thus, and thus only, that you will find Christ's grace sufficient for thee. The rule of heaven is, Believe and live; believe and be blessed. It is when you look unto Christ Jesus, and look, as it were, into Christ Jesus, and note his grace to you, his favour for you, his love for your soul, his lovingkindness and tender mercy in becoming a Saviour for you, to save you for ever;-it is when you live thus looking unto Christ Jesus, and into Christ Jesus, as your own living and loving Saviour, "who loved you and gave himself for you;"-it is thus only, that will you find his heavenly and divine energy streaming down into your heart, pacifying it, purifying it, comforting it, and strengthening it, so that, without any merit in yourself, without anything that could become a ground of boasting in yourself, you are kept, and led, and armed, and blessed, and made fit to bless others. In looking unto Christ Jesus and into Christ Jesus, you see somewhat of that glorious reality of things within the light of which Christ Jesus himself dwelt and dwells, and thus was, and is, ever perfectly good and glorious. You see somewhat, indeed, of that glorious reality of things within the light of which God the Father himself ever dwelt and dwells, and was, and is, and ever will be, infinitely good and infinitely glorious. You are in thought at the very Fountain-head of goodness and glory. And being there, it is no wonder that you get some little of the same goodness and glory in your own little vessel.

O then use the grace of Christ Jesus-use it by faith. Draw near, in spirit, to Christ Jesus. Draw near to him as he hung on the cross. Draw near to him as he sits on the throne. Keep near to him. Stay in his realised presence. Look up to his eyes of love, as his eyes of love look down upon you. Look into his eyes. Look far in beyond his eyes, into his heart. Behold there his love, his grace, his loving-kindness, his tender-mercy. Stand and gaze. And you will find that that love, that grace, that lovingkindness, that tender-mercy, is sufficient for thee, whatever the peculiarity of your duty or your trial may be. Even in the presence of your earthly sovereign, gazing upon her gracious countenance, you would be penetrated with an influence, emanating from her grace, that would mightily restrain you if tempted, and mightily constrain you if called to labours of love, and mightly uphold you, if you were wounded in your heart by the wickedness of others. How much more will you be influenced and blessed by the grace of Christ Jesus! Happy, is the man who lives daily by faith in him! Happy is the man who, whether in his home, or on the street, or in his office, or in the workshop, keeps near to Christ Jesus! Happy is the man who has Christ Jesus very close beside him at the very

moment that temptations or other trials assail him. Happy is the man who has Christ Jesus close beside him at the hour of death, and who thus and therefore is able to say and to shout-victory, victory, through the blood of the Lamb. Yes, O Jesus, thy grace is sufficient for me!

DEAL KINDLY WITH THE ERRING.

Few of our youthful recollections are more vivid than a scene we witnessed while prosecuting literary studies at the University of Edinburgh. Stepping in one evening to a sceptical Lyceum, we heard an essay read, presenting in rambling array a variety of objections to the divinity of the Bible. At the close, discussion was invited, when up stood a man in a white neckcloth who, without deigning to notice one of the arguments advanced, surged over in a passionate tirade against the entire misbelieving tribe, roundly declaring that it was secret sin, or the love of it, and not honest doubt, that lay at the root of all their professed speculative difficulties. As we contrasted this distempered effusion with the calm silence of the sceptical essayist, the irrepressible thought started up, Is not that doubter in the present case displaying more of the Christian spirit than his denouncer? O the pity of it when insensate bigots, whether girt about the neck with black or white,―men who have never had a doubt, perhaps, because they have never as yet had a deep and earnest thought,-assume to throttle an honest doubter who sticks torn and bleeding among the briars of a vast and tangled wild, and would roughly shake him out of his difficulties by pronouncing on his motives, and imputing to him what, in his conscience, he could swear to be untrue!

That there are very numerous cases in which secret sin starts and fosters sceptical doubt, is alike true and intelligible. It is no less clear, both in fact and philosophy, that other predisposing causes of scepticism exist, rife and rampant, in these bewildered times, with which secret immorality has nothing whatever to do. Instead of shouting enemy, therefore, the more excellent way is to take the doubter by the hand and call him brother. If no conclusion to the contrary is forced upon us, we are bound to concede to the doubter as pure, high-minded aspirations, and conscious fealty to truth as we should claim for ourselves, and we would say to him, "Come, fellow truth-seeker, and let us reason fraternally together, and, if we cannot agree on all points, perchance we may agree on some."

James Renwick was one of the noblest of Scotland's confessors and martyrs. In him gentleness and firmness combined with rare wisdom and talent. He admirably lived his own motto, "Let us be lions in God's cause, and lambs in our own." As an able writer remarks, if the cause of the Covenant, in its later and most trying stage, had in Richard Cameron its mighty agitator, in James Renwick it had its masterly organizer. Never did Christian make good his faith by a more heroic life or triumphant death. And yet, while a student at Edinburgh, his mind was invaded and tortured even by atheistic doubts. To a confidential friend with whom he was ranging the fields, he exclaimed, as he uneasily gazed on the adjacent mountains, "If these were all devouring furnaces of burning brimstone, I should be content to go through them, if so be I could be assured there is a God!" So has it sometimes been with others of our best and noblest spirits. The ploughshare of agonizing doubt has driven itself into them beam-deep, and thereby prepared the soil for a stronger, grander faith.

To this class belonged the foremost historical figure in the religious world, since holy apostles walked the earth. Go back three and a half centuries, and transfer yourself to one of the cells of that dingy pile known as the Augustinian Convent of Erfurt. You there discern a young spectral form, the incarna tion of unrest, wringing his hands for the agony that is in him, and waking up the echoes of those gloomy corridors with the despairing cry, "O wretched man that I am!" Imagine an austere dogmatist, grim with the burdens of doom, to have entered and plied that sorely-tried young man with the scorpionwhip of terrific warnings and ungracious imputations! It would have fallen like nitre on a raw wound, and might have roused his mighty nature to an atitude of stouter defiance against both God and man-for with all his profound consciousness of sin, and desert of hell, Luther owns that he was not only void at that time of all love to God, but often, in his heart of hearts, "felt incensed against him." Happily, a better, because kindlier treatment, was in reserve for him. Staupitz, his vicar-general, a man of imposing presence, but radiant with faith and love, approached him tenderly, and in a spirit of sympathetic appreciation, addressed to him gospel words, which fell on his soul like a blessed balm, and sent him forth to enact and take his place in history as "the solitary monk that shook the world."

One of the most interesting chapters in the life of John Knox is one which is wholly unwritten, beyond a general hint, by the aid of which, as a sort of "dim religion light," imagination may reverently look into the dark vista career of the Scottish refor

upply the rest. The luded by a somewhat

lengthened period of deep spiritual struggle, known only to himself and his God, in the rural seclusion of Langniddrie; during which who can tell what lowering shadows of chilling doubt passed over his soul? Had cold hard words been addressed to him by some precise and priggish formalist who had never, with all his profession, experimentally learned what spiritual conflict means, the earnest young spirit, if not too earnest and too mighty for human influence to ruin, might have been cauterized into insensibility, or stung to despair. As it was, under the gentle and kindling influences of gospel truth and love, Knox emerged, a spiritual giant, to do his life's work, and earned the undying memorial of 66 one who never feared the face of man."

It is thrilling to observe on what sharp edges of decision great spirits have perilously stood and trembled, and by what slight incidental finger-touches they have at length been swayed to either side, thenceforth to shine as suns, or glare as baleful meteors, and print their mark for good or evil, broad and deep on their generation. The fiery Loyola, during his spiritual crisis, was as near as possible deciding to throw his energies into the scale of the Protestant Reformation. As it was, under some incidentally determining bias, he declared for persistent adherence to the papacy, which thenceforward found in him a champion of reaction who galvanized its carcase, or rather touched it into a life that availed to arrest, and even roll back, the high tide of the Reformation.

On the same principle, strong natures, in their indignant revolt from perverted Christian creeds, after long threading the precipice, without any better phase of Christianity having been presented to them, and without the help of a friendly hand or even a kindly look, have at last toppled over, or desperately leaped, into the cheerless void of scepticism, and thus been more than lost, both to themselves and their generation. In other cases they have been saved by the timely presentation of God's love to them in Jesus in its full-orbed purity and simplicity, and under the influence of the kindly sympathies by which it was commended to their attention. We could name such cases not a few; and probably the most of earnest ministers in our large centres have been gladdened by this inspiriting variety of gospel triumphs.

Many of our spouting Lyceum sceptics are notoriously very small men, of little reading and less brain, who have not specific gravity enough to reach the depths either of investigation or spiritual struggle, and who have not breadth enough to survey the grand field of inspiration, and who, therefore, in their levity, pronounce Christianity a sham, when they have yet need to learn which be the first principles of moral and religious truth. But No. 14.]

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it is no less true that some of the strongest minds, under peculiar influences, drift into scepticism; and by virtue of their very strength, when they do preponderate in this fatal direction, the die is cast, and they remain sceptics for life. No stronger consideration could, by any possibility, be urged to induce the utmost care and caution in dealing with sceptics, lest, by our indiscretion and hard unfeeling temper, we drive them into a wilderness whence they may never return.

We have spoken of earnest spiritual strugglers, but even in the worst of cases, where spiritual struggle there is none, and much of evil instead, there is reason enough, and more than enough, for dealing tenderly with the doubter. The soul that has no positive faith, that is all at sea on the great life-questions of God, Christ, and destiny, is desolate indeed; and if, besides, it be torn by vulture-passions, or scathed by the fires of vice, it is a howling wild that may well start our pity, while it stirs our aversion. Think of Byron, the poet of sceptical sorrow, setting it to tenderest music, and filling the world with his wail. Think of Voltaire misanthropically declaring, as the reflex of his own heart's experience, that "in man is more wretchedness than in all other animals put together," and frantically adding, "The bulk of mankind are nothing more than a crowd of wretches equally criminal, equally unfortunate. I wish I had never been born. Think even of Hume, with all his oft-paraded cheerfulness and philosophic serenity, exclaiming, "I seem affrighted and confounded with the solitude in which I am placed by my philosophy. When I look abroad on every side I see dispute, contradiction, distraction. When I turn my eye inward I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. Where am I? or what am I? From what cause do I derive my existence? To what condition shall I return? I am confounded with questions. I begin to fancy myself in a most deplorable condition, environed with darkness on every side." To deal harshly with such stricken men is neither just nor generous. Even when they put on a defiant front, and speak or write hard things against the faith, we shall do well to remember that this may be a "whistling aloud" against the storm within-the irrepressible explosion of an anarchical soul. For us to retort in a stern or corrosive tone will be like laying the lash "on the raw," and may madden them into a wilder and more settled obduracy.

No, let "the law of kindness be on our tongue :" let "grace be on our lips." "The mouth of the righteous is a well of life," not a fountain of "cursing and bitterness." If our heart has been a marsh-as alas! all hearts have,--the tree of Calvary will, by the instrumentality of our faith, have sweetened it, and broken up its great deep, and made it overflow with "rivers of living water.