strange permission of their crime in selling him into Egyptian slavery, God meant it unto good." What He does is "for our good always." Even while, like Jacob, human weakness is crying out in despair, "all these things are against me," the answer of the Holy Ghost is, through the pen of St. Paul, "All things work together for good." Yet how weak our faith! When God sends suffering upon us we begin to ask, What have we done that we should be singled out as the objects of God's displeasure? But God Himself says, "not in wrath but in love have I rebuked thee," and "for thy profit." What if we ourselves cannot see that we need such discipline, or even feel that it is working us harm and not good, shall we trust our own judgment rather than divine wisdom? shall we cultivate a morbid gloomy complaining or indifferent spirit while infinite love is unwillingly afflicting us, that under the chastening influence of sorrow we may grow into a more Christlike beauty of character? Oh, let us remember the perfect fatherhood and fatherliness of God! Divine knowledge of our character and needs, divine wisdom in foreseeing results, divine love for His dear children-these are our guaranty that in nature, measure, and frequency, God will adapt and apportion to the temperament of His children all His afflictive dealing.

As to the exact result He proposes in our chastisement-the profit He would secure it is not any merely human virtue of patience, or any single grace or virtue He would add to our character, but a transformation of our whole self. This is the profit for which He chastens us, as He himself defines it," that we might be partakers of the divine holiness."'

Think of the stainless purity of Him in whose sight the heavens are not clean; as, in comparison with the perfect whiteness of snow, nothing else seems white. What must it be to share such purity to partake of such holiness! There is no conceivable good to be compared with that. It is better than heaven, for it makes heaven. Will not such a result repay the patient endurance of sorrow? Will it not be a privilege to come up out of great tribulation and wash our robes thus, so that they shall be forever gloriously white and glistening? The highest glory of our religion is that it holds out to us something to be! The most the world offers is something to have, or rather to hold, for we can possess nothing save what we have in ourselves; what we have most truly

is what we are what we become. The unspeakable promise which invites us onward and upward is not then, we shall " 'have" -even heaven-that is too small a reward for a God of infinite love to offer those who share His perfect bliss and glory; but we "shall be"-shall be "like Him." That is the only thing that represents infinite riches! God is rich, not because of what He has, but of what He is; if it were conceivable that the universe were annihilated, He could not be poor, because of what He is : and therefore He cannot promise His beloved any higher bliss than to be like Him. He does promise we shall share as sons the father's property; our patrimony, however, is not a partaking of the universe, but "of His holiness!"

IV. Once more, our earthly parents chasten us temporarily, not permanently, as the text says, "for a few days." This phrase means more than it seems to imply. It probably refers to the fact that much of our parental training looks to immediate results, not remote ones—it is with reference to a few days, or at most to our short earthly life. Not only do a few days limit the period during which we endure their chastening, but they limit also its ordinary results. The effect is transient, not permanent. It is true that there are times when parental correction looks with foresightedness into a remoter future, and with pious anxiety seeks to prepare the soul for another life, looking beyond the immediate present, these few days, to the unnumbered years of the great Forever. But how seldom is the chastisement of a child regulated by such calm, earnest, prayerful reference to an immortal future! How careful is the parent then to make the child see the real guilt of sin, its peril, its hatefulness-to adapt the correction to these remote results of everlasting well-being!

That

Now, God's chastening always looks to eternal results. which is near at hand impresses us most vividly; the future seems far off and uncertain; we are therefore always emphasizing present good and undervaluing the more precious things of the hereafter; we feel our present ills to be almost too heavy to be borne, while the great results which lie in the future seem vague and shadowy. How different must all this appear to God, whose omniscient eye sees the end from the beginning, and to whom the remotest future is as vivid as the present, the remotest result as real as the present process! The life that may seem long to us

is nothing to Him who sees a thousand years as a day. Hence God speaks to us of "our light affliction, which is but for a moment."' If some human being should dare to call some of our earthly afflictions light and momentary, we should esteem it heartless mockery of our grief. Light! Is that blow light that knocks a strong man to earth and buries him beneath the wreck of his dearest joys and hopes, and seems to overwhelm him in a general ruin? Is that sorrow for a moment which darkens every future earthly hour, covers every prospect with a funeral pall, and through years and years haunts the heart with mocking shadows of former happiness, and as in the old Egyptian feasts, sets a ghastly skeleton at every table of festivity? To us, affliction is heavy and of crushing weight! To us, it is life-long burden and sorrow. Why does a pitying Father above call it light and momentary? He sees the glorious results; to His eye the future is unveiled; the few days of our earthly pilgrimage are over, the endless cycles of eternity begun. All sorrow and sighing have hushed their plaintive wail, every tear is wiped away. We have come up out of great tribulation.

GOD'S VOICE TO THE NATION.*

BY TRYON EDWARDS, D.D.

Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?-2 SAMUEL iii. 38.

This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones, to the intent that the living may know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men.-DANIEL iv. 17.

THIS world is a place where God is ever present-walking about it as He did of old in Eden. In various ways He is ever addressing us, as there He did our first parents-now in the lessons of instruction and kindness, now in the tones of solemn monition and reproof, and now in the accents of terror. He comes to us in the morning light and the gathering darkness-in the bud, the

* Preached in Rochester, N. Y., the Sabbath after the death of President Harrison.

leaf, the flower-in the summer's breeze and the whirlwind's voice -in the gurgling of the streamlet and the roar of the cataract; now, as to Adam, in stillness in the cool of the day, and now, as in some flaming sword, waving with its burning sweep around the tree of our richest blessings and fondest hopes. But though God is ever about us, and ever addressing us, there are times when He does this in more than the ordinary sense-when we almost hear His voice in audible accents. There are times when the tones that come to us are almost startling-seasons that are echoing points-reverberating stations, where God arrests us, that He may pour His appeals in all their fulness upon our ears; seasons every one of which is as a burning bush to us, to which God compels us to look, that from it we may hear His voice. Such, for example, was the day of the assertion of our national independence, when the noble declaration of our fathers broke in upon the stillness and security of a king-trodden world, unfolding the great principles of human dignity and right, and that man is the hereditary subject of none but God; sending doubt and paleness and fear to the thrones of despots, and in calm decision proclaiming those great principles which are yet to revolutionize the world, and perhaps to prepare the way for the universal spread and triumph of the Gospel of Christ. Such, again, was the season when two of our ex-Presidents, in a single day, and that the jubilee of our country, passed to their final account-when the pealings of a nation's joy were exchanged for the tollings of grief, and the sun that rose in gladness went down in sorrow. Such, again, would be the case, if war should now burst in upon us, with startling crash, like a thunderbolt from heaven, blighting our commerce, and cutting off and eating up our wealth, and desecrating, not to say ending, our Sabbaths, and spreading its almost numberless vices, and devouring our sons and fathers and husbands, and filling the land with fear and violence and blood. Every such event, whether past or possible, is as a sermon to a people, where God is the preacher— calling them to repent of their sins, and to remember and bow to His rule.

And such an event, my hearers, is that which so lately and sadly has sounded to your ears, and through the land, sinking deep into the nation's heart, and sending thoughtfulness to the brows, and seriousness to the hearts of millions. I refer to the death of the

President of these United States. He has gone from the highest station of earthly greatness-gone, as in a moment-torn from the summit to which he had but just ascended, and while the plaudits were still sounding in his ears. As the warrior, the scholar, the statesman, the Christian, I stop not to dwell upon his character, or to estimate his merits. Standing upon higher ground, as God's ambassador, I turn to his removal as a national event in which the Lord is speaking to us as a people. I say it is a national event; for the party views that favored or opposed the man are forgotten at the grave of the ruler. Death has pushed them aside for a season, and the nation, like one family afflicted, bows like one family around the grave of its head. And to us as members of that family sound the lessons that God is sending-lessons to which we should bow with reverence-lessons designed for our monition, for our good. To us as individuals, to us as citizens, in all our public relations, God is speaking. Let us then dismiss every other thought, that we may listen to His voice, that we may ask for and ascertain the meaning of His Providence.

I. God, by this event, is reminding us of His own supremacyof His overruling Providence. Prone as we are, whether as individuals or as nations, to forget God, His sovereignty and our dependence, we need something ever to keep them in our view, something that, like the miracles to Israel in the desert, or the handwriting on the walls of Belshazzar's palace, shall ever keep the Almighty before us. And God sees this, and He is ever sending sickness and sorrow, and trial, and death, His visible and terrible ministers, to impress them upon us-ever to make us feel His providence and His rule. Every pang that racks our frame; every sorrow that crushes the heart to the world's eye, or that gnaws it with keener tooth in secret; every sickness that points with meaning finger to the grave, all whisper to us of the divine supremacy. But pre-eminently is this true of death. The agonizing throes of dissolution, as they send their pulsations through the world, are ever and loudly speaking of God. If there be a place on earth where we are impressed with His overruling sov. ereignty and providence-where we feel that His will is supreme, and that ever and steadily He will carry forward His purposes, it is in the chamber, and by the bed of death. There we see the nothingness of earthly might, of human strength.

Disease comes