contrary notwithstanding.

Say to your soul, "There He

is, and I am in the middle of an awful turmoil and conflict, and it just seems as though it were utterly impossible to do anything but to go down. But here He is. Thou dost find thyself this morning, notwithstanding all these drawbacks, in the house of God, in the place of prayer, where Christ is with us.

Soul, go to Him. Leave all and clutch Him. You will not stick in the middle as Peter did. One bold little push, man, and you are in His arms. Take the first step, and the grace that enables you to take the first step clear of self, clear of unbelief, will hold you up till eternity's end. There is no doubt about it. He who begins has, in the beginning, the pledge of the ending, for it is Christ who begins in us. What are we afraid of? Why is it that we doubt? Why is it that we have no faith?

Again, I say, the Master's word is "Come;" and the great Day will show this-that all human speech has just run itself up into "Yea, yea," in answer to Christ's "Come," or a dour, dogged, hell-bound "Nay, nay." All speech has that in it-"Yes,

"'O Lamb of God, I come,'

or else, "No," kept back either by fear or whatever it be. And in the day for which all other days were made, God Himself will only have two utterances. One utterance will be the re-echoing, the final utterance of that: "Come, ye blessed;" Or else the thunder tone of the other word: "Depart, ye cursed."

The Lord bless to us this brief study of His Word. What

shall we sing to close with? I am a little puzzled. Shall we sing

"Come, Thou long expected Jesus"?

It is past three o'clock in the morning, and it is a wild time: and I am greatly needing Thee.

Shall we sing that with Charles Wesley?

sing with Charlotte Elliot,

"Just as I am without one plea,

But that Thy blood was shed for me,

And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,

O Lamb of God, I come"?

Or shall we

Well, we cannot sing both, and I think that the latter is

the only one in our book.

May God give us grace to sing

it and to do it. Amen.

Henderson & Spalding, General Printers, Marylebone Lane, London, W.

THE RICH MAN AND LAZARUS.

A Sermon

PREACHED AT REGENT SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,

BY THE

REV. JOHN MCNEILL.

TEXT -Luke xvi. 19 to 31.

IN preaching from this subject, my friends, I shall be careful to avoid suggesting that the teaching of the parable is "Woe to the rich" and "Blessed are the poor." The rich and the high-born are in special danger, need special and solemn warning; and the Word of God here and elsewhere certainly is clear of their blood. But I am not forgetting that pride, haughtiness of heart, selfishness, and all manner of spiritual wickedness may abound in the hearts of those who are not wealthy. Let it be honestly admitted; some of us here know how proud and exclusive and selfish we could be, although we have no blood to boast of, and are not gifted with a big purse. The poor can be, in their own way, as godless as the rich. The subject is here. We need a theme like this occasionally, each and all of us, to cool the fever in our blood, and keep us at our Vol. II.-No. 9.

proper bearings; lest, because of the quiet, even flow of our comforts, we might come into the case described by the Psalmist when he said, "Because they have no changes; therefore they fear not God."

"There was a certain rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: and there was a certain beggar." Afterwards this story leaves the earth, and goes on within the veil, into that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns. If the latter part should be strange and mysterious and somewhat hard to understand, we should not, therefore, fling off from accepting it. There is this presumption at the outset in favour of its fact and veritythat at the beginning, the fact and verity of the story are very palpable. Nobody disputes the substantial reality, without a single line of exaggeration, of the rich man clothed in purple and fine linen, and the beggar named Lazarus. While I utter it, all that is Oriental fades into its secondary place, and we find ourselves in a flash with the East and the West end of our own city laid before our eyes. Nobody disputes the calm, sober, sad fact and reality of the beginning of the story. Why, then, should we raise dispute when He, who tells the story with such sanity and calmness at the beginning, steps on with us within the veil, and, in the same sane, calm, and collected speech, continues the narrative where any other narrator would need to stop? Ah, yes! there is no exaggeration at the beginning; all is sober fact. The certain rich man and the beggar, poor, naked, and destitute in every

sense-this is London in the nineteenth century, and no tale of centuries ago that has grown dim and distant, and has proved to be shadowy and unreal by the test of modern criticism. No modern criticism can get rid of this. We have it to-day. How vividly the two extremes are put before us. Go to Hyde Park, and you see it—the rich man rolling, and poor Lazarus lying on the grass across the railing. To some this may seem to be a wild, ghostly story at the end of it, but again, I repeat, that it is neither wild nor shadowy at the beginning. There is no exaggeration, there is no caricature. Here there is no holding up of some lay figure to be kicked and pulled to pieces. There is nothing at all against the man's moral character in a certain way. He was simply very rich, very wellto-do. He is set forth as he is. There is no denunciation needed. There he is, is he not denounced simply by being described? "Clothed in purple and fine linen, and faring sumptuously every day." The Bible handles wealthy folks. very freely. I rather fear that if David had lived to-day, and had described wealthy people, saying, "Their eyes stand out with fatness; they have more than heart can wish," he would have been denounced in certain quarters as being a partisan, violently hateful of the rich, and violently and irrationally in love with the needy. But let us proceed.

"There was a certain beggar named Lazarus, laid at his gate, full of sores, desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table: moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores." First, let me ask you to look upon