Christ's own glorious body, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing." Communicants, friends separated by death, shall see one another again. Pious ministers and pious people shall meet at the mouth of the opened tomb. Pious parents shall see their pious children. Friend shall greet friend, and brother shall greet brother, as graveyards are broken up in the day of the resurrection. They shall be caught up together in the clouds to meet their Lord in the air; so shall they ever be with the Lord. Comfort one another with these words. Sorrow not as those who have no hope. Death and the grave are dreadful realities. We shudder at dis

solution. We fear the judgment of the Most High God, and are overwhelmed when we stand just on the entrance of eternity. We know the world is little to us. We shall soon leave it! Covered with crape, we are travelling toward the resting-place of the dust of our fathers. Our sins, our deathless souls, our God-oh, what amazing anxieties crowd on our aching hearts! But in the Gospel we see everything provided for us that sin, and death, and the grave, and the judgment, and eternity can make us need. If we are to die, Jesus Christ can sympathize with us: He has died before us; He has died for us. Oh death, where is thy sting? Death may be a terror to nature; but death is the servant of the Christian. Death is yours. Ye are not death's. He shall not hurt you. All he can do is to take up the trembling believer, and put him into the arms of Jesus Christ, when He comes again to receive him to Himself. If we are to give our bodies to the grave, we know who owns it, who has conquered it, and robbed it of its victory. Ah, more: we know how he robbed it. Our best Friend, our Almighty Saviour, has been down into its bosom. He has softened, sweetened, sanctified that bed of sleep. Oh! if I am a Christian, I would rather go by that dark path to heaven, than go like Elijah with his chariot and horses of fire! It will be more like Christ. I shall lie where He lay. I shall prove His love. I shall experience His power. This dead body shall rise; and in heaven, a sinner saved, redeemed, loved, raised from the dead and taken into the family of God-in heaven, I shall love to tell what Jesus Christ hath done for me. Angels shall hear it! I will tell it to the old prophets ! I will hunt up my fathers who go there before me, and tell it to them! I will wait for my children to die, and, as they come there, I will tell it to them! Oh,

my God, my God! this is enough! I will praise Thee for it forever! Oh! I am comforted now. I can bury my friends, my minister, my father, my daughter; I can set my foot upon the grave; and, with a heart filled with comfort from the God of heaven, I can wait the day when that stilled heart shall beat again, and those dumb lips shall speak from the opened coffin, and we shall be caught up together in the air. "For our conversation is in heaven, whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself."

5. Those who have no hope are exercised in such cases of affliction (I am ashamed to say it as much as I was sorry to say the other, but it is true; I am compelled to say it)—those without hope are exercised with a very ineffectual sorrow. How few of them make any good use of the affliction. We see them afflicted often. Where is the sinner without hope who has lived in the world twenty years and not had his heart torn and forced to bleed at the death of some loved and valued friend? But what is the result? We see those without hope, then downcast and troubled. We go to the funeral of their friends; we bear them to the tomb; we come to sympathize with them and beseech them to lay it to heart, for such is the end of all flesh. But such persons -these same persons so afflicted, so tender and heart-stricken-do not come at the next communion to the Lord's Supper. They mourned their friends; they remembered for a little while that the way he had gone was the way of all the earth. And they believed, too, that such an affliction would not be lost upon them— that the counsels and entreaties of the dying would not be to them a vain lesson. But they do not come to repentance. And while their happy friend is in the bosom of God, they continue the same rejection which gave the last and the deepest pang to the heart of that friend in his hour of death. The grass has not sprung green upon the turf that covers him before they are embarked again in the world as eager as ever, dishonoring his memory by their transient impressions, and his anxiety by forgetfulness of God.

Christians ought not to sorrow like them. Such sorrow dishonors the dead. It pours contempt upon the anxieties and prayers of the dying, and insults by neglect the grace of God

which enabled them to die in peace. No, no! let your afflictions make you better. If you are Christians, let your sorrows lead you to mourn the sin which brought death into the world, and trust more firmly in Christ who vanquished death for you. Make due improvement of your afflictions-solemn improvement. God means something by it when He afflicts you. Ask Him what He means. Let not the affliction sit lightly upon you, and for a mere transient week. You do not sorrow in a proper manner if your sorrows do not make you better Christians. They ought to make you better. They ought to make you love prayer more, love Christ more, love one another more. They ought to bring you to the communion-table on next Lord's day in a more tender, and holy, and happy frame. Death is doing up his work in this communion. And, my brethren, shall we not make haste and get ready to die? Where the next blow shall fall, God only knows. This father, this mother, this child, this minister, may fall next. Oh, God take none of us away unprepared! Plunge none of us into hell! Lead us by our warnings to our Saviour; and then come-come when thou wilt-and take us from the pains of our death-bed home to the bosom of our God.

THE PURPOSE OF DIVINE CHASTISEMENTS.

BY ARTHUR T. PIERSON, D. D., PHILADELPHIA.

For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness.-HEB. xii. 10.

IN. nothing, perhaps, is it so hard to feel for ourselves and to help others to feel that God is good, as in life's great afflictions. We are so prone to look only at the present sorrow and forget the future joy; so apt to dwell on the aggravations of grief rather than its alleviations; so inclined to interpret God's dealings by our sinful deserts rather than His pitying love, that, under the burden of some severe and sudden calamity, we feel more like Job's wife, tempted to "curse God and die," than like that Old Testament saint himself, prompted to say, "Blessed be the name of the Lord." Nor can it be thought very strange if, when one stands

and looks upon what De Quincey calls a "household wreck," in which are brought to ruin not only all one's bright hopes, but one's best joys and purest loves, so that the very heart itself seems crushed and buried beneath the fragments of its idols-it is not altogether strange, if, looking upon what to all human sight is wanton waste, unmingled woe, one cannot, under the sudden paralysis of the shock, feel that such a blow was from a hand guided only by love. Is it strange, too, if they who behold such ruin of joy and hope and love and life itself, are struck dumb—if words of solace or even of sympathy die on our lips, and we who would fain comfort and console, stand speechless and, looking upon these earthly wrecks of happiness and hope, ask, “Why is this so? Can it be that there is mercy in such seeming wrath?”’ But if we are speechless, there is this comfort even to our dumbness we need not speak, for God has spoken. In ways without number, under every variety of figure, by every mode of speech and form of illustration, He assures us that "He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men;" that whatever sorrow He sends upon us is "solely for our good." In the text, the climax of all possible representations of this truth is reached. this do not convince our understanding and appeal to our hearts, nothing can. God condescends to reason with us, from the analogy of parental affection, drawing both argument and illustration. We have often felt the beauty of the methods elsewhere used for presenting the same essential truth, as, for example, where God compares himself to the refiner of silver, melting His people down in the crucible of affliction to "purge away their dross ;" but in this comparison is couched the beauty of an unutterable tenderness. You know how a father feels toward a son-how he yearns over him; how he loves him; how he lives for him. You know how a father shrinks from the necessity of chastising the son, yet nerves himself to the duty of correcting his faults, lest sparing the rod he may spoil the child. You know with what an agony of reluctance a father surrenders his son to the surgeon's hand, to save him from death, or the living death of a distorted and crippled form; how he would fain himself lie down and submit to be bound with cords and probed by keen blades to save his boy the pain and peril of such an operation; how his father-heart sickens and his face grows ashy pale as he witnesses the suffering

by which alone the child may be saved from death or deformity. Do you understand that? God can then speak intelligibly to you. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him." If you murmur at God in the time of your calamity, He says to you, "Ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children: My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth."

He addresses our parental instincts, and asks us whether we do not ourselves know that love and chastening are not contradictory or inconsistent. Even so, says God, do I love whom I chasten, and scourge my every son. Nay, He presses the analogy further, and says to us that we are to regard chastening as an evidence of love, a confirmation of our sonship, and because all true sons are partakers of this fatherly discipline, its absence in our case would bring into doubt the legitimacy of our very claim to be called God's children.

Then, as this fatherly argument proceeds, He appeals to our best judgment whether, if we yield submission and reverence to our fathers in the flesh, we shall not be in subjection to Him who represents the perfection of all fatherhood and fatherliness.

I need not say that this doctrine of Love as the impulse and interpreter of affliction is peculiarly Biblical. When calamity befell a pagan he beheld in it a mark of divine displeasure, and at once set himself at work to appease the wrath of Deity. There is a tradition which accounts for the existence of an "altar to the unknown God" at Athens, upon the ground of an attempt to remove the scourge of pestilence. It is said that when offerings to every known deity had been offered in vain, it was suggested that some yet unknown god might be the author of their calamities, and hence the altar with its inscription. Even the ancient people of God were very slow to accept the right view of God's chastisements. It is true many of God's severer dealings were in His displeasure, yet still not in wrath to destroy, so much as in love to reclaim His erring people; and only assuming a destructive form when the sacrifice of some seemed to be essential to the salvation

of the rest. It was very proper then, that in this epistle to the Hebrews, the apostle should inculcate the Christian doctrine of God's fatherly chastisements, teaching us to regard trial as a