you who feel yourself left alone; too advanced in life to make new friendships, and none, even if you formed them, that could fill the blank of old ones:-blessed, we say for you, with your own years failing, your own strength impaired, your loved ones taken from your side, to lift your tearful eye on the Great Unchanging, and to say, amid these slanting shadows and stript boughs and wintry skies-"But THOU-oh, THOU, art the same, and Thy years shall not fail!"

Desponding Christian (it may be erring and backsliding one), you who feel clouds and darkness dimming the brightness of former days, cast down because of your coldness and deadness. Past or recent sin may have covered you with shame and sorrow. You may, like the disciples, have slept glorious opportunities away. You may be wondering if Christ can still cast on you, as once He did, a pitying eye. Your mournful soliloquy and pensive musing is this"Surely my way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God!" Be

comforted. "If we believe not, He abideth faithful. He cannot deny Himself." You may have changed towards Him; but He is unchanged towards you. The clouds may intervene, but the unchanging Sun shines the same as ever in the firmament. Looking away from your own fluctuating self, you may revert with chastened confidence to the day of your spiritual espousals, when you knew and felt that He loved you; and then take courage in the conviction that that love is unchanged, that it can admit of no diminution nor decay.

Bereaved Christian, you who have been called more specially to experience the sorrows of life, how consolatory to know that there is one prop that cannot give way, one Friend beyond the reach of vicissitude, who is working out your soul's everlasting wellbeing in His own calm world, far above and beyond the heavings and convulsions of ours. One who is the same amid storm and sunshine, births and deaths, marriage peals and funeral knells: of whom you can say, amid the wreck of all human confidences, "The

LORD liveth, and blessed be MY ROCK!" Nay more. When, we ask, is the thought of the immutability of Christ most precious to you? Is it not just when your heart and your flesh are fainting and failing: when lover and friend are put far from you, and your acquaintance into darkness? Like trees which the winds of autumn have stripped of their leaves, you are led, in the very wrestling with these storms, to moor your roots firmer and faster and deeper in the Rock of Ages! You can tell alike as your experience and your confidence—

"Our lives are like the shadows
On sunny hills that lie,

Or flowers which deck the meadows

That blossom but to die :

A sleep, a dream, a story

By strangers quickly told;

An evanescent glory

Of things that soon grow old.

But Thou-THE ROCK OF AGES

For evermore hast been;
What time the tempest rages

Our dwelling-place serene."

Yes, sheltered in these clefts, you can feel the

glad assurance, that no desolating wave which has swept away your earthly moorings, can ever separate you from the love of Christ. You can see the rainbow of the covenant resting majestically on the stormy billows, and read on its luminous scroll of ruby and emerald and gold the glorious superscription—“I am the Lord, I change not."

The Sympathy of Christ.

"I know their sorrows."-Exod. iii. 7.

"He hath sent Me to bind up the broken-hearted.”—Isa. lxi. 1. "When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which

came with her, He groaned in the Spirit, and was troubled, and said, Where have ye laid him? They say unto Him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept."-John xi. 33-35.

"For both He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren."-Heb. ii. 11. "FOR WE HAVE NOT AN HIGH PRIEST WHICH CANNOT BE TOUCHED WITH THE FEELING OF OUR INFIRMITIES; BUT WAS IN ALL POINTS TEMPTED LIKE AS WE ARE, YET WITHOUT SIN."-Heb. iv. 15.

"This happiness does Christ vouchsafe to all His, that as a Saviour He once suffered for them, and that as a Friend He always suffers with them." -Dr South, 1633.

"O Sirs! there is in Jesus something proportionable to all the straits, wants, necessities, and desires of His poor people."-Thomas Brooks, 1635. "He is the great sympathetic nerve of the Church, over which all the oppressions and sufferings of His people distinctly pass.

Surveying this scene of overtoiled labour, and sleepless anxiety, and wasting solicitude, in which mortals are embroiled, the voice of Jesus-the Friend of man-the tender Sympathiser with human woe, is heard rising in tones of the kindest compassion."-Dr Harris.