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^.j

PICTURES AND EMBLEMS.

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D.

Being Illustrations from his Sermons.

SELECTED HY

JAMES H. MARTYN.

"Jucundum nihil est, nisi quod reiicit variwtas." — Bacon.

SECOND EDITION.

1 1

T O R O N T O, CANADA:

S. R. BRIGGS,

TORONTO WILLARD TRACT DEPOSITORY.

PREFACE.

It will be conceded that illustrations have their
place and purpose in sermons. But illustrations
should be selected with a reference to their force
rather than to the'r beauty, and be marked more
by their homely propriety than by their grace or
elegance.

Whatever is pure is also simple. It does not
keep the eye on itself. Effective illustration will
not divert the mind from the truth it is designed
to illustrate, as a gorgeous cathedral window, through
which the light streams, tinged with a thousand
hues, attracts the attention to the pomp and splen-
dour of the artist's work ; but the window should
be forgotten in the landscape it displays.

Dr. Maclaren's Sermons have won a high place
amongst our Christian classics ; and the illustrations
from those Sermons which have been gathered
together in this volume are characterized by freshness
and refined and delicate beauty, and are rich in
devotional, not less than in practical, lessons.

iv Preface.

It is hoped that their publication in a separate
volume may be helpful to preachers and students,
and acceptable to all those who can appreciate
what is beautiful and true in our best Sermon
literature

It is proper to say that Dr. Maclaren has had
no part in the selection of the illustrations, but they
are published by his kind permission.

J. H. M.

Rock Ferry, Cheshire.
September ^ 1885.

■1

CONTENTS.

Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII. ...
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.

L. •••

••• •**

... .•• ... ...

... .*• •. •

. . . • ..

... • •.

• •• ...

... • .•

••• ...

PAGE
I

88
117
145

175

202
225

252

/x.

fJL^jC

CHAPTER I.

REMEMBER once seeing a mob of revellers
streaming out from a masked ball, in
a London theatre, in the early morning
sunlight ; draggled and heavy-eyed, the rouge
showing on the cheeks, and the shabby tawdriness
of the foolish costumes pitilessly revealed by the
pure light. So will many a life look when the day
dawns, and the wild riot ends in its unwelcome
beams.

2. The issue and outcome of believing service
and faithful stewardship here is the possession of
the true life which stands in union with God, in
measure so great, and in quality so wondrous, that
it lies on the pure locks of the vi6lors like a flashing
diadem, all ablaze with light in a hundred jewels.

3. The spiritual life is, at the best, but a hidden

glory, and a struggling spark. There is no profit

in seeking to gaze into that light of glory so as to

2 Pin,ures and Emblems.

discern the shapes of those who walk in it, or the
elements of its lambent flames. Enough that in
its gracious beauty transfigured souls move as in
their native atmosphere.

4. The final condition will be the perfection of
human society. There all who love Christ will be
drawn together, and old ties, broken for a little
while here, be re-knit in yet holier form, never to be
parted more. Ah I the all-important question for
each of us is how may we have such a hope, like a
great sunset light shining into the western windows
of our souls. There is but one answer: Trust
Christ. That is enough. Nothing else is.

5. Living by Christ, we may be ready quietly to
lie down when the time comes, and may have all
the future filled with the blaze of a great hope that
glows brighter as the darkness thickens. That
peaceful hope will not leave us till consciousness
fails, and then, when it has ceased to guide us, Christ
Himself will lead us, scarcely knowing where we
are, through the waters, and when we open our
half-bewildered eyes in brief wonder, the first thing
we see will be His welcoming smile, and His voice
will say, as a tender surgeon might to a little child
waking after an operation, " It is all over." We
lift our hands wondering and find wreaths on our

Piffures and Emblems. 3

brow. We lift our eyes, and lo ! all about us a
crowned crowd of conquerors.

"And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which we have loved long since and lost awhile."

6. The past struggles are joyful in memory, as the
mountain ranges— which were all black rock and
white snow while we toiled up their inhospitable
steeps — lie purple in the mellowing distance, and
burn like fire as the sunset strikes their peaks.

7. Many a wild winter's day has a fair cloudless
close, and lingering opal hues diffused through all
the quiet sky. " At eventide it shall be light."

8. The only life that bears being looked back
upon is a life of Christian devotion and effort. It
shows fairer when seen in the strange cros?-lights
that come when we stand on the boundary of two
worlds— with "the white radiance of eternity"
beginning to master the vulgar oil lamps of earth
— than when seen by these alone.

9. There is such a congruity between righteous-
ness and the crown of life, that it can be laid on none
other head but that of a righteous man, and if it
could, all its amaranthine flowers would shrivel

and fall when they touched an impure brow.

B 2

4 Pi6ltires and Emblems,

10. All work that contributes to a great end is
great ; as the old rhyme has it, " for the want of a
nail a kingdom was lost."

11. We learn from historians tha': the origin of
nobility in some Teutonic nations is supposed to
have been the dignities enjoyed by the king's
household — of which you find traces still. The
king's master of the horse, or chamberlain, or cup-
bearer becomes noble. Christ's servants are lords,
free because they serve Htm, noble because they
wear His livery and bear the mark of Jesus as
their Lord.

12. There is a wide-spread unwillingness to say
the word " Death." It falls on men's hearts like clods
on a coffin — so all people and languages havs
adopted euphemisms for it— fair names which wrap
silk round his dart and somewhat hides his face.

13. We lose nothing worth keeping when we
leave behind the body, as a dress not fitted for home,
where we are going.

14. Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends
in a city.

1 5. We may change climates, and for the stormy
bleakness of life may have the long, still days of
heaven ; but we do not change ourselves.

PiSlures and Emblems. 5

16. This world is not to be for us an enchanted
garden of delights, any mc'^e than it should appear
a dreary desert of disappointment and woe. But it
should be to us mainly a palaestra, or gymnasium
and exercising ground. You cannot expe6l many
flowers or much grass in the place where men
wrestle and run. We need not much mind though
it be bare, if we can only stand firm on the hard
earth ; nor lament that there are so few delights to
stay our eyes from the goal.

17. Thinking of the past, there may be a sense of
not unwelcome lightening from a load of responsi-
bility when we have got all the stress and strain of
the confli6l behind us, and have, at any rate, not
been altogether beaten. We may feel like a captain
who has brought his ship safe across the Atlantic,
through foul weather and past many an iceberg, and
gives a great sigh of relief as he hands over the
charge to the pilot, who will take her across the
harbour bar and bring her to her anchorage in the
land-locked bay, where no tempests rave any more
for ever.

18. The life of men and of creatures is like a
river, with its source, and its course, and its end. The
life of God is like the ocean, with joyous movements
of tides and currents of life and energ ' and purpose,
but ever the same and ever returning upon itself.

6 Figures and Emblems.

19. Every pebble that you kick with your foot if
thought about and treasured, contains the secret of
the universe. The commonplaces of our faith are
the food upon which our faith will most richly feed.

20. The commonplaces of religion are the most
important. Everybody needs air, light, bread and
water. Dainties are for the few ; but the table which
our religion sometimes spreads for them, is like that
at a rich man's feast — plenty of rare dishes but never
a bit of bread ; plenty of wine and wine-glasses, but
not a tumbler-full of spring water to be had.

21. When Nero is on the throne, the only possible
place for Paul is the dungeon opening on to the
scaffold. Better to be the martyr than the Caesar.

22. " Heaven doth with us as men with torches do,

Not light them for themselves."
" God hath shined into our hearts that we might
give to others the light of the knowledge of the
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

23. Loyola demanded from his black-robed
militia obedience to the General of the Order so
complete that they were to be " just like a corpse,"
or " a staff in a blind man's hand." Such a regiment
made by a man is, of course, the crushing of the
will, and the emasculation of the whole nature.

Figures and Emblems. *]

But such a demand yielded to from Christ is the
vitalising of the will, and the ennobling of the spirit.

24. The owner of the slave could set him to any
work he thought fit. So our Owner gives all His
slaves their several tasks. As in some despotic east-
ern monarchies the Sultan's mere pleasure makes of
one slave his vizier, and of another his slipper-bearer,
our King chooses one man to a post of honour, and
another to a lowly place ; and none have a right
to question the allocation of work.

25. Let our spirits stretch out all their powers to
the better things beyond, as the plants grown in
darkness will send out pale shoots that feel blindly
towards the light, or the seed sown on the top of a
rock will grope down the bare stone for the earth
by which it must be fed.

26. The do6lrine of averages does not do away
with the voluntary chara6ler of each single a6l. The
same number of letters are yearly posted without
addresses. Does anybody dream of not scolding
the errand boy who posted them, or the servant who
did not address, because he knows that ?

27. The coals were scattered from the hearth in
Jerusalem by the armed heel of violence. That
did not put the fire out, but only spread it, for
wherever they were flung they kindled a blaze.

/'inures and Emblems,

28. What kind of Christians must they be who
think of Christ as " a Saviour for me," and take no
care to set Him forth as " a Saviour for you ?" What
should we think of men in a shipwreck who were
content to get into the life-boat, and let everybody
else drov/n ? What should we think of people in a
famine feasting sumptuously on their private stores,
whilst women were boiling their children for a meal,
and men fighting with dogs for garbage on the
dunghills ?

29. In the simple astronomy of early times, there
was no failure, nor decay, nor change, in the calm
heavens. The planets, year by year, returned
punctually to their places; and, unhasting and
unresting, rolled upon their way. Weakness and
weariness had no place there ; and the power by
which the most ancient heavens were upheld and
maintained was God's unwearied might.

30. What God does with poor weak creatures
like us, when He lifts up our weaknesses, and replen-
ishes our weariness ; pouring oil and wine into our
wounds and a cordial into our lips, and sendmg us,
with the joy of pardon, upon our road again ; that
is a greater thing than when He rolls Neptune in its
mighty orbit round the central sun, or upholds
with unwearied arms, from cycle to cycle, the circle

Pi£lures and Emblems, 9

of the heavens with all its stars. " He giveth power
to the faint " is His divinest work.

31. The leaven does not leaven the whole mass in
a moment, but creeps on from particle to particle.

32. From the beginning the true " Hero " of the
Bible is God ; its theme is His self-revelation cul-
minating for evermore in the Man Jesus. All other
men interest the writers only as they are subsidiary
or antagonistic to that revelation. As long as that
breath blows them they are music; else they are
but common reeds.

33. Christ is all in all to His people. He is all
their strength, wisdom, and righteousness. They
are but the clouds irradiated by the sun, and bathed
in its brightness. He is the light which flames in
their grey mist and turns it to a glory. They are
but the belt and cranks and wheels ; He is the
power. They are but the channel, muddy and
dry ; He is the flashing life which fills it and makes
it a joy. They are the body; He is the Soul
dwelling in every part to save it from corruption
and give movement and warmth.

" Thou art the organ, whose full breath is thunder ;
I am the keys, beneath Thy fingers pressed."

34. Let us be thankful if our consciences speak
to us more loudly than they used to do. It is a sign

Figures and Emblems.

of growing holiness, as the tingling in a frost-bitten
limb is of returning life.

35. In all fields of effort, whether intelleftual,
moral or mechanical, as faculty grows, consciousness
of insufficiency grows with it. The farther we get up
the hill the more we see how far it is to the horizon.

36. The thick skin of a savage will not be distur-
bed by lying on sharp stones, while a crumpled rose-
leaf robs the Sybarite of his sleep. So the habit of evil
hardens the cuticle of conscience, and the practice
of goodness restores tenderness and sensibility ;
and many a man laden with crime knows less of
its tingling than some fair soul that looks almost
spotless to all eyes but its own. One little stain of
rust will be conspicuous on a brightly-polished blade^
but if it be all dirty and dull a dozen more or
fewer will make little difference. As men grow
better they become like that glycerine barometer
recently introduced, on which a fall or a rise, that
would have been invisible with mercury to record
it, takes up inches, and is glaringly conspicuous.

37. The higher the temperature the more chilling
would it be to pass into an ice-house ; and the more
our lives are brought into fellowship with the perfefl
Life, the more we shall feel our own shortcomings.

ten

Figures and Emblems.

38. We are all writing our lives* histories here, as
if with one of these " manifold writers " — a black
blank page beneath the flicisy sheet on which we
write, but presently the black page will be taken
away, and the writing will stand out plain on the
page behind that we did not see. Life is the filmy,
unsubstantial page on which our pen rests ; the
black page is death ; and the page beneath is that
indelible transcript of our earthly aftions, which
we shall find waiting for us to read, with shame
and confusion of face, or with humble joy, in another
world.

39. In all regions of life a wise classification of
men arranges them to their aims, rather than their
achievements. The visionary who attempts some-
thing high and accomplishes scarcely anything of
it, is often a far nobler man, and his poor, broken,
foiled, resultless life, far more perfe£l than his who
aims at marks on the low levels and hits them full.
Such lives as these, full of yearning and aspiration,
though it be for the most part vain, are *

" Like the young moon with a ragged edge
E'en in its imperfection beautiful."

40. The deeds that stand highest on the records
of heaven are not those which we vulgarly call great.
Many " a cup of cold water only " will be found to

Pi6lures and Emblems.

have been rated higher there than jewelled golden
chalices brimming with rare wines.

41. God's treasures, where He keeps His child-
ren's gifts, will be like many a mother's secret store of
relics of her children, full of things of no value, what
the world calls " trash," but precious in His eyes,
for the love's sake that was in them.

42. It does not matter whether you have the Gos-
pel in a penny testament, printed on thin paper with
black ink, and done up in cloth, or in an illuminated
missal glowing in gold and colour, painted with
loving care on fair parchment, and bound in jewelled
ivory. And so it matters little about the material
or the scale on which we express our devotion and
our aspirations ; all depends on what we copy, not
on the size of the canvas on which, or on the material
in which, we copy it.

43. Surely he has best learned his true place, and
the worth of Jesus Christ, who abides with unmoved
humility at His feet, and, like the lonely, lowly fore-
runner, puts away all temptations to self-assertion
while joyfully accepting it as the law of his life to

" Fade in the light of the planet he loves,
To fade in His love and to die."

44. We shall sleep none the less sweetly, though
none be talking about us over our heads. The world

Figures and Emblems,

has a short memory, and, as the years go on, the list
that it has to remember grows so crowded that it is
harder and harder to find room to write a new name
on it, or to read the old. The letters on the tomb-
stones are soon erased by the feet that tramp across
the churchyard.

45. To Jesus all service done from the same
motive is the same, and His measure of excellence is
the quantity of love and spiritual force in our deeds,
not the width of the area over which they spread.
An estuary that goes wandering over miles of
shallows may have less water in it, and may creep
more languidly, than the torrent that thunders
through some narrow gorge.

46. " Our citizenship is in heaven, from whence
we also look for the Lord Jesus as Saviour." The
little, outlying colony in this far-off edge of the em-
pire is ringed about by wide-stretching hosts of dusky
barbarians. Far as the eye can reach, their myriads
cover the land, and the watchers from the ramparts
might well be dismayed if they had only their own
resources to depend on. But they know that the
Emperor in His progress will come to this sorely
beset outpost, and their eyes are fixed on the pass
in the hill where they expe6l to see the waving
banners and the gleaming spears. Soon, like our

PiSlures and Emblems.

countrymen in Lucknow, they will hear the music
and the shouts that tell that He is at hand. Then
when He comes, He will raise the siege, and scatter
all the enemies as the chaff of the threshing-floor ;
and the colonists who held the post will go with Him
to the land which they have never seen, but which
is their home, and will, with the Vi6lor, sweep in
triumph " through the gates into the city."

47. The noblest use for the precious ointment of
love,which the poorest of us bears in the alabaster-
box of the heart, is to break it on Christ's head.

48. If we are content to see but one step at a time,
and take it, we shall find our way made plain. The
river wends, and often we seem on a lake without
an exit. Then is the time to go half-speed, and
doubtless, when we get a little further, the over-
lapping hills on either bank will part, and the gorge
will open out. We do not need to see it a mile off ;
enough if we see it when we are close upon it. It may
be as narrow and grim, with slippery, black cliffs
towering on either side of the narrow ribbon of the
the stream, as the caflons of American rivers, but it
will float our boat into broader reaches and onwards
to the great sea.

49. Our blunders mostly come from letting our
wishes interpret our duties, or hide from us plain

Figures and Emblems.

indications of unwelcome tasks. We are all apt to
do like Nelson, and put the telescope to the blind eye
when a signal is flying that we dislike.

50. Some of us have sad memories of times when
we journeyed in company with those who will never
share our tent or counsel our steps any more, and,
as we sit lonely by our watchfire in the wilderness,
have aching hearts and silent nights.

51. There are dangers and barren places, and a
great solitude in spite of love and companionship,
and many marchings and lurking foes, and grim
rocks, and fierce suns, and parched wells, and
shadeless sand wastes enough in every life to make
us quail often, and look grave always, when we
think of what may be before us. Who knows what
we shall see when we top the next hill, or round
the shoulder of the cliff that bars our way ? What
shout of an enemy may crash in upon the sleeping
camp ; or what stifling gorge of barren granite —
blazing in the sun, and trackless to our feet, shall
we have to march through to-day ?

52. There is nothing so certain as the unex-
pe6led. The worst thunder comes on us out of a
clear sky. Our Waterloos have a way of crashing
into the midst of our feasts, and generally it is when
all goes " merry as a marriage bell " that the cannon

Figures and Emblems.

shot breaks in upon the mirth, which tells that the
enemy have crossed the river and the battle is
begun.

53. An abstraft law of right is but a cold guide,
like the stars that shine keen in the polar winter.

54. No man can safely isolate himself, either in-
telleftually or in pra6lical matters. The self-trained
scholar is usually incomplete. Crotchets take
possession of the solitary thinker, and peculiarities
of character — that would have been kept in check,
and might have become aids in the symmetrical
development of the whole man, if they had been
reduced and modified in society — ^get swollen into
deformities in solitrde.

55. Are we not ever in danger of giving the very
choicest of our love to the dear ones of earth, lav-
ishing on them the precious juice which flows from
the freshly-gathered grapes, and putting God off
with the last impoverished and scanty drops which
can be squeezed from the husks ?

56. We are all apt to pin our faith on some
trusted guide, and many of us, in these days, will fol-
low some teacher of negations with an implicit sub-
mission which we refuse to give to Jesus Christ
We put the teacher between ourselves and God, and

Figures and Efnbiems.

fuide,

give to the glowing colours of the painted window
the admiration that is due to the light which shines

through it.

57. Like the armed colonists whom Russia and
other empires had o.n their frontier, who received
their bits of land on condition of holding the border
against the enemy, and pushing it forward a league
or two when possible, Christian men are set down
in their places to be "wardens of the marches,"
ci'izen soldiers who hold their homesteads on a
military tenure, and who are to " strive together for
the faith of the gospel."

58. Go up to your fears and speak to them, and as
ghosts are said to do, they will generally fade away.

59. It is usually a half-look at adversaries, and a
mistaken estimate of their strength, that make
Christians afraid. We may go into the battle, as
the rash French minister said he did into the
Franco-German war, " with a light heart," and that
for good reasons.

Co. It is strange and impressive when we come to
think how Providence, working with the same uni-
form materials in all human lives, can yet, like some
skilful artist, produc€S endless novelty and surprises
in each life.

{

'■.^.a

PiHtires and Emblems.

6i. The traitor was gone (John xiii.31). His
prc.r;nce had been a restraint ; and now that that
spot in their feast of charity had disappeared the
Master felt at ease ; and, like some stream out of
the bed of which a black rock has been taken, His
words flow more freely. " Therefore^ when he was
gone out, Jesus said."

62. Like the pellucid waters of the Rhine and the
turbid stream of the Moselle, that flow side by side
over a long space, neither of them blending discern-
ably with the other, so the shrinking from the
cross and the desire were cotemporaneous in Christ's
mind.

63. The New Testament, generally, represents
the cross as the very lowest point of Christ's degrada-
tion ; John's Gospel always represents it as the very
highest point of His glory. And the two things
are both true ; just as the zenith of our sky is the
nadir of the sky for those on the other side of the
world.

64. We know very early in life, unless we are
wonderfully frivolous and credulous, that the thread
of our days is a mingled strand, and the prevailing
tone a sober neutral tint.

ir-.rf/.--'

■ s .-.■

Figures and Emblems.

^i"-3i). His
low that that
jappeared the
Itrearr out of
|en taken, His
[when he was

hine and the
side by side
ling discern-
'& from the
us in Christ's

^ represents
it's degrada-
as the very
two things
^"^y is the
side of the

ess we are
the thread
prevaihng

65. All His life long Christ had been revealing
His heart, through the narrow rifts of deeds, like
someslender lancet windows ; but in His death all the
barriers are thrown down, and the brightness blazes
out upon men.

66. All through His life He had been trying to
communicate the box of ointment exceeding
precious, but when the box was broken the house
was filled with the odour.

6"]. There blends, in that last a6: of our Lord's —
for His death was His acl — in strange fashion, the
two contradi6lory ideas of glory and shame ; like
some sky, all full of dark thunder-clouds, and yet
between them the brightest blue and the blazing
sunshine.

68. All His life long Christ was the light of the
world, but the very noontide hour of His glory was
that hour when the shadow of eclipse lay over all
the land, and He hung on the Cross dying in the
dark. At His eventide * it was light,' and * He en-
dured the Cross, despising the shame ' ; and, lo 1
the shame flashed up into the very brightness of
glory, and the very ignominy and the suffering

were the jewels of His crown.

C 2

' * ' L

t.;.

I 1

■ft'

PiHtires and Emblems.

6g. A bit of stained-glass may be glowing with
angel-forms and piftured saints, but it always keeps
some of the light out, and it always hinders us from
seeing through it. And all external worship and
form has such a tendency to usurp more than be-
longs to it, and to drag us down subtly to its own
level.

70. That is the perfeftion of a man's nature when
his will fits on to God's like one of Euclid's tri-
angles super-imposed upon another, and line for
line coincides. When his will allows a free passage
to the will of God, without resistance, as light
travels through transparent glass ; when his will
responds to the touch of God's finger upon the keys,
like the telegraphic needle to the operator's hand ;
then man has attained all that God and religion
ran do for him, all that his nature is capable of.

71. Love is the only fire that is hot enough to
melt the iron obstinacy of a creature's will.

72. The vine which trails along the ground, and
twines its tendrils round any rubbish which it may
come upon is sure to be trodden under foot. If it
lift itself from the earth, and fling its clasping rings
round the shaft of the Cross, its stem will not be
bruised, and its clusters will be heavier and sweeter.
The tendrils which anchor it to the rubbish heap
are the same as those which clasp it to the Cross.

-->--< y

Figures and Emblems.

73. The trust with which we lean upon the
bruised reeds of human nature is the same as
that with which we lean upon the iron pillar of a
Saviour's aid.

74. Just as the hand of a dyer that has been work-
ing with crimson will be crimson ; just as the hand
that has been holding fragrant perfumes will be
perfumed ; so my faith, which is only the hand by
which I lay hold on precious things, will take the
tinflui.: and the fragrance of what it grasps.

75. Christ towers up above the history of the
world and the process of revelation, like Mount
Everest among the Himalayas. To that great peak
ail the country on the one side runs upwards, and
from it all the valleys on the other descend ; anc
the springs are born there which cany verdure and
life over the world.

^6. Christ is the true Prometheus that has come
from Heaven with fire, the fire of the Divine Life
in the reed of His humanity, and He imparts it to
us all if we will

TJ. Many an erudite scholar that has studied the
Bible all his life, has missed the purpose for which
it was given ; and many a poor old woman in her
garret has found it.

Ptfltires and Emblems.

78. Suppose one of those old Spanish explorers
in the i6th century had been led into some of those
rich Mexican treasure-houses, where all round him
were massive bars of gold, and gleaming diamonds,
and precious stones, and had come out from the
abundance with sixpence worth in his palm, when
he might have loaded himself with ingots of pure
and priceless metal ! That is what some of us do.
When Jesus Christ puts the key of His storehouse
into our hands, and ^ays to us "Go in and help
yourselves," we stop as soon as we are within the
threshold. We do little more than take some in-
significant corner, nibbled off the great solid mass
of riches that might belong to us, and bear that
away.

79. Is there any place in any of our rooms where
there is a little bit of carpet worn white by our
knees ?

80. Loose things on the deck of a ship will be
blown or washed overboard when the storm comes.
There is only one way to keep them firm, and that is
to lash them to something that is fixed. It is not the
bit of rope that gives them security, but it is the
stable thing to which they are lashed. Lash your-
self to Christ by faith, and whatever storm or
tempest comes you will be safe, and stand firm and
immovable.

'*■

' '••'fCCi:,

Figures and Emblems.

rs
se
im
ds,
he
en
lure
do.
use
elp
the
in-
lass
iiat

81. All manner of differences in opinion, in
politics, in culture, in race, which ma, ^oarate
men from men, are h'ke the cracks upon the surface
of a bit of rock which are an inch deep, while the
solid mass goes down a thousand feet.

82. Each tiny particle of a magnet, if it be
smitten off the whole mass, is magnetic, and sends out
influence from its two little poles. And so the
smallest and the feeblest faith i? one in chara6ler,
and one in intrinsic value, with the loftiest and
superbest.

83. The power of sympathising with any charac-
ter is the partial possession of that chara6ler for our-
selves. A man who is capable of having his soul
bowed by the stormy thunder of Beethoven, or
lifted to heaven by the ethereal melody of
Mendelssohn, is a musician, though he never com-
posed a bar. The man who recognises and feels
the grandeur of the organ music of Paradise Lost
has some of the poet in him, though he be a " mute
inglorious Milton."

84. All sympathy and recognition of charadler
involves some likeness to that charafler. The poor
woman that brought the sticks and prepared for
the prophet enters into the. prophet's mission, and
shares in the prophet's work and reward, though
his task was to beard Ahab, and hers was only to
bake his bread.

■«T'-V !

! ;
!

Pit} ares and Emblems.

85. The old Knight that clapped Luther on the
back when he went into the Diet of Worms, and
said to him : " Well done, little monk !" shared in
Luther's viflory and in Luther's crown. He that
helps a prophet because he is a prophet, has got the
making of a prophet in himself.

86. As all work done from the same motive is the
same in God's eyes, whatever be the outward shape
of it, so the work that involves the same spiritual
type of character will involve the same reward.
You find the Egyptian medal on the breast of the
soldiers that kept the base of communication as
well as on the breasts of the men that stormed the
works at Tel-el-Kebir.

87. The sculptor makes the marble image by
chipping away the superfluous marble. Ah ! and
when you have to chip away superfluous flesh and
blood, it is bitter work, and the chisel is often
deeply dyed in gore, and the mallet seems to be
very cruel.

88. There is an old proverb : " The shoemaker's
Avife is always the worst shod." The families of
many very busy Christian teachers suffer woefully
for want of remembering " He first findeth his own
brother."

.■,"J£5fe . -_ - «i-.-

■•^T''

Pi^tires and Emblems.

89. " Thou God seest me " is a very unwelcome
thought to a great many men, and it will be so,
unless we can give it the modification which it
receives from belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ,
and feel sure that the eyes which are blazing with
Divine Omniscience are dewy with divine and
human love.

90. If you do not seek Christ, as surely as He is
parted from our scnseyou will lose Him ; and He will
be parted from you wholly ; for there is no way by
which a pers. n who is not before our eyes may be
kept near us except only by the diligent effort on
our part to keep thought, and love, and will, in
conta6l with Him ; thought meditating, love going
out towards Him, will submitting. Uuless there
be this effort, you will lose your Master as surely
as a little child in a crowd will lose his nurse and
his guide, if his hand slips from out the protecting
hand. The dark shadow of the earth on which
you stand will slowly steal over His silvery bright-
ness, as it did last night over the moon's,* and you
will not know how you have lost Him, but only be
sadly aware that your heaven is darkened.

91. May I say that as a mother will sometimes
pretend to her child to hide, that the child's delight
may be the greater in searching and in finding, so

♦Total eclipse of the moon — August 4, 1884.

h-"^

»■■■

Figures and Emblems.

Christ has gone away from our sight in order, for
one reason, that He may stimulate our desires to
feel after Him.

92. All the antagonism that has stormed against
Christ and His cause and words, and His followers
and lovers, has been impotent and vain. The
pursuers are like dogs chasing a bird, sniffing along
the ground after their prey, which all the while sits
out of their reach on a bough and carols to the sky.

93. If we care anything about Christ at all, our
hearts will turn to Him as naturally as, when the win-
ter begins to pinch, the migrating birds seek the
sunny south, turning by an instin6l that they do not
themselves understand.

94. The same law which sends loving thoughts
out across the globe to seek for husband, child, or
friend when absent, sets the really Christian heart
seeking for the Christ, whom, having not seen, it loves.
As surely as the ivy tendril feels out for a support ; as
surely as the roots of a mountain-ash growing on the
top of a boulder fall down the side of a rock till they
reach the soil ; as truly as the stork follows the
warmth to the sunny Mediterranean, so truly, if
your heart loves Christ, will the very law of your
life be—" Ye shall seek Me."

Piflures and Emblems.

95. The chains ofsin can be got off. Christ looses
them by His blood. Like a drop of corrosive acid,
that blood, falling upon the fetters, dissolves them,
and the prisoner goes free, emancipated by the Son.

96. Each man of all the race may be quite sure
that he had a place in that Divine-human love of
Christ's, as He hung upon the cross. I may take it
all to myself, as the whole rainbow is mirrored on
each eye that looks.

97. The book which closes the new Testament
"shuts up all" "with a seven-fold chorus of hallelujahs
and harping symphonies" as Milton says, in its
stately music, and may well represent for us, in that
perpetual cloud of incense rising up fragrant to the
Throne of God and of the Lamb, the unceasing love
and thanksgiving which should be man's answer
to Christ's love and sacrifice.

98. A great thinker once said that he would
rather have the search after truth than the possession
of truth. It was a rash word, but it pointed to the
faft that there is a search which is only one shade
less blessed than the possession.

99. State and place are determined yonder by
character. Take a bottle of some solution in which
heterogeneous matters have all been melted up to-
gether, and let it stand on a shelf there and gradually

Piflures and Emblems.

settle down, and they will settle in regular layers,
the heaviest at the bottom and the lightest at the
top, and stratify themselves according to gravity.
And that is how the other world is arranged —
stratified. When all the confusions of this present
are at an end, and all the moisture is driven off, men
and women will be left in layers, — like drawing to
like.

100. Like the granite all fluid and hot, and fluid
because it was hot, Peter needed to cool in order to

soliuiT)" into roclv.

CHAPTER II.

ME worst man is least troubled by his
conscience. It is like a lamp that goes
out in the thickest darkness.

2. Instant by instant, with unbroken flow, as
golden shafts of light travel from the central sun,
and each beam is linked with the source from which
it comes by a line that stretches through millions
and millions of miles ; so, God's gift of strength
pours into us as we need.

3. Grace abhors a vs, um as nature does ; and,
just as the endless procession of the waves rises up
on to the beach, or as the restless network of the
moonlight irradiation of the billows stretches all
across the darkness of the sea ; so that unbroken con-
tinuity of strength gives grace for grace according

,.a

Piflures and Emblems.

to our need, and as each former supply is expended
and used up, God pours Himself into our hearts anew.

4. Soldiers who could stand firm and strike
with all their might in the hour of battle, will fall
asleep, or have their courage ooze out at their fingers'
ends, when they have to keep solitary watch at their
posts through a long winter's night

5. It is a great deal easier to be up to the
occasion in some shining moment of a man's life,
when he knows that a supreme hour has come,
than it is to keep that high tone when plodding
over all the dreary plateau of unevetilful, monoto-
nous travel and dull duties. It is easier to run
fast for a minute than to grind along the dusty
road for a day.

6. Many a ship has stood the tempest, and
then has gone down in the harbour because its
timbers have been gnawed to pieces by white ants.
And many a man can do what is wanted in the
trying moments, and yet make shipwreck of his
faith in !.i:ieventful times.

" Like ships that have gone down at sea,
When heaven was all tranquillity."

7. We have all a few moments in life of hard,
glorious running ; but we have days and years of
walking — the uneventful discharge of small duties.

Figures and Emblems.

8. " I am the first and the last," says Christ,
and His love partakes of that eternity. It is like
a golden fringe which keeps the net of creation
from ravelling out.

9. When Christ was here on earth, the multi-
tude thronged Him and pressed Him ; but the
wasted forefinger of one timid woman could reach
the garment's hem for all the crowd.

1,
)f

10. Past — present — future. These are but the
lower layer of clouds which drive before the winds
and melt from shape to shape. God dwells above
in the naked, changeless blue.

1 1. They tell us that the sun is fed by impa6l
from obje6ls from without, and that the day will
come when its furnace-flames shall be quenched
into grey ashes. But Christ's love is fed by no
contributions from without, and will outlast the
burnt-out sun, and gladden the ages of ages for
ever.

12. The hand that holds the seven stars is
as loving as the hand that was laid in blessing
upon the little children ; the face that is as the sun
shining in its strength beams with as much love as
when it drew publicans and harlots to His feet

(II

Figures and Emblems,

The breast that is girt with the golden girdle is
the same breast upon which John leaned his happy
head.

13. You remember the old story of the prisoner
in his tower, delivered by his friend, who sent a
beetle to crawl up the wall, fastening a silken
thread to it, which had a thread a little heavier
attached to the end of that, and so on, and so on,
each thickening in diameter until they got to a
cable That is how the devil has got hold of a great
many of us. He weaves round us silken threads
to begin with, slight, as if wc could break them with
a touch of oui fingers, and they draw after them, as
certamly as destiny, at each remove a thickening
chain, until, at last, we are tied and bound, and our
captor laughs at our mad plunges for freedom, which
are as vain as a wild bull's in the hunter's nets.

14. There is such a fate as being saved, yet so
as by fire, going into the brightness with the smell
of fire on your garments.

15. The starry vault that bends above us so far
away, is the same in the number of its stars when
gazed on by the savage with his unaided eye, and
by the astronomer with the strongest telescope ;
and the Infinite God, who arches above us, but

Piftiires and Emblems. 2i'h

comes near to us, discloses galaxies of beauty and
oceans of abyssmal light in Himself according to
the strength and clearness of the eye that looks
upon Him.

i6. Some imperfeft Christians have but little
capacity for possessing God, and therefore their
heaven will not be as bright, nor studded with as
majestic constellations as others.

17 "I am going down into the pit ; you hold
the ropes," said Carey the pioneer missionary.
They that hold the rcpes, and the daring miner
that swings away down in the darkness, are one in
work, may be one in the motive, and, if they are,
shall be one in the reward.

18. The little child who believes in Christ may
seem to be insignificant in comparison with the
prophet with his God-louched lips, or the righteous
man of the old dispensation, with his austere purity ;
as a humble violet may seem by the side of a rose
with its heart of fire, or a white iiiy, regal and tall.

19. Oh! what a reversal of this world's judg-
ments and estimates is coming one day, when the
names that stand high in the roll of fame shall be
forgotten, like photographs that have been shut up
in a portfolio, and when you take them out have
faded off the paper.

PiHures and Eviblems.

20. The world knows nothing of its greatest men^
but there is a day coming when the spurious mush-
room aristocracy of power and the like, tnat the
world has worshipped, will be forgotten ; like the
nobility of some conquered land, that is brushed
aside and relegated to private life by the new nobility
of the conquerors ; and the true nobles, God's
greatest — the rightenus, who are righteous because
they have trusted in Christ — shall shine forth like
the sun ' in the kingdom of My Father."

21. The gospel is not merely a message of
deliverance, it is also a rule of condu6l. It is not
merely theology, it is also ethics. Like some of the
ancient municipal charters, the grant of privileges
and proclamation of freedom is also the sovereign
code which imposes duties and shapes life.

22. The greatest principles of the gospel are to
be fitted to the smallest duties. The tiny round of
the dew-drop is shaped by the same lav/s that,
mould the giant sphere of the largest planet. You
cannot make a map of the poorest grass field
without celestial observations. The star is not too
high nor too brilliant to move before us and guide
simple men's feet along their pilgrimage.

23. " If ye love me keep my commandments."
That draws all the agitations and fluctuations of

PiHures and E, iblems.

the soul after it, as the rounded fulness of the moon
does the heaped waters in the tidal wave that girdles
the world.

24. The censures nor the praise of man need not
move us. We report to headquarters, and subor-
dinates' estimate need be nothing to us.

25. "Seek ye my face." Nothing in all the
world is so blessed as to hear that wonderful
beseeching call sounding in every providence,
travelling to us from every corner of the universe,
speaking to us in the light of setting suns and in
the hush of midnight skies ; sounding in the break
o" >■ ives on the beach, and in the rustle of leaves
m i;i. f rest depths ; whispering to us in the depths
of our c wn hearts and wooing us by all things to
our rest. Everything assumes a new meaning and
is appareled in celestial light when we are aware
that everything is a messenger from God to guide
us to Himself

26. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after
God, for they shall be filled. He does not hold out
a gift with one hand, and then twitch it away with
the other when we try to grasp, as children do with
light refle6led from a looking-glass on a wall.

I y

27. The descendants of the original settlers in

our colonies talk still

D 2

of coming to England as

» \

Figures and Emblems.

" going home," though they were born in Austrah'a,
and have lived there all their lives. In like manner
we Christian people should keep vigorous in our
minds the thought that our true home is there where
we have never been, and that here we are foreigners
and wanderers.

28. A Christian man's true affinities are with
the things not seen, and with the persons there,
however the surface relationships knit him to the
earth. In the degree in which he is a Christian, he
is a stranger here and a native of the heavens.
That great City is, like some of the capitals of
Europe, built on a broad river, with the masr^ of
the metropolis on the one bank, but a wide-spread-
ing suburb on the other. As the Trastevere is to
Rome, as Southwark to London, so is earth to
heaven, the bit of the city on the other side the
bridge.

29. " Seek His face evermore." That Face will
brighten the darkness of death, and " make a sun-
shine in that shady place." As you pass through
the dark valley It will shine in upon you, as the
sun looks through the savage gorge in the Hima-
layas, above which towers that strange mountain
which is pierced right through with a circular
aperture.

Pi^iires and Emblems.

2>7

30. We do belong to another polity or order of
thinsfs than that with which we are connected bv
the bonds of flesh and sense. Our true affinities
are with the mother city. True we are here on
earth, but far beyond the blue waters is another
community, of which we are truly members ; and
sometimes in calm weather we can see, if we climb
to a height above the smoke of the valley where
we dwell, the faint outline of the mountains of that
other land, lying dream-like on the opal waves,
and bathed in sunlight.

31. "The white radiance of Eternity " streaming
through it from above gives all its beauty to the
"dome of many-coloured glass" which men call
life.

32. Some of us are as dead to the perception of
God's gracious call, just because it has been sound-
ing on uninterruptedly, as are the dwelliers by a
waterfall to its unremitting voice.

33. Fixed resolves need short professions. A
Spartan brevity, as of a man with his lips tightly
locked together, is fitting for such purposes.

34. How few of us could honestly crystallise
the aims that guide our life into any single sen-
tence? We try the impossible feat of riding on
two horses at once. We resolve and retrafl, and

Pictures and Emblems.

hesitate and compromise. The ship heads now
one way and now another, and that not because we
are wisely tacking — that is to say, seeking to reach
one point by widely-varying courses — but because
our hand is so weak on the helm that we drift
wherever the wash of the waves and the buffets of
the wind carry us.

35. That is heaven on earth, nobleness, peace,
and power, to stand as at the point of some great
ellipse, to which converge from all sides the music
of God's manifold invitations, and listening to
them, to say, I hear, and I obey. Thou dost call,
and I answer, Lo ! here am I.

36. Endeavour to keep vivid the consciousness
of God's face as looking always in on you, like the
solemn frescoes of the Christ which Angelico painted
on the walls of his convent cells, that each poor
brother might feel his Master ever with him.

37. An invisible vapour may hide a star, and we
only know that the film is in the nightly sky because
Jupiter, which M'as blazing a moment ago, has
become dim or has disappeared. So fogs and
vapours from the undrained swamps of our own
selfish, worldly hearts may rob the thought of God
of all its genial lustre, and make it an angry ball of
fire, or may hide Him altogether from us.

Pi^itres and Emblems.

38. If the resolve to seek God's face be not made
by us at the very moment when we become aware
of His loving call, it is very unlikely to be made at
all The first notes of that low Voice fall on the
heart with more persuasive power than they retain
after it has become familiar with them, even as the
first-heard song of the thrush in spring-time, that
breaks the long wintry silence, has a sweetness all
its own. The echo answers as soon as the mother
voice ceases.

39. The old word is true, with a new application
to all who try in any shape to procure salvation by
any work of their own : " Thou hast nothing to
draw with, and the well is deep." But there is no
need for all this profitless work. It is as foolish as
it would be to spend money and pains in sinking a
well in some mountainous country, where every
hill-side is seamed with water-courses, and all that
is needed is to put one end of any kind of wooden
spout into the " burn " and your vessels under the
other. The well of salvation is an Artesian well
that need*^ no machinery to raise the water, but
only pitchers to receive it as it rises.

40. The unsubstantial abstra6lion of the meta-
physical God, described only in terms as far removed
as may be from human analogies, for fear of being
guilty of " anthropomornhism," never helped or

PiHures and Emblems.

gladdened any human soul. It is but a bit of mist
through which you can see the stars shining.

41. We see the radiant brightness of the full
moon, but no eye has ever beheld the other side of
that pure silver shield. We can know but an
aspe6l and a side of God's nature.

42. That solitude of great men is one of the
compensations which run through all life, and make
the lot of the many little more enviable than that
of the few great. " The little hills rejoice together
on every side," but, far above their smiling com-
panionships, the Alpine peak lifts itself into the
cold air, and though it be "visited all night by
troops of stars," is lonely amid the silence and
the snow.

43. Which of us that is a father is not glad at
his children's gifts, even though they be purchased
with his own money, and be of little use ? They
mean love, so they are precious. And Christ, in
like manner gladly accepts what we bring, even
though it be love chilled by selfishness, and faith
broken by doubt, and submission crossed by
self-will.

44. As Philippi was to Rome, so is earth to
heaven, the colony on the outskirts of th,* empire,
ringed round by barbarians, and separated by

P in lire s and Emblems.

sounding seas, but keeping open its communica-
tions, and one in citizenship.

45. Amid the shows and shams of earth look
ever onward to the realities, " the things which are',*
while all else only seems to be. The things which
are seen are but smoke wreaths, floating for a
moment across space, and melting into nothingness
while we look.

46. God is His own motive, as His own end.
As His Being, so His Love (which is His Being) is
determined by nothing beyond Himself, but ever
streams out by an energy from within, like the
sunlight whose beams reach the limits of the system
and travel on through dim, dark distances, not be-
cause they are drawn by the planet, but because they
are urged from the central light.

47. The temptation once yielded to gains power.
The crack in the embankment which lets a drop or
two ooze through is soon a hole which lets out a
flood.

48. The microscopic creatures, thousands of
which will go into a square inch, make the great
white cliffs that beetle over the wildest sea and front
the storm. So, permanent and solid chara6ler is
built up out of trivial a6lions ; and this is the solemn
aspc6l of our passing days, that they are making us.

Piflures and Emblems.

49. No debt need be carried forward to another
page of the book of our lives, for Christ has given
Himself for us, and He speaks to us all — " Thy sins
be forgiven thee."

50. As on some battle-field, whence all traces of
the agony and fury have passed away, and harvests
wave, and larks sing where blood ran and men
groaned their lives out, some grey stone raised by
the vidlors remains, and only the trophy tells of the
forgotten fight ; so, that monumental word, " I have
overcome," stands to all ages as the record of the
silent, life-long conflict.

51. God does not lose us in the dust of death.
The withered leaves on the pathway are trampled
into mud, and indistinguishab'" to human eyes ; but
He sees them even as when they hung green and
sunlit on the mystic tree of life.

52. The planet nearest the sun is drenched and
saturated with fiery brightness ; but the rays from
the centre of life pa^s on to f'ach of the sister spheres
in its turn, and travel away outwards to where the
remotest of them all rolls in its far-off orbit, unknown
for milleniums to dwellers closer to the sun, but
through all the ages visited by warmth and light
according to its needs. These blessed spirits around
the throne do not absorb and intercept the love of
God.

Pitltires and Emblems.

53. We know of earthly loves which cannot die.
They have entered so deeply into the very fabric of
the soul, that, like some cloth dyed ingrain, as long
as two threads hold together they will retain the tint.

54. Experience is ever the parent of hope, and
the latter can only build with the bricks which the
former gives.

55. When a man is walking along some narrow
ledge amongst the Alps, with the precipice at his
side, the guide will say to him : " Do not look down,
or you perish." Your only hope is looking up.
When Peter saw the water boisterous he began to
sink. You fix your eye on Christ, and then your
tottering faith will go in safety.

56. We can be sure of this, that God will be with
us in all the days that lie before us. What may be
round the next headland we know not ; but this wc
know, that the same sunshine will make a broadening
path across the waters right to where we rock on
the unknown sea, and the same unmoving nightly
star will burn for our guidance. So we may let the
waves and currents roll as they list ; or rather, as
He lists, and be little concerned about the incidents
or the companions of our voyage, since He is with
us.

Figures and Emblems,

.|»

57. The awful power of habit solidifies actions
into customs, and prolongs the reverberation of
every note once sounded along the vaulted roof of
the chamber where we live.

58. Few of us have reached middle life who do
not, looking back, see our track strewed with the
gaunt skeletons of dead friendships, and dotted with
"oaks cf weeping," waving green and mournful
over graves, and maddened by footprints striking
away from the line of march, and leaving us the
more solitary for their departure.

59. " Do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,

To this wide world and all her fading sweets,"

it matters not, if only our hearts are stayed on God's
love, which " neither things present nor things to
come" can alter or remove.

60. The thought of the Omnipresence of God,
so hard to grasp with vividness, and not altogether
a glad one to a sinful soul, is all softened and
glorified, as some solemn Alpine clifif of bare rock (
is when the tender morning light glows on it, when
it is thought of as the Omnipresence of Love.

61. Forecasting is ever close by foreboding.
Hope is interwoven with fear, the golden threads of
the weft crossing the dark ones of the warp, and
the whole texture gleaming bright or glooming,
according to the angle at which it is seen.

Pifltires and Eviblems.

)f
)f

62. It would be a very poor affair if all we had
to say to men was : — "There is a beautiful example;
follow it I " Models are all very well, only, unfor-
tunately, there is nothing in a model to secure its
being copied. You may have a most exqui ite
piece of penmanship lithographed on the top of
the page in a child's copy-book, but what is the
good of that, if the poor little hand is trembling
when it takes the pen, and if the pen has got no
ink in it, or the child does not want to learn ?
Copy-books are all very well, but you want some-
thing more than copy-books.

63. It takes a very strenuous effort to bring the
unseen Christ before the mind habitually, and so
as to produce efiefls in the life. You have to shut
out a great deal besides in order to do that ; as a
man will shade his eyes with his hand in order to
see some distant thing the more clearly. Keep out
the cross lights, that you may look forward. You
cannot see the stars, when you are walking down a
town street and the gas lamps are lit. All those violet
depths, and calm abysses, and blazing worlds, are
concealed from you by the glare at your side. So,
if you want to see into the depths and the heights,
to see the great white throne and the Christ on it,
who helps you to fight, you have to go out unto
Him beyond the camp, and leave all its dazzling
lights behind you.

[lf~"

PiSlures and E^nblems.

64. Like some half-hewn block, such as trav-
ellers find in long-abandoned quarries, whence
Egyptian temples, that were destined never to be
completed, were built, our spirits are but partly
" polished after the similitude of a palace," while
much remains in the rough. The builders of these
temples have mouldered away, and their unfinished
handiwork will lie as it was when the last chisel
touched it centuries ago, till the crack of doom ;
but stones for God's temples will be wrought to
completeness and set in their places.

65. We have as much of God as we can hold.
All Niagara may roar past a man's door, but only
as much as he diverts through his own sluice will
drive his mill, or quench his thirst. That grace
is like the figures in the Eastern tales, that will
creep into a narrow room no bigger than a nutshell,
or will tower heaven high. Our spirits are like the
magic tent whose walls expanded or contra6led at
the owner's wish ; we may enlarge them to enclose
far more of the grace than we have ever possessed.

66. There is ever something of dread in Hope's
blue eyes.

6^. In that great ocean of the Divine Love we
live, and move, and have our being ; floating in it like
some sea-flower which spreads its filmy beauty and

Pi^.iires and Emblems.

waves its long tresses in the depths of mid-ocean.
The sound of its waters is ever in our ears, and
above, beneath, around us, its mighty currents run
evermore.

68. We need not cower before the fixed gaze
of some stony God, looking on us unmoved, like
those Egyptian deities that sit pitiless with idle
hands on their laps, and wide-open, lidless eyes
gazing out across the sands. We need not fear the
Omnipresence of Love, nor the Omniscience which
knows us altogether, and loves us even as it knows.

69. " So great a cloud of witnesses." They are
" a cloud " like that background of one of Raffaelle's
great piflures, which, at first sight, seems only a
bright mist, and looked at more closely is all full of
calm, angel faces.

70. As a boy learning to swim, after trying in
the shallows and finding that the water bears him
up, has confidence to strike out into deeper water,
so Christ perfe6ls our faith by rewarding it.

7 1 So long as we are joined to Christ, we partake
of His life, and our lives become music and praise.
The electric current flows from Him through all
souls that are " in Him," and they glow with fair
colours, which they owe to their conta<ft with Jesus.
Interrupt the communication, and all is darkness.

i'fTizn'c: :r.".- -■ Mti.stA'i^-t-'-j

Ml'

Pi^iwes and Emblems.

72. The pi6lure of what men are, painted at the
beginning of the Epistle to the Romans, is black,
like a canvas of Rembrandt. The Bible is " nature's
sternest ^.ainter, but her best."

73. The distance of a star is measured by the
apparent change in its position, as seen from different
points of the earth's surfate or orbit. But the great
Light of God's love stands steadfast in our heaven,
nor moves a hair's-breadth, nor pours a feebler ray
on us, whether we look up to it from the midsummer
day of busy life, or from the midwinter of death.
These opposites are parted by a distance to which
the millions of miles of the \/orld's path among the
stars are but a point, and yet the love of God streams
down on them alike.

74. How dusty and toil-worn the little group of
Christians that landed at Puteoli must have looked
as they toiled along the Appian Way and entered
Rome ! How contemptuously emperor, and philo-
sopher, and priest, and patrician would have curled
their lips if they had been told that in that little
knot of Jewish prisoners lay a power before which
theirs would cower and finally fade !

75. The Rabbis have a beautiful bit of teaching,
buried among their rubbish, about angels. They
say that there are two kinds of angels : the angels

Figures and Emblems.

It the

)lack,

Iture's

of service and the angels of praise, of which two
orders the latter is the higher, and that no angel in
it praises God twice, but having once lifted up his
voice in the psalm of heaven, then perishes and
ceases to be. He has perfe6led his being, he has
reached the height of his greatness, he has done
what he was made for, let him fade away. The
garb of legend is mean enough, but the thought it
embodies is that ever true and solemn one, without
which life is nought : " Man's chief end is to glorify
God."

76. In heaven, after " ages of ages " of growing
glory, we shall have to say, as each new wa^e of
the shoreless, sunlit sea bears us onward, " It doth
not yet appear what we shall be."

yy. The palaces which we build are ever like
that in the story, where one window remains dark
and unjewellcd, while the rest blaze in beauty. But
when God builds, none can say, " He was not able
to finish." In His great palace He makes her
" windows of agate," and all her — " borders of
pleasant stones."

78. I suppose that if the mediaeval dream had
ever come true, and an alchemist had ever turned
a grain of lead into gold, he could have turned all
the lead of the world in time, and with crucibles

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PiSlures and Emblems.

^nd furnaces enough. The first step is all the
difficulty ; and if you and I have been changed
from enemies into pons, and had one spark of love
to God kindled in our hearts, that is a mightier
change than any that remains to be effefled in
order to make us perfe6l. One grain has been
changed, the whole mass will be in due time.

79. Widely as we stretch our reverent concep-
tions, there is ever something beyond. After we
have resolved many a dim, white cloud in the starry
sky, and found it all ablaze with suns and worlds,
there will still hang, faint and far above us, hazy
magnificences which we have not apprehended.

80. The same mysterious power lives in the
swaying branch, and in the veined leaf, and in the
blushing clusters. With like wondrous transform-
ations of the one grace, the Lord pours Himself into
our spirits, filling all needs and fitting for all circum-
stances.

81. Many a stately elm that seems full of
vigorous life, for all its spreading boughs and clouds
of dancing leaves, is hollow at the heart, and when
the storm comes, goes down with a crash, and men
wonder, as they look at the ruin, how such a mere
shell of life, with a core of corruption, could stand
so long. It rotted within, and fell at last because

i
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Figures and Emblems.

le
led

ve
lier

in
ten

its roots did not go deep down to the rich soil, where
they would have found nourishment, but ran along
near the surface, among gravel and stones. If we
would stand firm, be sound within, and bring forth
much fruit, we must strike our roots deep in Him
who is the anchorage of our souls, and the nourisher
of all our being.

82. Take the finest needle, and put it below a
microscope, and it will be all ragged and irregular ;
the fine, tapering lines will be broken by many a
bulge and bend, and the point blunt and clumsy.
Put the blade of grass to the same test, and see how
true its outline, how delicate and true the spear-head
of its point. God's work is perfe6l, man's work is
clumsy and incomplete.

83. The longest line may be conceived of as
produced simply by the motion of its initial point
So should our lives be ; our progress not consisting
in leaving our early a6ls of faith behind us, but in
repeating them over and over again, till the points
coalesce in one unbroken line which goes straight
to the throne and heart of Jesus.

84. As in some great symphony, the theme

which was given out in low notes on one poor

instrument recurs over and over again, embroidered

with varying harmonies, and unfolding a richer

E 2

PiHiLres and Emblems.

, I

music till it swells into all the grandeur of the
triumphant close, so our lives should be bound into
a unity, and in their unity bound to Christ, by the
constant renewal of our early faith, and the fathers
come round again to the place which they occupied
when, as children, they first knew Him that is from
the beginning to the end one and the same.

85. Cleave to the Lord by habitual play of medi-
tative thought on the treasures hidden in His name,
and waiting, like gold in the quartz, to be the prize
of our patient sifting and close gaze.

86. As our eyes travel over the wide field of
Christendom, and our memories go back over the
long ages of the story of the Church, let gladness,
and not wonder or reluctance, be the temper with
which we see the graces of Christian chara6ler lift-
ing their meek blossoms in corners strange to us,
and breathing their fragrance over the pastures of
the wilderness. In many a cloister, in many a
hermit's cell, from amidst the smoke of incense,
through the dust of controversies, we should see
and be glad to see, faces bright with the radiance
caught from Christ.

87. Round the story of Christ's life the final
struggle is to be waged. The foe feels that, so
long as that remains, all other victories count for

■&

Pifttires and Emblems.

nothing. We feel that if that goes, there is nothing
to keep. The principles and the precepts will
perish alike, as the fair palace of the old legend,
that crumbled to dust when its builder died.

88. " Abide in Me and I in you." Fairest of all
symbols is this lovely emblem of the vine, setting
forth the sweet mystery of our union with Him.
Far as it is from the outmost pliant tendril to the
root, one life passes to the very extremities, and
every cluster swells, and reddens, and mellows, be-
cause of its mysterious flow.

89. Augustine said, " W^^r .: Christ is there is the
Church ;" and that is true, but vague : for the question
still remains, "and where is Christ?"

90. It used to be an axiom that there was no
life in the sea beyond a certain limit of a few
hundred feet. It was learnedly and conclusively
demonstrated that pressure and absence of light,
and I know not what beside, made life at greater
depths impossible. It was proved that in such
conditions creatures could not live. And then,
when that was settled, the " Challenger " put down
her dredge five miles, and brought up healthy and
good-sized living things with eyes in their heads,
from that enormous depth. So, then the savant had
to ask, Jioiv can there be life ? instead of asserting

"t it

! .1'

Pifures and Emblems.

there cannot be; and, no doubt, the answei will
be forthcoming some day. We have all been
too much accustomed to draw arbitrary limits to
the diffusion of the liiC of Christ among men.
Let us rather rejoice when we see forms of beauty,
which bear the mark of His hand, drawn from depths
that we deemed waste, and thankfully confess that
the bounds of our expeflation, and the framework
of our institutions, do not confine the breadth of His
working, nor the sweep of His grace.

91. A wide-spread literature provides so many —
I would not say empty — spaces for any voice to
reverberate in, that both the shouters and the
listeners are apt to fancy the assailants are an army,
when they are only a handful, armed mainly with
trumpets and pitchers.

92. It is strange that the Jewish race should have
so jealously preserved books which certainly did not
flatter national pride, which put a mortifying ex-
planation on national disasters, which painted them
and their fathers in dark colours, which proclaimed
truths they never loved, and breathed a spirit they
never caught. It is stranger still that, in the long
years of dispersion, the very vices and limitations
of the people subserved the same end, and that stiff
pedantry and laborious trifling — the poorest form of
intelledlual adlivity — should have guarded the letter

Piflures and Emblems.

of the word, as the coral inse6ls painfully build up
their walls round some fair island of the southern
sea.

93. How antique and ineffe6lual the pages of
the past generations are compared with the ever
fresh youth of the Bible, which, like the angels, is
the youngest and the oldest of books.

94. Who knows anything about the world's
wonders of books that, a hundred years ago, made
good men's hearts tremble for the ark of God? You
may find them in dusty rows on the top shelves of
great libraries. But if their names had not occurred
in the pages of Christian apologists, flies in amber,
nobody in this generation would ever have heard of
them.

95. Here at one end is the great fountain ever
brimming. Draw from it ever so much, it sinks not
one hair's breadth in its pure basin. Here, on the
other side, is an intermittent flow, sometimes in
scanty driblets, sometimes in painful drops, some-
times more full and free, on the pastures of the wil-
derness. Wherefore these jerks and spasms? It
must be something stopping the pipe. Yes, of
course. God's might is ever the same, but our
capacity of receiving and transmitting that might
varies, and with it varies the energy with which that
unchanging power is exerted in the world.

I II.

ilil

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PiHitres and Eviblems.

96. Driftwood may swim with the stream ; the
ship that holds to her anchor swings the other way.

97. If your mother's name were defiled, would
not your heart bound to her defence? When a
prince is a dethroned exile, his throne is fixed deeper
in the hearts of his adherents, " though his back be
at the wall," and common souls become heroes be-
cause their devotion has been heightened tosublinity
of self-sacrifice by a nation's rebellion. And when so
many voices are proclaiming that God has never
spoken to men, that our thoughts of His Book are
dreams, and its long empire over men's spirits a
waning tyranny, does cool indifference become us ?
will not fervour be sobriety, and the glowing emotion
of our whole nature our reasonable service ?

98. The consciousness that Christian truth is
denied, makes some of you falter in its profession»
and fancy that it is less certain simply because it is
gainsaid. The mist wraps you in its folds, and it is
difficult to keep warm in it, or to believe that love
and sunshine are above it all the same. " Because
iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax
cold."

99. The golden rod, wherewith the Divine
Builder measures from jewel to jewel in the walls of
the new Jerusalem, takes in wider spaces than v/e
have meted with our lines.

Piflm'es and Emblems.

lOO. You may hammer ice on an anvil, or bray-
it in a mortar. What then? It is pounded ice
still, except for the little portion melted by heat of
percussion, and it will soon all congeal again. Melt
it in the sun, and it flows down in sweet water,
which mirrors that light which loosed its bonds of
cold. So, hammer away at unbelief with your
logical sledge-hammers, and you will change its
shape, perhaps ; but it is none the less unbelief
because you have ground it to powder. It is a
mightier agent that must melt it, — the fire of God's
love, brought close by a will ablaze with the sacred
glow.

'(,'.;

^Uki

CHAPTER III.

']■

<-i

LANGUID church breeds unbelief as
surely as a decaying oak fungus. In a con-
dition of depressed vitality, the seeds of

disease, which a full vigour would shake off, are fatal.

Raise the temperature, and you kill the inse6l germs.

2. A warmer tone of spiritual life would
change the atmosphere which unbelief needs for its
growth. It belongs to the fauna of the glacial epoch,
and when the rigours of that wintry time begin to
melt, and warmer days to set in, the creatures of
the ice have to retreat to arflic wildernesses, and
leave a land no longer suited for their life.

3. If God's arm seems to slumber it is because
we are asleep. His power is invariable, and the
Gospel which is committed to our trust has lost
none of its ancient power. If there be variations,
they cannot be traced to the Divine element in the

"St

PiHures and Emblems.

church, which in itself is constant, but altogether
to the human which shifts and fluctuates, as we
only too sadly know. The light in the beacon
tower is steady and the same ; but the beam it
throws across the water sometimes fades to a speck,
and sometimes flames out clear and far across the
heaving waves, according to the position of the
glasses and shades around it. The sun pours out
heat as profusely and as long on the 22nd of Decem-
ber as on Midsummer day, and all the difference
between the frost and darkness and glowing bright-
ness and flowering life, is simply owing to the
earth's place in its orbit and angle at which the
unalterable rays fall upon it. The changes are in
the terrestrial sphere ; the heavenly is fixed for ever
the same.

4. We decline to dig up the piles of the bridge
that carries us over the abyss because voices tell us
that it is rotten. It is shorter and perfe6lly reason-
able to answer : " Rotten, did you say ? well we
have tried it and it bears." We know in Whom
we have believed.

5. As some warrior-king, himself roused from
sleep and girded with flashing steel, bids the clarion
sound through the grey twilight to summon the
prostrate ranks that lie round his tent, so the sign
of God's awaking, and the first a6l of His conquer-

Piflttres and Emblems,

ing might is this trumpet call — " The night is far
spent, the day is at hand " — " put off the works of
darkness," the night gear that was fit for slumber —
"and put on the armour of light," the mail of purity
that gleams and glit'ters even in the dim dawn.

6. There is no need to wait for anything more
than we possess. Remember the homely old
proverb, " You never know what you can do till
you try," and though we are conscious of much
unfitness, and would, sometimes, gladly wait till
our limbs are stronger, let us brace ourselves for
the woik, assured that in it strength will be given
to us that equals our desire.

7. There is too much work waiting, to suspend
our a6livity till we have answered each denier.
We do not hold our faith in the word of God as
the winners of a match do their cups and belts,
on condition of wrestling for them with any
challenger.

8. There is a wonderful power in honest work
to develop latent energies and reveal a man to
himself I suppose, in most cases, nobody is half
so much surprised at a great man's greatest deeds
as he is himself They say that there is dormant
elc6lric energy enough to make a t-hunderstorm in
a few rain drops, and there is dormant spiritual

Pifltires and Emblejjis.

force enough in the weakest of us to flush into
beneficent light, and peal notes of awaking into
many a de-^f ear.

9. The effort to serve your Lord will reveal to
you strength that you know not. And it will in-
crease the strength which it brings into play, as the
used muscles grow like whipcord, and the pra6liscd
fingers become deft at their task, and every faculty
employed is increased, and every gift wrapped in a
napkin melts like ice folded in a cloth, according
to that solemn law, " To him that hath shall be
given, and from him that hath not shall be taken
away even that which he hath."

10. The confidence of ability is ability. "Screw
your courage to the sticking place, and you will
not fail."

11. We who labour in our great cities have to
acknowledge that commercial prosperity and busi-
ness cares, the eagerness after pleasure and the
exigencies of political strife, diffused doubt and
wide-spread artistic and literary culture, are eating
the very life out of thousands in our churches, and
lowering their fervour till, like molten iron cooling
in the air, what was once all glowing with ruddy
heat is crusted over with foul, black scoriae, ever
encroaching on the tiny, central warmth.

i I

PiBures and Emblems.

12. Christ's first disciples left Him once to agon-
ise alone under the gnarled olives in Gethsemane,
while they lay sleeping in the moonlight.

13. Our truest prayers are but the echo of God's
promises. God's best answers are the echo of our
prayers. As in two mirrors set opposite to each
other, the same image is repeated over and over
again, the reflection of a refleftion, so here, within
the prayer, gleams an earlier promise, within the
answer is mirrored the prayer.

14. It is with us as with infants, the first sign
of whose awaking is a cry. The mother's quick
ear hears it through all the household noises, and
the poor, little, troubled life, that woke to a scared
consciousness of loneliness and darkness, is taken
up into tender arms, and comforted and calmed.
So, when we dimly perceive how torpid we have
been, and start to find that we have lost our Father's
hand, the first instinfl of that waking, which must
needs be partly painful, is to call to Him, whose ear
hears our feeble cry amid the sound of praise, like
the voice of many waters, that billows round His
throne, and whose folding arms keep us as one
whom his mother comforteth.

15. We have not to look back as from low-lying
plains to the blue peaks on the horizon, across

Pi6lures and Emblems.

which the church's path once lay, and sij^h over
changed conditions of the journey. The highest
water-mark that the river in flood has ever reached
will be reached and over-passed again, though to-day
the waters may seem to have hopelessly subsided.

16. That which ascends as p-ayer descends as
blessing, like the vapour that is drawn up by the
kiss of the sun to fall in freshening rain.

17. You remember the old story, how when
Jerusalem was in her hour of direst need, and the
army of Babylon lay around her battered walls, the
prophet was bid to buy " the field that is in Anathoth
in the country of Benjamin," for a ign that the tran-
sient fury of the invader would be beaten back, that
Israel might again dwell safely in the land. So with
us,thehosts of our King'si lemies comeuplikca river,
strong and mighty ; but all this world, held though
it be by the usurper, is still "Thy land, O Immanuel,"
and over it all Thy peaceful rule shall be established.

18. Where is the joyful buoyancy and expansive
power with which the Gospel burst into the world ?
It looks like some stream that leaps from the hills,
and, at first, hurries from cliff to cliff full of light and
music, but flows slower and more sluggish as it
advances, and at last almost stagnates in its flat
marshes.

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h
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Pi5lttres and Emblems.

19. It avails nothing that the ocean stretches
shoreless to the horizon : a jar can only hold a
jarful. The receiver's capacity determines the
amount received, and the receiver's desire deter-
mines his capacity.

20. If we would lend to purer emotions, we must
try to enter into the lower feelings which we labour
to elevate. It is of no use to stand at the mouth of
the alleys we wish to cleanse, with our skirts daintily
gathered about us, and smelling-bottle in hand, to
preach homilies on the virtues of cleanliness. We
must go in among the filth, and handle it, if we
want to have it cleared away.

21. The truth which a man or a generation
requires most is the truth which he or they like least ;
and the true Christian teacher's adaptation of his
message will consist quite as much in opposing the
desires and contradi6ling the lies, as in seeking to
meet the felt wants of the world. Nauseous
medicines or sharp lancets are adapted to the sick
man quite as truly as pleasant food and soothing
ointment.

22. The refle6lion of Christ's triumphant con-
sciousness of power should irradiate our spirits as
we do His work, like the gleam from gazing on God's
glory which shone on the lawgiver's stern face while
he talked with men.

Pifltires and Embleins.

tches
Hd a
the
leter-

23. Mark how in us, as in our Lord, the sigh
of compassion is conne6led'with the look to heaven.
It follows upon that gaze. The evils are more real,
more terrible, by their startling contrast with the
unshadowed light which lives above cloud-racks
and mists. It is a sharp shock to turn from the
■free sweep of the heavens, starry and radiant, to
the sights that meet us in "this dim spot which
men call earth."

24. It IS glad labour which is, ordinarily, pro-
ductive labour — ^just as the growing time is the
changeful April, and one knows not whether the
promise of harvest is most sure in the clouds that
drop fatness, or in the sunshine that makes their
depths throb with whitest light, and touches the
moist-springing blades into emeralds and diamonds.

25. Wherever men would help their fellows,
this is a prime requisite, that the would-be helper
should conle down to the level of those whom he
desires to aid. If we wish to teach, we must stoop
to think the scholar's thoughts. The master who
has forgotten his boyhood will have poor success.

26, Here on the one hand is the boundless ocean
of the Divine Strength, unfathomable in its depth,
full after all draughts, tideless and calm, in all its
movements never troubled, in all its repose never

ii!

Pulures and Emblems.

stagnating ; and on the other side is the empty
avidity of our poor, weak natures. Faith opens
these to the impulse of that great sea, and " accord-
ing to our faith," in the exa6^ measure of our
receptivity, does it enter our hearts.

27. Faith is the true anaesthesia of the soul ;
and the knife may cut into the quivering flesh, and
the spirit be scarce conscious of a pang.

28. Love, ambition, and all the swarm of
distrafling desires will be driven from the soul in
which the lamp of faith burns bright. Ordinary
human motives will appeal in vain to the ears which
have heard the tones of the heavenly music, and
all the pomps of life will show poor and tawdry to
the sight that has gazed on the vision of the great
white throne and the crystal sea.

29. Some seeds are put to steep and swell in
water, that they may be tested before sowing. The
seed which we sow will not germinate unless it be
saturated with our tears.

30. As the diver in his bell sits at the bottom of
the sea, and draws a pure air from the free heavens
far above him, and is parted from that murderous
waste of green death that clings so closely round
the translucent crystal walls that keep him safe ;
so we, enclosed in God, shall repel from ourselves

\ \

Pi^zirts and Emblems.

' k

if
'4

all that would overflow to destroy us and our work,
and may by His grace lay deeper than the waters
some courses in the great building that shall one
day rise,, stately and many-mansioned, from out of
the conquered waves.

31. For us, too, when the shadow of our cross
lies black and gaunt upon our paths, and our souls
are troubled, communion with heaven will bring
the assurance, audible to our ears at least, that
God will glorify Himself even in us.

32. They predi6l the harvests in Egypt by the
height which the river marks on the gauge of the
inundation. So many feet there represents so
much fertility. Tell me the depth of a Christian
man's compassion, and I will tell you the measure
of his fruitfulness.

33. "The help which is done upon earth He

doeth it all Himself." We and our organisations

are but the channels through which His might is

poured ; and if we choke the bed with turbid

masses of drift and heavy rocks of earthly thoughts,

or build from bank to bank thick dams of worldli-

ncss compafl with slime of sin, how shall the full

tide flow through us for the healing of the salt and

barren places ? Will it not leave its former course

silted up with sand, and cut for itself new outlets,

. F .2

Piclures and Emblems.

;

while the useless quays that once rang with busy
life stand silent, and "the cities are solitary that
were full of people " ?

34. Machinery saves manual toil, and multiplies
force. But we may have too heavy machinery for
what engineers call the boiler power — too many
wheels and shafts for the steam we have to drive
them with. What we want is not less organisation
or other sorts of it, but more force.

35. Feverish a6livity rules in all spheres of life.
The iron wheels of the car which bears the modern
idol of material progress whirl fast, and crush
remorselessly all who cannot keep up the pace.

36. Loose-braced, easy souls, that lie open to
all the pleasurable influences of ordinary life, are
no more fit for God's weapons than a reed for a
lance, or a bit of flexible lead for a spear-point.
The wood must be tough and c6mpa6l, the metal
hard and close-grained, out of which God makes
His shafts. The brand that is to guide men through
the darkness to their Father's home must glow with
a pallor of consuming flame that purges its whole
substance into light.

37. The solemn words which shine like stars —
starlike in that their height above us shrinks their
magnitude and dims their brightness, and in that

Piniires and Etnhlems.

they are points of radiance partially disclosing, and
separated by, abysses of unlighteu infinitude — tell
us that, in the order of eternity, before creatures
were, there was communion, for " the word was with
God," and there was unity, for " the word was God."

38. If we would give sight to the blind, we must
ourselves be gazing into heaven. Only when we
testify of that which we see, as one might who,
standing in a beleagured city, discerned on the
horizon the filmy dust-cloud through which the
spearheads of the deliverers flashed at intervals,
shall we win any to gaze with us till they, too, be-
hold and know themselves set free.

39. Unbelief has a contagious energy wholly
independent of reason, no less than has faith, and
afle(5ts multitudes who know nothing of its grounds,
as the iceberg chills the summer air for leagues, and
makes the sailors shiver long before they see its
barren peaks.

40. We have ever need to refresh the drooping
flowers of the chaplet by bathing them in the Foun-
tain of Life, to rise above all the fevered toil of earth
to the calm heights where God dwells, and, in still
communion with Him, to replenish our emptied
vessels and fill our dimly-burning lamps with His
golden oil.

Pifitires and Emblems.

y '!

41. If our faith is to grow high and bear rich
clusters on the topmost boughs that look up to the
sky, we must keep the wild lower shoots close
nipped. Without rigid self-control and self ' imili-
ation, no vigorous faith.

42. Hands that are full of gilded toys and glass
beads cannot grasp durable riches, and eyes that
have been accustomed to glaring lights see only
darkness when they look up to the violet heaven
with all its stars.

43. It may suit observers who have never done
anything themselves, and have not particularly clear
eyes for appreciating spiritual work, to talk of
Christian missions as failures ; but it would ill become
us to assent to the.lie. Is the green life in the hedges
and in the sweet pastures starred with rathe prim-
roses, and in the hidden copses blue with hyacinths,
a failure, because the east wind bites shrewdly, and
"the tender ash delays to clothe herself with green"?

44. No matter what may be the superficial differ-
ences of dress, the same human heart beats beneath
every robe.

45. Let us be glad when " the things which can
be shaken are removed," like mean huts built against
the wall of some cathedral, masking and marring the
completeness of its beauty ; " that the things which

■I

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Piflures and Eviblems.

7''

cannot be shaken may remain," and all the clustcrctl
shafts, and deep-arched recesses, and sweet tracery
may stand forth freed from the excrescences which
hid them.

46. The stream that is to flow broad and life-
giving through many lands must have its hidden
source high among the pure snows that cap the
mount of God. The man that would work for God
must live with God.

47. Modern astronomy begins to believe that
the sun itself, by' long expense of light, will be shorn
of its beams and wander darkling in space, circled
no more by its daughter planets. But the Sun of
our souls rays out for ever the energies of life and
light and love, and after all communication possesses
the infinite fulness of them all.

I..

48. There is such a thing as the very perfe6lion
of arrangement without life, like cabinets in a
museum, where all the specimens are duly classified
and dead.

49. I believe with the old preacher, that if God
can do without our learning, He needs our ignor-
ance still less ; but it is of comparatively little
importa,nce whether the draught of living water be

Pifltires and Emblems.

: ! I'

; U

brought to thirsty lips in an earthen cup or a
golden vase.

" The main thing is, does it hold good measure ?
Heaven soon sets right all other matters."

50. How possible it is for us to have our faith
all honey-combed by gnawing doubt while we
suspe6l it not, like some piece of wood apparently
sound, the whole substance of which has been eaten
away by hidden worms.

51. The most ignorant and erroneous "religious
sentiment " — to use a modern phrase — is mightier
than all other forces in the world's history. It is
like some of those terrible compounds of modern
chemistry, an inert, innocuous-looking drop of
liquid. Shake it, and it flames heaven high, shat-
tering the rocks and ploughing up the soil. Put
even an adulterated and carnalised faith into the
hearts of a mob of wild Arabs, and, in a century,
they will stream from their deserts, and blaze from
the mountains of Spain to the plains of Bengal.

52. The arrow may be keen and true, the shaft
round and straight, the bow strong, and the arm
sinewy ; but unless the steel be winged it will fall to
the ground long before it strikes the butt. Your
arrows must be winged with faith, else orthodoxy,
and wise arrangements, and force, and zeal, will
avail nothing.

Pifltires and Emblems.

53. While we aim at the utmost possible p.er-
fe6lion in all subordinate matters, let us remember
that they all without faith are weak, as an empty-
suit of armour with no life beneath the corslet ;
and that faith without them all is strong, like the
knight of old, who rode into the bloody field in
silken vest and conquered.

54. The low foot-hills that lie at the base of
some Alpine country may look high when seen from
the plain, as long as the snowy summits are wrapped
in mist, but when a little puff of wind comes and
clears away the fog from the lofty peaks, nobody
looks at the little green hills in front. So the world's
hindrances, and the world's difficulties and cares,
they look very lofty till the cloud lifts. And when
we see the great, white summits, everything lower
does not seem so very high after all. Look to Jesus,
and that will dwarf the difficulties.

55. Life, at first, may seem gay and brilliant, a
place for recreation or profit or pleasure, but we very
soon find out that it is a sand-strewn wrestling
ground. Many flowers cannot grow where are the
feet of the runner and the strife of the combatants.
The first thing done to make an arena for wrestlers
is to take away the turf and the daisies, then to beat
the soil down hard and flat. And so our lives get
flattened, stripped of their beauty and their fragrance,

PiHures and Emblems.

because they are not meant to be gardens, they are
meant to be wrestling grounds.

56. A life of faith, a life of effort to keep ever
before us the unseen crown, will be a life noble and
lofty. We are ever tempted to forget it. The "man
with the muck-rake " in John Bunyan's homely
parable was so occupied with the foul-smelling
dungheap that he thought a treasure, that he had
no eyes for the crown hanging a hair's-breadth over
his head. A hair's-breadth? Yes? And yet the
distance was as great as if the universe had laid
between.

57. Men in this world win their objedls or lose
them. Whether is it better to creep, like the old
mariners, 'from headland to headland, altering your
course every day or two, or strike boldly out into
the great deep, steering for an unseen port on the
other side of the world that you never beheld, though
you know it is there? Which will be the nobler
voyage ?

58. There are hosts of difficulties in our lives as
Christian men, which will be big or little, just as we
choose to make them. You can either look at them
through a magnifying or diminishing glass. The
magnitude of most of the trifles that affe6l us may
be altered by our way of looking at them.

\ ■■ I

Pi5litres and Emblems.

[d
m

Iff

;V ■

59. There are. seaweeds that He down at the
bottom of the sea, but when their flowering time
comes, they lengthen their stalks, and reach the
light and float upon the top, and, when they have
flowered and fruited, they sink again into the depths.
Our Christian life should come up to the surface,
and open out its flowers there, and show them to
the heavens, and to all eyes that look.

60. " Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him
alone." What a contrast between that condition of
mind and the gentle, gracious power which, like t!t '.
dew, is distilled into the soul by the influences of
the Spirit of God. The one is like the frowning
cliffs which front the wild Polar ocean, white with
ice and black with barren rock ; the other like the.
limestone walls, that keep back the Mediterranean,
green and flowery to the water's edge — a barrier as
complete, but all draped with beauty, and fruitful
and sunny.

61. We are apt to look back to Pentecost, and
think that that marked a height to which the tide
has never reached since, and therefore we are stran-
ded amidst the ooze and mud. But the river which
proceeds from the throne of God and of the Lamb
is not like one of our streams on earth, that leaps to
the light and dashes rejoicingly down the hill-side,
but creeps along sluggish in its level course, and

■ 1 i

Piclurcs and Emblems.

dies away at last in the sands. It pours along the
ages the same full volume with which it gushed
forth at first.

62. The mists of gathering ages wrap in slowly-
thickening folds of forgetfulness all other men and
events in history, and make them ghostlike and sha-
dowy ; but no distance has yet dimmed or will ever
dim that human form divine. Other names are like
those stars that blaze out for a while, and then
smoulder down into almost coniplete invisibility ;
but Christ is the very Light itself, that burns and is
not consumed. Other landmarks sink below the
horizon as the tribes of men pursue their solemn
march through the centuries, but the cross on
Calvary " shall stand for rin ensign of the people,
and to it shall the Gentiles seek."

63. Christ could not, if He would, take a man
to His right hand whose heart was not the home of
simple trust and thankful love, whose nature and
desires were unprepared for that blessed world. It
would be like taking one of those creatures — if
thn'-e be such— that live on the planet whose orbit
is farthest from the sun, accustomed to cold, organ-
ised for darkness, and carrying it to that great
central blaze, with all its fierce flames and tongues
of fiery gas that show up a thousand miles in a

! I

\i'AJ\

Piclnres and Emblems.

moment. It would crumble and disappear before
its blackness could be seen against the blaze,

64. As the sun behind a cloud, which hides it
from us, is still pouring out its rays on fai-off lands,
so Christ, veiled in dark, sunset clouds of Calvary,
sent the energy of His passion and cross into the
unseen world, and made it possible that we should
enter there.

65. As one who precedes a mighty host, pro-
vides and prepares rest for their weariness, and food
for their hunger, in some city on their line of
march, and having made all things ready, is at the
gates to welcome their travel-stained ranks when
they arrive, and guide them "to their repose ; so
Christ has gone before, our Forerunner, to order all
things for us there.

66. As in the heavens there be planets that
roll nearer and nearer the central sun, and others
that circle farther out from its rays, yet each keeps
its course, and makes music as it moves, as well as
planets whose broader disc can receive and reflefl
more of the light than the smaller sister spheres,
and yet each blazes over its whole surface, and is
full to its very rim with white light ; so, round t/iat
throne the spirits of the just made perfc6l shall
circle in order and peace — every one blessed, every

Piniires and Emblems.

I' ^ g

':i'

one perfc6l, every one like Christ to begin with,
and becoming liker through every moment of the
eternities.

6y. There are plenty of people who think that
the felicities of the heavenly world are dependent
solely on Christ's arbitrary will and can be bestowed
by an exercise pf mere power, as an eastern prince
may make this man his vizier and that other one
his water-carrier.

68. When a pauper becomes a millionaire by
sitting and vehemently wishing that he were rich,
when ignorance becomes learning by standing in a
library and wishing that the contents of all these
books were in its head, there will be some hope
that the gates of heaven will fly open to your
desires.

69. It 15 possible for a man to carry the freshness,
the buoyancy, the elastic cheerf'ilness, the joyful
hope of his earliest days, right on through the
monotony of middle-aged maturity, and even into
old •. ge, shadowed by the lovely rcfle6lion of the
tonus which the setting sun casts over tl^e path.

70. We arc meant to gladden, to aJosn ^^o
refiCsJi this parched, pvos^ic world, with a frcsh;v3S
brought fro.n the chainhers o^ the Sunrise.

■J

Figures and Emblems.

71. The dew, formed in the silence of the dark-
ness while men sleep, falling as willingly on a bit
of dead wood as anywhere, hanging its pearls on
every poor spike of grass, and dressing everything
on which it lies with strange beauty, each separate
globule tiny and evanescent, but each flashing back
the light, and each a perfe6l sphere, feeble one by one,
but united mighty to make the pastures of the wilder-
ness rejoice — so, created in silence by an unseen
influence, feeble when taken in detail, but strong in
their myriads, glad to occupy the lowliest place,
and each " bright with something of celestial light,"
Christian men and women are to be " in the midst
of many people as a dew from the Lord."

72. Some of us feel that we are shut in by
immense and sovereign power which we cannot
oppose. And yet, like some ragfng rebel in a
dungeon, or some fluttering bird in a cage, we beat
ourselves all bruised and bloody against the bars in
vain attempts at liberty, alternating with fits of

•cowed apathy as we slink into a corner of our cell.

73. As in the old Saxon monarchies, tliQ
monarch's domestics were nobles, the men of Christ's
household are ennobled by their service.

74. We cannot scold nor dragoon men to love
. Jesus Christ. We cannot drive them into the fold

Pintcres and Emblems.

t i

with dogs and sticks. We are to be gentle, long-
suffering, not doing our work ^' uii ^jassion "' r' ; .
will, but remembering that :. ie'-:, s is tm^^h e t
and that we shall best adoi.i th^ c ■ ctrii^ ^ i' Go^.'
our Saviour when we go amon^ j-cn with -hr 1 ^ ->!
caught in the inner san6luary s^- I irradi ■ :':i;.: c .r
facej, and our hands full of . Vssings'to bestov on
.our brethren. We are to be soldier-priests, stiong
and gentle, like the ideal of those knights of old who
were both, and bore the cross on shield and helmet
and sword-hilt.

75. We cloak our sins from ourselves with many
wrappings, as they swathe a mummy in volumi-
nous folds.

^6. "The grace of God that bringeth salvatiuii
to all men hath appeared disciplining" — and His
hand is never more gentle than when it plucks away
the films with which we hide our sin^ tiom ourselves,
and shows us the "rottxnness and dead men's
bones" beneath the whited walls of the sepulchres
and the velvet of the coffins.

! 1

'j'j. What matters it though \vc float in the
greai ocean of the Divine Love, if with pitch and
canvas wc have Cvtvefully closed every aperture at
whic!\ the flood can entci ? A hermetically closed

• I:

Pi^lttres and Emblems.

)ng-

.rOi.,

•

jar. plunged in the Atlantic, will be as dry inside as
if it were lying on the sand of the' desert.

78. Every pleading of Christ's grace, whether by
providences, or by books, or by His own word docs •
something with us. It is never vain. Either it
melts or it hardens. The sun either scatters the
summer morning mists, or it rolls them into heavier
folds, from whose livid depths the lightning is flash-
ing by mid-day.

79. We shall never see the glory of that light
which dwells between the cherubim if our visits
to the shrine are brief and interrupted, and the
bulk of our time is spent outside the tabernacle
amidst the glaring sand and the blazing sunshine.

80. No short swallow-flights of soul will ever
carry us to the serene height where God dwells.
It is the eagle, with steady, unflagging flaps of his
broad pinion, and open-eyed gaze upwards, that
rises " close to the sun, in lonely lands," and leaves
all the race of short-winged and weak-sighted
twitterers far below.

81. God does not lose the details in the whole ;

as we, looking on some great crowd of upturned

faces, are unconscious of all, but recognise no single

one. •

Piritires and Emblems.

82. The heart vibrates most readily in answer
to gentle touches, the conscience in answer to
heavier, as the breath that wakes the chords of an
yEolian harp would pass silent through the brass of
a trumpet.

83. i\s the sunshine pours down as willingly
and abundantly on filth and dunghills as on gold
that glitters in its beam, and jewels that flash back
its lustre, so the light and warmth of that unsetting
and unexhausted source of life pours down "on the
unthankful and on the good." Xhc great ocean
clasps some black and barren crag that frowns
against it as closely as with its waves it kisses some
fair strand enamelled with flowers and fragrant with
perfumes. So that sea of love in which we live, and
move, and have our being, encircles the worst with
abundant flow.

84. The love of Christ has to come to sinful
men with patient pleading and remonstrance, that
it may enter their hearts and giye its blessings.
Some of j^ou may remember a modern work of art
in which that long-suffering appeal is wonderfully
portrayed. He. who is the Light of the world stands,
girded with the royal mantle clasped with the
priestly breastplate, bearing in His hand the lamp of
truth, and there, amidst the dew of night and the rank
hemlock, He pleads for entrance at the closed door

'■■!

Piflures and Emblems.

ver
to
an
of

which has no handle on its outer side, and is hinged
to open only from within. " I stand at the door and
knock. If any man open the door I will come in."

85. Our gaze upon Christ is to be like that of a
man who resolutely turns away his eyes from other
things, to fix them, with keen interest and eagerness,
with protrafled, steady look, on something which
he is resolved to learn thoroughly.

86. " Looking unto Jesus." That conveys the
same idea of rigid shutting out of other things in
order that one supreme light may fill the eye and
gladden the soul. If you do not carefully drop
black curtains round the little chamber, and exclude
all side lights, as well as all other obje6ts from the
field of vision, there will be no clear impression of
the beloved face made upon the sensitive plate. It
must be in the. darkness that the image is transferred
to the heart.

^y. No man can see the beauty of a country as
he hurries through it in a train. It is only when
we sit still and gaze till all the landscape sinks into
our souls, and we are steeped in it, that its fairness
is revealed to us.

88. No man makes progress in any branch of hu-
man thought or science without this first condition

— the habit of pinning himself down wholly to the

G 2

'.1

Piflures and Emblems.

subjc6l in hand, and rigidly restraining all wandering
thoughts. You must bring your instrument to a
point before it will penetrate, to an edge that it may
cut — and only firm concentration of oneself on the
matter before us will do that ; and if that be true of
regions of thought, where men willingly resort, and
from which no relu6lance of heart draws them back^
how much more true it must be of that region to
which our heavy souls are averse to rise, and whose
pure, keen air it is hard for our lungs to breathe ?

89. If on the wild stock of our sinful nature a
better life has been budded, we have to take care
that the energy of our souls does not waste itself in
vagrant shoots, that bear only scentless, wild flowers ;
and that we prune close and unsparingly our wander-
ing thoughts, our earthly desires, else we shall bear
no fragrant blossoms.

90. A hurried glance is as profitless as a careless
one. You do not see much on first going into a
dark room out of the light ; nor do you see much on
first going into the light out of the dark. When a man
steps for a hasty moment out of the bright, sunny
market-place, with all its gay colouring, into the cool,
dark cathedral, he sees but dimly the still figures
above the altar, and the subdued splendour of stained
glass and sculptured shrines; and if he rushes back to
the outside glare before his eyes become accustomed

J ■' •

lay
;he
of
.nd
ck

Pictures and Emblems.

to the obscurity, he will bear away but a vague im-
pression of confused richness and have nothing
definite to remember.

91. Alas! how little of this patient, prolonged
concentration of interested thought on our dear
Lord do even thie best and devoutest of us employ !
And as for the ordinary Christian life of this da\' —
what a sad contrast does it present to such an ideal !
It was Newton, I think, who, when asked as to his
method of working in attacking complicated
problems, had only the simple answer to give. " I
keep it before me."

92. To one man, looking out on the world
almost as a beast might look, nothing appears won-

• derful, nothing great ; to another, " every common
sight" bears "the glory and the freshness of a
dream," and snems " apparelled in celestial light."
To one man, booking up with lack-lustre, stolid
gaze,' the stars are but so many shining points,
laid flat on a flat arch ; to another, they are spheres
immeasurable and multitudinous, set in violet
depths, which imagination cannot fly across, or
thought fathom; and as the earth and the heavens
vary according to the eye that looks upon them, so
does Christ vary. "Is it nothing to you all ye that
pass by?" The careless glance sees nought even
in that unparalleled sorrow — while some who gaze

CMAGE EVALUATION
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11.25

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Figures and Emblems.

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are bowed in grief, and some are smitten with pen-
itence, and angels are filled with wonder.

93. We stand together in the secret place of
thunder, we stand together before the fontal source
of light. Some of us hear but an inarticulate
rumbling above the clouds, while others hear the
very speech of God. Some of us see but a
formless brightness, where others behold Him who
is the master-light of all our seeing.

94. Christ was a miser of the moments, and
carefully husbanding and garnering up every capa-
city and every opportunity. He toiled with the toil
of a man who has a task before him, that must be
done when the clock strikes six, and who sees the
hands move over the dial, and by every glance
that he casts at it is stimulated to intenser service
and to harder toil.

95. There is a fatal monotony in all our lives —
a terrible amount of hard drudgery in them all.
We have to set ourselves morning after morning
to tasks that look to be utterly insignificant and
disproportionate to the power that we bring to bear
upon them — like elephants picking up pins with
their trunks ; and yet we may make all our common-
place drudgery great, and wondrous, and fair, and
full of help and profit to our souls, if, over it ail —

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our shops, our desks, our ledgers, our studies, our
kitchens, and our nurseries — we write, " My meat
is to do the will of Him that sent me."

96. Our most troubled utterances of sore need,
our sighs and groans, should be accompanied whh
faith which feels the summer's sun of joy even in
the mid-winter of our pain, and sees vineyards in
the desert.

97. Blossoms and flowers will come again, how-
ever untimely frosts have burned the young leaves
into brown powder. No sorrow is so crushing and
hopeless but that happiness may again visit the
heart, where trust and love abide.

98. Cisterns may be broken, but the fountain
cannot be choked up with their ruins.

99. The yawning emptiness of our parched
hearts, thirsting for God, like the cracked ground in
drought, is a plea with Him.

100. It cannot but be that he who calls on God
will be answered. Anything is credible rather than
that our prayer ascending should be flung back
unanswered, as if it had struck against heavens,
which were brass.

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CHAPTER IV.

ID any of you, parents, ever hear your
child wake from sleep, with some panic
fear, and shriek the mother's name
through the darkness? Was not that a more
powerful appeal than all words? And, depend
upon it, that the soul which cries aloud on God,
"the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,"
though it have " no language but a cry," will never
call in vain.

• 2. There is an a6l of loving will which is most
clearly conveyed by that strong, and yet plain and
intelligible, metaphor, "Bow down thine ear," as an
eager listener puts his hand to his ear and bends
the lobe of it in the direflion of the sound.

3. There are two methods of lightening a burden
— one is to diminish the load, the other is to

Piflures and Emblems.

strengthen the shoulders that carry it. The latter
is often the more blessed — and often the shape in
which God answers our prayer. " For this thing I
besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from
me. And He said unto me, My grace is sufficient
for thee."

4. The great man and all his cortege are kept
outside, and God's servant will not even come out,
but sends the message, " Go and wash in Jordan."
That uncourtly reception is no piece of vulgar
arrogance, like the pride of a pope that keeps an
emperor standing in the snow in the castle-yard
for three days before he will absolve him.

5. Are we going to stand upon our miserable
tiny mole-hills beneath those solemn stars far above
us and say — " Their light ought to fall upon us in
another fashion from what it does on those people
that live a little lower down ? "

6. It is the same air which vivifies all men's
blood, the same light which gleams in all men's
eyes, the same Gospel which saves all men's souls.

7. As the same blood is repeatedly driven
through the veins by the contra6lion and dilating
of the heart, so all true prayer will flow forth over
and over again., a? the spirit opens in yearning, and
closes itself in calm fruicion on the grace it has

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received, and then dilates again in longing and
sense of need.

8. Wherever God's grace is discerned, and His
love is welcomed, there praise breaks forth, as
surely as streams pour from the cave of the glacier
when the sun of summer melts it, or earth answers
the touch of spring with flowers.

9. Our sorrows are never so great that they
hide our mercies. The sky is never covered with
clouds so that neither sun nor stars appear for
many days.

10. The winter's day has had its melancholy
grey sky, with many a bitter dash of snow and
rain — but it has stormed itself out, and at eventide
a rent in the clouds reveals the sun, and it closes in
peaceful clearness of night.

1 1 . The harps of heaven are hushed to hear
their praise who can sing, " Thou hast redeemed us
to God by Thy blood."

12. "But he was a leper." There is a but in
every marl's fortunes, because there is a but in
every man's chara6ler.

1 3. The first dnd second Psalms are obviously
intended as a kind of double introdu6tion to the

Figures and Emblems.

whole Psalter. We might call them the frontis-
piece and vignette to the book.

14. There, on the right hand, are the flowery-
slopes of the mount of blessing ; there, on the left,
the barren, stern, thunder-riven, lightning-splintered
pinnacles of the mount of cursing. Every clear
note of benedi6lion hath its low minor of impreca-
tion from the other side. Between the two, over-
hung by the hopes of the one, and frowned upon
and dominated by the threatenings of the other, is
pitched the little camp of our human life, and the
path of our pilgrimage runs in the trough of the
valley between. And yet — might I not go a step
farther, and say that above the parted summits
stretches the one over-arching blue, uniting them
both, and their roots deep down below the surface
interlace and twine together.

15. God's love can no more fall on rebellious
hearts than the pure crystals of the snow can lie
and sparkle on the hot, black cone of a volcano.

16. A great botanist made what he called "a
floral clock," to mark the hours of the day by the
opening and closing of flowers. It was a graceful,
and yet a pathetic, thought. One after another
they spread their petals, and their varying colours
glow in the light. But one after another they

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PiHtires and Emble7ns

wearily shut their cups, and the night falls, and
the latest of them folds itself together, and all are
hidden away in the dark. So our joys and trea-
sures, were they sufficient did they last, cannot last.
After a summer's day comes a summer's night, and
after a brief space of them comes winter, when all
are killed, and the leafless trees stand silent —

" Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

17. If we live for Christ, the power of that
motive will make all our nature blossom like the
vernal woods, and dry branches break into leafage.
If we dwell in Him, we shall be at home wherever
we are, like the patriarch who pitched his tent in
many lands, but always had the same tent wherever
he went.

18. Christ was as unsafe when He went up
to Jerusalem as John Huss when he went to
the Council of Constance with the Emperor's safe-
condu6l in his belt ; or as a condemned heretic would
have been .in the old days, if he had gone and stood
in that little dingy square outside the palace of the
Inquisition at Rome, and there, below the. obelisk,
preached his heresies.

19. As we may say, every time Christ planted
His foot on the flinty path the blood flowed. Every

Pin,ures ana Emblems.

step was a pain like that of a man enduring the
ordeal and walking on burning iron or sharp steel.

20. Notwithstanding the black barrier which we
have flung across the stream by our sin, the pure
and deep flood of the love of God shall rise and
surge over the impediment, and fill our souls.

21. Every man, by every sinful a£l, carries a
coal to the hell-fire that may have to consume him.

22. No multiplication oi times will make eternity.

23. Every other creature presents the most
accurate correspondence between nature and cir-
cumstances, powers and occupations. Man alone
is like some poor land-bird blown out to sea, and
floating half-drowned with clinging plumage on an
ocean where the dove " finds no rest for the sole of
her foot," or like some creature that loves to glance
in the sunlight, but is plunged into the deepest
recesses of a dark mine.

24. Is it not true that, deep below the surface
contentment with the world and the things of the
world, a dormant, but lightly slumbering sense of
want and unsatisfied need lies in your souls ? Is it
not true that it wakes sometimes at a touch ; that
the tender, dying light of sunset, or the calm abysses
of the mighty heavens, or some strain of music, or

PiSlures and Emble^its.

a line in a book, or a sorrow in your heart, or the
solemnity of a great joy, or close conta6l with
sickness and death, or the more dire6l appeals of
Scripture and of Christ, stir a wistful yearning and
a painful sense of emptiness in your hearts, and of
insufficiency in all the ordinary pursuits of your
lives ?

* 25. The thought of Eternity is in us all— a pre-
sentiment and a consciousness ; and that universal
presentiment itself goes far to establish the reality
of the unseen order of things to which it is dire6led."
The great planet that moves on the outmost circle
of our system was discovered because that next it
wavered in its course in a fashion which was inex-
plicable, unless some unknown mass was attra6ling
it from across millions of miles of darkling space.
And there are " perturbations " in our spirits which
cannot be understood, unless from them we may
divine that far-off and unseen world, that has power
frorri afar to sway in their orbits the little lives of
mortal men,

26. You have need of God, and, whether you
know it or not, the tendrils of your spirits, like some
climbing plant, not fostered by a careful hand but
growing wild, are feeling out into the vacancy in
order to grasp the stay which they need for their
fruitage and their strength.

Pictures and Emblems.

27. The contexture of life, ana even the per-
plexities and darkness of human society, and the
varieties of earthly condition — if they be confined
within their own proper limits, and regarded as parts
of a whole — they are all co-operant to an end. As
from wheels turning different ways in some great
complicated machine, and yet fitting by their cogs
into one another, there may be a resultant dire6t
motion produced even by these apparently antag-
onistic forces.

' 28. I know what Eternity is, though I cannot
define the word to satisfy a metaphysician. The
little child taught by some grandmother Lois, in a
cottage, knows what she means when she tells him
" you will live for ever," though both scholar and
teacher would be puzzled to put it into other words.

29. Men may so plunge themselves into the
present as to lose the consciousness of the Eternal-^
as a man swept over Niagara, blinded by the spray,
and deafened by the rush, would see or hear nothing
of the death that encompassed him. And yet the
blue sky with its peaceful spaces stretches above the
hell of waters.

30. "Our jp^^/z^;'" forgives us; Let us keep
fast by that. And, then, let us remember our own
childhood, our children, if we have any, and how

Pifltires and Emblems.

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vvc do with them. What makes the little face fall
and the tears come to the eyes ? Is it your taking
down the rod from behind the door, or the grave
disapprobation in your face, and the trouble and
rebuke in your eyes? It is not only the buffet
from the father's hand that makes the punishment,
but still more the disturbance and the displeasure
of the father's heart that makes the child's punish-
ment. And forgiveness is not complete when the
father says, " Well, go away, I will not hurt you,"
but when he says, "Well, come, I am not angry
with you, and I love you still." Not putting up
the rod, but taking your child to your heart is your
forgiveness. So long as the faintest trace of dis-
turbance of the father's love by pain or disapproba-
tion remains, so long as one fragment of the fault
stands like the broken timbers of a dam to block
the stream, so long the child is not pardoned. He
is forgiven when the last thin film of mist between
him and his father has faded away. And the
Heavenly Father seals His pasdon to us when He
declares, " I have blotted out, as a cloud, thy sins."

31. They that went before do not prevent us on
whom the ends of the ages are come. The table
that was spread for them is as fully furnished for
the latest guests. The light, which was so magical
and lustrous in the morning beauty, for us has not

Figures and Emblems.

faded away into the light of common day. The
river which flowed in these past c^ges has not been
drunk up by the thirsty sands. The fire that on':e
blazed so clear has not died down into grey ashes.

32. No matter what tempests assail us, the
wind will but sweep the rotten branches out of
the tree.

33. As in war they will clear away the houses
and the flower-gardens that have been allowed to
come and cluster about the walls and fill up the
moat, yet the walls will stand ; so in all the confli6ls
that befall Christ's church and God's truth, the
calming thought ought to be ours : if anything
perishes it is a sign that it is not His, but man's
excrescence on His building. Whatever is His
will stand for ever.

.34. Discipline submitted to is, if I may so say,

like that great apparatus which you find by the

side of an astronomer's biggest telescope, to wheel

it upon its centre and to point its tube to the star

on which he would look. So our anticipation and

desire, the faculty of expedlation which we have, is

wont to be direfled along the low level of earth,

and it needs the pinions and levers of that gracious

discipline, making us sober, righteous, godly, in

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PiSlures and Emblems,

order to heave it upwards, full-front against the sky,
that the stars may shine into it.

35. "Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with
an east ^»nnd." The metaphor is that of a ship like
a great, unwieldy galleon, caught in a tempesl..
However strong for fight, it is not fit for sailing.
Like some of those turret ships of ours, if they
venture out from the coast and get into a storm,
their very strength is their destru6lion, their armour
wherein they trusted . ensures that they shall sink.

36. We are ever tempted to think of the present
as commonplace. The sky is always farthest from
earth right above our heads. It is at the horizon
behind, and the horizon ir front, where earth and
heaven seem to blend.

37. Is it true of us that into our hearts there
steals subtle, inipalpable, but quickening £s the land
breeze laden with the fragrance of flowers to the
sailor tossing on the barren sea, a hidden but yet
mighty hope of an inheritance with Christ — when
He shall appear?

38. It is with us as with the people in some
rude country fair and scene of riot, where the booths,
and the shows, and the drinking-places are pitched
upon the edge of the common, and one step from
the braying of the trumpets brings you into the

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solemn stillness of the night, and high above the
stinking glare of theoil lamps there is the pure light
of the stars in the sky, and not one amongst the
many clowns that are stumbling about in 'the midst
of sensual dissipation ever looks up to see that calm
home that is arched above them.

39. The speculum, the obje6l-glass, must be
polished and cut by many a stroke and much friftion
ere it will reflefl " the image* of the heavenly ;" so
grace disciplines us, patiently, slowly, by repeated .
strokes, by rhuch rubbing, by much pain, and then
the cleared eye beholds the heavens, and the purged
heart grows towards " the coming " as its hope and
its life.

40. " As the shadow of a great rock in a weary
land." I was reading, a day or two ago, one of our
last books of travels in the wilderness of the Exo-
dus, in which the writer told, how, after toiling for
hours under a scorching sun, over the hot, white,
marly. flat, seeing nothing but a beetle or two on
the way, and finding no skelter anywhere from the
pitiless beating of the sunshine, the three travellers
came at last to a little Retem bush only a few feet
high, and flung themselves down and tried to hide,
at least, their heads, from those "sunbeams like
swords," even beneath its ragged shade. And my

text tells of a great rock, with blue dimness. in its

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Pi6lures and Emblems.

shadow, with haply a fern or two in the moist
places of its crevices, where there is rest, and a man
can lie down and be cool, while all outside is burn-
ing sun, and burning sand, and dancing mirage.

41. "And so the word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness t>f perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought."

42. There is no depth in a Chinese pi6lure be-
cause there is no shade. It is the wrinkles and
marks of tear and wear that make the expression
in a man's portrait. " Life's sternest painter is the
best."

43. We live a life defenceless and exposed to
many a storm and tempest. I need but remind
you of the adverse circumstances — the wild winds
that go sweeping across the flat level, the biting
blasts that come down from the snow-clad moun-
tains of destiny that lie round the low plain on
which we live. And I need but remind you of
that last wild wind of Death, that whirls the sin-
faded leaves into dark corners, where they lie and
rot.

44. You have not lived thus long without
learning that though, blessed be God ! there do
come in all our lives long periods of halcyon rest,

Figures and Emblems.

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when " birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed
wave," and the heavens above are clear as sapphire,
and the sea around is transparent as opal — yet the
little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, may rise
on the horizon, and may thicken and blacken, and
grow greater and nearer till all the sky is dark, and
burst in lightning, and rain, and fierceness of wind,
till "through the torn sail the wild tempest is
streaming," and' the white crests of the waves are
like the mane of Death's pale horse leaping upon
the broken ship.

45. The Gospel proclaims and produces ho fan-
tastic ethics of its own. The a6lipns which it
stamps in its mint are those which pass current in all
lands — not a provincial coinage, but recognised as
true in ring, and of full weight everywhere.

46. Do not fancy that Christian righteousness is
different from ordinary " goodness,"except as being

.broader and deeper, more thorough-going, more im-
perative. The precepts of the one, like some rock-
hewn inscriptions by forgotten kings, are weathered
and indistinfl, often illegible, often misread, often
neglefled. The other is written in living chara61;ers
'in a perfe6l life.

47. You cannot gird on "righteousness" above
the old self, as some beggar might buckle to himself

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Pi6lures and Emblems.

royal velvet with its ermine over his filthy tatters.
There must be a putting off in order .to and accom-
panying the putting on.

48. Every life ha? dark tracts and long stretches
of sombre tint, and no representation is true to fa6l
which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no
shadows on the canvas.

49. You will sometimes see a wounded animal
licking its wounds with its own tongue. How much
more hopeless still is our effort by our own power
to. staunch and heal the gashes which sin has made.

50. I remember a rough parable of Luther's,
grafted on an older legend, which runs somewhat in
this fashion : — A man's heart is like a foul stable.
Wheelbarrows and shovels are of little use, except
to remove some of the surface filth, and to litter all
the passages in the process. What is to be done
with it ? " Turn the Elbe into it," says he. The
flood will sweep away ail the pollution. Not my
own efforts, but the influx of that pardoning, cleans-
ing grace which Is in Christ will wash away the
accumulations of years, and the ingrained evil which
has stained every part of my being.

51. It is useless to build dykes to keep out the
,vild waters. Somewhere or other they will find
a way through. The only real cure is that which

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103

only the Creating hand can efifefl, who, by slow
operation of some inward agency, can raise the level
of the low lands, and lift them above the threatening
waves.

52. Beware of the slightest defle6lion from the
straight line of right. If there be two lines, one
straight and the other going off at the sharpest
angle, you have only to produce both far enough,
and there will be room between them for all the
space that separates hell from heaven.

53. We heap upon ourselves, by slow, steady
accretion through a lifetime, the weight that, though,
it is gathered by grains, crushes the soul. There
is nothing heavier than sand. You may lift it by
particles.. It drifts in atoms, but heaped upon a
man, it will break his bones, and blown over the
land it buries pyramid and sphynx, the temples of
gods artd the homes of men beneath its barren,
solid waves.

54. Our days are full of foiled resolutions, at-
tempts that have broken down, unsuccessful rebel-
lions, ending like the struggles of some snared wild
creature, in wrapping the meshes tighter round U9.

55. There is no power in human nature to
cast off this clinging -self. As in the awful

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Pi6lures and Emblems.

vision of the poet, the serpent is grown into
the man.

56. Whoever takes it for his law to do as he
likes will not for long like what he does. Or, as
George Herbert says :—

" Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,
Embroidered lies, nothing between two dishes —
These are the pleasures here."

57. Do any of you remember the mournful
words with which one of our greatest modern
writers of fiction closes his saddest, truest book :
" Ah ! vanitas vafiitatum ! Which of us is happy
in this world ? which of us has his desire ? or, having
it, is satisfied ? " No wonder that with such a view
of human life as that, the next and last sentence
should be, " Come, children, let us shut up the box
and the puppets, for the play is played out."

58. In all regions of life exercise strengthens
capacity. The wrestler, according to the old Greek
parable, who began by carrying a calf on his
shoulders, got to carry an ox by and by.

59. If a do^or knows that he can cure a disease,
he can afford to give full weight to its gravest
symptoms. If he knows he cannot, he is sorely
tempted to say it is of slight importance, and, though
it cannot be cured, can be endured without much

Pifltires and Emblems.

105

Into

he
r as

discomfort. And so the Scripture teachings about
man's real moral condition are chara6lerised by two
peculiarities which, at first sight, seem somewhat
opposed, but are really harmonious and closely con-
nefled. There is no book and no system in the
whole world that takes such a dark view of what
you and I are ; there is none animated with so bright
and confident a hope of what you and I may become.

60. There are certain diseases of which a
constant symptom is unconsciousness that there is
anything the matter. A deep-seated wound does
not hurt much.

61. Which is the gloomy system ? That which
paints in undisguised blackness the fa6ls of life, and
over against their blackest darkness the radiant
light of a great hope shining bright and glorious,
or one that paints humanity in a uniform monotone
of indistinguishable grey, involving the past, the
present and the future — which, believing in no
disease, hopes for no cure ?

62. We shall know Christ by getting like* Him.
The water of life takes the shape of the containing
vessel, but it has likewise the property of dilating
the spirit into which it flows, and, by fruition, en-
larging capacity, and hence kindling desire. The
sun shines upon the sensitive" plate, and an
image of the sun is photographed there.

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Figures and Emblems.

63. As a man writes his name upon the fly-leaf
of his books, or stamps his initials on his valuables,
so Christ gives His name in token of proprietorship,
and builds on that fa6l at once the assurance of
prote6lion and the demand for service.

64. " I bear in my body the marks of the Lord
Jesus," and the letters which are here burned in by
hot irons will yonder be filled with lustrous^ gold,
and the ownership which on earth was testified by
suffering will in heaven be manifested in glory.

65. When our wills go in the direflion of Christ's
purposes, then they are His in so far as the touch of
His finger upon the keys in the heavens moves the
tremulous needles of our volitions upon the earth.

66. The sun remains the same, but as different
as its sphere looks, seen from the comet at its aphe-
lion, away out far beyond the orbits of the planets
in the dim regions of that infinite abyss, and seen
from the same orb at its perihelion when it circles
round close by the burning brightness; so different
does that mighty Sun of Righteousness look to us
now in His eternal self-revelation, by sacrifice and
death, from what He will seem in that same self-
revelation when we shall stand by His Side.

6y. As you may give to a man in the temperate
or frigid zones the seeds of some tropical plant, that

Figures and Emblems.

107

may, perhaps, grow and put forth some pale leaves
and I'nefifeflual blossoms, which yet will scarcely
be worthy to be called leafage and flowerage, as
compared with the broad, smooth foliage and glow-
ing brightness that the same seeds would evolve
planted in their natural soil ; so here into our
hands, wanderers in inclement climes, God puts
what I may call the exotic seeds — the knowledge
of His love in Christ — and we tend them ; and,
blessed be His name, they do grow beneath our
cloudy skies, and amidst our long winters. But
when we come to that higher house where these be
planted, they shall flourish in a luxuriance a.nd
beauty undreamed of before.

68. Did you ever try to measure one day's aflions
by the standard of the New Testament ? Cultivate
the habit — the habit of bringing all that you do side
by side with this light ; as- a scholar in some school
of art will take his feeble copy, and hold it by the
side of the masterpiece, and compare line for line,
and tint for tint.

69. You and I have no present adequate means
of knowing from what we have been delivered.
We stand with averted eyes^ as upon the edge of
some great volcano, and see the swirling sulphur
smoke and the fierce flames flashing out from the
yellow sides of the fiery pit below ; but we see but

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II ;)

Iktle of what we have escaped from, nor know the
dolefulness of the regions of alienation and rebellion
and persistent rejection of God.

70. The higher you rise upon the cliffs, the
further down into the abyss you can look ; and,
when we know what hell is, by the antithesis of
heaven, we shall have a new vision, by what we
win, of what we escaped when He took away the
sting of death, and closed the gates of that dismal
landi

71. There are more things round about you that
will tempt you downwards than will draw you up-
wards, and your only security is constant watchful-
ness. As George Herbert says : —

" Who keeps no guard upon himself is slack,
And rots to nothing at the next great thaw."

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72. Suppose a man were to say about a steam-
ship, " the stru6lure of this vessel shows that it is
meant that we should get up a roaring fire in the
furnaces, and set the engines going at full speed,
and let her go as she will." Would he not have
left out of account that there was steering apparatus
which was as plainly meant to guide as are the
engines to draw? What are the rudder and the
wheel for ? Do they not imply a pilot ? And is

PiSlures and Emblems.

109

not the make of our souls as plainly suggestive of
subordination and control ?

■ " Unless above himself he can erect himself,

How mean a thing is man."

73. In earthly joy there is ever something
lacking, ever some unilluminated window in the
palace, black amid the blaze.

74. Death, death itself, will be but the last burst
of the expiring storm, the last blast of the worn-out
tempest, and then, the quiet of the green, inland val-
leys of our Father's land, where no tempest comes
any more, nor the loud winds are ever heard, nor the
salt sea is ever seen ; but perpetual calm and blessed-
ness ; all mystery gone, and all rebellion hushed and
silenced, and all unrest at an end for ever. " No
more sea."

75. I remember once seeing a bit of an old
Roman road ; the lava blocks were there, but for
vyant of care, here a young sapling had grown up
between two of them and had driven them apart ;
there they were split by the frost ; here was a great
ugly gap full of mud ; and the whole thing ended
in a jungle. How shall a man keep the road in re-
pair ? " By taking heed thereto." Things that
are left to go anyhow in this world have a strange
knack of going one ''how" You do not need any-

PiHures and Emblems,

I i

thing else than negh'gence to ensure that things will
come to grief.

^6. There may be a fountain of blessedness in
your hearts, the springs and sources of which lie too
deep down to be affe6led, either by the summer
drought or the winter's frost.

'j'j. L'*e is a voyage over a turbulent sea ;
changing circumstances come rolling after each
other, like the undistinguishable billows of the great
ocean. Tempests and storms rise. There is weari-
some sailing, no peace, but " ever climbing up the
climbing wave." That is life.

*]%. There is an end to all " the weary oar, the
weary, wandering fields of barren foam." On the
shore stands the Christ ; and there is rest tJiere.

79. That restless, profitless working of the great,
homelees, hungry, moaning ocean — what a pi^ure
it is of the heart of a man that has no Christ, that
has no God, that has no peace by pardon.

80. A little barque pitching in the night, and one
figure rises quickly up in the stern, and puts out a
rebuking hand, and speaks one rnighty word, "Peace !
be 3till." And the word was heard amid all the hurly-
burly of the tempest, and the waves crouched at his
feet like dogs to their master.

Pifltires and Emblems.

Ill

8i. How much of the knowledges of earth will
have ceased to be applicable, when the first light-
beam of heaven falls upon them !

82. The sea stands as the emblem of untamed
power. It is lashed into yeasty foam, and drives
before it great ships and huge stones like bulrushes,
and seems to have a savage pleasure in eating into
the slow-corroding land, and covering the beach
with its devastation.

83. The great Armada comes in its pride across
the waters — and the motto that our England struck
upon its medal, when that proud fleet was baffled,
serves for the epitaph over all antagonism to God's
Kingdom. " The Lord blew upon them, and they
were scattered."

84. The ark of God " moves on the face of the
waters," and though wild tempests howl to beat it
from its course,. yet beneath all the surface confusion
and commotion, there is, as in the great mid-ocean,
a silent current that runs steady and strong, and it
carries the keel that goes deep enough down to rest
in it, safely to its port.

85. In one of the mosques of Damascus, which
has been a Christian church, and before that was
a heathen temple, the portal bears, deep cut in Greek
charadlers, the inscription, " Thy kingdom, O Christ,

112

Pi5lures and Emblems.

is an everlasting kingdom, and Thy dominion en-
dureth throughout all generations/' The confident
words seem coritr^difled by the twelve centuries of
Mohammedanism on which they have looked down.
But, though their silent prophecy is unheeded and
unheard by the worshippers below, it shall be proved
true one day, and the crescent shall wane before
the steady light of the Sun of Righteousness.

86. All through the apocalypse we heay the dash
of the waves. • '

87. Think how the fa6l of dying will solve many
a riddle ! how much more we shall know by shifting
our position ! "There must be wisdom with great
Death," and he " keeps the keys of all the creeds."

88. Who can tell what unknown resources and
what possibilities of new powers there lie, all dor-
mant and unsuspe6led, in the beggar on the dung-
hill, and in the idiot in the asylum ?

89. We look out upon the broad ocean, and far
away it seems to blend with air and ^ky. Mists come
up over its surface. Suddenly there rises on the
verge of the horizon a white sail that was not there
a moment ago, and we wonder, as we look out from
our hills, what may be beyond these mysterious
waters. And to ancient peoples there were mysteries
which we do not feel. Whi;,her should they come, if

Figures and Emblems.

ion en-
nfident
uries of
I down,
ed and
proved
before
;s.

he dash

re many
shifting
th great
creeds."

rces and
, all dor-
le dung-

•

, and far
sts come
3 on the
lot there
out from
ysterious
Hysterics
r come, if

they were to venture on its untried tides ? And then,
what lies in its sunless caves that no eye has seen ?
It swallows up life, and beauty, and treasure of every
sort, and engulfs them all in its obstinate silence.
They go down in the mighty waters, and vanish as
they descend ; what would it be if these were drained
off? what revelations — ^wild sea-valleys and mountain
gorges ; the dead that are in it, the power ::hat lies
there, all powerless now, the wealth that has been
lost in it ? What should we see if depth and dis-
tance were annihilated, and we beheld what there
is out yonder, and what there is down there ?

90. There is much that lies beyond the horizon
which our eyes cannot reach. There is much that
lies covered by the deeps, which our eyes could vQdich
if the deeps were away.

91. Men will yield their whole souls to the
warmth and light that stream from the cross, as
the sunflower turns itself to the sun.

92. For the present, there has to be much
destrudlive as well as constru6live work done.
Many a wretched hovel, the abode of sorrow and
want, many a den of infamy, many a palace of
pride, many a temple of idols, will have to be pulled
down yet, and men's eyes will be blinded by the
dust, and their hearts will ache as they look at the

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Pz^ures and Emblems.

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ruins. Be it so. The finished stru6lure will oblite-
rate the remembrance of poor buildings that cum-
bered its site. This Emperor of ours may indeed
say, that He found the city of brick and made it
marble.

93. Travellers sometimes find in lonely quarries,
long abandoned or once worked by a vanished race,
great blocks squared and dressed, that seem to
have been meant for palace or shrine. But there
they lie, negle6led and forgotten, and the bull 'ing
for which they were hewn has been reared without
them. Beware, lest God's grand temple should be
built without you, and you be left to desolation
and decay.

94. The ideal perfe6lion of faith would be that
it should be unbroken, undashed by any speck of
doubt. But the reality is far different. It is no
full-orbed completeness, but, at the best, a growing
segment of reflefled light, with many a rough place
in its jagged outline, prophetic of increase ; with
many a deep pit of blackness on its silver surface ;
with many a storm-cloud sweeping across its face ;
conscious of eclipse, and subjefl to change.

95. Wavering confidence, crossed and broken,
like the solar spe6lrum, by many a dark line of
doubt, will make our conscious possession of Christ's
gift fitful.

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Figures and Emblems.

115

96. There is Christ, as most of us, I suppose,
believe, Lord of all creatures, administering the
affairs of the universe ; the steps of His throne and
the precinfls of His court are thronged with depen-
dents whose eyes wait upon Him, who are fed from
His stores ; and yet my poor voice may steal through
that chorus-shout of petition and praise, and His
ear will deteft its lowest note, and will separate
the thin stream of my prayer from the great sea
of supplication which rolls to His seat, and will
answer me.

is no

97 These demons of worldliness, of selfishness,
of carelessness, of pride, of sensuality, that go career-
ing through your soul are like the goblin horseman
in the old legend ; wherever that hoof-fall strikes,
the ground is blasted, and no grass will grow upon
it any more for ever.

98. God drives a deep share through many a
wayside heart, and the coulter of affliction breaks
up many a spirit that it may afterwards yield " the
peaceable fruit of righteousness."

99. The power and vitality of faith is not
measured by the comprehensiveness and clearness
of belief. The richest soil may bear shrunken and
barren ears ; and on the arid sand, with the thinnest
layer of earth, gorgeous cacti may bloom out, and

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Pidlures and Emblems,

fleshy aloes lift their sworded arms, vvith stores of
moisture to help them through the heat.

100. Many a poor soul that clasps the base of
the crucifix clings to the cross ; many a devout heart,
kneeling before the altar, sees, through the incense
smoke the face of the Christ

■V

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s of

e of
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mse

CHAPTER V.

HRIST'S mercy, like water in a vase,
takes the shape of the vessel that
holds it.

2. Suppose a little child, just beginning
to open its eyes and unfold its faculties upon this
wonderful world of ours. There you get the extreme
of capacity for receiving impressions from without,
the extreme of susceptibility to the influences that
come upon it. Tell the little thing some trifle that
passes out of your mind ; you forget all about it ;
but it comes out again in the child weeks and weeks
afterwards, showing how deep a mark it has made.

3. It is the law of the human nature that, when
it is beginning to grow, it shall be soft as wax to
receive all kinds of impressions, and then that it
shall gradually stiffen and become hard as adamant
to retain them. The rock was once all fluid, and
plastic, and gradually it cools down into hardness.

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Figures and Emblems,

If a flnger-dint had been put upon it in the early
time, it would have left a mark that all the forces
of the world could not make nor can obliterate now.
In our great museums you see stone slabs with the
marks of rain that fell hundieds of years before
Adam lived ; and the footprint of some wild bird
that passed across the beach in those old, old times.
The passing shower and the light foot left their
prints on the soft sediment ; then ages went on^
and it has hardened into stone; and there they
remain, and will remain for evermore.

4. Thank God for that " fine linen, clean and
white, the righteousness " with which Christ covers
our wounded nakedness. It becomes ours, though
no thread of it was wrought in our looms.

5. If we are to do God's work in the world, we
must be good, righteous, and true men. That robe>
like the silken vest in which the knight, in the old
legend, went forth to fight, is our true mail. It
will turn blows and deaden cuts, and stay thrusts
that will dint and shear through and pierce every
other defence.

6. Beautiful to think of, how Christ laid hold of
the vulgar things round about Him as the occasions
for the utterance and moulds for the form of His
precious words, and hung the teachings of His

Pictures and Emblems.

119

wisdom on every thorn-bush and on every waving
wheat-ear.

7. It is an awful thought that we may scatter
abroad seeds which may take root in some hearts
and may spring up a dark, waving, poisonous, hem-
lock growth. It is a blessed thought that we can
sow seed which shall bear fruits of righteousness
an hundredfold.

8. If you cannot see results here in the hot
working day, the cool evening hours are drawing
near, when you may rest from your labours, and
then they will follow you.

9. We all think far too much of external a6livity
and too little of that spirit who must guide and
fru6lify it ; too mu^h of the institutions, and too little
of the indwelling God. The great organ must be
filled with the breath from the four winds of heaven,
ere solemn praise can be thundered from its pipes.
You may perfedl your machinery ; but all its nicely-
fitting parts stand motionless — a dead weight ; and
not a spindle whirrs till the strong impulse, born
of fire, rushes in.

10. " His going forth is prepared as the morning "
that breaks, day by day, over a dark world, flushing
the heavens with tender light, ^vakening shrill music
on every bough, and opening the folded petals of
all the flowers.

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120

Figures and Emblems.

11. Alas! that oui careless indifference should
so often leave our fleeces dry, while God's dew falls
in silence from His starry heaven.

12. Judge nothing before the time. We cannot
criticise the great Artist when we stand before His
unfinished masterpiece, and see dim outlines here, a
patch of crude colour there. But " wait patiently
for Him."

13. We all receive unfinished tasks from those
who go before ; we all transmit unfinished tasks to
them who come after. Our vocation is to advance
a little the dominion of God's truth, and to be one
of the long line who pass on the torch from hand to
hand.

14. What does it matter whether we have been
set to dig out the foundation, working amongst mud
and wet, or have laid the lowermost courses, which
are all covered up and forgotten, or happen to have
been among those who bring forth the headstones
with shoutings ? We are all builders all the same.
The main thing is we have some work there.

1 5. We work for eternity. We may well wait for
the scaffolding to be taken away. Then we shall find
that preparatory work is all represented in the final

Pi6lures and Etnblems.

121

lis

issue ; even as the first film of alluvium, deposited
in its delta by some mighty stream, is the real foun-
dation for the last which, long ages after, rise above
the surface and bear waving com and the homes of
men.

1 6. If you have God for your "enduring
substance," you can face all varieties of condition,
and be calm, saying —

" Give what Thou canst, without Thee I am poor,
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away."
The amulet that charms away disquiet lies here.

17. Twice, or thrice, perhaps, in a lifetime, a
man's road leads him up to a high dividing point, a
watershed as it were, whence the rain runs from one
side of the ridge to the Pacific, and from the other
to the Atlantic. His whole future may depend on
his bearing the least bit to the right hand or to the
left, and all the slopes below, on either side, are
wreathed in mist.

18. If we have not learned the habit of commit-
ting the daily-recurring monotonous steps to God,
we shall find it very, very hard to seek His help
when we come to a fork iu the road.

19. Shall we try to be content with an animal
limitation to the present, and heighten the bright
colour of the little to-day by the black back-ground

122

Figures and Emblems.

that surrounds it, saying, " Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die."

20. Our will is to be master of our passions, and
desires, and whims, and habits, but to be servant of
God. It should silence all their Cries, and itself be
silent, that God may speak. Like the lawgiver
captain in the wilderness, it should stand still at the
head of the ordered rank, ready for the march, but
motionless, till the Pillar lifts from above the
san£luary.

21. Let the affe6lions feed on God, the will wait
mute before Him, till His command inclines it to
decision, and quickens it into a6lion ; let the desires
fix upon His all-sufficiency ; and then the wilderness
will be no more trackless, but the ruddy blaze of
the guiding pillar will brighten on the sand a path
which men's hands have never made, nor human
feet trodden into a road.

22. The future is dim, after all our straining to
see into its depths. The future is threatening, after
all our efforts to prepare for its coming storms.
A rolling vapour veils it all ; here and there a
mountain peak seems to stand out ; but in a moment,
another swirl of the fog hides it from us.

23. Think how surely rest comes with delighting
in God. For that soul must needs be calm which

Pictures and Emblems,

123

is freed from the distra6lion of various desires by
the one master attraction. Such a soul is still as the
great river above the falls, when all the side currents
and dimpling eddies and backwaters are effaced by
the attraction that draws every drop in the one
direction ; or like the same stream as it nears its end>
and, forgetting how it brawled c*mong rocks and
flowers in the mountain glens, flows " with a calm
and equable motion" to its rest in the central sea»

24. The presence of the King awes the crowd
into silence. When the full moon is in the nightly
sky it makes the heavens bare of flying cloud-rack^
and all the twinkling stars are lost in the peaceful^
solitary splendour. So let delight in God rise in
our souls, and lesser lights pale before it— do not
cease to be, but add their feebleness, unnoticed, to
its radiance.

25. Character is made, as coral reefs are built
up by a multitude of tiny creatures, whose united
labours are strong enough to breast the ocean.

26. If we were not eager to stand on the giddy
top of fortune's rolling wheel, we should not heed
its idle whirl ; but we let our foolish hearts set our
feet there, and thenceforward every lurch of the
glittering instability threatens to lame or kill us.

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Figures and Emblems.

27. Do not venture the rich freightage of your
happiness in crazy vessels. If you do, be sure that,
somewhere or other, before your life is ended, the
poor, frail craft will strike on some black rock rising
sheer from the depths, and will grind itself to chips
there.

28. If your life twines round any prop but God
your strength, be sure that, some time or other, the
stay to which its tendrils cling will be plucked up,
and the poor vine will be lacerated, its clusters
crushed, and its sap bleeding out of it.

29. TiiC sunshine flows into the opened eye, the
breath ot life into the expanding lung — so surely, so
immediately, the fulness of God fills the waiting,
wishing soul.

30. " I have been young, and now am old," says
David. The dim eyes have seen and survived so
much, that it seems scarcely worth while to be
agitated by what ceases so soon. He has known
so many bad men blasted in all their leafy verdure
and so many languishing good men revived, that —

" Old experience doth attain
To something of prophetic strain."

Life, with its changes, has not soured but quieted
him. It does not seem to him an endless maze,
nor has he learned to despise it. He has learned
to see God in it all, and that has cleared its con-

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Pi£lures and Emblems.

125

fusion, as the movements of the planets, irregular
and apparently opposite, when viewed from the
earth, are turned into an ordered whole, when the
sun is taken for the centre.

31. It is not our changing circumstances, but
our unregulated desires, that rob us of peace. We
are feverish, not because of the external temperature,
but because of the state of our own blood.

32. We tie ourselves to these outward posses-
sions, as Alpine travellers to their guides, and so,
when they slip on the icy slopes, their fall is our
death.

33. Moralities and the externals of religion will
wash away the foulness which lies on the surface,
but stains that have sunk deep into the very sub-
stance of the soul, and have dyed every thread in
warp and woof to its centre, are not to be got rid of so.
The awful words which our great dramatist puts
into the mouth of the queenly murderess are heavy
ivith the weight of the most solemn truth. After
ill vain attempts to cleanse away the stains, we

like her, have to say, "There's the smell of the
blood still — will these hands ne'er be clean ? "

34. Do not resist that merciful, searching fire,
which is ready to penetrate our very bones and

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Pz^jires and Emblems.

marrow, and burn up the seeds of death which lurk
in the inmost intents of the hearts ! Let Him
plunge you into that gracious baptism, as we put
some poor piece of foul clay into the fire, and like
it, as you glow you will whiten, and all the spots
shall melt away before the conquering tongues of
the cleansing flame.

35. How profound a truth lies in the words —
" What maketh Heaven, that maketh Hell."

36. Where are the cloven tongues of fire, where
the flame which Christ died to light up ? Has it
burned down to grey ashes, or, like some house-fire,
lit and left untended, has it gone out after a little
ineffe6lual crackling among the lighter pieces of
wood and paper, without ever reaching the solid
mass of obstinate coal.

37. Does Christ's love which fills our hearts
coruscate and flame in our lives, making us lights
in the darkness, as some fire-brand caught up from
the hearth will serve for a torch, and blaze out into
the night ?

38. Did you ever see a blast-furnace ? How
long would it take a man, think you, with hammer
and chisel, or by chemical means, to get the bits of
ore out from the stony matrix? But fling them
into the great cylinder, and pile the fire, and let the

Figures and Emblems.

127

strong draught roar through the burning mass, and
by evening you can run off a glowing stream of
pure and fluid metal from which all the dross and
rubbish is parted, which b^.s been charmed out of
all its sullen hardness, and will take the shape of
any mould into which you like to run it. The fire
has conquered, has melted, has purified. So love
"shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost
given unto us, will purify us from all our sins."

39. There is a fire that consumes the barren tree,
and the light chaff that is whirled from the threshing-
floor by the wind of God's fan ; but there is also a
fire that, like the genial heat in some green-house,
makes even the barren tree glow with blossom, and
bends its branches with precious fruit.

40. To Israel the pledge and sacramental seal
of God's guardianship and guidance was the pillar
which, in the fervid light of the noon-day sun, seemed
to be but a column of wavering smoke, but which,
when the darkness fell, glowed at the heat and
blazed across the sleeping camp, a fiery guard.

41. We are afraid to be fervent ; our true danger
is icy torpor. We sit frost-bitten and almost dead
among the snows, and all the while the gracious
sunshine is pouring down, that is able to melt the
white death that covers us, and to free us from the
bonds thai hold us prisoned in their benumbingclasp.

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Figures and Emblems,

42. Our love is secondary — God's is primary ;
ours is reflexion, His the original beam ; ours is
echo, His the mother- tone.

43. Heaven must bend to earth before earth can
rise to heaven. The skies must open and drop
down love, ere love can spring in the fruitful fields.
And it is only when we look with true trust to that
great unveiling of the heart o*" God which is in Jesus
Christ, that our hearts are melted, and all their
srjws are dissolved into sweet waters, which, freed
from their icy chains, can flow with music in their
ripple, and fruitfulness along their course, through
our otherwise silent and barren lives.

44. Men's indolence, and men's sense- 1^ den
natures, will take symbols for realities, notes for
wealth. The eye will be tempted to stay on the
rich colours of the glowing glass, instead of passing
through these to heaven's light beyond.

45. Love to God is no idle emotion or lazy rap-
ture, no vague sentiment, but the root of all praflical
goodness, of all strenuous efforts, of all virtue, and
of all praise. That strong tide is meant to drive the
busy wheels of life and to bear precious freight-
age on its bosom ; not to flow away in profitless
foam.

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PiHures and Erablems.

129

46. Love is the fruitful mother of bright child-
ren, as our great moralist-poet learned when he
painted her in the " House of Holiness " : —

" A multitude of babes about her hung,
Playing their sport that joyed her to behold."

47. Our souls, by reason of sin, are " like sweet
bells jangled, harsh and out of tune." Love's master
hand laid upon them restores to them their part in
"the fair music that all creatures make to their
great Lord," and brings us into such accord with
God that

" We on earth, with undiscording voice,
May rightly answer "
even the awful harmonies of His lips.

48. Ce/emonies stand long after the thought
which they express has fled, as a dead king may sit
on his throne stiff and stark in his golden mantle,
and no one come near enough to see that the light
is gone out of his eyes, and the will departed from
the hand that still clutches the sceptre.

49. As two stringed-instruments may be so tuned

to one key-note that, if you strike the one, a faint

ethereal echo is heard from the other, which blends

undistinguishably with its parent sound ; so, drawing

near to God, and brought into unison with His mind

and will, our responsible spirits vibrate in accord

I30

PiHicres and Emblems.

i .

with His, and give forth tones, low and thin indeed,
but still repeating the mighty music of heaven.

50. The imitation of the obje6l of worship has
always been felt to be the highest form of worship.
Many an ancient teacher, besides the Stoic philo-
sopher, has said, " He who copies the gods worships
them adequately."

51. The perfect man in the heavens will mclude
the graces of childhood, the energies of youth, the
steadfastness of manhood, the c^'.lmness of old age ;
as on some tropical trees, blooming in more fertile
soil, and quickened by a nearer sun than ours, you
may see at once bud, blossom, and fruit — the ex-
pe6lancy of spring, and the maturing promise of
summer, and the fulfilled fruit of autumn — hanging
together on the unexhausted bough.

52. The deepest emotions in another world will
be capable of expression — nor, as now, like some
rushing tide, choke the floodgates through whose
narrow aperture they try to press, and be all tossed
into foam in the attempt.

53. With unworn and fresh heart we may bring
forth fruit in old age, and have the crocus in the
autumnal fields as well as in the spring-time of our
lives.

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Pifiures and Emblems.

131

54. For those who die in His faith and fear,
" better is the end than the beginning, and the day
of one's death than the day of one's birth." Christ
keeps the good wine to the close of the feast.

55. Youth is the time for hope. The world lies
all before us, fair and untried. The past is too
brief to occupy us long, and its furthest point too
near to be clothed in the airy purple which draws
the eye and stirs the heart. We are conscious of
increasing powers which crave for occupation. It
seems impossible but that success and joy shall be
ours. So we live for a little while in a golden haze ;
we look down from our peak upon the virgin forests
of a new world that roll away to the shining waters
in the west, and then we plunge into their maze.«
to hew out a path for ourselves, to slay the wild
beasts, and to find and conquer rich lands. But
soon we discover what hard work the march is»
and what monsters lurk in the leafy coverts, and
diseases hover among the marshes, and how short
a distance ahead we can see, and how far off it is
to the treasure-cities we dreamed of; and if at last
we gain some cleared spot whence we can look
forward, our weary eyes are searching at most for
a place of rest, and all our hopes have dwindled tc
hopes of safety and repose.

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Pifliires and Emblems.

56. Early delights cannot long survive. Custom
stales them all, and wraps everything in its robe of
ashen grey.

57. Time devours his own children. The morn-
ing hours come to us with full hands, the evening
hours come with empty hands and take ; so that, at
the last, " naked shall he return to go as he came."

58. Here we float on a land-locked lake, and on
every side soon reach the bounding land ; but there
we are on a shoreless ocean, and nev. hear any
voice that says, " Hitherto shalt thou come and no
farther."

59. The eye by gazing into the day becomes
more recipient of more light ; the spirit cleaves
closer to a Christ, more fully apprehended and more
deeply loved ; the whole being, like a plant reaching
up to the sunlight, grows by its yearning towards
the light, and by the light towards which it strains
— lifts a stronger stem, and spreads a broader leaf,
and opens into immortal flowers, tinted by the
sunlight with its own colours.

60. Each stage of our earthly course has its
own peculiar chara6leristics, as each zone of the
world has its own vegetation and animal life.

PiHitres and Emblems,

133

rn-

61. The same progress which brings April's
perfumes burns them in the censer of the hot
summer, and buries summer beneath the falling
leaves, and covers the grave with winter's snow.

" Everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment."

62. The life of man, being under the law of
growth, is, in all its parts, subje6l to the consequent
necessity of decline, and very swiftly does the
dire6lion change from ascending to descending. At
first, and for a little while, the motion of the danciitg
stream, which broadens as it runs, and bears us past
fields each brighter and more enamelled with flowers
than the one before it, is joyous ; but the slow
current becomes awful as we are swept along, when
we would fain moor and land — and to some of us it
comes to be tragic and d-eadful at last, as we sit
helpless, and see the shore rush past and hear
the roar of the falls in our ears, like some poor
wretch caught in the glassy smoothness above
Niagara, who has flung dov/n the oars, and, clutching
the gunwhale with idle hands, sits effortless and
breathless till the plunge comes.

63. One of our modern mystics has said, hiding
imaginative spiritualism under a crust of hard, dry
matter-of-fact, "In heaven the oldest angels are the
youngest."

^f\

II.

lil

! i

134

Figures and Emblems,

64. For body and for spirit the life of earth is a
definite whole, with distinct stages, which succeed
each other in a well-marked order. There is youth,
and maturity, and decay — the slow climbing to the
narrow summit, a brief moment there in the stream-
ing sunshine, and then a sure and gradual descent
into the shadows beneath.

65. The same equable and constant motion urges
the orb of our lives from morning to noon, and from
noon to evening. The glory of the dawning day,
with its golden clouds and its dewy freshness, its
new-awakened hopes and its unworn vigour, climbs
by silent, inevitable stages to the hot noon. But
its ardours flame but for a moment, but for a mo-
ment does the sun poise itself on the meridian line,
and the short shadow point to the pole. The inex-
orable revolution goes on, and in due time come
the mists and dying purples of evening, and the
blackness of night.

66. Once when Jesus was on earth, as some
hidden light breaks through all veils, the pent-up
glory of the great " God with us " seemed to stream
through His flesh, and tinge with splendour even the
skirts of His garment.

6y. Rolling clouds hidf the full view, but through
them gleam' the lustrous walls of the city which
hath the foundations.

Piftures and Emblems.

135

|ed

th,

im-

6%. The hopes for the future lie around us as
flowers in some fair garden where we walk in the
night, their petals closed and their leaves asleep, but
here and there a whiter bloom gleams out, and
sweet, faint odours from unseen sources steal through
the dewy darkness.

69. When bordering on despair at the sight of
so much going wrong, so much ignorance, and
sorrow, and vice, so many darkened understandings,
and broken hearts, such wide trails of savagery
and godlessness, I can look up to Jesus, and can see
far, far away — the furthest thing on the horizon —
like some nebula, faint, it is true, and low down, but
flickering with true starry light — the wondrous
vision of many souls brought into glory, even a
world redeemed.

70. " We see not yet all things put under Him,
but we see Jesus." One of our celebrated astrono-
mers is said to have taught himself the rudiments
of his starry science when lying on the hill-side
keeping his father's sheep. Perhaps the grand
Psalm to which these words refer had a similar
origin, and may have come from the early days of
the shepherd-king, when, like those others of a
later day, he abode in the field of Bethlehem, keeping
watch over his flock by night. The magnificence
of the Eastern heavens with their " larger constella-

li.

I!"

136

Piflures and Emblems.

[il

tions burning," filled his soul with two opposite
thoughts — man's smallncss and man's greatness.

71. How seldom I am conscious of the visits of
God ; how full I am of weaknesses and impcrfc6lions
— the solemn voice within me tells me at intervals
when I listen to its tones. On my brow there
gleams no diadem ; from my life, alas ! there shines,
at the best, but a fitful splendour of purity, all
striped with solid masses of blackness.

72. The youngest brother of the king is nearer
to him than the oldest servant who stands before
his face. Our brother is Lord of all, and His do-
minion is ours.

73. The imprecision of human incompleteness is
made by all the records of human lives which we
possess. Go into a library, and take down volume
after volume, the biographies and autobiographies
of the foremost men, the saints and sages whom we
all reverence. Are not the honest autobiographies
what one of the noblest of them is called, " Confes-
sions"? Are not the memories the stories of flawed
excellence, stained purity, limited wisdom ?

74. Think of naked savages, who look up to
bears and lions as their masters, who are stunted
by cold or enervated by heat, out of whose souls

Figures and Einblems.

^Z7

have died all memories beyond yesterday's hunger,
and all hopes greater than a full meal to-morrow —
and say if these are God's men. So little are they
like it that some of us are ready to say that they
are not men at all.

75. As it has been said, with pardonable ex-
travagance, " Aristotle was but the rubbish of an
Adam," so in sober truth we may affirm that the
noblest and fairest charadlers are, after all, but
fragments of precious stones as compared with tha*^
one entire and perfe£l chrysolite, whose unflawed
beauty and completeness dririks in and flashes forth
the whole light of God.

76. " The grace of God," says Luther somewhere,
"is like a flying summer shower," It has fallen
upon more than one land, and passed on. Judaea
had it, and lies barren and dry. These Asiatic
coasts had it, and f ung it away.

yy. Remember that solemn, strange legend
which tells us, that, on the night before Jerusalem
fell, the guard of the Temple heard through the
darkness a voice mighty and sad, saying, " Let us
depart," and were aware as of the sound of many
wings passing from out of the Holy Place ; and on
the morrow the iron heels of the Roman legionaries
trod the marble pavement of the innermost shrine,

138

PiHiires and Emblems.

and heathen eyes gazed upon the empty place where
the glory of the God of Israel should have dwelt,
and a torch, flung by an unknown hand, burned
with fire the holy and beautiful house where He had
promised to put His name for ever \nd let us
learn the lesson, and hold fast by thi jrd whose
blood has purchased, and whose presence preserves
through all the unworthiness and the lapses of men,
that church against which the gates of hell shall
not prevail.

78. To separate ourselves from our brethren is
to lose power. Half-dead brands heaped close will
kindle one another, and flame will sparkle beneath
the film of white ashes on their edges. Fling
them apart, and they go out. Rake them together,
and they glow. Let us try not to be little, feeble
tapers, stuck in separate sockets, and each twinkling
struggling rays over some inch or so of space ; but
draw near to our brethren, and be workers together
with them, that there may rise a glorious flame
from our summed and colleflive brightness which
shall be a guide and hospitable call to many a wan-
dering and weary spirit.

79. Thank God for the chastising presence of
Christ. Better the eye of fire than the averted
face. Better the sharp sword than His holding
His peace as He did with Caiaphas and Herod.

PiSI tires and Eviblems.

139

It,
kl
id

ICS

I".

ill

80. Ephesus and her sister communities — planted
by Paul, taught by John, loved and upheld by the
Lord, warned and scourged by Him — where are they
now ? Broken columns and roofless walls remain ;
and where Chris s name was praised, now the
minaret rises by the side of the mosque, and daily
echoes the Christless proclamation, "There is no
God, bat God, and Mahomet is His prophet."

81. Let us beware lert, by any sloth and sin, we
choke the golden pipes through which there steals
into our tiny lamps the soft flow of that Divine oil
which alone can keep up the flame.

82. You know these lights which we use now in
public places, where you have a ring pierced with a
hundred tiny holes, from each of which bursts a
separate flame ; but when all are lit, they run into
one brilliant circle, and lose their separateness in the
rounded completeness of the blended blaze. That
is like what Christ's church ought to be We each
by our own personal conta6l with Him, by our
individual communion with our Saviour, become
light in the Lord, and yet we joyfully blend with
our brethren, and, fused into one, give forth our
mingled light.

83. All are needed to send out the church's
choral witness and to hymn the church's full-toned

140

Plflures and Emblems.

■ h I

1 i.

praise. The lips of the multitude thunder out
harmony, before which the melody of the richest
and sweetest single voice is thin and poor.

84. Are you any more a Christian because of
all that intelle6lual assent to the solemn verities of
your orthodox belief? Is not your life like some
secularised monastic chamber, with holy texts carved
on the walls, and saintly images looking down from
golden windows on revellers and hucksters who
defile its floor?

85. Joseph, too, surrounded by an ancient civili-
sation, and dwelling among granite temples and
solid pyramids, and firm-based sphinxes, the very
emblems of eternity, confessed that here he had no
continuing city, but sought one to come. Dying,
he said, " Carry my bones up from hence."

86. If vulgar brawling and rude merry-makers
fill the inn, there will be no room for the pilgrim
thoughts which bear the Christ in their bosom, and
have angels for their guard ; and if these holy way-
farers enter, their serene presence will drive forth
the noisy crowd, and turn the place into a temple.

87. A church is not to be merely a multitude of
separate points of brilliancy, but the separate points
are to coalesce into one great orbed brightness.

Piftzires and Embleiiis.

141

88. rhank God for the many instances in which
one glowing soul, all aflame with love of God, has
sufficed to kindle a whole heap of dead matter, and
send it leaping skyward in ruddy brightness. Alas !
for the many instances in which the wet, green wood
has been too strong for the little spark, and has
not only obstinately resisted, but has ignominiously
quenched its ineffe6tual fire.

89. Thank God, that when His church lives on
a high level of devotion, it has never wanted for
single souls who have towered even above that
height, and have been elevated by it, as the snowy
Alps spring not from the flats of Holland, but from
the high central plateau of Europe.

90. How silent and gentle, though so mighty,
is the aflion of the light — morning by morning
God's great mercy of sunrise steals upon a darkened
world in still, slow self-impartation ; and the light
which has a force that has carried it across gulfs of
space that the imagination staggers in trying to
conceive, yet falls so gently that it does not move
the petals of the sleeping flowers, nor hurt the lids
of an infant's eyes.

91. The one distributing spirit divides to each
man severally as He will ; and whether He endows
him with starlike gifts, which soar above and blaze

142

Pifliires and Emblems.

over half the world with lustre that lives through
the centuries, or whether He set him in some cottage
window to send out a tiny cone of light, that pierces
a little way into the night for an hour or two, and
then is quenched — it is all one.

92. Is it not true that the religious condition of
a church, and that of its leaders, teachers, pastors,
ever tend to be the same as that of the level of
water in two connefled vessels ? There is such a
constant intera6lion and reciprocal influence that
uniformity results. Either a living teacher will, by
God's grace, quicken a languid church, or a languid
church will, with the devil's help, stifle the life of
the teacher. Take two balls of iron, one red-hot
and one cold, and put them down beside each other.
How many degrees of difference between them,
after half-an-hour, will your thermometer show ?

93. Our lives should be like the costly box of
fragrant ointment which that penitent, loving
woman lavished on her Lord, the sweet, penetrating,
subtle odour of which stole through all the air till
the house was filled.

■ \\

94. Nothing but Christian faith gives to the
furthest future the solidity and definiteness which
it must have if it is to be a breakwater for us against
the flu6tuating sea of present cares and thoughts.

IS!- ;

Figures and Emblems.

143

95. If the unseen is ever to rule in men's lives,
it must be through their thoughts. It must become
intelligible, clear, real. It must be brought out of
the flickering moonlight of fancy and surmises into
the sunlight of certitude and knowledge.

96. He is rather a beast than a man who floats
lazily on the warm, sunny wavelets, as they lift him
in their roll, and does not raise his head high enough
above them to see and steer for the solid shore where
they break.

97. Stars -bine ; so do lamps. Light comes from
both, in different fashion indeed, and of a different
quality, but still both are lights. So, essentially, all
Christian men have the same worl- to do.

98. How absurd, how monotonous, how trivial
it all is, all this fret and fume, all these dying joys
and only less fleeting panics, all this mill-horse
round of work which we pace, unlesc we are, mill-
horse-like, driving a shaft that goes tJirougJi the luall^
and grinds something that falls into "bags that
wax not old " on the other side.

99. It is the horizon that gives dignity to the
foreground. A picture without sky has no glory.
This present, unless we see gleaming beyond it
the eternal calm of the heavens, above the tossing
tree-tops with withering leaves, and the smoky

Ii( i

1';-

( ,:

if: .

^t'

' P '

H|u^

144

Picltires and Emblems.

chimneys, is a poor thing for our eyes to gaze at, or
our hearts to love, or our hands to toil o- But
when we see that all paths lead to heaven, and that
our eternity is afifefled by our a6ls in time, then it
is blessed to gaze — :t is possible to love the earthly
shadows of the uncreated beauty, it is worth while
tc work.

100. God's chariot is self-moving. One after
another who lays his hands upon the ropes and
hauls for a little space, drops out of the ranks. But
it will go on, and in His majesty He will ride
prosperously.

iVf^Sip^w;.

It, or
But
that
en it
rthly
while

after
and
But
ride

CHAPTER VI.

HOUGH beaten back again and again by
the surge of our passions and sins, like
some poor shipwrecked sailor, sucked
back with every retreating wave and tossed about
in the angry surf, yet keep your face towards the
beach, where there is safety, and you will struggle
through it all, and, though it were but on some
floating boards and broken pieces of the ship, will
come safe to land.

2. The spiritual life was nourished in Joseph
and in the rest of the "world's grey fathers" on
what looks to us but like seven basketsful of frag-
ments.

3. Across the gulf of centuries we clasp hands ;
and in despite of all superficial differences of culture
and civilisation, and all deeper differences in know-
ledge of God and His loving will, Pharoah's prime

■ I ■
I-!

I 1

i ! <

i.i!

146

Pi6lures and Emblems.

minister, and the English workman, and the Hindoo
ryot, may be alike in what is deepest — the faith
which grasps God.

4. The tent life will always be the natural one
for those who feel that their mother country is be-
yond the stars. We should be like the wandering
Swiss, who hear in a strange land the rude old
melody that used to echo among the Alpine
pastures. The sweet, sad tones kindle home sickness
that will not let them rest ; no matter vLere they
are, or what they are doing, no matter what honour
they have carved out for themselves with their
swords, they throw off the livery of the alien king
which they have worn, and turning their backs upon
pomp and courts, seek the free air of the mountains,
and find home better than a place by a foreign
throne.

5. When the mist lifts, and shows the snowy
summits of the "mountains of God," the nearer
lower ranges, which we thought the highest, dwindle
indeed, but gain in sublimity and meaning by the
loftier peaks to which they lead up.

6. The true Christian faith teaches us that this
is the workshop where God makes men, and the
next the palace where he shows them. All here is
apprenticeship and training. It is of no more value

Pictures and Emblems,

147

than the attitudes into which gymnasts throw them-
selves, but as a discipline most precious.

7. A man who has not learned to say, " No " —
who is not resolved that he will take God's way, in
spite of every dog that can bay or bark at him, in
spite of every silvery voice that woos him aside —
will be a weak and a wretched man till he dies.

8. In your heart, like some black well-head in a
dismal bog, is the source of all the swampy corrup-
tion that fills your life. You cannot staunch it,
you cannot drain it, you cannot sweeten it. Ask
Him, who is above your nature and without it, to
Llicinge it by His own new life infused into your
spirit. He will heal the bitter water.*- He alone
can.

1' 1

;« I

■i\

9. The sweet singer of Israel had taught men
songs of purer piety and subtler emotion than the
ruder harps of older singers had ever flung from
their wires.

10. They whose souls are fed with heavenly
manna, and who have learned that it is their
necessary food, will scent no dainties in the flesh-
pots of Egypt, for all their rank garlic and leeks.

1 1. Many a man who thinks himself a Christian,

is in more danger from the daily commission, for

L 2

148

Pi^liires and Emblems.

■i

il'H

■i

example, of small pieces of sharp pra6Hce in his
business, than ever was David at his worst. White
ants pick a carcass clean sooner than a lion will.

12. Saul — a blasted pine tree, towering above
the forest, but dead at the top, and barked and
scathed all down the sides by the lightning scars of
passion.

13. Let God's Holy Spirit be the foundation of
thy life, and then thy tremulous and vagrant soul
shall be braced and fixed. The building will become
like the foundation, and will grow into " a tower of
strength that stands foursquare to every wind."
Rooted in God, thou shalt be unmoved by " the
loud winds when they call "; or if still the tremulous
leaves are huddled together before the blast, and
th^ swaying branches creak and groan, the bole
. ill stand firm, and the gnarled roots will not part
from their anchorage, though the storm-giant drag
at them with a hundred hands.

14. The artist that is satisfied with his transcript
of his ideal will not grow any more. There is a
touching story, I remember, told of a modern
sculptor, who was found standing in front of his
master-piece, sunk in sad reverie ; and when they
asked him why he was so sad, " Because," he
answered " I am satisfied with it." " I have em-

Pi&ures and Emblems.

149

bodied," he would say, " all that I can think or feel.
There it is. And because there is no discord
between what I dream and what I can do, I feel that
the limit of my growth is reached."

15. No man knows how much of goodness,
nobleness, and wisdom are possible for any man,
or for himself No bounds can be set to that
progress of growth. There is no point on that happy
voyage, beyond which icy cliffs and a frozen ocean
forbid a passage ; but before us, to the verge of our
horizon of to-day, stretch the open waters : and
when that furthest point of vision lies as far astern
as it now gleams ahead, the same boundless sapphire
sea will draw our yearning desires, and bear on-
wards our advancing powers.

16. We need firmness to guard holiness, to be
the hard shell in which the fruit matures.

17. When the sunbeams fall upon a mirror, it
Hashes in the light, just because they do not enter
its cold surface. It is a mirror, because it does not
drink them up, but flings them back. The contrary
is the case with these sentient mirrors of our spirits.
In them, the light must first sink in before it can
ray out. They must first be filled with the glory,
before the glory can stream forth. They are not so
much like a refle6ling surface as like a bar of iron,

I50

PiBtires and Emblems.

N.: ''■

which needs to be heated right down to its obstinate
black core before its outer skin glow with the
whiteness of a heat that is too hot to sparkle. The
sunshine must fall on us, not as it does on some
lonely hill-side, lighting up the grey stones with a
passing gleam that changes nothing, and fades away,
leaving the solitude to its sadness ; but as it does
on some cloud rradled near its setting, which it
drenches and saturates with fire till its cold heart
burns, and all its wreaths of vapour are brightness
palpable, glorified by the light which lives amidst
its mists. So must we have the glory sink into us
before it can be reflefled from us.

1 8. Just as we fit round a central light sparkling
prisms, each of which catches the glow at its own
angle, and flashes it back of its own colour, while
the sovereign completeness of the perfefl white
radiance comes from the blending of all their separ-
ate rays ; so they who stand round about the starry
throne receive each the light in his own measure
and manner, and give forth each a true and perfefl,
and altogether a complete, image of Him who
enlightens them all, and is above them all.

19. Like the serene choirs of angels in the old
pictures, each one with the same tongue of fire on
the brow, with the same robe flowing in the same
folds to the feet, with the same golden hair, yet

'ili

Pictures and Emblems.

151

each a separate self, with his own gladness, and a
different instrument for praise in his hand, and his
own part in that " undisturbed song of cure concert,"
we shall all be changed into the same image, and
yet each heart grow great with its own blessedness,
and each spirit bright with its own proper lustre of
individual and charafleristic perfe6lion.

20. We cannot erase the sad records from oui
past. The ink is indelible ; and besides all that
we have visibly written in these terrible autobio-
graphies of ours, there is much that has sunk into
the page, there is many a " secret fault," the record
of which will need the fire of that last day to make
it legible.

21. This is the blessedness of all true penitence,
that the more profoundly it feels our own sore need
and great sinfulness, in that very proportion does
it recognise the yet greater mercy and all-sul'ficient
grace of our loving God, and from the lowest
depths beholds the stars in the sky, which they
who dwell amid the surface-brightness of the noon-
day cannot discern.

22. The wheels of God's great will may grind
us small, without our coming to know or to hate
our sin. About His chastisements, about the reve-
lation of His wrath, that old saying is true to a

i?f

I-

ni^

152

Figures and Emblems,

great extent : " If you bray a fool in a mortar, his
folly will not depart from him."

23. Profound and suggestive is that other name
for sin, that which is twisted or bent — " iniquity."
It is the same metaphor which lies in our own
word " wrong," that which is wrung or warped from
the straight line of right. To that line, drawn by
God's law, our lives should run parallel, bending
neither to the right hand nor to the left. But,
instead of the firm directness of such a line, our
lives show wavering deformity, and are like the
"tremulous strokes in a child's copy-book. David
had the pattern before him, and by its side his un-
steady purpose, his passionate lust had traced this
wretched scrawl. The path on \vhich he should
have trodden was a straight course to God, unbend-
ing like one of these conquering Roman roads, that
will turn aside for neither mountain nor ravine, nor
stream nor bog.

24. As you run your pen through the finished
pages of your last year's diaries, as you seal them
up and pack them away, and begin a new page in
a new book on the first of January, so it is possible
for every one of us to do with our lives.

25. A man never gets what he hoped for by
doing wrong, or, if he seem to do so, he gets some-

PiHtires and Emblems.

153

thing more that spoils it all. He pursues after the
fleeing form that seems so fair, and when he reaches
her side, and lifts her veil, eager to embrace the
tempter, a hideous skeleton grins and gibbers at
him. The syren voices sing to you from the smiling
island, and their white arms, and golden harps, and
the flowery grass, draw you from the wet boat and
the weary oar ; but when a man lands he sees the
fair form end in a slimy fish, and she slays him and
gnaws his bones. " He knows not that the dead
are there, and that her guests are in the depths of
hell."

26. As, sometimes, you will find in an old monk-
ish library the fair vellum that once bore lascivious
stories of ancient heathens and pagan deities turned
into the manuscript in which a saint has penned his
contemplations, an Augustine his Confessions, or a
Jerome his Translations, so our souls may become
palimpsests. The old, wicked, heathen chara6lers
that we have traced there may be blotted out, and
covered over by the writing of that Divine Spirit
who has said, " I will put my laws into their minds
and write them in their hearts."

27. If you look closely enough into a man's eye,
you will see in it little piflures of what he beholds
at the moment : and if our hearts are beholding

' *

154

PiSlures and Emblems,

»'j

Kl.

Christ, Christ will be mirrored and manifested on
our hearts.

28. Self-respe6l and reverence for the san6lities
of our deepest emotions forbid our proclaiming
these from the house-top. Let these be curtained,
if you will, from all eyes but God's, but let no folds
hang before the pi6lure of your Saviour that is
drawn on your heart.

29. Let Christ's pure face shine upon heart and
spirit, and as the sun photographs itself on the
sensitive plate exposed to its light, and you get a
likeness of the sun by simply laying the thing in
the sun, so He will " be formed in you."

30. Our past is a blurred manuscript, full of
false things and bad things. We have to spread
the writing before God, and ask Him to remove the
stained chara6lers from its surface, that once was
fair and unsoiled.

31. Our finite minds have to lose the individual
in order to grasp the class. Our eyes see the wood
far off on the mountain-side, but not the single trees,
nor each fluttering leaf

32. It is possible to stumble at noontide, as in
the dark. A man may starve, outside of barns
filled w-'-.h plenty, and his lips may be parched with

Pi^lures and Emblems.

15:

thirst, though he is within sight of a broad r . cr
flowing in the sunshine. So a soul may stiffen 'n ,>:,
the death of self aud sin, even though the Voice
that wakes the dead t:o a life of love be calling to it.

33. As one of the old mystics called prayer
*' the flight of the lonely man to the only God," so
we may call the a6l of faith the mee ing of the soul
alone with Christ alone.

34. Are our chara6lers like those transparent
clocks, where you can see not only the figures and
hands, but the wheels and works ?

35. It was a deep, true thought which the old
painters had, when they drew John as likest to his
Lord. Love makes us like.

36. Iron near a magnet becomes magnetic.
Spirits that dwell with Christ become Christ-like.
The Roman Catholic legends put this truth in a
coarse way, when they tell of saints who have gazed
on some ghastly crucifix till they have received, in
their tortured flesh, the copy of the wounds of Jesus,
and have thus borne in their body the marks of the
Lord. The story is hideous and gross, the idea
beneath is ever true.

37. The man that travels with his face north-
wards has it grey and cold. Let him turn to the

•S6

Piflttres and Emblems.

11 I

v/arm south, where the midday sun dwells, and his
face will glow with the brightness that he sees.
Live in sight of your Lord, and catch His spirit.

38. There is but a fragment of the great image
yet reproduced in your soul, a faint outline dimly
traced, with many a feature wrongly drawn, with
many a line still needed, before it can be called even
approximately complete. See to it that you neither
turn away your gaze nor relax your efforts till all
that you have beheld in Christ is repeated in you.

39. One of the most obvious peculiarities of
Paul's style is his habit of " going off at a word."
Each thought is, as it were, barbed all round, and
catches and draws into sight a multitude of others
but slightly related to the main purpose in hand.
And this characteristic gives, at first sight, an appear-
ance of confusion to his writings. But it is not
confusion, it is richness. The luxuriant underwood
which this fertile soil bears, as some tropical forest,
does not choke the great trees, though it drapes
them.

40. In the Old Dispensation, the light that broke
through clouds was but that of the rising morning.
It touched the mountain tops of the loftiest spirits :
a Moses, a David, an Elijah caught the early gleams ;
while all the valleys slept in the pale shadow, and

Pi6lures and Emblems,

157

the mist clung in white folds to the plains. But the
noon has come, and from its steadfast throne in the
very zenith, the sun which never sets pours down
its rays into the deep recesses of the narrowest
gorge, and every little daisy and hidden flower
catches its brightness, and there is nothing hid from
the heat thereof.

41. A hundred processes may go to the manu-
fa6lure of one article, though it were only a pin ;
and all the multitude of our engagements may, if
we will, be stages in one great journey.

42. All our course, if we have Christ with us in
the vessel, will be like sailing down some fair,
widening stream amongst rocky mountains, and
vine-clad slopes, with the blue sky above. Every
now and then seeming to be land-locked, and yet,
as each rocky headland is rounded, the shining
river stretches itself into another reach, and laving
the base of another verdant hill, slides broader and
deeper to the great sea to which we come.

43. The earth-born vapours may hang about
the low levels, and turn the gracious sun himself
into a blood-red ball of lurid fire : but they leacli
only a little way up, and high above their region is
the pure blue, and the blessed light pours down
upon the upper surface of the white mist, and thins

I '

158

Figures and Emblems.

away its opaqueness, and dries up its clinging
damp, and at last parts it into filmy fragments that
float out of sight, and the dwellers on the green
earth see the light which was always there even
when they could not behold it, and which, by
shining on, has conquered all the obstru6lions that
veiled its beams.

Tl!!

44. You take the course of life that is forced
upon you. Is that what you have got a conscience
for, that you should be like those creatures in the
lowest region of organised life, whom the micro-
scopist makes visible by feeding with some coloured
material which absorbs and tinges their whole
filmy organisation ? And so you get the colour of
what you live upon.

45. Surely there is nothing walks the earth
more contemptible, as well as more certainly evil,
than a man who lets himself be made by whatever
force may happen to be strongest near him, and
fastening up his helm, and unshipping his oars, is
content to be blown about by every vagrant wind,
and rolled in the trough of each curling wave.

46. We must be made fast to something that is
fast, if we are not to be swept like thistledown
before the wind.

Figures and Emblems.

159

47. The breast that is girt with the golden
girdle of priestly . sovereignty is the same tender
home on which John's happy head rested in placid
contentment.

48. If rejected, the work of Christ does more
harm to a man than anything else can, just because
if accepted, it would have done him more good.
The brighter the light, the darker its shadow. The
pillar, which symbolised the presence of God, sent
down influences on either side ; to the trembling
crowd of Israelites on the one hand, to the pursuing
ranks of the Egyptians on the other ; and though
the pillar was one, opposite effefls streamed from
it, and " it was a cloud and darkness to them, but it
gave light by night to these." Everything depends
on which side of the pillar you choose to see.

49. The ark of God, which brought dismay and
death among false gods and their worshippers,
brought blessing into the humble house of Obed-
Edom, the man of Gath, with whom it rested for
three months before it was set in its place in the
city of David.

50. The child may struggle in the mother's
arms, and beat the breast that shelters it with its
little hand ; but it neither hurts nor angers that
gentle bosom, and the firm but loving grasp holds
it fast.

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PWures and Emblems.

51. The "brook by the way" is but to refresh
us as we go on to the fight. A few drops caught
up in the palm as we run will help us, but if we
fall on our knees to slake our thirst, we have to
fling down our sword and unbrace our helmet, and
we prove ourselves too self-indulgent for the army
of God.

52. The billows are white on the long track
astern, but he does not see them who stands at the
bow, and marks the foam of the sparkling waves
that leap up to meet the good ship as she comes
onward. It is when you turn yowx face to the sun,
that a golden path of light stretches across the sea,
right before your feet. It is when we look forward
and Christward, letting Him fill the future and the
future fill our hearts, and it is only then that we
can " forget the things that are behind."

53. What a noble thing any life becomes, that
has driven through it the strength of a uniting
single purpose, like a strong shaft of iron bolting
together the two tottering walls of some old
building.

54. Many of us simply keep on doing the narrow
round of things that we fancy we can do well, or
have always been in the way of doing, like barrel-
organs, grinding our poor little sets of tunes, without

PiSIures and Emblems.

i6i

any notion of the great sea of music that stretches
all round about us, and which is not pegged out
upon our cylinders at all.

55. Forget your past circumstances, whether
they be sorrows or joys. The one is not without
remedy, the other not perfefl. Both are past ;
why remember them ? Why should you carry
about parched corn when you dwell among fields
white unto harvest ? Why carry putrid water in
the bottom of a rancid skin, when living in a land
of fountains and brooks that run among the hills ?
Why clasp a handful of poor withered flowers,
when the grass is sown with their bright eyes open-
ing to the sunshine ?

56. God gives us remembrance in order that
we may make great and blessed use of it. Often
in our hearts may shine an after-glow of corus-
cating light from a sun that has set, more lustrous,
more calm, more mellow, than when its hot fervours
were falling on our heads — a pensive, clear, and
still Indian summer of memory after the sultry
autumn has gone.

57. We may have as much of God as we want,

as much as we can hold, far more than we deserve.

No ebb withdraws the waters of that great ocean ;

and if sometimes there be sand and ooze where

■ i

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i> it

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If!

162

Figures and Emblems.

once the flashing flood brought h'fe and motion, it
is because careless warders have shut the sea-gates.

58. If we are sitting drowsy by our camp-fires,
the enemy is on the alert You can hear the tramp
of their legions and the rumble of their artillery
through the night, as they march to their posts on
the field. It is no time for God's sentinels to nod.

59. As the shower of ashes at Pompeii moulded
themselves over the forms of the poor wretches
that were smothered by them, and preserved till
to-day the print of the very waves of their hair and
the texture of their dress, " salt " was crusted round
that living core, and Lot's wife perished, because she
watched in trembling retrospe6l the flying moments
which, rightly used, would have set her in safety.

60. Habits are like fences, very good to guard
the soul from sudden incursions of trespassers, but
very bad when the trunk has grown up and presses
against their stubborn rings.

61. "I press toward the mark, reaching forth
unto the things that are before." " Reaching forth
unto." The idea is that of a man stretching himself
towards something as a runner does, with his body
straining forward, the hand and the eye drawn on-
ward toward the goal. He does not think of the
furlongs that he has passed, he heeds not the nature

Piriures and Emblems.

of the ground over which he runs. The sharp stones
in the path do not stay him, nor the flowerets in the
grass catch his glance. The white faces of the
crowd around the course are seen as in a flash as
he rushes past them to the winning-post, and the
parsley-garland that hangs there is all that he is
conscious of

62. Do you " press toward the mark," and the
moment that you toe the line where the winning-
post stands, at that moment on your brow will fall
the amaranthine garland.

61. The hopes of men, who have not their hearts
fixed upon God, try to grapple themselves on the
cloudrack that rolls along the flanks of the moun-
tains, and our hopes pierce within that veil and lay
hold of the Rock of Ages, that towers above the
flying vapours.

64. A drop of blood on your brain, or a crumb
of bread in your windpipe, and, as far as you are
concerned, the outward heavens and earth "pass
away with a great" silence, as the impalpable
shadows that sweep over some lone hill-side.

" The glories of our birth and state

Are shadows, not substantial things ;

There is no armour against fate ;

Death lavs his icy hand on kings."

M 2

164

ritlures and Emblems.

65. Here the distrafling whirl of earthly things
obscures God from even the devoutest souls, and
His own mii^hty works which reveal do also conceal.
In them is the hiding as well as the showing of His
power. But tu^ re the veil which draped the perfe6l
likeness, and gave but dim hints through its heavy
swathings of the outline of immortal beauty that
lay beneath, shall fall away. " I shall be satisfied,
when I awake, with Thy likeness."

66. We live in a busy time. Life goes swiftly
in all regions. Men seem to be burning away faster
than ever before, in an atmosphere of pure oxygen.

6"]. The watchman's office falls to be done by
all who see the coming peril, and have a tongue to
echo it forth. What should we think of a citizen
in a bcleagured city, who saw the enemy mounting
the very ramparts, and gave no alarm because that
was the sentry's business ? In such extremity every
man is a soldier, and women and children can at
least keep watch, and raise shrill shouts of warning.

6Z. The watchman who stands on his watch-
tower whole nights, and sees foemen creeping
through the gloom, or fire bursting out among the
straw-roofed cottages within the walls, shouts with
all his might the short, sharp alarum, that wakes the

Pictures and Eviblcuis.

i6:

sleepers to whom slumber were death. Let us pon-
der the pattern.

69. The prayer that prevails is a refle6lcd
promise. Our office in prayer is but to receive on
our hearts the bright rays of God's word, and to flasli
them back from the poUshed surface to the heaven
from whence they came.

70. The ancient legend which told how, on
many a well-fought field, the ranks of Rome dis-
cerned through the battle dust the gleaming weapons
and white steeds of the Great Twin Brethren far in
front of the solid legions, is true in loftier sense in
our Holy war.

71. "I ivill that they whom Thou hast given
Me, be with Me where I am." The instinfl of the
church has, from of old, laid hold of an event in
His earthly life to shadow forth this great truth,
and has bid us see a pledge and a symbol of it in
that scene on the Lake of Galilee : the disciples
toiling in the sudden storm, the poor little barque
tossing on the waters tinged by the wan moon, the
spray dashing over the wearied rowers. They seem
alone, but up yonder, in some hidden cleft of the
hills, their Master looks down on all the weltering
storm, and lifts His voice in prayer. Then, when
the need is sorest, and the hope least, He comes

ill

I'-

1 66

Piflures and Emblems.

across the waves, making their surges His pavement,
and using all opposition as the means of His
approach, and His presence brings calmness; and
immediately they are at the land.

72. Take heed that the process of dissipating
the vain shows of earth be begun betimes in your
souls. It must either be done by faith, whose rod
disenchants them into their native nothingness, and
then it is blessed ; or it must be done by death,
whose mace smites them to dust, and then it is pure,
irrevocable loss and woe.

73. Let your hearts seek Christ, and your souls
cleave to Him. Then death will take away nothing
from you that you would care to keep, but will
bring you your true joy. It will but trample to
fragments the " dome of many-coloured glass " that
" stains the white radiance of eternity."

74. At first the music of the prophetic song
seems to move uncertainly amid sweet sounds, from
which the true theme by degrees emerges, and
thenceforward recurs, over and over again, with
deeper, louder harmonies clustering about it, till it
swells into the grandeur of the choral close.

75. The fairest life ever lived on earth was that
of a poor man, and with all its beauty it moved

Piflures and Emblems.

167

lis
id

within the limits of narrow resources. The lovc-
hcst blossoms do not grow on plants that plunge
their greedy roots into the fattest soil. A little
light earth in the crack of a hard rock will do.

y6. While all without is unreal, it is also fleeting
as the shadows of the flying clouds ; and when God
awakes, it disappears as they before the moonlight
that clears the heavens.

yy. All things that are, are on condition of
perpetual flux and change. The cloud-rack has
the likeness of bastions and towers, but they are
mist, not granite, and the wind is every moment
sweeping away their outlines, till the phantom
fortress topples into red ruin while we gaze. The
tiniest stream eats out its little valley and rounds
the pebble in its widening bed ; rain washes down
the soil, and frost cracks the cliffs above. So silently
and yet mightily does the law of change work, that
to a meditative eye the solid earth seems almost
molten and fluid, and the everlasting mountains
tremble to decay.

78. Do we not all know that, when the chains
of slumber bind sense, and the disturbance of the
outer world is hushed, there are faculties of our
souls which work more strongly than in our waking
hours ? We are all poets, " makers " in our sleep.

S I

i
! !

I -JL-Ijptl

:?)'

•'•111

ft}:

i ■

i6S

Figures and Emblems.

Memory and imagination open their eyes when
flesh closes it. We can live through years in the
dreams of a night ; so swiftly can spirit move when
even partially freed from " this muddy vesture of
decay."

79. Here we are like men asleep in some
chamber that looks towards the eastern sky. Morn-
ing after morning comes the sunrise, with the
tender glory of its rosy light and blushing heavens,
and the heavy eyes are closed to it all. Here and
there some lighter sleeper, with thinner eyelids or
face turned to the sun, is half conscious of a vague
brightness, and feels the light, though he sees not
the colours of the sky nor the forms of the filmy
clouds. Such souls are our saints and prophets;
but most of us sleep on unconscious.

80. The treasures which are kept in coffers are
not real, but only those which are kept in the soul.

81. This life of ours hides more than it reveals.
The day shows the sky as solitary, but for wandering
clouds that cover its blue emptiness. But the night
peoples its waste places with stars, and fills all its
abysses with blazing glories. " If light so much
conceals, wherefore not life ? "

Z2. God docs not set us here as on a knife edge,
with abysses on cither side ready to swallow us if

Piclnres and Euiblcms.

169

we stumble, while He stands apart watching for our
halting, and unhelpful to our tottering feebleness.

83. For sixty times sixty slow, throbbing
seconds, the silent hand creeps unnoticed round
the dial, and then, with whirr and clang, the bell
rings out, and another hour of the world's secular
day is gone. The billows of the thunder-cloud
slowly gather into vague form, and slowly deepen
in lurid tints, and slowly roll across the fainting
blue ; they touch — and then the fierce flash, like the
swift hand on the palace-wall of Babylon, writes its
message of dcstruraon over all the heaven at once.

" The mill of God grinds slowly,
But it grinds exceeding small."

84. In the tabernacle of Israel stood two great
emblems of the fun6lions of God's people which
embodied two sides of the Christian life. Day by
day there ascended from the altar of incense the
sweet odour, which symbolised the fragrance of
prayer as it wreathes itself upwards to the heavens.
Night by night, as darkness fell on the desert and
the camp, there shone through the gloom the
hospitable light of the great golden candlestick,
with its seven lamps, whose stead" rays outburncd
the stars that paled with the morning. Side by
side they proclaimed to Israel its d -itinv "^o be the
light of the world, to be a kingdom of priests.

\m\

'If

i : 'i

^li.

I/O

Piftures and Evzblems.

85. " He could there do no mighty works be-
cause of the!*- unbelief." The great reservoir is
always full — full to the brim ; however much may
be drawn from it, the water sinks not a hair's breadth ;
but the bore of the pipe and the power of the
pumping-engine determine the rate at which the
steam flows from it. The obstru6lion of indifTercncc
dammed back the water of life. The city perishes
for thirst if the long line of aquedu6l that strides
across the pk.''n towards the home of the mountain
torrents be ruinous, broken down, choked with
rubbish.

86. This Master, Christ, works in front of His
men. The farmer that goes first among all the
sowers, and heads the line of reapers in the yellow-
ing harvest-field, may well have diligent servants.
Our Master went forth, weeping, bearing precious
seed, and has left it in our hands to sow in all fur-
rows Our Master is the Lord of the harvest, and
has borne the heat of the day before His servants.

^y. Let it be our life's work to show forth Christ's
praise ; let the very atmosphere in which we move
and have our being be prayer. Let two great cur-
rents set ever through our days, which two, like the
great movements in the ocean of the air, are but
the upper and under halves of the one movement- —
that beneath with constant energy of desires rush-

■pp

Pifliires and Emblems.

171

ing in from the cold poles to be warmed and expan-
ded at the tropics, where the all-moving sun pours
his di reft rays ; that above charged with rich gifts
from the Lord of light, glowing with heat drawn
from Him, and made diffusive by His touch, spread-
ing itself out beneficent and life-bringing into all
colder lands, swathing the world in soft, warm folds,
and turning the polar ice into sweet waters.

>ia

88. Most of you will understand what I mean
when I say that if a young man comes into this
cit}'. and takes his place at desk or counter, or on
the benches of Owen's College, and there forgets
resistance, sturdy non-compliance, and heroic daring
to be singular, when evil tempts him, he is ruined
body and soul. Like some pleasure-boat that runs
out of harbour with a careless crew, flags flyir.g,
and laughter sounding, and ' '"fore she has well
cleared the port is smashed > pieces on the black
shelf of rocks, half hid by the sunny waters as the}'
break over it in dancing foam

89. Do not let yourselves be talked, or fright-
ened, or swayed by the mere mass of evil example
out of your true path, as the remoter planets may
be perturbed in their orbits by that huge body
which moves where the light is feeblest on the
outer verge of the system.

1/2

Pifl2ires and Emblems.

go. What a shame it is that a man should have
no more volition in what he does and in what he
refrains from than one of those gelatinous creatures
that float about in the ocean, which have to move
wherever the current takes them, though it be to
cast them upon the rocky shore with an ebbin;;
tide!

91. In the field of opinion, the lazy acquiescence
with which men hand their ready-made cut-and-
dried theories and ti"<oughts from one to another,
and never " look the gift-horse in the mouth," but
swallow the thing whole, for no better reason than
that contained in the cowardly old proverb that
" what everybody says must be true," is the fruitful
source of error, hypocrisy, weakness, and misery.

92. You must learn to look with yoi'r own eyes,
and not through the spc6lacles of any human guides,
authorities, or teachers upon the mystic, awful veri-
ties of this strange life, and upon the light that falls
on them from the far-off empyrean above.

93. If you £;o careering amo,.^ tiie H-^wers and
fruits that grow around you in '..i" o Mfc fi:,,.; !s open-
ing for you, like town cl" 'UVen tuii'' d \o ■ -o T ). a day
in the woods, picking whatever is br.gh'. and tasting
whatever looks as , " .t would be :-^v^:t.t, j^ou will
poison yourselves w il\ .Tightshade and hv:ml'-.,lc.

:i«

Piclures and Emblems,

94. Christ puts not bread into our hands but
sccd-corn, and although, we carry away the full sacl-:
whenever we go to our Brother and ask Him to
feed our hungriness, it is germinal principles that
He gives us, rather than loaves, and we have got to
cultivate them and watch them, and patiently too,
in the belief that He will bless the springing thereof,
and after many days we shall find seed for new
sowing, as well as bread for the eater.

95. Gather off you ■ beech-trees in the budding
spring days a little brown shell, in which lies tender
green foliage, and if you will carefully strip it, you
will find packed in a compass, that might almost go
through the eye of a needle, the whole of that which
afterwards in the sunshine is to spread and grow to
the yellow-green foliage which delights and freshens
the eye. So in Christ — to be unfolded through
slow generations, in accordance with human ex-
perience and wants — is all that men can know or
need to know concerning God and themselves, and
the relations of both — their duties, their hopes, their
fears, and their love.

96. They tell us that no two atoms ever really
touch ; some film of air is ever between them.
And after all sweetness of closest society there is a
gap between the most loving souls. But we can be
joined to Christ in real, perfo6l union.

174

PiHures and Eiiibleuis.

gy. Christ is in us as the sunh'ght in the else
darkr I chamber ; , n • > i Him as the cold, green

i-ii..^^ i iT'ia' '^, glows through and
::/! i tr;i'; ;orming heat.

log, - -. .J-'.
thron'^i " \.L

;he :..
rudJ^

98. H kV many >> us '. c like great, overgrown
boys, wL' jc cduci'i': \as been negle6led, sitting
upon tlij lowest form th their spelling-books in
their hands when they are men, and having learnt
next door to nothing in all the years we have called
ourselves Christians ?

99. Is it not true that we are angry rather than
thankful when some new thought comes to us out
of Christ's word, disturbing all the rest, just as when
you get a new piece of furniture into your house,
you havo to arrange and re-arrange all the other
l)icccs in order to get it straight.

KXV God speaks, and it is done. At the sound
of that thundor-voice, hushed stillness and a [);uise
of Urciid fulls wyton all the wide earth, deeper and
more awx^struck than the silence of the woods
with their huddling leaves, when the feebler peals
roll through the sky. " The depths are congealed
in the heart of the sea," as if you were to lay hold
of Niagara in it> v/ildcst plunge, and were with a
word to fiw ze ali its descending waters and stiffen
them into immovableness in fetters of eternal ice.
So He utters His voice, and all meaner noises are
hushed.

tli^J

CHAPTER VII.

S two carbon points when the elc6lric
stream is poured upon them are gnawed
to nothingness by the fierce heat, and
\()U can see them wasting before your eyes, so the
concentrated ardour of the breath of God falls upon
the hostile evil, and lo ! it is not.

2. We on whom the ends of the earth are come
have the same helper, the same friend that " the
world's grey patriarchs" had. They that go before
do not prevent them that come after. The river is
full still. The van of the pilgrim host did, indeed,
long, long ago drink and were satisfied, but the
bright waters are still as pellucid, still as near, still
as refreshing, still as abundant as they ever were.

3. " There is a river, the streams whereof shall
make glad the city of God." Alone among the

til

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176

Piriures and Emblems.

sr n

V'X ■ i

great cities and historical centres of the world,
Jerusalem stood upon no broad river, one little
perennial stream, or rather rill of living waters was
all which it had ; but Siloam was mightier and
more blessed for the dwellers in the rocky fortress
of the Jebusites than the Euphrates, Nile or Tiber
for the historical cities which stood upon their
banks.

4. " The glorious Lord will be unto us a place
of broad rivers and streams wherein shall go no
galley with oars." The picture in that metaphor is
of a stream lying round Jerusalem, like the moated
rivers which girdle some of the cities in the plains
of Italy, and are the defence of those who dwell
enclosed in their flashing links.

5. The waters of the sea! those barren, wander-
ing fields of foam, going moaning round the world
with unprofitable labour, how they have been the
emblem of unbridled power, of tumult and strife,
and anarchy and rebellion.

6. Bread nourishes, not when it is looked at,
but when it is eaten.

7. The extremest power is silent. The mighti-
est force in all the universe is the force which has
neither speech nor language. The parent of all
physical force. As astronomists seem to be more

\S\\\

Figures and Eviblenis.

1 77

lorld,
little
was
and
tress
'ibcr
their

and more teaching us, so the great central sun which
moveth all things, which oper.ites all ph}-.sic.'il
changes, whose beams arc all but omnipotent, and
yet fall so quietly that they do not disturb the
motes that dance in the rays,

8. As you can take and divide the water all but
infinitely, and it will take the shape of every con-
taining vessel ; so into every soul according to its
capacities, according to its shape, according to
its needs, the blessed presence of the God of our
strength shall come.

9. The Lord may seem to sleep on his hard,
wooden pillow in the stern of the little ushing-boat,
and even while the frail craft begins to fill may show
no sign of help. But ere the waves have rolled over
her, the cry of fear that yet trusts, and of trust that
yet fears, wakes Him who knew the need, even
while He seemed to slumber, and one mighty word
as of a master to some petulant slave, " Peace ! be
still, " hushes the confusion, and rebukes the fear,
and rewards the faith.

10. Whence come these hopes, cherished in spite
of all failures ? They are like morning dreams
which the proverb tells us are true.

11. As distance has paled other lights and hidden

lower watch-towers below the horizon, have we not

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178

PiHttres and Emblems,

learned thereby to estimate more truly the bright-
ness of the one undying flame which burns across
the waste nor knows diminution by space, nor ex-
tin6lion by time, and to measure more accurately the
height of that rallying point for the nations which
towers higher and higher as we recede from it.

12, What a wretched humiliation for a man
with such a nature to be the serf of such a lord, to
be, as Milton says, " the deje6led and down-trodden
vassal of perdition !"

13. Thunder and lightning are child's play com-
pared with the energy that goes to make the falling
dews and quiet rains.

14. " The least flower with a brimnung cup may stand
And share its dewdrop with another near."

1 5. The tramp of the hours goes on. The poets
paint them as a linked chorus of rosy forms, gar-
landed and clasping hands as they dance onwards.
So they may be to some of us at some moments.
So they may seem as they approach, but those who
come hold the hands of those who go, and that
troop has no rosy light upon their limbs, their gar-
lands are faded, the sunshine falls not upon the
grey and shrouded shapes, as they steal ghost-like
through the gloom — and ever and ever the bright

Piftures and Emblems,

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and laughing sisters pass on into that funeral band,
which grows and moves away from us unceasing.

1 6. The material is perishable — but yet how
much more enduring than we ! The pa ements
we walk upon, the coals in our grates — how many
millenniums old are they ? The pebble you kick aside
with your foot — how many generations will it out-
last ? G(j into a museum, and you will see hanging
there, little the worse for centuries, battered shields,
notched swords, and gaping helmets — ay, what
has become of the bright eyes that once flashed the
light of battle through the bars, what has become
of the strong hands that once gripped the hilts ?
" The knights are dust," and " their good swords
are " not " rust." The material lasts after its owner.

17. I do not know why a man should be either
regretful or afraid, as he watches the hungry sea
eating away this " bank and shoal of time " upon
which he stands, even though the tide has all but
reached his feet ; if he knows that God's strong
hand will be stretched forth to him at the moment
when the sand dissolves from under him, and will
draw him out of many waters, and place him high
above the floods in that stable land where there is
" no more sea." —

18. This universal condition of sinfulness is
plainly, and, in the deepest sense of the word, un-

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natural ; a fungus, not a true growth ; a monstrosity
or abnormal development ; a diseased excrescence
or wen, and not sound, healthy flesh.

19. I know few things sadder — unless we believe
in Christ, the Deliverer — than that indestru6lible
hope with which a thousand sinful generations have
lived and died without its fulfilment. What count-
less unfulfilled aspirations, what baffled trust, what
gleams of light tnat faded and seemed treacherous
as the morning red that dies into rainy grey before
the day is old !

20. Seed corn is found in a mummy case. The
poor form beneath the painted lid is brown and
hard, and more than half of it gone to pungent
powder, and the man that once lived has faded
utterly ; but the handful of seed has its mysterious
life in it, and when it is sown, in due time the green
blade pushes above English soil, as it would have
done under the shadow of the Pyramids four
thousand years ago, and its produce waves in a
hundred harvest-fields to day.

21. The money in your purses now will some
of it bear the head of a king that died half a century
ago. It is bright and useful ; — where are all the
people that in turn said they " owned " it ?

Piflures and Emblems.

i8i

22. Other June days will come, and the old rose-
trees will flower round houses where unborn men
will then be living ; when the present possessor is
gone to nourish the roots of the roses in the grave-
yard.

23. Can you fill up the swamps of the Mississippi
with any cart-loads of faggots you can fling in?
Can you fill your souls with anything which belongs
to this fleeting life ?

24. Hope, which streams upon the most lurid
masses of opaque cloud till their gloom begins to
glow with an inward lustre, and softens into solemn
purples and reds.

25. One does not like altering words so familiar
as those of our translation of the Bible, which have
sacredness from association and a melancholy music
in their rhythm.

26. Did you ever stand upon the shore on some
day of that "uncertain weather when gloom and
glory meet together," and notice how swiftly there
went racing over miles of billows, a darkening that
quenched all the play of colour in the waves, as
if suddenly the angel of the waters had spread his
broad wings between sun and sea, and then how in
another moment as swiftly flits away, and with a
burst the light blazes out again, and leagues of ocean

l82

Pintires and Embleins.

■I i\

flash into green, and violet, and blue. So fleeting,
so utterly perishable, are our lives for all their
seeming, solid permanency, " Shadows in a career,"
as George Herbert has it — breath going out of the
nostrils.

27. The crested waves seem heaped together
p.s they recede from the eye till they reach the
horizon, where miles of storm are seen but as a line
of spray. So when a man looks back upon his life,
if it have been a godless one, be sure of this, that it
will be a dark and cheerless retrospe6l over a
tossing waste, with a white rim of wandering, barren
foam, vexed by tempest.

28. It is the prismatic halo and ring of eternity
round this poor glass of time that gives it all its
dignity, all its meaning.

29. As in some ancestral home in which a
family has lived for centuries — son after father has
rested in these great chambers, and been safe
behind the strong walls ; so, age after age, they
who love Him abide in God. "Thou hast been
our dwelling-place in all generations."

30. Christ alone shows us that the black walls
of the prison-house where we toil, solid seeming
though they be, high above our power to scale, and

Pin^ures and E^nblems.

183

clammy with the sighs of a thousand generations,
are undermined and tottering.

31. Most men seem to think that they have
gone to the very bottom of the thing when they
have classified the gifts of fortune as good or evil,
according as they produce pleasure or pain. But
what is a poor, superficial classification. It is like
taking and arranging books by their bindings and
flowers by their colours.

32. You and I write our lives as if on one of
those manifold writers which you use. A thin,
filmy sheet here, a bit of black paper below it ; but
the writing goes through upon the next page. And
when the blackness that divides two worlds is swept
away there — the history of each lite, written by
ourselves, remains legible in eternity.

33. The prophecies are like the diagrams in
treatises on perspe6live, in which diverging lines
are drawn from the eye, enclosing a square or other
figure, and which, as they recede further from the
point of view, enclose a figure, the same in shape,
but of greater dimensions. There is a historical
event foretold, the fall of Jerusalem. It is close up
to the eyes of the disciples, and is comparatively
small. Carry out the lines that touch its corners
and define its shape, upon the far distant curtain of

1 84

Pictures and Emblems.

the dim future there is thrown a like figure,
Infinitely bigger, the coming of Jesus Christ to
judge the world.

34. The eye has a curious power, which they
call persistence of vision, of retaining the impression
made upon it, and therefore of seeming to see the
obje6l for a definite time after it has really been
withdrawn. If you whirl a bit of blazing stick
round, you will see a circle of fire though there is
only a point moving rapidly in the circle. The eye
has its memory like the soul. And the soul has its
power of persistence, like the eye, and that power
is sometimes kindled into activity by the fafl of
loss.

35. The loss of dear ones should stamp their
image on our hearts, and set it as in a golden glory.
Vain regret, absorbed brooding over what is gone,
a sorrow kept gaping long after it should have been
healed, is like a grave-mound off which desperate
love has pulled turf and flowers in the vain attempt
to clasp the cold hand below.

36. Sorrow clears away the thick trees, and lets
the sunlight into the forest shades, and then in
time corn will grow.

37. As they tell of a Christian father, who, riding
by one of the great lakes of Switzerland all day

Piclures and Emblevts.

185

long, on his journey to the Church Council that was
absorbing his thoughts, said towards evening to the
deacon who was pacing beside him, " Where is the
lake ?" so you and I, journeying along by the margin
of this great flood of things when wild storm sweeps
across it, or when the sunbeams glint upon its blue
waters, " and birds of peace sit brooding on the
charmed wave," shall be careless of the changeful
sea if the eye looks beyond the visible and beholds
the unseen, the unchanging real presences that make
glory in the darkest lives, and "sunshine in the
shady place."

38. The total length of day and night all the
year round is the same at the North Pole and at
the Equator — half and half. Only, in the one place,
it is half and half for four-and-twenty hours at a
time, and in the other, the night lasts through
gloomy months of winter, and the day is bright for
unbroken weeks of summer. But, when you come
to add them up at the year's end, the man that
shivers in the ice, and the man that pants beneath
the beams from the zenith, have had the same length
of sunshine and of darkness. It does not matter
much at what degrees between the Equator and the
Pole you and I live ; when the thing comes to be
made up we shall be all pretty much on an equality.

39. The narrow gorge stretches before us, with its
dark overhanging cliffs that almostshutoutthe sky ;

1 86

Pictures and Emblems,

the path is rough and set with sharp pebbles ; it is
narrow, winding, steep ; often it seems to be barred
by some huge rock that gets across it, and there is
barely room for the broken ledge yielding slippery
footing between the beetling cliff above and the
steep slope beneath that dips so quickly to the
black torrent below. All is gloomy, damp, hard ;
and if we look upwards the glen becomes more
savage as it rises, and armed foes hold the very
throat of the pass. But, however long, however
barren, however rugged, however black, however
trackless, we may see, if we will, a bright Form
descending the rocky way with radiant eyes and
calm lips, God's messenger, Hope ; — and the rough
rocks are like the doorway through which she
comes near to us in our weary struggle.

40. The tastes which knit us to the perishable
world, the yearnings for Babylonish garments and
wedges of gold, must be coerced and subdued.

41. Never mind how black it may look ahead,
or how frowning the rocks. From between their
narrowest gorge you may see, if you will, the guide
whom God has sent you, and that Angel of Hope
will light up all the darkness, and will only fade
away when she is lost in the sevenfold brightness of
that upper land, whereof our " God Himself is sun

'■

Figures and Emblems.

187

and moon " — the true Canaan, to whose everlasting
mountains the steep way of Hfe has climbed at last
through valleys of trouble, and of weeping, and of
the shadow of death.

42. Earthly hopes or sad remembrances die in
the fruition of a present God, all-sufficient for mind,
and heart, and will — even as the sun when it is
risen with a burning heat may scorch and wither
the weeds that grow about the base of the fruitful
tree whose deeper roots are but warmed by the rays
that ripen the rich clusters which it bears.

43. The ordinary notion of a special providence
goes perilously near the belief that God's will is
less concerned in some parts of a man's life than in
others. It is very much like desecrating and secular-
ising a whole land by the very a6t of focussing the
san6lity in some single consecrated shrine.

44. The light of hope which fills our sky is like
that which, on happy summer nights, lives till
morning in the calm west, and with its colourless,
tranquil beauty, tells of a yesterday of unclouded
splendour, and prophesies a to-morrow yet more
abundant.

45. The glow from a sun that is set, the ex-
perience of past deliverances, is the truest light of
hope to light our way through the night of life.

]

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i88

PiHures and Emblems.

46. When we, in our wise husbandry, have
irrigated the soil with the gathered results of our
sorrows, the heavens bend over us, and weep
their gracious tears, and " the rain also covereth it
with blessings."

47. The slope of the valley of trouble is ever
upwards. Never mind how dark the shadow of
death which stretches athwart it is. If there were
no sun there would be no shadow : presently
the sun will be right overhead, and there will be no
shadow then.

48. The heart of God opens its hidden store-
houses for us as we approach, like some star that,
as one gets nearer to it, expands its disc and glows
into rich colour, where at a distance was but pallid
silver.

49. Joy and sorrow, and hope and fear, cannot
be continuous. They must needs wear themselves
out and fade into a grey uniformity, like mountain
summits when the sun has left them.

50. The constant wash of the sea of life under-
mines the cliffs and wastes the coasts. The tear
and wear of external occupations is ever afling
upon our religious life.

PiSlures and Emblans.

189

51. Travellers tell us that the constant rubbing
of the sand on Egyptian hieroglyphs removes every
trace of colour, and even effaces the deep-cut
chara6lers from basalt rocks. So the unceasing
attrition of multitudinous trifles will take all the
bloom off your religion, and efface the name of the
King cut on the tablets of your hearts, if you do
not countera6l them by constant, earnest effort.

52. If the summit reached can only be held by
earnesL endeavour, how much more is needed- to
struggle up from the valleys below.

53. Our Captain provides us with an inexhaus-
tible strength, to which we may fully trust. We
shall not exhaust it by any demands that we can
make upon it. We shall only brighten it up, like
the nails in a well-used shoe, the heads of which
are polished by stumbling and scrambling over
rocky roads. " Thy shoes shall be iron and brass ;
and as thy days so shall thy strength be."

54. Did you ever see that ele6lric light which is
made by dire6ling a strong stream upon two small
pieces of carbon ? As the ele6lricity strikes upon
these and turns their blackness into a fiery blaze,
it eats away their substance as it changes them into
light. But there is an arrangem^ent in the lamp by
which a fresh surface is continually being brought

190

PiHures and Emblems.

into the path of the beam, and so the h'ght continues
without wavering, and blazes on. The carbon is
our human nature, black and dull in itself; the
cleflric beam is the swift energy of God, which
makes us light in the Lord.

55. For a little while it is true, even in the life
of nature, that our power grows with our days.
But we soon reach the watershed, and then the
opposite comes to be true.

56. Go into some of the great fortresses in con-
tinental countries, and you will find the store-rooms
full of ammunition and provisions ; bread enough
and biscuits enough, it would look, for half the
country, laid up there, and a deep well somewhere
or other about the courtyard. What does that
mean ? It means fighting — that is what it means.
So we are brought into the strong pavilion, so well
provisioned, so well fortified and defended ; that
means that we shall need all the strength that is to
be found in those thick wails, and all the sustenance
that is to be found in those gorged magazines ; and
all the refreshment that is to be drawn from that
fair, and full, and inexhaustible fountain, before
the battle is over and the vi<5lory won.

57. The portion of Asher was the rocky sea-
coast. The sharp, jagged rocks would cut anything

Pi5lures and Emble^ns.

191

of leather to pieces long before the day's march
was over ; but the tribe has got its feet shod with
metal, and the rocks which they have to stumble
over will only strike fire from their shoes. "Thy
shoes shall be iron and brass."

58. The oldest angels, says Swedenborg, seem
the youngest.

59. The years that are gone ought to have drawn
us somewhat away from our hot Pursuing after
earthly and perishable things. They should have
enriched us with memories of God's loving care,
and lighted all the sky behind with a glow which
is refle6led on the path before us, and becomes calm
confidence in His unfailing goodness. They should
have given us power and skill for the confli6ls that
yet remain, as the Red Indians believe that the
strength of every defeated and scalped enemy
passes into his conqueror's arms.

60. If for us, drawing nearer to the end is draw-
ing nearer to the light, our faces shall be brightened
with that light which we approach, and our path
shall be "as the shining light which shines more
and more unto the noon-tide of the day," because
we are closer to the very fountain of heavenly ra-
diance, and growingly bathed and flooded with the
outgoings of His glory.

192

Pintircs and Eviblerns.

6i. Here the unresting beat of the waves of the
sea of time gnaws away the bank and shoal where-
on we stand, but there each roll of that great ocean
of eternity shall but spread new treasures at our
feet and add new acres to our immortal heritage,

62. " My soul waiteth for the Lord more than
they that watch for the morning." What a pi6lure
that is ! Think of the wakeful, sick man, tossing rest-
less all the night on his tumbled bed, wracked with
pain made harder to bear by the darkness. How
often his heavy eye is lifted to the window-pane, to
see if the dawn has not yet begun to tint it with a
grey glimmer ! How he groans, " Would God it
\NG.'CQ. morning ! " Or, think of some unarmed and
solitary man, benighted in the forest, and hearing
the wild beasts growl, and scream, and bark all
round, while his fir^ dies down, and he knows that
his life depends on the morning breaking soon.

63. As some out-numbered army, unable to
make head against its enemies in the open, flees to
the shelter of some hill-fortress, perched upon a
crag, and, taking up the drawbridge, cannot be
reached by anything that has not wings ; so David,
hard pressed by his foes, fl» ss into God to hide
him, and feels secure behind these strong walls.

64. All our cries of sorrow, and all our acknow-
ledgements of weakness and need, and all our

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PiB^ires and Emblem^..

193

plaintive brseechings, should be inlaid, as it were,
between two layers of brighter and gladder thought
like dull rock between two veins of gold.

65. It may be long before the morning breaks,
but even while the darkness lasts a faint air begins
to stir among the sleeping leaves, the promise of the
dawn, and the first notes of half-awakened birds
prelude the full chorus that will hail the sunrise.

66. It is beautiful, I think, to see, how in the
compajs of this one little Psalm (Psalm lix.) the
singer has, as it were, wrought himself clear, and
sung himself out of his fears. The stream of his
thought, like some mountain torrent, turbid at first,
has run itself bright and sparkling. The first courses
of his psalm, like those of some great building, are
laid deep down in the darkness, but the shining
sarrmit is away up there in the sunlight, and God's
glittering glory is sparklingly reflefted from the
highest point.

6^. When troubles are past, and their meaning
is plainer, and we possess their results in the weight
of glory which they have wrought out for us, we
shall be able to look back on them all as the mercies
of the God of our mercy, even as when a man looks
down from the mountain-top upon the mists and the
clouds through which he has passed, and sees them

194

Pifiztres and Emble7iis.

all smitten by the sunshine that gleams upon them
from above.

68. God does not turn people out to scramble
over rough mountains with thin-solcd boots on.
When an Alpine climber is preparing to go away
into Switzerland for rock work, the first thing
he does is to get a pair of strong shoes, with plenty
of iron nails in the soles of them. Each of us may
be sure that if God sends us on stony paths He
will provide us with strong shoes, and will not send
us out on any journey for which He does not equip
us well.

69. An old saying tells us that we do not go to
heaven in silver slippers, and the reason is because
the road is rough. The " primrose way " leads
somewhere else, and it may be walked on
" delicately."

70. Those two ships that went away a while
ago upon the brave, and, as some people thought,
desperate task of finding the North Pole — any one
that looked upon them, as they lay in Portsmouth
Roads, might know that it was no holiday cruise
they were meant for. The thickness of the sides,
the strength of the cordage, the massiveness of the
equipments, did not look like pleasure-sailing.

Pifljires and Emblems.

195

71. Many a proffered succour from heaven goes
past us, because we are not standing upon our
watch-tower to catch the far-off indications of its
approach, and to fling open the gates of our heart
for its entrance. How the beleaguered garrison, that
knows a relieving force is on the march, strain their
eyes to catch the first glint of the sunshine on their
spears as they top the pass !

72. Unless you put out your water-jars when it
rains you will catch no water ; if you do not watch
for God coming to help you, God's watching to be
gracious will be of no good at all to you.

73. Do we pore over God's gifts, scrutinising
them as eagerly as a gold-seeker does the quartz in
his pan, to detect every shining speck of the
precious metal.

74. Of what avail is it that a strong haud from
the cliff should fling the safety-line with true aim
to the wreck, if no eye on the deck is watching for
it? It hangs there, useless and unseen, and then
it drops into the sea, and every soul on board is
drowned. It is our own fault if we are ever over-
whelmed by the tasks, or difiiculties, or sorrows of
life.

75. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling
noises, God's voice is little likely to be heard. As

O 2

196

Pi6l2nes and Emblems.

in some kinds of deafness, a perpetual noise in the
head prevents hearing any other sounds ; the rush
of our own fevered blood, and the throbbing of our
own nerves, hinder our catching His tones.

^6. It is the calm lake which mirrors the sun,
the least catspavv wrinkling the surface wipes out
all the refle6led glories of the heavens. If we
would mirror God our souls must be calm.

77. Tut your own selves by the side of this
Psalmist — "Truly my soul waiteth upon God,"
— and honestly measure the contrast. It is like
the difference between some crowded market-place,
all full of noisy traffickers, ringing with shouts,
blazing in sunshine, and the interior of the quiet
cathedral that looks down on it all, where are cool-
ness and subdued light, and silence and solitude.

78. All emotion tends to exhaustion, as surely
as a pendulum to rest, or as an Eastern torrent to
dry up.

79. Before the throne of the Great King, His
servants are to stand like those long rows of atten-
dants we see on the walls of eastern temples, silent,
with folded arms, straining their ears to hear, and
bracing their muscles to execute his whispered
commands, 01 even his gesture and his glance.

Figures and Emblems.

197

80. A man's will should be an echo, not a voice ;
the echo of God, not the voice of self. It should be
silent, as some sweet instrument is silent till the
owner's hand couches the keys,

81. We have to stop our ears to the noises
around, however sweet the songs, and to close many
an avenue through which the world's music might
steal in.

82. As the flowers follow the sun, and silently
hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by
his shining, so must we — if we would know the joy
of God — hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds still
before Him whose voice commands, whose love
warms, whose truth makes fair our whole being.

83. There can be no greater slight and dis-
honour to a giver than to have his gifts negle6led.
You give something that has perhaps cost you much,
or which, at any rate, has your heart in it, to your
child, or other dear one ; would it not wound you,
if a day or two after you found it tossing about
among a heap of unregarded trifles ? Suppose that
some of those Rajahs that received presents on the
recent royal visit to India had gone out from the
durbar and flung them into the kennel, that would
have been an insult and disaffe6lion, would it not ?
But these illustrations are trivial by the side of our
treatment of the ** giving God."

f<%

198

PiHtires and Emblems,

84. Most of us are far less happy than we might
be, if we had learned the Divine art of wringing the
last drop of good out of everything. After our rude
attempts at smelting there is a great deal of valuable
matter left in the dross, which a wiser system would
extrafl.

85. One wonders when one gets a glimpse of
how much of the raw material of happiness goes to
waste in the manufacture in all our lives.

Z6. There, in his little niche, like some statue
of a forgotten saint, scarce seen amidst the glories
of a great cathedral, "Quartus, a brother," stands to
all time. Probably he may have been a Greek by
birth, and so have had to stretch his hand across a
deep crevasse of national antipathy, in order to
clasp the hand of his brethren in the great city.

Zy. It is impossible for us to throw ourselves
completely back to the conditions of things which
the Gospel found. The world then was like some
great field of cooled lava on the slopes of a volcano,
all broken up by a labyrinth of clefts and cracks,
at the bottom of which one can see the flicker of
sulphurous flames.

88. Sometimes it is true about people, as well
as about scenery, that " distance lends enchantment
to the view."

Figures and Emblems.

199

89. When a speaker sees the reporters in front
of him, he weighs his words.

90. Do not let thunder-clouds, however heavy
their lurid piles, shut out from you the blue that is
in your sky.

91. Lean all your weight on God, as on some
strong staff, and depend upon it that support will
never yield nor crack ; there will no splinters run
into your palms from it.

92. "Simply to Thy cross I cling," as some
half-dx^owned, shipwrecked sailor, flung up on
the beach, clasps a point of rock, and is safe
from the power of the waves that beat around him.

93. Temptations lurk around us, like serpents
in the grass; they beset us in open ferocity, like
lions in our path.

94. " As far from danger as from fear,

While love, almighty love, is near."

95. As God guards me, so I stand expe6lant
before Him, as one in a besieged town, upon the
ramparts there, looks eagerly out across the plains
to see the coming of the long-expe6led succours.

96. Here is the stifling smoke, coming up from
some newly-lighted fire of green wood, black and

If.^^i5--v

200

PiSlures and Emblems,

choking, and solid in its coils ; but as the fire burns
up, all the smoke-wreaths will be turned into one
flaming spire, full of light and warmth. Do you
turn your smoke into fire, your fear into faith.

97. " And he exhorted them all, that with
purpose of heart they should cleave unto the Lord."
We may follow out the metaphor of the word in
many illustrations. For instance, here is a strong
prop, and here is the trailing, lithe feebleness of
the vine. Gather up the leaves that are creeping
all along the ground, and coil them around that
support, and up they go straight towards the
heavens. Here is a limpet, in some pond or other,
left by the tide, and it has relaxed its grasp a little.
Touch it with your finger, and it grips fast to the
rock, and you will want a hammer before you can
dislodge it. There is a traveller groping along some
narrow, broken path, where the chamois would tread
cautiously, his guide in front of him. His head
reels, and his limbs tremble, and he is all but over,
but he grasps the strong hand of the man in front
of him, or lashes himself to him by the rope, and
he can walk steadily.

98. Jesus Christ puts himself at the head of the
mystic march of the generations, and, like the mys-
terious angel that Joshua saw in the plain by

.-T ~ 1. - -Li^

Pictures and Emblems.

20I

Jericho, makes the lofty claim : " Nay, but as Cap-
tain of the Lord's host am I come up."

99. No doubt there still remain obscurities
enough as to what we ought to do, to call for the
best exercise of patient wisdom ; but an enormous
proportion of them vanish, like mist when the sun
looks through, when once we honestly set ourselves
to find out where the pillared Light is guiding.

100. Let us take heed, lest turning away from
Christ we follow the will-o'-the-wisps of our own
fancies, or the dancing lights, born of putrescence,
that flicker above the swamps, for they will lead us
into doleful lands where evil things haunt, and into
outer darkness.

'A
I

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A^^u...^'.-^:^*^rZ:2'lvi^^'- t'V.

.■i-.JjJii^i5-^j.:

CHAPTER VIII.

AITH and fear do blend, thank God.
They are as oil and water in a man's
soul, and the oil will float above, and
quiet the waves.

2. Not when the sun shines, but when the tem-
pest blows and the wind howls about his ears, a man
gathers his cloak round him, and cleaves fast to his
supporter. The midnight sea lies all black ; but
when it is cut into by the oar, or divided and
churned by the paddle, it flashes up into phosphor-
escence. And so it is from the tumults and agita-
tions of man's spirit that there is struck out the
light of man's faith. There is the bit of flint and
the steel that comes hammering against it ; and it
is the conta6t of these two that brings out the
spark.

Figures and EmbletJis. 203

3. A vi6lorious faith will

" — rise large and slow
From out the fluctuations of our souls,
As from the dim and tumbling sea
Starts the completed moon."

4. When war desolates a land, the peasants fly
from their undefended huts to the shelter of the
castle on the hill-top, but they cannot reach the
safety of the strong walls without climbing the
steep road. So, when calamity darkens round us,
or our sense of sin and sorrow shakes our hearts, we
need effort to resolve and to carry into praflice the
resolution " I flee unto Thee to hide me."

5. "In our embers is something that doth live."

6. It was not Moses, nor Jethro, with his quick
Arab eye and knowledge of the ground, that guided
the Israelites ; but that stately, solemn pillar, that
floated before them. How they must have watched
for the gathering up of its folds as they lay softly
stretched along the tabernacle roof! and for its
sinking down, and spreading itself out, like a misty
hand of blessing, as it sailed in the van.

7. In danger Christ lashes us to Himself, as
Alpine guides do when there is perilous ice to get
over.

204

PiHures and Emblems.

8. There should always be a good clear space
between the guiding ark and you, "about two
thousand cubits by measure," that there may be no
mistake about the road. It is neither reverent nor
wise to be treading on the heels of our Guide in our
eager confidence that we know where He wants us
to go.

9. Do not let the warmth by the camp-fire, or
the pleasantness of the shady places where your
tent is pitched, keep you there when the cloud lifts.

10. When we know not where to strike the foes
that seem invulnerable, like the warrior who was
dipped in the magic stream, or clothed in mail
impenetrable as rhinoceros' hide. He will make us
wise to know the one spot where a wound is fatal.

11. "In our own strength we nothing can :

Full soon were we down-ridden" —
as Luther has taught us to sing.

1 2, The barren rocks and white snow glow with
purple as the setting sun touches them.

13. The wild cliffs of the eastern region where
Penicl lay, or the savage fastnesses in the southern
wilderness, a day's march from Hebron, where Jacob
lived so long, come back to his memory amid the
flat, clay land of Egypt ; and their towering height,

Pifljires and Emblems.

205

their immovable firmness, their cool shade, their
safe shelter, spoke to him of the unalterable might
and impregnable defence which he had found in
God.

14. Take care, in the old-fashioned phrase, "of
running before you are sent."

1 5. As on some rocky site in Palestine, where a
thousand generations in succession have made
their fortresses, one may see stones laid with the
bevel that tells of early Jewish masonry, and above
them Roman work, and higher still masonry of
crusading times, and above it the building of to-
day ; so we, each age in our turn, build on the great
Rock-foundation, dwell safe there for our little lives,
and are laid to peaceful rest in a sepulchre in the
rock.

16. Commentators tell us that on the first
evening of the Feast of Tabernacles, two huge
golden lamps, which stood one on each side of the
altar of burnt offering in the temple court, were
lighted as the night began to fall, and poured out a
brilliant flood over temple, and city, and deep
gorge ; while far into the midnight, troops of rejoic-
ing worshippers clustered about them with dance
and song.

rfc ;,

206

Pi&iires and Emblems.

17. The cloud of the humanity, "the veil, that
is to say, His flesh," enfolds and tempers ; and
through its transparent folds reveals, even while it
swathes, the Godhead. Like some fleecy vapour
flitting across the sun, and irradiated by its light, it
enables our weak eyes to see light, and not dark-
ness, in the else intolerable blaze.

18. The men in the rear who guard the camp,
and keep the communications open, may deserve
honours, and crosses, and prize-money as much as
their comrades who led the charge that cut through
the enemy's line and scattered their ranks.

19. Gome dream of Divine help in the struggle
of battle has floated through the minds and been
enshrined in the legends of many people, as when
the panoplied Athene has been descried leading the
Grecian armies, or, through the dust of confift, the
gleaming armour and white horses of the Twin
Brethren far in advance of the armies of Rome.

20. As a father in old days might have taken
his little boy out to the butts, and put a bow in his
hand, and given him his first lesson in archery,
dire(5^'ng his unsteady aim by his own firmer finger,
and lending the strength of his wrist to his child's
feebler pull, so God does with us. The sure, strong
hand is laid on ours, and is " profitable to diredl."

|,^"?<s'*j«P^./"r*:''>*

Pi^lures and Emulems.

207

21. Like some man that goes out in the morn-
ing with his sted-basket full, and finds the whole
field where he would fain have sown covered
already with the springing weeds or burdened with
the hard rock, and has to bring back the germs of
possible life to bless and fertilise some other soil :
so He that comes back weeping, bearing the precious
seed that He found no field to sow in, knows a
deeper sadness, which has in it no prophecy of joy.

22. Like intertv/ining snakes, the loathly heads
are separate ; but the slimy convolutions are
twisted indistinguishably together, and all unbelief
has in it the nature of perversity — as all perversity
has in it the nature of unbelief.

23. We grieve Christ most when we will not
let Him pour His love upon us, but turn a sullen,
unresponsive unbelief towards His pleading grace,
as some glacier shuts out the sunshine from the
mountain-side with its thick-ribbed ice.

24. It is hard to keep the arrow-point firm
when the heart throbs and the hand shakes.

25. The man that cannot be angry at evil lacks
enthusiasm for good. Better the heat of the tropics,
though sometimes the thunderstorms may gather,
than the white calmness of the frozen poles.

208

Pictures and Emblems.

26. God's anger is His love thrown back upon
itself from unreceptive and unloving hearts ; just
as a wave that would roll in smooth, unbroken, green
beauty into the open door of some sea-cave is dashed
back in spray and foam from some grim rock.

27. The feelings of Christ on looking on sin
were like a piece of woven stuff with a pattern on
either side ; on one the fiery threads — the wrath ; on
the other the silvery tints of sympathetic pity. A
warp of wrath, a woof of sorrow, and a dew of
flame married and knit together.

28. The fluttering leaves and bending branches
need a firm stem and de*.:p roots. The firm stem
looks noblest in its unmoved strength, when it is
contrasted with a cloud of light foliage dancing in
the wind.

29. " Have I been so long with you, and yet
hast thou not known Me ?" The days had seemed
to go so slowly. He longed that the fire which
He came to fling on earth were already kindled ;
and the moments seemed to drop so slowly from
the urn of time.

30. There is something that stimulates the
imagination in these mere shadows of men that
we meet in the New Testament story. What a

TWpw^

W«t'»^??«^'!i?T-»'^il»5'W^!W3?''^

PiHures and Emblems.

209

strange fate that is to be made immortal by a line
in this book — immortal and yet so unknown !

31. " We all are changed by still degrees ;
All but the basis of the soul."
And " the basis of the soul," in the truest sense, is
that one God-laid foundation, on which whosoever
buildeth shalfNnever be confounded, nor ever need
to change with changing time.

32. How beautiful it is to see a man, below
whose feet time is crumbling away, holding firmly
by the Lord whom he has loved and served all his
days, and finding that the pillar of cloud, which
guided him while he lived, begins to glow in its
heart of fire as the shadows fall, and is a pillar of
light to guide him when he comes to die.

33. Good husbandry does not grind up all the
year's wheat for loaves for one's own eating, but
keeps some of it for seed to be scattered in the
furrows.

34. The standing water gets green scum on ?t.
The close-shut barn breeds weevils and smut. Let
the water run. Fling the seed broadcast. Thou
shalt find it " after many days."

35. There never was such a lonely soul on this

earth as Christ's, because there never was another

2IO

Pi6lures and Emblems.

so pure and loving. "The little hills rejoice together'^
as the Psalm says, "on every side," but the great
Alpine peak is alone there, away up amongst the
cold and the snows — the solitary Christ, the un-
comprehended Christ, the unaccepted Christ.

36. " How long must I be with you ? " says
the loving Teacher, who is prepared ungrudgingly
to give His slow scholar as much time as he needs
to learn his lesson. He is not impatient, but He de-
sires to finish the task ; and yet He is ready to let the
scholar's dulness determine the duration of His stay.

37. " Give all thou hast ; high Heaven rejcfls
the lore of nicely-calculated less or more."

38. Depend upon it, if for an instant we turn
away our heads, the thievish birds that flutter over '
us will be down upon the precious seed that is in
our basket, or that we have sown in the furrows,
and it will be gone. Watch, that ye may keep.

39. There was never an unused talent rolled up
in a handkerchief yet, but when it was taken out
and put into the scale, it was lighter than when it
was committed to the keeping of the earth. Gifts
that are used fru6lify.

40. Many a man in David's little band saw
nothing but cold, grey stone where David saw the

Figures and Emblems.

211

flashing armour of the heavenly warrior. To the
one ail the mountain blazed with fiery chariots, to
the other it was a lone hill-side, with the wind
moaning among the rocks,

41. A man coming out of some room blazing
with gas cannot all at once see into the violet depths
of the mighty heavens, that lie above him with all
their shimmering stars.

42. The proteftion which we have is prote6lion
in, and not protection from, strife and danger. It
is a filter which lets the icy cold water of sorrow
drop numbing upon us, but keeps back the poison
that was in it

43. As a child sometimes carries a tender-
winged butterfly in the globe of its two hands
that the bloom on its wings may not be ruffled by
its fluttering, so God carries our feeble unarmoured
souls enclosed in the covert of His Almighty
hand.

44. The devotion which is to be diffused through

our lives must be first concentrated and evolved in

our prayers. These are the gathering grounds

which feed the river. The life that was all one long

prayer needed the mountain-top and the nightly

converse with God.

P 2

Sfi

212

Piilures and Emblems.

45. That was truly " The Lord's Prayer " which
He poured out beneath the olives in the moonlight

46. So manifold are the aspefls of God's infinite
sufficiency, that every soul, in every possible variety
of circumstance, will find there just what will suit
it. That deep fountain is like some of those fabled
springs which gave forth whatsoever precious
draught any thirsty lips asked.

47. Mahanaim is still the name of every place
where a man who loves God pitches his tent.

48. We are in the centre of the encampment —
as they put the cattle and the sick in the midst of
the encampment on the prairies when they fear an
assault from the Indians — because we are the
weakest.

49. We cannot too firmly hold, or too pro-
foundly feel, that an unbroken continuity of sup-
plies of God's grace — unbroken and bright as a sun-
beam reaching in one golden shaft all the way from
the sun to the earth — is His purpose concerning us.

50. Bars of uncoined treasure and ingots of
massy gold lie in God's storehouses, to be put into
circulation as soon as we need, and can use them.

51. We cling to what is familiar in the very
furniture of our houses ; and yet we are ever being

PiiliLres and Emblems.

213

forced to accept what is strange and new, and, like
some fresh article in a room, it is out of harmony
with the well-worn things that you have seen stand-
ing in their corners for years. It takes some time
for the raw look to wear off, and for us to "get
used to it," as we say. So is it, though often for
deeper reasons, in far more important things.

52. No man is less likely to come to the know-
ledge of the truth than he who is always deep in
love with some new thought, " the Cynthia of the
minute," and ever ready to barter "old lamps for
new ones."

53. Just as we may have looked upon some
mountain scene, where all the highest summits
were wrapt in mist, and the lower hills looked
mighty and majestic, until some puff of wind came
and rolled up the curtain that had shrined and hid-
den the icy pinnacles and peaks that were higher
up. And as that solemn white Apocalypse ros*.
and towered to the heavens, we forgot all about
the green hills below, because our eyes beheld the
mighty summits that live amongst the stars and
sparkle white through eternity.

54. The never-ceasing boom of the great ocean
as it breaks on the beach, drowns all smaller
sounds.

214

Pi£lures and Emblems.

55. We wonder at the smooth working of the
machinery for feeding a great city ; and how, day
by day, the provisions come at the right time, and
are parted out among hundreds of thousands of
homes. But we seldom think of the punctual love,
the perfefl knowledge, the profound wisdom which
cares for us all, and is always in time with its gifts.

56. Other plants which the " Heavenly Father
hath not planted " have their zones of vegetation
and die outside certain degrees of latitude ; but the
seed of the kingdom is like corn, an exotic nowhere,
for wherever man lives it will grow, and yet an
exotic everywhere, for it came down from heaven.

57. The Gospel has its mysteries no less than
those old systems of heathenism which fenced round
their deepest truths with solemn barriers, only to be
passed by the initiated. But the difference lies here
— that its mysteries are taught at first to the
neophytes, and that the sum of them lies in the
words which we learned at our mother's knees so
long ago that we have forgotten that they were ever
new to us.

58. The mount of Transfiguration must be left,
for all there were there Moses and Elias, and the
cloud of the Divine Glory, and the words of approval
from Heaven, because there was a demoniac boy.

PiSlures and Emblems.

215

and his weeping, despairing father, needing Christ
down below.

59. Our Lord's miracles have been called " the
great bell before the sermon," but they are more
than that. They are themselves no unimportant
part of the sermon.

60. Think of " all the misery that is done under
the sun." If it could be made visible, what a dark
pall would swathe the world, an atmosphere of
sorrow rolling ever with it through space.

61. However we may differ from one another,
in training, in habits, in cast of thought, in idiosyn-
crasies of character, in circumstances, in age, all
these are but the upper strata which vary locally.
Beneath all these there lie everywhere the solid
foundations of the primeval rocks, and beneath
these, again, the glowing, central mass, the flaming
heart of the world. Christianity sends its shaft
right down through all these upper and local beds,
till it reaches the deepest depths, which are the
same in every man — the obstinate wilfulness of a
natur'^' adverse from God, and the yet deeper-lying
longings of a soul that flames with the conscious-
ness of God, and yearns for rest and peace.

62. As the chalk cliff's in the South, that rear
themselves hundreds of feet above the crawling sea

:«

2l6

Pifltires and Emblems.

\ i

beneath, are all made up of the minute skeletons of
microscopic animalculae ; so life, mighty and awful,
as having eternal consequences, life that towers
beetling over the sea of eternity, is made up of
minute incidents, of trifling duties, of small tasks ;
and if thou art not " faithful in that which is least,"
thou art unfaithful in the whole.

63. The energy of the Divine power is as
mightily at work here now sustaining us in life, as
it was when He flung forth stars and systems like
sparks from a forge, and willed the universe into
being.

64. The ancient promise, long repeated, has
come sounding down through the echoing halls of
the centuries, and rings in our ears as fresh as when
first it was spoken — " There remaineth a rest for the
people of God."

65. God works with bruised reeds, and out of
them makes polished shafts, pillars in His house.

66. Joy may grow on the very face of danger,
as a slender rose-bush flings its bright sprays and
fragrant blossoms over the lip of a catara6l.

67. V/e get the table in the wilderness here.
\'i is as when the son of some great king comes
back from foreign soil to his father's dominions,

■it

rs^sa

Figures and Emblems.

217

and is welcomed at every stage in his journey to
the capital with pomp of festival, and messengers
from the throne, until he enters at last his palace
home, where the travel-stained robe is laid aside,
and he sits down with his father at his table.

68. The sh?ep are led by many a way, some-
times through sweet meadows, sometimes limping
along sharp-flinted, dusty highways, sometimes
high up over rough, rocky mountain-passes, some-
times down through deep gorges, with no sunshine
in their gloom ; but they are ever being led to one
place, and when the hot day is over they are
gathered into one fold, and the sinking sun sees
them safe, where no wolf can come, nor any robber
climb up any more, but all shall rest for ever under
the Shepherd's eye.

69. Memory softens down all the past into one
uniform tone, as the mellowing distance wraps in
one solemn purple the mountains which, when close
to them, have many a barren rock and gloomy rift.

70. When " Hope enchanted smiles," with the
light of the future in her blue eyes, there is ever
something awful in their depths, as if they saw some
dark visions behind the beauty.

71. The assurance that the hand which strikes
is the hand which binds up, makes the stroke a

2l8

Figures and Emblems.

blessing, sucks the poison out of the wound of sorrow,
and turns the rod which smites into the staff to
lean on..

72. Life is a sore fight ; but to the Christian man,
in spite of all the tumult, life is a festal banquet.
There stand the enemies, ringing him round with
cruel eyes, waiting to be let slip upon him like eager
dogs round the poor beast of the chase. But, for
all that, here is spread a table in the wilderness,
made ready by invisible hands ; and the grim-eyed
foe is held back in the leash till the servant of God
has fed and been strengthened.

73. God is all, but tdoii canst work I These two
streams of truth are like the rain-shower that falls
upon the water-shed of a country. The ooe half
flows down the one side of the everlasting hills, and
the other down the other. Falling into rivers that
water different continents, they at length find the
sea, separated by the distance of half the globe.
But the sea into which they fall is one, in every
creak and channel.

74. Your horizon ought to be full of fear, if your
gaze be limited to yourself; but oh! above our
earthly horizon with its fogs, God's infinite blue
stretches, untroubled by the mist and cloud which
are earth-born.

•Wi"*^'-

Piclures and Emblems,

219

75. Our seasons of communion, our hours on
the mount, are to prepare for the sore, sad work in
the plain ; and he is not the wisest disciple who tries
to make the mount of Transfiguration the abiding
place for himself and his Lord.

76. It is the hot noon-tide, and the desert lies
baking in the awful glare, and every stone on the
hills of Judaea burns the foot that touches it. But
in that panting, breathless hour, here is a little
green glen, with a quiet brooklet, and a moist, lush
herbage all along its course, and great stones, that
fling a black shadow over the dewy grass at their
base ; and there would the shepherd lead his flock^
while the "sunbeams like swords" are piercing
everything beyond that hidden covert. Sweet
silence broods there. The sheep feed and drink%
and crouch in cool lairs till he calls them forth
again. So God leads His children.

yy. It is a rainy climate where half the days
have rain in them ; and that is an unusually troubled
life of which it can with any truth be affirmed that
there iias been as much darkness as sunshine in it.

78. The waters of happiness are not for a luxu-
rious bath, where a man may lie, till like flax
steeped too long, the very fibre be rooted out of
him ; a quick plunge will brace him, and he will
come out refreshed for work.

220

PiBiires and Emblems.

79. All the rest of Divine tranquillity is rest in
rapid, vigorous, perpetual motion. Ay, it is just as
it is with physical things : the looker-on sees the
swiftest motion as the most perfeft rest. The
wheel revolves so fast that the eye cannot discern
its movements. The cataraft foaming down from
the hill-side, when seen from half-way across the
lake, seems to stand a silent, still, icy pillar.

80. God be thanked that the calm clouds which
gather round the western, setting sun, and stretch
their unmoving loveliness in perfc6l repose, and
are bathed through and through with unflashing
and tranquil light, seem to us in our busy lives and
in our hot strife like blessed prophets of our state
when we, too, shall lie cradled near the everlasting,
unsetting Sun, and drink in, in still beauty of
perpetual contemplation, all the glory of His face,
nor know any more wind and tempest, rain and
change.

81. Go out into the world and strip everything
th?t: appeals to you of its disguises ; and you will
find it true that, where Christ is not, there — (let it
woo ever so sweetly, and sing ever so melodiously)
there is only a siren, that tempts you down beneath
the sunny surface of pleasure to the black depths
below, where she lives on dead men's bones.

Pi6liires and Emblems.

2'JI

82. Trust Christ ! and so thy soul shall no longer
be like " the sea that cannot rest," full of turbulent
wishes, full of passionate desires that come to
nothing, full of endless moanings, like the homeless
ocean that is ever working and never flings up any
produfl of its work but yeasty foam and broken
weeds ; — but thine heart shall become translucent
and still, like some land-locked lake, where no winds
rave nor tempests ruffle ; and on its calm surface
there shall be mirrored the clear shining of the
unclouded blue, and the perpetual light of the sun
that never goes down.

83. Blessings here are only in blossom, sickly
often, putting out very feeble shoots and tendrils ;
and yonder, transplanted into their right soil, and
in their native air, with heaven's sun upon them,
they burst into richer beauty, and bring forth fruits
of immortal life.

\ i

84. Your death may be but the passing from
one degree of tranquillity to another, and the calm
face of the corpse, whence all the lines of sorrow
and care have faded utterly away, will be but a poor
emblem of the perfect stillness into which the spirit
has gone.

85. One of the apocryphal books says a truth
" He that despiseth little things shall fall by little
and little."

222

PiSlttres and Emblems.

86. Just as two roads that diverge from each
other at a very sharp angle, get the wider apart the
further they go, till at last half a continent may be
held bewixt them— "he little deflection from the
narrow line of Cari^Lian duty and simple faithful-
ness, it is only God's mercy that will prevent it
from leading thee away out, out, out into the waste
plains and doleful wildernesses, where all sinful, and
dark, and foul things dwell for ever.

87. Small infidelities are infidelities, and will
produce the greater. The little thief goes in at the
narrow window, and opens the door for all the big
ones.

88. God's very Bcinq \est. And yet that
image that rises before us, t luesque, still in its
placid tranquillity, is not repellent nor cold, is no
dead marble likeness of life. That great ocean of
the Divine nature which knows no storm nor billow,
is yet not a tideless and stagnant sea.

89. It is comparatively easy to a6l nobly under
the stimulus of extraordinary excitement, when the
soul is all on fire, as a soldier will strike with giant
strength in the crisis of a fight, and for the moment
will be all unconscious of his bleeding wounds.

90. Most of us are living not screwed up to the

Pi^tires and Emblems.

223

highest pitch. One of our wise old poets says —

" Who keeps no guard upon himself, is slack,
And rots to nothing at the next great thaw."

QT. Like the air which in the lungs needs to be
broken up into small particles and diffused ere it
parts with its vitalising principle to the blood ; so
the minute afls of obedience, and the exhibition of
the power of the Gospel in the thousand trifles of
Christian lives, permeating everywhere, will vitalise
the world and will preach the Gospel in such a
fashion as never can be done by any single and
occasional, though it may seem to be more lofty
and more worthy, agency.

92. Just as the quality of life may be as p^rfefl
in the minutest animalculae of which there may be
millions in a cubic inch, and generations may die
in an hour — just as perfe6l in the smallest inse6l as
in " behemoth, biggest born of earth " ; so righteous-
ness may be as completely embodied, as perfeflly
set forth, as fully operative, in the tiniest aflion
that I can do, as in the largest that an immortal
spirit can be set to perform.

93. The circle that is in a gnat's eye is as true
a circle as the one that holds within its sweep all
the stars ; and the sphere that a dew-drop makes is
as perfe6l a sphere as that of the world.

224

Pifliires and Emblems.

94. Like some of those creeping weeds that lie
underground, and put up a little leaf here, and
another one there ; and you dig down, fancying
that their roots are short, but you find that they go
creeping and tortuous below the surface, and the
whole soil is full of them — so all sin holds on by
one root.

95. The mass of trifles makes magnitude.

■■. :

96. After all your work, your anxiety gets but
such a little way down ; like some passing shower
of rain, that only softens an inch of the hard-baked
surface of the soil, and has nothing to do with
fru6tifying the seed that lies feet below the reach
of its useless moisture.

97. Shame on me if I am anxious ! for every
lily of the field blows its beauty, and every bird of
the air carols its song without sorrowful forboding ;
and yet there is no Father in the heaven to them !

98. The heathen tendency in us all leads to an
over-estimate of material good, and it is a question
of circumstances whether that shall show itself in
heaping up earthly treasures, or in anxious care.
They are the same plant, only the one is growing
in the tropics of sunny prosperity, and the other in
the ar6lic zone of chill penury.

.^rna '.HT-.

Pictures and Emblems.

225

99. The poor woman that sits quietly in her
garret, and works away there, patient, and unknown,
and poverty-stricken, at the small tasks and mo-
notonous trivialities of her daily life, is doing
the same thing as Paul when he stands up before
Caesar, or as the martyr when he dies at the stake.

100. Every step of the road, you have to cut
your way through opposing foes. Every step of the
road has to be marked with the blood that comes
from wounded feet. Every step of the road is won
by a tussle and a strife.

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I !«k HWlMJP^^l

■{

CHAPTER IX.

HE old ! md that the Grecian host lay
weather-bound in their port, vainly
waiting for a wind to come and carry
t-hem to conquest ; and that they were obliged to
slay a humLn sacrifice ere the heavens would be
propitious and fill their sails, — may be translated
into the deepest verity of the Christian life. We
may see in it that solemn lesson — no prosperous
voyage, and no final conquest until the natural life
has been offered up on the altar of hourly self-denial.

2. Just as the old leaves drop naturally from the
tree when the new buds of spring begin to put them-
selves out, let the new affeflion come and dwell in
thy heart, and expel the old.

3. Christ's words are like a jewel with many
facets, which catches light at many different angles.

PiSIures and Emblems,

227

4. Anxiety — it is all vain. After all your
careful watching for the corner of the heaven where
the cloud is to come from, there will be a cloud, and
it will rise somewhere, but you never know in what
quarter. After all your fortifying of the castle of
your life, there will be some little postern left un-
guarded, some little weak place in the wall left un-
commanded by a battery ; and there, where you
never looked for him, the inevitable invader will
come in ! After all the plunging of the hero in the
fabled waters that made him invulnerable, there was
the little spot on the heel, and the arrow found its
way there 1

5. Just as men, with devilish ingenuity, can distil
poison out of God's fairest flowers, so we can do
with everything that we have.

6. Every blessing, every gladness, every pos-
session external to us, and f-very facult)/^ and at-
tribute within us, we turn into heavy weights that
drag us down to this low spot of earth. We make
them all sharp knives with which we clip the wings
of our heavenward tendencies, and then we grovel
in the dust

7. Sin is like a great forest-tree that we may
sometimes see standing up green in its leafy beauty,
and spreading a broad shadow over half a field ; but

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228

Pifliires and Emblems.

when we get round on the other side, there is a
great, dark hollow in the very heart of it, and
corruption is at work there. It is like the poison-
tree in travellers' stories, tempting weary men to
rest beneath its thick foliage, and insinuating death
into the limbs that relax in the fatal coolness
of its shade. It is like the apples of Sodom, fair
to look upon, but turning to acrid ashes on the
unwary lips.

8. Sin is like the magician's rod that we read
about in old books. There it lies ; and if tempted
by its glitter, or fascinated by the power that it
proffers you, you take it in your hand, the thing
starts into a serpent with eredled crest and sparkling
eye, and plunges its quick barb into the hand that
holds it, and sends poison through all the veins.

9. There is nothing certain to happen, says the
proverb, but the unforeseen.

10. Like a mad bull, the man that is tempted
lowers his head and shuts his eyes, and rushes
right on.

11. The passion, the desires, the impulses that
lead us to do wrong things — they are like a crew
that mutiny, and take for a moment the wheel
from the steersman and the command from the
captain, but then, having driven the ship on the

^i,:

Piiliires and Emblems.

229

rocks, the mutineers get intoxicated, and lie down
and sleep.

12. When we come to grasp the sweet thing
that we have been tempted to seize, there is a ser-
pent that starts up amongst all the flowers.

13. As the old historian says about the Roman
armies that marched through a country, burning
and destroying every living thing, " They make a
solitude, and they call it peace." And so do men
with their consciences.

14. Sin is not only guilt, but it is a mistake.
" The game is not worth the candle," according to
the French proverb.

15. He that is trembling lest the lightning
should strike him, has no heart to feel the grandeur
and to be moved by the solemn awfulness of the
storm above his head. And a man to whom the
whole thought, or the predominant thought, when
God rises before him, is, how awful will be the inci-
dence of His perfeflions on my head ! does not and
durst not think about them, but reverence Him.

16. The Bible knows nothing of an unpractical
theology, but, on the other hand, the Bible knows
still less of an untheological morality. It digs deep,
bottoming the simplest right a<5tion upon right

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Piflures and Emblems.

thinking, and going down to the mountain bases on
which the very pillars of the universe rest, in order
to lay there, firm and immovable, the courses o^
the temple of a holy life.

17. The short cord of my plummet does not
quite go down to the bottom of the bottomless, and
I do not profess either to understand God or to
understand man, both of which I should want to do
before I understood the mystery of their conjoint
aftion.

18. The smallest particle of light falling on the
sensitive plate produces a chemical change that
can never be done again, and the light of Christ's
love brought to the knowledge and presented for
the acceptance of a soul, stamps on it an inefface-
able sign of its having been there.

19. Never is the box of ointment opened with-
out some savour from it abiding in every nostril to
which its odour is wafted.

20. The natural result of the simple rejeflion of
the Gospel is that, bit by bit, all the lingering
remains of nobleness that hover about the man,
like scent about a broken vase, shall pass away.

21. Opponents fire their small shot against the
great Rock of Ages, and the little pellets fall flat-

Pifljires and Emblems.

231

tcncd, and only scale off a bit of the moss that has
gathered there.

22. If you would win the world, melt it, do not
hammer it.

23. Man after man, rich in gifts, endowed often
with far larger and nobler faculties than the people
that oppose him, with indomitable perseverance, a
martyr to his error, sets himself up against the
truth that is sphered in Jesus Christ ; and the great
Divine message simply goes on its way, and all
the battlement and noise is like so many bats
flying against a light ; or the wild sea-birds that
come sweeping up in the tempest and the night,
against the hospitable Pharos that is upon the rock,
and smite themselves dead against it.

24. I remember, away up in a lonely Highland
, alley, where beneath a tall, black cliff, all weather-
worn, and cracked, and seamed, there lies at the
foot, resting on the greensward that creeps round
its base, a huge rock that has fallen from the face
of the precipice. A shepherd was passing beneath
it, and suddenly, when the finger of God's will
touched it, and rent it from its ancient bed in the
everlasting rock, it came down, leaping and bound-
from pinnacle to pinnacle — and it fell ; and the

232

Pifiures and Emblems.

inan that was beneath it is there now !' " Ground
to powder."

25. The man that loves God, what has he to be
afraid about? All events must be right for him.
Every wind must ^ ' south wind, blowing blessing
and warmth.

26. The only good that the existence of the
passion of fear in a human spirit does, is to warn
of danger and to prompt escape from calamity. It
sometimes leads us to the place of safety, and then
it vanishes, and leaves us there to the guidance of a
white-robed angel and a better friend.

27. Fear and love rise up in antagonism to each
other as motives in life, like those two mountains
from which respe<5lively the blessings and curses of
the old law were pronounced — the Mount of Curs-
ing, all barren, stony, without verdure and without
water; the Mount of Blessing, green and bright
with many a flower, and blessed with many a trick-
ling rill. From the blasted summit of the mountain
which gendereth to bondage may be heard the
words of the law, but the power to keep all these
laws must be sought on the sunny hill, where liberty
dwells in love and gives energy to obedience.

28. Intelleftual scepticism may be but the thin
crust, the hardened surface-layer of the quaking bog

Pifltires and Emblems,

233

of fear in the heart. The brain is often bribed by
the conscience, and the wish becomes the father of
the thought.

29. How much of the restless energy in work, how
much of the furious abandonment of vice, is nothing
more than an attempt to drown the still small voice,
by the rushing noise of a turbid, foaming life ! That
is fear in the mask of mirth.

30. Our love comes from apprehending that
great Gospel and blessed hope, that God's love is
mine, mine in His Son. Mine that my love may
be perfe6lly fixed upon it ; mine without disturbance
from any of His awful attributes, mine without fear
of loss or harm from any events. Believing this,
the heart fills with a mighty tide of calm, responding
love, which sweeps away on the crest of its rejoicing
wave the vileness, the sorrows, the fears, which once
littered and choked its channels.

31. Dig down to the living rock, Christ and His
infinite love to you, and let it be the strong founda-
tion, built into which you and your love may become
living stones, a holy temple, partaking of the firm-
ness and nature of that on which it rests.

32. All men everywhere have some more or less
a6live or torpid working of conscience. " 'Tis con-
science that makes cowards " — cowards of whom ? —
*^ of us ail" said the dramatist.

1*1 i

Pidlitres and Emblems.

33. One of our poets gives a grim pi6lure of a
traveller on a lonesome road, who has caught a
glimpse of a frightful shape close behind him,

"And having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head."

The dreadful thing is there on his very heels, its
breath hot on his cheek ; he feels it though he does
not see, but he dare not face round to it ; he puts a
strong compulsion on himself, and, with rigidly fixed
face, strides on his way, a sickening horror busy with
bis heart. An awful image that, but a true one,
with regard to what many men do with their
thoughts of God.

34. Darkness lies on nature, except to those
who in

"the light of setting suns.
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky,"

see that Form which the disciples saw in the
morning twilight.

35. Either our life is the subje61: of a mere
chaotic chance ; or else it is put into the mill of an
iron destiny, which goes grinding on, and crushing
with its remorseless wheels, regardless of what it
grinds up ; or else, through it all, in it all, beneath
and above it all, there is the Will which is Love,
and the Love which is Christ.

Pi5lures and Emblems.

235

36. The tangled web of human history is only
intelligible when that is taken as its clue, " From
Kim are all things, and to Him are all things."
The ocean from which the stream of history flows,
and that into which it empties itself, are one.

37. The fountain that rises in my heart can
only spring up heavenward because the water of it
flowed down into my heart from the higher level.

38. It is a dreary seventy years of pilgrimage
and strife, unless, as you travel along the road, you
still see mc.rks that He, who went before you, has
left by the wayside for your guidance and your
sustenance.

39. Love will trace Christ everywhere, as dear
friends can dete6l each other in little marks which
are meaningless to others. Love has in it a longing
for His presence which makes us eager and quick
to mark the lightest sign that He for whom it longs
is near, as the footstep of some dear one is heard
by the sharp ear of affeflion long before any sound
breaks the silence to those around.

40. " It is the Lord " is written large and plain
on all things ; but, like the great letters on a map,
they are so obvious and fill so wide a space, that
they are not seen.

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236

Pictures and Emble^ns.

41. Our love can never be anything else than
the echo to His voice of tenderness, than the re-
fle6led light upon our hearts of the full glory of his
affeflion.

X^ 42. Do not trust a death-bed repentance, my
brother. I know that God's mercy is boundless.
I know that " whilst there is life there is hope." I
know that a man going— sv/ept down that great
Niagara — if, before his little skiff tilts over into the
awful rapids, he can make one great bound with all
his strength, and reach the solid ground — I know
he may be saved. It is an awful risk to run. A
moment's miscalculation, and skiff and voyager
alike are whelming in the green chaos below, and
come up mangled into nothing, far away down
yonder upon the white, turbulent foam.

43. The key-words of Scripture meet the same
fate as do coins that have been long in circulation.
They pass through so mary fingers that the inscrip-
tions get worn off them.

44. There is the great ocean Christ Himself;
and on this is the empty vessel of my soul ; and
the little narrow pipe that has nothing to do but to

"bring across the refreshing water, that is the a6l of
faith in Him.

Figures and Emblems,

237

45. When the child looks up into the mother's
face, the symbol to it of all protc6lion ; or into the
father's eye, the symbol to it of all authority, — that
emotion by which the little one hangs upon the
loving hand and trusts the loving heart that towers
above it in order to bend over it and scatter good,
is the same as the one which, glorified and made
divine, rises strong and immortal in its power, when
fixed and fastened on Christ, and saves the soul.

46. There is the tree : the trunk goes upward
from the little seed, rises into the light, gets the
sunshine upon it, and has leaves and fruit. That
is the upward tendency of faith — trust in Christ.
There is the n t, down deep, buried, dark, unseen.
Both are springing, but springing in opposite di-
re6lions, from the one seed. That is, as it were, the
negative side, the downward tendency — self-distrust.

47. Logically, laith comes first, and love next,
but in life they will spring up together. The ques-
tion of their order of existence is an often-trod battle-
ground of theology, all strewed with the relics of
former fights.

48. Christ stand." before each of us. And what
is the consequence ? A parting of the whole mass
of us, some on one side and some on the other.
As when you take a magnet, and hold it to an in-

238

Figures and Emblems.

:J!

discriminate heap of metal filings, it will gather out
all the iron, and leave behii i all the rest.

49. The crown of thorns proclaims a sovereignty
founded on sufferings. The sceptre of feeble reed
spe<iks of power wielded in gentleness. The coss
leads to the crown. The brow that was pierced by
the sharp acanthus wreath, therefore wears the dia-
dem of the universe. The hand that passively held
the mockery of the worthless, pithless reed, therefore
rules the princes of the earth with the rod of iron.

50. The characteristics and attributes of Christ
are known to us only by do6lrinal propositions and
by biographical statements. Apart from them the
image of Christ must stand a pale, colourless phan-
tom before the mind, and the faith which is dire6led
towards such a nebula will be an unintelligent
emotion, as nebulous and impotent a^ the shadow
towards which it turns.

51. It is the prerogative of man that his force
comes from his mind, and not from his body.

52. That old song about a sad heart tiring in a
mile, is as true in regard to the Gospel, and the
works of Christian people, as in any other case.

53. The gladness which rests in Christ will be a
gladness which will fit us for all service and all en-

Pifitires and Emblems.

239

durance ; which will be unbroken by any sorrow,
and, like the magic shield of the old legend,
invisible, slender, in its crystalline purity, will stand
before the tempted heart, and will repel all the
" fiery darts of the wicked."

54. If the arm is to smite with vigour, it must
smite at the bidding of a calm and light heart.

55. Memory in another world is indispensable
to the gladness of the glad, and strikes the deepest
note in the sadness of the lost.

56. For some, in another world, growth will
only be a growth into greater power of feeling
greater sorrow. Sucii an one grows up into a
Hercules ; but it is only that the Nessus shirt may
wrap round him mere tightly, and may gnaw him
with a fiercer agony.

57. Everything which you do leaves its effe6l
with you for ever, just as long-forgotten meals are
in your blood and bones to-day.

58. Every a^l that a man performs has printed
itself upon his soul, it has become a part of him-
self; and, though, like a newly-painted pi6lure,
after a little while the colors go in, why is that ?
Only because they have entered into the very fibre
of the canvas, and have left the surface because

ft I

■>5">7v^'"^.'^'^'"?".*,^ '■'»'';■■ nr' '^..-fj' -v-vi' '•■;•■;■'_

240

Pi^tires and Emblems.

1 !

they are incorporated with the substance, and they
want but a touch of varnish to flash out again.

59. How strangely there come swimming up
before us, out of the depths of the dim waters of
oblivion — as one has seen some bright shell drawn
from the sunless sea-caves, and gleaming white
and shapeless far down before we had it on the
surface — past thoughts, we know not whence or
how!

60. As the devlcping solution brings out the
image on the photographic plate, so the mind has
the strange power, by fixing the attention, as we
say (a short word which means a long, mysterioc^j
thing), upon that past that is half-remembered and
half-forgotten, of bringing it into clear consciousness
and perfe6l recollection.

61. Men remember their childhood which they
had forgotten for long years. You may remember
that old story of the dying woman beginning to
speak in a tongue unknown to all that stood around
her bed. When a child, she had learned some
northern language, in a far-off land. Long before
she had learned to shape any definite remembrances
of the place, she had been taken away, and not
having used, had forgotten the speech. But at last
there rushed up again all the old memories, and
the tongue of the dumb was loosed and she spake !

jifl""., J%N!||,W"»H"

PUhires and Emblems.

241

62. The fragmentary remembrances which we
have now, lift themselves above the ocean of forget-
fulness like islands in some Archipelago, the summits
of sister hills, though separated by the estranging
sea that covers their converging sides and the valleys
where their roots unite. The solid land is there
though hidden. Drain off the sea, and there will
be no more isolated peaks, but continuous land.

63. As on the little retina of an eye there can
be painted, on a scale inconceivably minute, every
tree and mountain-top in the whole wide panorama
— so, in an instant, one may run through almost a
whole lifetime of mental afls.

64. The drowning man, when he comes to him-
self, tells us, that in the interval betwixt the instant
when he felt he was going and the passing away of
consciousness, all his life stood before him ; as if
some flash in a dark midnight, had lighted up a
whole mountain country — there it all was !

65. As from the mountain of eternity we shall

look down, and behold the whole plain spread before

us. Down here we get lost and confused in the

devious valleys that run off from the roots of the

hills everywhere, and we cannot make out which way

the streams are going, and what there is behind

that low shoulder of hill yonder ; but when we get

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242

Pictures and Eriiblems.

\ v.

to the summit peak, and look down, it will all shape
itself into one consistent whole, and we shall see it
all at once.

66. One old Roman tyrant had a punishment in
which he bound the dead body of the murdered to
the living body of the murderer, and left them there -
scaffolded. And when that voice comes, " Son,
remember !" to the living soul of the godless, un-
believing, impenitent man, there is bound to him
the murdered past, the dead past, his own life ; and,
in Milton's awful and profound words : —

"Which way I fly is hell — myself am hell."

6^. God is the divine and unfathomable ocean ;
Christ the Son is the Stream that brings salvation
to every man's lips.

68. Oh ! my friend, you are a happy and a
singular man if there is nothing in your life that you
have tried to bury, and the obstinate thing will not
be buried, but meets you again when you come
away from its fancied grave. I remember an old
castle where they tell us of foul murder committed
in a vaulted chamber with a narrow window, by
torchlight one night ; and there, they say, there are
the streaks and stains of blood on the black oak
floor ; and they have planed, and scrubbed, and
planed again, and thought they were gone — but

Figures and Emblems.

243

there they always are, and continually up comes
the dull reddish-black stain, as if oozing itself out
through the boards to witness to the bloody crime
again !

69. When a heart is diverted from its one central
purpose, when a life is split up in a hundred different
direftions and into a hundred different emotions,
it is like a beam of light passed through some
broken surface where it is all refra6led and shivered
into fragments ; there is no clear vision, there is no
perfe6l light.

70. Like some black rock that heaves itself
above the surface of a sun-lit sea, and the wave
runs dashing over it ; and the spray, as it falls
down its sides, is all rainbowed and lightened ; and
there comes beauty into the mighty grimness of the
black thing ; so a man's transgressions rear them-
selves up, and God's great love, coming sweeping
itself against them and over them, makes out of
the sin an occasion for the flashing more brightly
of the beauty of His mercy, and turns the life of
the pardoned penitent into a life of which even the
sin is not pain to remember.

71. There be two thirsts, one the longing for

God, which, satisfied, is heaven ; one, the longing

for cessation of the self-lit fires, and for one drop

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244

Piflures and Embleiiis.

.: fj

of the lost delights of earth to cool the thirstj
throat, which, unsatisfied, is hell.

72. All great thoughts have a solemn quiet in
them, which not unfrequently merges into a still
sorrow.

73. Yes, joy, but sorrow too ! the joy of the Lord,
but sorrow as we look on our own sin and the
world's woe ! the head anointed with the oil of glad-
ness, but also crowned with thorns ! These two
states of mind, both of them the natural operations
of any deep faith, may co-exist and blend into one
another, so as that the gladness is sobered, and
chastened, and made manly and noble ; and that
the sorrow is like some thunder-cloud, all streaked
with bars of sunshine, that go into its deepest depths.
The two do not clash against each other, or reduce
the emotion to a neutral indifference, but they blend
into one another ; just as, in the Ar6lic regions, deep
down beneath the cold snow, with its white desola-
tion and its barren death, you shall find the budding
of the early spring flowers and the fresh green grass ;
just as some kinds of fire burn below the water ; just
as, in the midst of the barren and undrinkable sea,
there may be welling up some little fountain of
fresh water that comes from a deeper depth than
the great ocean around it, and pours its sweet
streams along the surface of the salt waste.

Figures and Emblems.

245

74. The Christian life is all like one of those
sweet spring showers in early April, when the rain-
drops weave foi us a mist that hides the sunshine ;
and yet the hidden sun is in every sparkling drop,
and they are all saturated and steeped in its light

75. Just as you injedl colouring matter into the
fibres of some anatomical preparation ; so a Christian
may, as it were, injedl into all the veins of his
religious charafler and life, either the bright tints
of gladness or the dark ones of self-despondency ;
and the result will be according to the thing that
he has put into them.

^6. The natural chara(5ler determines to a large
extent the perspective of our conceptions of Christian
truth, and the colouring of our inner religious life.

TJ. If there is but little heat around the bulk of
the thermometer, no wonder that the mercury marks
a low degree. If there is but small faith, there will
not be much gladness.

78. Men venture themselves upon God's word
as they do on doubtful ice, timidly putting a light
foot out, to feel if it will bear them, and always
having the tacit fear, " now, it is going to crack ! "
You must cast yourself on God's gospel with all
your weight, without any hanging back, without
any doubt, without even the shadow of a suspicion

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246

Piflures and Emblems.

that it will give — that the firm, pure floor will give,
and let you through into the water.

79. If a man has once felt, and feels, in however
small and feeble a degree, and depressed by what-
soever sense of daily transgressions, if he feel, faint
like the first movement of an imprisoned bird in its
Qgg, the feeble pulse of an almost imperceptible
and fluttering faith beat — then that man has a right
to say, " God is mine."

80. As one of our great teachers, not long gone
from us, said, " Let me take my personal
salvation for granted " — and what ? and " be idle ? "
No ; " and work from it."

81. Just as men that would see the stars at noon-
day, look not into the heavens above them, but down
into some deep, dark well ; when you, Christian,
would have the highest pattern and the surest pledge
of your immortal blessedness, gaze with fixed eye
down into the depths of that spirit of yours where
God's Spirit abides ; and though at first you may
see nothing but its own cold waters, look and ever
look, and you will see at last, glimmering and
shimmering beneath its surface, tremulous light
points, the shadows of the stars ; for the Holy Spirit
that is mirrored there, is " the earnest," the sample,
and the evidence of " the inheritance."

PiHures and Emblems.

247

82. The cold waters of that narrow stream of
death are no purifying bath in which you may wash
and be clean.

83. Many Christians manage to distil for them-
selves a bitter vinegar of self-accusation out of grand
words in the Bible, that were meant to afford them
but the wine of gladness and of consolation.

v/ 84. The road into Giant Despair's castle is
' through doubt.

85. No one, who plunges himself into tl o alfairs
of the world without God, can easily escape out of
two sad alternatives. Either he is utterly wearied
and disgusted with their triviality, and dawdles out
a languid life of supercilious superiority to his work,
or else he plunges passionately into it, and, like the
ancient queen, dissolves in the cup the precious jewel
of his own soul.

86. Sin is but the cloud behind which the ever-
lasting Sun lies in all its power and warmth, un-
affe6led by the cloud ; and the light will yet strike,
the light of His love will yet pierce through, with
its merciful shafts, bringing healing in their beams,
and dispersing all the pitchy darkness of man's
transgression.

87. What a grand thing the life is into the

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248

PiHures and Emblems.

midst of wliich can be injefled, as it were, — like the
branching veins of silver in the hard rock — the
glorious, rich metal of this Divine influence. Death
simply is the means for the coming of the superlative
of what here we have in the positive !

88. What a solemn and sublime thought it is
that a Christian carries through this world in his
heart no smaller possession than the produ6live
seed which only needs its natural climate and its
fostering skies to burst into the unfading flower of
endless and perfe6l glory !

89. The witness of the Spirit, if it were yonder
in heaven, would shine like a perpetual star ; the
witness of the Spirit, here in the heart on earth,
burns like a flickering flame, never to be extin-
guished, but still not always bright, wanting to be
trimmed, and needing to be guarded from rude
blasts,

90. You will never " brighten your evidences "
by polishing at them. To polish the mirror ever so
assiduously does not secure the image of the sun on
its surface. The only way to do that is to carry
the poor bit of glass out into the sunshine. It will
shine then, never fear.

91. Christ's pitying tenderness had sometimes to
clothe itself in sharpest words, even as His hand

>fl

Pi5lu7'es and Emlhrns.

249

of powerful love had once to grasp the scourge of
small cords.

92. You cannot gather up the spilt water ; you
cannot any more gather up and re-issue the past
life.

93. Christ's suffering stands as a thing by itself,
and unapproachable, a solitary pillar rising up
above the waste of time.

/ 94. Christ is willing to bear and help me to
bear, the pettiest, the minutest, and most insignifi-
cant of the daily annoyances that may come to
ruffle me. Whether it be a poison from one serpent
sting, or whether it be poison from a million of
buzzing tiny, mosquitoes ; if there be a smart,
go to Him, and He will help you to bear it

95. Our faith rests on centuries.

96. They tell us that in some trackless lands,
when one friend passes through the pathless forests,
he breaks a twig ever and anon as he goes, that
those who come after may see the traces of his
having been there, and may know that they are
not out of the road. Oh ! when we are journeying
through the murky night, and the dark woods of
affli6lion and sorrow, it is something to find here
and there a spray broken, or a leafy stem bent down

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250

Pi5lures and Emblems.

with the tread of His foot and the brush of His
hand as He passed ; and to remember that the path
He trod He has hallowed ; and thus to find linger-
ing fragrances and hidden strengths in the remem-
brance of Him as " in all points tempted like as we
are," bearing grief for us, bearing grief with us
bearing grief like us.

97. All the glowing furnaces of fiery trial and
all the cold waters of affliflion, are but the prepara-
tion through which the rough iron is to be passed
before it becomes tempered steel, a shaft in the
Master's hand.

98. The further the pendulum swings on the one
side, the further it goes up on the other. The g eper
God plunges the comet into the darkness, out yoi ler,
the closer does it come to the sun at its nearest
distance, and the longer does it stand basking and
glowing in the full blaze of the glory from the central
orb. So, in our revolution, the measure of the dis.
tance from the farthest point of our darkest earthly
sorrow, to the throne, may help us to the measure
of the closeness of the bright, perfefl, perpetual
glory above, when we are 011 the throne : for if so be
that we are sons, we must suffer with Him ; if so be
that we suffer, we imist be glorified together.

Pi6lures and Emblems.

251

99. Those weeping Marys found those two calm
angel forms sitting with folded wings, like the
cherubim over the mercy seat, but overshadowing
a better propitiation.

100. All that we can do, when we seek to remem-
ber, is to wander back somewhere about that point
in our life where the shy thing lurks, and hope to
catch some sight of it in the leafy coverts.

I'll

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^r:

CHAPTER X.

EATH is an isthmus, narrow and almost
impalpable, on which, for one brief instant,
the soul poises itself; whilst behind it
there lies the inland lake of past being, and before
it the shoreless ocean of future life, all lighted with
the glory of God, and making music as it breaks
even upon these dark, rough rocks.

2. Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it
if only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its
inner side.

3. Death is a darkness that is caused by the
light, and a darkness that ends in the light.

4. As we play with the names of those that are
familiar to us, so a loving faith can venture to play,
as it were, with the awful name of Him who is King
of Terrors, and to minimise it down to that shadow

Pitlures and Emblems,

253

and refle<5^ion of itself which we find in the mighty
a6l of going to rest.

5. On the clear mountain top we stand in the
light of God's face ; and then we come down into
the plain, and the earthly vapours shut out the blue.

6. I am afraid that the most of Christian people
do with that Divine reason for work, " the love of
Christ constraineth me," as the old Franks (to use
a strange illustration) used to do with their long-
haired kings, they keep them in the palace at all
ordinary times, give them no power over the govern-
ment of the kingdom, only now and then bring
them out to grace a procession, and then take them
back again into their reverential impotence.

7. Our high tides of devotion do not come so
often as the tides of the sea, and then for the rest
of our time there is the long stretch of foul,
oozy, barren beach when the waters are out, and all
is desolation and deadness.

8. The best of earth is the shadow of heaven.

9. Do you and I keep our religion as princes
do their crown jewels — only wearing them on
festive occasions, and have we another dress for
week-days and working-days ?

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254

Piilttres and Emblems.

10. Would it not be grand if we could so go
through life, as that all should be not one dead
level, but one high plateau, as it were, on the moun-
tain-top there, because all rested upon " Whatsoever
ye do, in word or deed, do it all in the name of the
Lord Jesus."

11. That one motive, "The love of Christ
constraineth us," is like one of those applications
of power you have often seen, where a huge hammer
is lifted up, and comes down with a crash that
breaks the granite in pieces, or may be allowed to
fall so gently and so true, that it touches without
cracking a tiny nut beneath it. The one principle,
mighty and crashing when it is wanted ; and yet
coming down with gentle, with accurately-propor-
tioned force on all life. Or, to take a higher
illustration : it is like that mighty power that holds
a planet in its orbit, in the wild, weltering waste of
solitary space ; and yet binds down the sand-grain
and dust-mote to its place.

12. How differently, eight hundred years ago
Normans and Saxons looked at the square towers
that were built all over England to bridle the in-
habitants ! To the one they were the sign of the
security of their dominion ; to the other they were
the sign of their slavery and submission. Torture
and prison-houses they might become ; frowning

Figures and Ejnblems.

255

portents they necessarily were. The way of the
Lord is a castle-fortress to the man w.ho does good,
and to the man that does evil it is a threatening
prison, which may become a hell of torture.

13. To many modern thinkers the whole drift
and tendency of human affairs affords no sign of a
person direfling these. They hear the clashing and
grinding of opposing forces, the thunder as of falling
avalanches, and the moaning as of a homeless wind,
but they hear the sound of no footfalls echoing down
the ages.

14. Music is a torture to some ears ; and there
are people who have so alienated their hearts and
wills from God that the Name that should be " their
dearest faith " is not only their " ghastliest doubt,"
but their greatest pain.

15. "And seeketh that which is gone astray."
The word is, literally, " which goeth astray," not
" which is gone astray." It piftures the process of
wandering, not the result as accomplished. We see
the sheep, poor, silly creatures, not going anywhere
in particular, only there is a sweet tuft of grass here,
and it crops that ; and then there is another a little
further, and it crops that ; and here there is a bit of
ground which is soft walking, and it goes there ; and
so, step by step, not meaning anything, not knowing

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PiSIures and Efiiblems.

where it is going, or that it is going anywhere, it goes,
and goes, and goes, and, at last, it finds out that it is
away on its beat on the hill-side — for sheep keep to
one little bit of hill-side generally, as a shepherd
will tell you — and then when it begins to bleat, and,
most helpless of creatures, fluttering and excited,
tears about amongst the thorns and brambles, or gets
mired in some quag or other, and it will never get
back itself until somebody comes for it.

1 6. As a bit of glass, when the light strikes it,
flashes into sunny glory ; as every poor little muddy
pool on the pavement, when the sunbeam falls upon
it, has the sun mirrored even in its shallow mud ; so
into your poor heart and mine the vision of Christ's
glory will come, moulding and transforming you
to its own beauty.

17. Men have learned to love and gaze upon
some fair character till some image of its beauty
has passed into their ruder natures. To love such
and look on them has been an education.

18. A man never gets to the end of the distance
that separates between him and the Father, if his face
is turned away from God. Every moment the sepa-
ration is increasing. Two lines start from each other
at the acutest angle, are further apart from each
other the further they are produced, until at last

Piflures and E^nblems.

257

the one may be away up by the side of God's
throne, and the other away down in the deepest
depths of hell.

19. There is a great deal in every nature, and,
most of all, in a Christian nature, which is like the
packages emigrants take with them, marked " not
wanted on the voyage." These go down into the
hold, and they are only of use after landing in the
new world.

20. The dreams of a chrysalis about what it
would be when it was a butterfly would be as
reliable as a man's imagination of what a future
life will be.

21. Ignorance is not always repellent. Blank
ignorance is. But ignorance shot with knowledge
like a tissue, which, when you hold it one way, seems
all black, and, when you tilt another, seems golden,
stimulates men's desires, hopes, and imaginations.

22. The white mountains keep their secret well.
Not until we have passed through the black rocks
that make the throat of the pass on the summit,
shall we see the broad and shining plains beyond the
hills, " It doth not yet appear what we shall be."

23. Like the great aquedu6ls that stretch from

the hills across the Roman Campagna, the Incarna-

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258

Pifltires and Emblems.

tion of Jesus Christ brings the waters of the fountain
from the mountains of God into the lower levels of
our nature, and the foetid alleys of our sins.

24. Many of us walk in darkness, who, if we
were but in communion with God, would see the
lone hill-side blazing with chariots of horses of fire.

25. That great Light, which is Christ, is like the
star that hung over the magi, fit to blaze in the
heavens, and yet stooping to the lowly task of
guiding three poor men along a muddy road on
earth.

26. In communion with God, you will get light
in all seasons of darkness and of sonow. The
darkest hours of earthly fortune will be like a Green-
land summer night, when the sun scarcely dips be-
low the horizon ; and, even when it is absent, all the
heaven is aglow with a calm twilight.

27. Like some citadel, that has an unfailing well
in its court-yard, we may have a fountain of glad-
ness within ourselves which nothing that touches the
outside can cut off.

28. " With Thee is the fountain of life." The
words give a wonderful idea of the connexion
between God and all living creatures. The fountain
rises, the spray on the summit catches the sunlight

PtSlures and Emblems.

259

for a moment, and then falls into the basin, jet after
jet springing up into the light, and in its turn, re-
coilinci into the darkness. The water in the fountain,
the water in the spray, the water in the basin are all
one.

29. There is such a thing as death in life ; living
men may be dead in trespasses and sins, dead in
pleasure, dead in selfishness. The awful vision of
Coleridge, in the " Ancient Mariner," of dead men
standing up and pulling at the ropes, is only api6lure
of the realities of life ; where, as on some Witches
Sabbath, corpses move about in the adlivities of this
dead world.

30. After a world of hungry men have fed upon
Christ, He remains inexhaustible as at the beginning;
like the bread in His own miracles, of which the
pieces that were broken and ready to be given to
the eaters were more than the original stock as it
appeared when the meal began. Or like the fabled
meal in the Norse Walhalla, which the gods sat
down to to-day, and to-morrow it is all there on the
board, as abundant and full as ever.

31. Many of the sources of earthly felicity are

dammed up and stopped off from us if we are living

beneath the shadow of God's wings. Life will seem

to be and will be sterner, and graver, and sadder

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if ■

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26o

Figures and Emblems.

than the "lives that ring with idiot laughter, solely,"
and have no music because they have no melan-
choly in them.

32. What a blessing it is for us to have, as we
may have, a source of joy, frozen by no winter,
dried up by no summer, muddied and corrupted by
no irridescent scum of putrcfa6lion which ever
mantles over the stagnant ponds of earthly joy.

33. Let us be sure that what we do not under-
stand yet is good and loving too. The web is of
one texture throughout. The least educated ear
can catch the music of the simplest melodies which
run through the Great Composer's work. We shall
one day be able to appreciate the yet fuller music
of the more recondite parts, which to us seem only
jangling and chaos at present.

34. That man who has God on his side is rich ;
that man is a pauper who has not God for his.

35. " How often would I have gathered thy
children together as a hen gathereth her chickens
under her wings !" The Old Testament took the
emblem of the eagle — sovereign, and strong, and
fierce. The New Testament took the emblem of
the domestic fowl — peaceable, and q^entle, and affec-
tionate.

Piflures and Emblems.

261

36. Why will you " spend your money for that
which is not bread, and your labour for that which
satisfies not," as Indians in famine eat clay, which
fills their stomachs but neither stays their hunj^er
nor ministers strength ?

37. The heavens are the home of light, the
source of every blessing, arching over every head,
rimming every horizon, holding all the stars, open-
ing into abysses as we gaze, with us by night and
by day, undimmed by the mist and smoke of earth,
unchanged by the lapse of centuries, ever seen,
never reached, bending over us always, always far
above us. And so the mercy of God towers above
us, and stoops down towards us, rims us all about,
and arches over us all, sheds down its dewy bcnc-
di6lion by night and by day, is filled with a million
stars and light points of beauty and of splendour, is
near us ever to bless and succour, to help, and
holds us all in its blue round. "Thy mercy, O
Lord, is in the heavens."

38. The obscurity of the sea. And what sort
of obscurity is that? Not that which comes from
mud or anything added. That which comes from
depth. As far as a man can see down into its
blue-green depths they are clear and translucent ;
but where the light fails, and the eye fails, there

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262

Pi5lures and Emblems.

comes what we call obscurity. The sea is clear
but our sight is limited.

39. " Thy righteousness is like the great moun-
tains — Thy judgments are a great deep." Here
towers Vesuvius ; there at its feet lie the waters of
the bay. So the righteousness springs up like some
great cliff rising sheer from the water's edge, while
its feet are laved by " the sea of glass mingled with
fire," the Divine judgments, unfathomable and
shoreless. The mountains and the sea are the two
grandest things in nature, and in their combination
sublime ; the one, the home of calm and silence, the
other in perpetual motion ; but the mountain's
roots are deeper than the depths of the sea, and
though the judgments are a mighty deep, the
righteousness is deeper, and is the bed of that ocean.

40. God's righteousness towers above us ; God's
judgments go down beneath us. We can scarcely
measure adequately the one or the other. The
mountain is high, the deep is profound. Between
the mountain and the sea there is a strip of level
land. Upon the level where wc live are the green
fields, where the cattle browse, and the birds sing»
and we till, and reap, and live, and are fed.

41. The northern and the southern pole of the
great sphere are one and the same, a straight axle
through the very heart of it, from which the bound-

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PiHures ana Ernbleiiis.

263

ing lines swell out to the equator, and towards
which they converge again on the opposite side of
the world. So mercy is the strong axle-tree, the
northern pole and the southern, on which the whole
world of the Divine perfc6lions revolves and moves.

42. Unless Thy righteousness, like the great
mountains, surrounds and guards the low plain of
our lives, they will lie open to all foes.

43. " Thy righteousness is like the great moun-
tains." Like these, its roots are fast and stable ;
iike these, it stands firm for ever ; like these, its
summits touch the fleeting clouds of human
circumstances ; like these, it is a shelter and a refuge,
inaccessible in its steepest peaks, but affording
many a cleft in its rocks, where a man may hide
and be safe. But, unlike these, it knew no begin-
ning, and shall know no end. Emblems of perma-
nence as they are, though Olivet looks down on
Jerusalem as it did when Melchisedek was its king,
and Tabor and Hermon stand as they did before
human lips had named them, they are wearing
away by winter storms and summer heat. But God's
righteousness is more stable than the mountains,
and firmer than the firmest things upon earth.

44. "There s.all \--. two women grinding at a
mill," the one of them at that side shall be a Chris-

264

PiHtires and Emblems.

tian, the other of them on that shall not. They
push the handle round, and the push that carries
the handle round one half the circumference of the
mill-stone may be a bit of religious worship, and
the push that carries it round the other half of the
circumference may be a bit of serving the world'
and the flesh, and the devil. It is not the things
you do, it is the way you do them.

45. Two men shall be sitting at the same desk,
two boys at the same bench at school, two students
at the same books down at Owen's College there ;
and the one shall be serving God and glorifying
His Name, and the other shall be serving self and
Satan.

! I

46. As a mother might fling herself out of the
sledge that her child might escape the wolves in
full chase, here is one that comes and fronts all
your foes and says, " Let these go their way, Take
Mc."

47. The world is hard and rude ; the world is
blind and stupid ; the world often fails to know its
best friends and its truest benefa6lors ; but there is
no crust of stupidity so crass and dense but that
through it will pass the penetrating shafts of light
that ray from the face of a man who walks in
fellowship with Jesus.

Pictures and Emblems.

26:

48. Just as every leaf which you take off some
plants and stick into a flower-pot will, in time, be-
come a little plant exa6lly like the parent from
which it was taken ; so the Christ-life that is in you,
if it is worth anything — that is to say. if it is really
in you at all — will be shaping )'f)u into His likeness,
and growing into a copy of its source and origin.

49. The least little tiny speck of musk, invisibly
taken from a cake of it, and carried away ever so
far, will diffuse the same fragrance as the mass from
which it came ; and the little, almost imperceptible
slice, if I may so say, of Jesus Christ's life that is in
you and me, will smell as sweet, if not as strong, as
the mass from which it came.

50. A certain kind of sea-weeds that lie down at
the bottom of the sea, when their flowering time
comes, elong? j T'lcir stalks, and reach the light, and
float upon the Lop, and then, when they have flowered
and fruited, they sink again into the depths. Our
Christian life should come up to the surface, and
open out its flowers there, and show them to the
heavens and to all eyes that look.

51. I heard a few nights ago that if you take a
bit of phosphorous and put it upon a slip of wood,
and ignite the phosphorus, bright as the blaze is,
there drops from it a white ash that coats the wood,

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Pi^tires and Emblems.

and makes it almost impossible to kindle the wood.
And so, when the flaming convi6lion laid upon your
hearts has burnt itself out, it has coated the heart,
and it will be very difficult to kindle the light there
again.

52. The darkest prison cell will not be so very
dark if we remember that Christ has been there be-
fore us ; and death itself will be softened into sleep
because our Lord has died.

53. Shakespeare puts a grim word into the
mouth of one of his chara6lcrs which puts the theory
of many of us in its true light, when describing a
dying man calling upon God, he makes the narra-
tor say : " I, to comfort him, bid him he should not
think of God. I hoped there was no need to
trouble himself with any such thoughts yet."

54. Just as the lower gifi of what we call
"genius" is above all limits of culture, or educa-
tion, or position, and falls on a wool-stapler in
Stratford-on-Avon, or on a ploughman in Ayrshire ;
so, in a similar manner, the altogether different
gift cf that "^ >.iir, life-giving Spirit follows no
lines thrt .J U'^ohts o. institutions draw. It falls
upci! an A:M.i ^-^t n ar 'ronk in a convent ; and he
shakes Europe. It rails upon a tinker in Bedford
;.\r 1; and he w!;t(.; "Pilgrim's Progress." It falls

Figures and Emblems.

267

upon a cobbler in Kettering ; and he founds
Christian missions.

55. The old divines used to say that God was
greatest in the smallest things.

56. We have no right to ask for an impossible
uniformity of religious experience. You can print
off as many copies as you like of a drawing of a
flower on a printing-presc. and they all shall be alike,
petal for petal, leaf for leaf, shade for shade ; but
no two hand-drawn copies will be so precisely alike,
still less, will any two of the real buds that blow on
the bush there. Life produces resemblance with
differences ; it is machinery that makes fac-similcs.

57. I remember once holding on by the ground
on the top of Vesuvius, and looking full into the
crater all swirling with sulphurous flames. Have
you ever looked into your hearts like that, and seen
the wreathing smoke and the flashing fire that are
there ?

58. Just as when the chemist colle6ls oxygen
in a vessel filled with water, as it passes into the
jar it drives out the water before it ; the love of God,
if it come into a man's heart in any real sense, in
the measure in which it comes, will deliver him
from the ^ove of the world.

268

PiRures and Emblems.

59. " Can there be any good thing come out of
Na'^-oth?" A prejudice, no doubt, but a very
' L "r o ss one ; a very thin ice, which melted as soon
a.' •-'.'■i. I's smile beamed upon Nathaniel.

i suppose all of us can look back to a place
son' vvhere or other, under some hawthorn-hedge,
c • 3omc boulder by the sea-shore, or some mountain-
tc^/, perhaps in some back parlour, or in some
crowded street, where some never-to-be-forgotten
epoch in our soul's history passed, unseen by all eyes,
and which would have shown no trace except,
perhaps, a tightly-compressed lip, to any on-looker.

61. The bells that jingle on the horses in the
waggoner's team may bear the same inscription as
blazed on the High Priest's mitre, " Holiness to the
Lord " ; and the shop-girl behind the counter may
be a"^ truly offering sacrifice to God as the priest by
the alUr.

62. A dew-drop is shaped b)' the same laws
which mould the mightiest of the planets.

(>%, Christ was a man to whom all men with
whom He came in conta6l were like those clocks
with a crystal face, which show us all the works.

O4. Let us rejoice to feel that Christ sees all
those moments which no other eye can seo. In

PiHures and Emblems.

269

our hours of crisis, and in our monotonous and
uneventful moments, in the rush of the furiou?
waters when the stream of our lives is caught
among rocks, and in the long, languid reaches of its
smoothest flow, when we are fighting with our fears
or yearning for His light, or even when sitting
dumb and stolid like snow-men, apathetic and
frozen in our indifference, He sees us and pities
and will help the need which He b-^holds.

65. Just as when you take a flower out of the
woods, and put it into a greenhouse, and cultivate
and nip it, and guide its growth, you will get a
broader leaf and a finer flower than when it was
wild ; so the disciplined, restrained, consecrated
man is the man whose life is the richest, fullest,
largest, the gladsomest, the noblest in every way.

66. To lift Christ up is the work of all Christian
preachers and teachers ; and, as far as they can, to
hide themselves behind Jesus Christ, or, at the most,
to let themselves appear just as the old painters
used to let their own likenesses appear in the great
altar-pieces — a little kneeling figure, there, away
in a dark corner of the background.

6"]. Our arguments for Christianity do fare very
often very much as did that elaborate discourse
that a bishop once preached to prove the existence

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270

Figures and Emblems,

of a God, at the end of which a simple old woman,
who had not followed his reasoning veryintciligently,
exclaimed, "Well, for all he says, I can't help think-
ing there's a God after all."

68. The " sorrow of the world " passes over me
like the empty wind through an archway. It
whistles for a moment and is gone, and there is
nothing left to show that it was ever there. It comes
like one of those brooks in tropical countries, dry
and white for half the year, and then there is a rush
of muddy waters, fierce but transient, and leaving
no results behind.

69. Is it as blessed for you to feel : " Thou,
Christ, bcholdest me now," as it is for a child to feel
that when it is playing in the garden its mother is
sitting up at the window watching it, and that no
harm can come ?

70. There have been men driven mad in prisons
because they knew that somewhere in the wall
there was a little pin-hole, through which a goaler's
eye was always, or might be always, glaring down
at them.

71. You may pound a man's mistaken creed to
atoms with sledge-hammers of reasoning, and he is
not much the nearer being a Christian than he was

I !

Figures and Emblems.

271

before ; just as you may pound ice to pieces, and
it is pounded ice after all.

72. God has made us for something else than
that we should be the sport of circumstances. And
it is a disgrace to any of us that our lives should be
like some little fishing-boat, with an unskilful or
feeble hand at the tiller, yawling from one point of
the compass to another, and not keeping a straight
and dirc6l course.

73. Soldiers follow their commanders. There is
the hell of the battle field ; here a line of wavering,
timid, raw recruits. Their commander rushes to
the front, and throws himself upon the advancing
enemy with the one word " Follow !" And the
weakest becomes a hero.

74. Travellers follow a guide. Here is a man
upon some dangerous corner of the Alps, with a bit
of limestone as broad as the palm of your hand for
him to pick his steps upon, and, perhaps, a couple of
feet of snow above that for him to walk upon, a
precipice of two thousand feet on either side. And
his guide says, as he ropes himself to him, " Now, look
here ! you tread where J tread." Jesus said to Philip
** Follow Me."

75. The "Imitation of Christ" which the old

272

PiHures and Emblems.

anonymous monk wrote about, is the sum of all
pra6lical Christianity.

y6. Two snow flakes on the top of a mountain
are an avalanche by the time they reach the valley.

yy. Wherever in our Lord's life any incident
indicates more emphatically than usual the lowliness
of His humiliation, there, by the side of it, you get
something that indicates the majesty of His glory.
For instance, He is born a weak infant, but angels
herald His birth ; He lies in a manger, but a star
hangs trembling above it, and leads sages from afar,
with their myrrh, and incense, and gold. He sits
wearied on the stone coping of a well, and craves
for water from a peasant-woman ; but He gives her
the water of life. He lies down and sleeps, from
pure exhaustion, in the stern of the little fishing-
boat, but He wakes to command the storm, and it
is siill. He weeps beside tlie grave, but He flings
His voice into its inmost recesses, and the sheeted
dead come forth.

78. Would a beam of light from God, coming
in upon your life, be like a light falling upon a
gang of conspirators, that would make them huddle
all their implements under their garments, and
scuttle out of the way as fast as possible? Or
would it be like a gleam of sunshine on the flowers,

t"i.

Piflures and Emblems.

273

opening out their petals and wooing from them

fragrance ?

Which ?

79. What a strange fate that is which has
befallen those persons in t'le Gospel narrative who,
for an instant came into conta6l with Jesus Christ !
Like ships passing across the white splendour of
the moonlight on the sea, they gleam silvery pure
for a moment as they cross the track, and then are
lost and swallowed up in the darkness.

80. Christ's mercy to a world does not come
like water in a well that has to be pumped up by
our petitions, by our search ; but like water in some
fountain, rising sparkling into the sunlight by its
own inward impulse.

81. Christ came to a forgetful and careless
world, like a shepherd who goes after his flock in
the wilderness, not because they bleat for him, since
they crop the herbage which tempts them even
farther from the fold and remember it or him no
more ; but because he cannot have them lost. The
shepherd goes out on the mountain side, for all
the storm and the snow, and wades knee-deep
through the drifts until he finds the sheep.

82. Universally this is true, that, sooner or later,
when the delirium of the passion and the rush of

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274

PiHures and Emblems.

the temptation are over and we wake to consciouness,
we find that we are none the richer for the thing
gained ; and oh ! so infinitely the poorer for the
means by which we gained it It is that old story
of the veiled prophet that wooed and won the hearts
of foolish maidens, and when he had them in his
power in the inner chamber, removed the silver veil
they had looked upon with love, and shewed hideous
features, that struck despair into their hearts.
Every man's sin does that for him.

83. The diffused and wide-shining mercies which
stream from the Father's heart are all, as it were,
focussed, as through a burning-glass, into one strong
beam in Christ, which can kindle the greenest wood
and melt the thick-ribbed ice.

84. Orthodox orthodoxy, divorced from pra6lice
is like the dried flowers that botanists put between
sheets of blotting-paper, with no perfume in them,
and no colour in them, and no growth or life in
them — the skeletons of dead beauty.

85. The "wrath" and the "love" of God differ
much more in the difference of the eye that looks
than they do in themselves. Here are two bits of
glass — one of them catches and retains all the
fiery- red rays ; the other all the yellow. It is the
one same pure white beam that passes through them

Pi^ures and Emblems.

^7S

both ; but one is only capable of receiving the fiery-
red beams of the wrath, and the other is capable of
receiving the golden light of the love.

86. Christ is the boundless ocean. We have
contented ourselves with coasting along the shore,
and making timid excursions from one headland to
another. Let us strike out into the middle deep,
and see all the wonders that are there.

87. This great Christ is like the infinite sky with
its unresolved nebulae : we have but looked with
our poor, dim eyes ; let us take the telescope, that
will reveal to us suns blazing where now we only
see darkness.

88. Hearts, like flowers, which could not be
burst open by the crowbar of law, may be wooed open
by the sunshine of love.

89. Wolves tear sick wolves to pieces.

90. The world looks at its own possessions
through a microscope, which magnifies all the infin-
itesimals, and then it looks at "the land which is
very far off" through a telescope turned the wrong
way, which diminishes all that is great. But, if we
can get up by the side of Jesus Christ, and see
things through His eyes and from His station, it
will be as when a man climbs a mountain, and the

little black line, as it seemed to him when looked

T 2

276

Piflures and Emblems.

' •

at from the plain, has risen up into a great cliff,
and all the big things down below, as they seemed
when he was among them, have dwindled. That
white speck is a palace ; that bit of a green patch
there, over which the skylark flys in a minute, is a
great lord's estate.

91. Like some sea-anemone that gathers in its
tentacles and shuts itself up over its prey, so that
you cannot shove a bristle into the lips ; your hearts
may close over your earthly good in such a posi-
tion, so tight, and desperate, and obstinate, that
God's grace and His proffered gifts have no chance
of finding their way into your hearts at all.

92. Like some of those rivers that disappear in
a subterranean tunnel, and then emerge into the
light again ; the life that sinks out of sight in the
valley of the shadow of death will come up into a
brighter sunshine beyond the mountains, and it will
be running in the same direflion that it was run-
ning in when it was lost to mortal eye.

93. What hindered the runners in that old
Grecian legend when she whom they were pursuing
cast down in the path a golden apple, and they
turned aside and slackened their pace to catch at

Pi5lures and Emblems.

277

94. Styrian peasants thrive and fatten upon
arsenic ; and men may flourish upon all iniquity and
evil, and conscience will say never a word.

95. That our consciences may be enlightened
and set right we want a standard, like the standard
weights and measures that are kept in the Tower
of London, to which all the people in the little
country villages may send up their yard measures,
and their pint pots, and their pound weights, and
find out if they are just and true.

96. Christ upsets the world's standard of value
as one might do who went among savages whose
only medium of currency was cowrie shells, and
putting these aside, let them see that there was
gold and silver in the stones that were kicked about
by their feet.

97. One grain of love to God and likeness to
Him will outweigh, in its power to enrich, a whole
California of gold.

98. The smallest soul is bigger than the biggest
fortune. Dives' riches are too poor to satisfy
Lazarus. All the wealth of all the Rothschilds is
too little to fill the soul of the poorest beggar that
stands by their carriage door with hungry eyes.

99. We are like the Indians that live in rich gold

278

Pi5lures and Emblems.

countries, who could only gather the ore that
happened to lie upon the surface or could be washed
out of the sands of the river. But, in this great
Christ there are depths of gold, great reefs and veins
of it, that will enrich us all if we dig, and we shall
not get it unless we dig.

100. Death sets the solitary in families. We
are here like travellers plodding lonely through the
night and the storm, and then crossing the threshold
into the great hall full of friends.

1 01. Men will be sorted yonder. Gravitation
will come into play undisturbed ; and the pebbles
will be ranged according to their weights on the
great shore where the sea has cast them up, as they
are upon Chesil beach down there in the English
Channel, and many another coast besides ; all the
big ones together and sized off to the smaller ones,
regularly and steadily laid out.

102. Men in Dantesque circles were only made
more miserable because all around them were of the
same sort, and some of them worse than themselves.

103. Conscience is like the light on the binnacle
of a ship ; it tosses up and down along with the
vessel. We want a steady light yonder on that
headland, on the fixed, solid earth, that shall not
move as we move, nor vary at all.

Pifiures and Emblems.

279

104. When Paul felt himself very near his end,
he yet had interest enough in common things to
tell Timothy all about their mutual friend's occu-
pation, and to wish to have his books and parch-
ments.

105. Scaffoldings are for buildings; and the
moments, and days, and years of our earthly lives
are scaffolding.

106. Like as in northern lands, where there is
only a week or two from the melting of the snow
to the cutting of the hay, the whole harvest of a
life may be gathered in a very little space, and all
be done which is needed to make the life complete.

107. Every Christian man must be lonely.
After all communion, we dwell as upon islands
dotted over a great archipelago, each upon his
little rock, with the sea dashing between us ; but
the time comes when, if our hearts are set upon
that great Lord, whose presence makes us one,
there shall be no more sea, and all the isolated
rocks shall be parts of a great continent.

108. In this world things of little worth have
to be toiled for. Nothing for nothing is the inex-
orable law in the world's markets ; but God sells

28o

Figures and Emblems.

rt-

without money and without price. Life and the
air which sustains it are gifts.

" 'Tis only Heaven can be had for the asking,
' Tis only God that is given away."

109. Men have been asking all through the ages,
•*Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?"
You have tried to climb. Your progress has been
slow, like that of some crawling inse6l upon some
smooth surface — an inch in advance with immense
pains, and then a great slide backwards. But
Heaven bends down to us, and Christ puts down
the palm of His hand, if I may say so, and bids us
step on to it, and so bears us up on His hands.

1 10. A heart that is all agitated, as so many
hearts are, by the cares, and joys, and treasures^
and sorrows of this life, will be like some mountain
lake over which a gust of wind comes, ruffling its
surface and blotting out every refle6lion of sky and
stars. You can only mirror God in the calm sur-
face of a pure and quiet heart.

111. Nothing goes through crystal but light;
and the crystal battlements of heaven will keep out
all the sons of darkness, and all the darkness that
is within them.

112. " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they
shall see God." The impure heart brings a film of

Figures and Emblems,

281

catara6l over the eye ; and the foul heart is hurt by
the light as a diseased eye is.

1 1 3. You cannot lay hands on yourself, and lift
yourself up from the earth, unless you have got
something to lift by, that is fixed outside of you.
No more can a man lift himself up from his sin
unless there be something above him which he can
grasp.

114. It is not enough to wash the hands — the
heart must be clean, and all these dormant evils
that lie within every one of us, like hybernating
snakes in a cave, these must be got rid of somehow
if we are to dwell with God.

115. The children's old riddle :

" Banks full and braes full ;
Gather ye all day you will not gather your handsful,"

to which the answer is " Mist ! " is a very good
designation of the things on which the most of us
set our hearts. And if our hearts are thus set on
vanity, a thing of naught, a piece of emptiness, like
a child's Easter Qgg, sugar outside and nothing
inside, then you cannot get near God.

116. A drop of evil diffused through your heart,

will be like a drop of ink in a bucket, it will take

away the transparency of the water, and prevent it

from refle<5ling the blue above.

ill;

282

PiHures and Emblems.

Wj. When Absolom would not go to Joab
Joab burned his corn, and then Absolom came to
him. When a man will not come to Christ, some-
times He burns his corn, and then, sometimes, the
man comes.

r n

118. You take a hermetically sealed bottle and
put it into the sea, it may float about in mid-ocean
for a century, surrounded by a shoreless ocean, and
it will be as dry and empty inside at the end as it
was at the beginning. So you and I float, live,
move, and have our being in that great ocean of
the Divine love in Christ ; but you can cork up your
hearts and wax them over with an impenetrable
cover, through which that grace does not come.

119. Is your life to be like one of those northern
Asiatic rivers that loses itself in the sands, or that
flows into, or is sluggishly lost, in a bog ? or is it
going to tumble over a great precipice, and fall
sounding away into the blackness ? or is it going tc
leap up into " everlasting day."

120. I beseech you all, and especially you
young people, not to let the world take and mould
you, like a bit of soft clay put into a brick-mould,
but to lay a masterful hand upon it, and compel it
to help you, by God's grace, to be nobler, and
truer, and purer.

Piflures and Emblems.

2S3

121. It is a shame for men to live the lives that
so many among us live, as completely at the mercy
of externals to determine the direflion of their lives
as the long weeds in a stream yield to the force of
the current.

122. The life of a Christian man on earth and
his life in Heaven are but one stream, as it were
which may, indeed, like some of those American
rivers, run for a time through a deep, dark cavern
or in an underground passage, but comes out at
the further end into broader, brighter plains and
summer lands ; where it flows, with a quieter current
and with the sunshine reflected on 'its untroubled
surface, into the calm ocean.

123. If you have Christ in your heart, then life
is possible, peace is possible, joy is possible, under
all circumstances and in all places. Everything
which the soul can desire it possesses. You will be
like men that live in a beleagured castle, and in the
court yard a sparkling spring, fed from some source
high up in the mountains, and finding its way in
there by underground channels which no besiegers
can ever touch.

124. It is a miserable thing to see men and
women driven before the wind like thistle down.
You can make your choice whether, if I may so say,

284

Piflures and Emblems.

you shall be like balloons that are at the mercy of
the gale, and can only shape their course according
as it comes upon them and blows them along ; or,
like steamers that have an inward power that enables
them to keep their course from wnatevcr point the
wind blows ; or like some sharply-built sailing ship
that, with a strong hand at the helm, and canvass
rightly set, can sail almost in the teeth of the wind
and compel it to bear it along in all but the opposite
direflion to that in which it would carry her if she
lay like a log on the water.

! '

If :

ALPHABETICAL INDEX.

(Note. — The Ntimhcr after each subject refers to the paragraph

of the Chapter).

CHAPTER I {page i).

Absence : Its Effect on Love, 91

Alabaster Box : Love's, 47

Alabaster Box : Christ's, 66

Arbiter of Destiny : The, 99

Astronomy in Eaily Time's, 29

Blunders : Their Oiigin, 49

Caring fo~ Christ, 93

Carpet : The worn, 79

Change of Worlds, 15

Character the Arbiter of Destiny, 99

Christ All in All, 33

Christ and History, 75

Christ's Alabaster Box, 66

Christ's Method of Revealing Himself,

65
Christ's Ownership, 24
Christ's Sacrifice : Man's Answer to,

Chrisi'an Life viewed from the Bound-
ary of Two Worlds, 8

Christian Obedience : Its Result, 23

Christian's First Find : The, 88

Citizenship in Heaven, 46

Commonplaces : The Value of, 19, 20

Conscience : Quickened by Righteous-
ness, 36

Conscience : Voice of, 34

Contact with Christ a Revealer of Self,

Coolness necessary to Solidity, loo

Cross, the : Its Shame and Glcry, 63

Death : Nothing lost at, 13

Death of Christ, the : Glory and Shame
of, 67

Death of Christ both Sunset and Sun-
rise, 68

Death : Widespread Repugnance to, 12

Deeds of Greatness, 40

Destiny : Its Arbiter, 99

Devotion : How mea'- »d, 42

Divinest Work : Goo », 30

^^^nniity to Christ : Vanity of, 92

Eternal Rest : On »vhat dependent, 44

External Worship : Tendency of, 6g

Eye of God : Why unwelcome, 8g

Faith : A Trust, 57

Faith fixed too low, 56

Faith : Great and Small, 82

Faith : How influenced, 74

Fear : Its Cause, 59

Fear : Reasons for. 51

Fears : How vanquished, 58

Freedom from Sin, 95

God's Divinest Work, 30

Gymnasium : The World a, i6

Hero of the Bible : The True, 32

History, Life's : How written, 38

Humility : Choice of, 43

Hunger, Spiritual, 25

Insufficiency : Consciousness of, 35

Isolation ; Its Consequences, 54

Judas : Treachery of, 61

Learning : Ignorance of, 77

Leaven, 31

Life, Christian : Viewed from the

Boundary of Two Worlds, 8
Life : Created and Uncreated compared

18
Life, Crown of: Its Relation to Right-

eousness, Q
af :

A hidden Glory at

Life, Spiritual

best, 3

Life : The Outcome of Service, 2
Life's H istory : How written, 38
Light at Eventide, 7
Light : Its Use, 22
Living by Christ, s
Loneliness in the Light of Memory, 50

-*«^;.!.-i.-.c ^, t-.-

286

f '•

Alphabetical Index.

Losing Chrisl : How to ensure, 90
I ove and Absence, 91
Love and Selfwill, 71
Love : Its Promptings, 94
Love Misplaced : Dangers of, 55
ove of Christ focusised in every

Believer, 96
Love's Alabaster Dox, 47
Man's Course, ^4
Memory and Loneliness, 50
Men : Classification of, 39
Motive : Influence of, 86
Nobility : Origin of, 1 1
Obedience, Christian : Its Result, 23
One Step at a Time, 48
Crigin of Blunders, 49
Ownership, Ch'ist's, 24
Perfection : Marks of, 70
Perfection : The Final Condition of

Humr.n Society, 4
Persecution defeating Itself, 27
Pleasure in the Light of the Judgment, 1
Prayer : A Pointed Question on, 79
Prometheus : The true, 76
Providence : Variety of, 60
Rest, Eternal : On what dependent, 44
Retrospection: When consolatory, 17
Right : Abstract Law of, 53
Righteousness in Relation to the Crown

of Life, 9
Sacrifice of Christ : Man's Answer to,

Seeking Truth : Blessedness of, 98
Self: Change of, 15
Selfishness and the Saviour, 28
Separation : How produced, 81
Service : How measured, 45
Solidity : How attained, 100
Spiritual Hunger, 25
Spiritual Life : A hidden Gioiy at

best, 3
Stability : How attained, ^o
Storehouse of Christ, the : How used,

78
Strength in Weakness, 30
Struggles viewed retrospectively, 6_
Superfluous, the : Necessity of Loving,

87 ...

Sympathy : Dependent on Similarity,

83.84
Sympathy : Helpfulness of, 85
Treachery of Judas, 61
Trifles : God's Estimate of, 41
Trust : Always the Same, 73
Truth : B'.essednes of Seeking for, 98
Unexpected, the : Certainty of, 52
Vice Ruling : Its Meaning, 21
Vine, the : Its Ne^d, 72
Will : Responsibility of, 26
Work : What makes it Great, 10
World a Gyi.inasium, 16
World: Change of, 15
Worship, External : "Tendency of, 69

CHAPTER IT {page 29).

Acts of Faith : Repetition of, 83

Affin'.ties : Christian, 28

Age of the Biblet : The, 93

Aimlessness, 34

Anchor : The, 96

Angels and the Rabbis : The, 75

Assailants, Literary : Often overeati-

mated, 91
Attraction of Love : The, 23
Bible Pictures : Reality of, 72
Bible : Jewish reverence lor, 92
Book : The youngest and oldest, 93
" Brought forward": Why should the

Debt be? 49
Buildings : Divine and Human, 77
Call : The Blessed, 25
Capacity for God : Man's, 65
Capacity our only Limitation, 15, 16
Character : How made, 48
Christ : Where is He ? 89
Citizenship : The True, ^o

Clea'.'ing to the Lord : On, 85

Cloud : Kafaelle's, 69

Concentration : Necessity of, 63

Conscience : A dtad, i

Constancy : Divine, 2

Contact and Glow, 71

Conversion a greater Change than

Sanctification, 78
Copies : What else ?
Deafness, Spiritual : Its Cause, 32
Death : Not lost in, 51
Deathlessness of Love : Tlie, 53
Deceitfulness of Sin, 13
Discovery : T'^e Everlasting, 79
Disobedience a>'d Spiritual Deafness, 32
Divine Love rn^ Omniscience, 68
Divine Measurements, 99
Dread, irk relation to Hope, 66
Drifting, 34

Duties, Smallest: What they may
illustrate, 22

^■~-~~

ESI

Alphabetical Index,

287

Earth, a Colony of Heaven, 44

Epitaph : Christ's, 50

Eternity of God : The, 10

Experience and Hope, 54

Eye for Chriiitian Graces : An, 86

Faith : How perfected, 70

Faith's Touch : VicariousHess of, 9

Fear and Hope : inseparablenebb of, 61

Final Struggle, the : its Centre, 87

Finished and tno Unfinished : The, 64

Foreboding and Forecasting, 61

Forecastiiig and Foreboding, 61

Fulness, Divine : Why it varies, 95

Gifts : Their ciualifying Value, 43

God easily Hidden, 37

God : Man's Capacity for, 65

God : Partially Knowable only, 41

God : Self-sufficiency of, 46

Gospel Principles and smallest Duties,

Gospel, the : A Deliverer and a Captor,
21

Greatness : Solitude of, 42

Grace determinerl by Need, 3

Grass, Blade of : Contrasted with a
Needle, 82

Habit : Power of, 57

Home : The True, 29

Hope and Experience, 54

Hope and Fear : Inscparableness of, 61

Hunger for God : Blessedness of, 26

Inexhaustibleness : Divine, 70

Jewish Reverence for the Bible, 92

Judgment Day, the, and human Esti-
mates, 19

Life, Christ s : Unity and Sufficiency
of, 80

Lj:'e in unexpectec* Places, 90

Lit-^ : The oympbony of, 84

Life : Uuever tfu'.ness of, 7

Light : Planetary _Trai. '.mission of, 52

Limitation determined by Capacity, 15,
16

Literary Assailants often Overesti-
mated, 91

Literature : Anti-biblical, 94

Loneliness : Its Dangers, 4

Loneliness of Greatness, 42

Looking up, On, 55

Lov3 and Omniscience : Divihe, 68

Love : Attractiveness of, 23

Love : Deathlessness of, 53

Love : Eternal, 8

Love of Christ : Perennial, it

Love : Omnipresence of, 36, 56, 60

Love : Untouched by Time, 59

Love Waxing cold, 98

Love's Ocean, 67

Man's Capacity for Godj 65

Metaphysical, the : Unsubstantialness

of, 40
Mighty God and Prince of Peace :

The, n
Mists : What they can hide, 37
Models : What else ? 62
Needle, a, contrasted with Blade of

Grass, 82
" Not Yet" of Eternity : The, 76
Obedience, Prompt: Meaning of, 35
Ocean of Love : The, 67
Old Debts : On "Bringing Forward,"

49
Omnipresence of God and Christ, 36,

56
Omnipresence of Love : The, 36, 56, 60
Omniscience and Love : Divine, 68
Opposition : Value of, 97
Plodding : Its Difficulties, 5
Praise and Blame : How estimated, 24
Professions : Short, 33
Progress : Wherein it consi'its, 83
Promptness : Necessity of, 38
Rabbis and the Angels : The, 75
Radiance of Eternity : The, 31
Rafaelle's " Cloud," 69
Repetition of Acts of Faith : On the, 83
Resolves, fixed : Their practical Need,

33
Retrospect : The Wrecks of, 58
Reverence for the Bible : Jewish, 92
" Rooted" in Him, 81
Salvation by Fire, 14
Salvation, Well of : An Artesian Well,

39
Sanctification not so difficult as Con

version, 78
Saved, but by Fire, 14
Seeking Evermore, 29
Seen versus Unseen : The, 45
Shipwreck : In Harbour, 6
Sin : Deceitfulness of, 13
Small Things : Day of, 7*;.
Solitude of Greatness, 42
Stca.dfabtnuss of God : The, 75
Struggle, the Final : Centre of, 07
Symphony of Life : The, 84
'1 emptatiun : Growth of, 47
Time : Inability of, 59,
Unbelief: How destroyed, 100
Unfinished and the Finished : The, 64
Vines and Branches : Their one Life, 88
Well of Salvation : An Artesian Well,

39
Work : Divine and Human, compared,

82
Wreckage of the Past : The, 58
Youth of the Bible : The, 93

X 2

-I' ■

if
(I

288

AlpJiahctical Index.

CHAPTER III {page 58).

Ability : Confidence of, lo I

Anaesthesia of the Soul : The True, 27 1
Arrangement, Lifeless : On, 4S
Arrow : The One Need of the, 52
Awaking: First Instinct of, 14
Beholding Christ : On, 85
Being : The Gradation of, 66
Beneficence and Fulness : On Divine,

47
Blessing : Showers of, i6
Blindness, Spiritual : Requisites for

Curing, 38
Caged In : On being, 72
Capacity Determined by Desire, 19
Challenges : Not always to be accepted,

7
Channels of Help, 33
Church's Progress : The, 15
City Life: Spiritual Influence of, 11
Clouds : Behind the, 64
Communion and Unity : Pre-human

Existence of, 37
Compassion the Cause of Fruitfulness,

32
Compassion, Sigh of: Its Antecedent,

Concentration : Necessity for, 88

Conscience and Heart : On the, 82

Control of Self: Necessity of, 41

Cross : The Shadow of the, 31

Crown of Life : The, 56

Dawn : The Herald of, 5

Deep : On Launching into the, 57

Deniers of the Faith : Not always to
be Heeded, 7

Depths : Down into the, 20

Desire and Capacity, 19

Details : God's Care of, 81

Dew : God's, 71

Difficulties : On Magni.ying or Dimi-
nishing, 58

Drudgery : Cure for, 95

Effort ; Teaching of, 9

Elasticity of Trust, 97

"Excelsior !" 80

Faith : According to our, 26

Faith in Extremest Need, 96

Faith : Omnipotence of, zS, 53

Force : Increase of Necessary, 34

Forethought : Christ's, 65

Fruitfulness Determined by Compas-
sion, 32

Fulness and B»neficence : On D.vine,

47
Garden : Life not a, 55
Gentleness : Power of. 74

Germination : The Secret o 29
Glad Labour always Productive, 24
Glory that Excelleth : Where to see, 79
Gospel and Joy : The, 18
Ciradation of Being : "The, dd
Happiness, Heavenly : Not arbitrarily

fixed, 67
Heart and Conscience ; On the, 82
Heait, the : Unaffected by Difference

of Dress, 44
Help : Channels of, 33
Herald of Dawn ; The, 5
Hiding from Ourselves, on, 75
Hiding in God : On, 30
Honest Work : Power of, 8
Hurry : Futility of, go
Hurry : The Result of, 87
Idolatry contrasted with Worship, 60
Ignorance and Learning : On, 49
Impartiality of God ; On the, 83
Incapacity, Spiritual : Causes of, 42
Incredible : The, 100
Instruments : God's, 36
Joy of the Gospel : The, 18
Labour, Glad :_ Always Productive, 24
Languor, Spiritual, i
Learning preferable to Ignorance, and

Righteousness to both, 49
Life : Not a Garden, 55
Life, City; Spiritual Inlluence of, 11
Lifeless Arrangement : On, 48
Loneliness of Christ, 12
I<ook that removes Difficulties : The, 54
Miserliness of Christ : The, 94
Missions, Christian : Are they Fail-
ures, 43
Monotony : Cure for, 95
Name ; The Imperishable, 62
Needs rarely Wants, 21
Newton's Secret, 91
Ourselves : On Hiding from, 75
Patience of Christ : The, 84
Pentecost not the Church's Hi.-rh Water

Mark, 61
Possibility : The Unexpected, 50
Power, Christ's : Our Joy, 22
Prayer: Echo of God's Promise, 13
Progress, Material : Remorselessnes'^

of, 35
Progress : The Church's, 15
Prophets, False : How to Answer

them, I
Pruning of Self : Necessity of, 41, 89
Purpose about us : God's, 70
Religious Sentiment : Power of the,

Alphabetical Index.

289

Right Hand, Christ's : Beyond the

reach of, 63
Righteousness preferable to Learning,

+9
Sealed, Hermetically : On being, 77
Seed which Germinates : The, 29
Self-control : Necessity of, 41
Self Revealed to Self . On, 76
Service which Ennobles : The, 73
Shadow of the Cross: The, 31
Shaking, Divine : On, 45
Showers of IJlessing, 16
Soul's True An.-estliesia : The, 27
Strength : On Renewing our, 40
Stooping to Conquer : On, 25
Surface : On Coming to the, 59
Thirst, Spiritual : A Plea, 99
Trust : Elasticity of, 97

Try! 6

Unbelief : Contagiousness of, 3S
Unbelief: Its Native Air, 2
Unchangeableness : God's, 3
Unity and Communion : Pre-human

Existence of, 37
Victory : Christ's Final, Assured, 17
Vision : On Differences of, 92, 93
Vision, Spiritual : On Excluding

Hindrances to, 86
Wants rarely Needs, 21
Wishes : Emptiness of, 63
Work and Life : On, 46
Work, Honest : Its Power, 8
Worship and Idolatry Contrasted, 60
Wrestling-ground : Life a, 55
" Youth : Even to Old Age," 69

CHAPTER IV {page 88).

Afiliction : The Coulter of, 98
Antagonisms of Human Life : Their

Result, 27
Apocalypse : Waves and the, 86
Pilessings : Some Common, 6
]>uildingy God's ; On being omitted

from, 93

Fitting the Strength to

Of Fortune and Cha-

Iiurden

the, -x
"I5ut". "the :

racter, 12
Capacity : How Strengthened, 58
Clock : A Floral, 16
Coals of Hell; The. 2t
Confidence : Courage of, 59
Confidence : Or. Wavering, 95
Conduct : The true Standard of, 68
Cross : The Attractions of the, 91
" Cry, their": " He also will hear," i
Death, but the Storm's Expiring

Breath, 74
Debt : The Unknown, 69, 70
Deeds, Perfect : The Loveliness of, 41
Deep : What Underlies the Mighty,

89 > 90
Desires : Cure for Misdirected, 34
Destruction which Follows Pride :

'Lhe, 83
Dignity : On Standing upon our, 5
Disease : The most Dangerous, 60
Downwards : On being Drawn, 71
Ear: On " Bowing Down" the, 2
Eternity : Definition of Impossible, 28
Eternity : Man's Instinct of,
Eternity Unmeasurable, 22
Failures ; On, 54

Faith : Perfection of, 94

Faith : Vitality of, 99

Feelers : The Soul's, 26

Fittest : On the Survival of the, 32

Flood, the : And the Ark, 84

Forgiveness : The Father's Personal
Act, 30

Fulness : The Eternal, 31

Gospel Coinage : Currency of in all
Lands, 45

Grace : Methods of its Discipline, 39

Growth in different Atmospheres, 67

Heart, Human : Luther on the Im-
purity of the, 50

Heavens : The Neglected, 38

Heed : On Taking, 75

Hell : The Coals of, 21

Home, at : Conditions of being, 17

Hope that Quickens : The, 37

Hunger : The Heart's, 24

Inward Work : The Creator's, 51

Jerusalem : Christ's last Journey to, 18

Journey to Jerusalem : Christ's last, i3

Joy : On Earthly, 73

Kingdom : The F.verla'ting, 85

Knowledge of Christ : Its Kssential, 62

Knowledge : On Outgrowing, 81

Light at Eventide, 10

Likeness to Ch'-ist : On, 62

Life : Its Storms, 43, 44

Life : The Fountain of, 76

Life : The Sombre Tints of, 48

Life : The Voyage of, 77

Love Triumphant, 20

Naaman : The Disappointment of, 4

Negligence : Its result, 75

290

Alphabetical Index.

Obedience to Christ : On, 65

Ocean : The Restless, 79

Ownership : Christ's Token of, 63, 64

Pilgrimage : Valley of, 14

Portrait : What makes the Expression

of, <J2

Possibilities : On Dormant, 88

Power : Untamed, 82

Prayer : The Result of Spiritual

Vision, 8
Present, the : On being Overwhelmed

by, 29
Present, the : Not Commonplace, 36
Psalmist's Frontispiece : The, 13
Punishment : The Child's, 30
Riddle : Solving the, 87
Righteousness : A Straight Line, 52
Righteousness : On Christian, 46, 47
Risen Christ : Discrimination of the, 96
Rebellion : Love and, 15
Redemption : Song of, and the Angels,

II
Restlessness : Man's, 23

Revelation : Of Time and Eternity, 66

Self: Power of, 5s

Shadow : Its Refreshment, 40

Ships : Broken, 35

Shore : The Further, 78

Signs : Outward and Visible, ioq

Sin : Not to be Self-healed, 49

Sorrows : Transparency of, 9

Sternness : Hope's, 61

Su bordination ; Naturalness of Human

Survival of the Fittest : On the, 32
Tempest : Obedience to Christ of the,

80
Transformation : The Great Builder's

92
Vanity of \ anities, 57
Via Dolorosa : The. 19
Way (Our Own) : Results ot having,

56
Weight, the, that Crushes the Sou

53
Worldhness : The Demons of, 97

CHAPTER V {page 117).

■^.

1 1 :".■
'.If.

Affections : The Food of the, 21
Angels : The Oldest and Youngest, 63
Breakwater : Life's Effective, 94
Ceremonies : On Lingering, 48
Character : How Made, 25
Chariot, God's : Self-moved, 100
Chastisement: Value of, 79
Child : Susceptibilities of, 2
Church : The Complete, 82, 83, 87
Churches : Where are the Seven, 80
Clouds : Hiding and Revealing, 67
Common Things : Christ's Use of, 6
Crises : Life's, 17
Criticising : The Time for, 12
Danger : Our True, 41
Degeneration : Examples of Human,

74
Delights : Eph ^meral Nature of Early,

56.
Desp- ir : The Cure for, 69
Discord : Its Cause, 47
Earthly Life : Unity of its Various

Stages, 64
Emotions : Adequate Expression of

Deepest, 52
Enjoyment : Present, 19
Experience: Phases of, 60
Faiih in Relation to Death, 54
Faithfulness, God's : An Old Man's

Testimony on, 30

Fire that Fructifies : The, 39

Fire that Purges : The, 38

Fleeces : Dry, 1 1

Eortune : The Wheel of, 26

Fragments : On, 75

Fulness of God : For Whom ? 29

Future, The : Its Relation to the Pre-
sent, 99

Future : the Hopes for, 68

Future : Uncertainty of the, 22

Gift : Source of every, 43

Grace : On Unused, 76

Growth : On, 59

Guardianship : The Pledge of Divine,
40

Guides, False • Killed by, 32

Heaven and Hell : That which makes,

35
Ni're and There : A Contrast, 58
Imperfection : On Human, 71, 73
Inn : On making Room for Christ at, 86
Joseph : The Dying Request of, 85
King : Relatives of t_he,_ 72
Lamps : On Extinguishing our, 81
Laziness : The Unmanliness of, 96
Life : The only Strength of, 28
Light : Its daily Products, 10
Light : The Silence of, 90
Lights in the Darkness : On Being,

Alphabetical Index.

291

" Human

Love and her bright Children, 46

Love : Primary and Secondary, 42

Mail : The True Coat of, 5

Man : Smallness and Greatness of, 70

Manhood : The Inclusiveness of Per-
fect, 51

Mercy, Effects of, determined by the
Character of the Recipient, 1

Motion : On constant, 65

Motor : Life's True, 45

Ointment : Life's Precious, 93

Old Age : Fruitfulness in, 53

One Against Many, 88

Pastor and People : A Thought for, 92

Peace : Stolen by Desire, 31

Present : Of value only if there is a
Future, 98

Progress : Inevitable Changes of, 61
and 62

Poverty and Riches : What Constitutes,
16

Resting in God : On, 23

Results : Certainty of, by-and-bye, 8

Robe : The Best, 4

Seeds which We may Sow, 7

Shining : The Christian's Work, 97

Shortsightedness : Human, 44

Silence of the Soul : On the, 24

Silent unto God : On Heing, 34

Souls : On Towering, 89

Steps: "Ordered." 18

Surface Religion : On, 33

Sympathy : The Vibrations of, 49

Tasks: Men's Unfinished, 13

Temple : The Forsaken, 77

Time : The Descructiveness of, 57

Transfiguration : Christ's, 66

Union : On the Strength of, 78

Unseen, the : How it is to Rule us, 95

Vessels : On Seaworthy, 27

Will, Human : Master and Servant, 20

Work : A Hand in the, 14

Work, Preparatory : All Represented

in Final Issue, 15
Work : Two Ways of Looking at, 9
Worship : The Higliest Form of, 50
Youth : Discipline of, 55
Youth : The Plasticity of, 3

CHAPTER VI {page 145).

Pre.

Acquiescence : On Lazy, 91

Ark of God : Twofold Influence of, 49

Beholding : Changed by, 29

Beholding Christ : On, 27

Blotting out the Past : On, 26, 30

Break by the Way : The, 51

Castor and Pollux, 70

Change : Universality of, 77

Character : On Transparency of, 34

Christ in Us : On, 9-

Christ : Twofold Effects ofthe Workof,

48 . .

City: No Continuing, 4
Clasping Hands across the Centuries :

On, 3
Crookedness : On Moral, 23
Curtain : When to Use the, 28
Death in the Midst of Life, 32
Death : The Christian's Friend, 73
Death : What it Blots out, 64
Determination ; Nothing without, 7
Discipline :_0n Unfruitful, 22
Discrimination : On, 93
Disenchantment : Spiritual, 72
Dissatisfaction : Growth and, 14
Dunces : On Spiritual, 98
Excitement : Useless, 50
Firmness : The Guard of Hohness, 16
Forerunner • The Great, 86

Food : The Soul's Necessary, 10
Foundation of Life : The Sure, 13
Future : Christ's Will and Our, 71
Gift : Christ's, 94
God: The Measure of for us 57
Growth : Dissatisfaction and, 14
Habits : On, 60
Heart : Deceitfulness of the, 8
Here and TJure : A Contrast, 65
Hopes : Misplaced, 63
How Christ Disturbs us, 99
Indifference : The Obstruction of, 85
Incense and Prayer : Emblems of

Christian Life, 84
Iristability: CoiUemptibleness of, 45
Life : Speed of Modern, 66
Life : On Beginning the New, 24
Life : Only a Discipline, 6
Life : The Fairest ever Lived, 75, 76
Life : The Work of our, 87
Life : What it Hides, 81
Light : Morning and Noontide, 40
Likeness : Produced by, 35
Little : The Greatness of the, 95
Looking Christward : On, 54
Low Diet and Result, 44
Magnetism : On Divine, 36
Mark : On Pressing towards the, 61, 62
Memory : Best Use of, 56

292

A Iphabciical Index.

\ \

.11

il;

Mind : The Finiteness of the Human,

. 31

Moments : Value ot, 59

Multa in Uno, 41

Not Done : What God has, 82

Past : Irrecoverableness of, 20

Past : On Forgetting the, 55

Paul: The Literary Style of, 39

Penitence : I'lessedness of True, 21

Perfect : Not yet, 38

Pillow : St. John's, 47

Prayer and God's Promise, 69

Prayer : Definition of, 33

Prayers : Infinite Possibilities of, 15

Psalmist : The Teachings of the, 9

Purpose : On Singleness of, 53

Reflection: On Spiritual, 17, 18, 19

Resistance to Evil : On, 88

Routine : Its Deadening Influence,

54 ^. ,
Saul : A Simile, 12
Self-reliance : On, 92

Sentinels : True Attitude of, 58

Singleness of Purpose : On, 53

Sleep : A Heavy, 79

Sleep : The Activities of, 78

Slowness of God : The, 83

Spiritual Nourishment in Early Days,

2
Stability : How Attained, 46
Steadfastness : On, 89
Struggle : The Victorious, i
Theme of the Prophets : The True, 74
Treasures : Real and Unreal, 80
Trifes : Sharp Practice in, n
Union : On Perfect, 96
Unseen, Unheard, Unconceived, 5
Vapours : On Earth-born, 43
Vessel : Christ in Our, 42
Voice : The Power of God's, 100
Volition : On Weakness of, 90
Watchman : Qualification for a, 67, 63
Wronp-doing ; A Blunder, as well as

Sin, 25

CHAPTER VII {pai^c 175).

Absorbed : On being Blessedly, 37
Angels : Oldest and Youngest, 58
Association : Sacredness of. 25
Bereavement : True Use of, 35
Bread : Its Use, 6
Captain of the Lord's Host : As, 98
Classification : Superficialness of Hu-
man, 31
Clearing ; The Needful, 36
Cleaving : The Need of, 97
Command : The Irresistible, 9
Contrast : A Healthy, 77
Courage : On Fraternal, 86
Cries of Sorrow : Where to Place them,

64
Cross : On Clinging to the, 92
Danger : Cause of, and Absence of, 94
Darkness : On Heeding not the, 47
Darkness : Not to be Heeded, 41, 42
Dawn : Signs of its Approach, 65
Defences: Surrounded by, 4
Difficulties : Why they Conquer us, 74
Dwelling-place, the, of all Generations,

29.
Electric Light, the : A Comparison, 54
Emotion and Erhaustion, 78
Enchantment, the : Borrowed from

Distance, 88
Endeavour : Need for Constant, 52
Energy of Dew and Rain, 13

! E(|uality : A Strange, 38

[ Eternity: Riches of, 61

j Evil : How it is Consumed, i

Fancies : On Following our, 100

Fear: Neither Need nor Room for, 17
^ Fears: Singing Oneself out of, 66

Fleeing to God : On, 63

Gifts, Neglected : A Slight and Dis-
honour to the Giver, 83

Gifts of God : Scrutinising the, 73

Gladness : The Secret of, 3

Happiness : On the Waste of, 84, 85

Helper : The Everlasting, 2

Hope : Buoyancy of, 10
j Hope : The Light of, 44, 45

Hope : The Lustre of, 24
; Hope : The Presence of, 39
I Hopelessness of Hope without Christ,

i '9 .

, Journey : Equipped for the, 68, 69, 70

Life from the Regions of Death, 20

Light of the Ages : Central, 11

Matter : Mystery of, 16

Mirrors : God's, 76

Money : On the "Ownership" of, 21

Music : On Excluding the World's, St
I Obscurities: The Way in which they
I Vanish, 99

Our Life : Fleeting Nature of, 26
. Path of the Just : The, 60

Alphabetical Index.

293

Perdition : Humiliation of, 12

Power : A Limit to our, 55

Presence of God : Suitable to Capacity,

8
Providence : On so-called " Special ,"

43
Prophecy : The Perfection of, 33
Rain : The Gracious, 46
Retrogression : On the Impossibility of,

Retrospect : The most Cheerless, 27
Sea : The Troubled, 5
Silence : Omnipotence of, 7
Silent before God : On being, 82
Sinfulness : Unnaturalness of, 18
Smoke : How to Drive it Away, 96
Soul : Infinity of the, 23
Speaker : The Careful, 89
Staff of God : Leaning on, 91
Storehouses ; Hidden, 48
Strength equal to Needs, 57
Strength of God : Means Need of Ser-
vants, 56

Strength : The Inexhaustible, 53
Succour : On Watching for the Ex-
pected, 95
Succour : Why we Lose, 71, 72
Tastes, Earthly : On Subduing, 40
Temptations ; When to expect them, 93
Thunder-clouds: On Conquering the, 90
Time : The Dignity of, 28
Time : The Steady March of, 1 5
TriHes : Power of, 51
Troubles : The Side of, which gives

their Meaning, 67
Unselfishness : On, 14
Vision : " Persistence" of, 34
Voice of God : On Excluding, 75
Waiting for the Lord : On, 62
Waiting for God : On, 79
Wear and Tear : Its Inlluence, 50
Will, Human : Should be the Echo ot

God, 80
Writer : Life's Manifold, 32
Years, Past : What have they done for
Us? 59

CHAPTER VIII {J>age202).

Anger, God's : His Baffled Love, 26

Anxiety : Shame of, 97

Blessings : Blossoms of, 83

Care : God's Tender, 43

Circles : Uniformity of, 93

Danger : Protection in, not from, 42

Darkness : Light out of, 2

Death : A Simile, 84

Death : Life in, 5

Defence : Jacob's, and its Emblems, 13

Devoted Life : How Fed, 44

Disappointment of Christ : The, 21

Disappointment : Christ's " Yet " of, 29

Distance : On following at a, 8

Dream : The Universal, 19

Duties, Small : Greatness of, 91

Duties, Small : Faithfulness in, qi

Energy, Divine : Present and Past,

Excitement: Its Meritless Stimulus,

89
Faith and Fear : The Blending of, i
Faith : On Victorious, 3
Faithfulness : Unity of, 99
Falling by Little and Little : On, 85
Familiar : Our Preference for the, 5 1
Fear : The Source of, 74
Firmness of Hand : On, 24
Giving all : On, 37
Glory : The more excellent, 53

Grief : Christ's greatest, 23

Guide : The Trusty, 7

Hand : From the same, 71

Heat, Tropical : Preferable to Arctic

Stillness, 25
Hiding-place : The only, 4
Hope : Visions of, when Smiling, 70
Husbandry : Good, 33
Immortalised : On being, by New

Testament, 30
Joy : Where it may grow, 66
Knowledge of the Truth : How mis3cd,

T- 52

Life : A Feast in a Fight, 72
Life : What it is made up of, 62
Lord's Prayer : The, 45
Magnitude : How formed, 95
Mahanaim : The Modern, 47
Masonry of each Generation : On the,

15
Material Good : Heathenishness ot

over-estimating, 98
Memory : Mellowing Influence of, 69
Miracles : The Lord's, 59
Misery : On Universal, 60
Motion, Perpetual : Rest in, 79
Mysteries of the Gospel, 57
Oasis in the Desert : The, 76
Ocean : The mighty, 54
Opposition : At every Step, 100

294

Alphabetical Index.

■

Patience of Christ : Matchlessness of,

36.
Perfection : Quality, not Size, 92
Perversity: Unbelief of, 22
Pillar : The Guidinc, 6
Plants : Which God nas not planted, 56
Pleasure-bound : On be"ng, 9
Providence : The Punctuality and

Omniscience of, 55 _
Purpose of God concerning us : The, 49
Refreshment Divine : Hov Adminis-
tered, 78
Restfulness of God's Being, 88
Rest that Remaineth : The, 64
Roads : On diverging, 86
Running before being Sent: On, 14
Self-constraint: On, 90
Sheep : The Way they are led, 68
Sin: Christ's Feelings on Beholding,

Sm_: Deep-rootedness of, 94
Solidarity of the Human Race : On

the, 61
Solitariness of Christ : On the, 35
Soul : Basis of the, 31
Stagnation : Evils of, 34
Steadfastness of Old Age : Beauty of,

32
Stem and Foliage : A Contrast, 28

Stillness of Trust : On the, 82
Storehouses of God : Contents of, 50
Strife : Protection /«, not from, 42
Sufficiency of God : Manifold Aspects

of, 46
Sunset Clouds, and their Prophecies,

80
Sunset Glow, 12

Sunshine than Darkness : More of, 77
Surface : On looking Beneath the, 81
" Suum Cuique," 18
Talents : On the Deterioration of, 39
Temple Lichts : On some, 16
Thieves : Little and Big, 87
Training for Life's Battle : On, 20
Transfiguration, Mount of : A Lodging,

not a Home, 75
Transfiguration : On leaving the Mount

of, 58
Transformation : God's, 65
Trust : On the Stillness of, 82
Unbelief : Perversity of, 22
Unwatchfulness : Fatality of, 38
Veil, the : Hiding and Revealing, 17
Vision : DilTerences of, 40, 41
Weakness : Luther's sense of, 1 1
Weak : The Place of the, 48
Wilderness : The Table in the, 67
Workers with God, 73

CHAPTER IX (^pao:e 225).

11 il •!

Affections : New and Old, 2
Aflliction : Temporary Nature of, 97
Annoyances : On Petty, 94
Anxiety ; Vanity of, 4
Attributes of Christ : How learned, 50
Bible : The Theology and Morality of

the, 16
Brain : Conscience Bribing the, 28
Business without God : On, 85
Character : On Natural, 76
Christ : Magnetic Power of, 48
Christian Life : What it is Like, 74
Christian, the : What he Carries, 88
Circulation : Worn by long, 43
Conscience : The Universal Work

of,

32
Darkness

Light in the, 34
Death no Purifier of Sin, 82
Deeds, Eternal ; Effects of, 57, 58
Detective : The Sure, 29
Doubt : The Road to Despair is, 84
Eternity : Earth seen from, 65
Evidences : How to Bright'jn the, 90
Explanation of Life : The True, 35

Faith and Love : Their Logical and

Living Order, 47
Faith, our : Its Props, 95
Faith, Small, and Little Gladness, 77
Faith : The Act of, 44
Fear : Nothing to, 25
Fear : Right use of, 26
Force, Mental : On, 51
Forerunner : Traces of the, 96
Foundation which gives Satisfaction :

The, 31
Fountain, the : Why it plays, 37
Gladness, Christian : Invulnerability

°*^' S3 . . ,

Gospel : On Rejectmg the, 20

Guides : Wayside, 38

History, Human : The Clue of. 36

Inheritance : The Earnest of the, 81

Irrecoverable : That which is, 92

Joy or Sorrow : Complementary of each

other, 73

Legend : I'he Clear yet Unseen, 40

Life's Superlative : On, 87

Life : The Colouring Matter of, 75

Alphabetical Index.

295

Light : Its Power, 18 1

Love, our : Nothing but an Echo of I
His, 41 _ j

Love : VVhat it Springs from, 30 !

Memory : Its Place in the next World,

55 I

Memory : Marvels of, 61, 62, 63, 64 j
Mirth: The Mask of, 29 |

Motives : Antagonistic, 27 1

Ocean^ the, and the Stream, 67
Opposition to the Gospel : Utter Vanity \

of, 2T

Past : Thoughts of the Dead, f 6 .

Perversion : Possibilities of, 6 i

Poison : Distilled from Fairest Flowers,

5 !

Possibility, the : Too Bare to be risked,

42 i

Powder : Ground to, 24 |

Prerogative : On Man's, 51
Prosperity : Secret of Spiritual, 1
Recollection f Mystery of, \3o
Remembrance : On Efforts at, 100
Reverence the Completest Cure for

Error, 15
Right to claim God as ours : On the,

79
Rock of Ages: On Assaulting the, 21
Sad Heart, the : Soonest Tired, 53
Self-accusation : On, 83
Shallowness: On Human, 17
Sin : A Blunder, 14

Sin only a Cloud, 86
Sin : Transformations of, 8, 12
Sin : Hollowness of, 7
Solitude not Peace, 13
Sonship : The must of, 98
Sorrow : On the Growth of, 56
Sovereignty of Christ : How pro-
claimed, 49
Stain : The Indelible, 63
Sufferer : The Unique, 93
Temptation : Madness o\, 10, 11
Tenderness in Using the Scourge : On,

91
Thirsts: The Two, 71
Thoughts : On the Reappearance of,

59
Thoughts of God : What some do with

the, 33
Thoughts : On the Solemn Quiet of, 72
Timidity : On Religious, 78
Tomb : The Angels and the, 99
Transformation : Love's great, 70
Trust : Always the same, 45
Trust in Christ and Self-distrust Illus-
trated, 46
Truth : Facts of, 3 _
Unibreseen : Certainty of the, 9
Vigour : On Smiting with, 54
Vision : Cause of Dimness of, 63
Witness : The Spirit's, 89
Work : The Highest Motive to, 80
World, the : How to Win it, 22

CHAPTER X {page 252).

Aimless Life : The Disgracefulness of,

72
Alienation the Cause of Doubt, 14
Aqueduct : The Incarnation an, 23
Arguments : The Weakness of some,

67
Avalanches : How they Begin, 76
Beauty : On Dead, 84
Bethels of Human Experience : The,

60
Christ : Inexhaustibleness of, 30
Christ : The Weeping, 35
Christ : Why some Men come to, 117
Christ's Life : The Contrasts of, 77
Christianity : The Sum of, 75
Clearness and Mist : On, 5
Commander : The Successful, 73, 74
Conduct : The High Level of, 10
Conscience : The Silent, 94
Convictions : Unheeded, 51
Creeds and Arguments, 71

Dark Hours : A Thought for, 52
Darkness : On Self-produced, 24
Dead while Living, 29
Death : What is it ? 1, 2, 3
Dew-drops and Planets, 62
Differences and Facsimiles, or Life and

Mechanism, 66
Direction : The Wrong, 1 8
Discipline : Fruitfulness of, 65
Dynamics; A Lesson in Spiritual, 113
Education : Love's, 17
Evil : Power of, n6
Externals : At the Mercy of, 121
Eye ; The Power of an, 70
Flower-slips : On Planting, 48
Focus : Mercy's, 83
Fortress or Prison : Which? 12
Fragrance : On Christian, 49
Future : The Hidden, 22
Genius and Grace, 54
Given Away : The only Possession, 108

u ?

! i !

296

Alphabetical Index.

Glory : The Transrormlng, 16

Going Astray : On Seeking that which

is, ij
Gravitation : On Spiritual, loi
Guiding Star : The, 25
Heaven : The Shadow of, 8
Heart : The Crater of the, 57
Heart : A Clean, 114
Heavens and God's Kicrcy : The, 37
High-tides : On Occasional, 7
Hindrance : The Runners', 93
" Holiness to the Lord ": On, 61
Ignorance sometimes Tolerable, at
Imagination : Fruitlessness of, 20
Impurity : Its Blinding Influences, 112
Infiniteness of Christ, 87
Influence : Christ's Disturbing, 96
Joy for Evermore : Fulness o^ 32
Life, Christian : The Unity of in Time

and Eternity, 122
Life : The Fountain of, 28
Life's Harvest : The Si*ason of, 106
Life's Possibilities with Christ in the

Heart, 123
Lifting up Christ : On, 66
Light : The Fixed, 103
Light : The Infallible Method of

getting, 26
Light's Penetration : On, 1 1 1
Love and Gold, 97
Mercy : A Simile, 41
Mercy of Christ : Energy of the, 80
Misery : On the Increase of, 102
Money : On Ill-spent, 36
Motive: The Highest, 11
Normans and Saxons, the : A Con-
trast, 12
Ocean : "The Unsailed, 86
Omniscience of Christ : The, 63, 64
Poor in Affluence : On being, 34
Poverty: On being Rich in, 34
Proportions : True, 90.

Providence and Modern Thinkers, 13
Question : A Pointed, 69, 78
(Juiciness of Heart : Clod's Mirror, iic
Rays : Love's Fiery and Golden, 85
Religion : Oa Every-day, 9
Riches : Not always Gain, 82
Riddle : The Children's, 115 _
Righteousness , God's : A Simile, 39,

40, ^2, 43
ScalToldings : Life's, 105
Sea : The Obscurity of, 38
Sea-anemones : A Simile, pi
Sealed : On being Hermetically, 178
Self-sacrificing Love of Christ : Tne,

46
Shepherd : Why He seeks the Sheep,

81
Smallest Things : God's Greatness in,

55
Sorrow of the World : Unfruitfulness

of, 68
Soul : Greatness of the, 98
Standard, a : Needed by conscience, 95
Stooping of Heaven to Earth : On the,

109
Stupidity : Sure Cure for Spiritual, 47
Sunshine and the Crowbar, 88
Surface : On Coming to the, 50
Terrors : The Name which Silences
Threshold : On Crossing the, 100
Tunnel : The Subterranean, 92
Unseen : The Goodness of the, 33
Voyage : Not Wanted on the, 19
Wealth : Littleness of, 98
Will : The Unfailing, 27
Wind : On being driven before the, 124
Wings : On Living beneath God's, 31
Work : The Divine Reason for, 6
World : On being Moulded by, 120
World : On Deliverence from the, 58
Worship and Sacrilege, 44, 45
Your Life : What is it like ? 119

lie

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