fear and drain your courage and your strength; but have such healthy apprehension of it, such a seizure of all its spirit and scope, as will help you to pray broader prayers and plead with humbler audacity all the promises tending in the direction of assured forgiveness. Men may carry their dead selves about with them so as to corrupt the present life and to take out of it all joy, and spring, and hope. In no such way are we to detain the past; we are to detain it in the sense of gathering its richest lessons, its best instructions; it is to be to us as a warning or as a finger pointing to dangerous places and to forbidden occupations and delights.

A wonderful man was

Now Moses will turn comforter. Moses! A legislator with a hard mouth that could speak nothing but law; then a preacher whose tone softened into expostulation, here and there delicately hardened into rebuke,—a marvellous mixture of human tones. In this instance he will quote one of his own prayers, and through the quotation show the gentleness of the spirit which made him at once the severest and meekest man in history. Moses remembered his own prayers. There are those who would not have prayers published; nor need we wonder at their want of desire or approbation in this matter: they abuse what poor prayers they do offer ; they turn them out and never inquire concerning their destiny or their reply; they are spoken and forgotten;-what wonder that they have no prayers to quote! Moses remembered every prayer he ever addressed to the ear of Heaven, and gathering Israel, as it were, closely around him, he says,-I prayed for you; and when God was quite near I availed myself of his condescension to say "O Lord God, destroy not thy people and thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember-" Thus he would call God to recollection. The man's prayer was remembered by the memory of the heart; if he did not quote the exact words he quoted the precise substance. The petition went in this direction: for the people, for the covenant, for God's own sake; and if even new words were set to the music of the spiritual expression they in no wise altered the meaning of the suppliant's plea. This is the true consistencynot that a man shall remember his words, but that he shall be

faithful to his meaning. They who live in the consistency of words are pedants, harsh judges, companions who ought to be delighted with their own society and to be relieved of the association of other hearts. Consistency is in purpose, meaning, the fire of the soul; and where there is such integrity towards God the words will often seem to contradict one another: eye-witnesses can be called to make oath that such and such words were spoken on such and such days; it is false in the view of its want of the larger truth; it is exact without being true; it is precise without being philosophical and complete. A wonderful insight into prayer is given in this quotation. Moses pleads for present Israel on account of ancient Israel :-"Remember thy servants." What was their name? "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." Here is a prayer with some leverage; here is a breathing that comes up from eternity. The plea is not to be argued within the present five minutes. We belong to the ancient time, and to-day reap the harvest which vanished men did sow. Answers are coming from eternity because of God's love of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. The light that struck the little earth but last night left the star whose gospel it brings some ten thousand years ago,— and it only arrived yesternight! Replies may be on their way from the Old Testament saints for aught we know to the contrary. The prayers we find in the Old Testament are so large it may well have taken all this time to receive adequate replies. The great prayers were offered in the Hebrew tongue-prayers that stormed the heavens, that seemed to hold in their entreaty the necessities of every possible age of time. Do not let us cut ourselves off by an unholy act of deletion from the ages of the furthest past. God's ministry is wondrous; God's providence is spread all over the line of life. The joy we had yesterday was the result of a reply that came from heaven in answer to a mother's tender intercession. Moses went upon the plea that Israel were still the people of God :—they are rebellious, they are stiff-necked, they have broken all the commandments, they made a calf and worshipped it; but they are still thine; they must not be damned on the detail: they are still thine: they are in the covenant, they are within thy gracious purpose. Were God to judge us by the incident and trouble of to-day, the lapse of yesterday and the trespass of to-morrow, his universe could not

cohere for twenty-four hours. He is a God of covenant, decree, sovereignty, meaning; and he is conducting the whole Churchold, new, present, to come-and whatever may be the intermediate steps, and difficulties, and provocations to himself, at last. the Lamb and the bride shall be wedded, and all heaven shall be the festal chamber.

SELECTED NOTE.

"Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and fenced up to heaven, a people great and tall, the children of the Anakims, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can stand before the children of Anak!” (vv. 1, 2).—We seem to be looking on the remains of some Cyclopean city. These are scanty enough, but still sufficient to be remarkable. It is not merely, however, their size that strikes us, but their curiously mingled order and confusion, as they lie down in the ravine at our right, or rise above each other on the hill-slope at our left. We see no pillars, no ornaments, no inscriptions. Whatever city was here it belonged to a far antiquity, a time of rude, unadorned, but massive architecture, when men, few in number, and unable to apply any great amount of power, took advantage of natural peculiarities, such as the withdrawing cave, or the outstanding boulder, and instead of shaping their materials to their plan, shaped their plan to their materials. Yet the scene is not a bare one; far from it. There is no stream below, no rill trickling down the clefts, no moss vivifying the dead stone; but there is quite a wilderness of rich brushwood overspreading the whole. Not shrubs merely, but trees, have taken possession of every free inch of soil; the ballut, the privet, and the fir rooting themselves in each crevice, and forming an exquisite fringe, or rather network of green, through whose interminable meshes the grey patches of the old rock came up like the tombstones of some primeval cemetery.

It appears that this region was occupied at a very early period by the Anakim, who were of the Rephaim nations. Their chief city, Hebron, which we are just approaching, was one of the oldest cities of history, having been built seven years before Zoan, in Egypt (Numb. xiii. 22), the chief city of the Delta. The identity of the Anakim and Rephaim is of no consequence to our present statement; still, it is worth while noticing that Moses explicitly mentions this:-"The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall as the Anakims; which also were accounted Rephaim" (in our translation, giants), "as the Anakims" (Deut. ii. 10, 11). Thus the Anakim branch of the Rephaim were the original occupiers of Southern Judea. They were the first that took possession of its mountains, building cities, and swaying no feeble sceptre over a large region around. They were evidently not only an ancient, but a warlike and formidable tribe. It was not of hordes of savage wanderers or herdsmen that Moses made mention (Deut. ix. 1, 2). And even though we may admit that the report of the spies was greatly coloured by their fears, still their language indicates the character of the Rephaim tribe (Numb. xiii. 33).

PRAYER.

ALMIGHTY GOD, how can we live so long as Satan is in our heart? It is not life: it is death twice dead. The pain is more than we can bear. All music is choked; all light is put out; all hope is killed. We are in fear of the enemy; yea, though we boast sometimes in his hearing we know that our boasting is vain. He is stronger than we are older, wiser, more subtle than any beast of the field. He comes into Eden: he allures us by seductions which are fatal. This is our life's complaint; this is our heart's bitter testimony. When we would do good evil is present with us; the good that we would we do not: the evil that we would not that we do. We know this to be so, and who would tell us otherwise is but a messenger of falsehood, having come up from the depths of darkness to befool and curse us. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. We bless thee that we have not to fight the foe in our own strength. God is with us: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble; therefore will we not fear: no breaking up of earth or time shall cause us to quake, for hidden in the almightiness of God we are at rest, and blessed by heavenly love we live in everlasting summer. We are always denying Christ thrice a day we say we do not know him; whenever the knowledge would involve difficulty, persecution, loss, pain, then we do not know the Man; and when we can use him as a passport, a key wherewith to open difficult gates, then we know him, and are proud of him, and speak his name quite loudly. God be merciful unto us, sinners! We have learned the art of hypocrisy : we are skilled in that evil way. Oh that we might be courageous, burningly in earnest, invincible, resolute in all holy purpose; then surely the world would hear of us, and listen to us, and in some degree obey the word which thou dost inspire us to speak. How many blessings have we for which we ought to be thankful!—the home, standing on secure foundations; the table that is in the midst of it more than a table for bodily sustenance, a table of sacrament and memorial; and the lamps which shine upon it are let down from heaven; and the chair of peace, and the fire of comfort, and the bed of rest, and the word of love, and the bond of Christian fellowship-how can we speak of these things? We cannot speak of them: we must sing of them, call for an instrument of ten strings to help us to express inexpressible love. Thou hast given us a measure of strength and health and force; thou hast kept reason upon her throne, and the will is still under control; we are not altogether lost, even the worst of us. Say so to the bad man; tell him that even he may return, though so disfigured that none can tell who he is, and so utterly lost that it is impossible to miss him -even he may come back again : wide is mercy's door, loud is mercy's call,

tender are the tears of Heaven, yet red with blood. We bless thee for all Christian hope, for all Christian security and spiritual prospect. We are no longer prisoners: we hover upon the horizon as if ready to take flight over broader space, where the light is clearer and the day without an eventide. Inspired to do thy will, may we turn comfort into stimulus, may our consolations be the beginning and the seal of strength; and wherein our tears have been dried and our hands have ceased to shake, may our watchfulness be the keener and our industry the completer. Take the bad man out of our way when he would hinder us; let him go out into the night that we may have a word together about better things, and speak that word as it ought to be spoken.

Lord, hear us! Christ upon the Cross, save us! Blood of the eternal covenant, take out the last stain of sin! Spirit of the living God, Holy Ghost, baptise us as with fire! Amen.

Deut. x.-xi.

EDUCATED TOWARDS SPIRITUALITY.

HO

OW to introduce the spiritual element into all this instruction of an external and formal kind was the difficulty even of inspiration. We have felt all along that the speeches and instructions delivered to Israel meant, as to their purpose and issue, something that was not expressed. We now come to find an indication of that which is intensely spiritual. The method of its introduction is-so it may be said, with reverence -infinitely skilled. Great prizes of land were offered, wonderful donations of milk and honey and harvest, and as for springs and fountains of water, they were to rise in perennial fulness and beauty. What wonder if considerable eagerness should mark the spirit of the men to whom such promises were delivered? Who would not be eager for land flowing with milk and honey, green all the year round because of the abounding waters, smiling with fruitfulness because of the blessing of God? But this could never be enough: the promises cannot end in themselves; when they have been uttered they quiver with an unexpressed meaning. To bring that meaning under the attention so as to secure the confidence of the people God I will set aside a tribe that is to have no land. That was a subtle revelation of ulterior design. Out of that arrangement was to come the inspiration that foretold the passing away of the heavens and the dissolution of the earth and the destruction