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HEART-TREASURE.

A GOOD MAN, OUT OF THE GOOD TREASURE OF THE HEART, BRINGETI FORTH GOOD THINGS.-MATT. KIL. 35.

OUR Divine Teacher, like a skillful alchemist, extracts the pure gold of wholesome doctrine from common objects and occurrences. From material water, He discourses on the spiritual water of life. From natural bread, He ascends to soul-nourishing conferences on His own flesh and blood, that living Bread which came down from heaven. Passing through vineyards, He improves the opportunity to speak of Himself as the true Vine, and of those saints that are really grafted into Him, and bring forth corresponding fruit. Thus also, in my text, he takes an occasion of uttering precious medicinal truths, from the poisonous blasphemies of the Scribes and Pharisees. He had just cast out a blind and dumb devil. This glorious miracle produced very different effects on different individuals. On the person possessed, it wrought soundness; on the people, amazement; on the Pharisees, madness and blasphemy, insomuch that they charge God himself with imposture. To

these last our Lord directs the discourse in which the text occurs. He refates their unfounded calumny by clear arguments, demonstrating His divine power in the miracle. He exposes, moreover, the heinous criminality of the slander; and exhorts them to repentance, in the most earnest and solemn manner; urging them to conceive more correctly of divine works, and to speak of them more reverently; sinee for every idle, much more blasphemous expression, they must give account in the day of judgment.

In the course of this exhortation, He shows that thoughts are the first-born of the heart, the fountain from which all outward expressions flow. Words are bat the echo of the language of the heart. There may be much in the heart which is never attered by the hips; but nothing can fall from the latter which has not its origin in the former; for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." This He illustrates by the metaphor of a treasure laid up in the heart, from which good and evil men bring forth respectively good and evil things. To the first part of this similitude alone--the heart-treasure of the good man- the present examination relates. A brief explanation of the terms in which it is expressed, may assist in forming a corrcet view of its import.

This treasure is described as the property of a

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