voices, yet with stuff in them of noble texture, shut up to a nursery through the prime of their days. Some longing, pining, panting for a work they love, bound to a work they loathe. Some with a genial, generous, royal nature, wrestling with the serpents of care and penury their long life through. "This is a mad world, my masters;" "the times are out of joint ;" it is all out of joint everywhen and everywhere! "No man hath hired us "" to the work which we are fit for; a glorious wealth of being, of power, is left to "fust in us unused." Patience, brothers, patience! One grand work, the grandest, spreads broad and fair before you: "in your patience possess ye your souls." The hiring is in higher, wiser hands; the patience, the hope are in yours, with all their glorious eternal fruit. None of the sighing, none of the groaning, none of the desire and yearning of your spirit, is hidden from Him who made you, and who in His own good time will call you to your God-ordained work. "UNTO THIS LAST WILL I GIVE, EVEN AS UNTO THEE reveals the sublime equity of His dealings. Await with strong patience, with steadfast hope, the things and the times of His sovereign appointment; till you find with profound and wondering joy, that your patience has won a prize whose splendour outshines the constellations, and whose bliss shall outlast eternity.

IV.

LAW AND LIFE.

"In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be."-ECCLES. xi. 3.

THERE are few passages in the word of God which are more constantly misapplied than this. It is systematically wrested to the establishment of doctrines with which it has nothing whatever to do. The popular interpretation of the text treats it as equivalent to the assertion, that the condition of the human soul through its long eternity is settled absolutely and irrevocably by death. We believe that nine out of ten, of those who hold this doctrine, would quote this passage if they were suddenly asked to sustain their belief out of the word of God. With the truth of the doctrine in question, we are not dealing in the present discourse; there are passages in the word of God which bear on it with most unquestionable cogency. But this is not one of them. present purpose is to show what it does mean, and that its reference is to a subject which is well nigh as far removed from that on which it is supposed to bear as the poles.

Our

We approach a dread, an awful subject, when we contemplate the condition of those who pass into the unseen world impenitent and faithless, who despise finally, as far as we can trace, the riches of the mercy and the love of God. It is a subject which is occupying the most earnest and solemn thoughts of some of the wisest of our Christian thinkers, and on which a large freedom of judgment will have to be conceded within the visible pale of the Christian Church. It is easy to state the doctrine of universalism, and to offer it as a solution of the dark difficulties with which the subject is surrounded.

But it is not easy to get the doctrine of universalism out of the Bible; nay it is not possible, without grievous violence to some of its plainest and most awful statements: nor, on the other hand, is it easy to harmonize it with any intelligent conceptions of the moral freedom and responsibility of every child of the human race. Others seek refuge, for it is as a refuge that they appear to cling to it, in the theory of annihilation-that is, the annihilation on a vast scale of that which God made to be His masterpiece, which He constituted in His own image, and into which He infused by inspiration the breath of His own. life. More grievous violence must be done to the plain language of Scripture by the advocates of this theory than by those of the former; and it seems to us still harder to find for it a place in any intelligent and harmonious conception of the scheme on which God made the worlds.

Were it possible for us to hold it, it would seem to unfold a terrible vision of the issue of the great experiment of creation. The free beings whom God made to be the glory of His universe, dropping down in throngs, after a life struggle full of anguish and despair, into the darkness of the everlasting night! One would be tempted to ask passionately in that case, Why was not the dire experiment of liberty ended in the hour of the first transgression? why was not the free universe, parent of such wrongs and miseries, strangled in its birth?

Nor may we dare to hide from ourselves and others, in these days, the dread considerations involved in the doctrine which the Church has drawn from explicit statements in the word of God. Eternal punishment; eternal suffering in the universe; moans rising up ever in the ear of heaven; the cries of souls in anguish piercing the serenity of the heavenly rest. Eternal evil too. Evil never more to die out of the worlds on which the dew of the primal benediction lay, and which flashed back the smile of Him who looked upon them and saw that "they were very good." The curse rioting, sin

reigning unto death, in some region of the universe sustained and ruled by the Divine hand; never to be expelled from the creation, never to be drawn under the merciful reign of God. We are too prone to hide the awful reality which is behind this language, by vague notions of the judgment as the final banishing of evil from the sight of God and of the blessed. Nothing that is can be banished from the sight of God; nothing that existswe will not say lives, life is a sacred word—can exist from moment to moment without the interposition of the Divine hand. Ever present before the great Father must be the anguish and the moans of the souls in torment; ever to His eye there must be this dark counterfoil to the joy and glory of the redeemed. And yet the question. forces itself upon us: what else can the plain statements of the Scriptures mean, nay what else can in the essential nature of things befall a free spirit that chooses to exercise its freedom in sin? We may well feel with a wise one of old, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for us: it is as high as heaven, what can we do? it is as deep as hell, what can we know?"

Sore difficulties beset us in working out a clear and harmonious theory of the judgment and its issues. But blessed be God that we can rest in the belief that all will be, in ways that we see not, so wisely and righteously ordered by the Judge of all the earth, as to satisfy the yearning heart, not of the great Father only, but of the Redeemer of humanity, and to fill the universe with praise. Here as elsewhere, when we are bewildered and perplexed by thoughts too high for us and which reach too far, we find a sure refuge and rest in faith. We believe God in Christ, and we can leave our future and the future of humanity in His hand. Meanwhile, our work, our duty is clear: "Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God." "This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent." "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus

Christ." "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved."

But this is beside the scope of the present discourse. I have to consider what these words, so strangely misapplied, do mean, and to draw from them those most pregnant lessons concerning the conduct of life which they are intended to afford. "Cast thy bread upon the waters for thou shalt find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth. If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be. He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all. In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good."

I. The key to the passage, the broad idea which underlies the whole, is in the first verse. In the sixth verse the writer repeats the thought under a varied form, and it is evident that it rules the whole. Let us ask ourselves what it means. It is a fair question whether we have here a reference to a popular proverb descriptive of the most useless and apparently hopeless work, "casting bread upon the waters," or whether there is a reference to Egyptian husbandry, which might seem just as futile a method, did not experience prove that a harvest of splendid abundance is the well-nigh certain result. I do not think that it is needful to settle the rival claims of the two interpretations,* inasmuch as the essential point of the author's meaning

* Those who wish to settle the critical question will find ample help in Dr. Ginsburg's learned and exhaustive "Commentary on Ecclesiastes." (Longmans, 1861.)