To do one brave and generous action, this seems simple enough; but to stand on the watchtower day and night, always vigilant; watching, lest the foe surprise us; watching, lest our hearts betray us; watching unto prayer, that we may keep ourselves in the love of God. Oh! this is a work, this is a labour which only grace can help us to perform. But here is the comfort. No length of days can exhaust the believer's patience or peril his spiritual life, because the just shall live by faith.

486. Life the only time to seek Salvation

Oh! bethink you, each one of you, there is but one hope, and that one hope lost, it is gone for ever. Defeated in one battle, a commander attempts another, and hopes that he may yet win the campaign. Your life is your one fight, and if it be lost it is lost for aye. The man who was bankrupt yesterday commences again in business with good heart, and hopes that he may yet succeed; but in the business of this mortal life, if you are found bankrupt, you are bankrupt for ever and ever. I do therefore charge you by the living God, before whom I stand, and before whom I may have to give an account of this day's preaching ere another day's sun shall shine, I charge you see to your own salvation.

487. Life, Trusting in Christ a Sign of

Suppose there is a person here who does not exactly know his age, and he wants to find the register of his birth, and he has tried and cannot find it. Now, what is the inference that he draws from his not being able to tell the day of his birth? Well, I do not know what the inference may be, but I will tell you one inference he does not draw. He does not say, therefore, "I am not alive." If he did, he would be an idiot, for if the man is alive he is alive, whether he knows his birthday or not. And if the man really trusts in Jesus, and is alive from the dead, he is a saved soul, whether he knows exactly when and where he was saved or not.

488. Life, Spiritual, Prayer a Sign of

While a man can pray he is never far from light; he is at the window, though, perhaps, as yet the curtains are not drawn aside. The man who can pray has the clue in his hand by which to escape from the labyrinth of affliction. Like the trees in winter, we may say of the praying man, when his heart is greatly troubled, "his substance is in him, though he has lost his leaves." Prayer is the soul's breath, and if it breathes it lives, and, living, it will gather strength again. A man must have true and eternal life within him while he can continue still to pray, and while there is such life there is assured hope.

489. Life, Spiritual, the Guarantee of Growth The young beginner in grace should feel that it will not be impossible for him to grow to the stature of a perfect man in Christ Jesus, because grace has quickened him and made him a babe. That is the greatest thing, to make me alive at all. When grace has gone so far as to give me life, and put me in the family, I need not fear but what grace will nurture that; life, and ultimately bring me to perfection. If I find myself growing in God's garden, though I be the tiniest plant in all the bed, yet it is such a mercy to be in the garden at all—I who was a wild, rank weed out in the wilderness before—that I will not doubt but what he will water me when I need it, and that he will tend and care for me till I shall come to perfection.

490. Lifelessness of the Church Our churches seem to be half alive. It is a dreadful thing to read of the punishment practised by ancient tyrants when they tied a living man to a corpse, and he had to go about with this corpse strapped to him, and rotting under his nostrils, and yet that is too often the condition of the living ones in our churches: they are bound by ties of church union to a portion of the church which is spiritually dead, though not so manifestly corrupt as to render it possible for us to cut it off. The tares, which we may not root up, hamper and dwarf the wheat. O God, the Holy Ghost, make the church alive right through, from the crown of its head to the soul of its foot, so that the whole church may cry continually, "Let God be magnified."

491. Light, Air, and Water, Emblems of Christ

You will have observed that all the good things which God has made are diffusive. There is light; you cannot confine light within narrow limits. Suppose we were to grow so bigoted and conceited as to conceive that we had all the light in the world inside the Tabernacle. We might have iron shutters made to keep the light in, yet it is very probable that the light would not agree with our bigotry, and would not come in at all, but leave us in the dark for wanting to confine it. With splendid mirrors, Turkey carpets, jewellery, fine pictures, rare statuary, you may court the light to come into palatial halls, it comes, it is true, but as it enters it whispers, "And I passed through the iron grating of a prison, just now. I shone upon the poor cottager beneath the rude thatched roof, I streamed through the window out of which half the glass was gone, and gleamed as cheerily and willingly upon the rags of poverty as in these marble halls." You cannot clip the wings of the morning, or monopolize the golden rays of the sun. What a space the light has traversed, doing good. Millions of miles it has come streaming from the sun, and yet further from yonder fixed star. O light! why couldst thou not be contented with thine own sphere, why journey so far from home? Missionary rays come to us from so vast a distance that they must have been hundreds of years in reaching us, and yet their mission is not over, for they flash on to yet remoter worlds. So with the air; as far as the world is concerned, the air will throw itself down the shaft of the deepest coal pit, climb the loftiest Alp, and although men madly strive to shut it out, it will thrust itself into the fever lair and cool the brow of cholera. So with water. Here it comes dropping from every inch of the cloudy sky, flooding the streets, flushing the foul sewers, and soaking into the dry soil. Everywhere it will come, for water claims to have its influence everywhere felt. Fire, too, who can bind its giant hands? The king cannot claim it as a royal perquisite. Among those few sticks which the widow woman with the red cloak has been gathering in the wood, it burns as readily as in Her Majesty's palace. It is the nature of Jesus to diffuse himself; it is his life to do good.

492. Light, Every Christian a In Eastern dwellings it would be necessary, if you lost a piece of money and wanted to find it, to light a candle at any time; for in our Saviour's day glass was not used, and the windows of houses were only little slits in the side of the wall, and the rooms were very dark. Almost all the Oriental houses are very dark to this day, and if anything be dropped as small as a piece of silver, it must be looked for with a candle even at high noon. Now, the sphere in which the church moves here on earth is a dim twilight of mental ignorance, and moral darkness, and in order to find a lost soul light must be brought to bear upon it. The Holy Spirit uses the light of the gospel; he convinces men of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment to come. The woman lit a candle, and even thus the Holy Spirit lights up some chosen man whom he makes to be a light in the world. He calls to himself whomsoever he wills, and makes him a lamp to shine upon the people. Such a man will have to be consumed in his calling, like a candle, he will be burnt up in life-giving. Earnest zeal and laborious self-sacrifice will eat him up. So may this church, and every church of God, be continually using up her anointed man and women, who shall be as lights in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, to find out lost souls.

493. Light from Christ

Light! oh, how precious would it be to you, if you were immured in one of those prisons which we have seen at Venice, below the water's level, deep down, with winding passages, where even a refracted ray of light could never reach the prisoner, where he sat alone and felt for the wall, but could see nothing. "Truly," as Solomon says, "the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." Now, the soul has no light, no true light, no heavenly light but what Jesus brings. When a spirit is once made to feel its guilt, it is shut up in prison until Christ brings it light in the darkness of its dismay. There is no hope to a convicted spirit till Jesus shows his atoning blood; there is no clear knowledge of the way of salvation till Christ brings the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in his own face. You who love him know what brightness he has given to you, what light has irradiated your once dark spirit since you have known him, and how your heart has laughed for very joy because he has turned again your captivity, and given you to rejoice in the light of his countenance.

494. Light, Sowing of The sun, like a sower, scatters broadcast his beams of light upon the once dark earth. Look up at night upon the sky bespangled with stars, and it seemeth as though God scattered them like gold-dust upon the floor of heaven in picturesque irregularity, thereby sowing light. Or if you want a fact which comes nearer to the sowing of light literally than anything which our poets have written, think of our vast coal-beds which are literally so much sown light. The sun shone upon primeval forests, and the monstrous; ferns grew and expanded under the quickening influence. They fell, as fall the leaves of chestnut and of oak in these autumns of our latter days, and there they lie stored deep down in the great cellars of nature, for man's use; so much sown light, I say, which springs up beneath the hand of man in harvests of flame, which flood our streets with light, and cheer our hearths with heat. Sown light, then, is neither unpoetical nor yet altogether unliteral. There is such a thing as a matter-of-fact, and we may use the expression rightly enough, without grotesqueness of metaphor. Understand, then, that happiness, joy, gladness, symbolised by light, have been sown by God in fields that will surely yield their harvest for all those whom by his grace he has made upright in heart.

495. Light, Walking in

I cannot dwell in the sun, it is too bright a place for my residence, unless I shall be transformed, like Uriel, Milton's angel, who could dwell in the midst of the blaze of its excessive glory, but I can walk in the light of the sun though I cannot dwell in it; and so God is the light, he is himself the sun, and I can walk in the light as he is in the light, though I cannot attain to the same degree of perfection, and excellence, and purity, and truth, in which the Lord himself resides. Trapp is always for giving us truth in a way in which we can remember it, so he says we are to be in the light as God is in the light for quality, but not for equality; we are to have the same light and as truly to have it and walk in it as God does, though as for equality with God in his holiness and perfection, that must be left until we cross the Jordan and enter into the perfection of the Most High.

496. Likeness to Christ

Behold from heaven's mint golden pieces of inestimable value are sent forth, and each one bears the image and superscription of the Son of God. The face of Jesus is more lovely to God than all the worlds, his eyes are brighter than the stars, his voice is sweeter than bliss; therefore doth the Father will to have his Son's beauty reflected in ten thousand mirrors in saints made like to him, and his praises chanted by myriads of voices of those who love him, because his blood has saved them.

497. Likeness to Christ in Death and Glory

You see that creeping worm, how contemptible is its appearance! You wish to sweep it away; that is the beginning of the thing. You see that insect with gorgeous wings playing in the sunbeams, sipping at the flower bells, and full of happiness and life; that is the end thereof. That worm, that caterpillar, that maggot, if you will, is yourself; and you are to be content with that until you be wrapped up in the chrysalis of death; but you cannot tell what you shall be after death. All that we know is that when Christ shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Be content to be like him, a worm, a caterpillar in the beginning, that like him you may be satisfied when you wake up in his present likeness. Again, you see that rough-looking diamond; it is put upon the wheel of the lapidary. With much care he begins to use it, and to cut it on all sides. It loses much—much that seemed costly to itself. Do you see it? The king is to be crowned, the diadem is put upon the monarch's head with the trumpet's joyful sound. There is a glittering ray which flows from that diadem, and it comes from that diamond that was cut just now by the lapidary. You may venture to compare yourself to such a diamond, for you are one of God's people, and this is the time of the cutting process. You must endure it. Be of good courage, and murmur not. Let faith and patience do their perfect work. In the day when the crown shall be set upon the head of the King, Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, one ray of glory shall stream for you, for you shall be his.

498. Little Cares, Influence of

What fools we are, brethren, and yet if some one else were to call us fools we should not like it, though I do not doubt but that we are very well named, whoever may give us the title, for the whole of heaven cannot make us rejoice if we have one pain in our head; and all the harps of angels, and our knowledge of our interest in "the glory that is to be revealed," cannot make us happy if some little thing happens to go contrary to our minds. Somebody trod on the corns of your pride as you were coming in here, and if an angel had preached to you you would not have enjoyed it, because of your mind being discomposed. Oh, simpletons that we are! The table is daintily spread; the manna of heaven lies close to our hand, but because there is a little rent in the garment, or a small thorn in the finger, we sit down and cry as though the worst of ills had happened to us! Heaven is thine own, and yet thou criest because thy little room is scantily furnished! God is thy Father, and Christ thy brother, and yet thou weepest because a babe has been taken from thee to the skies! Thy sins are all forgiven, and yet thou mournest because thy clothes are mean. Thou art a child of God, an heir of heaven, and yet thou sorrowest as though thou wouldst break thy heart, because a fool hath called thee ill names! Strange is it; foolish is it, but such is man—strangely foolish, and only wise as God shall make him so.

499. Littles, The, Showing forth God

Seeing the jonquil, the hyacinth, the anemone, and many others of our garden flowers growing wild in the valleys on the Italian side of the Alps, and hearing the ceaseless chirping of the innumerable insects which fill the air with their song, and looking up to the snowy peaks piercing the clouds, one could not help comparing the beauty and perfectness of the little, with the overwhelming awe and sublimity of the great. He who launches the thunderbolt guides the fire-fly; he who hurls the falling mass from the shivering Alpine summit controls the descent of the dewdrop; and he, who covereth heaven and earth with the black wings of tempest, stoops down to cherish the violet blooming amid the velvet turf.

500. Longsuffering of God, Marvel of

Ah! my brethren, can you think for a minute what you and I would do if some cruel wretches should take our children and torture them, and burn them alive; how would our wrath be up, and how would we strike in their defence! But remember that from the days of Christ until now the dear children of God, dearer to him than our children are to us. have been shut up in prison to rot, have been sawn asunder, have wandered about in sheep skins and goat skins, have been burned at Smithfield and a thousand other places, and have crimsoned the snows of the Alps with their blood; and yet God, in the great deeps of his forbearance, has been still. There has been, it is true, a vengeance in providence in the long run: the reader of history knows how God has avenged every persecution; still the recompense was slow. There were no fiery arrows to pierce Bishop Bonner, when he condemned Anne Askew; there were no immediate lightning flashes to wither Domitian or Nero when they insultingly put the people of God to death. No, the Lord bears long with them, and his longsuffering is a deep, a great deep.

501. Lord's Supper, a Bond of Union

There is something painful, but pleasing, when the father dies, for the children to come together at the funeral, and to go together to his grave. Many family heartburnings have been healed when they have joined in a memorial. The poor man's grave, especially, has much charm in it to me. There come the sons and daughters, and club together their shillings to buy the grave and to buy the coffin. Often over the rich man's grave there is a squabble as to who shall share his wealth; but there is not any in this case. The man has died penniless, and John, and Mary, and Thomas, all come; and they all see who can do the most in providing the patriarch's grave; and if there be a tombstone, it is not one that pays for it, but they all put their moneys together, so that father's memorial may be shared in by them all. How I like that thought! We being many are one bread, and we being many are one cup. Brethren, I cannot do without you. If I want to celebrate the Lord's death, I cannot go into my chamber, and take the piece of bread and the cup, and celebrate the ordinance alone. I cannot do it. I must have you; I cannot do without you. And you, the most spiritual minded of you, if you shut yourselves up in a cell, and try to play the monk and the super-excellent, cannot keep this ordinance. You must have fellowship; you must come down among the saints; for our Saviour has put this as a memorial which cannot be celebrated except jointly, by the whole together. Ye must come together to break this bread. "This do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me." Did the Master know that we should be so apt to split up into sections! Did he know that we should be so apt to be individualized till we forgot to bear one another's burdens? And did he, therefore, while he made baptism the personal, solitary confession of faith, make this communion to be a united joint memorial in order that we might be compelled to come together—might by sweet constraint be driven to meet in the same place with one accord, or else be unable to make a memorial of his death? It is a joint memorial.

502. Lord's Supper, a Means of Conversion

How often within these walls has God blessed the breaking of bread to the conversion of souls! Let me refresh the memories of such. Some of you have been looking on from these galleries; you dared not come down with the people of God, but you did not like to go away; and so you sat, and you looked on, and your mouths were watering, not for the bread and wine, but for Christ. You wanted him, and gradually you were like the robins in the cold winter's days. You first, as it were, tapped at the church's window-pane very gently, and you were afraid, and you stepped back again; but all the world was cold, and there was not a crumb for you. Then you saw the open window of a gracious promise, "Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out;" and, pressed by absolute necessity, you came to Jesus. You came into the family circle of Jesus Christ's people, and you feasted, and you are glad tonight.

503. Lord's Supper, a Place for Song When the shepherds sat down amongst the sheep they tuned their pipes, and warbled forth soft and sweet airs in harmony with rustic quietude. All around was calm and still; the sun was brightly shining, and the birds were making melody among the leafy branches. Shall I seem fanciful if I say, let us unite in a pastoral tonight? Sitting round the table, why should we not sing, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters"? If there be a place beneath the stars where one might feel perfectly at rest and ease, surely it is at the table of the Lord. Here, then, let us sing to our great Shepherd a pastoral of delight. Let the bleating of sheep be in our ears as we remember the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for his flock.

504. Lost, Christ the Saviour of the

Some whom Christ saves are lost socially. They are not mentioned in the family now. It brings such a pang to the mother's heart, such a flush to the father's cheek. They could not enter now into any respectable society; they are marked men and marked women. There are some who are lost even before the laws of the land. The hand of justice has been laid upon them, and they are under the law; they are even marked as felons, it may be. And yet the Son of Man has come to seek and to save those who are socially lost. When the gates of society are shut, the gates of mercy are not shut. When man considers the case to be utterly hopeless, and men are put as it were into, a sort of lazar-house, lest the infection should spread, Jesus walks into the lazar-house, and touches the leper, and says, "I will; be thou clean." Ye may shut them out from yourselves, but not from the Saviour. When they have come to the worst, and have run their round of dissipation, till they themselves are jaded and sick, still can the Master step in and whisper into that ear, rendered attentive by pain and sickness, and snatch the firebrand from the flame, to the glory of his own grace.

505. Lost Souls, Cry of

There was a story in the papers some time ago of a man being found dead in a ditch, who had been lying there dead for six weeks. It was said that somebody had heard a cry of "Lost, lost," but it was dark, and he did not go out to see who it was! "Shocking! shocking!" say you, and yet just the very same thing may have been done by you. There are some persons here tonight who may not cry "Lost," because they do not feel they are lost, but they are so; and will you let them die in the ditch of their ignorance? There are others who are crying, "Lost!" and who want a word of comfort; and will you let them perish in despair for the want of it? My brethren, let the needs of humanity provoke you to activity.

506. Love and Duty

Men will do far more from love than we might dare to ask as a matter of duty. Napoleon's soldiers frequently achieved exploits under the influence of fervid attachment for him, which no law could have required them to attempt. Had there been cold-blooded orders issued by some domineering officer, who said, "You shall do this, and you shall do that," they would have mutinied against such tyranny, and yet when the favourite little corporal seizes the standard, and cries, "Come on!" they will rush even to the cannon's mouth, out of love to the person of their gallant leader. This is the difference between the law and the gospel. The law says, "You shall, or you shall be punished;" but the gospel says, "I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have forgiven all your trespasses; now my love shall sweetly constrain you, and the influence of inward principle shall guide you in my ways, my law shall be Written, not upon stone, but upon the fleshy tablets of your hearts." The old covenant in all that it did only provided precepts; but the gospel provides the power to keep the precept. The old law appealed to the selfishness of our corrupt nature; the gospel appeals to the nobler instincts of a heaven-born life. The law drove us, but the gospel draws us. The law came behind us with its dog and stick, as our drovers do from the cattle markets; but the gospel goes before us, as the Eastern shepherd before his sheep, and we cheerfully follow where the gospel leads the way. This is the difference, then, between the old law and its inability to sanctify us, and the gospel and its wonderful power to purify.

507. Love, Christ Real to

Love makes the Saviour real to the heart. When I preach sometimes, and my love is cold, and my zeal is flagging, I talk about the Master as though he were but an historical personage, some one that had lived and gone; but when my heart is warm towards him, then I talk of him as though he were in the pulpit with me, as though I could see him, as though you too could see him, as though I was speaking of our own familiar friend who was here in the midst of us. Every spiritual mind knows, and I need not remind him of it, that love does realise Christ, and thus the contact which love makes between Christ and the soul is more real than any which the hand or the eye could form.

508. Love, Food of The food of love is a sense of sin, and a grateful sense of forgiveness. If you and I felt more deeply the guilt of our past lives, we should love Jesus Christ better. If we had but a clearer sense that our sins deserve the deepest hell, that Christ suffered what we ought to have suffered in order to redeem us from our iniquities, we should not be such cold-hearted creatures as we are. We are perfectly monstrous in our want of love to Christ, but the true secret of it is a forgetfulness of our ruined and lost natural estate, and a forgetfulness of the sufferings by which we have been redeemed from that condition. O that our love might feed itself and find a renewal of its strength in remembering what sovereign grace has done!

509. Love of Christ, All-embracing The saints were from the beginning joined to Christ by bands of everlasting love. Before he took on him their nature, or brought them into a conscious enjoyment of himself, his heart was set upon their persons, and his soul delighted in them. Long ere the worlds were made, his prescient eye beheld his chosen, and viewed them with delight. Strong were the indissoluble bands of love which then united Jesus to the souls whom he determined to redeem. Not bars of brass or triple steel could have been more real and effectual bonds. True love, of all things in the universe, has the greatest cementing force, and will bear the greatest strain and endure the heaviest pressure: who shall tell what trials the Saviour's love has borne, and how well it has sustained them? Never union more true than this. As the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, so that he loved David as his own soul, so was our glorious Lord united and joined to us by the ties of fervent, faithful love. Love has a most potent power in effecting and sustaining union, but never does it display its force so well as when we see it bringing the Maker into oneness with the creature, the divine into alliance with the human. This, then, is to be regarded as the day-spring of union—the love of Christ Jesus the Lord embracing in its folds the whole of the elected family.

510. Love of Christ in our Afflictions The penal result of sin Christ has exhausted; he endured it all, and now the cross that comes to you is garlanded with Jove, all over it is inscribed with lines of affection. I know that this is hard to be believed, especially while you are carrying a green cross, new to your shoulder, for this always frets the soul; it is when you become accustomed to sorrow by having borne the yoke in your youth, that you fret not and mourn not, as though some strange thing had happened to you.

511. Love of Christ to his People

There is no music in the rarest sounds compared with these three syllables, which drop from the Redeemer's lips like sweet-smelling myrrh. "Beloved!" If he had addressed but that one word to any one of us, it might create a heaven within our soul, which neither sickness nor death could mar. Let me sound the note again, "Beloved!" Doth Jesus love me? Doth he own his love? Doth he seal the fact by declaring it with his own lips? Then I will not stipulate for promises, nor make demands of him. If he loves me he must act towards me with lovingkindness; he will not smite his beloved unless love dictates the blow; he will not forsake his chosen, for he never changes. Oh, the inexpressible, the heaped-up blessednesses which belong to the man who feels in his soul that Christ has called him beloved!

512. Love of God, the Fountain of Blessing

If it would be marvellous to see one river leap up from the earth full grown, what would it be to gaze upon a vast spring from which all the rivers of the earth should at once come bubbling up, a thousand of them born at a birth? What a vision would it be! Who can conceive it! And yet the love of God is that fountain from which all the rivers of mercy which have ever gladdened our race—all the rivers of grace in time and of glory hereafter—take their rise. My soul, stand thou at that sacred fountain-head, and adore and magnify for ever and ever "God, even our Father, who hath loved us."

513. Love of Jesus increased by Service for us

It is a strange thing in human nature, that if anybody does you a kindness, you may forget him, and be ungrateful; but if you bestow a kindness on a person, you will love him and remember him. It is not the receiver generally that is certain to give the love, it is the giver of kindness who binds himself to the other. A mother must love her child because she has done so much for it; she has suffered, and she has cared so much, that she must love it. The more you have done for a person the better you love him. Now, Jesus does not love us because of any good in us, but to-day he loves us because he has done so much for us. He has taken the yoke from our necks, he has laid meat to us, he has drawn us with bands of love, and cords of a man, and having spent so much love on us, he loves us dearly. Jesus who suffered so much, is bound to us by new bonds. Calvary is not only the fruit of his love, but the root of fresh love. Another stream of love springs up at the cross foot. "I," saith the Redeemer, "can see my groans and agonies in them." He loves us because he has loved us. This thought ought to cheer us—God has done too much for us to let us perish.

"Can he have taught me To trust in his name, And thus far have brought me To put me to shame?"

514. Love to Christ Implanted by God

I once knew a good woman who was the subject of many doubts, and when I got to the bottom of her doubt, it was this: she knew she loved Christ, but she was afraid he did not love her. "Oh!" I said, "that is a doubt that will never trouble me; never, by any possibility, because I am sure of this, that the heart is so corrupt, naturally, that love to God never did get there without God's putting it there." You may rest quite certain, that if you love God, it is a fruit, and not a root. It is the fruit of God's love to you, and did not get there by the force of any goodness in you. You may conclude, with absolute certainty, that God loves you if you love God. There never was any difficulty on his part. It always was on your part, and now that the difficulty is gone from you, none whatever remains. O let our hearts rejoice and be filled with great delight, because the Saviour has loved us and given himself for us.

515. Love to Christ not Disinterested

There are two gentlemen of equal rank in society, and the one is not at all obliged to the other; now, they, standing on an equality, can easily feel a disinterested admiration of each other's character, and a consequent disinterested affection; but I, a poor sinner, by nature sunk in the mire, full of everything that is evil, condemned, guilty of death, so that my only desert is to be cast into hell, am under such obligations to my Saviour and my God. that it would be idle for me to talk about a disinterested affection for him, since I owe to him my life, my all. Besides, until I catch the gleams of his mercy and his lovingkindness to the guilty, his holy, just, and righteous character are not lovable to me, I dread the purity which condemns my defilement, and shudder at the justice which will consume me for my sin. Do not, O seeker, trouble your heart with nice distinctions about disinterested love, but, be you content, with the beloved disciple, to love Christ because he first loved you.

516. Love to God the return of his Love to us

Love to God is like a great mountain. The majority of travellers view it from afar, or traverse the valley at its base: a few climb to a halting-place on one of its elevated spurs, whence they see a portion of its sublimities: here and there an adventurous traveller climbs a minor peak, and views glacier and alp at closer range; fewest of all are those who scale the topmost pinnacle and tread the virgin snow. So in the church of God. Every Christian abides under the shadow of divine love: a few enjoy and return that love to a remarkable degree: but there are few, in this age sadly few, who reach to seraphic love, who ascend into the hill of the Lord, to stand where the eagle's eye hath not seen, and walk the path which the lion's whelp hath never trodden, the high places of complete consecration and ardent self-consuming love. Now, mark you, it may be difficult to ascend so high, but there is one sure route, and only one, which the man must follow who would gain the sacred elevation. It is not the track of his works, nor the path of his own actions, but this, "We love him because he first loved us."

517. Loveliness of Christ

I am an engraver this morning, and I seek somewhat whereon I may engrave this heavenly line. Shall I take unto me ivory or silver? Shall I borrow crystal or gold? These are too common to Dear this unique inscription: I put them all aside. Shall I spell my text in gems, with an emerald, a sapphire, a ruby, a diamond, or a pearl for each single letter? Nay, these are poor perishable things: we put them all away. I want an immortal spirit to be the tablet for my writing; nay, I must lay aside my graving tool, and ask the Spirit of God to take it: I want a heart prepared of the Holy Ghost, upon whose fleshy tablets there shall be written no other sentence than this, and this shall suffice for a right royal motto to adorn it well: "Yea, he is altogether lovely."

518. Loveliness of Christ Universal

It generally happens that to the noblest building there is an unhappy point of view from which the architecture appears at a disadvantage; the choicest piece of workmanship may not be equally complete in all directions; the best human character is deformed by one flaw, if not with more; but with our Lord all is lovely, regard him as you will. You shall contemplate him from all points, and only find new confirmation of the statement that "he is altogether lovely." As the everlasting God before the world was made, angels loved him and adored; as the babe at Bethlehem or as the man at Bethany; as walking the sea or as nailed to the cross; in his grave, dead, and buried, or on his throne triumphant; rising as forerunner, or descending a second time to judge the world in righteousness; in his shame, despised and spit upon, or in his glory, adored and beloved; with the thorns about his brow and the nails piercing his hands, or with the keys of death and hell swinging at his girdle; view him as you will, and where you will, and when you will, "he is altogether lovely." Under all aspects, and in all offices and relations, at all times and all seasons, under all circumstances and conditions, anywhere everywhere, "he is altogether lovely."