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dislikings, their experience, their habits and their hopes, for the most part antagonistic to one another; but in this they were at one-they all were mortal, and died because they were all sinners in the sight of God. Similarly, Moses the man of God, here stands before us in retrospection of the past. Six hundred thousand males, and probably double that number of the other sex, if the mixed multitude is included, swelling their numbers to more than a million of people, had passed out of Egypt into the great and terrible wilderness in prospect of an earthly paradise beyond. They were saved by miracle; they lived by miracle; they marched or encamped by miracle. Such favouritism no people ever enjoyed; such mercies never before nor since fell to the lot of mortals; yet two men of the million only survived-in forty years all had perished.

If I am

1st. See here the fearful malignity of sin against God. addressing individuals who both speak and think lightly of sin, let them give heed to the dreadful fact of a nation, a whole nation, finding their graves in the waste howling wilderness instead of the promised land. On their way, under divine leadership, to the region of terrestrial bliss, assured to them by the Almighty Himself, and, rendering the air vocal with song, while timbrel and harp united in the high sounding praises of Israel's God to banish sorrow, and for once to turn a desert, where wild beasts roam, into a sanctuary sacred to Jehovah. First, we say, look, and see to it; that fact, the indisputable fact stands up to the instructive gaze of upcoming generations, that ONE SIN, a people's unbelief, changes the whole scene, and turns into desolation, mourning and woe, the pictured scene of transcendant loveliness that had allured a whole people to forego a home in the then grandest nation on earth, for one beyond the flood, and known by report only. What can more deeply affect us than this spectacle? Be it that this is not an every-day spectacle. Ah! but the cursed thing that wrought it all is in the midst of us; in every heart of every child of man, in misbelief of God, in the doubts and suspicions of some, in positive infidelity in others; in all, if not repented of and abandoned, "The wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience."

2nd. A second fact comes to light here, no less instructive-namely, the veracity, the faithfulness of God, no way invalidated by His breach of promise. His promise to give the people the land of Canaan as an inheritance involved, and must have involved, fealty to their King, obedience to His commands. Promises of good from God in every case presuppose allegiance to His person and government, as departure from Him must presuppose the infliction of His righteous displeasure. Therefore, the "Kibroth Hattavah," the graves of lust that marked the track of the travelling nation in its pilgrimage, stood there to tell succeeding generations that the "God of Israel is not a man that He should lie, or the son of man that He should repent." And this principle, you will find, runs throughout the entire revelation of God in His dealings with the children of men. A very remarkable example of this we

have in the case of Eli: "I said indeed that thy house and the house of thy father should walk before me for ever: but now the Lord saith, Be it far from Me: for them that honour me I will honour, and they that despise Me shall be lightly esteemed."

We shall, in the further prosecution of the subject before us, and by Divine help, show

I. The tentative character of life's journey.

II. Retrospection of the past essential to extracting wisdom from the review.

As in the case of Israel, so also in the events occurring in the life of a Christian man, these are designed to humble but after what manner?

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But first remark that pride is God's enemy and man's misery; yet there is no natural heart free from this sore evil. It lurks under a thousand disguises, and is most easily compelled to show itself by simply charging it home on the sinner who, either by a proud denial, or taking up a violent dislike at the accuser ever after, evinces his true character. This passion riots and rages in the hearts that have long been in a high position of prosperity, and nursed in the lap of ease and carnal security. But let circumstances change; let the man or woman be obliged by an irresistible necessity to descend from the eminence long occupied, without ever dreaming that such a thing was possible as that the sun of their prosperity could ever set; that instead of honour would come neglect; instead of fulness, want; and for mirth and song would fall depression so gloomy and weighty that, heart-sick of life, the sufferer should seek to shun society and hide himself from all living. Have you, dear hearer, only tasted of such a cup, and did you revolt and recoil? O, cease to shudder and to rave against Providence. Know you not that the Only-wise has been leading you by a way to humble thee, to hate the evil passion you hugged in your bosom, and to dispossess you of an evil you had never otherwise been willing to part with? To humble you was the aim; to empty you out of a soul-damning sin, which had otherwise cut you off from happiness and salvation. Or have you, fellow-traveller, been conducted through an arid sand track in the waste howling wilderness, and all all joy is. withered, and you are to be a mourner all your days? But why? What is the matter? A darling child has most unexpectedly sickened and died; nor that alone, but another and another sweet flower death has cropped from your sweet retreat; or the desire of your eyes and the light of your dwelling has been quenched, and you lift up your weeping eyes and sorrowing voice, and cry out with a mother of old, "Call me not, Naomi, beautiful, for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me." Or you have sons or daughters whom the Destroyer has met with, and thrown over them such a glamour as to take heart and affection clean away from seeking conformity to Jesus Christ to conformity to this present evil world. O yes, I see

how it is, you have got to King David's day, and to his bitter portion in the journey, royal palace though be his dwelling. You go alone, and with the King of Israel pour out your sorrows, "O Absalom, my son, my house, my house is not so with God"-not so as I would have, not so as God would have it!

Ah! "briars and thorns now." Could He not have led you away home by an easier way, a softer footing? Yes, he could. He could have taken you through the desert in a balloon, or on eagle's wings. But where then had been the proud heart without trials that could not be broken; where the carnal heart that could not have been spiritualised; where the heart that bowed not, melted not, but under the white heat of the furnace? "I have chosen thee in affliction." Verily, He led them by a right way to the city of habitation. But more still. He led them about and about for forty long years. "For forty years He suffered their mourning in the wildness" to prove them. So it is with you now. "Faith, hope, and love "Faith, hope, and love" are being proved. Your faith is proved in the course of your journey, Christian. All along the way you go your ears are assailed at every step by new discoveries antagonistic to the life of God in the soul of man. Infidelity is now reasoning against Revelation, and tampering with the Being of a First Cause. Literature is pouring out in flood its waters deeply impoisoned with fictitious matters that glisten and glide away on the surface, but waters of Mara they are, whose bitterness no tree cast into them can sweeten. The world never put forth the inviting charms it now wears, and temptations to gain its applause, secure its honours, and amass its riches. To be left behind in the race is crushing to the ardent spirits of the young, and the bitterest of all misfortunes in the esteem of old age. Here then faith is proved. Shall "the faith once delivered to the saints" fall before these flattering illusions, or shall it pass them all by as the ignis fatuus of the night? Shall the syrens' transporting voices draw us to their enchanted isle, or shall not the ancient faith spread her banner on the breeze, and at the risk of this pompous world's words of contempt and scorn, cry, "God forbid that I glory save in the Cross." Brethren, the way you are led by is to prove you. Will ye also go away? Cry aloud, “To whom shall we go," &c.

Their hope was being proved, all the years of the forty; but how often did it faint, and murmuring vanished away; they would never see the good land. "Let us make a captain, and return to Egypt." Oh, my brethren, how often has the hope of the heavenly rest, like a dying taper which trembled in the socket, yet revived again by the breath of the Spirit, and but for his vitalizing energy breathed on the expiring flame must have died for ever away. The cold breath of unbelief had well nigh extinguished it, but reviving faith in the promise-keeping God, nourished by the same good Spirit, has made it shoot up again, kindling new light and life in your souls. He who first planted it has sustained it through all its flickerings, and "the good hope through grace shall live and triumph even to the end."

Hope, true Christian hope, maketh not ashamed, because founded on the Divine testimony and the love of God shed abroad in our heart by the Holy Spirit given to us. "Cast not away, then, your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward; ye have need of patience, that when ye have done the will of God ye may receive the promises unbroken and in full." He "proved their love as well." "I remember thee, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in a land not sown, Israel was holiness to the Lord." But how soon did the sacred passion disappear in the shameful transaction of the golden calf, when even the venerable Priest himself, with shameless prevarication, insinuated that from the furnace "came out this calf." A more calf-like answer to his brother Moses his human lips could not have uttered. Alas, Lord, what is man !—that repentance may have brought again the hearts of many to the Lord can scarcely be doubted. Still, "the proof" which God sought of their affection to the King and Saviour afforded too much evidence that the most part of this evil congregation were mere hypocrites and time-servers. Now, Christian disciple, how is it with you? Has the TEST been going forward all your journey, and has it verified your profession? In prosperity and adversity? in crosses, afflictions, and most alluring temptations, has your love to Christ triumphed over all? No backslidings, no idols, no half-heartedness, no suspicions of God's faithfulness, no desires to amalgamate with the sinful worldlings around you? "Simon, son of Jonas," I ask, "lovest thou me?" Does your HEART respond, "Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love thee." Where are the proofs; what have you done, what are you doing for Christ, for His people, His church? Do you say, “God forbid that I should glory but in the cross?"

But now again let us turn the leaf in our domestic history. A very different course in some of your lives is on the record. Some of you have been exempt from the hardships others have encountered. Ye have been conducted along a pleasant pathway. Want has never looked in at your door, nor heavy trouble, nor has death once broken the enchanted family circle. Prosperity has smiled on all your undertakings, health and happiness have graced your dwelling places, and the 103rd Psalm has most frequently been the song of your family circle. But think you there has been no trial of your humility?-in all this no proof of your loyalty to Christ-and no intended development of what is in your hearts? Far from it, for this very comfortable course of trial has been designed to evince your true, your real character, whether a joyous and prosperous course should draw you nearer your God and further your spirituality or drive you further off from both; whether this world or the next had the mastery over you, and whether your dying flesh had your heart's or the interests of your never-dying soul.-Great Spirit of all grace! O lend us Thy help to know our God, to know ourselves, and to draw from our review of life how to live and how to die, and thus to grow in blessed meetness for our elevation to a higher sphere.

Lastly, "to know what was in thine heart." God needed not all Israel's forty years' journey to know what was in their hearts, for known to Him are all the hearts of the children of men; but to know, i.e. to make known to themselves and others what way within them. Ah! brethren, how little do any of us know of ourselves. "The heart is deceitful, and desperately wicked; who can know it?" A lying, deceitful, prevaricating thing is the human heart. How often do mankind deceive themselves. Think that they are saints when they are not; that they are converted and children of God when they are not; that they are in God's favour when they are not; that they are in the right way when they are in an opposite course; that they have done their duty towards God and man when they have done no such thing; and that they have a good prospect beyond the grave when it is a spider's web that breaks at every breeze. Now, then, as the forty years' trial was from first to last a tentative process developing their true state and character, even so the course of time with every one of us is just the opening out by all its incidents, all its joys and sorrows, all its perplexities and all its affections, designed to show us ourselves in our secret and true history, whether we read it aright or not. All that has happened in the life's history of every one of us is a sort of education, in the matter of all others most important to us, acquainting us with what men in general have no relish for a true and thorough knowledge of ourselves.

But do any inquire of us as to profit being the result of all this selfknowledge acquired by these laborious processes of thought? We answer, Yes. You shall cease to be the subjects of a fatal delusion, but, realising the fact of your alienation from God, you are henceforth in a condition to cry "What shall we do"? as did the awakened Jews under Peter's Sermon. And is that nothing? And to lie open to an honest welcoming of eternal salvation through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ; and is that nothing? Once in darkness, now in the light; once on the brink of hell's unmeasurable depths of anguish, but now caught away from the edge of destruction; once miserably unhappy, but now rejoicing in God through faith in Jesus Christ. And is all this nothing? Well, but a true and affecting view of our moral condition. is the very foundation of this new creation in the soul. How shall he seek to a physician, who believes himself in sound health, or to crave pardon of the man to whom he owes nothing, or to ask and cry for deliverance from a conflagration whose house and property within are untouched by fire? No wiser are those teachers who are for ever calling out to flee, until they instruct us from what we are to flee, and whither away. No wiser is the course of the preacher who publishes a salvation free as the air, and ready all ready for acceptance, until he succeeds in convincing us of the debts we owe, the position of most frightful danger we occupy, and who then seized our hands as did the Angel, and hurried us off from the furious wrath of a visitation already on its way to burn us up as it did the cities of the plain, and to involve us to a dead certainty in the same appalling and inextinguishable ruin in the end.

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