Such is the picture of what shall take place in reference to God's ancient people when Christ returns to reign.

Such too is our blessed hope. Let me ask, do our hearts ever lean heavenward? If these things be so, should not heaven, and by heaven I mean that future glory, have a larger place in and a firmer hold of our hearts? Do not think that to make money, and to get rich, or to be powerful, or to be exalted, is the end of your existence. Man's joy is always in proportion to the magnitude and the grandeur of the hope that he cherishes. If then your hope be an earthly good, your joy must be an earthly joy; and a joy that fails when the goodness fails: but if your hope be everlasting, inexhaustible, heavenly, then the joy that you feel will rise to the greatness of the hope, and will endure for ever. The joys of this world are like streams on the earth, that are full in summer when the shower falls, but are soon dried up, and leave their channels bare. But the joys that the hope of Christ inspires are like those streams that flow from the avalanches on the Alps, that are fullest, and coolest, and sweetest when all other streams are dried up. Set therefore your affections upon things above, where Christ is. Let us rejoice to learn this-if we suffer with him by his appointment, we shall also reign with him; if we bear our cross because he has given it, we shall wear the crown that he will bestow upon us; and if we are suffering with Christ, and suffering for Christ's sake, and in a cause that he has consecrated and that we feel to be divine, it is not man, but inspiration that says, "Our light afflictions, which are but for a moment, work out for us a far more exceeding, even an eternal weight of glory; and our sufferings now are not worthy to be compared with the glory which is to be revealed." Seeing all these things which are visible must be dissolved, let me add in the language of Peter, when he says, "The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

People find fault when one writes or prints or preaches these things; but it is not the preacher you should find fault with, but Peter; and not Peter, but Peter's Lord : the time when they shall be is a subject of fair discussion, and on which Christians may differ and do differ; but the fact that it will be is not a matter of discussion, it is a matter of revelation; Peter says so. But what is his inference? "Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness; looking for," instead of deprecating or deploring that day, and wishing that that day would not come when the earth shall undergo this fiery baptism, Peter says that we ought to look for it; "what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat." What makes him look to such a dreadful catastrophe without terror? He tells you in the next verse: "We, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”

LECTURE XXXV.

THE LAST WARNING CRY.

On the eve of the final fall of the great western apos tacy, a voice from heaven is re-echoed from earth urging all God's people to escape, lest they perish.

"I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues."-REV.

xviii. 4.

THESE words constitute the warning cry that precedes the nearing and final desolation of the great Apostacy, the features and the characteristics of which have been so vividly delineated in the three or four previous chapters. I believe that these words constitute the solemn cry addressed at the moment that now sweeps past us to increasing thousands brought within its reach, in every province, diocese, parish, and department of the Roman Catholic Church. And it is as such, as the special and the characteristic voice of the age, that I take it from the chapter, and refer to the great and important truths which it seems to me to embody.

First of all, we read in this verse of the sins of Babylon. It would take hours to enumerate the sins that cleave to that system, or to denounce, in terms worthy of the subject, the blood of martyrs by which her robes, in every century and in every section of the globe, have been deeply stained. On these I shall not dwell, but I will allude to two or three of the spiritualif I may use such an epithet at all—of the spiritual sins

or errors by which that Church is branded at the present moment. First of all, her sins, or her sin, is committed against God the Father. To hold the name of God does not always imply that he who subscribes to the creed that defines his attributes believes in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. If I instance the predominant and the most prominent characteristic of the Church of Rome, it is, that she has lost all true apprehension of God as our Father. She may repeat a thousand Pater Nosters with the lip, but the magnificent petition, "Our Father," is altogether strange to her heart, and yet stranger to her system. Some Protestants, I fear, share so far in her sins; and sharing in the sin they may, unless they repent, partake also of the judgments of Babylon. These men who think that God loves us because Christ died for us may be in a Protestant Church, but they are essentially sharing in the sin, and they may partake in the judgments of Rome. The Church of Rome holds not in theory, but in the practical development of her creed, that God is an angry, implacable, revengeful tyrant; that He needs to be propitiated by victims offered on his altars every day, by sufferings inflicted by priests or penitents; and that after you have done all that human nature can do to propitiate this Being, lest you escape without his exacting the least atom and element of punishment, you are sent to a region called Purgatory, where the sins that God would not or could not forgive are burned out by purgatorial fire. Such a notion of God is just as opposite to the portraiture of that God who is revealed in the Bible as darkness is to light. If I understand the God of the Bible, He is One, not who loves me because Christ died for me, but who so loved me, that as the expression of that love, He gave Christ to die for me, and that He waits to be gracious; that He needs nothing to be suffered by me, nothing to be paid on my account, to love me; that the only obstruction to my instant pardon, instant peace, instant joy, is not in God, but wholly and exclusively in me.

should

In other words, I feel that the invitation of the Bible is to come to God at once through Christ, and see and find in him my Father. But in the Church of Rome you must keep at a distance, wait at this stage, suffer at that stage, invite or entreat an angel to help you at another stage, implore a saint to help you at another, bid a priest offer a sacrifice here, and another there, buy or earn an indulgence at Rome; and when you have paid all, and suffered all, and sacrificed all, you must still descend into a realm where it depends upon the mercy of a priest on earth, not upon the mercy of our God in heaven, how long you will be tortured in flame, till you are made fit for heaven, and God consents to receive you. Is that the God of the Bible at all? Is it not a God that may head an Apostacy, but not that God to whom we say "Our Father," and who does not wait till we come all the way to Him, but rushes forth upon the wings of love, falls upon the penitent mid-way, and whilst the penitent is expecting indignation, he finds that God has been preparing for him, before he believed, the great festal supper, the bridal robe, the ring for his finger, the music that bids him welcome home.

In the second place, this system sins against God the Son. Let any man read the most popular books of devotion that are authorized by that Church, and he will find how grievously it sins against God the Son. The Pope arrogates his Crown, the priests assume a monopoly of his Cross, the saints in heaven, imaginary as often as real, are made participators of his mediation, and whilst Christ is theoretically acknowledged, he is practically dislodged, displaced, and degraded. Of course, if I were speaking to a Roman Catholic, I would not say that in your creed you dogmatically do so; but I would prove to him, that inferentially and practically this is the characteristic of that system. I give you one single instance of the awful transference of what belongs to Christ to a creature in this simple fact. This very year 1860, whilst spending a few weeks on the Continent of Europe, I made it a rule to seek out an