Moses when he descended from the mount. Would that there were more of such living shining Christians to lead others to seek that Saviour, some of whose loveliness appears in them with such attractive power!

What a difference it makes in the enjoyment of the beauties of creation when, instead of merely dwelling on the poetry of beauty, or taking scientific views and talking of forces of nature and laws of matter, we can look through all these external things to a living, personal God, and bowing before him in humble awe, can say, with Thomas, "My Lord and my God." For is not the same Lord who condescended to Thomas's unbelief the living Word by whom the worlds were made? None can ever really enter to the full into the enjoyment of his works until, being reconciled by the blood of the cross, they can see all the great and the beautiful in creation as the work of their Father's hand, and receive the sense and enjoyment of their excellence as a token of love from bis hand.

Another grand scene one evening at the Eggischhorn was a violent thunderstorm. It came up from the Italian side of the mountains; and long before it reached us, the lightning played in sheets and flashes of flame among the folds of the distant hills, showing their outlines in the gathering darkness in a wonderful manner. As the clouds drew nearer they were beneath as well as around us; and it was a sublime as well as awful sight to see, from the plateau on which the hotel is placed, the rocks and trees beneath our feet far down the mountain-side, one moment vividly illuminated by the forked flashes, and the next swallowed up again in the blackness of darkness. We seemed to be hanging over the edge of a gulf in which the warring elements were contending for the mastery. It was a scene such as the Psalmist describes in words which, in their simple majesty, must ever make all uninspired language appear weak and poor :

"The God of glory thundereth.

The voice of the Lord is powerful;
The voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars;
Yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.
The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness;
The Lord shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh.
The Lord sitteth King for ever."

In the midst of the roar and crash of the storm, when the thunder in its continuous reverberations left no pause between, and the rain was falling in sheets of water, our human sympathies were called forth by the arrival of a poor drenched traveller, who, heedless of his own half-drowned condition, was only anxious to get a horse and guide sent off at once for his wife, whom he had left behind near the Märjelen See, so worn out with ten hours of ice work that he had been obliged to leave her behind with the guides, and hurry on to seek help at the hotel. A horse and guides with lanterns were

soon sent cut to seek her; and by-and-by the lady arrived safe, though wet and weary.

The hotel was crowded to the very roof, and the Sabbath was anything but a day of rest to many of its inhabitants. After the short service held in the Salle à Manger by an English Church clergyman, who happened to be in the hotel, I took my book and spent the day outside, glad to get away from the continual coming and going, and clatter of travellers, guides, and horses. The day was splendid, and I wandered about resting here and there; when hungry, I got a collation of bread, wild strawberries, and cream ad libitum at a châlet, and did not return to the hotel till evening, so avoiding the noisy table d'hôte. Some few miles from the hotel, along the mountain-side, there is a little hamlet and a Popish chapel, the Valais being almost an entirely Roman Catholic canton. When I passed the chapel mass was over, and the people were all busy with their hay-making and such like occupations, the same as on an ordinary day.

The only appearance of a thought of Sunday which I saw, was a couple of girls returning from mass, in their holiday clothes. They greeted me pleasantly, but the German of the Valais is much more of a patois than the French at Sepey, so my intercourse with those I met was of the most limited description. Towards evening, I saw a beautiful pastoral scene, which took me back in thought to patriarchal days, when the chief riches lay in flocks and herds. On a level space of rich grass, close to a pretty little tarn, the Betten See, some one hundred and forty cows were gathered for the evening milking. They pressed round the milkers (nearly all men), eager to get the handful of salt which was given to each before milking her. The men looked very funny with their one-legged stools strapped to their loins, giving them the appearance of possessing stumpy tails, which, to a cursory observer, might almost supply an argument in favour of Darwinian theories-perhaps as good an argument as any they are likely to find.

High up among the steep crags that bounded one side of the plateau, the presence of a goat-herd was betrayed by a fire which he had lighted, while his jodelling song mingled with the musical tinkle of the bells with one of which each goat and each cow was provided. The varied notes of these bells sound very well at a distance, re-echoed from the cliffs. On the other side of the scene, the evening sun lighted up a wide range of snowy summits (including the Matterhorn) with that exquisite roseate flush which looks more like the glow of an internal fire, shining through the covering of snow, than the reflection of the sun's last rays. I returned to the hotel in the dusk, and enjoyed a quiet tea in my own room, full of thankfulness for the Sabbath peace I had enjoyed, amid the lack of the usual outward privileges of the day.

B. W.

INTRODUCTION.

VERY human mind we meet is a moving thought-hive. To our eye it is hidden; but to the eye of God it is a hive of transparent glass. For there is not a thought in our hearts, but lo! O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. The thoughts which nestle within us, and issue from us in language and in act, determine our moral character. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life."

66

The most exquisite piece of sculpture which a Powers or a Palmer ever carved was once only a thought; but their skilful hands smote the white marble until the beautiful images of the brain came forth. Upon the thought of James Watt and Robert Fulton we cross the trackless sea; while in its silent depths the thought of Professor Morse has laid the magic wire over which two continents converse. All the grandest enterprises of benevolence, and all the most stupendous crimes, were once only invisible phantoms in some man's or woman's busy brain. The Order of the Jesuits swarmed out of Ignatius Loyola's heart-hive; Sunday schools swarmed out of Robert Raikes'. If the jailer of Bedford prison had starved John Bunyan, he would have smothered the "Pilgrim's Progress" in its cradle. The very Bible is only God's blessed and holy thought revealed to us: by it we are made wise unto salvation.

A person is known by the company he keeps. So the thoughts which we harbour within us, and which go out through the doors of our mouths and our hands, determine our real character. A holy man gives house-room only to pure and godly thoughts, and he is constantly striving to bar up door and window against wicked intruders. Out of the treasure-house within him proceed all the white-winged words and all the beautiful deeds that are a blessing unto others.

Habitual thinking determines whether an individual is either Christ's or Satan's. As he thinketh, so is he. A sensualist is only a filthy thinker. The walls of his mind are hung around with lascivious pictures; his inmost soul is a brothel. Do a man's thoughts run every

From "Thought-Hives." By Theodore L. Cuyler, Pastor of Lafayette Avenue Church, Brooklyn. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers.

day upon the bottle? then he is a tippler or a sot. Does another man's thought-hive send out its winged messengers continually to gather honey from God's Word and his outlying world of Nature? then is he a devout and happy being. In such an one God dwelleth by his Spirit.

One of the highest of spiritual luxuries is the enjoy ment of pure and exhilarating and sublime thoughts; to such a devout and cheerful thinker a prison may be a palace. "I thought of Jesus," said holy Rutherford, "until every stone in the walls of my cell shone like a ruby." Wherefore let us keep our hearts, our thoughthives, with all prayer and watchfulness; for out of them are the issues of our life. And no one can handle the pitch of a wicked, obscene, or abominable thought for any considerable time without being defiled thereby. There is no greater torment than to be an unclean, er intensely selfish, or corrupt thinker. This is a genuine demoniac possession. Such an one is "grievously vexed with a devil." To go through some people's hearts would be like a walk through Sing-Sing penitentiary. Every room has a rascal in it. Out of such hearts proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, covetousness, pride, blasphemy. What a hell in advance to be living in such a habitation of the devil! To be such a man or woman for ever is the everlasting punishment of the lost.

All thoughts have their germs. The surest way to kill a sin is to kill it in the egg. At the very moment when a wicked thought is born is the right time to destroy it. These little serpents soon become the anacondas that strangle conscience and ruin character. How important, too, is the nursing into active life and vigour of every good suggestion and holy aspiration! A noble career depends on the treatment given to the infant ideas that are born in the soul. The best of these are the direct product of the Holy Spirit. Te quench a good thought is often a quenching of the Spirit; and the eternal damnation of millions has been the result of this sin against the infinite Love.

Christ is the purifier of the heart. He who walks in constant fellowship with Jesus hath the clean heart and the holy life. And an active, prayerful, loving mind, teeming with busy plans of usefulness, and swarming out into deeds of daily beneficence, is a hive of blessings, not only to its possessor, but to all who partake of its stores of honey.

THE GREAT CHOICE.

ALLOW me the privilege of addressing a few plain, affectionate words to one who is yet without a hope in Christ. I address you, my friend, as the possessor of an immortal soul. In the language in which Moses addressed Israel before he went up to his mountain deathbed, "I set before you life and death: choose life!" Every one has the power of choice. God made you a free moral agent. The very fact that you are now reading these lines proves that you have the power of choice. Every Christian in the world is a Christian simply because he accepted Christ when He was offered. Every impenitent sinner is yet one because he chooses to be. There is no decree of the Almighty which forbids your having eternal life, if you desire to secure it. Perhaps you cavil at "God's decrees." Just look at this one: "He that believeth on the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved." Or at this one: "As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked." Or at this one: "Whosoever cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." God's immutable decrees, in fact, secure salvation to every penitent believer and follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.

When Joshua submitted the great alternative, "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve," he addressed his auditors as free agents. When Christ said to Andrew and James and John, "Follow me,” he talked to them as rational beings, who had the power of choice. If they could not "follow" him, why did he ask them? When Simon Peter stood up before the mass-meeting in Jerusalem, and exclaimed, "Repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the Holy Ghost," he addressed them as free agents; and three thousand of them accepted the Divine Saviour.

If you ask me what is meant in the Bible by "life," I would answer,-It is the favour of God; it is the pardon of your sins; it is the sustaining strength to do right; it is a union of heart to Jesus; it is a divine support in the last hour, and everlasting holiness and joy beyond the grave. "Death" is the opposite of life; it is the absence of life. Spiritual death is the unbroken dominion of sin in this world, and the unending punishment of sin in the world to come. In this world the God of mercy says to every one, "I set before you life and death: choose life." In the next world, the divine and all-righteous Judge will say to those who choose life, "Come, ye blessed of my Father; inherit the kingdom prepared for you." To those who choose death he will say, "Depart, ye cursed!" and they "shall go away into everlasting punishment."

But you may say, "I do not choose death. It is impossible that any sane person should deliberately choose to be eternally wretched, when he might be eternally happy." This seems very plausible, and there is a sense in which it is true. Men do not commonly select wretchedness and ruin as the end of their volun

tary endeavours. They do not set success and happiness on the one hand and ruin on the other, and then calmly choose to be ruined. Yet it is equally true that men are continually selecting and pursuing courses that inevitably lead to ruin.

Here is a young man setting out in life. Of course, his preference is to become rich and prosperous. But he chooses also to lead a career of indolence and thriftlessness, which inevitably brings him to poverty, and keeps him there. His poverty is the fruit of his own conduct. Again, no man voluntarily chooses the disgrace and disease and horrors of drunkenness. But thousands, alas! do choose to tamper with the wineglass and the brandy-bottle, and their own free choice brings them surely to the drunkard's self-damnation. Did that poor girl who gave her heart and hand to the showy vagabond who stole her affections choose to become a wretched wife? Yet she did choose to marry him; she did it in spite of reason and conscience, and dearly does she pay the consequences of her choice.

In the same manner, my impenitent friend, when you decide to reject the knocking Saviour from your heart, you do choose to risk the awful consequences, When you choose to live on in sin, to follow the devices and desires of your own lusts, and to grieve the Holy Spirit of love, you deliberately choose everlasting death. You choose the road that leads to death. If you are lost, it will be your own fault. It will not be your heavenly Father's fault: he says to you, "Choose life!" It will not be the loving Saviour's fault: he says to you, "Look unto me, and live!" It is not the fault of that patient Spirit of truth, who is now pleading with you to renounce sin and accept the atonement offered to you in the gospel.

It is a delightful thought that your encouragements to seek life are so abundant. The Word of God overflows with encouragements. You may grow discouraged in seeking wealth, or health, or office, or great literary attainments; but no living man or woman need despair of gaining salvation. If you seek it in time, and seek it rightly, it is yours. The only time you are sure of is the present; and the only way is, through penitence and faith in the crucified Jesus. Eternal life is now within your reach. It does not depend on intellect, or wealth, or social patronage, or on the will of another. It depends on your own willingness to accept the Saviour, and by divine help to serve him faithfully. God will not hinder you, and Satan cannot hinder you, if you are in earnest. The only being who can destroy you is your own self. God is love; and God sets before you life and death, and says to you with infinite tender"Choose life! Give me thy heart!"

ness,

distress of mind. She had been awakened by hearing me preach from the words, "Choose life." She wished to know what she should do. I said, "You have been opposing God all your life. You have shut Christ from your heart. He seeks admission. Let him in. Give yourself all up to him. Choose life." I prayed with her, and besought her to yield herself to Jesus while we were on our knees. After rising up, I handed to her Newman Hall's blessed little book, “Come to Jesus." She laid it down, and modestly said, "I want now to pray too." We knelt once more together; and in

sweet, artless language, she just poured out her whole soul in penitent petition, and gave herself up to Jesus. She rose with brightened countenance, and said, "I feel more peaceful now." She had made the great CHOICE-she had given her heart to God; and on the next Sabbath she stood up and made a public profession of her faith in the Redeemer. My friend, you can make the same choice. It is only a moment's work, when you are in earnest. God offers you his help. I have set before you life and death; before you lay down this book, determine to CHOOSE LIFE.

XL.

THE PARTIES AT THE BAR.

ACTS xxiv. 1-23.

HE comfort given to the missionary in his extremity consists in an assurance, not that his troubles should cease, but that his witness-bearing should continue. The Lord knew what grieved his servant's heart; and in order to gladden it, announced, Thou shalt bear witness of me at Rome. This was the promise, and it must be fulfilled. Many and various agents will be pressed into the service in order to accomplish it. The bloodthirsty enmity of the Jewish priesthood, and the impartial dignity of Roman law; the plot of assassins, and the sharp-sighted love of kindred; the avarice of a profligate governor, and the discipline of the imperial legions, -all conspired, like the several parts of a machine in motion, to preserve the missionary's life and transplant him to the metropolis of the world.

At Cæsarea the distinguished prisoner was kept, for protection as much as for restraint, until his accusers should arrive. In five days the prosecutors were on the spot, and the case was called. The high priest in person, with several of his confederates, represented the Sanhedrim. The priests did not venture to conduct their own case. Already they had found Paul too much for them in debate. They knew by experience that he quickly detected the weak point in an adversary's argument, and had no mercy on sacerdotal impertinence. Wise in their generation, the Jewish conclave hired a Roman advocate to conduct the prosecution. These men, after studying law in the capital, were wont to practise in the provinces. They were acquainted with legal forms, and with the judicial precedents: provincial litigants found it their interest to employ them. It is by no means certain that the advocate used the Latin tongue; for examples occur in which the Greek was employed even in Rome.

It was a rule with rhetoricians to compliment the presiding judge at the outset ; and this part of his function Tertullus greatly overdid. He was able to point with truth to the suppression of certain bands of robbers as a boon conferred on the country; but history proves that the governor's own cruel and lawless acts oppressed the people more than all the robbers he had rooted out. The glimpse which this book gives of Felix perfectly accords with the character he bears in contemporary history. He was a licentious, rapacious, cruel, and unjust man.

After the advocate's exordium comes the indictment against the prisoner. Its terms are suspiciously general. No specific act is libelled, but a vague scolding accusation preferred against Paul as a pest and a disturber. Nothing strange has happened to this servant of Christ The Master had warned his disciples that they should be accounted and called "offscourings;" but, at the same time, he pronounced them to be "the salt of the earth." The high priest and his colleagues appeared personally and assented to the statements of their adv cate. When the case of the prosecutors was closed, the governor beckoned to Paul that he was at liberty to reply. The gravity and order of a Roman tribunal contrast strongly with the lawless insolence of the high priest in his court at Jerusalem.

Paul, too, like his adversary Tertullus, begins with a word of compliment to the presiding magistrate; but he utters no falsehood and no exaggeration. He only mentions an obvious fact, that the governor had long experience of the country. As to the substance of his address, it consists of two parts: those things in the cusation that were criminal were not true; and these that were true were not criminal. The crimes falsely charged he denied, and challenged his accusers to the proof: the portions of the indictment that were true he confessed, and contended that they violated no law.

Even in an oration, whose direct object was the de monstration of his own innocence and the preservation

of his own life, Paul contrives incidentally to indulge his ruling passion—that is, to commend the gospel of Christ. He carefully points out that the belief of the gospel is not the rejection of the Mosaic system, but its natural result. He testifies to thoughtful Jews that the right understanding of Moses leads to the reception of Jesus as the Christ. In the matter of the resurrection, too, which was the immediate occasion of the tumult in the council at Jerusalem, his faith coincided with that of the Pharisees who were prosecuting him.

Besides allusions to controverted doctrines, he introduces a most interesting and instructive reference to personal, practical holiness of life; " Herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God and toward men." This is a precious morsel; especially when we consider the position in which it stands, and the circumstances in which it was given. In great ecclesiastical and doctrinal contentions, such as those in which Paul was then engaged, or those which agitate the Church in our own day, zeal in public debate too often overrides and crushes private, personal godliness and purity of conscience. It is reproving and instructive to observe that the Apostle of the Gentiles, at the very moment when he was compelled to contend alone against a nation leagued to destroy him, devoted himself habitually and with all his might to the growth of grace in his own soul, and the practice of righteousness in all his conduct. Clear in his logic as well as ardent in his affections, he rightly divides the word of truth on this subject for our instruction in the end of the world. Morality with Paul, as with Moses, diverges into two main channels, the first containing our duty to God, and the second our duty to man. He strove to have these two commandments written, not with ink, but on the fleshy tables of his heart. Let the conscience be clean, whether it point upward to God, or outward to men. The two great commandments in this preacher's life were, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and thy neighbour as thyself."

Nor did this great saint find compliance easy. Obedience to that law "exceeding broad" did not come to him by chance, without plan and effort. He speaks of it in the terms which belong to the drill of a soldier. It is a commonplace in military economy, that a soldier cannot be made in a day. Raw recruits, however perfect may be their arms and their uniform, are useless when they meet an enemy. Wherein really consists the strength of an army in the day of battle? In the previous exercise of the individual combatants. This conception Paul adopts and applies to his own life as a witness for Christ and a warfare against sin. For the motive to fight, and the will to make sacrifice on the side of holiness, he depends altogether on the redemption of Christ. He is bought with a price, and is therefore not his own; his life and all his faculties are at the disposal of the Lord that bought him; but for the skill and power to fight successfully on the side he has chosen he depends

on a careful and constant exercise. The success of the

Christian army in their holy war depends on the drill, day by day, of individual warriors.

And if the Apostle of the Gentiles, a man great in the faith, found it necessary to maintain constantly a military watchfulness and practice, how presumptuous in any of us to count on keeping the course, and acquiring the crown, by an indolent wish to be safe, without a constant watchfulness, an energetic effort, and a more than military sternness in laying aside every weight, and the sin that doth most easily beset us. Soldiers are never done with exercise: although they have served honourably for a quarter of a century, they must still submit to drill. If the soldiers of Jesus Christ were as wise in their generation and as painstaking, more victories would be won, and more captives made. The kingdom of Christ would "come" in greater power, both in the hearts of individual disciples and over the nations of the earth.

XLI.

PAUL AND FELIX.

ACTS xxiv. 24, 25.

THERE are in the Scriptures certain grand outstanding portions, which seem to bulk more largely and shine more brightly than the rest. In the Old Testament the twenty-third Psalm and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah: in the Gospels the interviews with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, the parables of the sower, the shepherd, and the prodigal: in the Acts, the gospel preached to the Ethiopian by Philip, and to the jailer by Paul; the gospel preached to Felix here and rejected; —these are specimens of words that grave themselves more deeply on the memory of Bible students, and come up more frequently for use. Nor is it either unlike the ways of God or incongruous with the nature of the case that some points should excel in beauty and power where all is divine. On the earth's surface, some mountains rear their heads into the sky far above the valleys and the "little hills" that bound them, and some stars are superior to others in breadth and brightness. To recognize practically such pre-eminence does not disparage the body of revelation any more than the earth that bears the mountains, or the skies that hold forth the stars.

To a thirsting soul these notable portions are like wells by the wayside. The traveller drank from them in succession the first time he trod the path, perhaps fifty years ago; but if he is living still, and still on pilgrimage, with the same hot sand beneath his feet, and the same hot sun above his head, he will drink from each wellremembered spring as he passes it, with as much delight as on the first day he discovered its refreshing water. He will not turn away his head with the complaint, I have known these wells so long and tasted of them so often that I am wearied of them now. Therefore, spring, O wells, as long as there is a desert, and drink, O pilgrims, as long as you are thirsty; for the princes