of the one come from without, those of the other from within. They spring up from supreme sympathy with the true, the beautiful, and the good. (c) The one is often, as we have seen, sinful, the other never. We never read of sinful happiness, sin and happiness cannot co-exist, moral excellence is the only fountain of happiness. (d) The one is temporary, the "pleasures of sin for a season." It cannot run into the future or survive our bodily dissolution; the other is permanent, it is a well springing up to eternal life. Another practical truth suggested by the text is that

TRIALS.

had

II. RELIGION HERE, NOT YONDER, HAS ITS "Suffer affliction with the people of God. . the reproach of Christ." "The people of God" their afflictions in the time of Moses, and they were severe, and they the anointed ones of God, the christs-have had their afflictions from that day to this, and will to the end of time. Their trials are of two classes.

First Those that come from without. "Marvel not (said Christ) that the world hateth you, it hated Me before it hated you." Their trials come to them simply on account of their account of their religion, for the same reason that they came to Christ. "If ye were of the world, the world would love its own." The christs, the anointed people, like the Christ of christs, have always been persecuted by the world in some form or other. To what slanders, obliquies, insults, indignities, and cruelties was Jesus of Nazareth subject when on this earth! Why? Because He lived righteousness, the moral radiance of His character exposed the corruptions of His contemporaries, His doctrines wounded their prejudices, and sapped the

foundation of their influence. Were a man to appear in England to-day, to live religion as Christ lived it, what terrible afflictions would soon befall him! Let him denounce, day by day, the cupidity of our traders, the ignorance, the narrowness, the hypocrisy and the greed of thousands of our public teachers of religion, the self seeking of our legislators, the ambitions, the vanities and the sensualities of many of our rulers; let him keep on day by day, as Christ did, thundering against wrong-doers everywhere, and would he not arouse the wrath of his age against him? It is an universal fact that "all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." Their trials are

Secondly Those that come from within. Agonising wrestlings against pernicious prejudices and sinful habits, poignant compunctions and bitter humiliations, at the felt distance between what they are and what they ought to be, between the actual and the ideal, believe me that the inner life of a religious man in this world is a life of great trial. It is a campaign where the foes are numerous and strong, where the struggles are strenuous and continued, and where defeats are sometimes overwhelmingly distressing. Religion, then, here has its trials. I say here, not yonder. "The people of God," the anointed ones, will be delivered from all afflictions in the great hereafter beyond the grave. "And one of the elders asked me, and said, What are these that are arrayed in white garments, and whence came they? And I said, Sir, thou knowest, and he said, These are they that came out of great tribulation," &c. (Rev. vii. 13-17). The other practical truth suggested by the text is that:

III. DESTINY HERE, NOT YONDER, IS AT OUR CHOICE.

Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God." This choice is the great choice of our earthly life. As a free agent, man has the power of "choosing," and this power he is employing every day. His choosings are numerous and varied, evermore is he choosing this, and rejecting that, but this is the one great choice, the choice that decides his destiny. I make three remarks about this choice, which Moses made between sin and its pleasures, and religion and its trials

First: It was a choice which he made in his full manhood. He was not a child, not a youth, not in the state of juvenesence, when he came to this decision. He was forty years of age, in the prime of manhood. He had seen life in its varied phases.

Secondly: It was a choice which he made not from impulse, but from judgment. "Esteeming the reproach of Christ." How often our choice is made from the rush of a sudden impulse; and often, therefore, proves unwise and pernicious. But the reason of Moses was mature, reason trained in all the learning of Egypt. He calmly weighed the two conditionssin and its pleasures, and religion and its trials; weighed them in the balance of an enlightened judgment; and he rejected the one, and accepted the other.

Thirdly: It was a choice determined by his faith in future retribution. "He had respect unto the recompence of the reward; " or, as the New Version has it, "he looked unto the recompence of reward." He acted from foresight. He believed in a future, a future into which the consequences of our present lives would be carried, and where the "pleasures of sin" would

be no more, and where the "people of God" would have a full "recompence" for all their trials and struggles in the present life. Was he influenced in his choice by the hope of future reward? He might have been to some extent; for it is natural. Is it right to be influenced by such considerations? I am disposed to say, No, to that question. But this I maintain, that no man can form a true estimate of human life that does not take the future into account, as well as the present. The man who would form a proper judgment of the climate of one year must have regard to all the seasons, not to one only. One brief day here is not the sum of our life, it is a mere fraction; reason and the Bible attest this. There is a future, immeasurably greater, and the future is the recompensing part of our existence, and we must have "respect" to it. Paul did so. "I reckon that the sufferings of this present world are not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall hereafter be revealed. to us." Thus let us act. Look to the future, follow our life on, and mark well whither its steps are tendiLg.

CONCLUSION :-Who will not say that Moses was the man of noblest choice? He used the highest prerogative of his being, the power of choosing in the wisest way, his choice made him the great man he became, and how great he was! Of all the world's great men, Moses is the greatest. He was the historian of the creation, his pen detailed the remodelling of this planet, as a suitable habitation for man, the origin of the race, and the stirring and extraordinary events that transpired in the first stages of human history. He was the legislator, not of a district or a class, but of

the world. His code embodied principles on which all governments should be based, to which all men are amenable, and by which all men are to be judged at last. He was the conqueror of Egypt's proud monarch, he broke the iron rod of the oppressor, freed his race from a crushing and ignominious thraldom, and became the founder of the most glorious commonwealth that ever appeared on the stage of time. He was an eminent type of the Son of God; and ages after his departure from the world he appeared with Elias on the Mount of Transfiguration, and talked with Christ about the death that He should accomplish at Jerusalem. From no man did there ever issue such a deep and ever swelling stream of influence, as from Moses. His name figures in all literature, floats in the traditions of heathens, is a household word in all Christendom, is dear to all the good on earth, and mingles with the songs of heaven.

MORAL COURAGE.- "A great deal of talent is lost in the world for the want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves a number of obscure men, who have only remained in obscurity because their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort; and who, if they could have been induced to begin, would in all probability have gone great lengths in the career of fame. The fact is that to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can. It will not do to be perpetually calculating risks and adjusting nice chances; it did very well before the flood, when a man could consult his friends upon an intended publication for a hundred and fifty years, and then live to see its success afterwards; but at present a man waits, and doubts, and consults his brother, and his particular friends, till one fine day he finds that he is sixty years of age; that he has lost so much time in consulting his first cousins and particular friends that he has no more time to follow their advice." SIDNEY SMITH.