at the close of all, in the splendours of eternal allotment, amid adoring angels and perfected men, we cheerfully "come to Mount Zion.”

The Christian's Life-Purpose.

Your steady purpose in the daily puttings forth of your Christian life should be to glorify God. Every question of Christian casuistry must be settled by His will; every act must be consecrated by His blessing; all matters of earthly concernment must be judged of in the light which streams from His throne. This is, in fact, the essential difference between the man that is born, and the man that is born again-the one is influenced by motives of external pressure, but which this world bounds; the other subordinates all minor matters to the one grand life-purpose of glorifying God. And thus it must be with you when the greater obligation comes into collision with the less, as it will sometimes, when passion, and interest, and friendship, and even earthly mandate, all point one way, and duty, distinctly perceived, lifts her solitary finger in another, the decid

ed heart, choosing the right and spurning the wrong, must adopt as its rule of action the acknowledgment of the divine supremacy, "We ought to obey God rather than man." When temptation presents itself in some form of endearment or in some mantle of beauty, and when the flesh is weak before the well-circumstanced sin, the victorious spirit, realising the invisible, should say, "How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" When common things, or familiar and ordinary matters of life, call for a rule or regulation, and for a standard of arbitration and opinion, you will be at no loss to find it in the apostle's words-" Whether, therefore, we eat or drink, or whatever we do, we do all to the glory of God." That is the primary purpose of the Christian's life.

The Use of Means.

It is part of the design of God, touching the promulgation of His gospel, that it should be extended by human agency. In its first ages it was supported by the attestation of miracles; but in perpetuity it has been con

fided (never, of course, to the exclusion of Divine influence) to the use of means. God has so formed our nature that we are uniformly, and almost involuntarily, receiving impressions from each other. Life is nothing but one vast series of dependencies. So subtle and so persuasive is this law of association, that it is influential, even when we are hardly conscious of its existence. The chance word from the lips of a friend, falling upon some nascent desire like a spark upon tinder; the vision of some grave or wise one, held up to the glance of fancy so often, that it has become the ideal model of the heart's aspiring; the music of some old word greeting the ear with a strange melody, have fixed the tone of a spirit and have fashioned the direction of a life. The world is just one unbroken chain of these actions and reactions. We are bound by them; we are compassed by them; and we can no more escape from them than we can fling ourselves beyond the influence of the law of gravitation, or refuse to be trammelled by the all-embracing air. The design of God in using these mutual dependencies for the spreading of the gospel, is manifest from many scriptural

facts. The call of Cornelius, which might have been less troublesomely and more rapidly accomplished by the angel who appeared to him in vision, was reserved till Peter had taken the weary journey from Joppa to Cesarea; in the conversion of the blessed St Paul, the human agency was signally evident in the person of Ananias, the certain disciple from Damascus. And this is God's method of proceeding still. For this He instituted His own grand ordinance of preaching, that the eternal truth might be communicated to mankind in tones of kindred speech, endearing feeling and emotion, flitting over the countenance the while, and the soul's deep sympathy welling up through the utterances of the tongue. And, in your own experience, the friend's kind word or kinder life, how eloquent the sermon! How your prostrate spirit melted from its savage winter as a tender piety shone upon it! How, like some rock against which the waves of the frantic ocean have dashed for ages in vain, but which was shivered in a moment by the lightning, your hearts long wayward, in after years of hardening, were cleft asunder in a moment by the memory

of some nursery hymn, or of some gentle mother's prayer!

Influence.

The stone, flung from my careless hand into the lake, splashed down into the depths of the flowing water, and that was all. No, it was not all. Look at those concentric rings, rolling their tiny ripples among the sedgy reeds, dipping the overhanging boughs of yonder willow, and producing an influence, slight but conscious, to the very shores of the lake itself. That hasty word, that word of pride or scorn flung from my lips in casual company, produces a momentary depression, and that is all. No, it is not. It deepened that man's disgust at godliness, and it sharpened the edge of that man's sarcasm, and it shamed that half-converted one out of his penitent misgivings, and it produced an influence, slight but eternal, on the destiny of an immortal life. Oh, it is a terrible power that I have this power of influence—and it clings to me. I cannot shake it off. It is born with me; it has grown with my growth,