SERMON XVII.

HEAVENLY DISCIPLINE.

PROVERBS XVii. 3.

"The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the Lord trieth the hearts."

(Twenty-sixth Sunday after Trinity.—Morning.)

You remember that the figure here employed is no uncommon one in the word of God. Of necessity, the idea is of frequent occurrence; and it is not difficult to see that the similitude is strikingly appropriate. The land of Egypt is called by Jeremiah the "iron furnace" in which God's people were humbled and chastened for a time, that they might learn their lessons of faith and patience, and that the name of Jehovah might be magnified among the heathen when the time of deliverance should come. Sometimes the work of judgment is compared to the melting process; words of awful strength are heaped up to signify the kindling of God's anger against a people on whom lighter

chastisements had been tried in vain. "Son of man," was His message to Ezekiel, "the house of Israel is to me become dross; all they are brass and tin and iron and lead in the midst of the furnace. As they gather silver and brass and iron and lead and tin into the midst of the furnace, to blow the fire upon it to melt it, so will I gather you in mine anger and in my fury, and I will leave you there, and melt you." Sometimes the purifying process is the thing pointed at; the work of chastening goes on, but all for good; there are sterling qualities, answering to the precious ore, which come out the purer and the brighter for correction opportunely given, and tempered all the while with fatherly love and tenderness. "Now

for a season, writes St. Peter to the scattered and persecuted Christians whom he had known and taught, "ye are in weakness through manifold temptations, that the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ." One other passage we must not omit,that in which the last of the Prophets describes the coming Saviour, forewarning the ancient Church that, in the new Dispensation, as in the old one, God would make search for iniquity, and that the peculiar people must be a holy people to the end of time; "Who may abide the day of His coming? and who may stand when He approacheth? for He is like a refiner's fire, and like fuller's soap; and

He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; and He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.

In the same strain speaketh the wise King of Israel, but with almost epigrammatic force and point," The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the Lord trieth the hearts." However we may forget God, He "is not far from every one of us. It is not more certain that His presence pervades the Universe, than that a work is going on in relation to every living man of which the design is to raise him from the gross world of sense to the higher and nobler world of faith. We may lose sight of this great fact in our moral history; most men, alas! in their busy or their prosperous times, do lose sight of it; but it is as real as any thing else that concerns them ; -as real as the house they dwell in,—the friends they mingle with, -the prizes for which they have contended most earnestly, or the losses which have filled their souls with anguish.

If any thoughtful man reviews his course from childhood to youth,-from youth to early manhood, -then from the days in which the full responsibilities of life began to be felt to those in which they have become serious and weighty almost to painfulness, or again from that busy anxious time to a later stage when he begins to look for quiet and repose, and finds that his friends no longer miss him as once they did, if he stands aside, and

lets the stream of working life rush on as it will,— he will find a hundred things, more or less memorable, which have helped to make him what he is. Teachers selected by others,-friends won by himself,-familiar companions whom he never sought, but who have clung to him for evil or for good,— changes of residence, involving new intimacies or dissolving old friendships,―strange accidents altering the whole complexion of his daily life,-books that have challenged him in God's name, like a living Prophet, or lured him with the music of pleasant words to hurtful error,-all these will rise up in vision before him, as he looks back and reckons what hath been gained and lost and done and suffered; and to many events and persons he will be able to assign some specific influence in moulding his mind and character to their present shape.

But the mistake of numbers is to view this array of bygone incidents as if they had been disposed at random,—to overlook God's guiding and controlling hand, and to speak of life as if it had been a succession of lucky chances, a maze without a plan, a sum total of minute details which happened in a certain order, but might as easily have happened in any other. Really, however, behind all these appearances there hath been an invisible Worker who led them hither and thither,-sent friends to help them, and permitted seducers to try their integrity, gave them a chequered experience, marked with some calamities and many blessings,-all, that

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they might know what the world is, and what they themselves are, and might come with yearning hearts to the "Fountain of living waters." Lord has been "trying their hearts" though they knew it not; and His purpose, as in the case of the wandering tribes who spent those forty years between Egypt and Canaan, has been to "prove" them by the way, and to "do them good in their latter end." Miracles and Prophets were not wanted. They have found no deliverance like that which formed the theme of Miriam's song, nor seen plagues among them like that which thinned the camp of Israel by thousands in a day. But the world was His all the while, and He shaped and ruled it at His pleasure. From point to point an unseen Hand has guided them, and stage by stage a sleepless Eye has watched them, so that in their loneliest times they were not actually deserted, and, when they were least conscious of external pressure, they were not wholly free.

Now all this is admitted at the great turning points of our career. Let some calamity come upon us which drives us to solitude and lonely musings,—something which darkens our homes, or brings suddenly to an end some of our most cherished purposes, and we say at once, (if there be not a lack of religious feeling amounting to downright profaneness) that God is dealing with us then. Christian friends come in, perhaps, and offer timely counsel. Some will use Solomon's figure, it may