and thus the prophecy closes, proclaiming that " God is in his holy temple," and bidding "all the earth keep silence before him." In brief, the prophet, living not long before the Captivity, and bewailing the wickedness of the age, foresees the execution of God's wrath against that wickedness; and he puts his vision upon record, mingled with earnest pleadings for mercy, and with strong expressions of confidence in God; for the very vision of God's coming judgments assures him that "the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." All this is a sort of commentary on the "prayer" or psalm in the closing chapter. The psalm begins, with lyrical abruptness, "O Lord, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid." It recalls and celebrates God's wonderful interpositions of old for the salvation of his people; and it closes with the sublimest and most cheering utterance of trust and joy in God.

We see then what years those were of which the prophet speaks in the text. They were years of declension and prevailing wickedness, and years of God's displeasure. "O Lord, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid! O Lord, revive thy work; make thy work to live; keep thy work alive in the midst of the years!" The scroll of years to come had been unrolled before him; and as he saw, at one view, what lay around him and what God revealed to him of the future, he was filled with dismay. Israel, laden with iniquities, was to be overwhelmed with calamities. The chosen people were to be swept away from their own land; and then the proud and fierce barbarians, that led them captive, were to be crushed under God's displeasure. In such years, what would become of God's own work; his work of mercy, causing the just to live by faith, and filling the earth with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord? And therefore he cries to God, "Oh, keep alive thy work as these years of terror roll away!" His first and foremost thought is that of the paramount importance of God's spiritual and saving work. That work of God is dear to all God's children; and as they look over the uncertainties of the future, their solicitude is that God's great work may live and prosper.

There is, in the text, another thought intimately blended with this. See how the mind of the prophet advances from one member of the text to another.

"O Lord, thy work in the midst of the years revive,

In the midst of the years make known!"

He knows the spirit of faith assures him-that God's great work will live, and will outlive every catastrophe. His prayer then is not merely that God will keep his work alive in the midst of the years. The prayer rises to a bolder strain, as it swells into importunity. It beseeches God not only that in the midst of the dark years to come he will make his work to live, but that in the midst of the years he will make it known. It is like the prayer of Moses in Psalm xc. 16, 17: "Let thy work appear

unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children; and let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us." Often God carries on his work out of the sight of men. It may seem to stand still-it may even seem to retrograde-while yet it is advancing, and its triumph is steadily approaching by processes beyond the reach of human knowledge. Often-nay, sometimes for a long series of years together, or even for successive ages-he is working out of sight, slowly maturing the arrangements, and accumulating the instrumentalities and influences by which, in the end, the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of his glory.

Deep in unfathomable mines

Of never-failing skill

He treasures up his bright designs,

And works his sovereign will."

Often he draws a veil of thick darkness over himself and his great work. His work does not appear to his servants, nor his glory to their children. The beauty of the Lord our God does not break forth upon the souls that watch for its appearing. The powers of darkness seem to triumph, as if the redeeming and new-creating God had abandoned his work. But even in the midst of those years, his work which he planned from eternitythat work of his for which, in the fulness of time, God himself was manifest in the flesh-lives on, and makes its progress unperceived. As in the night, he is silently preparing the day, and bringing the sun to its rising; as in the winter, when the mountains stand clad in snow, and the streams are locked in ice, and universal vegetation seems dead, he by a thousand unseen processes is working still, and is making the world ready for the sudden renovation of the spring; so in the midst even of those years when man sees nothing of the progress of God's redeeming work, he still keeps his work alive, and is preparing the arrangements and means by which, when his appointed season comes, light and life, beauty and joy, the beauty of holiness and the joy of his salvation shall break forth and fill the earth. Faith waits for that glad season, and as it waits, it prays with importunate desire:

"Let thy work appear unto thy servants,

And thy glory unto their children."

"O Lord, thy work in the midst of the years revive,

In the midst of the years make known!"

"How long, O Lord! how long?"

There is yet another thought involved in the text, and involved also in any just conception of God's work in the recovery of the lost and the salvation of the world from sin. The prayer of the prophet is,

"O Lord, thy work in the midst of the years revive,

In the midst of the years make known;

In wrath remember mercy!"

The work of God in this world-that great work which was in the prophet's thoughts-is not a work of mere power, like that

which is continually producing changes in the world of nature. It is a work of intellectual, moral, and spiritual renovation, to be wrought in the minds of individual men, and to diffuse itself through all that complicated fabric of relations and mutual influences that constitute society. It is a work then in which God has to do with all the intellectual and moral powers of creatures whom he has made for responsibility, and whom he would recover from their apostasy and ruin by means and processes conformable to the nature which he has given them, and by virtue of which they are responsible. Thus, in carrying on his work, he has to contend with the wickedness and wilfulness of those whom he would save, and he must act accordingly Those whom he would save, those whom he calls, those to whom he manifests himself in loving-kindness, rebel and vex his Holy Spirit. Those whom he would lead by his goodness to repentance, often provoke him to a just and necessary indignation, and by their hardness and impenitence treasure up to themselves wrath against the day of wrath. Even his own children-his children by renovation and adoption-provoke him and dishonor him, and grieve that Holy Spirit by which they have been sealed. Thus it becomes necessary for God, from time to time, in the progress of his work, to manifest his wrath, and make his power known. Thus, in the progress of the ages, there are seasons, sometimes long, dark, dreadful seasons of wrath and destruction. Sometimes it becomes necessary, in the prosecution of God's plans, that old foundations be broken up; that nations be shaken from their seats; that races of men be swept from the earth; and that darkness and chaos seem to be returning. Such a season of God's righteous visitations, such a series of years filled up with vengeance and destruction, was before the mind of the prophet when his emotions found utterance in this prayer. His thoughts, piercing the future, had caught some terrific glimpses of what was soon to come. In prophetic vision he had seen the approaching, manifestations of God's displeasure against sin. Those years, the scroll of which had been unrolled before him, were to be years of wrath. He sees God's wrath about to break forth upon Israel, and upon the heathen. God's wrath-oh, how dreadful is God's wrath! "I have heard," he cries, "O Lord, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid!" "O Lord, in wrath remember mercy As Abraham pleaded with God for the cities of the plain, as Moses pleaded with God for Israel in the wilderness, so the prophet intercedes with God in behalf of God's own work, and cause, and people. Such is the privilege, not of patriarchs and prophets only, but of all believing souls. They partake, as it were, in Christ's own office of intercession for the world. Who can tell how often their prayers prevail, to hold back or turn away the destroying wrath of God?

I will bring this discourse to a conclusion, by briefly recapitu lating some of those general lessons which the text, as thus unfolded, affords us.

I. The prayer for the revival, or the keeping alive of God's work, is the spontaneous utterance of a heart touched by God's Spirit. Not more surely does the needle, touched with the magnetic power, move in sympathy with the magnetic currents that flash around the globe, invisibly to human eyes; not more surely does that needle, pointing with tremulous impulse toward the pole, betray the mysterious agency that has touched it, than the soul in which God's work of spiritual renovation is begun, becomes spontaneously conscious of a sympathy with that great work throughout the world-a sympathy that manifests itself in impulses of desire and hope and prayer. The Lord's Prayer, in its childlike simplicity, opening with these petitions, "Hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," was framed for the very purpose of giving fit utterance to this spontaneous sympathy with the work of God. Wherever that prayer is breathed from the heart of faith and love, there is fulfilled that ancient prediction concerning the Redeemer, the King in the kingdom of God, "Prayer shall be made for him continually;" for him, that is, for his cause, his interest, his kingdom. This inward, living sympathy with God's renewing and restoring work, the work for which Christ came into the world, is part of our union with Christ, by which we are his, and he is ours-our Lord, our life, our light, our joy. Thus, in the words of an apostle, "Our fellowship is with the Father, and with Jesus Christ his Son."

II. God's work is often going on in the world when it is not seen or made known, when even his own people are not permitted to discern its progress. You remember Elijah fleeing into the wilderness, and there crying from his cavern to his God, "The children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, I only, am left, and they seek my life to take it away." But what saith the answer of God to him? "I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to Baal." Even then, when it seemed as if all Israel had apostatized; when persecution had silenced the voices of the prophets in death, and the last of them all was a fugitive; when darkness, like a funeral pall, was over all the land of promise; even then God was working.

So it ever has been; so it ever shall be, even to the glorious consummation. In the winter he is preparing the verdure and the bloom of spring. In the darkness he is working, carrying on his unknown processes-he with whom is no darkness at all; and when he is ready, there shall be light. Over the void and formless chaos, the Spirit of his love and power" sits brooding;" and, ere long, as the new world, shaped out of infinite disorder, emerges in its beauty, and takes its place in the vast harmony of the creation, the morning stars shall welcome it with songs, and all the sons of God shall shout for joy.

III. Sometimes it is necessary for God to carry on his work

by dispensations of wrath. Sometimes things are at such a pass that there is no other way for God to answer the prayers which he breathes into the hearts of his own people. The cry of the oppressed and wronged goes up mingling with voices from under the altar, "How long, O Lord, how long wilt thou not avenge our blood?" "And will not God avenge his own elect?" Yes:

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By terrible things in righteousness thou wilt answer us, O God of our salvation." By his wrath poured out upon the nations, or by his rod that smites his beloved ones with a father's tender carefulness, he is working his own work, and bringing to pass the good pleasure of his goodness. When God called the Chaldeans in his wrath, and they swept over Israel like a destroying whirlwind, what were they but the stormy wind fulfilling his word? For aught we can say, such a manifestation of God's wrath may be, at this moment, ready to break upon the world. Ages of systematized injustice and deceit, ages of wrong-doing and oppression on the part of governments, ages of suffering and of progressive degradation on the part of subject nations, seem to have come near to some great crisis. What that crisis shall bring forth, as its immediate results, He only can foretell who is making all things to work together for the accomplishment of his eternal counsels. The year now opening is likely to be, throughout wide regions of the European continent at least, a year of terrible convulsions. Already we begin to see, as it were, upon the eastern sky the glare of the kindling conflagragration. Already we see "upon the earth distress of nations with perplexity; men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth." It is easy to comfort ourselves with the belief that a new order of things is about to be established in that old world. It is easy to dream that, in the next rising of the nations against their oppressive governments, there shall suddenly come forth from the confusion a new and orderly condition of society, in which all political institutions shall rest on the foundation of justice, and shall have no other end than the common welfare, and in which the Word of God, no longer bound and hampered by the alliance of the civil with the ecclesiastical powers, shall have free course and be glorified. But when we think how long and slow a process it is for a people to learn the art of self-government; how slowly new political arrangements are compacted into strength and durability, and how slowly justice forces itself into law and the administration of law where old prejudices and established interests are to be overcome; and when we remember how slowly, as men count slowness, God's work of making all things new has seemed to advance along the track of ages heretofore; we tremble at the anticipation of the events that are likely to be crowded into the year that has just begun; "For behold, the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity." "O Lord, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid."