few understandings so utterly darkened, and few consciences so completely seared and callous, that they can altogether be quiet from fear of evil; and thus the contingency of speedy, if not the certainty of eventual, death, disturbs and discolours the current of life, constraining them to reflect, that it is ever flowing on towards eternity. "The wicked," said the Prophet, "are like the troubled sea which cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt;" while, to crown all, if the way of the ungodly does not always DISQUIET, yet assuredly it always DEceives, whether by representing the object sought as endued with attractions, which in reality, it does not possess; or by misrepresenting, i. e. by understating, or perhaps omitting to state at all, the precariousness of its nature, and the possibility at least of its early and sudden termination. A striking example of this is presented to us in the rich man, who had, as he thought, "laid up much goods for many years," but to whom,

while anticipating the long enjoyment of his accumulated wealth, "Soul, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry" there came the voice of the Messenger of judgment, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee-then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?" Now the evil here was not in possessing, but in perverting; the error was in imagining that a soul, whose chief concern must be to work out its own salvation, could safely take its ease, and abandon itself to indulgence in a probationary state. That the end of such a way must be to perish, is self-evident, if the word of God be true-and true it must be, though every man were proved a liar! And who can dispute the saying of the wise man, "the wicked is driven away in his wickedness, but the righteous hath hope in his death?"

What then, let every reader ask, is his own way? Whatever it be, one thing is clear, that the Lord knoweth it, and not only so, but that we ourselves may

know it, if we will. For though, in the full sense of the expression, it is only by the Lord, as a "God of judgment that actions are weighed," yet He has given us in his word a balance which we ourselves may hold; "he that is of the earth is earthy, and speaketh of the earth;" and "to love the world, and the things of the world" is the " way of the ungodly," and "shall perish. He that is of God heareth God's words"-and to hear and to obey them is the way of the righteous. His way the Lord knoweth, and we too shall know it in that day, when "God will bring every work into judgment and every secret thing whether it be good or whether it be evil, and the end shall be according to the works."

One single question embodies the practical application of the entire subject. If Christ be not the WAY, what shall be the END?

XII.

The Character of the Tree determined by the Fruit.

HE Holy Scriptures abound in the language of illustration; and these illustrations being chiefly taken from pro

minent objects or familiar processes in nature, it is a language the force of which all must feel, and the import of which none can choose but understand. We might employ the simplest terms which human ingenuity could invent to describe, in spiritual things, the dawn, the developement, the progress, and the perfection of the human mind; but we should speak to many in a language not to be apprehended by them, if we did not summon nature to our aid. How much of prac

tical understanding, for example, on one of the most mysterious and abstruse of topics, shall we derive from considering Messiah's most simple yet most significant words; "Either make the tree good, and his fruit good, or else make the tree corrupt, and the fruit corrupt, for the tree is known by its fruits."

By examining this expressive emblem in the plain and literal tenor of the words, we trace evil to its origin; we detect it in its influence; and we deprecate it from its consequences. Either make, i. e. suppose or assume the tree to be good in its root, and its fruit will be also good: or assume the tree in its root to be corrupt, diseased, or cankered, and its fruit will be corrupt. And who would not say of the good tree, "Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it;" and who would not pronounce, as by natural instinct concerning the corrupt tree, whose fruit is cankered, insipid, and incurably corrupt, that "it is good for nothing but to be cut down and cast into the fire;" that