-life in the best sense. Some kinds of existence are hardly to be called life: but what shall that be when the saints are partakers of their Lord's resurrection? when they shall know Him as the resurrection and the life? when they shall have access to the tree of life, and shall drink of the river of water of life? when soul and body shall exhibit all the freshness, vigour, and joy of everlasting life?

What promise ever fell more acceptably on the ear of a perishing world than this: "I am the Life?" Nothing about you that is good and worthy need die. Your tastes, friendships, aspirations, shall be all immortal. Do you suffer under any thing which appears to you inconsistent with that life which you would fain enjoy? Does poverty hamper you? Does sickness oppress you? Are you divided by distance from those you love, or by the inscrutable barrier of the grave? Do . the springs of life seem drying up within you? Are you losing your relish for pleasures, has your step less elasticity, have your spirits less freshness? Does life pall on you? Can you find little to interest you, and are you tempted to complain that your day is over? Yet it need not be so. If you can secure a place in Him, the Way, can make good your standing in Him, you shall find Him Life to you.

The true Christian, spite of obstacles, and reverses, and disappointments, has new and inward sources of joy and refreshment opened to him. Christ is "in him a well of water, springing up into everlasting life"." He does not want novelties or extraordinary advantages to interest him. "He that hath the Son hath life"."

5 John iv. 14.

"This is life eternal, that they

6 1 John v. 12.

might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent".

God's gifts go together. What were truth without life? What were life, without truth? They cannot be disjoined. Whoso hath truth, hath God. Whoso hath God, hath truth. And so with life. Whoso lives, in a real sense, must live in God. Whoso has God, has thereby everlasting life. The way is truth to us and life. O brethren, God grant that we may know His dear Son in all His fulness, as He desires to make Himself known to us!

'

There is not one here present to whom He would not willingly be the Way, the Truth, the Life. O how can He be less than Divine who thus speaks? "No man cometh unto the Father but by me." "I am the way." Who but God could be this to one man, not to say to all the myriads of the redeemed? Lastly, brethren, remember that the Saviour spoke these words when He had just instituted the Sacrament of His Body and Blood; and so His words point us there, where we shall find Him ready to make them good, ready to reveal Himself to us in all His offices, to make us follow Him as the Way, be enlightened by Him as the Truth, enjoy Him as the Life. Not a revelation on His part but claims corresponding acknowledgments and duties from us on our part. As He is the Way, He claims that we should trust Him, cleave to Him, hold fast to Him, abide in Him, that we may be found in Him. As He is the Truth, He expects us to learn from Him, to bring all things to the test of His word, to have no faith in any other

7 John xvii. 3.

enlightenment, to put no confidence in any other projects for enlightening the world, but in those afforded by Him through His Gospel and Church; and as He is the Life, He bids us come with a glad heart, seek to religion for our joys and hopes, not look at it as a necessity from which we dare not escape, but as the life of our life, our soul's best and truest life.

O may He never say of us, "Ye will not come unto me that ye may have life!" but may we know Him, every day, more firmly as the Way, increasingly as the Truth, more enjoyably as the Life-we that have souls to be saved, minds to be fed, spirits to be recruited-we that are made to rest in God, to know truth, and to enjoy life. Brethren, I am confident that the most genial among you has not enjoyed life as he may enjoy it, for there is no lasting, worthy enjoyment of it separate from God, from Christ, who is your life. The wisest has not known truth when he has sought it by his own powers, instead of receiving it as a child. The most energetic has made no progress, till he found the way. He is the Way.

He is truth-the Truth. He is life-the Life.

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, LONDON.

VICTORY SURE BUT GRADUAL

DEUTERONOMY vii. 22.

"And the Lord thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee."

(From the First Evening Lesson for the Fourth Sunday after Easter.) THESE chapters of the Book of Deuteronomy, if they are read with the slightest thought and seriousness, cannot fail to be regarded as far more than historical. They speak to us. They were written for our learning. All the Scriptures of the Old Testament were so. Even where it is least obvious, the lesson they contain (could we but read it) is still for us. But the history of the Israelites scarcely needs comment. We can scarcely miss the truths it teaches, the warnings it utters, the encouragements it suggests.

All the later revelations of God are there shadowed forth by anticipation,-the natural condition of man, his bondage under sin, the misery of that state, the cruel hardness of the tyrant whose yoke he bears, the helpless groaning under that oppression which he abhors, but from which he cannot, even in hope, set himself free.

We see the wonderful goodness of God in sending deliverance to the captive: first, to the world generally in its redemption by the death and passion of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and then more particularly to those individuals of the human race, who have believed and been baptized into Christ's Name. These [No. 30.]

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are placed in a new relation to God, like the Israelites when baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea', and are made partakers of special blessings.

The next stage in the parallel is that which follows the passage of the sea, that which follows the general Redemption, and the individual Baptism, and ushers the nation into the waste and dreary wilderness, or (at a later point) into the wars and temptations of Canaan, the Church or the Christian into the anxieties and struggles of a life-long pilgrimage through this world. There is the revelation of God's will, the law given on Sinai, figuring the Christian's law, which is the word and example of Christ. There are the wonderful supports vouchsafed by God to Israel, the manna, and the water from the rock, typifying the means of grace which God has provided for us in the ordinances of Christian worship, and the possession of those better oracles of which our Lord says, "They are spirit, and they are life." There is the guidance of the pillar of cloud and of fire, representing the inward direction of the Holy Spirit of God.

And then, amidst all these tokens of the Divine care and presence, there is also the sad record of human perverseness and sin; the murmurings, and the regrets, and the misgivings, and the backslidings, the sins, open and secret, the evil lustings, the impure acts, the idolatries and apostasies, by which during forty years the Israelites, true types of the men of every age and land, tempted and provoked God in the desert-records of sin, and therefore also of displeasure and judgment. Again and again was the heavy wrath of God against sin

1 1 Cor. x. 2.

2 John vi. 63.