sledge-hammer, the refreshment and restoration lies in perfect rest; if I am weary with walking, the rest or refreshment would be reclining or lying down. But if my brain is weary and exhausted, how am I to rest it? That is a question I can experimentally speak of. The rest of the brain is not cessation from work, for that is more exhausting than work; but it is change of the currents of thought; that is its refreshment. If, after you have been exhausted and worn out by the excitements of thought, you say, Now I will go into the country; I will spend ten days or three weeks in perfect cessation from all thought; you will find that you are only stimulating your brain worse by the absence of thought than it is stimulated by the pressure and the presence of thought. Then how are you to rest the brain? By changing the subject of thought. Hence, when people go to different places in the country, to the sea-side, to the green fields, to the blue hills, I believe it is not that the atmospheric air of Scotland differs very much from the atmospheric air of London: chemists will tell you that when they analyze the two the difference is infinitesimal, but that the mind is occupied by a totally different subject, and its thoughts made to roll in totally different channels. What is the cause, now, of paralysis-I do not mean the only cause, but the prevailing cause of paralysis—which is now a disease so common; of lunacy, mania, or madness? It is that our thoughts constantly, without interruption, or change, rush and roll along in one channel till the brain, the channel of the thought, is exhausted and utterly worn out. No man can live long who keeps in his head-for the head, I need not tell you, is to the mind what the hand is to the body-and rushing through his brain without ceasing, one continuous current of thought, and of the same thought, and in the same channels, excited by the same objects. Unless he change, unless he bring into the channel of his brain other thoughts, he will suffer. God's ordinance for keeping man physically healthy is the Christian sab

bath. Take it in its lowest aspect, look upon it in its humblest light, and I say the Christian sabbath is to mankind physically an inestimable blessing. And, therefore, whenever the sabbath morning comes, do write upon the doors of your soul, the reverse of what you find sometimes written upon sheds in London, 66 No admission on business here." Shut the shutters of the mind and the doors of the heart with the doors of the counting-house, and let the sabbath, at all hazards, at any sacrifice, be consecrated to totally different thoughts, sympathies, and associations; the thoughts of heaven, the sense of repose, the hopes of peace, and quietness, and assurance for ever. On that day, that seems the queen of all the days of the week, the world puts on its loveliest robe, and earth its brightest sunshine; on that day, it seems to me, the earth emerges with greater freshness, and the days of the week appear crowned with their richest glory. It is the silence for a little that we may hear God speak; it is the flash of heaven's sunshine, that we may get a foretaste of that land whose sun never sets. It is an island cast into the roaring cataracts of this present world, standing upon which we can hear the chimes of heaven, see the sunshine of glory, whilst the world, and the world's torrents, rush by, neither disturbing nor disquieting those whose hearts are set upon the rest that remaineth for the people of God. The sabbath is that day when the earth has its rest; when the very sanctuary stands out from the houses in brighter and more beautiful relief; and man enjoys that respite which not only gives him an increase to his capital of physical health but inspires his heart with the hopes of the eternal rest. Is the sabbath sweet to you? Is the sanctuary dear to you? Do you really feel, when Saturday evening comes, Thank God that we have reached another stage in our journey? and can you really feel, as the hairs whiten, as the eyes grow dimmer, as the muscles grow feebler, as the step becomes more tottering, as the heart,

234

weary with the heat and the march of life, begins to stagger, and, like a muffled drum, to indicate the funeral march that leads to the grave, can you say, We thanked God when every week closed on Saturday night, and culminated in Sunday; we can thank Him still that the world's long week has closed, and that it, too, must culminate in a sabbath whose sun shall have no western setting?

LECTURE XVIII.

THE LATTER RAINS.

"And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh," &c.-JOEL ii. 28, 32.

THE reason why I think I may with profit, if it please God to give his blessing, call attention to the gift and the operations of the Holy Spirit of God is found in what we have read in the newspapers. Most of us have probably seen the striking and impressive proofs of the presence of God, in spite of the imperfections which cleave to them, that are now presented in different parts of our country. A member of my congregation, whose name I do not know, sent me a message that he would place in my hand from 50l. to 100l. to cover all expenses, if I would go to Ireland, and personally see what was going on there, and come back and state the results of my experience. I have preferred not to accept the offer; but I have done what I think is just as good. I have read almost all that has been written, at least all that I can find, or have access to; I have carefully analyzed and separated in my own mind the chaff from the wheat; and now I am persuaded, whilst there is much fanaticism; much that is of the Wicked One; much that is the imperfection of poor flesh and blood; much fever which ought not to be (and yet even fever is the evidence of life, for a dead man can have no fever); whilst, in short, there is much that true Christians must deplore; yet I am persuaded, notwithstanding, that there is the first sprinkling of the latter rains; those rains that may be looked for to precede the

glorious consummation, when the bride shall make nerself ready, and Christ shall come to be glorified in all his saints, and in them that believe. Believing this, it may be most useful if, instead of my reciting, what is stimulating, facts which I might have witnessed, or relating the story, like many excellent ministers, of what they have seen, I keep to the law and to the testimony, and show from God's own book what we may expect to be the true effects, and influence, and power, and so far the test of the presence in the church of that holy and blessed Spirit. In America, during that visitation of the Spirit of God to which I have previously referred, one single denomination in the course of some six months, I believe I am not sure of the precise time-had 136,000 added to its communion out of the world; some of them Jews, some of them Papists, many of them nothing at all; all of whom have been brought under the saving impressions apparently of the Spirit of God. An excellent minister at Belfast, whom I have the pleasure of knowing, states that in some places of worship, in Ulster, the difficulty used to be to get an attendance at all; and that now the difficulty is to find room for masses of people, and to persuade those that meet to depart when they have met. He states also that 20,000 Bibles have been sold in Ulster during six months; about double the number that had been sold in the previous year. Dr. Morgan, a most excellent minister of the Irish Presbyterian Church, and a man in whose judgment much confidence is justly reposed, states his belief that it is at least an extraordinary work of divine grace; that thousands and tens of thousands throughout Ireland are gathering to divine ordinances who spent the day in pleasure, in worldly amusement, and something worse. The Bishop of Down and Connor, the last man in the world that I should expect to have been carried away by any wave of excitement, a man of intense coolness, sobriety, and intelligence, states in the strongest terms his belief in the divinity of this work. A nobleman