SQLite format 3@  ii!%%atableTopicsTopicsCREATE TABLE Topics (Title NVARCHAR(100), Notes TEXT)0WiU01 Passport at the Gate{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 PASSPORT AT THE GATE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\pa3q00 Hospice of the Pilgrim{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 &| b K4%$e0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 HOSPICE OF THE PILGRIM\endash THE GREAT REST-WORD OF CHRIST\par by John MacDuff, 1891\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened,\par and I will give you REST." \endash Matthew 11:28\par \par Preface\par MacDuff HOP: 01 Passport at the Gate\par MacDuff HOP: 02 The Pilgrim Vision\par MacDuff HOP: 03 The Door of Entrance\par MacDuff HOP: 04 The Chamber Called Peace\par MacDuff HOP: 05 The Hospice of Trust\par MacDuff HOP: 06 The Divine Fatherhood\par MacDuff HOP: 07 The Resurrection and the Life\par MacDuff HOP: 08 Rest in Service\par MacDuff HOP: 09 Hospice Watchers\par MacDuff HOP: 10 Beyond the Valley\par MacDuff HOP: 11 The Gate Wide Open\par MacDuff HOP: 12 A Hospice in Mysterious Dealings\par MacDuff HOP: 13 Rest in the Crucified\par MacDuff HOP: 14 The Pilgrim's Security\par MacDuff HOP: 15 The Unknown Morrow\par MacDuff HOP: 16 Hospice Foundation\par MacDuff HOP: 17 Hospice of the Mourner\par MacDuff HOP: 18 Voices of the Glorified Rest-giver\par MacDuff HOP: 19 The Meek and Lowly Pilgrim\par MacDuff HOP: 20 The Reassuring Voice\par MacDuff HOP: 21 The Earthly and the Heavenly Hospice\par MacDuff HOP: 22 The Hospice Outlook\par MacDuff HOP: 23 The Pilgrim's Confidence\par MacDuff HOP: 24 The Final Welcome\par MacDuff HOP: 25 Misgiving Rebuked\par MacDuff HOP: 26 Rest of Forgiveness\par MacDuff HOP: 27 Fellowship with the Father and the Son\par  MacDuff HOP: 28 Rest in the Holy Spirit\par MacDuff HOP: 29 Hospice of Prayer\par MacDuff HOP: 30 Final Rest and Beatific Presence\par \par \par PREFACE\par \par "The heart never rests until it finds rest in You."\par "You only are rest."\par "Let my heart, a great ocean swelling with\par billows, be calm in You."\par "Fix there, then, your resting-place, O my soul!"\par \endash Sentences from Augustine.\par \par Who, in their memories of Switzerland and Italy, can fail to recall the HOSPICES for storm-beaten travelers which stud the higher and more perilous passes? One specially dwells in recollection, possibly because it was the first seen--the familiar hospice in the Pennine Alps; bringing still before us, though half a century has elapsed, the experience of pitiless sleet and darkness outside; and of log-fires, shelter, and genial fellowship inside. Others of more primitive form are constructed of pine or blocks of rough-h ewn granite; at times with a motto or word of welcome surmounting their porches.\par \par Such are surely typical, with a singular significance, of gospel realities--GOSPEL HOSPICES; and peculiarly of One whose motto of golden lettering occupies the prominent place in the pages which follow. It is the monograph of inspired monographs--words which, amid the priceless sayings of Jesus, "the Church throughout all the world" most lovingly clings to, and would be the last to part with--a strain of he avenly music which seems only endeared by repetition, as if the rehearsal brought out ever new and hitherto slumbering harmonies. The heart of humanity throbs responsive to this solitary solution for unrest.\par \par How often has this verse, in many forms and phases, been recognized as an inspired teacher! Its rhythmic syllables have been enshrined in Art, and Music, and Sacred Song.\par \par Into how many millions of aching hearts this saying of Jesus has found entrance, and brought with it the olive-branch of peace? It has formed for six thousand years the response to the cry of weary, care-worn humanity--a cry embracing every nation and every climate, from the yearnings of heathendom to the longings and aspirations of the present hour. From the tumultuous sea of the world's unrest the cry has gone up like a dirge of baffled souls\endash "Oh, where can rest be found?"\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par T his verse has been cherished by fevered toilers in life's weary struggle. Yet in that stern, diversified battle--it may be with the humbling memories, the unrest and agony of conscious sin--in the season of pain and suffering and bereavement, in the loneliness of the supreme hour of all--how often has that word turned the storm into a calm! the weary and heavy-laden, the tearful and the fearful, sobbing themselves to rest in the peace of Christ!\par \par The traveler groping in tempest, with eve ry star apparently swept from the sky, yet looking wistfully amid the blinding hail and drifting snows for some HOSPICE of shelter, is at last able to record his experience--"I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me--refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul. I cried unto You, O Lord--I said, You are my Refuge [Hospice] and my Portion in the land of the living" (Psalm 142:4-5).\par \par As will be seen, the invitation, recorded alone by the first evangelist, is taken as the golden prop which supports many of those other restful words ("rest-texts''), which we owe to the lips of Him who spoke as never man spoke--"The words which I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." The Rock of Ages is one, but its clefts are many; each with its own silent answer to the quest, "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest" (Ps. 55:6). The Sun of heaven is one, but encircled with many attendant stars and satellites. The Gospel Hospice, with its conspicuous motto of 'welcome', is one, but its chambers of repose and refuge are many. In accordance with the true plural rendering of the Hebrew in one of the most precious portions of the Psalter, we can say, as we enter the gracious Hospice for all pilgrims, "Return unto your Rests, O my soul!"\par \par "And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." (Phil. 4:7.)\par \par \par \par \par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } r \par "Whoever shall do the will of My Father who is in heaven, the same is My brother, and sister, and mother." Matthew 12:50\par \par These seem appropriate opening words, addressed to us by the Great Rest-Giver, on entering the Pilgrim-Stronghold. Mother, sister, brother, are names suggestive of the most hallowed Hospices of earthly affection. Earthly love in its depth and constancy is identified with them. When other trusted friendships fail--when other trusted fellowships, like strong mooring cables, suddenly snap asunder, and we are left drifting aimlessly in unsympathetic isolation--the relationships of home and kindred are rendered more sacred and endearing than ever. The world, at times ungenerous, may do its worst; but nothing can diminish or impair the love of father, mother, sister, brother.\par \par The earthly is a parable of the heavenly. Christ offers a divine homestead to all those that do, or--what is all He asks or expects from imperfect natures--who seek to do the will of His Father in heaven. He offers and promises that in Himself the reality of these varied relationships, individually and combined, shall meet. No, more than all--at times through misconception, at times from sadder causes, son may be estranged from parent, brother from brother, sister from sister. But there is a Friend that sticks closer than a brother, or than any human relative. "Come unto Me!"--He offers a sure and abiding Hospice to the orphaned and fatherless, a stormless haven to the tempest-tossed. There is no contingency in His words--"And you shall find rest unto your souls."\par \par If one of the most comforting themes brought into greater prominence in recent times be the Fatherhood of God, so also is this its counterpart and complement--the Brotherhood of Christ. He is linked in communion with universal humanity--"God, yet my Brother; Brother, yet my God." Wondrous thought! that the ties most endearing on earth, the sanctities of the family and home, have their highest and truest expression in the love of the Brother of brothers, the Friend of friends. He knew, surely, the finer impulses of the soul which these varied earthly relationships suggest, who reserved His last benediction for His beloved human mother, and the brother-heart of His dearest apostle.\par \par I may be enabled to appropriate these privileges and enduring fellowships by striving to fulfill the Savior's one stipulated condition--of having my own way and will coincident with the divine, my nature more and more brought into delighted consecration to the service of Him whom it is alike my duty and honor to obey. If there be a fervent desire to do it, that "will" can be done anywhere--everywhere. "In all places I will come unto you and bless you"--in life's public ways, or in life's sequestered by-paths; in its "loud stunning tide" and noisy crowds, or in its enforced silences; in the fever-heats of mart and exchange, or in quiet retirement of the study, or in seclusion of the sick chamber; in the glare of day, or in the hush of night. Nor does the doing of that Father's will involve or exact great efforts or conspicuous deeds. Little services, little self-denials, the conscientious discharge of little responsibilities are acceptable (shall we say, most acceptable?) in the eye of Him who looks not on the outer appearance, but who looks on the heart.\par \par "They also serve who only stand and wait."\par \par "The deeds that He would have me do\par \par Are wrought by love and prayer;\par \par A world of lowly charities\par \par Awaits His servant's care.\par \par I need not seek some high emprise,\par \par Or lofty work for God,\par \par While crowds of simple duties rise\par \par Like daisies from the sod."\par \par Drudging commonplace work, worthily performed, with the right motive and spirit, is transfigured into divine service. Many a common coin may thus be stamped with the image and superscription of heaven. Many a voice feeble with pain and sorrow, may be made to resound with divine music.\par \par One other thought our verse of today suggests. The purest and closest of human relationships--the affection subsisting between mother, sister, brother, taken here by Christ Himself, in the aggregate, as types of "a greater love"--are in themselves, and at the best, precarious, finite, perishable. Death may have defrauded, or at any moment may defraud, the earthly pictures of their charm, leaving only blank memories behind. But the "doers of God's will"--"pilgrims of the night"--in their impregnable, unassailable Hospice, are authorized to make the challenge, embracing this world and the next--"Who shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord?" In Him the earthly and heavenly affections, with their golden links welded together, will be strengthened, perpetuated, intensified in the unblighted Home and Hospice above--the life immortal.\par \par  Meanwhile let me live under the sovereignty of the lofty motive power, the purest and grandest of all spiritual forces, to walk and act so as to please God; inspired with the ambition, not of "serving Him much," but of "pleasing Him perfectly;" following the example of One whose motto was--and never more so than when the shadows of a deeper than this world's darkness were gathering around Him--"Not My will, but may Yours be done!"\par \par O Christ! help me to some feeble reflection of this Your divine consecration; that, accepting the accompanying promise You do here make, I may serve myself heir to these peerless relationships. Knowing by increasing experience that Your service is self-rewarding and self-satisfying, may I be able to say, in Your own prophetic word\endash "I delight to do Your will, O my God--yes, Your law is within my heart."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \par \par \pard\cf1\fs23\par }  "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Blessed are the pure in heart--for they shall see God." Matt. 5:8\par \par To see God! What a Hospice! every window ablaze with Deity!\par \par The Psalmist's ardent aspiration, as he anticipated through the troubled dream of life the morning of immortality, was this--"I shall be satisfied, when I awake with Your likeness" (Ps. 17:15). "Yet in my flesh," said a yet older pilgrim, weary and heavy laden, "shall I see God" (Job 19:26).\par \par But the promise has not a future and heavenly anticipation only. That realizing sight and sense of the invisible, is a present beatitude bestowed on the "pure in heart." To them the unveiling of the divine glory is a special prerogative. It is this transparency of soul which imparts the capacity for "seeing God." We cannot see the splendor of the material sun through the pane of glass blurred with dust and cobwebs. The Divine Being can alone be discerned through the translucent windows of the holy renewed nature. "I shall behold Your face in righteousness." It was the prophet-spectator whose lips were touched with the live altar-coal who could say, "I have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!"\par \par "Come to Me," says Jesus, as He invites to this Hospice, "and I will give you rest." There is a wonderful rest in the conscience void of offence both toward God and toward man. The soul that is the haunt of passion or impurity, seeking rest, can find none. To the owner of a throne, with gilded halls, and lordly surroundings, and an illustrious pedigree--if there be degraded memories and a blemished life--happiness is impossible. We can understand Paul's noble protestation before King Agrippa. Rather "these bonds" with a pure conscience; than a crown on the brow, scarred with dishonor (Acts 26:29).\par \par O Great Rest-Giver, impart this purity of soul, that holiness without which no man can see the Lord. Alas! it is too ofte n nebulous vapors of our own creating--the noisy jars and turmoil of life, its feverish and fretting cares--which dim the Infinite Vision. "But those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength." The higher the spiritual Pilgrim ascends above mist and valley, the more is his moral sight cleared, and he insures the serenity of the soul at peace with God.\par \par Try to build around you a fortress that will render as impossible, as may be a disloyal thought, a lapsed purpose, an unworthy ai!m, an aggrieved and corroded conscience. Let Purity and Love be the two ministering angels which keep the fire burning on the shrine of the heart-temple. Aspire after loyalty to truth and duty. Seek to be able to cherish the memory, not of defeat and failure, cowardliness and surrender--but the happier retrospect of vanquished temptation, struggle ending in victory, the conquests of goodness. Thus under a serene sky may the vision and blessing of the pilgrim patriarch be yours, who, as he paused on his jo"urney, called his Hospice "Peniel"--"for," said he, "I have seen God face to face."\par \par Or the similar realization by faith of a near and ever-present God--the shadow of the Almighty--which nerved Moses in the midst of his wilderness trials, and gave him grace to suffer and be strong. "He endured, as seeing Him who is invisible." It was in his case the ratification of the outset promise--"My Presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest."\par \par While blessed are all thos#e who enjoy this soul-sight, this luminous spiritual vision, it was enjoyed pre-eminently, O Christ, by You! Your heart was the home of unsullied purity. You were the true "Lily of the Valley," without speck or stain on its petals; and, being such, You did know, as none other could, the delight, and "rest," and reality of Your own beatitude. Creature-purity can at the best be a feeble approximation to that of You, the Sinless One; the dim luster of candle or glow-worm compared to the glory of the meridian sun; the finite as compared to the infinite. But seeking as a life-long, habitual aim, to be gradually conformed to Your image, with some good measure of lowly confidence may this be my avowal, combining an earthly and a heavenly meaning\endash "We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } WiU01 Passport at the Gate{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 PASSPORT AT THE GATE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\pa3q00 Hospice of the Pilgrim{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blu 7a02 The Pilgrim Vision{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE PILGRIM VISION\par \par 'ed, and I will give you rest."\par \par "I am the door--by Me if any man enters in, he shall be saved." John 10:9\par \par Where or what is the entrance-gate to these "peaceful habitations," these "quiet resting-places"? (Isa. 32:18)\par \par To this question varied have been the answering voices echoed through the ages. Many--most of these are false, delusive, unsatisfactory--men, like the citizens of Sodom, "wearying themselves to find the door." Naaman's preference for his( Syrian rivers--the streams murmuring amid the groves and gardens of Damascus, and his rejection of the waters of Israel--Jordan and the tributary brooks that fitfully fed it--is a just reflection and picture of the many gropings after the false rest, and the many evasions of the true rest. Some strive to enter through the gateway of ethical system and philosophic code and tenet. Others, through the gateway of human merit. Others through ceremonial observances--fasts and vigils, penances and pilgrimages, )rites and ceremonies, creeds and dogmas, party badges and contrived shibboleths. These, and such as these, are alike spurious and unavailing.\par \par Christ is the true and only true Door of entrance. "Look unto Me, and be saved, all the ends of the earth;" and "neither is there salvation in any other." There was but one way for the Israelites of old to avert the sword of the destroying angel. They might have resorted to measures of their own devising. Massive blocks of stone, immense as those *of the familiar pyramids, might have been piled in front of their dwellings--walled up, for that part, to heaven. They would avail nothing as a substitute for the blood-sprinkled lintels and door-posts.\par \par Again--in the lofty poetry of the prophet, Lebanon might have been transformed into a high altar, its forests of oak and cedar converted into fuel, and the cattle roaming their glades laid thereon as a burnt-offering (Isa. 40:16). All would have been inadequate and worthless. As there wa+s but one door to the ark, one gate to the cities of refuge, so there is, to every seeker and climber, only one entrance to the spiritual Hospice, with its challenge and rebuke to whatever is false and artificial--"This gate of the Lord into which the righteous shall enter." "Come unto ME," says the Divine Rest-Giver; "I am the way, and the truth, and the life."\par \par "To whom, O Savior, shall we go?\par We gaze around in vain.\par Though pleasure's fairy lute be strung,\par, And mirth's enchanting lay be sung,\par We dare not trust the strain.\par You have the words of endless life;\par You give victory in the strife\endash\par In life, in death, alike we flee,\par O Savior of the world, to Thee."\par \par And gracious to every pilgrim is the assurance, that through this solitary entrance all are warranted and all are welcome; no moat or iron gateway to prevent reaching direct the open portal. Thousands have ent-ered in and been saved, and yet there is room.\par \par Other hospices of the world are restricted to privileged classes--the favored few. Not so here. "If ANY man." The sun and the light of heaven are not more free than the offer of salvation. The King has flung wide the gates to the most fainting and toil-worn. No flaming sword of cherubim bars the way. No adversary can obscure or erase the motto and superscription on its portico--"Behold, I have set before you an open door, and no man can shu.t it."\par \par O God, I come, weary and heavy laden, to this sheltering Refuge. If, until now, I have been a stranger to safety and peace, let me hear Your voice, and let faith accept the offer--"Come in, you blessed of the Lord, why do you stand outside?" "Enter in and be saved." The invitation and the promise have lost none of their divine efficacy and gracious music since they were first uttered. There is no other call so reliable; there is no other security so strong. There is no such "fina/lity" in any other of earth's utterances. Time writes its wrinkles all around. What seems most enduring is subject to flux, vacillation, disintegration, decay. The globe itself, as in long past epochs, so even now, is subjected to geological and climatic variations--inappreciably, but none the less surely, to strange alternations of heat and cold. The apparently most stable things are not stable. "The world goes spinning down the ringing grooves of change." The old "hearts of oak," Britain's pride, have g0iven way to iron-sheathed leviathans with their sleeping thunders. The mechanical agencies and triumphs of modern discovery may possibly, before a few decades elapse, have to abdicate in favor of other kingly forces and motive powers, some new dynamics hidden in nature's laboratory.\par \par "Our little systems have their day\endash\par They have their day, and cease to be."\par \par But while other gates of brass may be broken, other bars of iron wrenched asunder, there can b1e no change in the portals of the Gospel Hospice. He who is Himself the Entrance Gate, and who stands holding it in His hand, who opens and no man shuts, whose unwearied invitation is "Knock, and it shall be opened," is "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever."\par \par "Open to me the gates of righteousness--I will go into them, and I will praise the Lord!"\par \par Take me to the fold, is the inarticulate cry of the wanderer of the flock. Take me to the ark, is the 2inarticulate longing of the dove, as, conscious of its homelessness, with weary wing and wailing cry it roams the wilderness of waters. Take me to the Hospice-gate, is the yearning of the belated traveler battling with blinding hurricane of hail or snow. Take me home, take me to my father, is the plaintive monotone of the child that has lost its way in the noisy thoroughfare, unheeded by the passers-by.\par \par Humanity has ever borne attestation to this soul restlessness--that the world at its3 best, with its glittering prizes, glowing visions, and winged ambitions, cannot satisfy. But HE can satisfy; He does satisfy. "And He said unto them, Did you lack anything? And they answered, nothing" (Luke 22:35). How many can joyfully appropriate the words of Bunyan in his great allegory, "When I came at the gate that is at the head of the way, the Lord of that place did entertain me freely, and gave me such things that were necessary for my journey, and bid me hope to the end!"\par \par Many refuges may prove too often refuges of lies, counterfeits, figures of the true. But shielded, guarded, shepherded by Christ, safe in His keeping--safe within the wicket-gate of the Fold and the portals of the Pilgrim-Hospice, may I be able in reposeful confidence to say\endash "My flesh and my heart fails--but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } FFEy!04 The Chamber Called Peace{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fon5 iA03 The Door of Entrance{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE DOOR OF ENTRANCE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burden&6ttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE CHAMBER CALLED PEACE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you--not as the world gives, give I unto you." John 14:27\par \par No diviner or more soothing music than this--the great lullaby of lullabies.\par \par 7 What a Hospice the words must have been for those to whom they were first addressed! The pilgrim apostles, laboring and heavy laden, were about to be overtaken by whelming tempest. Thunder clouds they had little anticipated were at the moment gathering ominously around them. In that valley of the shadow of death they were entering there was no blue opening, no rift in the sky. Their best Friend, as they had been forewarned, was soon to be removed. The voice would soon no longer be heard which was us8ed to say in seasons of depression and sadness, "Come apart into a desert place and rest awhile." They would be left alone to buffet the storm.\par \par But, before the valley-gloom is encountered, the gracious Rest-Giver, in a divine, spiritual sense, utters the conventional greeting--so well known to all Orientals, and specially the Jews--Peace! "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you."\par \par It was a true Hos-peace, "a House of Peace," whose gates He was opening to them9. He who came to give peace on earth welcomes the weary ones in. The customary Jewish salutation conveyed little meaning. It had degenerated into mere formal parlance--no more. "Mine," says Christ, "My promised gift, is no mere verbal form of expression, but a reality."\par \par And, though first spoken to the disciples, it was a farewell promise--a parting legacy for all--for you and for me. Death-bed sayings are always affecting and sacredly treasured. Here is a keepsake intended for the Churc:h and for believers of every age; all the more precious because uttered within shadow of Gethsemane.\par \par The walls of this Gospel Hospice are built of peace of Christ's own procuring--"peace through the blood of His cross." The pilgrim who reaches the threshold of "the chamber called peace, whose windows open to the sunrising," is safe, restful, secure, happy.\par \par "All my favorite passages in the Holy Scriptures," says one of the greatest of our poets in the days of her simpl;est devotion (Mrs. Barrett Browning), "are those which promise and express peace--such as, 'The Lord of peace, Himself give you peace always and by all means;' 'My peace I give unto you--not as the world gives give I;' and, 'He gives His beloved sleep.' They strike upon the disturbed earth with such a foreignness of heavenly music." The last of these she makes the refrain in the most familiar of her verses\endash\par "His dews drop mutely on the hill,\par His cloud above it saileth still<\endash\par More softly than the dew is shed,\par Or cloud is floated overhead,\par He gives His beloved sleep."\par \par "O Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant me Your peace!" Your peace is "not as the world gives." The world's rest, the rest of creature comforts and external blessings, is fitful, uncertain, unstable--ours today, gone tomorrow. Often its greeting is, "Peace, peace, when there is no peace."\par \par And yet, if it be not a=n apparent paradox, "not as the world gives" implies another, almost opposite characteristic; and the thought ought to be one of comfort to many. Let none, in the pursuit of peace, be downcast or discouraged by reason of harassment, mental and moral discords and disharmonies. These are often preludes to truest cadence. If I might venture to expand the thought and illustration of a gifted writer (Professor Elmslie, "Memoir and Sermons," page 291), the world's peace is often not worth the having, just becau>se it takes the shape of an easy-going quiescence--no more. It is alike artificial and superficial. The peace of Christ, on the other hand, that which is best and noblest, frequently comes after conflict and out of conflict. It is a peace which has its travail and birth-pangs--a peace which at times has its pedigree in defeat, baffling enigma, mysterious discipline, bewildering doubt, barely vanquished temptation. Two of the small but beautiful lakes among the Allan hills, near Rome, so peaceful and seren?e, with myrtle and olive trees mirrored in the quiet waters, occupy the craters of extinct volcanoes. Their cradles of rest were rocked by unrest. First, struggle, upheaval--forces of terror and destruction, a seething caldron, then peace. First, wild convulsion and paroxysm; this followed by nature's loveliest pictures and features of repose--"quiet waters," the song of nightingales in the adjacent woods, trails of vine, a cascade of wild roses, a golden canopy of moss and lichen on the surrounding rocks@.\par \par "Not as the world gives," says the great Peace-Giver. "I have chosen you in the furnace [the crater] of affliction." "After you have suffered awhile, establish, strengthen, settle you." "These are those who have come out of Great Tribulation."\par \par Yet, true as this often is, it is equally true that when once the boon of this unworldly peace is secured, how reliable and permanent it is! "The peace of God which passes all understanding, shall keep [as in a stronghold or HAospice] your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." "Keep;" it is the guarantee of security. The promised gift is alike present and future--a peace which the world cannot give, and which the world cannot take away; peace ringing its silver bells in unlikeliest places--in peasant hut and lonely garret, and amid hum of busiest industry, yes, too, even amid uncongenial and repelling environments; peace in joy, peace in sorrow; peace in the varied vicissitudes of life; peace, above all, in the solemn hour when the spirit is about to wing its arrowy flight to the Great Beyond. Peace floods the death-chamber with its own mellowed celestial radiance. The Hospice catches the earliest sunbeam, and is gilded with the last evening ray.\par \par "These things have I spoken unto you, that in Me you might have peace."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } Co you know not now; but you shall know hereafter." John 13:7\par \par Most gracious Refuge, specially built on the Hill Difficulty, designed for Faint-hearts and Feeble-minds--weary ones, in their nights of toil and darkness. This saying of the Savior can be condensed in two words, "Trust Me."\par \par There is much in life's pilgrimage and its complexities which must be left to faith, and much that is baffling to sight; much demanding the surrender of our own wills and the merging of Dthem in a Higher. "All these things are against me," said the stricken patriarch. He lived to cancel and reverse this impeachment of the divine faithfulness, and to recognize the love and mindfulness which in an impatient moment he had disowned.\par \par The great apostle of an after age descried the kindling fires of persecution. Too surely anticipating the battles of the faith, he could see little with the eye of sense save conflict and suffering. But faith takes him within the Gospel Hospice.E Amid present insecurity, it whispers of nobler things in reversion. Faith puts into his lips this song in the night, "We know that all things work together for good." He trusted his Lord's "hereafter" promise, and he lived to make this entry in the diary of his own personal experience, "The things which have happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel."\par \par It is for us to honor God by implicit reliance on His word.\par "You may not see that all is gFood\endash\par The bow is broken in its strength;\par But what is now misunderstood\par Will have its 'wherefore' solved at length."\par \par "Providence," says Flavel, "is like a curious piece of tapestry, made up of a thousand shreds, which, single, we know not what to make of, but put together and stitched up orderly, they represent to the eye a beautiful history."\par \par "His plans, like lilies pure and white, unfold.\par We must not tear the cGlose-shut leaves apart;\par Time will reveal the calyxes of gold."\par \par When the pillar-cloud, as with Israel of old, conducts, not by the short and easy way to Canaan, but by the circuitous route and through the depths of the sea, it is for us to offer no remonstrance, but, with unmurmuring submission and unreasoning faith, to hear the directing Voice, the "marching orders"--"Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward." The Savior's promise will be abundantly ratified H"beyond the flood." But even in this world it is partially fulfilled.\par \par Not a few can endorse the Psalmist's averment, "They went through the flood on foot; there [in the very pathway of trial] did we rejoice in HIM." And if not at the time of chastening and affliction, "yet nevertheless afterward" the need-be is often unfolded, the peaceable fruits of righteousness are yielded and made manifest. But for the diverse sorrows of David, and of the subsequent Babylon minstrels, the best and mIost affecting portions of the Psalter would have been lost to us.\par \par The eyes of the pilgrim disciples on the way to Emmaus were "closed, so that they knew Him not." Their hopes had suddenly undergone a great eclipse. The "Sun of their soul'' had set in darkness. Tears of blissful communion were a memory--no more. They gazed on the cloud, but there was no trace of the rainbow. They could but echo the dirge wailed by others, "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laidJ Him." But in due time He revealed Himself--"Their eyes were opened, and they knew Him." Hastening to the upper room in Jerusalem, they joined in the briefest but gladdest of songs which thrilled on the lips of those there assembled, "The Lord is risen indeed!" (Luke 24:34.) The Divine dealing is often not at once but gradually explained. The clouds of mid-day and afternoon slowly but surely take on their crimson and silver linings in the western sky.\par \par "You noble few, who here unbending stand\par Beneath life's pressure! yet bear up awhile,\par And what your bounded view, which only saw\par A little part, deemed evil, is no more;\par The storms of wintry time will quickly pass,\par And one unbounded spring encircle all."\par \par "And it shall come to pass, that at evening time it shall be light."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } >Im506 The Divine Fatherhood{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbLiU05 The Hospice of Trust{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE HOSPICE OF TRUST\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "What I dBMl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE DIVINE FATHERHOOD\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "He that has seen Me has seen the Father." John 14:9\par \par What is God? That is the great, the primal and final problem of humanity. It formed the unsolved enigma of the ages until Christ came. It cannot beN frittered away by any modern Pantheistic theories in which the existence of a personal Deity is discarded and denied. No one can venture to say he has found rest until he attains some definite knowledge of the character of the Being with whom he has to do. Moses was only the unconscious interpreter of the world's anxious, yearning souls when he made the request, "I beseech You, show me Your glory." The answer has been given. A Hospice, precious above others, has the Rest-Giver provided for the weary travOeler--"No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him" (John 1:18).\par \par In another sense, indeed, we have seen and are daily seeing the world's Creator and Benefactor. Outer nature is no silent oracle. "The invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead." They are the most familiar of platitudes when we speak of the Almighty as imaged and manifested in Psea and earth and air and sky, in mountain and grove and valley; His praise intoned in song of bird, and music of stream, and deep bass of ocean; above all, in the music of the spheres--the stellar glories of the skies--day and night joining in the antiphonal strain.\par \par But there are at times, also, stern and conflicting, dissonant and discordant voices, anomalies ever and again occurring, alike in the material and moral economy--the scathing lightning, the havoc-making earthquake, the devQouring famine, the death-shrieks of the perishing, the sea's "wandering graves;" not to enlarge on many other forms under which we group what are called "startling providences," perhaps, specially, the baffling mysteries of suffering and pain. Our only explanation often is, "Verily, you are a God that hides Yourself;" "Your judgments are a great deep!"\par \par Yes, God, this great God, to many a soul would Himself be the mystery of mysteries, His name "secret" (wonderful), but for the gracious Rannouncement and declaration of the Incarnate Savior, "He that has seen Me, has seen the Father." The person and character of Christ have been well compared to a viaduct spanning the otherwise dreadful chasm separating us from the Unknowable and Incomprehensible of the agnostic, and rendering the God with whom we have to do alike knowable and known. "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest," for I am the Image, the Reflection, the Revelation of the Invisible; the true Antitype of the pillar of enfolding clSoud which screened from the Israelites of old the Presence of Deity; God in Christ, and Christ in God! As "words" are the audible expression of silent thought, so is He "THE WORD" (the Word which was made flesh), the spoken revelation of the Supreme--"Who has spoken unto us by His Son" (Heb. 1:2).\par \par Then follows the complementary query, "What is Christ?" Ponder the details of His life and ministry as these are evolved in the four Gospels. He is, above all else, "the Forgiver." While holinTess and purity and hatred of moral evil constituted the essentials of His ethical teachings, while uncompromisingly denouncing sin in its every hydra-shape, and stripping it of its sophistries--who can trace these three crisis-years in earth's history without being impressed by the conviction that Love, in its varied phases, formed the noblest expression of His character, and like a divine aroma perfumed His every word and deed?\par \par As we follow His footsteps on the shores of the Syrian lakUe, or in the temple-courts of Judea, or by the footpaths and groves of Olivet, or as He comes from His oratory beneath the silent stars, what do we behold? A Divine Pardoner; a gracious Being who impressed all with whom He came in contact with the spell of His goodness--succouring the needy, rescuing the perishing; imparting comfort and solace to the sorrowing, the troubled, the bereaved--confirming hesitating wills; pardoning faithless desertion; offering hope to the penitent; help to the disgraced, welcVome to the prodigal, salvation to the lost. Such, says He, is GOD--"My Father and your Father; My God, your God." And as this Father-God "sent" His Son to earth for the redemption of mankind, let all His sufferings, from Bethlehem's manger to Calvary's cross, and specially the latter, their crown and consummation, be the measure and exponent of the Father's love--"God so loved the world."\par \par Blessed Savior, in You, as the Revealer of the Almighty, I can lay my heaviest burden down. I can look up to the mightiest of all beings, and say, "From henceforth I know Him, and have seen Him." I can address Him by the endearing name You were specially called to unfold. Secure in this Gospel Hospice, I can read on its lintels the gracious lettering\endash "I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } X;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "I am the resurrection, and the life--he that believes in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." John 11:25\par \par "If a man dies, shall he live again?" has been the perplexed and perplexing question, the anxious, unsolved problem of the ages. When these eyes close in their mortal sleep, when dYust has returned to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth, shall there be, can there be, a requickening from decay to vitality? or is all to end in annihilation--dreamless oblivion? There is much to dim and darken. The very analogies of nature, beautiful as they are and so often quoted, are in themselves partial, unsatisfactory. Under the blaze of rigid, exacting truth, they are defective and misleading. The corn-grain, apparently without a spark of animation, as inert as the clods under which it is laid, Zis not dead but living. "Our Lord," says Luther, "has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring time." Yes; but these leaves come from no dead branch, or sapless trunk, or decayed root, but are nurtured by living though unseen forces within the apparent skeleton tree. The chrysalis, with the seeming torpor of death, has within it, also, the embryo, the same slumbering forces of life; its lustrous wings are not born of the worm and corruption. Not so that puls[eless, rayless, inanimate mortal human body, the speedy prey of dissolution. There is resurrection, rejuvenescence for the flowers of spring which rim the loved one's grave; but all else below seems to refute the fond dream of an afterlife, when, year after year, decade after decade, nothing save "everlasting silence reigns."\par \par "But come with Me," says Christ, "and I will ease you of this burden also. I will reveal to you the secret hidden from ages and generations. I can take, as no othe\r can, the bereft to the tombs of their loved ones, and whisper My own requiem and lullaby--In Christ, in peace. Rest with Me." You who are bearing this heaviest and most crushing of life-sorrows, be comforted! You can write on every churchyard gate, you can carve on every stone in these realms of silence, "My flesh also shall rest in hope."\par \par Laying aside the natural arguments for the immortality of the soul (perhaps one of the strongest of which is the instinctive feeling within each of] us of a hereafter), all uncertainty is swept away by the great word, and, subsequently, by the great deed, of our Divine Redeemer. He proclaims Himself here, when standing amid the memorials of death, as "the Resurrection, and the Life." He proved and substantiated the assertion--first, in a subsidiary way, by the revivifying of His deceased friend; and, afterwards, far more by His own gigantic triumph over Death and Hades, when He came forth from the sepulcher a moral Conqueror. By that rising He has co^nverted the graves of His people into "cemeteries" (sleeping places), "hospices" (houses of peace). The everlasting hills, to every pilgrim, are gilded with the light of unsetting suns. Our "loved and lost" are only lost to be loved again\endash\par "Though down the long, dim avenues of the past\par Their swift feet fled,\par In His eternity the rooms are vast\endash\par There wait they to be ours at last\endash\par They are not dead!"\par \par Glorio_us assurance! In Him, my once dying but now ever-living Lord and Head, Death is vanquished and the Grave spoiled. The last enemy only ushers into a blessed continuity of life. Christ, having overcome the sharpness of death, has opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.\par \par A writer narrates that Marcia, a Roman matron, was inconsolable, mourning the irreparable loss of a son of great promise. Seneca, one of the sagest of pagan philosophers, whose counsel she sought, advised her to forg`et her grief "as the lower creation do." His panacea was 'oblivion'. "Go, bury your sorrow." "Let the dead bury their dead." Hear Him, who has opened a Hospice at the very mouth of the dark valley, speaking by the lips of His apostle--"But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that you sorrow not, even as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him" (1 Thess. 4:13, 14).\apar \par No wonder the first Christians, on the walls of their catacombs, loved to portray the fabled Phoenix, the bird of Immortality, perched on the true Heavenly Palm; and that their loved greeting was not, "The Lord has died," but, "The Lord has risen."\par \par "Hallelujah! dry the tear,\par 'Jesus Christ is risen!'\par Sound o'er every silent coffin\endash\par 'Jesus Christ is risen!'\par \par Thrice blessed pledge, you mourners, keep,\par Who for your loved departed weep,\par Because He lives, they only sleep,\par Hallelujah!"\par \par May it be your earnest desire now, as risen with Christ, to seek those things that are above, where He sits at the right hand of God, that\endash "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall you also appear with Him in glory."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } +V Ye09 Hospice Watchers{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\l_ Uy08 Rest in Service{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\fc 107 The Resurrection and the Life{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210Wd0\fs24 REST IN SERVICE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "If any man serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am there shall also My servant be--if any man serves Me, him will My Father honor." John 12:26\par \par The service of Christ in its very activities is Rest. It is the answer to the weary cry and quest of humanity, "Who will show us any good? Lord, lift up the light of Your countenance upon us." "Come unto mee," is the address of many siren voices, titillating tones of questionable or forbidden pleasure, leading only to unrest, disquiet, heart-weariness, life-failure--tinted soap bubbles with a momentary iridescence, then collapsing.\par \par "Come unto Me," is the invitation addressed by Jesus; and in that are included many voices of healthful happiness and joy which God Himself approves. But even pleasures, in themselves lawful, fail to insure perfect satisfaction and peace. If they are legitimatef and commendable, it is only as means to an end. They are resting-places, but not substitutes for the only true Rest and Hospice in God and His Christ. "You will keep him in perfect peace [literally, peace, peace], whose mind is stayed on You" (Isa. 26:3).\par \par Blessed Savior, Your service alone is perfect freedom! The green pastures and the still waters are only to be found "by the Shepherd's tent." They who have gone the round of all the world's fascinations, are often the first to write ogn the retrospect, "Not enough." Theirs is the wooden Alpine chalet, for summer joys and summer skies; not the Hospice, with rock foundations and granite walls, the shelter for all seasons--"In summer and winter it shall be." They who have sought the Redeemer with loving purpose, tested Him, proved Him, are able to make the avowal of the Queen of Sheba regarding the true Solomon, "The half was not told me."\par \par Let the philosophic skeptic produce, out of his cold negations, a new Christ betther than the Christ of history; a diviner Force, to mold and regenerate humanity, than the Christ of Nazareth; some other and better than He to walk with untiring feet along every path of sorrow, every Via Dolorosa; who, better than He, could impart strength to the palsied arm, courage to the fearful, hope to the hopeless; drying weeping eyes, stilling the throbbings of aching hearts, taking anguish out of loneliness, strewing the wilderness and solitary places with lovelier flowers than those of Eden, opeining Hospices all along the pilgrim way up to the very gates of glory--then, but not until then, will we listen to the rejection of "the truth as it is in Jesus."\par \par O Jesus, Son of the Most High God, may it be my habitual desire, in accordance with the words of our meditation, and as evidence of heart-consecration to Your service, to "follow You;" to set You ever before me as my Ideal of all excellence, and to be gradually, however imperfectly, transfigured into Your divine likeness! Let jthe prayer and resolve of one who knew, more than most, the bliss and security of the Pilgrim-Hospice, be mine--"Let me set forth anew, O Lord, as a pilgrim on the earth, with my rod and staff; and so set my heart on You, that in all places You may be my dwelling-place and home--I in You and You in me" (Memorials of a Quiet Life). May I submissively accept even burdens, if it be Your will that I should carry them, feeling and saying in the spirit of Galileo when he had become blind, "Whatever is pleasing kto God is pleasing to me." Then will all trials be made light and all crosses easy.\par \par "There are briers besetting every path,\par That call for patient care;\par There is a cross in every lot,\par And an earnest need for prayer;\par But a lowly heart that leans on You\par Is happy everywhere."\par \par Let the wondrous thought included in the Savior's utterance of today prove a further quickener and inspiration--that in thus serving Him, following Him, loving Him, the Father, too, is honored and glorified. Let others be content with seeking rest and peace in the chase of trooping shadows, which perish with the using; be it mine, with rest in possession and glory in prospect, to say\endash "As for me, I will behold Your face in righteousness--I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Your likeness."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } mfnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 HOSPICE WATCHERS\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Occupy until I come." Luke 19:13\par \par "Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he comes shall find watching." Luke 12:37\par \par These two verses describe the character and the position of Christ'sn faithful servants, who, when the sign of the Son of man shall be seen in the heavens and the cry heard, "He comes, He comes to judge the earth," will be found safe in the Gospel Hospice, "occupying" and "watching;" ready with the exulting challenge, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?"\par \par It is a double message, meanwhile, from the Rest-Giver to those pilgrims who have borne, and are still bearing their burdens; who have accepted life as an appointed scene of discipline--everyo trial appointed; and who are looking forward with calm expectancy to that day which will reveal and explain all mysteries and solve all doubts; not over-solicitous to have the burden weighing on them removed or the cross uplifted, if it be His will to retain it. "Occupy until I come." "Occupy!" Work. Be busy. Recognize the present as the time, not for reverie, but as the season and realm of duty. It is the voice of Jesus, reminding of privilege and responsibility. "Occupy!" Be not like the lone marsh, thpe inky pool, with no outflow for its waters, with the miasma brooding over it, and whose margin the very birds seem to avoid. Rather be like the flowing stream "bounding over rock and wild cascade," "occupying" its living, life-giving mission to fertilize and bless.\par \par "Found watching." This is the complementary call. As the first is all exhortation to active, unremitting energy--working out salvation with fear and trembling; the latter is the inculcation of the passive virtues--waiting anqd watching, patience and trust. The one is the exhortation for the girded loins--zeal and activity; the other for the burning lamps--readiness for the opened door and the Bridegroom's summons, keeping vigil for the present, if need be, in the gloom under the olive-trees of sorrow--"Tarry here and watch with Me;" trusting the faithfulness of Him who there bore heavier and more mysterious burdens. Seen in the light of that great day of God, these burdens will lose their heaviness; they will be burdens no morre.\par \par Prepare me specially, gracious Savior, for that blessed hope, even Your own glorious appearing. "Until I come." It is a luminous rainbow, bright with the prismatic colors of gospel promise, spanning the evening of life and the Church's future. Let me often love to repair to the battlements of this Hospice and gaze at it through rain and cloud. "At evening-time it shall be light." When the advent-hour shall strike, it will be the world's true curfew-bell, announcing that the fires arse to be put out--the fires of sin, the fires of tribulation; and that the peace, so fitful, troubled, intermittent here, will be merged into that of eternity. The motto-saying of our Volume will have thus a new and everlasting significance\endash "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest FOREVER."\par \par "I am come," says a gifted writer, as the night-shadows were passing into daybreak--"I am come to that stage of my pilgrimage that is within sight of the River of Death; and I feel that now I must have all in readiness, day and night, for the messenger of the King."\par \par Happy those who thus, with trimmed lamps and replenished vessels, will be able, as they join the festal train on the great bridal day of the Church triumphant, to say\endash "Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } u flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." Luke 12:32\par \par It is the Shepherd's voice. Under that favorite and expressive emblem He is set before His Church as Himself the Burden-Bearer. The wandering sheep is on His shoulders, and He carries it back to the fold and to its rest rejoicing. The verse seems in this place to be put in contrast with the cares and solicitudes against which He had warned His people in the immediately preceding context. As a substitute fvor earthly-mindedness, they are called (to use the suggestive word of a German commentator) to "heavenly-mindedness,"--lifted above the fretting and depressive anxieties of a present evil world, to that kingdom of the Father which is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches are hostile to rest. With all the rare endowments of nature and "wealth of circumstance," few knew better than Dante what it was to be "weary anwd heavy laden;" how little outward things, and least of all worldly aggrandizement, could minister to the mind diseased, and meet the heart-longing for repose. In his great poem he puts these words into the lips of another\endash\par "For all the gold that is beneath the moon,\par Or ever has been, of those weary souls\par Could never make a single one repose."\par \par "The world passes away, and the lust thereof--but he that does the will of God abides forever."\par x \par Note two of the characteristics of those whom the Great Rest-Giver addresses.\par \par It is a LITTLE flock--despised by the world, unthought of by men; in many ways unworthy of the Shepherd's cognizance and regard. Each "little," each finite life is like the mathematical point, having position but no magnitude. The finite compared to the Infinite! It is like a tiny drop in the shoreless sea! But God's ways are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts. "Fear not, worm Jacyob." What may be scorned and unpitied of men, enlists the tenderness, sympathy, and love of the Shepherd of the sheep. "It is not," says He, "the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish" (Matt. 18:14). It is His own beautiful prophetic saying--"I will turn my hand upon the little ones" (Zech. 13:7).\par \par It is a TREMBLING flock. The existence of fear and misgiving is acknowledged; the apprehension, it may be, at times of the forfeiture of promised spizritual blessing; the encountering of peril and difficulty and danger. "The wolf comes and scatters the sheep." But ultimate safety is not the less insured, though possibly reached with torn fleece and bleeding feet. The Speaker interposes the quieting assurance, "Fear not." He gives His pledge to fetch every wanderer home. The covenanted kingdom is safe, for it is "the Father's good pleasure" to bestow it. A Father-God and a Shepherd-Savior have put their names to that kingdom's title-deeds. We have there{ a double guarantee, that nothing can defraud us of our covenant rights, nothing cross us out of our purchased inheritance. Occasionally there may be and will be tempests to buffet and floods to pass through. But He who purchased the flock and tended it, followed it in all its devious wanderings in "the dark and cloudy day," will at last fold it secure in the pastures of the blessed. In the words of an old divine, "He leads us in; He leads us through; He leads us on; He leads us up; He leads us home."\par \par O gracious Savior, Your strong arm will bear me safely. Let me be responsive to Your call and obedient to Your guidance and direction.\par \par I will listen to Your "Come unto Me," and to the sure word of promise, embracing this world and the next\endash "Fear not--for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name; you are mine."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } :: ]q10 Beyond the Valley{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 BEYOND THE VALLEY\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Fear not, littlet~g2058\f0\fs24 THE GATE WIDE OPEN\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Him that comes unto Me I will in no wise cast out." John 6:37\par \par None are so weary or heavy laden as those oppressed with doubt as to the ability and willingness of Christ to receive and save them. As "the heart knows its own bitterness," so the soul knows the pressure of its own moral burdens and impediments--specially among these the burdening memory of some heinous and presumptuous transgressions--sins against light and love; sins in defiance, and forgetfulness of privilege and responsibility; sins, it may even be, involving the loss of self-respect, and entailing the shame of remorse. Many are ready enough to own that the door of that Hospice of Pardon has been opened to countless multitudes. But, can its gates, is the despairing thought of not a few thus saddened with humbling retrospects, be unlocked to us? What of the soul "once enlightened," made a temple of the Holy Spirit, but that temple, through temptation and unwatchfulness, desecrated and defiled, some foul scar on its pure alabaster pillars, known only to Him whose eyes are as a flame of fire--the infinitely Holy One?\par \par Yes, if sin be unrepented of; if sin be persevered in, if blot be added knowingly to blot, and scar to scar, the reins recklessly surrendered to feeble, frail, faltering wills; if the prodigal be still groveling and content to grovel amid the husks and garbage of the far country--there can be little said to hush feverish unrest, and inspire with the hope of welcome and forgiveness. But the pivot on which the words of our present meditation seem to turn is, "Him that comes unto Me." In that coming is implied self-renunciation and sin-renunciation; sorrow for the past, and the promise and purpose of new obedience. Not, let it be imagined, that in such cases of heart-felt renewed consecration we claim future impeccability; that when a "conversion," in the true sense of that often-misused and travestied word, takes place, there can be no further coming short of lofty Christian ideals--no further failures, it may even be grievous woundings, in the spiritual battle. To say so would be not only, on no Bible authority, to minimize the real and persistent character of that warfare Paul again and again describes; but it would also in the case of many close the door of hope, and tend to put despondency into earnest and sensitive though frail and fallible natures.\par \par Blessed be God for His own balm-word for all such--"Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down; for the Lord upholds him with His hand." But this we may with confidence aver, that if there be present, honest, prayerful resolves for the future, anxiety and misgiving may be set aside. Christ's word of welcome and heart-cheer is enough. No barrier is placed by Him at the approach to the Hospice. There is the offer of unqualified forgiveness. There is a perch for the feeblest, most ruffled wing on this mighty Cedar of God.\par \par Weary ones, your pillow of thorns is made by Him a pillow of peace. He who touched the kneeling leper, and washed the traitor's feet, shows His unwillingness to quench the smoking flax. He stands with the ineffable love of eternity in His heart. He will "in no wise cast out." There is room on His shoulders for every wandering sheep. There is room in His heart for every prodigal child. There is room in His Hospice for every storm-beaten pilgrim. He could have uttered no stronger assurance of His love for sinners and His willingness to welcome and receive the weariest, the most outcast and lost. The sin which for us is "a burden too heavy for us to bear," is not too heavy for Him. "He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. The Lord has laid on Him the iniquities of us all." "This man receives sinners" was His distinctive characteristic.\par \par "Turn to the seventh chapter of Hebrews and twenty-fifth verse," said the blind girl to her spiritual adviser and friend. He did so. The words are--"Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost." "Lay my hand," she added, "on that verse--upon it I should like to die."\par \par There may be sins in conscience and memory at the cognizance of which the best and kindest friends would "cast out" from Christ forever. Their crushing, despairing verdict would be--"He will by no means receive." But His ways are not as man's ways, nor His thoughts as man's thoughts. His thoughts toward us are "thoughts of peace and not of evil." He reveals Himself with the garnered treasures of redemption, ready to dispense them to the chief of sinners.\par \par "Pardon my iniquity," cried one of old, who was no stranger to the pangs of an accusing conscience. And what was his plea? Was it, "Pardon my iniquity because of its triviality; because of inborn weakness, or fierce temptation, or some exceptionally extenuating circumstances"? No. It was the reverse. Conscious that he was in the hands of the All-Merciful--"Pardon my iniquity," he exclaims, "for it is great!" In the parable of the Prodigal Son, when the father "fell on his neck, and kissed him," the meaning in the original Greek is "kissed him much."\par \par Lord, I am unworthy to come under Your roof! Lord, I am unworthy to gather up the crumbs from Your table! My sins at times confront me like the swords of avenging angels. But He who is All-worthy gives the free, full, gracious invitation.\par \par At Your call I come! Blessed be Your name, let it be gladly repeated, that call is hampered with no conditions. "All you that labor and are heavy laden" takes in the wide circumference of humanity. In the freeness and sovereignty of Your redeeming grace, unbar to me the sheltering portal! And while in the sad, solemn memories of bygone apostasy I may be led at times to look with trembling apprehension to the future, let the thought of Your divine power and sympathy arm and strengthen me amid environing temptations. "Iniquities," was the wail of a stricken soul under the conscious sense of weakness, helplessness, unrest--"iniquities prevail against me," or, as that has been rendered, "are too strong for me." Here is God's gracious response and recipe--"Let him take hold of My STRENGTH, that he may make peace with Me; and he shall make peace with Me" (Ps. 65:3; Isa. 27:5).\par \par "You know all our conflict, all the failing\par Of flesh and spirit, lured by evil powers,\par The sore temptations these poor hearts assailing\par In our unguarded hours.\par \par "But we shall fear no evil--living, dying,\par Our souls are in Your care; You will defend\par The faithful servants on Your word relying,\par Even until the end."\par \par "Lord, I believe--help my unbelief."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } e~e\m]13 Rest in the Crucified{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl }12 A Hospice in Mysterious Dealings{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\cf1\lang2C a511 The Gate Wide Open{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lan}058\f0\fs23 v\cf0\fs24 A HOSPICE IN MYSTERIOUS DEALINGS\par \par "Come unto Me all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."\par \par "This sickness is for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby." John 11:4\par \par "Our friend Lazarus sleeps; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep." John 11:11\par \par Deepest of all mysteries, burden of all burdens--the early death of loved ones. "To what purpose is this waste?" Life perishing in its prime--the apparent flinging to the void a garnered store of intellect, goodness, friendship, worth! We can understand the aged decaying inhabitant of the forest, that has fulfilled its appointed years, succumbing to the axe or swept down by the storm. But why touch the vigorous sapling, or the tree in the glory of its early summers?\par \par Such were the thoughts that must have hovered over the casket of the beloved brother at Bethany, the center and brightener of a beautiful home. Many of the circumstantials, too, specially the sequel of the trial, were passing strange. When the Master was sent for at His distant place of sojourn, why the inaction? We imagine that when the messenger speeds with the tidings, "Behold, he whom You love is sick," not a moment would be lost in recrossing Jordan and hastening up the gorges of Judea to restore His friend. To delay an unanswered quest would be unlike His kind heart and customary prompt procedure.\par \par He would teach His church in every age that there is a tarrying love which, in certain circumstances, is as true as the instantaneous intervention, the immediate response. In the present case, he lingers "two days" before support is given. The weary and heavy-laden sisters, faint with watching and waiting and weeping, expect, hour after hour, their burden to be removed. Their Lord indefinitely continues it. Two days and two nights are they subjected to a trial as bewildering as their own personal bereavement--the trial of baffled hopes and unanswered prayers. "And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves--but He was asleep" (Matt. 8:24). The Hospice-gate of Hope seems mysteriously barred. "Has God forgotten to be gracious?"\par \par His people have ever been at times subjected to similar dealings--the seemingly unkind postponement in their hours of anxiety and soul-struggle--whether the prolonged, the apparently unnecessary discipline of pain, when every nerve becomes a chord of agony, or the equally acute torture of prolonged vigils by the couch of loved ones, or the anxieties and forecastings of the future.\par \par O faithless hearts in that Judean village, to doubt for a moment in your passionate grief your Lord's unwavering love and fidelity to His promises! O faithless hearts among ourselves, that would still echo the spirit of Martha's and Mary's plaintive monotone, the unworthy reflection--"Lord, if You had been here, this our brother had not died!" If You had been here, this sore calamity would not leave befallen us!\par \par Hush the reclaiming word! He is here. He who put the burden on keeps it on. As sure as at last He stood in the grave-yard of Bethany--shed sympathetic tears and spoke sympathetic words, gave the needed answer to prayer and the needed rest to weary souls--so will He, in the case of all, vindicate at last the wisdom and righteousness and love of His procedure. Behind the cloud-lands of life He is evolving good out of evil and order out of confusion.\par \par He will repeat, as the reason for each mysterious dispensation--He will write, if need be, the record on every sick-bed, the epitaph on each early grave--"For the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby."\par \par "What I do you know not now; but you shall know hereafter."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } {\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 REST IN THE CRUCIFIED\par \par "Come unto Me all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Peace be unto you. And when He had so said, He showed them His hands and His side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord." John 20:19, 20\par \par That was a weary and heavy-laden band gathered on the evening of the first great Easter. These disciples were like the sea driven by the wind and tossed. Hope alternately rose and fell. Tidings reached those who had partially revived their spirits, but such were conflicting and unauthenticated. "How different," would they not say one to another, "our present experiences, from the memories of three past years of tranquil peace and unbroken love, when we sat at His feet listening to His elevating teachings, or beheld the halt and the lame and the blind cured by healing word or touch; or when, on the stormy deep, we listened to His 'Peace, be still;' or when we mingled with the crowd in which many a heart, aching with deeper-seated than bodily disease, was hushed by the assuring invitation, 'Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.'"\par \par Peace is the yearned-for boon of every weary soul. Some may recall the story of Dante, seated in contemplative mood outside the convent gate. One of the inhabitants to whom he had entrusted the manuscript of the "Inferno," observing his pensive dejection, asked what it was for which he was longing. To the twice repeated question the, reply was given--"Peace!" What was thus whispered by the lips of the great poet, Christ alone can meet and answer.\par \par How He answers it may best be gathered from the sequence which forms the remarkable feature in the words of our present verse and narrative. There was no interval for questioning thought--the words of the recording evangelist are at once added--"And when He had so said, He showed them His hands and His side." It was the revelation of a crucified Savior. It was, in His own Person, the truth that was to be afterwards sounded forth, first by accredited apostles, and which, through the succeeding ages, was to form the central doctrine of Christianity and Christian teaching--"Jesus Christ and Him crucified."\par \par There is a second sequence, a second act in this divine Easter drama. The affrighted disciples, who, we are told in the context, "were assembled for fear," and had in their terror locked or barred the chamber door, were reassured. At the vision of this crucified One, with the spear-thrust and nail-marks, "the death of the cross," their terror was exchanged for gladness. "THEN were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord."\par \par Gracious Hospice! "He loved me, and gave Himself for me"--Christ, not the Example and Pattern (though that, as we know, He was conspicuously also), but "Christ crucified, the Power of God unto salvation to every one that believes."\par \par Show me, Lord, by faith, Your wounded hands, Your riven side! The peace secured and bestowed in this Hospice is "peace through the blood of the cross."\par \par "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } ind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE PILGRIM'S SECURITY\par \par "Come unto Me all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Seek first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." Matt. 6:33\par \par How many labor and are heavy laden because they reverse the order of their Lord's exhortation; giving priority to the things of earth, and making "the one thing needful" secondary and subordinate; allowing daily worries, cares, perplexities, trifles, to dim and obscure nobler verities! They are more concerned to rear gilded palaces on the shifting sands of the present, than first to make sure of the Hospice with its foundations drilled in the solid and enduring Rock. They allow the flare of earthly torches and the glimmer of artificial lights to blur the stars of heaven. How different existence would be were its first and chief object to live under the inspiration of doing God's will and seeking to please Him! The life of self-abnegation and self-consecration is the happy as well as the heavenly one--the life lived by those who are in the world and yet not of it, who walk and act as seeing Him who is invisible; their thoughts, interests, occupations interpenetrated with the sense of the Divine presence and love, conscious of unswerving fidelity to Truth and Righteousness.\par \par "Come unto ME," says Christ, and seek first My kingdom. Where religion, the law of His kingdom, in the best sense of the word, as an active, living, energizing force, is our recognized guide, giving direction to character and conduct, a wealth of happiness inevitably follows. When love to God strikes the key-note, the varied harmonies of earth assume a beautiful concord and cadence; the ordinary chords of life vibrate in sweet unison. Religion intensifies the enjoyment of common mercies. Hers is the heavenly chemistry which transmutes all things into gold.\par \par The man who walks with God is like Moses in his descent from the mount--his face shines with the reflected glory. The "rest" of Christ takes shape and form. Not infrequently it is so literally--the very outer lineaments are transfigured. We can most of us probably recall some such sunny, radiant countenance bright with the smile of a foretasted heaven--this in striking contrast with that which is scarred with selfishness, debased with vice, gloomy with the tyranny of demon-passion. "The purified righteous man," says Clement of Alexandria, "has become a coin of the Lord, and has the impress of his king stamped upon him." The soul itself becomes a Hospice, the home and haunt of peace, "filled with all joy and peace in believing."\par \par Hear the apostle's definition and description of the heirs of the Kingdom and lovers of God's righteousness--"In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, (in other words, Let Religion sway and dominate the actions, the life, the whole being); "and the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."\par \par "All these things shall be added unto you." Added! It seems like a promise of ever augmenting and augmented blessings--like the mountain streamlet, tiny and inconspicuous at first, but deepening as it hastens on its course to refresh and irrigate and beautify, at last expanding into "peace like a river"--the full flood of God.\par \par O You gracious Rest-Giver, prevent me forfeiting Your promised peace by becoming a prey to the groveling cares or the absorbing fascinations and pleasures of a present evil world! Let me listen to the monitory voice, "The kingdom of God is not food and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit."\par \par With this peace reigning and ruling within me, I can say with Paul\endash "I have all, and abound."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } QQIaA16 Hospice Foundation{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\RaU15 The Unknown Morrow{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE UNKNOWN MORROW\par \par "Come %qi14 The Pilgrim's Security{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkunto Me all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Take therefore no thought for the morrow--for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Matt. 6:34\par \par Who does not long for some Hospice from which to contemplate, calmly and undismayed, the veiled and shrouded morrow? The present may have its anxieties; but in the case of many, probably most, it is the unsolved riddle of the future that presses most heavily. That turning in the gorge I cannot see. Will the rushing stream be increased in volume? Are there no bridges to span its headlong course, no boulders even to afford a safe footing?\par \par "Come unto Me," says He who was Himself the Pilgrim of pilgrims in earth's Valley of Humiliation. In the midst of these anxious forecastings, "I will give you rest," rest, first of all, in the very thought which engenders these forebodings--that the morrow is unknown; that you are mercifully spared the anticipation of trials which might otherwise project a life-long shadow on your bright present, and make the future one long experience of sadness.\par \par Then, above all, rest in the gracious conviction that the morrow, unrevealed to you, is known to Him. He sees what you cannot see--"the end from the beginning." With Him there is no chance or contingency, no haphazard or peradventure. "Trust Me," He seems to say, "in the fulfillment of a double promise, spoken ages ago, that in this Hospice I have a store of sandals for the feet, and a pilgrim staff for the way. 'Your shoes shall be iron and brass; and as your days so shall your strength be.' These (in other words, My exceeding great and precious promises) will be adequate for all needs and difficulties, helping you over the rugged road and unbridged torrent."\par \par Indulge, then, no needlessly anxious thoughts. Do not allow life to degenerate into a round and vortex of weary care. God gives no prevenient store of grace. He provides no program of tomorrow's evils and trials, its needs and necessities. But when the morrow comes, the promised strength comes with it, and the traveler pursues his way with the words which the great Rest-Giver whispers in his ear, "I will make My grace sufficient for you."\par \par "Trust Him when dark doubts assail you;\par Trust Him when your strength is small;\par Trust Him when to simply trust Him\par Seems the hardest thing of all."\par \par Let even outer Nature, in her unfaltering laws and sublime sequences, teach the same lesson of confidence in the divine faithfulness:\par \par "And I will trust that He who heeds\par The life that hides in mead and wold,\par Who hangs yon alder's crimson beads,\par And stains these mosses green and gold,\par Will still, as He has done, incline\par His gracious care to me and mine."\par \par Blessed Savior, on Yourself may I be enabled to cast, not some cares, or the more pressing cares, but all my cares. "Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You."\par \par From the windows of this Gospel Hospice I will see the future, even though somber with cloud, spanned with the bow of covenant promise, and read the lettering of "dewy gold," \endash "O rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 HOSPICE FOUNDATION\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." John 3:16\par \par In this brief verse we have a Gospel within a Gospel, the Hospice of hospices--no fragile temporary structure, but formed, so to speak, from monoliths of primeval granite. Before the world was, that Hospice was planned--an eternal, unassailable stronghold. Love was the Rock on which it was built--"God so loved the world." How careful the great Rest-Giver is to trace all up to the sovereign love of the Father--not the tenet of a false and repellent theology, that Christ's atoning sacrifice was the cause of God's love to our world (an inversion and perversion of gospel terms), but rather that God's love was the originating and impelling cause of Christ's death. There was "a covenant of peace between them both." "It is not," says a writer, "that the atonement replenishes the wasting Fountain, but that the unwasting and unwearying Fountain makes the atonement." The measure of the Father's love (He could give no higher) was the gift of His own dear Son--His "Only Begotten."\par \par In thus addressing Nicodemus, Christ may possibly have had an historical reference to the "only begotten" of the head of the Jewish nation, and of the surrender of the heir of covenant promise by the Father of the faithful, typical of a Greater, who willingly laid His Isaac on the altar of burnt-offering--"He that spared not His own Son" (Rom. 8:32). In the immediately preceding context there is allusion made to another memorable incident in the annals of Pilgrim-Israel, and one with which the Rabbi was equally familiar--the lifting up by Moses of the bronze serpent. The host, bitten by fiery snakes, lay gasping on the sands of the wilderness, their eyes glazed with the film of death. They looked at the strange symbol on the standard--they "looked and lived." It was to the Divine Speaker, in His memorable night-colloquy with this anxious inquirer, an emblem of Himself on the cross--a symbol of redemption for the spiritual Israel of all ages who gaze with the eye of faith on the uplifted Son of man.\par \par These two incidents in the story of the Hebrew nation enshrine the most glorious words and message ever delivered to the world; while both events are strong in the assertion of the sacrificial element--Christ the Surety-Savior, Christ, the sufferer in our room and stead, the one only Source of pardon and acceptance and peace. "Come unto ME." "Look unto Me, and be you saved, all the ends of the earth." "God commends His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us."\par \par Jesus, in our general motto-verse, offers and promises to His weary ones Rest. God the Father, in the verse we are immediately considering, offers and promises to the weary ones everlasting Life. The two are convertible terms--the same gift, only under different figures. The world is weary--a caravan of pilgrims staggering under their burdens--Rest is the welcome boon for such. The world is dead and dying; its millions are perishing--Life is the welcome gift for such. Take which emblem we please. "Come unto Me," says Christ, "and the reality is yours. I died to make it so." Both boons, moreover, are alike present and future--the Rest of grace here, preparatory to the Rest of glory hereafter; the gift of Life here, preparatory to the everlasting Life hereafter.\par \par Lord, I come, weary and heavy laden, seeking rest. I need no other Hospice than this, bearing on its lintels so full and glorious a motto. I accept Your overtures of grace. Let me delight to ponder, let me be enabled in some feeble measure to grasp the wealth of meaning contained in the unfathomed and unfathomable. So loving of this doomed and dying world--the motive, the Father's Love; the resultant end, "Glory, Honor, Immortality, Eternal Life." In the contemplation of the peerless theme, we seem to be caught up into the third heavens with their infinite depths of blue, the paradise of love.\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } bl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 HOSPICE OF THE MOURNER\par \par "Come unto Me all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Blessed are those who mourn--for they shall be comforted." Matt. 5:4\par \par This is a comprehensive Evangel in itself--good news for the weary, a true Hospice for every heavy-laden pilgrim. The one word "mourn" takes in the twofold burden of sin and sorrow--the double load common to the children of humanity.\par \par The beatitude is spoken by Him whose specially foretold mission was to "comfort all that mourn" (Isa. 61:2). No wonder, therefore, it has an early place in His teaching; that it is one of the first Hospices whose gate He flings open with a "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest."\par \par Is it sin--that burden which an old pilgrim says is "too heavy for me"--the consciousness of shortcoming--sins of omission, sins of commission; the treason of the will, the truant affections, the memories of a blurred and blotted past? Cast this burden on your Savior-God. His precious blood besprinkles the lintels and door-posts of the Hospice. That covenant-token gives Him the right to bid you welcome. The forgiveness of God in Christ is surely the most soothing of divine gospel opiates. Owen tells us that when he was brought back from the gates of death, the first text he preached from was this--"But there is forgiveness with You that You may be feared."\par \par Is it sorrow--the burden of affliction? Is the word spoken to those enduring in its thousand shapes poverty, sickness, bereavement? None so needing shelter and rest as these. But God's comforts, like the stars of heaven, are brightest in a dark sky. As the sun requires to set before the stellar glories of the skies are visible, so with the soul. How many can testify, I never saw the surpassing comfort of the divine promises until death, in the removal of brother, or sister, or child, left my world without a sun!\par \par "O joy that do you seek me through pain,\par I cannot close my heart to thee;\par I trace the rainbow through the rain,\par And feel the promise is not vain\par That morn shall tearless be."\par \par It is doubtless this latter class--the afflicted--of whom the words of our verse today are mainly spoken. And how often in strange ways, in the case of such, do we find this beatitude of Christ realized and exemplified--blessedness surrounding the weary and heavy-laden pilgrim, and making him calm, restful, happy! It is one of the great compensations in the Christian life, that the mourner and sufferer are most conscious of the sweet drops that mingle in the bitter cup which their Father has prepared. Call to remembrance, in the circle of your acquaintance, some child of affliction--say of sickness and pain. Were not these the lips most lavish in acknowledgment of God's goodness and love? You would naturally expect otherwise--that the man who is seated luxuriously at life's banquet, and has nothing apparently to break the trance of outward happiness--material enjoyment--would be most profuse in his gratitude. How often is it the reverse! How often he takes the gifts with thankless, it may be peevish unconcern!\par \par While, on the other hand, it is frequently they who gather the scattered crumbs, and must be content with the cup of cold water, who enjoy God's commonest mercies--a glimpse from their secluded couch of the blue of summer sky, and breath of summer fragrance and gush of summer song--these accepted as pledges and parables of diviner realities.\par \par Thus does the gracious Rest-Giver fulfill the old promises spoken of Himself by the evangelical prophet--"I will restore comforts to him and to his mourners" (Isa. 57:18). "The Lord has anointed Me to bind up the brokenhearted\'85to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness" (Isa. 61:1, 3). The valleys of Baca and the tents of Kedar are thus often made musical with the songs of Paradise; the bed of languishing becomes as the house of God and as the gate of heaven. One of Samuel Rutherford's sayings, rendered into metre, beautiful alike for its imagery and simplicity, is on many such lips\endash\par \par "With mercy and with judgment\par My web of time He wove,\par And aye the depths of sorrow\par Were lustered with his love."\par "Blessed are those who mourn!"\par \par Then remember, He who utters this balm-word is Himself the King of sorrows, the Mourner of mourners. He knows, by the experience of His own suffering humanity, every pang that rends the heart. He was announced in the same great prophecy, hundreds of years before his incarnation, as "the Burden-Bearer." It sounds more like a gospel statement than a long antecedent prediction--"Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." Seeing that "He has suffered being tempted," there is an elevating speciality surely for our sorrowing seasons in the words emanating from His lips--"Come unto Me, and be comforted."\par \par Lord Jesus, impart to me a true mourning for sin, a true submission in trial. The storm-clouds may be gathering--they may have gathered, as I am holding on my darksome way; but with this Hospice in sight, I shall listen to Your own gracious invitation--"Come, my people, enter into your chambers, and shut your doors about you--hide yourself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast" (Isa. 26:20).\par \par "Come unto Me, and rest,\par You weary heart, distrest\par With wasting toil, and strivings vain and endless;\par Mourning from day to day\par For blessings passed away;\par Come unto Me; I will not leave you friendless.\par \par "I watched your cisterns fail,\par I saw you spent and pale,\par With parched lips, and heart with anguish bursting,\par When from the desert sod,\par Your cry went up to God.\par Come unto Me; I will not leave you thirsting."\par -S. Doudney\par \par "The days of your mourning shall be ended."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } &!918 Voices of the Glorified Rest-giver{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 VOICES aqa17 Hospice of the Mourner{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttOF THE GLORIFIED REST-GIVER\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last--I am He that lives, and was dead--and, behold, I am alive for evermore; and have the keys of Hades and of death." Rev. 1:17-18\par \par John was at this moment, in no ordinary sense of the word, one of the weary and burdened. He was left alone of the apostolic band. Many of his fellows and friends had died a martyr's death. Untold cruelties had stained the imperial purple; clouds brooded over the Christian cause. No sympathetic human voice was near to cheer him in his loneliness, as he wandered along the shore of that prison-island. Can we wonder if, in his solitary hours, he grouped himself among the heavy-laden? Can we wonder if these waves of the Aegean Sea were a type of his own inner feelings--so far as earth was concerned, seeking rest and finding none? His earthly home and Hospice was a desolate and terrible one.\par \par But the Rest-Giver, He who of old permitted him in tranquil love to pillow his head on His bosom, was near with the well-known lullabies which he had heard amid the pauses of the storm on Tiberias, and at the timid gathering in the upper room on the first Easter evening--"Fear not;" "I am alive!" Among the prognostications of coming evil and disaster conveyed in vision of opened seals and emptied vials--Hades and Death specially active participators in the drama--He reveals Himself as the great Lord of life, watching, as such, the destinies of the Church--not a seal broken, not a vial outpoured, without His bidding--walking in the midst of the golden candlesticks, and alone pronounced "worthy" to open the roll of Providence.\par \par Life and Death alternate and palpitate, strangely in this verse. DEATH, the mystery and portent of mankind; death, which lies like a cold avalanche on the heart of humanity; death, with its ghastly tapers lighting the long corridors of the past; death, the most irresistible of all natural forces, is here confronted by a Force mightier still--"I am alive for evermore;" "I have the keys of that gloomy gate, opening to the vast unknown, suspended at my belt. 'Fear not!' I Myself know death. I have felt it. I have passed through its portals. I was dead; but I have conquered it and its defiances, spoiled it of its power, and left the King of Terrors a vanquished foe. I have converted the very home of death, the grave, into a veritable Hospice, a 'cemetery,' a sleeping-place or bed of rest, preparatory to a waking up in endless life. 'Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord; for they rest.'"\par \par "There is no death--the leaves may fall,\par The flowers may fade and pass away;\par They only wait through wintry hours\par The coming of the May!"\par \par O weary and heavy-laden ones, who, it may be, through fear of death are all your lifetime subject to bondage, fear it not. Your Lord was dead. Fear not the chill tenets of the prophets of annihilation, who meet the yearnings of humanity with the requiem of despair\endash "Sleep the sleep that knows no waking."\par \par Your Lord lives. Leave to paganism to carve on its sepulchral slabs--"The land of no return." He is alive forever more. He will come again in His advent glory to take you to Himself, and to transplant you among the ingathered company of His ransomed.\par \par "Therefore dread I not to go\par O'er the silent river.\par Death, your hastening oar I know;\par Bear me, you Life-giver,\par Through the waters to the shore,\par Where mine own have gone before!''\par \par He gives us, meanwhile, the sublime guarantee\endash "Because I live, you shall live also."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } Y PILGRIM\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart--and you shall find rest unto your souls." Matt. 11:29).\par \par This is the sequel to our motto-verse, the expansion of the rest-saying of the loving Rest-Giver. None who have entered into the spirit of these words, but must recognize and find in them a gracious Hospice--a chamber of the "House Beautiful."\par \par "No man," says Luther, "if he were the gentlest and kindest in the world, could have such a gentle bearing as Christ had." He further tells of a legend regarding the Apostle Peter, that his eyes were always red with weeping and on being asked the cause; the reply was--"I weep when I recall the most sweet gentleness of Christ with His apostles." Possibly the remembrance of that sweet gentleness and forbearance towards himself was the most touching of all.\par \par Note the Savior's special message, in the meditation of today, to His burdened and weary ones. He virtually says--"Exchange burdens. Part with your own and take Mine. Make trial of My yoke, and bear it for My sake. It will be heavy without Me; but with My grace and blessing it will be easy and light. I do not promise in the rest I confer to 'remove your shoulder from the burden,' to give you immunity from care, and trial, and exactions; but I will do better--I will impart strength and endurance to bear."\par \par The existence of many is a pursuit after spurious and counterfeit rest, misnamed happiness--an aimless, vapid life of pleasure engrossed with objects which bring with them no sense of satisfaction or compensation--a dull, weary round in the world's monotonous tread-mill. This is not the rest Christ promises to His weary ones. Often the world's burdens, too, are weighted with unworthy accompaniments--wounded pride, injured self-love, disappointed ambition, the harboring of proud, vain-glorious thoughts. Here is a recipe for tranquillity of soul which the gospel may well claim as all its own--"For I am meek and lowly in heart." It has well been called the birth-song of Christianity--"He has put down the mighty from their seats, and has exalted the humble and meek."\par \par It was by these principles the new creed won its way on earth--not by material agencies. The martial spirit, the greatest of the old-world forces, had its day and its collapse. The serene, gentle spirit, nurtured among the hills of Nazareth, fought a bloodless war and conquered, with the sole weapons in His armory--weapons which He Himself assayed--"meekness and lowliness." Rich and poor, master and slave, owned the magic of "this new thing on the earth;" they took His yoke upon them, and, by strange paradox, all who tried found in the bearing of it rest.\par \par Further--gather from this gracious saying the bliss of endurance, submission, forbearance, love; lifted above the fret and fever of the world, the clash of debasing rivalries. Be not aspiring after great things, or envious of others, tempted to quarrel with outer circumstances--in other words, showing dissatisfaction with the appointments of God, making base surrender of duty to self-interest.\par \par The quiet mountain-lake is a beautiful thing, sleeping on its shadows, no ripple to disturb the placid mirror. But what is more inspiring and invigorating is the stream which issues from it, hurrying impetuously onward, battling its way over rock and boulder, to water and fertilize the plains below. Build your Hospice in the faithful study of Christ's spotless character and example, in its humility and self-sacrifice, combined with active consecration in doing His Father's will. "I am meek--I am lowly." These are the two silver and golden bells--curfew-chimes ringing to deepest and truest rest. They together constitute the true "patent of nobility." In the possession of calm, elevated peace in Himself, as on a mount of transfiguration, the tumults of passion are hushed, and with the favored disciple on Hermon you are able to exclaim--"It is good for us to be here." Moreover, included in this is the blessed privilege, taught by the meek and lowly Master, of helping other weary ones to bear their burdens and carry their crosses.\par \par "I know we are not here\par For our own selfish ease;\par The kingliest One the earth has known\par Lived not Himself to please.\par And they who have truly learned of Him\par How a burden can give rest,\par And joyfully share the great human care,\par Have learned life's secret best."\par \par Beautiful and touching is the plea of the apostle immediately following--"Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift."\par \par "I beseech you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } //"Q19 The Meek and Lowly Pilgrim{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE MEEK AND LOWLare weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Be of good cheer; it is I--be not afraid." Matt. 14:27\par \par It surely was an exceptional season of fear and unrest with the disciples, that night-storm on the Sea of Galilee.\par \par The saddest feature of the moment was that faith--the strong resolute faith of other times--had now deserted their better natures. They could see nothing but perilous environment, the surging billows and the darkness--for "it was the fourth watch of the night," about three o'clock, when the gloom was deepest, and no flush of morn as yet had tinted the wild hills of Gadara. Strangely different from their experience on a former occasion! He was then with them. Though asleep on "a coil of ropes for His pillow," He was there. They had the comfort of His Presence. They could awake (as they did awake) the weary slumberer; and the voice of the God within the toil-worn man rebuked the waves and turned the storm into a calm. Now it was different--their despairing monotone rather was, "How has He left us at the moment we most needed Him?" "Surely the Lord has forsaken me, and my God has forgotten me!" No, more, when He at last appeared on the crest of the waves, instead of recognizing Him with a shout of adoring welcome, they in their superstitious fear imagined that a demon of the deep, an apparition premonitory of death, had come from the spirit-world. Their cry was a cry of trouble.\par \par To such unworthy turbulence and misgiving truly they need not have given way. We know from the context where He had been all night--on some adjoining mountain engaged in prayer--engaged in prayer for them, watching through the darkness their tempest-tossed bark, in sympathetic touch with their palpitating hearts, and eager to speak His word of power. At last it is spoken. He who comes down from the mountain oratory to tread the waters, pronounces His gracious rest words--the reassuring "It is I" (literally, I AM). It is preceded and followed by "Fear not"--"Be not afraid." There can be no mistake. "O Lord God of hosts, who is a strong Lord like unto You? You rule the raging of the sea--when the waves thereof arise, You still them."\par \par It is a parable of profounder spiritual realities. In the unrest of the soul, amid the swirls and eddies of life's ocean, Jesus comes to His people--most often, too, when darkness is deepest. The sensible tokens of His love and mercy seem withdrawn. In their misgiving and incredulity they wail out the plaintive cry, "Where is now my God?" He seems, in accordance with the narrative of the storm, "as if he would pass them by." "My way is hidden from the Lord, my judgment is passed over from my God."\par \par "Be still!" Let patience have her perfect work. He will in His own time and way change the storm into a calm. We are, alas! often ourselves responsible for our unworthy despondencies. We turn our backs to the Sun of Righteousness. There is a shadow projected, but that shadow is our own. We conjure up some phantasms of unbelieving doubt. We say, like the disciples, "It is a spirit," and we "cry out for fear." Let us look away from ourselves, the surging waves and billows within us and around us, and keep the unwavering eye of faith on Him who is waiting to give rest to the weary, and peace to the troubled, and hope to the desponding. To revert to our figure, He has His Hospice built at every turn of the perilous way. He fences it with these same two buttresses--"Fear not; IT IS I; be not afraid."\par \par "O Redeemer! Shall one perish\par Who has looked to You for aid?\par Let me see You, let me hear You,\par Through the gloomy midnight shade,\par Utter You Your voice of comfort\endash\par 'It is I; be not afraid!'"\par \par In all time of our tribulation He will be true to His promise--"I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him." As the Hospice is most valued by the tempest-beaten traveler, so every trial is a fresh reason for resorting to "the Refuge from the storm, the Covert from the tempest." And when the last trouble of all, the hour of departure arrives, the Hospice-gates will be opened by the Divine Promiser of Rest, and the triplet-comfort fall for the last time on the ears of the weary and heavy laden\endash "Fear not; it is I; be not afraid."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\lang2058\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } yi20 The Reassuring Voice{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang1033\f0\fs24 THE REASSURING VOICE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who r children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him?" Matthew 7:11\par \par No hospice is more identified with peace, safety, security than that of a heavenly Father's love. When, therefore, the Bestower of Rest would inculcate, in the case of all weary and burdened ones, constant, unwavering trust, He strengthens and accentuates this feeling from its analogy with the tenderest of earthly ties. There is one important difference. Earthly parents, with the rarest exceptions, lavish affection on their offspring. But "being evil," with natures imperfect, they are apt at times to be indiscreet and unwise. Not so with our Father in heaven. He gives only what He knows to be best. It may not appear so to us. But our interests are in better and safer keeping than our own. There is often real kindness in His denial of blessings--in blessings withheld as well as in blessings bestowed. He blesses us often as the Jewish patriarch did his son's sons, "with hands crossed," speaking apparently with strange ambiguous voice. Life's hopes are thwarted, life's visions unrealized, life's mission unfinished, life's best years curtailed. Be patient. He who sees the end from the beginning, who knows the apparent contradictions of existence, and can view them in their due place and proportion, has some wise reasons muffled and concealed. As with that same father of Israel, "He guides His hands wittingly." Over every paternal dealing we can write--"He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness."\par \par And while He has thus but one end in view--our good--He has but one condition in the bestowment of blessing--that we "ask Him." The treasury--His repertory of promise--is full and free. We have only to use the golden key of prayer, unlock its contents, and make them our own. The very act of prayer and the faith and confidence it implies, the casting ourselves unreservedly at the mercy-seat, will itself help to the solution of many baffling problems and the removal of unbelieving doubts. It was prayer, "wrestling" at the brook Jabbok, which terminated the night-conflict, and at break of day sent the struggling pleader on his way rejoicing, the inheritor of a new name and a new blessing. Prayer is the magical charm with which every pilgrim is supplied in issuing forth from the Gospel Hospice on his journey. Prayer is the polish with which every pilgrim soldier keeps bright and shining the whole armor of God.\par \par O blessed Savior, give me this perfect rest in the assurance of a heavenly Father's protection, guidance, and care. I will look from the provided Hospice along the future, whether that future be bright with sunshine or mantled in gloom. I will see in Him to whom I owe all I have for time and for eternity a rich Provider, a wise Provider, a loving Provider, "the Father of all mercies, and the God of all grace."\par \par "Beneath Your watchful, loving eye,\par I supplicate for peace and rest,\par Submissive in Your hand to lie,\par And feel that it is best.\par \par "Though often, like letters traced on sand,\par My weak resolves have passed away,\par In mercy lend Your helping Hand\par Unto my prayer today."\par \par An earthly father may err, and does err; but\endash "As for God, His way is perfect."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\lang1033\fs23\par } &&}e%22 The Hospice Outlook{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{I)y21 The Earthly and the Heavenly Hospice{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE EARTHLY AND THE HEAVENLY HOSPICE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto you\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE HOSPICE OUTLOOK\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there you may be also." John 14:3\par \par "Come unto Me" is now echoed in a voice from Heaven.\par \par He who gave the invitation to the weary and heavy laden, in a world of unrest, issues the same under a different formula, regarding the world of everlasting rest. He will return to receive His people to Himself, pronouncing the promised beatitude, "Come, you blessed of My Father." No longer sin-laden, sorrow-laden pilgrims; but with every dimmed eye dried, every burden laid down, every foe conquered, He will conduct them to what the old writers call "the rest without a rest," the rest from sin and trial, the rest from the great fight of afflictions. The pilgrim lies down at night, weary and fatigued, in the earthly Hospice. When he awakes, he is in the heavenly one. His window looks no more out on cloud and storm and blackness. He is bathed in the light of Paradise. Yet he awakes not to dreamy inaction--rather will it be to participate in the unresting activities of the ransomed, "serving Him day and night in His temple." "They rest not" (Rev. 4:8).\par \par What an elevating thought, that the divine Rest-Giver is now, in His unresting love, preparing a Home, rearing a Hospice for His pilgrims on the true Alps of God, the everlasting hills of glory, where tempests of affliction never brood, and wintry Death no longer sways his icy scepter; no baffled hopes or frustrated plans--"the rest that remains." When they leave the world, to use another metaphor, it is not to an unknown land they are sailing. They are going, as millions before them have gone, to colonize the better country.\par \par Be it specially noted, too, He is "preparing a place" for His redeemed. It is true, most true, in a conventional phrase, that heaven's main characteristic is "not locality, but character." The pure in heart shall see God. The righteous shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. But neither must we dispense with the literal comfort of our Lord's words, that He has gone to make ready some special dwelling-place, where He will receive His people to Himself. What or where is the favored spot in the realms of space we cannot, by the boldest flight of a sanctified imagination, tell. For His risen saints, in their glorified resurrection-bodies, and for His own glorified Self, the center of their adoring homage, there must be some thing more than an ethereal, unmaterialistic heaven--a mere spirit-world. "In my Father's house are many mansions"--mansions suited and adapted for the tastes, capacities, idiosyncrasies of His vast family; the unreached ideals of earth fully attained in the perfected household above.\par \par Lord Jesus, prepare me for the place which You have gone to prepare for me. Amid the often fretful calls of existence, let me catch the joyous chimes wafted from the bells of glory. There may be, and will be, tearful partings here. There are angel-welcomes and saint-welcomes there, and His own welcome best of all. "I will come again!" Let me have my heart's best chambers meanwhile lustrated and plenished for the advent of the Elder Brother. Let no discordant note mar the joy of that welcome. "A little while, and you shall not see me--and again, a little while, and you shall see me!" The first little while is now running its course in the sand-glass; its hours and moments may soon, and must, sooner or later, be numbered and completed. May I be ready, always ready, for the "again, a little while, and you shall see Me,"--when the advent morn shall dawn, and the gates of the heavenly hospice be thrown open for waiting pilgrims.\par \par "Rest comes at length; though life be long and dreary,\par The day must dawn, and darksome night be past;\par Faith's journey ends in welcome to the weary,\par And heaven, the heart's true home, is ours at last!"\par \par "Make haste, my Beloved, and be like to a roe or to a young deer upon the mountains of spices."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } d wayfarers! It is the assurance not only of a "needs be" in whatever befalls them, but that all are the appointments of their heavenly Father.\par \par "Your heavenly Father!" We cling lovingly to the belief of "God over all;" God "in all places of His dominion;" God from center to circumference of space and being; the Divine Regent, pervading with His presence the great organic system He has formed; in the poetry of Scripture, the clouds His chariot, the light His clothing; His power girding the hills and setting fast the mountains--yet with tender care for the minute and lowly, making grass to grow for the cattle, penciling the flower, sculpturing the snow-wreath, watching the sparrows fall, and feeding the young ravens; the unslumbering Shepherd, keeping watch and ward continually, whether under the infinite blue of day or under night with its starry galaxies.\par \par We can leave science and philosophy to speak of Nature as in her decrees stern, unbending, controlled by forces simple and complex, all her own; the subject, the slave of inexorable law, from which, save by exceptional miracle, there can be neither evasion nor deflection--the revolution of the seasons, the alternation of day and night, gravitation, the processes of growth and decay, etc. But there are, at all events in the moral world, gainsay who will, forces independent of material ones, above and beyond material law. We are under the supervision and guidance of a personal God, "for in Him we live and move and have our being." Though mysteries and perplexities are only too patent on every side, yet we can rely on the assurance that His are no arbitrary dealings, swayed by caprice, marked and misdirected by human blindness and ignorance, but the dictates of unerring wisdom and of unchanging everlasting love. His nature and name are not that enshrined in the Scripture word "Zephaniah" (the Lord is darkness), but rather that of "Uriel" (God is my light). "God is light, and with Him is no darkness at all." The heavy laden, the bereaved, the orphan, the widow, and "him that has no helper," are shielded and canopied by the divine Fatherhood--the Pillar of Cloud in the day of prosperity, the Pillar of Fire in the night of adversity. Mark the Savior's words. They are not "My heavenly Father," but "your heavenly Father." He would have each child to know His individual, particular affection and pity, and, despite of baffling providences, to cleave to the unforgetting love of God. Happy those who are thus content to accept with confidence the needed "all things" here spoken of; who have listened to the Savior's invitation, and unhesitatingly accepted it, "Come unto Me." Safe within the Hospice built on Himself, the Rock of Ages, they can sing the lullaby of an old pilgrim traveler, unmoved amid the moanings of the tempest--"In the time of trouble He shall hide me in His pavilion--in the secret of His tabernacle shall He hide me; He shall set me up upon a rock."\par \par "What seems so dark to your dim sight\par May be a shadow, seen aright,\par Making some brightness doubly bright.\par The flash that struck your tree, no more\par To shelter you, lets heaven's blue floor\par Shine where it never shone before.\par The cry wrung from your spirit's pain\par May echo on some far-off plain,\par And guide a wanderer home again."\par \par "I am as a wonder unto many; but You are my strong refuge" (Hospice).\par \par "Why did I murmur underneath the night,\par When night was spanned by golden steps to Thee?\par Why did I cry disconsolate for light,\par When all Your stars were bending over me?"\par \par O blessed Redeemer! what do I require more than this, Your own blessed word, that all which befalls Your people is meted out by One who is too kind to mingle an unnecessary or superfluous drop in their cup of sorrow? He who died for me says so; and He says it of "My Father and your Father, of My God and your God." At times He uses the chisel to bring the quarried block into shape. He sees the possibilities of form and beauty in that rough mass of stone or marble, though involving at the time breaking and maiming.\par \par "So I think that human lives\par Must bear God's chisel keen,\par If the spirit yearns and strives\par For the better life unseen;\par For men are only blocks at best,\par Until the chiseling brings out all the rest."\par \par I thankfully repair to this Gospel Hospice. I need no other. Its windows look above and beyond all stormy clouds on the azure sky of heaven. Its walls enshrine this special promise of a Father's combined omniscience and love. Pointing to it I can devoutly and confidently say\endash "Remember the word unto Your servant, upon which You have caused me to hope."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } ..#y]23 The Pilgrim's Confidence{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE PILGRIM'S CONFIDENCE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things." Matt. 6:32\par \par What a rest is this for weary, burdeneviewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 THE FINAL WELCOME\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par Then the King will say to those on his right, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world." Matthew 25:34\par \par Gracious invitation of Christ to His ransomed Church. Many had been the calls to rest issuing from His throne of grace. This (retaining the same formula, "Come") is His final summons from the throne of glory, as his weary and heavy-laden people lay down their burdens forever, and are about to enter their eternal Hospice and Home.\par \par 1. Note the name of the Rest-Giver. He no longer speaks of Himself, as He once did in His state of humiliation, as a Pilgrim, needing rest as much as His people--the homeless Wayfarer of Galilee--but "a King", the Head of His redeemed--Lord of all, who had by His doing and dying purchased the regal right to say--"Inherit the kingdom." It is a gift which makes those on whom it is conferred "kings and priests unto God." Being a gift, it is from first to last of grace--all merit is excluded. In Milton's beautiful words\endash\par "With solemn adoration down they cast\par Their crowns, inwove with amaranth and gold."\par \par "Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be destroyed, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe." Hebrews 12:28\par \par 2. What enhances its value is that it is the gift of a Father's love. "Come, you who are blessed by my Father." The Hospice with its many mansions was prepared by the Father "from the foundation of the world." The divine Fatherhood, the great Father-heart of God, so precious in the Church below, will attain its full meaning in the Church of the First-born. Christ's own words will then reach their grandest, their everlasting significance, "My Father and your Father, My God and your God." "I in them and You in me, that they may be made perfect in unity!"\par \par 3. The rest of the heavenly Hospice is further to consist in the Presence and Love of the great Rest-Giver Himself. He says not, "Go, you ransomed ones; heralded by angels, to your thrones and your crowns; go apart from Me, and mingle in the ranks of ministering seraphim. My connection with you terminates, now that your earthly burdens are laid down. I go to My Father, and you see Me no more." No! It is, "Come, you blessed, come with Me. I will show you the path of life. Remember the words that I spoke, My closing words on earth. The promise will be in its widest, its eternal sense, ratified now--'If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto Myself, that where I am there you may be also.'" It would be no true rest to them, if the pilgrim-prayer could not still be offered as they stand on the threshold of bliss--"If Your Presence go not with us, carry us not hence." His response is, "Come!" "My presence shall go with You, and I will give you REST."\par \par 4. One other thought. It will be rest after labor, and rest-recompense for labor done under the inspiration of that divinest and most heaven-born of forces--Love to the Master. "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth--Yes, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them." "Come," is the Savior's word and form of welcome--and then He specifies the varied good deeds wrought by His people, and which He owns and accepts as done for Himself. Rich and poor too can participate in the same tribute-offering. Varied ministries of service, necessarily different in kind and degree (what we may designate by the conventional terms of high and low), will be equally valued by Him who tests all, not by material bulk or value, but by motive. Through this consecrated medium of love, the cup of cold water given to the needy will be owned and accepted at the great gathering of souls, whether that water be conveyed in golden goblet or in earthenware vessel.\par \par No rest on earth is sweeter or more welcome than that earned by unselfish, self-sacrificing toil--the consciousness of honest labor followed by well-earned approval and reward, the well-sustained fight followed by the spoils of victory. What will be the elements of joy in that rest which is the result of loving work done for the great Loving Being to whom we owe our eternal all?\par \par Blessed Savior, may I be able now with the ear of faith to hear these whisperings from the better world, where rest will be turned into rapture. And may it be mine at last, under the sway and dominion of a love which is eternal, casting my blood-bought crown at Your feet, to say\endash "In Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand there are pleasures for evermore."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par }  ]E24 The Final Welcome{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\st is an equivalent for Rest. He, the gracious Bestower of Rest, says "Come to Me--believe Me--trust Me, and your heavy burden, whatever it is, will at my appointed time be explained, lessened, or removed; and if not any of these, strength will be given to enable you to bear it."\par \par There was much when the above words were spoken, to stagger and paralyze faith, and therefore to foster unrest. A beloved brother dead and a Savior absent! Unlike the daughter of Jairus, who was still laid on her coffin within the house, Lazarus had been three days committed to the sepulcher when the Great Physician appeared. The triumph of death in his case was complete. On all human calculations the doom seemed beyond reversal.\par \par "Hush!" says the Redeemer. "Is anything too hard for the Lord? Man's extremity is My opportunity. Believe Me. Look beyond human frailty and the limitations of human power. 'With God all things are possible.' In the darkest seasons of depression, when faith and sight  seem waged in unequal conflict, and victory inclining to the latter, dismiss unworthy impeachments of the divine Wisdom. You shall yet, it may even be in the midst of crossed and unanswered prayers, see the glory of God."\par \par "We sadly watched the close of all,\par Life balanced in a breath;\par We saw upon his features fall\par The dreadful shade of death.\par All dark and desolate we were,\par And murmuring nature cried\endash\par 'Oh, surely, Lord, had You been here,\par Our brother had not died!'\par \par "But when its glance the memory cast\par On all that grace had done,\par And thought of life's long warfare past\par And endless victory won,\par Then faith, prevailing, wiped the tear,\par And looking upward, cried\endash\par O Lord, You surely have been here;\par Our brother has not died!" \endash Burns\par \par Blessed Savior, give me grac e to enter this secure Hospice revealed in the meditation of today, and to trust You in dark dispensations. Bestow upon me the rest of faith, confiding in You where I fail to discern Your footsteps, saying with one of these faithless yet faithful mourners--"But I know that even now, whatever You will ask of God, God will give it You." Sooner or later the cloud will have its silver lining; and my Bethany, whatever it be, now shrouded in funeral gloom, will be bathed in sunshine. The web woven with impaired vision and trembling fingers will then be seen to be no piece of disordered and inharmonious patchwork. "There is no complete answer to the question," says a leader of religious thought, "within the range of our present knowledge. We feel here that we only see the fringe of a vaster system of government than we can yet take measure of." "Glory to God for all," were Chrysostom's last words.\par \par "There are days of silent sorrow\par In the seasons of our life,\par There are  wild despairing moments,\par There are hours of mental strife,\par There are times of stony anguish,\par When the tears refuse to fall;\par But the waiting-time, my brothers,\par Is the hardest time of all.\par \par "But at last we learn the lesson\par That God knows what is best;\par \par For with wisdom comes patience,\par And of patience comes rest;\par Yes, a golden thread is shining\par Through the tangled woof of fate,\par And our hearts shall thank Him meekly\par That He taught us how to wait."\par \endash Psalms of Life\par \par "Said I not unto you?" I can fill up, with all His spoken promises, that blank cheque. I shall recognize troubles and sorrows only as the steps leading upward to the Heavenly Hospice. I shall look forward by anticipation, and see life's sanctuary, the temple of existence, no longer a half-completed structure, a half-developed plan, with pillars broken, and aisles unroofed, and windows bared to the storm, but standing out, the completed "building of God," in the fair and finished proportions of eternity. Meanwhile I can sing even through tears this "song in the night"\endash "Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him. Commit your way unto the Lord--trust also in Him; and He shall bring it to pass."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } NN]A25 Misgiving Rebuked{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 MISGIVING REBUKED\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Said I not unto you, that, if you would believe, you should see the glory of God?" \endash John 11:40\par \par Faith in Chriaith has saved you; go in peace." Luke 7:50\par \par These words were spoken to one of earth's most weary and heavy-laden, a child of despair, who sought the presence and solace of the Great Rest-Giver in the house of Simon of Galilee. The harsh, censorious, unsympathetic guests at the Pharisee's table made no attempt at kindly intervention. They would spurn her away unsuccoured, as if her touch were defilement. They would leave her a battered flower, crushed and broken with the pitiless rain and storm. Not only so; they were even tempted to repudiate and reject the divine character of the new Teacher on account of His apparent ignorance of her previous life--His apparent tolerance of impurity. "If His were indeed the Omniscience claimed, He must have known who it was that was now crouching abashed behind Him, and raining tears of remorse on His feet." It has been surmised that the words of our leading motto-verse and its invitation were uttered shortly before; that this outcast had heard them; that on hearing them the first ray of hope was kindled in her anguished soul. She followed the footsteps of the Redeemer. His words, "Come unto Me," had rung in her ear ever since like a chime of reposeful music; and she dared ask from Him--the gentle Dispenser of Pardons--that "absolution" which a cruel world and a conventional code of morality denied.\par \par "With silent step\par I enter, and along the lighted hall\par Pass swiftly, until I reach Your place, and stand\par  Behind You weeping; soft Your shadow falls\par And covers me from trouble and reproach,\par That none may chide my tears or bid me go."\par \par Yes, she was not mistaken. The Sun of Righteousness and Mercy shone, and the flower lifted its drooping leaves. With sobbing heart and speechless emotion, she came to the Mighty Burden-Bearer, as implied in the original "kissing much His feet" and was hushed to rest in the peace of a divine forgiveness. "Go in peace," or, as it is literally, "Go into peace"--go enter within My Hospice.\par \par There is a panacea in the words of our meditation for all who in diverse ways have guilt on the conscience. Transgressions in the past may be many and aggravated. Love and loyalty to God and truth and holiness may have been sadly ebbing. "My iniquities have separated between me and my God." In moments of faithlessness and despair, there may have been temptation to rush to the dungeons of Doubting Castle, rather than to the Gospel Hospice, and hear rung only the knell of extinguished hope. Blessed be His name! there are accents of love and reconciliation heard, telling that the separating gulf is bridged and the Hospice-gates flung wide open for welcome.\par \par "Far, far away, like bells at evening pealing,\par The voice of Jesus sounds o'er land and sea,\par And laden souls, by thousands meekly stealing,\par Kind Savior, turn their weary steps to Thee."\par \par I would make it my prayer--"Let me fall now into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are great; and let me not fall into the hand of man!" O Christ, O Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, where would I be but for You, with the plenitude of Your grace, the wealth of Your forgiveness? There is no bound to Your ocean mercy. It laves and washes with its ample tide the dreariest, rockiest shores of humanity. The Bible's great refrain from first to last is\endash "He is able also to save unto the uttermost." The uttermost! Who dare set limits to the uttermost a Savior-God can do, the possibilities of His infinite love?\par \par "Through life, through death, through sorrowing and sinning,\par Christ shall suffice me as He has sufficed.\par Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning;\par The beginning and the end of all is Christ."\par \par "Come," He seems still to say--"come unto ME! Others may reject the gracious offer. Others may be tempted to cower in terror over an irreparable, irrevocable past, as if condemned to stand hopeless outside the pale of mercy. O weary, restless soul, You are doubting My ability and willingness to reach your case. Doubt it not."\par \par "Go, in penitence bewailing,\par Go, and now bemoan your guilt;\par Trust the promise, never failing,\par 'I will save you if you wilt.'\par \par "Hasten, every soul despairing,\par At the cross of Jesus fall;\par Though with legion sins repairing,\par He will freely pardon all."\par \par There was a beautiful Jewish legend, that for many centuries after the rite was instituted, the red or scarlet thread bound round the neck of the scape-goat turned white. It was the significant token of forgiveness, the words of the great prophet, spoken on the threshold of his prophecy, put in visible emblematic shape--"Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord--though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool" (Isa. 1:18). Other Hospices," the divine Pardoner seems to say, "may be closed, but read the superscription over My Gospel Refuge and Stronghold. See the blood sprinkled on its lintels and door-posts, which gives Me the unchallenged prerogative to say\endash Neither do I condemn you--go, and sin no more."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } bbke26 Rest of Forgiveness{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 REST OF FORGIVENESS\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par Then Jesus said to the woman, "Your sins are forgiven." Luke 7:48\par \par And Jesus said to the woman, "Your fand make our abode with him." John 14:23\par \par What a hospice is this! What a wondrous relationship the words of the divine Bestower of Rest unfold--that love toward God in the soul of the believer has the most gracious of responses! Two of the adorable Persons in the ever-blessed Trinity are represented as Guests entering in and dwelling there. "My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him."\par \par It would seem as if the emblem were dear to Him who employs it; for it is the very same that is repeated, in still more touching and winning language, not in the days of His humiliation, but from the throne of His exaltation. Standing, as a patient KING, outside the closed portal of the heart, with the dews of night at His feet and frosty skies above, the lock of the door matted with ivy and corroded with rust, "Behold," says He, "I stand at the door, and knock--if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me" (Rev. 3:20). In the words of a sacred poet\endash\par "His bleeding feet still loiter at your door,\par His head against the iron bar is pressed,\par Impassioned tears rise in His eyes once more,\par He longs to give you REST."\par \par Both figures significantly convey the pleadings of a love that never fails, an importunity that never wearies, as well as a fellowship most intimate and endearing.\par \par O blessed meeting-place! Th e human heart becomes itself a Hospice--a house of shelter and refreshment, where the festal table of rich spiritual blessing is sacramentally spread, and where the storm raging without only enhances the gracious rest and security within. "And in this mountain shall the Lord of Hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined" (Isa. 25:6).\par \par "Accept these gifts beyond compare,\par And l!eave behind earth's toil and strife;\par Ascend the heights, and breathe the air\par Of God's own everlasting life.\par \par "If you will serve Him, you of Heaven\par The honored and approved shall be;\par Accepted, welcomed, loved, forgiven,\par Earth knows of no such pedigree."\par \par "My Father will love him." We are told of Thomas Aquinas, the scholar and saint of the thirteenth century, that when lying ill he had continually in his mo"uth these words of Augustine--"Then shall I truly live when I shall be quite filled with You alone and Your love" (Vaughan's Life).\par \par There is but one condition here made by the Divine Speaker regarding "the mountain guest-chamber,"--"If a man loves Me, he will keep My words."\par \par Gracious Redeemer, Author of Peace and Giver of Rest, help me to accept this stipulated provision. Enable me to hear and to obey Your voice, to reverence Your will, reflect Your holiness and purit#y, Your charity and unselfishness, Your patience patience and endurance, the beauty of Your life of self-consecration. The words of Jesus I am asked to "keep," are not the words of a dead teacher or prophet; not the obsolete sayings of the Christ of an historic past--a Figure which flitted in mystery across the world's stage nearly two thousand years ago, and then vanished like other great men of the olden time. They are the utterances of a divine, sympathetic, ever-living, ever-loving Being--the God-Man,$ the Man-God. They are arrows, polished shafts sent as fresh today as then from His golden quiver. The words of man may fail and falter, and before long be forgotten. But "the words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life," welling fresh from a perennial Fountain.\par \par "We will come unto him," further says our verse, "and make our abode with him." An ecclesiastical writer mentions that Ignatius, in the early years of the second century, "borrows an image from the sacred pageant o%f some heathen deity, where statues, sacred vessels, and other treasures are borne in solemn procession." "So," are the words of that venerated Christian regarding the true followers and worshipers of his Lord, "are they all marching in festive pomp along the Via Sacra--the way of love--which leads to God. They all are bearers of treasures committed to them; for they carry their God, their Christ, their shrine, their sacred things in their heart." Happy those who in some lowly measure are able to join this festal throng, bearing with them consecrated treasures, and seeking to take up their abode in the heart of the "Father-God!"\par \par Conscious, it may be, of past shortcoming and unworthiness, may I be yet enabled, with humble confidence, to make the avowal--"Lord, You know all things, You know that I love You." "He that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him."\par \par "Truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ."\par \par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } AA1}27 Fellowship with the Father and the Son{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 FELLOWSHIP WITH THE FATHER AND THE SON\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "If a man loves Me, he will keep My words--and My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, (tbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 REST IN THE HOLY SPIRIT\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "I will ask the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever." John 14:16\par \par A gracious Hospice opened by Christ to His disciples in the near prospect of His de)parture, was the promise of a divine Comforter, whose advent would more than compensate them for His own personal absence and loss; not a temporary visitant, like the angels who from time to time gladdened both dispensations; not like the Abrahams, and Elijahs, and Isaiahs, and Davids, and Baptists--brilliant passing meteors shining for a season and then lost in the darkness--no satellite with reflected or derivative light, but an abiding Presence and glory "above the brightness of the sun."\par \par * This heavenly Paraclete was to "teach them all things;" to "guide them into all truth;" to energize, with superhuman wisdom and power--a continued strength and inspiration for His people in the time to come. And, best of all, He was to be the ever-present Revealer of an absent Lord, magnifying Him in the affections of His Church and people--"He shall glorify Me for He shall receive from Me, and shall show it unto you."\par \par At Pentecost there was the full realization of the promise. Th+e windows of heaven were then opened, and showers of blessing descended. The gathered disciples were "baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire," each brow haloed with flame--a radiance of unearthly brightness. It was the predicted "times of refreshing." The prophetic announcement was fulfilled--"He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass, and as showers that water the earth." Multitudes were enabled to call Christ "Lord, by the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor. 12:3).\par \par Living as we do under ,"the dispensation of the Spirit," we have in His bestowal and name a true Refuge and House of Rest. He is emphatically the Spirit of peace, brooding with halcyon calm over the chaos of unrest. COMFORTER is surely the most precious of balm-words for the weary and heavy laden, the sin-burdened and sorrow-burdened. Filled with all joy and peace in believing, we "abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."\par \par "Filled with the Spirit"--that is the secret and explanation of the rest this Ho-spice affords. Its every window is thrown open to catch the divine breath and echoes from the everlasting hills. There replenished and recruited with His varied gifts, the traveler is ready to prosecute his upward and onward way, with the new song on his lips--"Your Spirit, O God, is good; lead me into the land of uprightness." The chalice of joy given by the divine Agent is so full of the living water of which He is the emblem, that there is no room in it for the poison-drops of sin, the contamination of. any baser earthly admixture. Rather, in His hands, life is like the vessels of Cana, not only filled to the brim, but the contents are gradually transfused and transfigured into the wine of heaven. Commonest blessings and joys are in Him sanctified, and become sacramental.\par \par "In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirsts, let him come unto Me, and drink. This spoke He of the Spirit" (John 7:37, 39).\par \par May it be mine perso/nally to appropriate this richest boon and legacy bequeathed by the departing Savior to His Church and people; recognizing in the presence and supporting grace of "the Comforter" the chief well of refreshment for pilgrims "passing through the Valley of Baca." It is an additional encouragement, too, in pleading for the peerless gift, that the divine Father is harmonized with the divine Son in the loving and bountiful bestowment. Does an earthly parent delight in lavishing tokens of affection on his offspring? "How much more shall your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit unto those who ask Him?"\par \par Happy those who are able, in some feeble measure, yet with lowly confidence, to join in the apostle's testimony\endash "The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, which is given unto us."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } ^130 Final Rest and Beatific Presence{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;;O]Q29 Hospice of Prayer{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\gener1au]28 Rest in the Holy Spirit{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\font'2ator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 HOSPICE OF PRAYER\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par "Whatever you shall ask the Father in My name, He will give you." John 16:23\par \par A gracious promise and a gracious welcome from the loving Rest-Giver. Wide is the range of blessing here given--"Whatever you ask." One condition alone is made, and which is thus elsewhere expressed--"If3 we ask anything according to His will, He hears us" (1 John 5:14). Surely the Inviter's own words are a pledge that all will be given that is really for our good; and all will as assuredly be withheld which would be detrimental to our best and truest well-being.\par \par The unique prayer of Jabez, though one of the most ancient in inspired story, has, in its expressed limitations, a significance and beauty which make it the property of no one dispensation, but of the Church and the believer in4 every age--"And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, Oh that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that Your hand might be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me! And God granted him that which he requested" (1 Chron. 4:10). The God of the old pilgrim-father is ever and alone the judge of what are "blessings indeed"--blessings not counterfeit but real. At times to us this is difficult to believe. The promise of our verse today seems to our short-sigh5tedness and unwisdom often strangely belied. The gates of the Hospice-sanctuary appear barred, and our purposes thwarted. The evils we dread and deprecate overtake us; the blessings we fondly invoke and implore are denied. Let us hush all misgivings; let us check all misconstruction of the divine will and wisdom by accepting the righteous ordinations of that Will, remembering from whom these answers come. "Whatever you shall ask the Father." "Even so, Father; for so it seemed good in Your sight."\par \pa6r A further guarantee the verse supplies is the divine Medium, through which alike our prayers are offered and the Father's will is conveyed--"In My name." It is the name that is above every name--the name of "the Wonderful Counselor," the divine Brother-Man, the King of heavenly hosts, yet the King of earthly pilgrims. "The name of the Lord is a strong tower [a Hospice]; the righteous runs into it, and is safe." Him the Father hears always. In the prophetic words of the psalm, "You have given Hi7m His heart's desire, and have not withheld the request of His lips." He is the true "Arbitrator between us, who lays His hand upon us both." He is the true Antitype in that double Rephidim picture--Moses on the mount and Joshua in the plain, pleading for us and fighting for us; only, unlike the type, there is no suspension in His intercession, His hand never "growing weary." He is the true Covenant Angel with the "much incense" of His adorable merits.\par \par There seems, at first sight, contr8adiction in an immediately subsequent verse of this same valedictory chapter. "You shall ask," says He, "in My name--and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you; for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me" (verses 26, 27). But it only lends intensity and emphasis to the Speaker's previous statement. It is as much as to say, "Though I be your ever-living, ever-loving Intercessor, the Prince who has power with God and must prevail, in another sense I need be no such Intermed9iary, I need to exercise no such intervention. Simply asking blessings through Me will be a passport to the Father's heart. You have only in your pleadings to name My name. It will be enough. Your love for Me will be sufficient to secure His love to you. Ask, and you shall receive, that your joy may be full."\par \par O blessed shelter and pausing-place for the climbers of every Hill Difficulty! There is no rest for the weary equal to that secured by prayer. In the very act of devotion there is :a sense of calmness and peace. A writer (Wells) happily illustrates this in citing the classic story of Orestes fleeing to the temple of Apollo, the god of light. Safe and inviolable in the sacred shrine, his fears and agitations are lulled as he lies prostrate in devotion before the altar. A beautiful and truthful picture of the believer on his knees at the mercy-seat, looking up in silence and trustfulness to the Father of Lights, with whom is no darkness at all! In that hour of quietness and confidence he gets strength. The apostle seems in the same way to carve an appropriate motto above the door of this gracious Hospice, this refuge of peace, when he says, "In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } <} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sl240\slmult1\lang2058\f0\fs24 FINAL REST AND BEATIFIC PRESENCE\par \par "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."\par \par At dawn the disciples saw Jesus standing on the beach, but they couldn't see who he was. He called out, "Children, have you caught any fish?" "No," they replied. John 21:4-5\par \par Weary and burdened with new apprehensions and desponding thoughts were these pi=lgrims of Galilee. Even Peter, despite of former protestations, now chafing under deferred and disappointed hope, seems to say, "I can wait on no longer; I shall resume the old daily occupation I had readily surrendered for a nobler, diviner mission. I am going fishing." And the others followed suit. It was a night of unremunerated toil. When their boat was drawing near to the western shore, a Figure stood out in the tender mystery of the dawn--the dim morning light that was breaking over the hills of Nap>htali. At first the jaded toilers knew Him not. The very tones of His voice seemed unfamiliar, even though the well-known greeting, "Children," reached their ears. But the Bidder of welcome was in due time recognized. The word passed from lip to lip, "It is the Lord!" A meal was ready spread on the shore; while a miraculous draught corroborated their surmises, and crowned the unrecompensed labor of "a night on the deep." The net was dragged ashore with its encumbering load, and the Lord of love was once m?ore surrounded with loving hearts. It was parable and miracle in one.\par \par After our night, too, on the world's sea of trial, life's varied and chequered appointments, there is to be a blessed day-dawn for all those that "love His appearing." In the morning of immortality, Jesus will meet us on the heavenly, as He did His disciples on the earthly shore, with the same gracious welcome. The prize which strewed the margin of the Lake of Galilee will have its emblematic counterpart in the recomp@ense for faithful, though in the case of some it may be fruitless, labor. As with the miraculous draught, then at least nothing will be lost, nothing lacking in the final gathering--no baffled hopes, or frustrated toil, or impeded work. "And for all there were so many, yet was not the net broken."\par \par In His own beatific Presence, too, the feast will be spread. That Presence and Love will consecrate and glorify the banquet--this not for a fleeting hour, but for eternity. Paul, in his great Aeighth chapter of Romans, ascends to the highest Hospice built on this side of heaven; and reaching these serene heights, where the toiling pilgrim breathes the air of the everlasting hills, he exclaims--"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" In that "morning without clouds" will the challenge attain its highest meaning and significance.\par \par Lord Jesus, Giver of Rest and Peace, let me hear Your voice even now on the celestial shore, saying, "Come unto Me, you weary ones, and I wilBl refresh you." Let me see in their spiritual symbolism (it may be yet dimly discernible) the lighted coal-fire, the fish laid thereon, and bread. Let the thought of that glad morning reconcile to all present experiences--storms, and buffetings, and night-watchings. Let the restful lullaby close alike this meditation and our volume\endash "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning."\par \par "What time I am awake I am still with You."\par \par "This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose." Isaiah 28:12\par \par "The night is over, the sleep is slept,\par They are called from the shadowy place;\par The Pilgrims stand in the glorious land,\par And gaze on the Master's face."\par \par Blessed be the Lord, that has given REST unto His people, according to all that He promised. There has not failed one word of all His good promise, which He promised. (1 Kings 8:56.)\par \pard\cf1\fs23\par }