atone for the infinite guilt of sin, that God's own Son assumed our nature, and suffered for sins, the just for the unjust. The words presuppose a means of deliverance from this destruction.Striking as is the analogy between the condition of man and the fading of the leaf, yet it will not hold good in everything. There is a point at which it fails. It is here that it ceases to set forth our state. We faded like the leaf until God arrested the spiritual decay into which we were fast falling. In ourselves our course was like the fading leaf, and, left to ourselves, our end would have been the same-entire destruction, had not God in His mercy rescued us from the approaching ruin. This is taught in the preceding context. In the fifth verse the prophet speaks of the future dispensations of God to his Church as dispensations of mercy-as dispensations that would unfold the way of salvation more clearly, and, in the place of a temporary and insufficient system, give one complete and abiding. In Thy purposed dispensations there is continuance, and we shall be saved. And then, after speaking of God's future plans of mercy, he describes what was our condition. We were all like the unclean, and all our righteousness as filthy rags, or as a filthy garment, and we faded like the leaf, all of us. The words, therefore, while they tell us of our sinfulness, and of the end to which sinfulness leads, at the same time assume that there is a way of deliverance. Indeed, our sinful condition is described chiefly with the object of bringing out the greatness of the salvation God in His mercy hath purposed in Christ Jesus. "We shall be saved." And this is one grand end the Bible has in view in setting forth the state of man as a sinner. It tells of the universality of his sinfulness-of its deepseated nature-of its many acts of transgressions, more in number than the hairs of the head-of its multitudinous aggravations, and chiefly of its character, as committed against God,-that we may realise all the more vividly the completeness of the salvation that is in Christ Jesus. Every necessity in man's case as a sinner Jesus fully meets. He bears our nature, and thus, in the nature that had sinned, He has rendered obedience and atonement. Under the nature of man He veils Divinity, and thus gives infinite value to all that He does on our account, so that, great as is our guilt, He yet can remove it; and many as are those that need salvation, He yet, from His infinite dignity, can present Himself as the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. It is this Saviour, so adapted to all the wants of man, that the gospel presents to us. Its good tidings are of a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. Let no man reject Him. He invites us all to come to Him. Read the record contained in the pages of inspiration of some of those who have come to Him, and received mercy from Him, and see proof that all are welcome. Manasseh, with hands stained with the blood of the saints-Paul, the blasphemer, and the persecutor of even womenthe malefactor who had railed upon Him-and Matthew, the publican, have had their sin forgiven them, and occupy no mean place among the spirits of the just made perfect. Their presence before the throne of God and of the Lamb, proves beyond dispute that the gospel message is good tidings of great joy to all people, and that the invitation to partake of the blessings it proclaims runs thus"Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." If this means of deliverance be despised, there is no other.-If we fade like the leaf, the prophet assures us, the end will be, our iniquities, like the wind, will carry us away. And it cannot be otherwise. We cannot give the infinitely valuable atonement the law of God demands from us ere we can be reinstated into the Divine favour; and, with evil in our nature, so far are we from keeping God's law, that we are daily breaking it, and adding to our already accumulated guilt. Reject Christ, and you reject the one means of deliverance, you refuse a Divine Saviour-the only Being that can save-and in due time you will have your portion in the lake that burns with fire. Men have sometimes spoken of the mercy of God as that which they trust will rescue them from punishment when they come to die. But they forget that God is just, and that it is only in Christ that He can pass by the sinner, and give him a place among His children. The mercy He shews to the sinner is mercy in Christ Jesus. But Christ has been despised. The mercy so abundantly held forth through a crucified Saviour has been rejected; and think you when God has been insulted in the person of His well-beloved Son that He will save? Think you, when the way He in His wisdom has appointed for man's salvation, has been knowingly, and with set purpose, departed from, that He will be willing to accept the sinner? With terrible emphasis Scripture assures us, that if we despise God's method of salvation there is no other. "Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh." The Church of Rome has long taught that the mediation of the Virgin Mary, or of other saints and angels, may do much for the sinner. But however common prayer to the saints may be in the Romish Church, Scripture knows nothing of it. Christ it points out as the one Mediator between God and man; and the purport of its teaching is that no other is needed. "He has put away sin by the sacrifice of himself." "By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." Hence Scripture proclaims that Jesus is the one Saviour. "This is the stone which is become the head of the corner. Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved." To turn away from Christ is to pursue a course whose end is destruction-is to cast from us the one means of escape from the wrath to come is at last to suffer our iniquities, like the winds, to carry us, powerless to resist their force, away to the lake that burns with fire. This means of deliverance will not always be afforded us.-It is revealed to us in the gospel, but the gospel will not always sound in our ears. It stands to reason that it should be so. God cannot always have His grace despised. He cannot always allow the sinner to go on in sin. However long He may forbear, forbearance has its limits. If, when fading like the leaf, He pitied us, and held out to us the means of arresting us from the destruction threatened us by sin, we yet despised the offered mercy, it is only becoming that it cease to be offered us, and we be left to treasure up wrath against the day of wrath. Let the hearer of the gospel continue to turn away from the means of deliverance it presents to him in Christ the Lord, and his heart will become harder-the story of the cross will fall upon his ear as an idle tale-what melted him to tears and stirred his spirit within him, when first he heard it, will affect him no longer-and, while yet apparently continuing to have mercy offered him, the lamentation of the Redeemer over the Jerusalem that had sinned away its day of grace will be true of him: "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes." Men little know the danger they incur in walking in the footsteps of Felix, rather than Sergius Paulus, and delaying acceptance of the gospel offer. It is not merely that life is uncertainthat the future is not their own-that the convenient season may never come, but the longer they stay away from Christ the more powerful the hold sin acquires over them, the more impervious does the soul become to the influence of the truth, the farther do they depart from God, the greater becomes the amount of their guilt, the more unlikely is it that they go to Him as the way to the Father. What is hard to-day will be far more so by a year's delay. The impressions now felt may have vanished, and the anxious and awakened heart may have subsided into a state of unconcern, out of which nothing will arouse it but the flames of hell. We In one respect these words describe the state of all of us. are all advancing to the grave, where indeed we shall fade as the leaf. When the leaf shall fall from off the tree is uncertain, but though the exact moment is unknown to us, that it will fall is absolutely certain. Just so is it with us in regard to death. We know not when it may come, but that it will come is not the less sure. Sooner or later we shall all fade as the leaf, and the place that once knew us shall know us no more. The fading leaf, therefore, mutely eloquent, tells us of our common mortality. In another respect they describe the condition of not a few in every large miscellaneous assembly. Those who are yet in unbelief, who are yet strangers to Christ, are fading as the leaf. They are increasing in sinfulness. The debt they owe to Divine justice is daily becoming larger. Their affections are becoming more and more concentrated upon the things of earth. They are morally deteriorating. They are fading as the leaf. The Lord stay them in their downward career! He now would have them to turn from sin to Himself. This very day He is passing by them in His ordinances, and with open arms, and in accents of pity and of love, He entreats with them, saying, "Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?" Let there be no delay in complying with His gracious invitation. It is now that He says to you, "Believe and live." But in this other respect there are those whom these words do not describe. Those who are in Christ Jesus no longer fade as the leaf. They no longer are in a state of moral deterioration. Their condition is an opposite one from the moment that the sinner come to Christ; the spiritual decay that characterised him in a state of unbelief is arrested. Henceforward he draws life from the fountain of life. Once in Christ Jesus, he progresses in holiness; his leaf fadeth never. The longer he lives the better he becomes. He gradually leaves sin behind him. And the death that to the impenitent brings a destruction, of which the fading of the leaf was a silent admonition, engrafts him where the winter-withering winds of sin shall never come to separate him from the tree of life which is in the midst of the Paradise of God. Behold, alas! our days we spend, How short a span Was long enough of old To measure out the life of man, In those well-temper'd days, his time was then Alas! And what is that! They come, and slide, and pass, Begun, we lend To sleep, to antic plays, And toys, until the first stage end; Twelve waning moons, twice five times told, we give We spend A ten years' breath What 'tis to live, or fear a death; Our childish dreams are fill'd with painted joys, How vain, How wretched, is Poor man, that doth remain A slave to such a state as this! His days are short at longest, few at most- They be The secret springs That make our minutes flee On wheels more swift than eagles' wings. How soon Our new-born light And this, how soon to grey-hair'd night! They end When scarce begun, And ere we apprehend That we begin to live, our life is done. In Christ, thy stay, And then the days that must From sin be few, shall be the way That leads to heaven, where there is no night Nor changing year, for God is its unchanging light. The first eight stanzas are from the "Christian Magazine" for 1812. The ninth stanza is new. THE SPIRITUAL BENEFITS OF THE SABBATH. TAKING the sacred Scriptures as the standard of belief, and studying them with a submissive, childlike spirit, it seems strange how any one can fail of being convinced of the Divine origin and permanent obligation of the Sabbath. It was instituted as a memorial of creation, and its observance enjoined upon man while in innocence; and there are unmistakeable indications of its continued existence during the patriarchal age. It was revealed anew amid the thunders of Sinai, and written by the finger of God upon tables of stone in the very heart of the moral law. We have the Lord Jesus Himself telling us "it was made for man"-not for the benefit of the Jewish people, but of the human race-and exemplifying, in His own conduct, its true nature and spirit. We have the example of His followers, for at least the first thirty years of the apostolic age, assembling, week after week, for the celebration of Divine worshipnot, indeed, on the seventh day as formerly, but on the first, as the witness and memorial of the new creation, which had recently emerged; we have their example as an evidence-yea, as virtually an authoritative declaration of its continued obligation. And we have explicit predictions in the Word of God that it should be observed, after the introduction of Christianity and the abolition of the Jewish ceremonial. "Pray ye," says Christ to His disciples respecting the destruction of Jerusalem," Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, nor on the Sabbath day." So, too, in predicting events still further removed into the distant future-the erection of that glorious Church, the rearing of that pile of spiritual architecture which is to grace the millennial age, Ezekiel says, "The |