Temple "whose Temple are ye"! Yes, and what a loud call surely to the believer to exercise the most scrupulous watchfulness and vigilance, lest, in some unguarded moment, he may be led thus to inflict foul dishonour on his Lord, as well as leave some indelible stain on his own conscience: the soul, which ought to be a mirror reflecting the Saviour's image, irretrievably blurred and shattered!

We have taken the saddest phase of spiritual aberration; and even if there be no such overt, or positive act of sin, faith and love and holiness may at times be dimmed from other causes, too varied and numerous to specify, each heart, knowing its own bitterness. But, be these experiences what they may; even in the lowest extremities, "in darkness and in the deeps," cannot Hope, "the song-bird"—the nightingale of the soul,—awake its reviving melody still, as of old, amid the deepening shadows and surging waves-" Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy water-spouts : all Thy waves and Thy billows are gone over me. Yet the Lord will command His loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life. . . Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him" (Ps. xlii. 7, 8, 11). Note, it is prayer, the cry of the new creature IN CHRIST, which restores the joys of salvation. See in that allegorical picture in the Song of Songs, how the Bride found at last her long-forfeited Lord. She simply sought Him. Prayer was her resort. Leaving the

darkened city, her footsteps carry her from hill to hill, and from valley to valley, wherever she deems it likely her Gracious Shepherd may be. The cry of a broken heart is heard. But observe too, it is a cry of unquenched love (for even to the HeartSearcher she can own "whom my soul loveth") :— "Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon" (Sol. Song i. 7).

The

If any eyes, dim with sadder than tears of bereavement, trace these lines, do not despair. "Cast thy burden" (the heaviest supposable one) "on the Lord, He will sustain thee;" He will release thee. enemy may do his best to drive thee to despondency; but take our monogram, as we find it in the lips of the same Old Testament Saint-when "tears had been his meat day and night;" smarting under the cruel, yet he felt merited sarcasm, of those who said unto him, "Where is now thy God?" They with their philosophy of despair would have him leave his covenant-shelter, and like a maimed and wounded bird betake himself to other refuges. What is his answer? Confident of his position as a child of that covenant, and with his perch, though all unworthy of it, on the sheltering boughs of the Tree of Life" IN THE LORD," is his reply, "put I my trust: why say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain"? (Ps. xi. 1.)

"Oh thou of little faith, wherefore dost thou doubt?"

God will not reject the sighings and aspirations of the penitential spirit. The promise is ever sure-"They that seek shall find." It may be uphill struggle; oftbaffled purposes

"An infant crying in the night-
An infant crying for the light,

And with no language but a cry.”

It may be the efforts of the chained eagle, flapping his wings-straining his eye for blue vault and everlasting hills. But "HE satisfieth the longing soul:" and it is only one of His thousand assured promises-“ Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint" (Isa. xl. 30, 31). "The waves," says Chrysostom, "are many and the storm is furious; but I fear not to be drowned, for I stand upon a Rock." It is by more fully realising not only that we are on the Rock, but in the Rock (IN CHRIST), that the words become to us an assurance as well as a precept-"Sin shall not have dominion over you" (Rom. vi. 14). "The most effectual way in which a Christian can get the better of a particular fault, is by cultivating the root of all holiness, by endeavouring to obtain a closer union with Jesus Christ, and to acquire more of that blessed Spirit

which will enable him to conquer all his corrup

tions, and to improve and strengthen all his Christian graces." 1

"At that day," therefore, (may we once more employ the Saviour's own utterance and say)-" At that day" (the day of Faith and Love and Holiness; it may be added, the day of godly sorrow, the day which listens to the moanings of the contrite in heart), "ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye IN ME, and I in you." We may, in a similar spiritual acceptation, append words spoken by the same Divine lips at the same solemn time. What accents of comfort to every sorrowing wanderer, bewailing, through his own self-forfeiture, the loss of the Great Shepherd! "And ye now therefore have sorrow; but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you" (John xvi. 22).

1 William Wilberforce's Letter to his Son. Life of Bishop Wilberforce, vol. i. page II.

XXXI.

CONCLUSION.

"Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum."Heb. viii. I.

"Thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph IN CHRIST."- -2 Cor. ii. 14.

N this closing chapter or 'Epilogue,' we may appropriately sum up with the above comprehensive verse not yet included in our list of the Apostle's Monogram, but which seems admirably to focus, and gather into one, the preceding meditations. It is a prolonged echo of the strain now so familiar to us—“ Thanks be unto God, which ALWAYS causeth us to triumph IN CHRIST."

"Victory IN CHRIST."

"This," says the Apostle John, "is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." But faith is not an abstraction. It derives its invincible power from reposing on a living Person. The soldier on the field may have many incentives to heroic deed: the goodness of his cause, the vantage-ground he occupies, -the bravery of his comrades, the precision and