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judgment, should every work and every secret thing, whether it were good or evil, be brought to light. The Divine order was not confined within the time-limits of a human life. Death did not destroy it, was not the great anomaly. How or in what way he knew not, but all that he had felt and known of the blessedness of God's servants, of the curse in which they involve themselves who turn aside from Him, acquired an infinite depth and power for him. He had dug deep, had gone through all the crusts of sensuality, doubt, perplexity, misery, despondency, but he had come at last to a rock, and out of that rock flowed the water of life. He was content not to answer the questions which had haunted him. He turned in utter weariness from the many books and the much study in which he had expected to find an answer. Now he was following a Divine light; it was a Divine voice that he heard proclaiming to him and to all men, ‘Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.'1

It is still

inadeThis may seem to us, as I said, a very quate result, unworthy of a devout Israelite. It falls far short of the faith of David. further distant from that of a believer in the gospel. We should be tempted to look on one who declared solemnly that the experience of a long life had taught him to acknowledge the

1 Eccles. xii 12-14

sovereignty of God and the eternal law of duty as speaking the language of a heathen. For such an one we should have little hope, it may be, a harsh condemnation.

I give thanks, brethren, that the record of this book teaches us to suspend, if not to reverse, our judgment. I believe that the old man who, when his strength and his wisdom were failing him, took refuge in this hope, and rested on this truth, was better, stronger, wiser, safer,—if you like to introduce the idea of safety,-than he whom the Queen of Sheba came to visit; who poured forth that wonderful prayer at the dedication of the Temple. For great as the truths were which he proclaimed, and marvellously as he rose to the perception of their harmony with each other, there was a subtle danger in all that eloquence and skill of speech. The very act of worship might soon pass into a display of his own wisdom, not the acknowledgment of an infinite wisdom, by which he was seeking to be taught. The intellect analyses truth, and may come to look on the truths as its own creations, or they may seem unable to bear the search, and vanish like the cloud-wreaths of the morning. And so that which seemed firmly grasped will slip away from us. Because we never knew the truths in their power, because they were things for us to talk

about and boast of, we suffer the due reward of our transgressions when we find even our acts of worship full of vanities and dreams. It is a gain and blessing unspeakable when we are able once again to hold one truth firmly, and to feel that that is real, divine, eternal. Better to know that in its power than to profess a whole creed with the carelessness of a pleasure-seeker, or the keenness of a controversialist.

And the blessedness of thus apprehending any one article of faith is, that it must needs lead on to others. The words, ' Fear God, and keep his commandments,' were the simplest of all precepts, and yet one who fixed his heart on them, and strove to live in them, would find himself led perpetually into new regions of truth, new convictions of sin, new forms of holiness. To fear God, not at stated times and in solemn worship only, but evermore; at morning and at noonday and in the evening; speaking or acting; in secret thoughts and unrevealed desires; not with the false fear of a slave or hireling, but with the true loving fear of children; to feel that His commandments are 'exceeding broad;' that no man is free from them; that they give freedom, and set a man's heart at liberty, what might not these thoughts teach to the humbled and contrite heart? Would they in the end leave him so far behind? Would there

not be growth, from faith to faith, and grace to grace; a perpetual increase of light, shining more and more brightly unto the perfect day? May we not hope that it was so for the Preacher? May we not hope that it is so for those who, as he did, have turned from the true wisdom that is of God to the harlotry of sense and selfishness, and then find themselves in doubt and perplexity, and then turn with true sympathy to works of love and mercy, and then seize on one great truth, and live on it and in it? May we not hope that it will be so for ourselves, so far as our temptations of the sense or of the intellect have been like his?

Certain, at any rate, we may be, that this is the Divine method of recovery. The simplest words. which we were taught in childhood, the acknowledgment that we have a Father in heaven, that we are justified by faith, that we are reconciled by the blood of Christ,—any one of these, if we grasp it firmly, will sustain us safely, and by it we may escape from the abyss of doubt in which we have wandered-from the destruction which lies beyond it.

[Note. I may be permitted to refer to the articles ECCLESIASTES and SOLOMON, in Dr. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, for a fuller examination of the character and the book which form the subjectmatter of this sermon.]

XVIII.

THINGS NEW AND OLD.'

'Then said he unto them, Therefore every scribe, which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.'-MATT. XIII. 52.

You

will readily divine, brethren, why I have chosen these words as the starting-point for what I have to say to you at this our annual gathering. It is obvious that they have much to do with that work in which we are all of us engaged; obvious, too, that they contain a distinct lesson for both the earlier and later stages of it. They speak of the discipline by which men are made true Scribes, 'instructed unto the kingdom of heaven.' They speak also of that which comes afterwards, the work of the householder, 'who brings forth out of his treasure,' as they are wanted, the new and the old things which he has stored up there. The man who has just begun to feel conscious that he is a student, entering on his work with high purposes

1 Preached at the Annual Gathering of Theological Associates and Students, King's College, London, in 1853.