ure, where it can get no fresh supply of air. Our life may be hid with Christ, but our light must not be hid, but openly shine.

3. The lamp-wick must be trimmed, otherwise the very wick that ought to flame and gleam will smoke and flicker and perhaps go out. Our experience must be constantly renewed from day to day. A former experience will not make up for the lack of a latter and riper one; our life daily renewed must attest our living union with our Saviour and Lord.

The subject suggests:

1. Our limited capacity and unlimited source of supply; compare the bowl and the olive-tree.

Take that saint after a thousand years in heaven. All deformity of body gone, the scars of old sin no more found, hers is a body of glory like her Lord's, with the beauty of unfading youth. Her mind has grown until it is stored with the riches of all universal knowledge. All the philosophers of ancient and modern times might come and sit at her feet to learn the mysteries of all wisdom. Her companions now are angels and saints. Her heart is free from every taint of evil and overflows with every Divine affection and rapture. For a thousand years not an evil thought has crossed her path, nor a corrupt imagination or memory defiled her heart or destroyed her peace. She stands

3. Our need of uninterrupted fellowship and communion with the Holy Spirit.

4. Our practical omnipotence when God is with us and in us.

That in the ages to come He might shew, etc.-Eph. ii. 7.

THERE is a wonderful suggestion here. The full measure of grace can never be known until the coming æons have revealed it. This side of death the greatest saint is imperfectly developed and matured. Let us suppose one of the worst of men-or worse, of women-a deformed, repulsive cripple, a moral leper in whose body and soul the most fearful scars of sin have left their mark-an object of general loathing even to companions in sin-uneducated, hateful, malicious, ugly, a wild beast among humanity. Let the grace of

God come into her soul and work its mighty work, until gradually evil lusts and passions are subdued, and the wild beast is tamed, until the heart overflows with love and grace, and the very body takes on a new complexion, and the features become radiant with the beauty of tenderness. This is a marvellous change, but it is nothing in comparison to what the ages to come shall show.

can express and no mathematics measure; and yet-think of it !—she is only now beginning by an insignificant fraction of time the interminable ages of an endless life, as eternal as God's, and all through that life infinite height on height beckons her onward and upward in the growth and progress of a perfection always complete yet always divinely incomplete! Eternity at every stage of her existence is still before her, and whatever she has attained, boundless growth is still inviting her to higher ecstasy and bliss.

A Charge to Hearers of the Gospel. [Literal translation.] Bear in mind your leaders; whoever have spoken to you the Word of God; observing the issue of their life-course, imitate their faith.—Heb. xiii. 7.

HERE are given three tests of a spiritual leader :

1. He speaks God's message; 2. He lives for heaven; 3. He has faith in a personal Saviour.

And there are three duties of the hearer: 1. To remember the messenger for his message's sake; 2. To observe the testimony of his holy life; and 3. To imitate his personal faith.

God's heaven-sent leaders deliver a heaven-given message. It is according

to the written Word (Isa. viii. 20; Jer. xxiii. 28). Again, they speak the language of positive conviction, not negations, but affirmations (2 Cor. i. 17-20); and, again, they are attended by spiritual power (1 Cor. ii. 1-4). The Word is God's, the conviction of a believer is behind it, and the Spirit's demonstration attends it. Moreover, it is with solemn earnestness, not frivolity (see Jer. xxiii. 32).

The declaration of the message is experimental, for it is backed by a personal faith in a personal Saviour. No unconverted man is fit to preach or teach the Gospel. The master of Israel must know these things heartwise. The centre of his message is Christ, and He must be the centre of his heart's faith and love and hope. If the truth is the ball, and the mouth the cannon, the explosive force behind the ball is the heart's passion for Jesus.

Such faith will be further confirmed and exhibited in a life which is under the power of eternal realities and whose end is Christ, heaven, and the glory of God.

The thought is progressive. God's leader speaks the Word God; convinced of its truth, he is led by it to a personal Saviour whom that Word enshrines, and that faith remoulds and remodels his life.

Thucydides said of his history: "I give it to the public as an everlasting possession, and not as a contemporary instrument of popular applause."

Paul was marked by enterprise, unselfishness, a sense of a mission, and a spirit of devotion to Christ.

The burning brand is not simply plucked from the fire, but changed into a branch. The soul saved from hell must be saved for heaven. Salvation is a work in which man co-operates with God; to be worked out, salvation in its fulness is reserved, ready to be revealed at the last time. Compare 1 Peter i. It includes deliverance from power and

Read the story of Jeroboam's rise into royalty (1 Kings xi. 26-40; xii. 19, 24); also of his apostasy (1 Kings xii. 25, 33). So the idolatrous worship goes on and the years pass.

Then trouble comes to Jeroboam. Abijah, the son of Jeroboam, a really beautiful character (see 1 Kings xiv. 13), sickens.

Shall

What now shall Jeroboam do? There is his own man-made worship he has set up at Dan and Bethel. he apply to this religion he himself has manufactured? This religion may do for pleasant weather, but for storm and strait he needs a Divine religion.

So in his strait he turns from the faith and worship he has himself instituted, and tells his wife to go with prayer and inquiry to Shiloh, where God's prophet dwells-God's prophet, Ahijah.

From his own false and merely human religion he turns in extremity to the true God. Golden calves, etc., will not do now. Get thee to Shiloh."

(A) Many men make a kind of religion of worldly success. By that I mean that for many men a worldly success gathers everything a real religion should gather about itself.

And worldly success of the true sort is right, is duty.

Every man's life is a plan of God; to

This was the kind of religion Jeroboam set up for himself; any way he would keep his kinghood, though, as he thought, he must do it by the worship of golden calves instead of Jehovah.

But a crisis comes-trouble, death. Then how sad for a man to feel himself shut off from God as Jeroboam did! Then only God can meet the need.

(B) Some men make a religion of external morality, but there is a world of motive as well as a world of outward deed. God demands not only that we do things that look right outwardly, but that are right inwardly. And the record a man makes of inward motive as well as of outward doing must confront him at the judgment. In view of such confronting, the best of us needs forgiveness; and if a man must depend simply on his own record, what help for him? We need a Divine atonement. The only religion which can endure the crisis of death and the judgment is the Divine religion of an atoning and justifying Redeemer.

(C) Some men make a religion of naturalism. Law simply is what they look at, but such view changes life into a mere mechanism; but the needs of the heart and the straits of life call for more than law. That was a good answer a plain collier made once at the

close of one of Mr. Bradlaugh's infidel lectures-" Maister Bradlaugh, me and my mate Jim were both Methodys, till one of these infidel chaps cam' this way. Jim turned infidel and used to badger me about attendin' prayer-meetings; but one day in the pit a large cob of coal came down upon Jim's head. Jim thought he was killed; and, ah mon! didn't he holler and cry to God. There's now't like cobs of coal for knocking infidelity out of a man.' Naturalism will not suffice always. Sometimes we need supernaturalism.

"Get thee to Shiloh." Here in Shiloh is what you need. Here is the great prophet, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. He only can meet and master all our necessities and extremities.

MAY 8-14.-FULNESS IN CHRIST.Col. ii. 9.

A grotesque mixture of Jewish ritualism and Oriental mysticism had begun to infect these Christians at Colos

sæ.

The underlying dogma of it was that matter is in itself evil and the cause of evil. It is very strange how modern errors are only ancient ones tricking themselves out with new names. This old notion that matter is evil and the source of evil is the bottom idea of the present pernicious fad of so-called Christian science-Christian only in the name it arrogates.

From this idea that matter is itself evil and the source of it sprung at once and easily the notion that God and matter were hostile to each other, and that, therefore, the material world and our material bodies and a Divine government of this material world could not spring directly from God.

Between pure Deity and this gross material world there must be a chasm wide and deep. Then, in order to bridge the gulf between pure Deity and gross and evil matter, this error, which was seizing the Colossian Christians, went on to assert that there must be a vast series of intermediate beings, transient

emanations,

each approaching more nearly to the material than his precursor, till at last the intangible and infinite was confined and curdled into actual earthly matter, and the pure was darkened thereby into evil."

Well, out of this sprang at once wrong notions of sin and of sin's cure; for if matter were the seat and source of evil, then sin did not arise from bad and rebellious spiritual will, but from the fact that man's soul was imprisoned in matter; and the thing to do, in order to be cured of sin, was to smite the evil and despised body with all sorts of slashing asceticisms; and here came in intense devotion to ascetic Jewish rites, etc. Notice how Romanism has absorbed this idea.

And then still further, this false philosophy went on to assert that the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself was only one of these transient and intermediate emanations, depriving Him at once, you see, of His eternal and essential Deity.

No, says the great apostle, in answer to such twisting and pernicious falsehoods-no; hold steadily to the true thought of Jesus Christ; He is the antidote to the poison of error (Col. ii. 810); for in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.

(A) The Godhead-that means "the perfections of the essential being of God." In our Lord Jesus Christ there is essential Deity. Veritably in Him is God Himself. Christ does not simply represent God as an ambassador represents his government at a foreign court. He is God. Gather together all the terms of adoration, worship, trust, affection, hope, clinging dependence, which it is right to use toward God, and it is as right to wreathe them all around our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, for in Him is the Godhead; for He is God.

(B) The fulness of the Godhead-that is to say, not a part of the Godhead is in Christ, but the infinite wholeness of it-"all" of it. That is a great word— fulness, pleroma. It means, as well as

words can tell it, the totality of a thing. Just as the fulness of heat and light is in the sun, so the fulness of the Godhead is in Jesus Christ our Lord.

(C) In Him dwelleth the fulness of the Godhead; dwelleth-so the Lord Jesus Christ is not a transient emanation from the Divine, as the false teachers were trying to get those Colossian Christians to believe. Rather, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is for all ages and for all times the perpetual expression of the Deity. As much for us in the nineteenth century as He was for the disciples in the first century.

(D) In Him dwelleth the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Oh, false teacher, seeking to corrupt the faith of that Colossian Church, matter is not essential evil and the cause of evil. See, the Godhead in Jesus Christ clothed Himself in matter. The fulness of the Godhead has come into brotherhood with you in the incarnation,

First. Since all the fulness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Jesus Christ, it is both irrational and useless to expect any further or other revelation than the revelation of God in Jesus Christ already given.

Second. Since the fulness of the Godhead dwells bodily in Jesus Christ, I ought to be sure I neither need make, nor can make, any human addition to His atonement. In two ways men are perpetually trying to do this: (a) By their own moralities. (b) By sacramental rites.

Third. Since the fulness of the Godhead dwells in the Lord Jesus bodily, I may be possessed of that which shall slay my fears. In Him is fulness

(a) Of sympathy.

(b) of power.

(c) Of atonement.

When I fear, let me think of that ful

ness.

(a) When I fear at the thought of living.

(b) When I fear at the thought of dying.

(c) When I fear at the thought of the judgment.

MAY 15-21.-THE STORY OF WHEN TO SAY No.-Dan. iii. 16.

"We are not careful to answer thee in this matter"--that is, there is no need that we further answer thee; we have nothing more to say; there is no more room for further argument.

It is a gala-time in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar is a great king, and he is about to celebrate a splendid triumph.

The war has been hard and long. At last the king is shining with success. From subjugated Egypt and from subjugated Judea he has returned to Babylon with vast and precious spoil. He will arrange a celebration worthy of his kingdom, his victory, himself; and of great Bel also, the deity of Babylon, who, he thinks, has been lending him his prowess. It shall be a triumph in which there shall be pomp of multitude, and pomp of music, and pomp of worship, and pomp of gold.

So out there on the plain of Dura, hard by Babylon, preparations for the ovation are going on. A colossal statue of the god Bel, ninety feet in height, is slowly lifted. The gold, gathered in immense quantities from conquered nations, is hammered into sheets and overlaid upon the image, so that from base to top the image looks a mass of gold. This finished, the celebration will be had. For account of the gathering of the multitude, the order of the jubilee, the magnificence of the music, the vast plain filled at the commanded moment with prostrate worshippers, the calm refusal to fall before the image of the three Hebrews, see our chapter (Dan. iii. 3-16).

The news of this refusal of the three Hebrews is carried to the king. He summons them. He flames with rage. "Is it true ye will not worship? Can it be ye dare resist me, Nebuchadnezzar? But in my gracious leniency I will give you another chance. yonder gleams the image. Once again shall the herald make proclamation. Once again shall the music burst. Then, if ye worship it shall be well with

See,