pains of sacrifice, and perfume the grave of ignominy, what are these but a more inspiring and more godlike call, since He is now our leader even here? O my brethren! here is our misery: that we think to go above Christ, and find some cheaper way; when, if we could truly descend to His level of sacrifice, and take His cross to follow, we should be raised in feeling and power, ennobled in impulse, glorified with Him in His joy. After all, the secret of all our dryness, the root of all our weakness, our want of fruit and progress, our dearth and desolation, is, that we cannot follow Christ. First, we cannot believe that He has any particular care of us, or personal interest in our life; and then, falling away, at that point, from His lead, we drop into ourselves to do a few casual works of duty, in which neither we nor others are greatly blessed. God forbid that we sacrifice our peace so cheaply! Let us hear-oh, let us hear to-day the Shepherd's voice; and, as He knows us in our sin, so let us go after Him in His sacrifice. Let us claim that inspiration, that ennobled confidence, that comes of being truly with Him. Folded thus in His personal care, and led by the calling of His voice, for which we always listen, let us take His promise and follow, going in and out, and finding pasture.

VIL

LIGHT ON THE CLOUD.

JOB Xxxvii. 21—"And now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds; but the wind passeth, and cleanseth them.”

THE argument is, let man be silent when God is dealing with him; for he cannot fathom God's inscrutable wisdom. Behold, God is great, and we know Him not. God thundereth marvellously with His voice; great things doeth He which we cannot comprehend. Dost thou know the wondrous works of Him that is perfect in knowledge? Teach us what we shall say unto Him, for we cannot order our speech by reason of darkness. If a man speak, surely he shall be swallowed up.

Then follows the text, representing man's life under the figure of a cloudy day. The sun is in the heavens, and there is always a bright light on the other side of the clouds, but only a dull, pale beam pierces through. Still, as the wind comes at length to the natural day of clouds, clearing them all away, and pouring in from the whole firmament a glorious and joyful light, so will a grand clearing come to the cloudy and dark day of life, and a full effulgence of light from the throne of God will irradiate all the objects of knowledge and experience.

Our reading of the text, you will observe, substitutes for cleansing, clearing away, which is more intelligible. Perhaps also it is better to read "on the clouds," and not "in." Still the meaning is virtually the same. The words, thus explained, offer three points which invite our attention.

I. We live under a cloud, and see God's way only by a dim light. II. God shines at all times with a bright light, above the cloud, and on the other side of it.

III. This cloud of obscuration is finally to be cleared away.

I. We live under a cloud, and see God's way only by a dim light. As beings of intelligence, we find ourselves hedged in by

mystery on every side. All our seeming knowledge is skirted. close at hand, by dark confines of ignorance. However drunk with conceit we may be, however ready to judge everything, we still comprehend almost nothing.

What, then, does it mean? Is God jealous of intelligence in us? Has He purposely drawn a cloud over His ways to baffle the search of our understanding? Exactly contrary to this. He is a Being who dwelleth in light, and calls us to walk in the light with Him. He has set His works about us to be a revelation to us always of His power and glory. His Word He gives us to be the expression of His will and character, and bring us into acquaintance with Himself. His Spirit He gives us to be a teacher and illuminator within. By all His providential works He is training intelligence in us and making us capable of knowledge.

No view of the subject, therefore, can be true that accuses Him. The true account appears to be, that the cloud under which we are shut down is not heavier than it must be. How can a Being Infinite be understood or comprehended by a being finite? And when this Being Infinite has plans that include infinite quantities, times, and relations, in which every present event is the last link of a train of causes reaching downward from a past eternity, and is to be connected also with every future event of a future eternity, how can a mortal, placed between these two eternities, without knowing either, understand the present fact, whatever it be, whose reasons are in both?

Besides, we have only just begun to be; and a begun existence is, by the supposition, one that has just begun to know, and has everything to learn. How then can we expect, in a few short years, to master the knowledge of God and His universal kingdom? What can He be to such but a mystery? If we could think Him out, without any experience, as we do the truths of arithmetic and geometry, we might get on faster and more easily. But God is not a mere thought of our own brain, as these truths are, but a Being in the world of substance, fact, and event, and all such knowledge has to be gotten slowly, through the rub of experience. We open, after a few days, our infantile eyes and begin to look about, perceive, handle, suffer, act and be acted on, and, proceeding in this manner, we gather in, by degrees, our data and material of knowledge; and so, by

trial, comparison, distinction, the study of effects and wants, of rights and wrongs, of uses and abuses, we frame judgments of things, and begin to pass our verdict on the matters we know. But how long will it take us to penetrate, in this manner, the real significance of God's dealings with us and the world, and pass a really illuminated judgment on them? And yet, if we but love the right, as the first father did before his sin, God will be revealed in us internally, as the object of our love and trust, even from the first hour. He will not appear to be distant, or difficult. We shall know Him as a friendly presence in our heart's love, and we shall have such a blessed confidence in Him that if, in the outer world of fact and event, clouds and darkness appear to be round about Him, we shall have the certainty within that justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne. Meanwhile, He will be teaching us graciously, and drawing us insensibly, through our holy sympathies, into the sense of His ways, and widening, as fast as possible, the circle of our human limitation, that we may expatiate in discoveries more free. And thus it comes to pass that, as the eyelids of the infant are shut down, at first, over his unpractised eyes, which are finally strengthened for the open day, by the little, faint light that shines through them, so our finite, childish mind, saved from being dazzled, or struck blind, by God's powerful effulgence, and quickened by the gentle light that streams through His cloud, is prepared to gaze on the fulness of His glory, and receive His piercing brightness undimmed.

But there is another fact less welcome that must not be forgot when we speak of the darkness that obscures our knowledge of God. There is not only a necessary, but a guilty limitation upon us. And therefore we are not only obliged to learn, but, as being under sin, are also in a temper that forbids learning, having our mind disordered and clouded by evil. Hence, come our perplexities; for, as the sun cannot shew distinctly what it is in the bottom of a muddy pool, so God can never be distinctly revealed in the depths of a foul and earthly mind. To understand a philosopher requires, they tell us, a philosopher; to understand patriotism, requires a patriot; to understand purity, one that is pure; so, to understand God requires a godlike spirit. Having this, God will as certainly be revealed in the soul, as light through a transparent window. "He that loveth

knoweth God, for God is love." What darkness, then, must be upon a mind that is not congenially tempered, a mind unlike to God, opposite to God, selfish, lustful, remorseful, and malignant! Even as an apostle says: "Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart."

The very activity of reason, which ought to beget knowledge, begets only darkness now, artificial darkness. We begin a quarrel with limitation itself, and so with God. He is not only hid behind thick walls of mystery, but He is dreaded as a power unfriendly, suspected, doubted, repugnantly conceived. Whatever cannot be comprehended-and how very little can be-is construed as one construes an enemy, or as an ill-natured child construes the authority of a faithful father. An evil judgment taken up yesterday prepares another to-day, and this another to-morrow, and so a vast complicated web of false judgments, in the name of reason, is spread over all the subjects of knowledge. We fall into a state thus of general confusion, in which even the distinctions of knowledge are lost. Presenting our little mirror to the clear light of God, we might have received true images of things, and gotten by degrees a glorious wealth of knowledge, but we break the mirror, in the perversity of our sin, and offer only the shivered fragments to the light; when, of course, we see distinctly nothing. Then, probably enough, we begin to sympathise with ourselves, and justify the ignorance we are in, wondering if there be a God that He should be so dark to us, or that He should fall behind these walls of silence, and suffer Himself to be only doubtfully guessed, through fogs of ignorance and obscurity. Reminded that He is and must be a mystery, we take it as a great hardship, or, it may be, an absurdity, that we are required to believe what we cannot comprehend. We are perplexed by the mode of His existence and action-how can He fill all things, and yet have no dimensions? How is it that He knows all things, before the things knowr exist? Foreknowing what we will do, how can we be blamed for what we were thus certain beforehand to do? How is it that He creates, governs, redeems, and yet never forms a new purpose, or originates a new act, which is not from eternity? How is He infinitely happy, when a great many things ought to be, and are declared to be, repugnant or abhorrent to His