sheep, with that word over them, "Let none of you go out of the door of his house until the morning." And to be saved in this simple way by the blood-red mark which they did not see, but which, being outside, could be seen by the destroying angel as he passed. And I should not wonder, as the Israelites and the Egyptians were not separated one from another, if the Egyptians were all round about the Israelites; and I should not wonder if some young Egyptians came round about these blood-streaked houses and cried, with scoffs and jokes, "Come out! Come out!" and laughed and said, "What are you doing in there? There is no judgment. There was never such a fine night in Egypt. Come out! Come out!" Was not that hard to bear? Is not that taunt in our ears yet" Come out, you stupid believers!" And it is ill to bear. It does look as if we had done a stupid thing. It does look as if we had just taken our intellect and trampled it under our feet in order to be Christians. We did not. We crucified not our intellect, but the pride of the intellect, which is a different thing, a thing of the devil, which will bring us to the doom of the devil. And I can imagine a young Israelite chafing and getting restless as the night wore on, and there came no sign of this doom, and no sign of this judgment; I can imagine him shaking himself, and saying, "I will assert my manhood. This may do for the old people; " and he is going over to the door, but his father rises, and with a voice like thunder says, "Unhand that door! Back for your life!" And he was right if he did. He was right. The Egyptians might laugh that night, and young, restless, hot-headed Israelites might have a little trouble, but nobody laughed in the morning. And you and I, children of faith, believers in God and in God's Christ who died for sin, just for a little while have to stand the laugh, and I admit that it is against our pride. By the grace of God, and in the obedience of faith, let me charge you, hold on, my brother, as you

began. Let us keep together, we who belong to "the household of faith." How that expression receives its illustration from this story. Let us keep together. Let us encourage ourselves to stay indoors until the morning. Some of you, God bless you, will not have long to wait. God bless all white and whitening heads in this assembly; you will not have long to wait. “Now is the time of your salvation nearer than when you believed." For you the morning cometh. Soon it shall break upon you, and you shall prove, even as down here you cannot, that you builded better than you knew when in simple faith you crucified all rationalism in your soul, all questioning, all pride, and simply believed in God and in the Son of God for salvation, for time, and for eternity. And for none of us will it be very long. Bless God, at the longest the time in which we have to wait here, prisoners of hope in the household of faith, is not long. Let me say again to any who are hesitating and halting, oh, my brethren, young or old, my sister, rich or poor, pass in-come in. The household of faith, the company of evangelical believers, is not the narrow, cribbed, cabined, confined place that you suppose it to be. Let every man speak his own experience, and I will speak mine, and say that since I came to simplicity of faith in Jesus Christ. I have not found any legitimate ambition of mind or heart. to be denied. I have only found that I am safely shut in to. all that is worth having, and shut out from all which, were I to get, would be the ruin of heart and life both here and hereafter. May God bless His own Word. Amen.

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

THE GREAT REFUSAL.

DELIVERED

A Sermon

IN REGENT SQUARE CHURCH,

ON JANUARY 22ND, 1890, BY THE

REV. JOHN MCNEILL.

A BROTHER prayed that this night might be "a night of decision," which led me to read you the chapter we have had before us as our lesson, and leads me now to preach from this familiar portion of God's Word. Although this man decided in the wrong way, may the Lord give us grace to go right where he went wrong.

"And when Jesus was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to Him, and asked Him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but one, that is God. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and mother. And he answered and said unto Him, Master, all these have I observed from my youth [and as you have it in another Gospel, What lack I yet?]. Then Jesus beholding him, loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven and come, take up the cross, and follow Me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions."-MARK X. 17-22.

Vol. II.-No. 4.

"The rich young ruler." But I trust that the very title of my subject may not stumble any of us, and make us listen with languid interest, simply because we are neither rich, nor prominent, nor influential. You see here the difficulty of suddenly deciding for Christ. The difficulty, so to speak, of stopping on your step and deciding at once; having no time to consult anybody, nor to say to yourself even, "What will be the outcome of this? If I become a follower of Jesus, what will become of all present things with which I am engaged?" Now, this is best illustrated over the head of the rich, the wealthy man. But it is really a difficulty for rich and poor alike. It is the great difficulty because of the worldiness that is in all our hearts. Whether we are rich or poor, we are all alike here. We are all marked by this: the love of the world. A cleaving to the world, whether it is the rich man's world, the middle-class man's world, or the poor man's world. We cling to it. It gets the first claim; Christ the second. Poor people will admit that as well as rich people. We don't naturally, any of us, go to Christ first. We look first after the things of the world.

This fact receives its most vivid illustration, I say, in the case of the rich man. For his world, on many accounts, is desirable and absorbing; and it is all the more difficult for him to give it up. But we are all prone to hold to the things of this world first, and look after Christ and eternity second, if at all. That is what this man did. I say this,

then, to bring the

subject near to all of us; rich and poor,

old and young, well-off or ill-off. Now, how does it present itself in the narrative?

"When Jesus was gone forth into the way, there came one running to Him." A rich young ruler. A gentleman; a man of high social position; a man of high office in Church and State. This Teacher and Preacher called Jesus was going about the land; and, when passing through this part, this rich young ruler saw Him, and did what you, perhaps, would not dare to do. He put aside shame and fear, and all that feeling of "Oh, what will people think if they see me running to this new Teacher, who says He is the Messiah?" The rich young ruler kneeled down in the public road before Jesus, and put his question about eternal life. Now, might not that encourage some of you to be a little more open and outward with your spiritual anxiety than you have yet been? My dear friend, don't hang back and say, "If I show that I am anxious, what will people say?" There was the rich young ruler who showed openly that he was anxious, and he was a gentleman, and some of you dearly love a gentleman. Your great question about the meetings at Regent Square is, What class of people are going? Are there any of the upper ten looking in? Yes! Some of them. And they are getting their superiority taken out of them!

Now banish all that. This wonderful Saviour of ours in His sojourn here, in the days of His humiliation, and ever since too, in the days of His resurrection, has bestowed His salvation upon all sorts of people. I will get you some of