common sources of pain and injury, and their cures, are found in close proximity. Old women's simples have a deeper method than science dreams. In the spiritual world, most surely the word which saves is "nigh us, even in our mouths, and in our hearts." If the world is near and the devil, Christ and all good angels are nearer. Cry, cry aloud! cry promptly and earnestly to a present Saviour; and, as the light parts and scatters the mists of the morning, the Lord the Saviour, with all His powers, breaks through the gloom, and is at your side. This bitter well may be your first heart-searching hour of anguish. "The Lord hath forsaken me, and my God hath forgotten me," is the cry of your desolate heart. "This first hope has cheated me, all others are mockers. Go to! the earth is bankrupt, and life is a snare." "Stand still, my brother, and see the salvation of God." There is a tree which God hath cast into the fountain of the world's bitterness; by killing the sin which poisons it, He hath made it sweet and clear. "Look unto Jesus, the author and finisher of thy faith, who for the joy which was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame," and drink again, the water shall refresh thee; then hasten on, thy home is in the land whose waters can never fail.

"There

is a stream there of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. And there thou shalt hunger no more, neither thirst any more; the sun shall not light on thee nor any heat, for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed thee, and shall lead thee unto living fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from thine eyes.

2. It strikes me that we have, in this miracle, most important suggestions as to the philosophy of all miracles.

I believe that the object of all miracles is to maintain, and not to violate-to reveal, and not to confound-the order of God's world. All true miracles are revealings of the living God in nature; blazing letters, to show to the blinded and sensual what His hand is daily doing for the beautifying and glorifying of the earth and life. The Lord has planted virtues of healing in drugs and balms; and the hand of Jesus, touching that palsied limb, reveals to us the fountain from which daily these blessed healings flow. The Lord is showing thee thus who healed that fever, who soothed that racking pain; "who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruction, and crowneth thee with His loving-kindness and tender-mercies."

And what does the calming of the stormy waters which St. Matthew describes to us expound ? The Lord hath shut up the storms in the deep ravines that open on that blue Galilean sea, and the Lord's hand ever loosens their bands when the land is thirsty, that they may sweep cool showers over the panting plains. And the voice of Jesus, shedding sweet peace as from an angel's wing over the storm-vexed waters, reveals the Being whose word maintains, calm and constant through the ages, this commerce and circulation of the elements-this ceaseless benediction of the world. "This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes."

The wonders reveal the wonder, the standing wonder of creation. They strike again the keynote of its order, and tune again the concords of these lower spheres. But let us understand that God's miracles will remain but marvels, aimless and voiceless, such as brutes tremble at in a storm, until we learn that the thrilling of the life along the nerve tissues of the body, as it bathes its breast in the morning freshness or the balmy sweetness of the spring; the melody of birds, the dewy brilliance of flowers, and all the grace and splendour of the universe, are "shown unto us by the Lord."

Sermon v.

The Springs and the Palm-Trees of Elim.

"And they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water, and threescore and ten palm-trees: and they encamped there by the waters."-Exodus, xv. 27.

THE first stage out of Egypt into the desert of Sinai is, as I have said, the most wearisome of the whole route. Three days' journey into the wilderness and no water! and their first well Marah -bitterness! God help them, if this was to be the common texture of their experience.

There

was no lack of graves in Egypt; all the toil and pain of the exodus might have been spared. And this history is profoundly true to life and to man's experience. Who has not been rudely awakened from his day-dreams of joyous liberty? Who, in his young career, has not knelt to drink of many a fountain which he found to be bitterness, and straightway flung himself passionately on the sand, cursing fate, life, and even God?

I suppose that to all the young pilgrims of God the first days of joy and bliss appear like a paradise regained. Sin pardoned; the chain of the

captor broken; the land of bondage fading in the distance; the tyrants dead upon the shore. The glow of victory, the sense of liberty, the vision of glory, conspire to make the first day's journey a rapturous triumphal progress, a realization of our dream of heaven. We need the three days' journey, and the springs of bitterness, to disenchant us; to reveal the wilderness around and before us, and bring us to the condition of soberminded Christian warriors, entering on a battlefield, the prize of which, after long stern conflict, will be victory in death. The humbling experience of our first station remains through life a wholesome memory: we find Marah again whenever we are tempted to forget the wilderness, and rest as though our heaven were won. It is strange, passing strange, to the carnal understanding, that the first station of God's elect host should be a well of bitterness; but to those who consider it steadily the strangeness will become familiar, and they will recognize the most friendly form of the fatherly discipline of God. And ever, that we fail not utterly, close by Marah we shall find, when we have learnt its humbling lessons, an Elim with its springs and palms.

Few stations in the desert are so difficult to identify as Elim, in spite of the marked features which it presented when Israel encamped under