"stumble" on those "dark mountains." The day of disease will come; the premonitory symptoms of your coming dissolution will arise. By-and-by the joy of life will be shadowed over. By-and-by, the light will grow dim. The thin grandeur of a fading world will soon begin to pass away! Your poor

heart will grow more and more solitary, as it takes its journey along the way of life. And all around you the gloom will grow thicker, and your "feet" will begin to "stumble upon the dark mountains." By-and-by, as you lie upon a dying bed, this awful thought will sound like a death-knell of despair in your ears, my brother: I have lived for the world; but I have lost it; I HAVE LIVED FOR THE WORLD; BUT I HAVE LOST IT!"

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Then the last moment comes,—the awful, crushing, overwhelming sense of danger. Then the frantic look of despair: a "look for light." O for one solitary ray of that "light" which once dawned into my heart! but the very moment while the eye is strained,-while it scans the horizon for one ray of "light"-that very moment God turns it into "gross darkness;" and the Lord's "flock"-the boy that attended the Sunday School,-the member of a Christian congregation who sat in his place at church, the respected member of society, that people always had a kind word to say about; but the man or the woman who lived without God in the world," the Lord's flock goeth into captivity."

"If ye will not hear Me," saith God, "Mine eyes shall weep sore, and run down with tears." O Thou Son of God! Thou hadst "tears" for lost Jerusalem, hast Thou not "tears" for a lost soul? Thou didst cry in the agony of Thy broken purpose (shall we say ?) "If thou hadst known, even thou in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace." And as Thou didst say the words, blessed Jesus, the tears streamed down Thy face. Hast Thou not "tears" for lost souls? Lo! I set before you this night the way of life and the way of death. Make up your minds, in God's name I charge you make up your minds, which way you will choose!

III.

"See Thy Way in the Dalley."

"For though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much sope, yet thine iniquity is marked before Me, saith the Lord God. How canst thou say, I am not polluted, I have not gone after Baalim? See thy way in the valley, know what thou hast done."-JEREMIAH ii. 22, 23.

IT

T seems almost incredible, that the children of Israel should ever have supposed themselves to be in the position which is indicated in this expostulation of their Divine Ruler. When we look at the page of sacred history, and contemplate the actual state of things at the time when the people are represented as denying, with the air of injured innocence, the charge laid against them, we are at a loss to understand how they could be so blind to themselves, so spiritually darkened, as to listen with no blush of self-condemnation to the words which had been put by God's prophet into their own mouths. I cease to wonder, when I use my faculties of observation, and behold how in our own day men trifle with truth, which one would think must bring conviction home to their hearts. I know of nothing more astounding than the power which the human heart possesses of deceiving itself.

It is not very long since-at the conclusion of a meeting held in my own parish, I was endeavouring to enter into conversation with some of the people who lingered behind. Amongst others, there was a poor woman, whose whole face showed a life of sin. You could not look at her countenance without seeing what her life had been. I said to her, "Do you think you are a sinner?" She replied, with a self-complacent air, "I don't think I am, in any particular sense of the word. I don't see that I am any worse than other people. don't see that I need call myself a sinner at all." I discovered not long after, that that woman was known, throughout the district, as about the worst woman in it. You could hardly name a sin which she had not committed.

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A minister of the gospel, a friend of mine, went to see a man who was lying on his dying bed, and the first question he asked him was, My friend, do you feel yourself to be a sinner?" "I do not think I do," was the reply. “What, have you never committed any sin ?" "I don't know that I have, he said. "Do you mean to say you have never sworn in your life?" 'Well, yes, now and then I may have sworn, or used a naughty word." "Have you never got drunk in your life?" he was asked. "I am afraid I have," the man replied, 66 now and then." "Have you never broken the Lord's day?" "I suppose I have, like other people." "I don't think I need go any further," said my friend, "we have a clear case against you.'

You say these were very ignorant people. They did not know what they were saying. My friends, the thing that astonishes me most is, that it is not so much poor ignorant people, who have never had any evangelical teaching, and whose whole life has tended to darken their understanding; but it is our respectable people who come to church, and sit under an evangelical ministry, who are so blinded that their hearts never seem to feel their need of the blood of Christ. The thing that surprises me most is, how these people when they talk about themselves, disclose the latent self-complacency, and self-righteousness, which lurks under the very admission which orthodoxy extorts from their lips. You would be considered very unorthodox, a very heretical kind of person, if you made any such assertion as this: "I do not believe I have ever committed a sin." Religious society expects it of you that you should be ready enough with the admission,O yes, we are all sinners." There is nothing easier than to get people to say that. A man shall say that with no blush on his cheek; no burden on his heart; and the very next moment he shall add something to undo the admission he has made. A man will say, "I am a sinner; but I am no worse than other people. I am a sinner; but then, I am doing the best that I can." "The best that you can do!" Very well, then, you are the highest saint that ever walked this earth. In the whole course of human history, I only know of One who did the best he could; and that was not John the Baptist, nor Elijah the prophet, nor Enoch; nor any other of God's holy saints. These men would have all confessed they were "vile sinners." But there was One Man who did actually

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the very best he could do. If you began with His history at Bethlehem, and followed it out to Olivet, you would never have found a single point in which it could have been improved upon, or one thing He could have done that He did not do; or one thing that He did, that He might have left undone. Absolute perfection was once, and only once, exhibited amongst us; and you, my dear friend, when you make the assertion that you are doing the best you can do at that very moment dare to put yourself, side by side, with the immaculate Lamb of God. For if you have really done the best you can you have done what Christ did, and you and the Lord are rivals in point of perfection! O when will men learn to say the true thing, instead of self-complacently telling that fearful lie-they have done the best they can! When will they smite upon their breasts, and say, "My God! I have done the worst I could do. I can do nothing worse than sin against Thee,— and I have done that. I can do nothing worse than lay up for myself a sure and certain store of retribution from the justice and equity of Almighty God,-and I have done that. I can do nothing worse than bring myself within a step of the very gate of everlasting destruction, the very gate of hell, and I have done that. And if God does not save me, I am lost for ever."

Now, in this passage of Scripture, God undertakes to expostulate with His people. He finds them priding themselves on, and surrounding themselves with, an edifice of selfrighteousness, a refuge of lies. The voice of God thunders forth this enquiry, if by any means He may awaken Israel to a consciousness of their sins. Oh! that that same Voice may sound in our midst to-night; if not with the thunders of the inspired prophet, yet in the power of the same Spirit through which he spake. Oh! that God Almighty may tear the blind from your eyes, and hold up the mirror of truth before your vision, and give you to see yourself as you actually

are.

There is something pathetic in the reference here to Israel of old. God looks at what they were, and contrasts them with what they might have been. "Yet"-although thou art what thou art-" yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed; how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto Me?"

Here is, first of all, an assertion, and then an enquiry. The assertion is that God has done His part, and done it per

fectly well. And when we look back at the origin of human history, the man that God first created was indeed "a noble vine," reflecting the goodness of his Maker; glorious, in the perfection of those attributes that belonged to his Almighty author, the reflex image of God. Then look at what man has made himself. Turn over the page of history, and behold a Cain with the brand of hell upon his brow, and the darkness of hell overshadowing his heart, and the genius of Satan perverting his nature. We see that man coming forth from the presence of God, the image is marred, the thing is ruined! Lo, we see a man standing before us, reflecting the malignity of the devil himself; his hands are red with the blood of his brother; his heart is inspired with the malignity of hell. Mark the contrast. Compare Adam as he was, with what Cain became; and we naturally ask ourselves, how came it to pass ? God did not make Cain so. God originally created man a noble being; but, says He, "How art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine!"

I am not going to spend time in enlarging upon this. I have already pressed it upon your attention; but by way of confirmation, I want you to see the order in which God puts it. As I said the other night, the true root of all lies in the apostacy of the human heart from God: that leads to moral corruption; the result is bringing forth evil deeds. And here we have the same lesson. The root-cause of all this transformation from good to evil, from blessedness to sin, lies in that word "strange." It is" a strange vine" that brings forth "the degenerate plant." Alienated from God, turned aside from original connection with Him, it becomes degenerate, and throws out degenerate offshoots.

The question God asks here, and that question will be asked by His Holy Spirit of all our consciences, sooner or later, if it has not been asked already is, "How hast thou become what thou art?" What art thou? A child of this world,a sinner ready to perish,-with a hardened heart, with a depraved will, with desires that turn downwards instead of God-wards.

There you are, my dear friends. Don't conceal yourself from yourself. How have you become so? Did God make you so? Thou art become-not what God made thee, but what the devil has turned thee into. Now God looks at thee, as thou art, and expostulates with thee. Is there any wisdom