up my connexions with the church and sacraments of Christ. This, indeed, is my chief reason for hoping at all: for if God do not meet with my soul again there, I am not likely to find Him again at home. I have no heart to seek Him at home now: but, could I only get such another strong impulse from the sanctuary, as that which first sent me to my closet and my Bible, I make no doubt but I should go on again as well as ever.

new impulse likely to come?

will not be 'required' of me,

And, is not this

Surely, my soul

whilst it is in

this unprepared state, nor before God has healed my backsliding! If it should be required of me this night'-or this year

What would you say to a case like this? Sheshbazzar would have said at once, and that in his most solemn and tender manner, "Take the sinner's hope for as a backsliding child, no line of the 'scarlet thread' of Adoption will save you, like Rahab, now that the Ark of the Covenant is sounding its Rams' horns around

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your walls." I say, in plainer terms, "The hope set before you in the Gospel,' may well suffice you. It would ill become you to stand out or stipulate with God for your first joy. He deserves your 'first love,' and your first works' too, for the hope still before you in the Gospel. And it is this, ' Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.' This is hope enough to make any one happy, who believes it: yes, and holy too: for what could bind you to follow holiness, if the assuring promise of salvation, from the lips of a God who cannot lie, do not?

"Do you dislike to have your hope of salvation thus thrown upon the eventual answer of earnest prayer? If so, you are not humble enough yet, to welcome salvation by grace alone. You will, however, be glad to do so, when you know yourself more intimately." Thus I should address such a woman, who was still "professing godliness," and yet unwilling to take up hope by prayer.

Look now at another case. There is a wo

man, not worldly-minded; not exactly averse to devotion or diligence; and not at all wishing for any assurance of hope or faith, which would be a pillow to sloth or inconsistency. But she has lost all her hope; as she calls her first enjoyment at the cross and the mercyseat. She can neither glow nor melt, think nor feel, there, as she once did and just because she cannot, she says, that she cannot see one ray of hope for herself. The fact is, she means by a ray of hope, a beam, if not a burst, of that joy which shone upon her soul, when she was first enabled to commit her soul into the hands of Christ: or she wants a degree of hope which would put down at once all the plagues of her heart; and keep out all temptation and vain thoughts; and make all duty delight, and all trials easy. She says, indeed, that she would be thankful for a single and the slightest ray of hope. But, tell her that God is sure to answer her cry for mercy; and that, although a fixed day-star of hope does not cheer her. It is not that form of hope which

150 VARIETIES, FROM

MISTAKES.

cheered her formerly. It does not warm or melt her heart at a glance, as her first believing views of the Lamb slain did. She is also too agitated, or too depressed, to grasp with her understanding, the sublime fact, that God's command, "Call on Me," is God's command to hope in him. He means " Hope," when He says, "Pray;" He means, "Pray," whenever he says, "Hope." But the very simplicity of this way of setting hope before us, seems mystery, if not mockery, to a sad spirit, when sadness has been long indulged. "Would not God show some token for good' at once, (it is said) if he intended to be gracious? But He sealeth up even the stars!" Yes: but just that the desponding may look at the sun. It is not breaking a "bruised reed," to say so. She will never hope, who does not see that the command to pray, is a Sun " shining in its strength." How truly Paul says, "We are saved by Hope!"

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ALLEGORY. No. 3.

RACHEL'S CURE.

WHEN they arrived at the Tent in the wilderness, Esrom spread the skin of the young Lion, which had perished in the swellings of Jordan, for a couch to Sheshbazzar. The Patriarch said, as he sat down upon it, "An old lion would not have rushed over the precipice after his prey, when the Jordan had overflowed all its banks. He would have couched when he heard the roar of the waters; or hunted in another direction, until they had subsided.

ESROM!

you have often pursued your speculations into the swellings of a river, which, like the Jordan, discharges itself into the DEAD Sea. It is of the Lord's mercies, that you were not swept by the wild waves of con