SQLite format 3@  ii!%%atableTopicsTopicsCREATE TABLE Topics (Title NVARCHAR(100), Notes TEXT) |ze!00 Memories of Bethany{\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\fs22 MEMORIES OF BETHANY\par By John MacDuff\par \par To mourners in Zion, with whom Bethany has ever been a name consecrated to sorrow, these memories a@+ TBn 11: 1-45\par \par 1. Opening Thoughts\par 2. The Home Scene\par 3. Lessons\par 4. The Messenger\par 5. The Message\par 6. The Sleeper\par 7. Lights and Shadows\par 8. The Mourner's Comfort\par 9. The Mourner's Creed\par 10. The Master\par 11. Second Causes\par 12. The Weeping Savior\par 13. The Grave Stone\par 14. Unbelief\par 15. The Divine Pleader\par 16. The Omnipotent Summons\par 17. The Box of Ointment\par 18. Palm Branches\par 19. The Fig Tree\par \par \pard\cf1\fs23\par } at spot which was hallowed above all others by the Lord of glory as the scene of His most cherished earthly friendship! However holy be the memories which encircle other localities trodden by Him in the days of His flesh\emdash Bethlehem, with its manger cradle, its mystic star, and adoring cherubim\emdash Nazareth, the nurturing home of His youthful affections\emdash Tiberias, whose shores so often echoed to His footfall, or whose waters in stillness or in storm bore Him on their bosom\emdash the crested heights where He uttered His beatitudes\emdash the midnight mountains where He prayed\emdash the garden where He suffered\emdash the hill where He died\emdash there is no one single resort in His divine pilgrimage on which sanctified thought loves so fondly to dwell as on the home and village of BETHANY.\par \par Its hours of sacred converse have long ago fled. Its honored family have slumbered for ages in their tomb. Bethany's Lord has been for centuries enthroned amid the glories of a brighter home. But though its Memories are all that remain, the place is still fragrant with His presence. The echoes of His voice\emdash words of unearthly sweetness\emdash still linger around it; and have for eighteen hundred years served to cheer and encourage many a fainting pilgrim in his upward ascent to the true Bethany above!\par \par There, the Redeemer of the world proclaimed a brief but impressive Gospel. Heaven and earth seemed then to touch one another. We have the tender tones of a Man blended with the ineffable majesty of God. Hopes "full of immortality" shine with their celestial rainbow-hues amid a shower of holy tears. The canceling from our Bibles of the 11th chapter of John would be like the blotting out of the brightest planet from the spiritual firmament. Each of its magnificent utterances has proved like a ministering-angel\emdash a seraph-messenger bearing its live coal of comfort to the broken, bleeding heart, from the holiest altar which SYMPATHY (divine and human) ever uprear ed in a trial-world! Many has been the weary footstep and tearful eye that has hastened in thought to BETHANY\emdash "gone to the grave of Lazarus, to weep there."\par \par While "the town of Mary and her sister Martha" furnishes us, thus, with a garnered treasury of Christian solaces, it exhibits also one of the loveliest of the Bible's domestic portraits. If the story of Joseph and his brethren is in the Old Testament invested with surpassing interest, here a Gospel home-scene in the New, of s till deeper and tenderer pathos\emdash a picture in which the true Joseph appears as the central figure, without any estrangements to mar its beauty. Often at other times a drapery of woe hangs over the pathway of the Man of Sorrows. But Bethany is bathed in sunshine\emdash a sweet oasis in His toil-worn pilgrimage.\par \par At this quiet abode of congenial spirits He seems to have had His main "sips at the fountain of human joy," and to have obtained a temporary respite from unwearied labor and unmerited enmity. The "Lily among thorns" raised His drooping head in this Eden-home. There we can follow Him from the courts of the Temple\emdash the busy crowd\emdash the lengthened journey\emdash the miracles of mercy\emdash the hours of vain and ineffectual pleading with obdurate hearts. We can picture Him as the guest of a peaceful family, spirit blending with spirit in sanctified communion. We can mark the tenderness of His holy humanity. We can see how He loved, and sympathized, and wept, and rejo iced!\par \par As the tremendous events which signalized the close of His pilgrimage drew on, still it is Bethany with which they are mainly associated. It was at Bethany the fearful visions of His cross and passion cast their shadow on His path. From its quiet palm-trees He issued forth on His last day's journey across Mount Olivet. It was with Bethany in view He ascended to heaven. Its soil was the last He trod\emdash its homes were the last on which His eye rested when the cloud received Him up into glory. The beams of the Sun of Righteousness seemed as if they loved to linger on this consecrated height.\par \par We cannot doubt that many incidents regarding His often sojournings there are left unrecorded. We have more than once, indeed, merely the simple announcement in the inspired narrative that He retired from Jerusalem all night to the village where His friend Lazarus resided. We dare not withdraw more of the veil than the Word of God permits. Let us be grateful for what we have of the gracious unfoldings here vouchsafed of His inner life\emdash the comprehensive intermingling of doctrine, consolation, comfort, and instruction in righteousness. His Bethany sayings are for all time\emdash they have "gone through all the earth"\emdash His Bethany words "to the end of the world!" Like its own alabaster box of precious ointment, "wherever the Gospel is preached," these will be held in grateful memorial.\par \par John, of all the Evangelists, was best qualified to do justice to this matchless picture. Baptized himself with the spirit of love, his inspired pencil could best portray the lights and shadows in this lovely and loving household. Preeminently like his Lord, he could best delineate the scene of all others where the tenderness of that tender Savior shone most conspicuous. He was the disciple who had leaned on His bosom\emdash who had been admitted by Him to nearest and most confiding fellowship. He would have the Church, to the last period of time, to enjoy the same. He interrupts, therefore, the course of his narrative that he may lift the veil which enshrouds the private life of Jesus, and exhibit Him in all ages in the endearing attitude and relation of a Human Friend. Immanuel is transfigured on this Mount of Love before His suffering and glory! The Bethany scene, with its tints of soft and mellowed sunlight, forms a pleasing background to the sadder and more awful events which crowd the Gospel's closing chapters.\par \par \par \par \par \cf1\fs23\par } ze!00 Memories of Bethany{\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\fs22 MEMORIES OF BETHANY\par By John MacDuff\par \par To mourners in Zion, with whom Bethany has ever been a name consecrated to sorrow, these memories are inscribed.\par \par Joh (oQ02 The Home Scene{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\f!Yy01 Opening Thoughts{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par OPENING THOUGHTS\par \par Places associated with great minds are always interesting. What a halo of moral grandeur must ever be thrown around thnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE HOME SCENE\par \par The curtain rises on a quiet Judean village, the sanctuary of three holy hearts. Each of the residents have some strongly-marked traits of individual character. These have been so often delicately and truthfully drawn that it is the less necessary to dwell minutely upon them here. There is abundant material in the narrative to discover to us, in the sisters, two characters\emdash both interesting in themselves, both beloved by Jesus, both needful in the Church of God, but at the same time widely different, preparing by a diverse education for heaven\emdash requiring, as we shall find, from Him who best knew their diversity, a separate and peculiar treatment.\par \par MARTHA, the elder (probably the eldest of the family), has been accurately represented as the type of activity; bustling, energetic, impulsive, well qualified to be the head of the household, and to grapple with the stern realities and routine of actual life; quick in apprehension, strong and vigorous in intellect, anxious to give a reason for all she did, and requiring a reason for the conduct of others; a useful if not a noble character, combining diligence in business with fervency in spirit.\par \par MARY was the type of reflection; calm, meek, devotional, contemplative, sensitive in feeling, ill suited to battle with the cares and sorrows, the strifes and griefs of an engrossing and encumbering world; one of those gentle flowers that pine and bend under the rough blasts of life, easily battered down by hail and storm, but as ready to raise its drooping leaves under heavenly influences. Her position was at her Lord's feet, drinking in those living waters which came welling up fresh from the great Fountain of life; asking no questions, declining all arguments, gentle and submissive, a beautiful impersonation of the childlike faith which "bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things."\par \par While her sister can so command her feelings as to be able to rush forth to meet her Lord outside the village, calm and self-possessed, to unbosom to Him all her hopes and fears, and even to interrogate Him about death and the resurrection, Mary can only meet Him buried in her all-absorbing grief. The crushed leaves of that flower of paradise are bathed and saturated with dewy tears. She has not a word of remonstrance. Jesus speaks to Martha\emdash chides her\emdash reasons with her. But with Mary, He knew that the heart was too full, the wound too deep, to bear the probing of word or argument; He speaks, therefore, in the touching pathos of her own silent grief. Her melting emotion has its response in His own.\par \par In one word, Martha was one of those meteor spirits rushing to and fro amid the ceaseless activities of life, softened and saddened, but not prostrated and crushed by the sudden inroads of sorrow. Mary, again, we think of as one of those angel forms which now and then seem to walk the earth from the spirit-land; a quiet evening star, shedding its mellowed radiance among deepening twilight shadows, as if her home was in a brighter sphere, and her choice, as we know it was, "the better part, that never could be taken from her."\par \par "What Mary fell short in words she made up in tears. She said less than Martha, but wept more; and tears of devout affection have a voice, a loud prevailing voice\emdash no rhetoric like that." (Matthew Henry)\par \par Of LAZARUS, around whom the main interest of the narrative gathers, we have fewer incidental touches to guide us in giving individuality to his character. This, however, we may infer, from the poignant sorrow of the twin hearts that were so unexpectedly broken, that he was a loved and lamented only brother, a sacred prop around which their tenderest affections were entwined. Included too, as he was, in the love which the Divine Savior bore to the household, for "Jesus loved Lazarus." Is it presumptuous to imagine that his spirit had been cast into much the same human mold as that of his beloved Lord, and that the friendship of Jesus for him had been formed on the same principles on which friendships are formed still\emdash a similarity of disposition, some mental and moral resemblances and idiosyncrasies? They were like-minded, so far as a fallible nature and the nature of a stainless humanity could be assimilated. We can think of him as gentle, retiring, amiable, forgiving, heavenly-minded; an imperfect and shadowy, it may be, but still a faithful reflection and transcript of incarnate loveliness. May we not venture to use regarding him his Lord's eulogy on another, "Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no deceit!"\par \par Nor must we forget, in this rapid sketch, what a precious unfolding we have in this home portraiture of the humanity of the Savior! "The Man Christ Jesus" stands in softened majesty and tenderness before our view. He who had a heart capacious enough to take in all mankind, had yet His special likings (sinless partialities) for individuals and minds which were more than others congenial and kindred with His own. As there are some heart sanctuaries where we can more readily rush to bury the tale of our sorrows or unburden our perplexities, so had He. "Jesus wept!"\emdash this speaks of Him as the human Sympathizer. "Jesus loved Lazarus"\emdash this speaks of Him as the human Friend! He had an ardent affection for all His disciples, but even among them there was an inner circle of holier attachments\emdash a Peter, and James, and John; and out of this sacred trio again there was one pre-eminently "Beloved." So, amid the hallowed haunts of Palestine, the homes of Judea, the cities of Galilee, there was but one Bethany.\par \par It is delightful thus to think of the heart of Jesus, in all but sin, as purely human, identical and identified with our own. He was no hermit, dwelling in mysterious solitariness apart from His fellows, but open to the charities of life\emdash in all His refined and hallowed sensibilities "made like unto His brethren." Friendship is itself a holy thing. The bright intelligences in the upper sanctuary know it and experience it. They "cry one to another." Theirs is no solitary voice\emdash no isolated existence. Unlike the planets in the material firmament, shining distant and apart, the angels are rather clustering constellations, whose gravitation-law is unity and love, this binding them to one another, and all to God.\par \par No! with reverence we say it\emdash may not the archetype of all friendship be found shadowed forth in what is higher still, those mystic and ineffable communings subsisting between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a past eternity? We can thus regard the friendship of Jesus on earth\emdash like all ennobled, purified affections\emdash as an emanation from the Divine; a sacred and holy stream, flowing directly from the Fountain of infinite lov!e. How our adorable Lord in the days of His flesh fondly clung even to hearts that grew faithless when fidelity was most needed! What was it but a noble and touching tribute to the longings and susceptibilities of His holy soul for human friendship, when, on entering the precincts of Gethsemane, He thus sought to mitigate the untold sorrows of that awful hour\emdash "Tarry here and watch with Me!"\par \par But to return. Such was the home around which the memories of its residents and our own, l"ove to linger. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus\emdash all three partakers of the same grace, fellow-pilgrims Zionward, and that journey sanctified and hallowed by a sacred fellowship with the Lord of pilgrims. The Savior's own precious promise seems under that roof of lowly unobtrusive love to receive a living fulfillment: "Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." Though many a gorgeous palace was at that era adorning the earth, where was the spot, what the dwelling#, half so consecrated as this? Solomon had a thousand years before, two miles distant, in presence of assembled Israel, uttered the exclamation, "But will God in very deed dwell with men upon earth?"\par \par He was now verily dwelling! Nor was it under any gorgeous canopy or magnificent temple. He had selected Three Human Souls as the shrines He most loved. He had sought their holy, heavenly converse as the sweetest incense and costliest sacrifice. How or where they first saw Jesus we cannot te$ll. They had probably been among the number of those pious Jews who had prayerfully waited for the "consolation of Israel," and who had lived to see their fondest wishes and hopes realized. The Evangelist gives no information regarding their previous history. The narrative all at once, with an abruptness of surpassing beauty, leaves us in no doubt that the Divine Redeemer had been for long, a well-known guest in that sunlit home, and that, when the calls and duties of His public ministry were suspended, m%any an hour was spent in the enjoyment of its peaceful seclusion.\par \par We can imagine, and no more, these often happy meetings, when the Pilgrim-Savior, weary and worn, was seen descending the rocky footpath of Olivet, Lazarus or his sisters, from the flat roof of their dwelling, or under the spreading fig-tree, eager to catch the first glimpse of His approach. When seated in the house, we may picture their converse: Themes of sublime and heavenly import, unchronicled by the inspired penmen,& which sunk deep into those listening spirits, and nerved two of them for a future hour of unexpected sorrow. If there be bliss in the interchange of communion between Christian and Christian, what must it have been to have had the presence and fellowship of the Lord Himself! Not seeing Him, as we see Him, "behind the lattice," but seated underneath His shadow, drinking in the living tones of His living voice. These "children of Zion" must, indeed, have been "joyful in their King."\par \par One 'of these hallowed seasons is that referred to in the 10th chapter of Luke's gospel, where Martha, the ministering spirit, and Mary the lowly disciple, are first introduced to our notice. That visit is conjectured to have occurred when Jesus was returning to the country from the Feast of Tabernacles. The Bethany circle had not yet dreamt of their impending trial. But, foreseen as it was by Him who knows the end from the beginning, may we not well believe one reason (the main reason) for His going there was( to soothe them in the prospect of a saddened home? So that, when the stroke did descend, they might be cheered and consoled with the remembrances of His visit, and of the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth.\par \par And, is not this still the way Jesus deals with His people? He visits them often by some precious love-tokens\emdash some special manifestations of His grace and presence before the hour of trial. So that, when that hour does come, they may not be altogether incapacitat)ed or overwhelmed with it. Like Elijah of old, they have their miraculous food provided before they encounter the sterile desert. When they come to speak of their crushed hearts, they have solaces to tell of too. Their language is, "I will sing of mercy and judgment!"\par \par We may be led to inquire why a character so lovely as that of Lazarus was not enlisted along with the other disciples in the active service of the Apostleship. "Why should Peter and Andrew, John and James, be summoned from* their boats and nets on Lake Gennesaret to follow Jesus, and this other, imbued with the same spirit and honored with the same regard, be left alone and undisturbed in his village home?"\par \par "To every man there is a work." Some are more peculiarly called to active duty, and better fitted for it; others for passive obedience and suffering. Some are selected as bold standard-bearers of the cross, others to give their testimony in the quiet seclusion of domestic life. Some are specially gifte+d, as Paul, to appear in the halls of Nero or on the heights of Mars' Hill, and, confronting face to face the world's boasted wisdom, maintain intact the honor of their Lord. Others are required to glorify Him on beds of sickness, or in homes of sorrow, or in the holy consistent tenor of their everyday walk. Some are called as Levites to temple service; others to give the uncostly cup of cold water, or the widow's mite. Others to manifest the meek, gentle, unselfish, resigned, forgiving heart, when there ,is no cup or mite to offer!\par \par Believer! rejoice that your path is marked out for you. Your lot in life, with all its "accidents," is your Lord's appointing. Dream not, in your own short-sighted wisdom, that, had you occupied some other or more prominent position\emdash had your talents been greater, or your worldly influence more extensive\emdash you might have glorified your God in a way which is at present denied to you. He can be served in the lowliest as well as in the most exalted st-ations! As the tiniest leaf or smallest star in the world of nature reflects His glory, as well as the giant mountain or blazing sun, so does He graciously own and recognize the humblest effort of lowly love no less than the most lavish gifts which splendid munificence and costly devotion can cast into His treasury. Let it be your great aim and ambition to honor Him just in the position He has seen fit to assign you.\par \par "Let every man," says the Apostle, "wherein he is called, therein abide with God." However limited your sphere, you may become a center of holy influences to the little world around you. Your heart may be an incense-altar of love and affection, kindness and gentleness to man\emdash your life a perpetual hymn of praise to your Father in Heaven; glorifying Him, like Martha, by active service; like Mary, by sitting at His feet; or, like Lazarus, by holy living and happy dying, and leaving behind you "the Memory of the Just" which is "blessed."\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } / had been committed to the sepulcher. Death had long left the residents with an unbroken circle. Can it be that the unwelcome intruder is so near at hand? that their now joyous dwelling is so soon to echo to the wail of lamentation? We imagine it was but lately visited by Jesus. In a little while the arrow has sped; the sacredness of a divine friendship is no guarantee against the incursion of the sleepless foe of human happiness. Bethany is a mourning household. The sisters are bowed in the agony of thei0r worst bereavement\emdash the prop of their existence is laid low\emdash "Lazarus is dead!"\par \par At the very threshold of this touching story, are we not called on to pause, and read the uncertainty of earth's best joys and purest happiness; that the brightest sunshine is often the precursor of a dark cloud. When the gourd is all flourishing, a worm may unseen be preying at its root! When the vessel is gliding joyously on the calm sea, the treacherous rock may be at hand, and, in one brief 1hour, it has become a shattered wreck!\par \par It is the touching record of the inspired historian in narrating Abraham's heaviest trial\emdash "After these things, God tested Abraham." After what things? After a season of rich blessings, gilding a future with bright hopes! Would that, amid our happy homes, and sunshine hours, and seasons of holy and joyous communion between friend and friend, we would more habitually bear in mind "This is not to last!"\par \par In one brief and unsus2pected moment, our Lazarus may be taken away in death. The messenger may now be on the wing to lay low some treasured object of earthly solicitude and love. God would teach us\emdash while we are glad of our gourds\emdash not to be "exceeding glad;" not to nestle here as if we were to live always, but rather, as we are perched on our summer boughs, to be ready at His bidding to soar away, and leave behind us what most we prize.\par \par It tells us, too, the utter mysteriousness of many of the d3ivine dispensations. "LAZARUS IS DEAD!" What! he, the head, and support, and stay of two helpless females? The joy and solace of a common orphan-hood\emdash a brother evidently made and born for their adversities? What! Lazarus, whom Jesus tenderly loved? How much, even to his Lord, will be buried in that early grave! We may well expect, if there be one homestead in all Palestine guarded by the overshadowing wings of angels to debar the entrance of death, whose tenants may pillow their heads night after n4ight in the confident assurance of immunity from trial, it must surely be that loved resort\emdash that "Arbor in His Hill of\par \par Difficulty," where the God-man delighted often to pause and refresh His wearied body and aching mind.\par \par Will Omnipotence not have set its mark, as of old, on the door-posts and lintels of that consecrated dwelling, so that the destroyer, in going his rounds elsewhere, may pass by it unscathed? How, too, can the infant Church spare him? The aged S5imeon or Anna we dare not wish to detain. Burdened with years and infirmities, after having gotten a glimpse of their Lord and Savior, let them depart in peace, and receive their crowns. These decayed trees in the forest\emdash those to whom old age on earth is a burden\emdash let them bow to the axe, and be transplanted to a nobler climate. But one in the vigor of life\emdash one so beautifully combining natural amiability with Christian love\emdash one who was pre-eminently the friend of Jesus, and that6 word profoundly suggestive of all that was lovely in a disciple's character. Death may visit other homes in that sequestered village, and spread desolation in other hearts, but surely the Church's Lord will not allow one of its pillars so prematurely to fall!\par \par And yet it is even so! The mysterious summons has come!\emdash the most honored home on earth has been crudely rifled!\emdash the most loving of hearts have been cruelly torn; and inscrutable is the dealing, for "Lazarus is dead!"7\par \par He, the young and strong, who cherished\par Noble longings for the strife,\par By the roadside fell, and perished\par On the threshold march of life."\par \par And worse, too, than all, "the Lord is absent!" Why is Omniscience tarrying elsewhere, when His presence and power above all, are needed at the house of His friend? The disconsolate sisters, in wondering amazement, repeat over and over again the exclamation, "If Jesus had been here, this our 8brother had not died!" "Has He forgotten to be gracious?" "Surely our way is hidden from the Lord, our judgment is passed over from our God."\par \par Ah! the experience of His people is often still the same. What are many of God's dispensations?\emdash a baffling enigma\emdash all strangeness\emdash all mystery to the eye of sense. Useless lives prolonged, useful ones taken! The honored minister of God struck down, the unfaithful watchman spared! The philanthropic and benevolent have an arrest 9put on their manifold deeds of kindness and generosity; the grasping, the avaricious, the mean-souled\emdash those who neither fear God nor do good to man, are allowed to live on from day to day! What is it but the picture here presented eighteen hundred years ago\emdash Judas spared to be a traitor to his Lord; while\emdash Lazarus is dead!\par \par But let us be still! The Savior, indeed, does not now lead us forth, amid the scene of our trial, as He did the bereft sisters, to unravel the myst:eries of His providence, and to show glory to God, redounding from the darkest of His dispensations. To us, the grand sequel is reserved for eternity. The grand development of the divine plan will not be fully accomplished until then; faith must meanwhile rest satisfied with what is baffling to sight and sense.\par \par This whole narrative is designed to teach the lesson that there is an undeveloped future in all God's dealings. There is an unseen "why and wherefore" which cannot be answered he;re in this present world. Our befitting attitude and language now is that of simple confidingness\emdash "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Listening to one of these Bethany sayings (we shall by and by consider), whose meaning will be interpreted in a brighter world by Him who uttered it in the days of His flesh\emdash "Said I not unto you, that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?"\par \par "O you who mourns on your way,\par With longings for the close of< day,\par He walks with you, that Angel kind,\par And gently whispers\emdash 'Be resigned;\par Bear up\emdash bear on\emdash the end shall tell,\par The dear Lord orders all things well.'"\par \par Our duty, meanwhile, is that of children, simply to trust the faithfulness of a God whose footsteps of love we often fail to trace. All will be seen at last to have been not only for the best, but really the best. Dark clouds will be fringed with mercy. What we call= now "baffling dispensations," will be seen to be wondrous parts of a great connected whole\emdash the wheel within wheel of that complex machinery, by which "all things, (yes, ALL things) are now working together for good."\par \par "Lazarus is dead!" The choicest tree in the earthly Eden has succumbed to the blast. The choicest cup has been dashed to the ground. Some great lights in the moral firmament have been extinguished. But God can do without human agency. His Church can be preserved, th>ough no Moses be spared to conduct Israel over Jordan, and no Lazarus to tell the story of his Savior's grace and love, when other disciples have forsaken Him and fled.\par \par We may be calling, in our blind unbelief, as we point to some ruined fabric of earthly bliss\emdash some tomb which has become the grave of our fondest affections and dearest hopes\emdash "Shall the dust praise you, shall it declare your truth?" Believe! believe! God will not give us back our dead as He did to the Bethan?y sisters; but He will not deprive us of anything we have, or allow one garnered treasure to be removed, except for His own glory and our good. Now it is our privilege to believe it\emdash in Heaven we shall see it. Before the sapphire throne we shall see that not one unnecessary thorn has been suffered to pierce our feet, or one needless sorrow to visit our dwelling, or tear to dim our eye. Then our acknowledgment will be, "We have known and believed the love which God has to us."\par \par "Oh,@ weep not though the beautiful decay,\par Your heart must have its autumn\emdash its pale skies\par Leading perhaps to winter's cold dismay.\par Yet doubt not. Beauty does not pass away;\par His form departs not, though his body dies.\par Secure beneath the earth the snowdrop lies,\par Waiting the spring's young resurrection-day."\par \par Be it ours to have Jesus with us, and Jesus for us, in all our afflictions. If we wish to insure these mAighty solaces, we must not suffer the hour of sorrow and bereavement to overtake us with a Savior until then a stranger and unknown. Luke tells us the secret of Mary's faith and composure at her loved one's grave\emdash She had, long before her day of trial, learned to sit at her Redeemer's feet. It was when in health Jesus was first resorted to and loved. In prosperity may our homes and hearts be gladdened with His footstep; and when prosperity is withdrawn, and is succeeded by the dark and cloudy day, may we know, like Martha and Mary, where to rush in our seasons of bitter sorrow; listening from His glorified lips on the throne to those same exalted themes of consolation which, for eighteen hundred years, have to myriad, myriad mourners been like oil thrown on the troubled sea. Jesus is with us! The Master is come! His presence will extract sorrow from the bitterest cup, and make, as He did at Bethany, a very home of bereavement and a burial scene, to be a hallowed ground!\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } %5%03 Lessons{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par LESSONS\par \par As yet the home of Bethany is all happiness. The burial-ground has been untraversed since, probably, years before the dust of one, or perhaps both parents.Dw the direction He had taken. The last time He had visited their home was at the Feast of Dedication, during the season of winter, when the palm-trees were bared of their leaves, and the voice of the turtle-dove was silent. Jesus, on that occasion, had to escape the vengeance of the Jews in Jerusalem by a temporary retirement to the place where John first baptized, near Aenon, on the wooded banks of the Jordan. It must have been to Him a spot and season of calm and grateful repose; a pleasing transition fErom the crude hatred and heartless formalism which met Him in the degenerate City. The savor of the Baptist's name and spirit seemed to linger around this sequestered region. John had evidently prepared, by his faithful ministry, the way for a mightier Preacher, for we read, as the result of the Savior's present sojourn, that "many believed on Him there."\par \par If we visit with hallowed emotion the places where first we learned to love the Lord, to two at least of those who accompanied the ReFdeemer, the region He now traversed must have been full of fragrant memories; there it was that Jesus had been first pointed out to them as the "Lamb of God;" there they first "beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and of truth."\par \par On His way there, on the present occasion, He most probably passed through Bethany, and apprized His friends of His temporary absence. Lazarus was then in his customary vigor\emdash no shadow of death had yet passed ovGer his brow; he doubtless parted with the Lord he loved happy at the thought of before long meeting again. But soon all is changed. The hand of sickness unexpectedly lays him low. At first there is no cause for anxiety. But soon the herald-symptoms of danger and death gather fast and thick around his pillow; "his beauty consumes away like a moth." The terrible possibility for the first time flashes across the minds of the sisters, of a desolate home, and of themselves being the desolate survivors of a lovHed brother. The joyous dream of restoration becomes fainter and fainter. Human remedies are hopeless.\par \par There was One, and only ONE, in the wide world who could save from impending death. His word, they knew, could alone summon luster to that eye, and bloom to that wan and fading cheek. Fifty long miles intervene between the great Physician and their cottage home. But they cannot hesitate. Some kind and compassionate neighbor is soon found ready to hasten along the Jericho road with the bIrief but urgent message, "Lord! behold he whom You love is sick." If it only reaches Him in time, they know that no more is needed. They even indulge the expectation that their messenger may be anticipated by the Lord Himself appearing. Others might doubt His omniscience, but they knew its reality. They had the blessed conviction, that while they were seated in burning tears by that couch of sickness, there was a sympathizing Being far away marking every heart-throb of His suffering friend. Even when the Jstern human conviction of "no hope" was pressing upon them, "hoping against hope," they must have felt confident that He would not allow His faithfulness now to fail. He had often proved Himself a Brother and Friend in the hour of joy. Could He fail\emdash can He fail to prove Himself now a "Brother born for adversity?"\par \par Although, however, thus convinced that the tale of their sorrows was known to Jesus, a messenger is sent; the means are employed! They act as though He knew it not; as iKf that omniscient Savior had been all unconscious of these hours of prolonged and anxious agony! What a lesson is there here for us! God is acquainted with our every trouble; He knows (far better than we know ourselves) every pang we heave, every tear we weep, every perplexing path we tread; but the knee must be bent, the message must be taken, the prayer must ascend!\par \par It is His own appointed method\emdash His own consecrated medium for obtaining blessings. Jesus may have gone, and probaLbly would have gone to restore His friend, even though no such messenger had reached Him\emdash we dare not limit the grace and dealings of God. He is often (blessed be His name for it!) "found by those who sought Him not." But He loves such messages as this. He loves the confiding, childlike trust of His own people, who delight in the hour of their extremity to cast their burdens upon Him, and send the winged herald of prayer to the throne of grace on which He sits.\par \par Would that we valueMd, more than we do, this blessed link of communication between our souls and Heaven! More especially in our seasons of trouble, (when "vain is the help of man,") happy for us to be able implicitly to rest in the ability and willingness of a gracious Redeemer. Prayer brings the soul near to Jesus, and fetches Jesus near to the soul. He may linger, as He did now at the Jordan, before the answer be granted, but it is for some wise reason; and even if the answer given is not in accordance with our pre-conceivNed wishes or anxious desires, yet how comforting to have put our case and all its perplexities\emdash in His hand, saying, "I am oppressed; undertake for me! To You I unburden and unbosom my sorrows. I shall be satisfied whether my cup be filled or emptied. Do to me as seems good in Your sight. He whom I love and whom YOU love is sick; the Lazarus of my earthly hopes and affections is hovering on the brink of death. That leveling blow, if consummated, will sweep down in a moment all my hopes of earthly haOppiness and joy. But it is my privilege to confide my trouble to You; to know that I have surrendered myself and all that concerns me into the hand of Him who 'considers my soul in adversity.' Yes; and should my schemes be crossed, and my fondest hopes baffled, I will feel, even in apparently unanswered prayers, that the Judge of all the earth has done right!"\par \par "It is said," says Rutherford, speaking of the Savior's delay in responding to the request of the Syrophenician woman; "It is saPid He answered not a word, but it is not said He heard not a word. These two differ much. Christ often hears when He does not answer. His not answering is an answer, and speaks thus: 'Pray on, go on and cry, for the Lord holds His door fast bolted\emdash not to keep you out, but that you may knock and knock."\par \par "God delays to answer prayer," says Usher, "because he would have more of it. If the musicians come to play at our doors or our windows, if we delight not in their music, we throw Qthem out money presently that they may be gone. But if the music please us, we forbear to give them money, because we would keep them longer to enjoy their music. So the Lord loves and delights in the sweet words of His children, and therefore puts them off and answers them not presently."\par \par Observe still further, in the case of these sorrowing sisters of Bethany, while in all haste and urgency they send their messenger, they do not ask Jesus to come\emdash they dictate no procedure\emdasRh they venture on no positive request\emdash all is left to Himself. What a lesson also is there here to confide in His wisdom, to feel that His way and His will must be the best\emdash that our befitting attitude is to lie passive at His feet\emdash to wait His righteous disposal of us and ours\emdash to make this the burden of our petition, "Lord, what would You have me to do?" "If it be possible let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will."\par \par Reader! invite Sto your gates this celestial messenger. Make prayer a holy habit\emdash a cherished privilege. Seek to be ever maintaining inter-communion with Jesus; consecrating life's common duties with His favor and love. Day by day before you take your flight into the world, night by night when you return from its soiling contacts, bathe your drooping plumes in this refreshing fountain. Let prayer sweeten prosperity and hallow adversity. Seek to know the unutterable blessedness of habitual filial nearness to your Father in heaven\emdash in childlike confidence unbosoming to Him those heart-sorrows with which no earthly friend can sympathize, and with which a stranger cannot intermeddle. No trouble is too trifling to confide to His ear\emdash no need too trivial to bear to His mercy-seat.\par \par "Prayer is appointed to convey\par The blessings He designs to give;\par Long as they live should Christians pray,\par For only while they pray, they live."\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } rrUEu05 The Message{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkiU MU04 The Messenger{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE MESSENGER\par \par Is the absent Savior not to be sought? Martha and Mary kneCVnd4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22 THE MESSAGE\par \par "Lord, he whom You love is sick."\par \par The messenger has reached\emdash what is his message? It is a brief, but a beautiful one. "Lord, behold he whom You love is sick." No labored eulogium\emdash no lengthened oration could have described more significantly the character of the dying villager of Bethany. Four mystic words invest his name with a sacred loveliness. By one stroke of his pen the Apostle unfolds a heart-history; so that we desire no mWore\emdash more would almost spoil the touching simplicity! "He whom You love!" We might think at first the words are inverted. Can the messenger have mistaken them? Is it not more likely the message of the sisters was this\emdash "Go and tell Him, 'Lord, he whom we love,' or else, 'he who loves You is sick?'"\par \par No! it is a loftier argument by which they would stir the infinite depths of the Fountain of love! They had "known and believed the love" which the Great Redeemer bore to their brother, aXnd they further felt assured that "loving him at the beginning, He would love him even to the end." Their love to Lazarus\emdash (tender, unspeakably tender as it was\emdash one of the loveliest types of human affection)\emdash was at best an earthly love\emdash finite, imperfect, fitful, changing, perishable. But the love they invoked was undying and everlasting, superior to all vacillation\emdash enduring as eternity.\par \par It is ours "to take encouragement in prayer from God only"\emdash to plead Ynothing of our own\emdash our poor devotedness, or our unworthy services; they are rather arguments for our condemnation. But His promises are all "Yes, and amen." They never fail. His name is "a strong tower," running into which the righteous are safe. That tower is garrisoned and bulwarked by the attributes of His own everlasting nature. Among these attributes not the least glorious is His LOVE\emdash that unfathomable love which dwelt in His bosom from all eternity, and which is immutably pledged neverZ to be taken from His people!\par \par Man's love to his God is like the changing sand. God's love is like the solid rock. Man's love is like the passing meteor with its fitful gleam. God's love like the fixed stars, shining far above, clear and serene, from age to age, in their own changeless firmament. Do we know anything of the words of this message? Could it be written on our hearts in life? Were we to die, could it be inscribed on our tombs, "This is one whom Jesus loved?" Happy assurance! The pure[ spirits who bend before the throne know no happier. The archangels\emdash the chieftains among principalities and powers, can claim no higher privilege, no loftier badge of glory! Love is the atmosphere they breathe. It is the grand moral law of gravitation in the heavenly economy. God, the central sun of light, and joy, and glory, keeping by this great motive principle every spiritual planet in its orbit, for "God is love."\par \par That love is not confined to heaven. It may be foretasted here on ear\th. The sick man of Bethany knew of it, and exulted in it. Though in the moment of dissolution he had to mourn the personal absence of his Lord, yet "believing" in that love, he "rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory." His sisters, as they stood in sorrowing emotion by his dying couch, and thought of that hallowed fraternal bond which was about so soon to be dissolved, could triumph in the thought of an affection nobler and better which knit him and them to the Brother of brothers\emdash and whi]ch, unlike any earthly tie, was indissoluble.\par \par And what was experienced in that lowly Bethany home, may be experienced by us. That love in its wondrous manifestation is confined to no limits, no age, no peculiar circumstances. Many a Lazarus, pining in need, who can claim no heritage but poverty, no home but cottage walls, or who, stretched on a bed of protracted sickness, is heard saying in the morning, "Would God it were evening! and in the evening, Would God it were morning!" Yet if he has th^at love of God reigning in his heart, he has a possession outweighing the wealth of worlds!\par \par What a message, too, of consolation is here to the sick! How often are those chained down year after year to some aching pillow\emdash worn, weary, shattered in body, depressed in spirit\emdash how apt are they to indulge in the sorrowful thought, "Surely God cannot care for me!" What! Jesus think of this wasted frame\emdash these throbbing eyes\emdash these powerless limbs\emdash this decaying mind! I f_eel like a wreck on the desert shore\emdash beyond the reach of His glance\emdash beneath the notice of His pitying eye!\par \par No, you poor desponding one, He does cherish, He does remember you!\emdash "Lord, he whom You love is sick." Let this motto-verse be inscribed on your Bethany chamber. The Lord loves His sick ones, and He often chastens them with sickness, just because He loves them. If these pages be now traced by some dim eyes that have been for long most familiar with the sickly glow of th`e night-lamp\emdash the weary vigils of pain and languor and disease\emdash an exile from a busy world, or a still more unwilling alien from the holy services of the sanctuary\emdash oh! think of Him who loves you, who loved you into this sickness, and will love you through it, until you stand in that unsuffering, unsorrowing world, where sickness is unknown! Think of Lazarus in his chamber, and the plea of the sisters in behalf of their prostrate brother, "Lord, come to the sick one, whom You love."\par a \par Believe it, the very continuance of this sickness is a pledge of His love. You may be often tempted to say with Gideon, "If the Lord be with me, why has all this befallen me?" Surely if my Lord loved me, He would long before this have hastened to my relief, rebuked this sore disease, and raised me up from this bed of languishing? Did you ever note, in the 6th verse of this Bethany chapter, the strangely beautiful connection of the word therefore? The Evangelist had, in the preceding verse, recordedb the affection Jesus bore for that honored family. "Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus." "When He had heard therefore that he was sick," what did He do? Flee on wings of love to the support of His loved friend? hurry in eager haste by the shortest route? We expect to hear so, as the natural deduction from John's premises.\par \par How, we might think, could love give a more truthful exponent of its reality than hastening instantaneously to the relief of one so dear to Him? But not so! "Whcen He had heard therefore that he was sick, He abode two days still in the same place where He was!" Yes, there is tarrying love as well as succoring love. He sent that sickness because He loves you! He continues it because He loves you! He heaps fresh fuel on the furnace-fires until the gold is refined. He appoints, not one, but "many days where neither sun nor stars appear, and no small tempest lies on us," that the ship may be lightened, and faith exercised; our bark hastened by these rough blasts nearder shore, and the Lord glorified, who rules the raging of the sea. "We expect," says Evans, "the blessing or relief in our way; He chooses to bestow it in His way."\par \par Reader! let this ever be your highest ambition\emdash to love and to be loved by Jesus. If we are covetous to have the regard and esteem of the great and good on earth; what is it to share the fellowship and kindness of Him, in comparison with whose love the purest earthly affection is but a passing shadow! Ah! to be without that loeve, is to be a little world ungladdened by its central sun, wandering on in its devious pathway of darkness and gloom. Earthly things may do well enough when the world is all bright and shining\emdash when prosperity sheds its bewitching gleam around you, and no symptoms of the cloudy and dark day are at hand; but the hour is coming (it may come soon, it must come at some time) when your Bethany-home will be clouded with deepening death-shadows\emdash when, like Lazarus, you will be laid on a dying couch,f and what will avail you then? Oh, nothing, nothing! if bereft of that love whose smile is heaven. If you are left in the agony of desolation to utter importunate pleadings to an Unknown Savior, a Stranger-God\emdash if the dark valley be entered uncheered by the thought of a loving Redeemer dispelling its gloom, and waiting on the Canaan side to show you the path of life!\par \par Let the home of your hearts be often open, as was the home of Lazarus, to the visits of Jesus in the day of brightness; andg then, when the hour of sorrow and trial unexpectedly arises, you will know where to find your Lord\emdash where to send your prayer-message for Him to come to your relief.\par \par Yes! He will come! It will be in His own way, but His joyous footfall will be heard! He is not like Baal, "slumbering and sleeping, or taking a journey" when the voice of importunate prayer ascends from the depths of yearning hearts! If, instead of at once hastening back to Bethany, He "abides still for two days where He wash"\emdash if He lingers among the mountain-glens of distant Gilead, instead of, as we would expect, hastening to the cry and support of cherished friendship, and to ward off the dart of the inexorable foe\emdash be assured there must be a reason for this strange procrastination; there must be an unrevealed cause which the future will in due time disclose and unravel. All the recollections of the past forbid one unrighteous surmise on His tried faithfulness. "Now, Jesus loved Lazarus," is a soft pillow on wihich to repose\emdash raising the sorrowing spirit above the unkind insinuation, "My Lord has forsaken me, and my God has forgotten me."\par \par If He lingers, it is to try and test the faith of His people. If He lets loose the storm, and allows it to sweep with a vengeance apparently uncontrolled, it is that these living trees may strike their roots firmer and deeper in Himself\emdash the Rock of eternal ages. Trust His heart, where you cannot trace His hand. Not one promise of His can come to nothingj. The channel may have continued long dry\emdash the streams of Lebanon may have failed\emdash the cloud has been laden, but no shower descends\emdash the barren waste is unwatered\emdash the windows of heaven seem hopelessly closed. No, no! Though "the vision tarry," yet if you "wait for it" the gracious assurance will be fulfilled in your experience\emdash "The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him."\par \par The fountain of love pent up in His heart will in due time gush fkorth\emdash the apparently unacknowledged prayer will be crowned with a gracious answer. In His own good time sweet tones of celestial music will be wafted to your ear! "It is the voice of the Beloved!\emdash lo, He comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills!"\par \par If you are indeed the child of God, as Lazarus was, remember this for your comfort in your dying hour, that whether the prayers of sorrowing friends for your recovery be answered or not, the Lord of love has at least heard them\emdash the messenger has not been mocked\emdash the prayer-message has not been spurned or forgotten! I repeat it, He will answer, but it will be in His own way! If the Bethany-home be ungladdened by Lazarus restored, it will exult through tears in the thought of Lazarus glorified. And the Marthas and Marys, as they go often unto the grave to weep there, will read, as they weep, in the holy memories of the departed, that which will turn tears into joy\emdash "Jesus loved him."\par \cf1\fs23\par } m surges of the ocean, are now at rest. Often and again, we may well believe, had they gone, like the mother of Sisera, to the lattice to watch the return of the messenger, or, what was better, to hail their expected Lord. Gazing on the pale face at their side, and remembering that before now the tidings of his illness must have reached Jesus, they may have even expected to witness the power of a distant word\emdash to behold the hues of returning health displacing the ghastly symptoms of dissolution. But nin vain! The curtain has fallen! Their season of aching anxiety is at an end. Their worst fears are realized\emdash "Lazarus sleeps."\par \par How calm, how tranquil that departure! Never did sun sink so gently in its crimson couch\emdash never did child, nestling in its mother's bosom, close its eyes more sweetly!\par \par "His summoned breath went forth as peacefully\par As folds the spent rose when the day is done."\par \par Befitting close to a calm and noiselesso existence! It would seem as if the guardian angels who had been hovering round his death-pillow had well-near reached the gates of glory before the sorrowing survivors discovered that the clay tabernacle was all that was left of a "brother beloved!"\par \par From the abrupt manner in which, in the course of the narrative, our Lord makes the announcement to His disciples, we are almost led to surmise that He did so at the very moment of the spirit's dismissal\emdash the Redeemer speaks while thep eyelids are just closing, and the emancipated soul is winging its arrowy flight up to the spirit-land!\par \par Death a SLEEP!\emdash How beautiful the image! Beautifully true, and only true regarding the Christian. It is here where the true and the false\emdash Christianity and Paganism\emdash meet together in impressive and significant contrast. The one comes to the dark river with her pale, sickly lamp. It refuses to burn\emdash the damps dim and quench it. Philosophy tries to discourse on dqeath as a "stern necessity"\emdash of the duty of passing heroically into this mysterious, oblivion-world\emdash taking with bold heart "the leap in the dark," and confronting, as we best can, blended images of annihilation and terror.\par \par The Gospel takes us to the tomb, and shows us Death vanquished, and the Grave spoiled. Death truly is in itself an unwelcome messenger at our door. It is the dark event in this our earth\emdash the deepest of the many deep shadows of an otherwise fair creration\emdash a cold, cheerless avalanche lying at the heart of humanity, freezing up the gushing fountains of joyous life. But the Gospel shines, and the cold iceberg melts. The Sun of Righteousness effects what philosophy, with all its boasted power, never could.\par \par Jesus is the abolisher of Death. He has taken all that is terrible from it. It is said of some venomous insects that when they once inflict a sting, they are deprived of any future power to hurt. Death left his envenomed stings in the body of the great Victim of Calvary. It was thenceforward disarmed of its fearfulness! So complete, indeed, is the Redeemer's victory over this last enemy, that He Himself speaks of it as no longer a reality, but a shadow\emdash a phantom-foe from which we have nothing to dread. "Whoever believes in Me shall never die." "If a man keeps My sayings, he shall never see death." These are an echo of the sweet Psalmist's beautiful words, a transcript of his expressive figure when he pictures the Dark Vatlley to the believer as the Valley of a "shadow." The substance is removed! When the gaunt spirit meets him on the midnight waters, he may, like the disciples at first, be led to "cry out for fear." But a gentle voice of love and tenderness rebukes his dread, and calms his misgivings\emdash "It is I! do not be afraid!"\par \par Yes, here is the wondrous secret of a calm departure\emdash the "sleep" of the believer in death. It is the name and presence of Jesus! There may be many accompaniments ouf weakness and prostration, pain and suffering, in that final conflict; the mind may be a wreck\emdash memory may have abdicated her seat\emdash the loving salutation of friends may be returned only with vacant looks, and the hand be unable to acknowledge the grasp of affection\emdash but there is strength in that presence, and music in that name to dispel every disquieting, anxious thought. Clung to as a sheet-anchor in life, He will never leave the soul in the hour of dissolution to the mercy of the stovrm. Amid sinking nature, He is faithful who promised\emdash "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." "You are with me!" says Lady Powerscourt\emdash "this is the rainbow of light thrown across the valley, for there is no need of sun or moon where covenant-love illumines."\par \par A Christian's death-bed! It is indeed "good to be there." The man who has not to seek a living Savior at a dying hour, but who, long having known His preciousness, loved His Word, valued His ordinancwes, sought His presence by believing prayer, has now nothing to do but to die (to sleep), and wake up in glory everlasting! "Oh! that all my brethren," were among Rutherford's last words, "may know what a Master I have served, and what peace I have this day. This night shall close the door, and put my anchor within the veil." "This must be the chariot," said Helen Plumtre, making use of Elijah's translation as descriptive of the believer's death\emdash "This must be the chariot; oh, how easy it is!" "Almoxst well," said Richard Baxter, when asked on his deathbed how he did.\par \par Yes! there is speechless eloquence in such a scene. The figure of a quiet slumber is no hyperbole, but a sober verity. As the gentle smile of a foretasted heaven is seen playing on the marble lips\emdash the rays gilding the mountain tops after the golden sun has gone down\emdash what more befitting reflection than this, "So gives He His beloved SLEEP!"\par \par "Sweetly remembering that the parting sigh\pary Appoints His saints to slumber, not to die,\par The starting tear we check\emdash we kiss the rod,\par And not to earth resign them, but to God."\par \par Or shall we leave the death-chamber and visit the GRAVE? Still it is a place of sleep; a bed of rest\emdash a couch of tranquil repose\emdash a quiet dormitory "until the day breaks," and the night shadows of earth "flee away." The dust slumbering there is precious because redeemed; the angels of God have it in custzody; they encamp round about it, waiting the mandate to "gather the elect from the four winds of heaven\emdash from the one end of heaven to the other." Oh, wondrous day, when the long dishonored casket shall be raised a "glorified body" to receive once more the immortal jewel, polished and made fit for the Master's use!\par \par See how Paul clings, in speaking of this glorious resurrection period, to the expressive figure of his Lord before him\emdash "Those also who SLEEP in Jesus will God br{ing with Him!" Sleep in Jesus! His saints fall asleep on their death-couch in His arms of infinite love. There their spirits repose, until the body, "sown in corruption" shall be "raised in incorruption," and both reunited in the day of His appearing, become "a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of their God."\par \par Weeping mourner! Jesus dries your tears with the encouraging assurance, "Your dead shall live; together with My body they shall arise." Let you|r Lazarus "sleep on now and take his rest;" the time will come when My voice shall be heard proclaiming, "Awake, and sing, you who dwell in dust." "My lover said to me, 'Rise up, my beloved, my fair one, and come away. For the winter is past, and the rain is over and gone. The flowers are springing up, and the time of singing birds has come, even the cooing of turtledoves. The fig trees are budding, and the grapevines are in blossom. How delicious they smell! Yes, spring is here! Arise, my beloved, my fai}r one, and come away.'" "Weep not! he is not dead, but sleeps. Soon shall the day-dawn of glory streak the horizon, and then I shall go that I may awake him out of sleep!"\par \par Beautifully has it been said, "Dense as the gloom is which hangs over the mouth of the sepulcher, it is the spot, above all others, where the Gospel, if it enters, shines and triumphs. In the busy sphere of life and health, it encounters an active antagonist\emdash the world confronts it, aims to obscure its glories, ~to deny its claims, to drown its voice, to dispute its progress, to drive it from the ground it occupies. But from the mouth of the grave the world retires; it shrinks from the contest there; it leaves a clear and open space in which the Gospel can assert its claims and unveil its glories without opposition or fear. There the infidel and worldling look anxiously around\emdash but the world has left them helpless, and fled. There the Christian looks around, and lo! the angel of mercy is standing close by his side. The Gospel kindles a torch which not only irradiates the valley of the shadow of death, but throws a radiance into the world beyond, and reveals it peopled with the sainted spirits of those who have died in Jesus."\par \par Reader! may this calm departure be yours and mine. "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: They REST." All life's turmoil and tossing is over; they are anchored in the quiet haven. Rest\emdash but not the rest of annihilation\par \par "Grave! the guardian of our dust;\par Grave! the treasury of the skies;\par Every atom of your trust\par Rests in hope again to rise!"\par \par Let us seek to have the eye of faith fixed and centered on Jesus now. It is that which alone can form a peaceful pillow in a dying hour, and enable us to rise, superior to all its attendant terrors. Look at that scene! The proto-martyr Stephen has a pillow of thorns for his dying couch, showers of stones are hurled by infuriated murderers on his guiltless head, yet, nevertheless, he "fell asleep." What was the secret of that calmest of sunsets amid a blood-stained and storm-wreathed sky? The eye of faith (if not of sight) pierced through those clouds of darkness. Far above the courts of the material temple at whose base he lay, he beheld, in the midst of the general assembly and Church of the First-born of Heaven, "JESUS standing at the right hand of God." The vision of his Lord was like a celestial lullaby stealing from the inner sanctuary. With Jesus, his last sight on earth and his next in glory, he could "lay himself down in peace and sleep," saying, in the words of the sweet singer of Israel, "When I awake, I am still with You."\par \par "It matters little at what hour of the day\par The righteous falls asleep. Death cannot come\par To him untimely who is fit to die.\par The less of this cold world the more of heaven;\par The briefer life, the earlier immortality." -Milman.\par \par "Our friend Lazarus sleeps." This tells us that Christ does not forget the dead. The dead often bury their dead, and remember them no more. The name of their silent homes has passed into a proverb, "The land of forgetfulness." But they are not forgotten by Jesus. That which sunders and dislocates all other ties\emdash wrenching brother from brother, sister from sister, friend from friend\emdash cannot separate us from the living, loving heart on the throne of heaven. His is a friendship and love stronger than death, and surviving death. While the language of earth is\par \par "Friend after friend departs,\par Who has not lost a friend?"\par \par The emancipated spirit, as it wings its magnificent flight among the ministering seraphim, can utter the challenge, "Who shall separate me from the love of Christ?" The righteous are had with Him "in everlasting remembrance." Their names "written among the living in Jerusalem;" yes, "engraved on the palms of His hands."\par \par One other thought\emdash Jesus had at first kindly and considerately disguised from His disciples the stern truth of Lazarus' departure. "Our friend sleeps." "They thought that He had spoken of taking of rest in sleep." They understood it as the indication of the crisis-hour in sickness when the disease has spent itself, and is succeeded by a balmy slumber\emdash the presage of returning health; but now He says unto them plainly, "Lazarus is dead." How gently He thus breaks the sad news! And it is His method of dealing still.\par \par He prepares His people for their hours of trial. He does not lay upon them more than they are able to bear. He considers their case\emdash He teaches by slow and gradual discipline, leading on step by step; staying His rough wind in the day of His east wind. As the Good Physician, He metes out drop by drop in the bitter cup. As the Good Shepherd, His is not rough driving, but gentle, guiding from pasture to pasture. "He leads them out;" "He goes before them." He is Himself their sheltering rock in the "dark and cloudy day." The sheep who are accustomed to the hardships of the mountain, He leaves at times to wrestle with the storm; but "the lambs" (the young, the faint, the weak, the weary) "He gathers in His arms and carries in His bosom."\par \par He speaks in gentle whispers. He uses the pleasing symbol of quiet slumber before He speaks plainly about the mournful reality, "Lazarus is dead." Truly "He knows our frame\emdash He remembers that we are dust." "Like as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him!"\par \par But let us resume our narrative, and follow the journey of the dead man's "Friend." It is a mighty task He has undertaken; to storm the strong enemy in his own citadel, and roll back the barred gates! In mingled majesty and tenderness He hastens to the bereft and desolate home on this mission of power and love.\par \par We left the sisters wondering at His mysterious delay. Again and again had they imagined that at last they heard His tardy step, or listened to His hand on the latch, or to the loving music of His longed-for voice. But they are mistaken; it was only the beating of the vine-tendrils on the lattice, or the footfall of the passer by. The Lord is still absent! Their earnest and importunate heart-breathings are expressed by the Psalmist\emdash "O Lord our God, early do we seek You; our soul thirsts for You, our flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; to see Your power and Your glory, as we have seen You." Be still, afflicted ones! He is coming! He will, however, let the cup of anguish be first filled to the brim that He may manifest and magnify all the more the might of His omnipotence, and the marvels of His compassion. The thirsty land is about to become streams of water. The sky is at its darkest, when, lo! the rainbow of love is seen spanning the firmament, and a shower of blessings is about to fall on the "Home of Bethany!"\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } ++UEu06 The Sleeper{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE SLEEPER\par \par "Our friend Lazarus sleeps."\emdash The hopes and fears which alternately rose and fell in the bosoms of the sisters, like theland relatives of the deceased had assembled to pay their tribute of respect to the memory of a revered friend, and to solace the hearts of the disconsolate survivors. They needed all the sympathy they received. It was now the dull dead calm after the torture of the storm, the leaden sea strewn with wrecks, enabling them to realize more fully the extent of their loss. Amid the lulls of the tempest, while Lazarus yet lived, hope shrunk from entertaining gloomy apprehensions. But now that the storm has spent its fury, now that the worst has come, the future rises up before them crowded with ten thousand images of desolation and sorrow. The void in their household is daily more and more felt. All the past bright memories of Bethany seem to be buried in a yawning grave.\par \par We may picture the scene. The stronger and more resolute spirit of Martha striving to stem the tide of overmuch sorrow. The more sensitive heart of Mary, bowed under a grief too deep for utterance, able only to indicate by her silent tears the unknown depths of her sadness. Thus are they employed, when Martha, unseen to her sister, has been beckoned away. "The Master has come." But desirous of ascertaining the truth of the joyful tidings, before intruding on the grief of Mary, the elder of the survivors rushes forth with trembling emotion to give full vent to her sorrow at the feet of the Great Friend of all the friendless!\par \par He has not yet entered the village. She cannot, however, wait His arrival. Leaving home and sepulcher behind, she hastens outside the groves of palm at its gate. It requires no small fortitude in the season of sore bereavement to face an altered world; and, doubtless, passing all alone now through the little town, meeting familiar faces wearing sunny smiles which could not be returned, must have been a painful effort to this child of sorrow. But what will the heart not do to meet such a Comforter? What will Martha be unprepared to encounter if the news brought to her is indeed confirmed? One glance is enough. "It is the Lord!" In a moment she is a suppliant at His feet. Doubt and faith and prayer mingle in the exclamation, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died!"\par \par That she had faith and assured confidence in the love and tenderness of Jesus we cannot question. But a momentary feeling of unbelief (shall we say, of reproach and upbraiding?) mingled with better emotions. "Why, Lord," seemed to be the expression of her inner thoughts, "were You absent? It was unlike Your kind heart. You have often gladdened our home in our season of joy\emdash why this forgetfulness in the night of our bitter agony? Death has torn from us our loved brother\emdash the blow would have been spared\emdash these hearts would have been unbroken\emdash these burning tears unshed, if You had been here!"\par \par Such was the bold\emdash the unkind reasoning of the mourner. It was the reasoning of a finite creature. Ah! if she could but have looked into the workings of that infinite Heart she was ungenerously upbraiding, how differently would she have raised her tearful suit!\par \par Her exclamation is\emdash "Why this unkind absence?" His comment on that same absence to His disciples is this\emdash "I was glad for your sakes that I was not there!"\par \par How often are God and man thus in strange antagonism, with regard to earthly dispensations! Man, as he arraigns the rectitude of the Divine procedure, exclaiming\emdash "How unaccountable this dealing! How baffling this mystery! Where is now my God?" This sickness\emdash why prolonged? This thorn in the flesh\emdash why still buffeting? This family bereavement\emdash why permitted? Why the most treasured and useful life taken\emdash the blow aimed where it cut most severely and leveled lowest?\par \par Hush the secret atheism! This trial, whatever it be, has this grand motto written upon it in characters of living light\emdash we can read it on anguished pillows\emdash aching hearts\emdash yes, on the very portals of the tomb\emdash "This is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby!" At the very moment we are mourning what are called "dark providences" "unfortunate calamities"\emdash "strokes of misfortune"\emdash "unmitigated evils"\emdash Jesus has a different verdict\emdash "I am glad for your sakes."\par \par His absence at Bethany\emdash the still more unaccountable lingering for two days in the same place after the message had been sent, instead of hastening directly to Lazarus\emdash all was well and wisely ordered. And although Martha's upbraidings were now received in forbearing silence, her Savior afterwards, in a calmer moment, read the rebuke\emdash "did not I say unto you\emdash if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?"\par \par It is indeed a comforting assurance in all trials, that God has some holy and wise end to subserve. He never stirs a ripple on the waters, but for His own glory, or the good of others. The delay on the present occasion, though protracting for a time the sorrows of the bereaved, was intended for the benefit of the Church in every age, and for the more immediate benefit of the disciples. They were destined in a few brief weeks also to be desolate survivors\emdash to mourn a Brother dearer still! He who had been to them Friend, Father, Brother, all in one, was to be, like Lazarus, laid silent in a Jerusalem sepulcher. The Lord of Life was to be the victim of Death! His body was to be transfixed to a malefactor's cross, and consigned to a lonely grave! He knew the shock that awaited their faith. He knew, as this terrible hour drew on, how needful some overpowering visible demonstration would be of His mastery over the tomb. Now a befitting opportunity occurred in the case of their friend Lazarus to read the needed lesson. "I was glad for your sakes, ...to the intent you might believe."\par \par Would that we could feel as believers more than we do\emdash that the dealings of our God are for the strengthening of our faith, and the enlivening and invigorating of our spiritual graces. Let us seek to accept more simply in dark dealings the Savior's explanation, "It is for your sake!" He gives us a blank-check for our every trial, endorsing it with His own gracious word, "This, this is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby."\par \par The words of Martha, then, surely teach as their great lesson, never to be hasty in our surmises and conclusions regarding God's ways. "Lord! IF You had been here?" Could she question for a moment that that loving eye of Omniscience had all the while been scanning that sick-chamber\emdash marking every throb in that fevered brow\emdash and every tear that fell unbidden from the eyes that watched his pillow? "Lord! if You had been here?" Could she question His ability, had He so willed it, to prevent the bereavement altogether\emdash to put an arrest on the hand of death before the bow was strung?\par \par O faithless disciple, why did you doubt? But you are before long to learn what each of us will learn out in eternity, that "all things are for our sakes, that the abundant grace might, through the thanksgiving of many, redound to the glory of God."\par \par But the momentary cloud has passed. Faith breaks through. The murmur of upbraiding has died away. He who listens makes allowance for an anguished heart. The glance of tender sympathy and gentleness which met Martha's eye, at once hushes all remains of unbelief. Words of exulting confidence immediately succeed. "But I know that even now whatever You will ask of God, God will give it You."\par \par What is this, but that which every believer exults in to this hour, as the sheet-anchor of hope and peace and comfort, when tossed on a tempestuous sea\emdash a gracious confidence in the ability and willingness of Christ to save. The Friend of Bethany is still the Friend in Heaven! To Him "all power has been committed;" "as a prince He has power with God, and must prevail." Yes, gracious antidote to the spirit in the moment of its trial; when bowed down with anticipated bereavement; the curtains of death about to fall over life's brightest joys. How blessed to lay hold on the perfect conviction that "the Ever-living Intercessor in glory has all power to revoke the sentence if He sees fit"\emdash that even now (yes now, in a moment) the delegated angel may be sent speeding from his throne, to spare the tree marked to fall, and prolong the lease of existence!\par \par Let us rejoice in the power of this God-man Mediator, that He is as able as He is willing, and as willing as He is able. "Him the Father hears always." "Father, I will," is His own divine formula for every needed blessing for His people. How it ought to make our sick-chambers and death-chambers consecrated to prayer! leading us to make our every trial and sorrow a fresh reason for going to God! Laying our burden, whatever it may be, on the mercy-seat, it will be considered by Him, who is too wise to grant what is better to be withdrawn, and too kind to withhold what, without injury to us, may be granted.\par \par Let us imitate Martha's faith in our approaches to Him. Ah, in our dull and cold devotions, how little lively apprehension have we of the gracious willingness of Christ to listen to our petitions! Standing as the great Angel of the Covenant with the golden censer, His hand never shortened\emdash His ear never heavy\emdash His uplifted arm of intercession never faint. No difficulty bewildering Him\emdash no importunity wearying Him\emdash "waiting to be gracious"\emdash loving the music of the suppliant spirit.\par \par Would that we had ever before us as the superscription of faith written on our closet-devotions, and domestic altars, and public sanctuaries, whenever and wherever the knee is bent, and the Hearer of prayer is invoked\emdash "I know that even now whatever You will ask of God, God will give it to You."\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } CC{ m08 The Mourner's Comfort{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\col+a07 Lights and Shadows{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par LIGHTS AND SHADOWS\par \par The sounds of lamentation had now been beard for four days in the desolate household. In accordance with general practice, the friends ortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\qr\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \pard\par THE MOURNER'S COMFORT\par \par "Your brother shall rise again!"\par \par Martha's tearful utterances are now met with an exalted solace. "Your brother shall rise again." It is the first time her Lord has spoken. She now once more hears those well-remembered tones which were last listened to, when life was all bright, and her home all happy. It is the self-same consolation which steals still, like celestial music, to the smitten heart, when every chord of earthly gladness ceases to vibrate. And it is befitting too that Jesus should utter it. He alone is qualified to do so. The words spoken to the bereaved one of Bethany are words purchased by His own atoning work. "Your brother\emdash your sister\emdash your friend, shall rise again!"\par \par This brief oracle of comfort was addressed, in the first instance, especially to Martha. It had a primary reference, doubtless, to the vast miracle which was on the eve of performance. But there were more hearts to comfort and souls to cheer than one; that Almighty Savior had at the moment throngs of other bereaved ones in view; myriads on myriads of aching, bleeding spirits who could not, like the Bethany mourner, rush into His visible presence for consolation and peace. He expands, therefore, for their sakes the sublime and exalted solace which He ministers to her. And in words which have carried their echoes of hope and joy through all time, He exclaims\emdash "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me will live, even though he dies!"\par \par If Bethany had bequeathed no other "memory" than this, how its name would have been embalmed in hallowed recollection! Truly these two brief verses are as apples of gold in baskets of silver. "Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life." Himself conquering death, He has conquered it for His people\emdash opening the kingdom of heaven to all believers.\par \par The full grandeur of that Bethany utterance could not be appreciated by her to whom it was first spoken. His death and resurrection was still, even to His nearest disciples, a profound mystery. Little did that trembling spirit, who was now gazing on her living Lord with tearful eye, dream that in a few brief days the grave was to hold Him, also, as its captive; and that guardian angels were to proclaim words which would, to Martha, have been all enigma and strangeness, "The Lord is risen!"\par \par With us it is different. The mighty deed has been completed. "Christ has died; yes, rather has risen again!" The resurrection and revival of Lazarus was a marvelous act, but it was only the rekindling of a little star that had ceased to twinkle in the firmament. A week more\emdash and Martha would witness the Great Sun of all undergoing an eclipse; in a mysterious moment veiled and shrouded in darkness and blood; and then all at once coming forth like a Bridegroom from his chamber to shine the living and luminous center of ransomed millions!\par \par Christians! we can turn now aside and see this great sight\emdash death closing the lips of the Lord of life\emdash a borrowed grave containing the tenantless body of the Creator of all worlds! Is death to hold that prey? Is the grave to retain in gloomy custody that immaculate frame? Is His living temple to lie there an inglorious ruin, like other crumbling wrecks of mortality? The question of our eternal life or eternal death was suspended on the reply! If death succeeds in chaining down the illustrious Victim, our hopes of everlasting life are gone forever. In vain can these dreary portals of death be ever again unbarred for the children of fallen humanity. Jesus has gone there as their surety-Savior. If His suretyship be accepted\emdash if He meet and fulfill all the requirements of an outraged law, the gates of the dismal prison-house of death will, and must be opened.\par \par If, on the other hand, there is any flaw or deficiency in His person or work as the Kinsman-Redeemer, then no power can snap the chains which bind Him; the tomb will refuse to surrender what it has in custody; the hopes of His people must perish along with Him! Golgotha must then become the grave of a world's hopes!\par \par But the stone has been rolled away. The grave-clothes are all that are left as trophies of the conqueror. Angels are seated in the vacant tomb to verify with their gladdening assurance His own Bethany oracle, "The Lord has risen indeed!" "He is indeed the resurrection and the life; he that lives and believes on Him shall never die!"\par \par Yes! however many be the comforting thoughts which cluster around the grave of Lazarus, grander still is it to gather, as Jesus Himself here bids us, around His own tomb, and to gaze on His own resurrection scene! It was the most eventful morning of all time. It will be the focus point of the Church's hope and triumph through all eternity.\par \par "The Lord is risen indeed!" It proclaimed the atonement complete, sin pardoned, mediation accepted, the law satisfied, God glorified! "The Lord is risen indeed!" It proclaimed resurrection and life for His people\emdash life (the forfeited gift of life) now repurchased. That mighty victor rose not for Himself, but as the representative and pledge of countless multitudes, who exult in His death as their life\emdash in His resurrection as the pledge and guarantee of their everlasting safety\emdash "I am He who lives," and "because I live you shall live also."\par \par Anticipating His own glorious rising, He might well speak to Martha, standing before Him as the representative of weeping, sinful, woe-worn humanity, "He who lives and believes on Me shall never die." "In Me, death is no longer death; it is only a parenthesis in life\emdash a transition to a loftier stage of being. In Me, the grave is the vestibule of heaven, the dressing-room of immortality!"\par \par Reader, yours is the same strong consolation. "Believe," "Only believe" in that risen Lord. He has purchased all, paid all, procured all! Look into that vacant tomb; see sin cancelled, guilt blotted out, the law magnified, justice honored, the sinner saved!\par \par Yes, and more than that, as you see Death's conqueror marching forth clothed with immortal victory, you see Him not alone! He is heading and heralding a multitude which no man can number. Himself the victorious prototype, He is showing to these exulting thousands "the path of life." He tells them to dread neither for themselves, or others, that lonesome tomb. The curse is extracted from it; the envenomed sting is plucked away. In passing through its lonesome chambers they may exult in the thought that a mightier than they has sanctified it by His own presence, and transformed what was once a gloomy portico into a triumphal arch, bearing the inscription, "O death, I will be your plague; O grave, I will be your destruction!"\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } nil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE MOURNER'S CREED\par \par How stands our faith? These mighty thoughts and words of consolation\emdash are they really believed, felt, trusted in, rejoiced over? Christian, "Do you believe this?" Are you really looking to this exalted life-giving Savior? Have you in some feeble measure realized this resurrection-life as your own? Have you the joyful consciousness of participating in this vital union with a living Lord? In vain do we listen to these sublime Bethany utterances unless we feel, "Jesus speaks to me," and unless we be living from day to day under their invigorating power.\par \par He had unfolded to Martha in a single verse a whole Gospel; He had irradiated by a few words the darkness of the tomb; and now, turning to the poor dejected weeper at his side, He addresses the all-important question, "Do you believe this?" Her faith had been but a moment before staggering. Some guilty misgivings had been mingling with her anguished tears. She has now an opportunity afforded of rising above her doubts\emdash the ebbings and flowings of her fitful feelings; and cleaving fast to the Living Rock. It elicits an unfaltering response\emdash "Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world."\par \par Remarkable confession! We would not so much have wondered to hear it after the grave had been rifled, and the silent lips of Lazarus had been unsealed; or had she stood like the other Mary at her Lord's own sepulcher in the garden, and after a few brief, but momentous days and hours, seen a whole flood of light thrown on the question of His Messiahship. But as yet there was much to dampen such a bold confession, and lead to hesitancy in the avowal of such a creed. The poverty, the humiliations, the unworldly obscurity of that solitary One who claimed no earthly birthright, and owned no earthly dwelling, were not all these, particularly to a Jew, at variance with every idea formed in connection with the coming Shiloh?\par \par Was Martha's then a blind unmeaning faith? Far from it. It was nurtured, doubtless, in that quiet home of holy love, where, while Lazarus yet lived, this mysterious Being, in an earthly form and in pilgrim garb, came time after time discoursing to them often, as we are warranted to believe, on the dignity of His nature, the glories of His person, the completeness of His work. It was neither the evidence of miracle or prophecy which had revealed to that weeping disciple that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God. With the exception of Micah's statement regarding Bethlehem as His birthplace, we question if any other remarkable prediction concerning Him had yet been fulfilled; and so far as miracles were concerned, though she may and must have doubtless known of them by hearsay, we have no evidence that she had as yet so much as witnessed one. We never read until this time of their quiet village being the scene of any manifestations of His power. These had generally taken place either in Jerusalem or in the cities and coasts of Galilee. The probability, therefore, is that Martha had never yet seen that arm of Omnipotence bared, or witnessed those prodigies with which elsewhere He authenticated His claims to Divinity.\par \par Where then did her faith come from? May we not believe she had made her noble avowal mainly from the study of that beauteous, spotless character\emdash from those looks, and words, and deeds\emdash from that lofty teaching\emdash so unlike every human system\emdash so wondrously adapted to the needs and woes, the sins, the sorrows, and aching necessities of the human heart. All this had left on her own spirit, and on that of Lazarus and Mary, the irresistible impression and evidence that he was indeed the Lord of Glory\emdash "the Hope of Israel, and the Savior thereof."\par \par And is it not the same evidence we exult in still? Is this not the reason of many a humble believer's creed and faith\emdash who may be all unlettered and unlearned in the evidences of the schools\emdash the external and internal bulwarks of our impregnable Christianity? Ask them why they believe? why their faith is so firm?\emdash their love so strong? They will tell you that that Savior, in all the glories of His person, in all the completeness of His work, in all the beauties of His character, is the very Savior they need!\emdash that His Gospel is the very errand of mercy suited to their souls' necessities; that His words of compassion, and tenderness, and hope, are in every way adapted to meet the yearnings of their longing spirits. They need to stand by the grave of no Lazarus to be certified as to His Messiahship. His looks and tones\emdash His character and doctrine\emdash His cures and remedies for the needs and woes of their ruined natures, point Him out as the true Heavenly Physician.\par \par They can tell of the best of all evidences, and the strongest of all\emdash the experimental evidence! They are no theorists. Religion is no subject with them of barren speculation; it is a matter of inner and heartfelt experience. They have tried the cure\emdash they have found it answered\emdash they have fled to the Physician\emdash they have applied His balm\emdash they have been healed and live! And you might as well try to convince the restored blind that the sunlight which has again burst on them is a wild dream of fancy, or the restored deaf that the world's joyous melodies which have again awoke on them are the mockeries of their own brain, as convince the spiritually enlightened and awakened that He who has proved to them light and life, and joy and peace\emdash their comfort in prosperity\emdash their refuge in adversity\emdash is other than the Son of God and Savior of the world!\par \par Reader, is this your experience? Have you tasted and seen that the Lord is gracious? Have you felt the preciousness of His gospel, the adaptation of His work to the necessities of your ruined condition?\emdash the power of His grace, the prevalence of His intercession, the fullness and glory and truthfulness of His promises? Are you exulting in Him as the Resurrection and Life, who has raised you from the death of sin, and will at last raise you from the power of death, and invest you with that eternal life which His love has purchased?\par \par Precious as is this hope and confidence at all times, specially so is it, mourners in Zion! in your seasons of sorrow. When human refuges fail, and human friendships wither, and human props give way, how sustaining to have this "anchor of the soul sure and steadfast"\emdash union with a living Lord on earth, and the joyful hope of endless and uninterrupted union and communion with Him in glory!\par \par Are you even now enjoying, through your tears, this blessed persuasion, and exulting in this blessed faith? Do you know the secret of that twofold solace, "the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings?"\emdash the "fellowship of His sufferings" telling of His sympathy with your sorrows below\emdash the "power of His resurrection" assuring you of the glorious gift of everlasting life in a world where sorrow dare not enter. Rest not satisfied with a mere outward creed and confession that "Jesus is the Savior." Let yours be the nobler formula of an appropriating faith\emdash "He is my Savior; He loved ME, and gave Himself for ME." Let it not be with you a possible salvation, but a salvation found; so that, with the tried apostle, you can rise above the surges of deepening tribulation as you glory in the conviction, "I know in whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him."\par \par Sad, indeed, for those who, when "deep calls unto deep," have no such "strong consolation" to enable them to ride out the storm; who, when sorrow and bereavement overtake them\emdash the lowering shadows of the dark and cloudy day\emdash have still to grope after an unknown Christ; and, amid the hollowness of earthly and counterfeit comforts, have to seek, for the first time, the only true One.\par \par Oh! if our hour of trial has not yet come, let us be prepared for it\emdash for come it will. Let us seek to have our vessels moored now to the Rock of Ages, that when the tempest arises\emdash when the floods beat, and the winds blow, and the wrecks of earthly joy are seen strewing the waters\emdash we may triumphantly utter the challenge, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?"\par \par "Say, you who tempt\par The sea of life, by summer plea impelled,\par Have you this anchor? Sure a time will come\par For storms to try you, and strong blasts to rend\par Your painted sails, and shred your gold like chaff\par O'er the wild wave. And what a wreck is man,\par If sorrow find him unsustained by God!\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } y AA10 The Master{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\g) e}09 The Mourner's Creed{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\freen0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE MASTER\par \par Martha can withhold no longer from her sister the joyful tidings which she has been the first to hear. With fleet foot she hastens back to the house with the announcement, "The Master has come, and calls for you." Mary hears, but makes no comment. Wrapped in the silence of her own meditative grief, "when she heard that, she arose quickly and came unto Him."\par \par "To her all earth could render nothing back\par Like that pale changeless brow.\par Calmly she stood\par As marble statue.\par In that maiden's breast\par Sorrow and loneliness sank darkly down,\par Though the blanched lips breathed out no boisterous plaint\par Of common grief."\par \par The formal sympathizers who gathered around her had observed her departure. They are led to form their conjectures as to the cause of this sudden break in her trance of anguish. She had up until that moment, with the instinctive aversion which mourners only know, and which we have formerly alluded to in the case of Martha, been shrinking from facing the gladsome light of heaven, caring not to look abroad on the blight of an altered world. But the few words her sister uttered, and which the other auditors manifestly had not comprehended, all at once rouse her from her seat of pensive sadness, and her shadow is seen hurrying by the darkened lattice. They can form but one surmise: that, in accordance with custom, she has betaken herself to the burial-ground to feed her morbid grief. "She goes unto the grave to weep there." Ah! little did they know how much nobler was her motive\emdash how truer and grander the solace she sought and found.\par \par There is little that is really profitable or hallowed in visiting the grave of loved ones. Though fond affection will, from some false feeling of the tribute due to the memory of the departed, seek to surmount sadder thoughts, and linger at the spot where treasured ashes repose, yet\emdash think and act as we may\emdash there is nothing cheering, nothing elevating there. The associations of the burial-place are all with the humiliating triumphs of the King of Terrors. It is a view of death taken from the earthly entrance of the valley, not the heavenly view of it as that valley opens on the bright plains of immortality. The gay flowers and emerald sod which carpet the grave are poor mockeries to the bereft spirit, shrouding, as they do, nobler withered blossoms which the foot of the destroyer has trampled into dust, and which no earthly beauty can again clothe, or earthly spring reanimate. They are to be pitied who have no higher solace, no better remedy for their grief, than thus to water with unavailing tears the trophies of death; or to read the harrowing record which love has traced on its slab of cold marble, telling of the vanity of human hopes.\par \par Such, however, was not Mary's errand in leaving the chamber of bereavement. That drooping flower was not opening her leaves, only to be crushed afresh with new tear-floods of sorrow. She sought One who would disengage her soiled and shattered tendrils from the chill comforts of earth, and bathe them in the genial influences of Heaven. The music of her Master's name alone could put gladness into her heart, and invite her to muffle other conflicting feelings and hasten to His feet. "The Master has come!" Nothing could have roused her from her profound grief but this. While her poor earthly comforters are imagining her prostrate at the sepulcher's mouth, giving vent to the wild delirium of her young grief, she is away, not to the victim of death, but to the Lord of Life, either to tell to Him the tale of her woe, or else to listen from His lips to words of comfort no other comforter had given.\par \par Is there not the same music in that name\emdash the same solace and joy in that presence still? Earthly sympathy is not to be despised; no, when death has entered a household, taken the dearest and the best and laid them in the tomb, nothing is more soothing to the wounded, crushed, and broken one, than to experience the genial sympathy of true Christian friendship. Those, it may be, little known before (comparative strangers), touched with the story of a neighbor's sorrow, come to offer their tribute of condolence, and to "weep with those who weep." Never is true friendship so tested as then. Hollow attachments, which have nothing but the world, or a time of prosperity to bind them, discover their worthlessness. "Summer friends" stand aloof; they have little patience for the sadness of sorrow's countenance and the funereal trappings of the death-chamber; while sympathy, based on lofty Christian principle, loves to minister as a subordinate healer of the broken-hearted, and to indulge in a hundred nameless ingenious offices of kindness and love.\par \par But "thus far shall you go, and no farther." The purest and noblest and most unselfish of earthly friends can only go a certain way. Their minds and sympathies are limited. They cannot enter into the deep recesses of the smitten heart\emdash the yawning crevices that bereavement has laid bare. But JESUS can! Ah! there are capacities and sensibilities in that Mighty Heart that can probe the deepest wound and gauge the profoundest sorrow. While from the best of earthly comforters the mind turns away unsatisfied; while the burial-ground and the grave only recall the deep humiliations of the body's wreck and ruin\emdash with what fond emotion does the spirit, like Mary, turn to Him who possesses the majesty of Deity with all the tenderness of humanity! The Mighty Lord, and yet the Elder Brother!\par \par The sympathy of man is often selfish, formal, constrained, commonplace, coming more from the surface than from the depths of the heart. It is the finite sympathy of a finite creature. The Redeemer's sympathy is that of the perfect Man and the infinite God\emdash able to enter into all the peculiarities of the case\emdash all the tender features and shadings of sorrow which are hidden from "the keenest and kindliest human eye."\par \par Mary's example is a true type and picture of what the broken heart of the Christian feels. Not undervaluing human sympathy, yet, nevertheless, all the crowd of sympathizing friends\emdash Jewish citizens, Bethany villagers\emdash are nothing to her when she hears her Lord has come! Happy for us if, while the world, like the condoling crowd of Jews, is forming its own cold speculations on the amount of our grief and the bitterness of our loss, we are found hastening to cast ourselves at our Savior's feet; if our afflictions prove to us like angel messengers from the inner sanctuary\emdash calling us from friends, home, comforts, blessings; all we most prize on earth\emdash telling us that ONE is near who will more than compensate for the loss of all\emdash "The Master has come, and calls for you!"\par \par It is the very end and design our gracious God has in all His dealings, to lead us, as he led Mary, to the feet of Jesus. Yes! you poor weeping, disconsolate one, "The Master calls for you." You individually, as if you stood the sole sufferer in a vast world. He wishes to pour His oil and wine into your wounded heart\emdash to give you some overwhelming proof and pledge of the love he bears you in this your sore trial. He has come to pour drops of comfort in the bitter cup\emdash to ease you of your heavy burden, and to point you to hopes full of immortality. Go and learn what a kind, and gentle, and gracious Master He is! Go forth, Mary, and meet your Lord. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning!"\par \par We may imagine her hastening along the foot-road, with the spirit of the Psalmist's words on her tongue\emdash "As the deer pants after the water brooks, so pants my soul after you, O God. My soul thirsts for God\emdash for the living God!"\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } Often at a season of sore bereavement some one poignant thought or reflection takes possession of the mind, and, for the time, overmasters every other. This echo of the other mourner's utterance leads us to conclude that it had been a familiar and often-quoted phrase during these days of protracted agony. This independent quotation, indeed, on the part of each, gives a truthful beauty to the whole inspired narrative.\par \par The two sisters, musing on the terrible past, gazing through their tears on the vacant seat at their home-hearth, had been every now and then breaking the gloomy silence of the deserted chamber by exclaiming, "If He had been here, this never would have happened! This is the bitterest drop in our cup\emdash all might have been different! These hot tears might never have dimmed our eyes; our beloved Lazarus might have been a living and loving brother still! Oh! that the Lord had delayed for a brief week that needless journey, or anticipated by four days his longed-for return; or would that we had dispatched our messenger earlier for Him. It is now too late. Though He has at last come, His advent can be of little avail. The dreadful destroyer has been at our cottage door before Him. He may soothe our grief, but the blow cannot be averted. His friend, and our brother, is locked in sleep too deep to be disturbed.\par \par Ah! is it not the same unkind surmise which is still often heard in the hour of bereavement and in the home of death?\emdash a guilty, unholy brooding over second causes? "If such and such had been done, my child would still be alive. If that means, or that remedy, or that judicious caution had been employed, this terrible overthrow of my earthly hopes would never have occurred; that loved one would have been still walking at my side; that chaplet of sorrows would not now have been girding my brow; the Bethany sepulcher would have been unopened\emdash "This my brother, would not have died!"\par \par Hush! hush! these guilty insinuations\emdash that dethroning of God from the Providential Sovereignty of His own world\emdash that hasty and inconsiderate verdict on His divine procedure.\par \par "If You had been here!" Can we, dare we doubt it? Is the departure of the immortal soul to the spirit-world so trivial a matter that the life-giving God takes no cognizance of it? No! Mourning one, in the deep night of your sorrow, you must rise above "untoward coincidences"\emdash you must cancel the words "accident" and "fate" from your vocabulary of trial. God, your God, was there! If there are perplexing accompaniments, be assured they were of His permitting; all was planned\emdash wisely, kindly planned. Question not the unerring rectitude of His dealings. Though apparently absent, He was really present.\par \par The apparent veiling of His countenance is only what Cowper calls "the severer aspect of His love." Kiss the rod that smites\emdash adore the hand that lays low. Pillow your head on that simple, yet grandest source of composure\emdash "The Lord reigns!" It is not for us to venture to dictate what the procedure of infinite love and wisdom should be. To our dim and distorted views of things, it might have been more for the glory of God and the Church's good, if the "beautiful bird of light" had still "sat with its folded wings" before it sped to nestle in the eaves of Heaven.\par \par But if its earthly song has been early hushed; if those full of promise have been allowed rather to fall asleep in Jesus, "Even so, Father; for it seems good in Your sight!" It was from no lack of power or ability on God's part that they were not recalled from the gates of death. "We will be silent\emdash we will open not our mouths, because You did it."\par \par Afflicted one! if the brother or friend whom you now mourn be a brother in glory\emdash if he be now among the white-robed multitude\emdash his last tear wept\emdash forever beyond reach of a sinning and sorrowing world\emdash can you upbraid your God for his early departure? Would you weep him back if you could from his eternal crown?\par \par Fond human nature, as it stands in trembling agony watching the ebbing pulses of life, would willingly arrest the pale messenger\emdash stay the chariot\emdash and have this wilderness re-lighted with his smile. But when all is over, and you are able to contemplate, with calm emotion, the untold bliss into which the unfettered spirit has entered, do you not feel as if it were cruel selfishness alone that would unclothe that sainted pilgrim of his glory, and bring him once more back to earth's cares and tribulations?\par \par We sadly watched the close of all,\par Life balanced in a breath;\par We saw upon his features fall\par The awful shade of death.\par All dark and desolate we were;\par And murmuring nature cried\par 'Oh! surely, Lord! had You been here,\par Our brother had not died!'\par But when its glance the memory cast\par On all that grace had done;\par And thought of life's long warfare passed,\par And endless victory won,\par Then faith prevailing, wiped the tear,\par And looking upward, cried,\par 'O Lord! You surely have been here,\par Our brother has not died!'\par \par We have already had occasion to note the impressive and significant silence of the Savior to Mary. We may just again revert to it in a sentence here. Martha had, a few moments before, given vent to the same impassioned utterance respecting her departed brother. Jesus had replied to her; questioned her as to her faith; and opened up to her sublime sources of solace and consolation. With Mary it is different. He responds to her also\emdash but it is only in silence and in tears! Why this distinction? Does it not unfold to us a lovely feature in the dealings of Jesus\emdash how He adapts Himself to the peculiarities of individual character. With those of a bolder temperament He can argue and remonstrate\emdash with those of a meek, sensitive, contemplative spirit, He can be silent and weep!\par \par The stout but manly heart of Peter needed at times a bold and cutting rebuke; a similar reproof would have crushed to the dust the tender soul of John. The character of the one is painted in his walking on the stormy water to meet his Lord; of the other, in his reclining on the bosom of the same Divine Master, drinking sacred draughts at the Fountain-head of love!\par \par So it was with Martha and Mary, "the Peter and John of Bethany;" and so it is with His people still. How beautifully and considerately Jesus studies their case\emdash adapting His dealings to what He sees and knows they can bear\emdash fitting the yoke to the neck, and the neck to the yoke. To some He is "the Lion of the tribe of Judah, uttering His thunders," pleading with Martha-spirits "by terrible things in righteousness." To others (the shrinking, sensitive Marys) whispering only accents of gentleness; giving expression to no needless word that would aggravate or embitter their sorrows.\par \par Ah, believer! how tenderly considerate is your dear Lord! Well may you make it your prayer, "Let me fall into the hands of God, for great are His mercies!" He may at times, like Joseph to His brethren, appear to "speak roughly," but it is in secret kindness. When a father inflicts on his wayward child the severest and harshest discipline, none but he can tell the bitter heart-pangs of yearning love that accompany every stroke of the rod.\par \par So it is with your Father in Heaven; with this difference, that the earthly parent may act unwisely, arbitrarily, indiscreetly\emdash he may misjudge the necessities of the case\emdash he may do violence and harm to his offspring. Not so with an all-wise Heavenly Parent. He will inflict no unessential or unneeded chastisement. Man may err, has erred, and is ever erring\emdash but "as for God, His way is perfect!"\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } ??y M511 Second Causes{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par SECOND CAUSES\par \par With a bounding heart, Mary was in a moment at her Master's feet. She weeps! and is able only to articulate, in broken accents, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." It is the repetition of Martha's same expression. on is moving on. We may suppose they have reached the gates of the burial-ground. But a new scene and incident here arrest our thoughts! It is not the humiliating memorials of mortality that lie scattered around the caves and grottoes and grassy heaps sacred to many a Bethany villager. It is not even the newly sealed stone which marks the spot where Lazarus "sleeps." Let us turn aside for a little, and see this great sight. It is the Creator of all worlds in tears! The God-man Mediator dissolved in tenderest grief! Of all the memories of Bethany, this surely is the most hallowed and the most wondrous. These tears form the most touching episode in sacred story; and if we are in sorrow, it may either dry our own tears, or give them the warrant to flow when we are told\emdash Jesus wept!\par \par Why those tears? This is what we shall now inquire. There is often a false interpretation put upon this brief and touching verse, as if it denoted the expression of the Savior's sorrow for the loss of a loved friend. This, it is plain, it could not be. However mingled may have been the hopes and fears of the weeping mourners around him, He at least knew that in a few brief moments Lazarus was to be restored. He could not surely weep so bitterly, possessing, as He then did, the confident assurance that death was about to give back its captive, and light up every tear-dimmed eye with an ecstasy of joy. Why, then, we again ask, this strange and mysterious grief? Come and let us surround the grave of Bethany, and as we behold the chief mourner at that grave, let us inquire why it was that "Jesus wept!"\par \par (1.) Jesus wept out of sympathy for the bereaved. The hearts around Him were breaking with anguish. All unconscious of how soon and how wondrously their sorrow was to be turned into joy, the appalling thought was alone present to them in all its fearfulness, "Lazarus is dead!" When He, the God-man Mediator, with the refined sensibilities of His tender heart, beheld the poignancy of that grief, the pent-up torrent of His own human sympathies could be restrained no longer. His tears flowed too.\par \par But it would be a contracted view of the tears of Jesus to think that two solitary mourners in a Jewish graveyard engrossed and monopolized that sympathy. It had a far wider sweep. There were hearts, yes\emdash myriads of desolate sufferers in ages then unborn, who He knew would be brought to stand as He was then doing by the grave of loved relatives\emdash mourners who would have no visible comforter or restorer to rush to, as had Martha, and Mary, to dry their tears, and give them back their dead; and when He thought of this, "Jesus wept!"\par \par What an interest it gives to that scene of weeping, to think that at that eventful moment, the Savior had before Him the bereaved of all time\emdash that His eye was roaming at that moment through deserted chambers, and vacant seats, and opened graves, down to the end of the world. The aged Jacobs and Rachels weeping for their children\emdash the Ezekiels mourning in the dust and ashes of disconsolate widowhood, "the desire of their eyes taken away by a stroke"\emdash the unsolaced Marys and Marthas brooding over a dark future, with the prop and support of existence swept down, the central sun and light of their being eclipsed in mysterious darkness!\par \par Think, (as you are now perusing these pages,) throughout the wide world, how many breaking hearts there are\emdash how loud the wail of suffering humanity, could we but hear it!\emdash those written childless and fatherless, and friendless and homeless!\emdash Bethany-processions pacing with slow and measured step to deposit their earthly all in the cold custody of the tomb! Think of the Marys and Marthas who are now "going to some grave to weep there," perhaps with no Savior's smile to gladden them\emdash or the desolate chambers that are now resounding to the plaintive dirge, "O Absalom, Absalom, would God I had died instead of you; O Absalom, my son! my son!"\par \par Think of all these scenes that that moment vividly suggested and pictured to the Redeemer's eye\emdash the long and loud miserere, echoing dismally from the remotest bounds of time, and there "entering into the ear of the God of Sabbath," and can you wonder that\emdash Jesus wept! Blessed and amazing picture of the Lord of glory! It combines the delineation alike of the tenderness of His humanity, and the majesty of His Godhead. His Humanity! It is revealed in those teardrops, falling from a human eye on a human grave. His Godhead! It is manifested in His ability to take in with a giant grasp all the prospective sufferings of His suffering people.\par \par Weeping believer! your anguished heart was included in those Bethany tears! Be assured your grief was visibly portrayed in that moment to that omniscient Savior. He had all your sorrows before Him\emdash your anxious moments during your friend's tedious sickness\emdash the trembling suspense\emdash the nights of weary watching\emdash the agonizing revelation of "no hope"\emdash the closing scene! Bethany's graveyard became to Him a picture-gallery of the world's aching hearts; and yours, yes! yours was there! and as He beheld it, "Jesus wept!"\par \par Jesus wept! His tears are over,\par But His heart is still the same;\par Kinsman, Friend, and Elder Brother,\par Is His everlasting name.\par Savior, who can love like Thee,\par Gracious One of Bethany!\par \par When the pangs of trial seize us,\par When the waves of sorrow roll,\par I will lay my head on Jesus\emdash\par Pillow of the troubled soul.\par Surely none can feel like Thee,\par Weeping One of Bethany!\par \par Jesus wept! And still in glory,\par He can mark each mourner's tear;\par Loving to retrace the story\par Of the hearts He solaced here.\par Lord! when I am called to die,\par Let me think of Bethany!\par \par Jesus wept! That tear of sorrow\par Is a legacy of love;\par Yesterday, today, tomorrow,\par He the same does ever prove.\par You are all in all to me,\par Living One of Bethany!\par \par (2.) Jesus wept when He thought of the triumphs of death! He was treading a burial ground\emdash moldering heaps were around Him\emdash silent sepulchral caves, giving forth no echo of life! It is a solemn and impressive thing, even for us, to tread the graveyard; more especially if there are there treasures of buried affection. The thought that those whose smile gladdened to us every step in the wilderness, who formed our solace in sorrow, and our joy in adversity\emdash whose words, and society, and converse were intertwined with our very being\emdash it is solemn and saddening, as we tread that land of oblivion, to find these words and looks and tears unanswered\emdash a gloomy silence hovering over the spot where the wrecks of treasure and loveliness are laid! He would have a bold, a stern heart indeed who could pace unmoved over such hallowed ground, and forbid a tear to flow over the gushing memories of the past!\par \par What, then, must it have been at that moment in Bethany with Jesus, when He saw one of those purchased by His own blood (dearest to him) chased by the unsparing destroyer to that gloomy prison-house? If we have supposed that the tears of Martha and Mary were suggestive of manifold other broken and sorrowing hearts in other ages, we may well believe that graveyard was suggestive of triumphs still in reserve for the tomb, numberless trophies which in every age were to be reaped in by the King of Terrors until the reaper's arm was paralyzed, and death swallowed up in victory.\par \par The few silent sepulchers around must have significantly called to the mind of the Divine spectator how sin had blasted and scathed His noblest workmanship; converting the fairest province of His creation into one vast Necropolis\emdash one dismal "city of the dead!" The body of man, "so fearfully and wonderfully made," and on which He had originally placed His own impress of "very good," ruined, and resolved into a mass of humiliating dust! If the architect mourns over the destruction of some favorite edifice of his, which the storm has swept down, or the fire has wrapped in conflagration and reduced to ashes\emdash if the sculptor mourns to see his breathing marble with one crude stroke hurled to the ground, and its fragments scattered at his feet\emdash what must have been the sensations of the almighty Architect of the human frame, at whose completion the morning stars and the sons of God chanted a loud anthem? What must have been His sensations as He thought of them, now a devastated wreck, moldering in dissolution and decay, the King of Terrors sitting in regal state, holding his high holiday over a vassal world!\par \par In Bethany He beheld only a few of these broken and prostrate columns, but they were powerfully suggestive of millions on millions which were yet in coming ages to undergo the same doom of mortality. If even our less sensitive hearts may be wrung with emotion at the tidings of some mournful catastrophe that occupies, after all, but some passing hour in the world's history, but which has carried death and lamentation into many households\emdash the sudden pestilence that has swept down its thousands\emdash the gallant vessel that was a moment before spreading proudly its white wings to the gale, the joyous hearts on board dreaming of hearth and home, and the "many ports that would exult in the gleam of her mast"\emdash the next moment hurrying down to the depths of an ocean grave, with no survivor to tell the tale! Or the terrible records of War\emdash the ranks of bold and brave patriots laid low in the carnage of battle\emdash youth and strength and beauty and rank and friendship blent in one red burial!\par \par If these and such like mournful tales of death, and the power of death, affect at the moment even the most callous among us, causing the lip to grow pale, and demanding the tribute of more than a tear, oh! what must it have been to the omniscient eye and exquisitely sensitive spirit of Jesus, as, taking in all time at a glance, He beheld the Pale Horse with its ghastly rider trampling under foot the vast human family; converting the globe in which they dwelt into a mournful valley of dry bones, filled with the wrecks and skeletons of breathing men and animated frames!\par \par The triumphs of death are, in ordinary circumstances, to us scarcely perceptible. He moves with noiseless tread. The footprint is made on the sands of time; but like the tides of the ocean, the oblivion-power washes it away. The name of yonder churchyard is the "land of forgetfulness!" Not so with the Lord of Life, the great Antagonist of this usurper! The future, a ghastly future, rose in appalling vividness before Him. Death (vulture-like) flapping his wings over the multitudes he claimed as his own\emdash vessels freighted with immortality lying wrecked and stranded on the shores of Time!\par \par Yes! we can only understand the full import of these tears of Jesus, as we imagine to ourselves His Godlike eye penetrating at that moment every churchyard and every grave\emdash the mausoleums of the great\emdash the grassy sods of the poor\emdash the marble grave-stone of the noble and illustrious\emdash the myriads whose requiem is chanted by the bleak winds of the desert or the chimes of the ocean!\emdash The child carried away in the twinkling of an eye\emdash the blossom just opening, and then frost-blighted\emdash the aged sire, cut down like a shock of corn in its season, falling withered and seared like the leaves of autumn\emdash the young exulting in the prime of manhood\emdash the pious and benevolent\emdash the great and good, succumbing indiscriminately to the same inexorable decree\emdash the erring and thoughtless, reckless of all warning, hurried away in the midst of scorned mercy!\par \par Oh! as He beheld this ghastly funeral procession moving before Him, the whole world going to the same long-home, and He Himself left the sole survivor, can we wonder that Jesus wept?\par \par (3.) Jesus wept when He thought of the impenitence and obduracy of the human heart. This may not be at first sight patent as a cause of the tears of Jesus, but we may well believe it entered largely as an element into this strange flood of sorrow. He was about to perform a great (His greatest) miracle; but while he knew that, in consequence of this manifestation of His mighty power, many of those who now stood around Lazarus' tomb would believe, he knew also that others would only "despise, and wonder, and perish;" that while some, as we shall afterwards find, acknowledged Him as the Messiah, others went immediately into Jerusalem to scheme with the Pharisees in plotting His murder\emdash "But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done."\par \par When He observed the impenitence of these obdurate hearts at His side, He could not subdue His tenderest emotion. We read that, when He saw the sisters weeping, and the Jews that were with them weeping, Jesus wept. These Jews could weep for a fellow-mortal, but they could not weep for themselves, and therefore for them, Jesus wept!\par \par One soul was precious to Him. He who alone can estimate alike the worth and the loss of the soul, might have wept, even had there been but one then present found to resist His claims and forfeit His salvation. But these tears extended far beyond that lonely spot in a Jewish village, and the few impenitent hearts that were then flocking around. These obdurate Jews were types of the world's impenitency. There was at that moment summoned before Him a mournful picture of the hardened hearts in every age\emdash those who would read His gospel, and hear of his miracles, and listen to the story of His love all unmoved\emdash who would die\emdash as they had lived, uncheered by His grace and unfit for His presence.\par \par Ah! surely no cause could more tenderly elicit a Redeemer's tears than this\emdash the thought of His Redemption scorned, His blood trampled on, His work valued as worthless. If we have thought of Him shedding tears over the ruin of the body, what must have been the depth and intensity of those tears over the sadder, more fearful ruin of the soul? Immortal powers, that ought to have been ennobled and consecrated to His service, alienated, degraded, destroyed! Immortal beings spurning away from themselves, both the day of grace and the hopes of heaven!\par \par Bitter as may have been the wail of mourning and sorrowing hearts that may then have reached His ear from future ages, more agonizing and dismal far must have been the wailing cry which, beyond the limits of time, came floating up from a dark and dreary eternity\emdash those who might have believed and lived, but who blasphemed or trifled, neglected and procrastinated, and finally perished!\par \par If we think of it, it is not the loss of health, or the loss of wealth, or the loss of friends, which forms the heaviest of trials, the deepest ground of soul sadness. We put on the sable attire as emblems of mourning; but if we saw things as a weeping Jesus sees them, there is more real cause for sackcloth and ashes for the heart at enmity with God, and despising His salvation, trampling under foot His Son, and enacting over again the sad tragedy of Calvary.\par \par Reader! are you at this moment guilty of living on in a state of presumptuous impenitence\emdash salvation unsought\emdash Jesus a stranger\emdash His name unhonored\emdash His Bible unread\emdash His promises unappropriated\emdash His wrath undreaded\emdash defeating all His marvelous contrivances of love, and remonstrance, and forbearance\emdash meeting a prodigal expenditure of His patience with cold and chilling indifference and neglect\emdash casting away from you the reservoir of the riches of eternity which He has been holding out for your acceptance?\par \par In that sacred Bethany ground, as you mark these falling tear-drops which dim His eye, there may have been a tear for you! Eighteen hundred years have since elapsed, but He to whom "a thousand years are as one day," marked even then your present ungrateful apostasy or guilty alienation\emdash there was a tear then which stole down that cheek on account of unrequited love!\par \par Is that tear to flow in vain? Are you to mock His tender sympathy still with cold formalism, or persisted-in impenitency? Are you to think of Bethany and its tear-drops and still go on in sin? Ah, never was sermon preached to an erring or impenitent sinner half so eloquent as this. Paul was not given to weeping, and it makes his fervid love of souls all the more striking when we find him confessing that he had wept like a child over those who were "enemies to the cross of Christ." We have often felt Paul's burning tears over hardened sinners to be touching and impressive. But what are they, after all, in comparison with those of Paul's Lord? He, the Great Sun of the World\emdash the Sun of Righteousness, was to set in a few brief days behind the walls of ungrateful Jerusalem in darkness and blood\emdash His last rays seem now lingering over the crest of Mount Olive\emdash His tears seem to tell that He has clung until He can cling no more to the fond hope that an impenitent nation and guilty city will yet turn at His reproof, believe and live.\par \par And still does He linger among us. Though the night comes, the beams of mercy are still tardily lingering, as if hesitant to leave the backsliding to their wanderings, or the impenitent to their own midnight of despair. O Reader! leave not this subject\emdash leave not the graveyard of Bethany until you think of Jesus as then weeping for you! Yes! for you\emdash your pitiable condition\emdash your perverse ingratitude\emdash your slighting of His warnings\emdash your grieving of His Spirit\emdash your unkindness to Him\emdash your obstinate disregard of your own everlasting interests.\par \par Let it be the most wondrous and heart-searching of all the memories of Bethany, that for your soul\emdash that traitor, truant, worthless soul\emdash which like a stray planet He might have allowed to drift away from Himself into the blackness of eternal darkness\emdash helpless, hopeless, ruined, lost!\emdash Yes! that for you, JESUS WEPT!\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } W a]12 The Weeping Savior{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE WEEPING SAVIOR\par \par "Jesus wept." John 11:35\par \par The silent processi It was a rocky sepulcher. A flat stone (possibly with some Hebrew inscription) lay upon the mouth of it. In wondering amazement the sorrowing group follows the footsteps of the Savior. "Behold how He loved him," whisper the Jews to one another as they witness His fast falling tears. Can His traveling thus to the tomb be anything more than to pay a mournful tribute to an honored friendship, and behold the silent home of the loved dead?\par \par No! He is about, as the Lord of Life, to wrench awa y the swaddling-bands of corruption, to vindicate His name and prerogative as the "Abolisher of death"\emdash to have the first-fruits of that vast triumph which, ages before the birth of time, He had anticipated with longing earnestness\emdash "I will ransom them from the power of the grave, I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be your plague; O grave, I will be your destruction!"\par \par Does He proceed forthwith to speak the word, and to accomplish the giant deed? He breaks silence . But we listen, in the first instance, not to the omnipotent summons, but to an address to the bystanders\emdash "Take away the stone," He said. What need of this parenthesis in His mighty work? Why this summoning in any feeble human agency when His own independent fiat could have effected the whole? Would it not have been a more startling manifestation of Omnipotence, by a mandate similar to that which chained the tempests of Tiberias, or the demoniac of Gadara, to have hurled the grave stone into fragm ents? Might not He who has "the keys of the grave and of death" Himself unlocked the portals preparatory to the vaster miracle that was to follow? No, there was a mighty lesson to be read in thus delegating human hands to remove the intervening barrier. The Church of the living God may, in every age, gather from it instruction!\par \par What, then, does the Savior here figuratively, but significantly, teach His people? Is it not the important truth that, though dependent on Him for all they are, and all they have, they are not thereby released and exempted from the use of means? He alone can bring back Lazarus from his death-sleep. Martha and Mary may weep an ocean of tears, but they cannot weep him back. They may linger for days and nights in that lonely graveyard, making it resound with their bitter dirges, but their impassioned entreaties will be mocked with impressive silence. Too well do they know that spirit is fled beyond their recall\emdash the spark of life extinguished beyond any earthly rekindling!\par \par But though the word of Omnipotence can alone bring back the dead; human hands and human efforts can roll away the adjoining stone, and prepare for the performance of the miracle; and after the miracle is performed, human hands may again be called in to tear off the cerements of the tomb, to ungird the bandages from the restored captive, to "take off the grave clothes and let him go."\par \par This simple incident in the Bethany narrative admits of manifold PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS. Let us look to it with reference to the mightier spiritual miracle of the Resurrection of the soul "dead in trespasses and sins." Jesus, and Jesus alone, can awake that soul from the deep slumber of its spiritual death, and invest it with the glories of a new resurrection-life. In vain can it awake of itself; no human skill can put animation into the spiritual skeleton. No power of human eloquence, no "excellency of man's wisdom," can open these rayless eyes, and pour life, and light, and hope into the dull caverns of the spiritual sepulcher. "Prophesy to the dry bones! "\emdash We may prophesy forever! We may try to wake the valley of dry bones by ceaseless invocations, but the dead will hear not! No bone of the spiritual skeleton will stir, for it is "not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts."\par \par But though it be a Divine work from first to last which effects the spiritual regeneration of man, are we from this presumptuously to disregard the use of means? Are prayer, and preaching, and human effort, and strenuous earnestness in the work of evangelism; are these all to be superseded, and pronounced unavailing and unnecessary? No, though man cannot wake to life his dormant spiritual energies\emdash though these lie slumbering in the deep sleep of the buried dead, and nothing but Lazarus' Lord can break the spiritual trance\emdash yet man can use the appointed means. He dare not be guilty of the monstrous inconsistency and crime of willingly allowing impediments to stand in the way of his spiritual revival which his own efforts may remove! He cannot expect his Lord to sound over his soul the gladdening accents of peace, and reconciliation, and joy, if some known sin be still lying, like the adjoining grave-stone, which it is in his power to roll away, and at his peril if he allows to remain!\par \par Christ is alone the "abolisher of death," and the "giver of life;" but notwithstanding this, "Roll you away the stone!" Do not neglect the means He has appointed and prescribed. If you neglect prayer, and despise ordinances, and trifle with temptation, or venture on forbidden ground, you are only making the intervening obstacle firmer and stronger, and willfully stripping yourselves of the gift of life.\par \par Naaman must plunge seven times in Jordan, or else he cannot be made clean. To cleanse himself of his leprosy he cannot, but to wash in Jordan he can. The snake-bitten Israelite must gaze on the brazen serpent; he cannot of himself heal one fevered wound, but to gaze on the appointed symbol of cure he can. In vain can the weapons of war effect a breach on the walls of Jericho; but the army of Joshua can sound the appointed trumpet, and raise the prescribed shout, and the impregnable walls in a moment are in the dust. Martha and Mary in vain can make their voices be heard in the "dull, cold ear of death," but at their Lord's bidding they can hurl back the outer portals where their dead is laid. They cannot unbind one fetter, but they can open with human hand the prison-door to admit the Divine Liberator.\par \par Let it not be supposed that in this we detract in any way from the omnipotence of the Savior's grace. God forbid! All is of grace, from first to last\emdash free, sovereign grace! Man has no more merit in salvation than the beggar has merit in reaching forth his hand for alms, or in stooping down to drink of the wayside fountain. But neither must we ignore the great truth which God strives throughout His Word to impress upon us, that He works by means, and that for the neglect of these means we are ourselves responsible.\par \par Paul had the assurance given him by an angel from heaven, when tossed in the storm at sea, that not one life in his vessel was to be lost; that though the ship was to be wrecked, all her crew were to come safe to land. But was there on this account any effort on his part relaxed to secure their safety? No! he toiled and labored at the pumps and rigging and anchors as unremittingly as before; and when some of the sailors made the cowardly attempt, by lowering a small boat, to produce their own escape, the voice of the apostle was heard proclaiming, amid the storm, that unless they abode in the ship none could be saved!\par \par The true philosophy of the Gospel system is this, to feel as if much depended on ourselves; but at the same time entertaining the loftier conviction that all depends upon God. Jesus, when He invites to the strait gate, does not advocate remaining outside, in a state of passive and listless inaction, until the portals be seen to move by the Divine hand. His exhortation and command rather is, "Strive", "knock", "agonize to enter in!" We are not to ascend to heaven, seated, like Elijah, in a chariot of fire, without toil or effort, but rather to "fight the good fight of faith." The saying of the great Apostle is a vivid portrait of what the Christian's feelings ought to be regarding personal holiness\emdash "I labored, . . . yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me."\par \par As the Lord of Bethany gives the summons, "Roll away the stone," His words seem paraphrased in this other Scripture, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure." You may feel assured that He will not impose upon you one needless burden; He will not exact more than He knows your strength will bear; He will ask no Peter to come to Him on the water, unless He imparts at the same time, strength and support on the unstable wave. He will not demand of you the endurance of providences, and trials, and temptations you are unable to cope with; He will not ask you to draw water if the well is too deep, or take away the stone if it is too heavy. But neither, at the same time, will He admit as an impossibility that which, as a free and responsible agent, it is in your power to avert. He will not regard as your misfortune what is your crime. "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me."\par \par Oh! let life be, more than it ever has been, one constant effort to roll away the stone from the moral sepulcher; carefully to remove every barrier between our souls and Jesus\emdash looking forward to that glorious day when the voice of the Restorer shall be heard uttering the omnipotent "Come forth!" and to His angel assessors the mandate shall be given regarding the thronging myriads of risen dead, "Loose them and let them go!"\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } ]]OQ]13 The Gravestone{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE GRAVE STONE\par \par "Take away the stone," He said. John 11:39\par \par They have now reached the grave.utterance to its querulous questionings and surmisings rather than remain obedient at the feet of Christ, reposing on the sublime aphorism, "All things are possible to him who believes." In the mind of Martha, where faith had been so recently triumphant, doubt and unbelief have begun again to insinuate themselves. This "Peter of the female sex" had ventured out boldly on the water to meet her Lord. She had owned Him as the giver of life, and triumphed in Him as her Savior! But now she is beginning to sink. A natural difficulty presents itself to her mind about the removal of the incumbent grave-stone. She avers how needless its displacement would be, as by this time corruption must have begun its fatal work. Four brief days only had elapsed since the eye of Lazarus had beamed with fraternal affection. Now those lips must be "saying to corruption, You are my father; to the worm, You are my mother and my sister."\par \par Death, she felt, must now be stamping his impressive mockery on that cherished earthly friendship, and, attired in his most terrible insignia, putting the last fatal extinguisher on the glimmerings of her faith and hope. "What need is there, Lord," she seems to say, "for this needless labor? My brother is far beyond the reach even of a voice like Yours. Why excite vain expectations in my breast which never can be realized? That grave has closed upon him for the 'forever' of time. Nothing now can revoke the sentence, or re-animate the silent dust, except the trumpet of God on the  final day."\par \par Thus blindly did Martha reason. She can see no other object her Redeemer can have for the removal of the stone, except to gaze once more on a form and countenance He loved. Both for His sake, and the strangers assembled, she recoils from the thought of disclosing so humiliating a sight.\par \par Alas! how little are fitful frames and feelings to be trusted. Only a few brief moments before, she had made a noble profession of her faith in the presence of her Lord. Hi!s own majestic utterances had soothed her griefs, dried her tears, and elicited the confession that He was truly the Son of God. But the sight of the tomb and its mournful accompaniments obliterate for a moment the recollection of better thoughts and a nobler avowal. She forgets that "things which are impossible with men are possible with God." She is guilty of "limiting the Holy One of Israel."\par \par How often is it so with us! How easy is it for us, like Martha, to be bold in our creed when" there is nothing to cross our wishes, or dim and darken our faith. But when the hour of trial comes, how often does sense threaten to displace and supplant the nobler antagonist principle! How often do we lose sight of the Savior at the very moment when we most need to have Him continually in view! How often are our convictions of the efficacy of prayer most dulled and deadened just when the dark waves are cresting over our heads, and voices of unbelief are uttering the upbraiding in our ears, "Where is #now your God?" But will Jesus leave His people to their own guilty unbelieving doubts? Will Martha, by her unworthy insinuations, put an arrest on her Lord's arm; or will He, in righteous retribution for her faithlessness, leave the stone sealed, and the dead unraised?\par \par No! He loves His people too well to let their stupid unbelief and hardness of heart interfere with His own gracious purposes! How tenderly He rebukes the spirit of this doubter. "Why," as if He said, "Why distrust me? Why$ stultify yourself with these unbelieving surmises. Have you already forgotten my own gracious assurances, and your own unqualified acceptance of them? My hand is never shortened that it cannot save; My ear is never heavy that it cannot hear. I can call the things which are not, and make them as though they were. Said I not unto you, in that earnest conversation which I had a little ago outside the village, in which Gospel faith was the great theme, if you would believe, you should see the glory of God?"\%par \par This Bethany utterance has still a voice\emdash a voice of rebuke and of comfort in our hours of trial. When, like aged Jacob, we are ready to say, "All these things are against me;" when we are about to lose the footsteps of a God of love, or have perhaps lost them, there is a voice ready to hush into silence every unbelieving doubt and surmise. "Although you say you cannot see Him, yet justice is before Him, therefore trust in Him."\par \par God often thus hides Himself from& His people in order to test their faith, and elicit their confidence. He puts us in perplexing paths\emdash "allures" and "brings into the wilderness," only, however, that we may see more of Himself, and that He may "speak comfortably unto us." He lets our need attain its extremity, that His intervention may appear the more signal. He allows apparently even His own promises to fail, that He may test the faith of His waiting people\emdash tutor them to "hope against hope," and to find, in unanswered praye'rs and baffled expectations, only a fresh reason for clinging to His all-powerful arm, and frequenting His mercy-seat. He first dashes to the ground our human confidences and refuges, showing how utterly "vain is the help of man;" so that faith, with her own folded, dove-like wings, may repose in quiet confidence in His faithfulness, saying, "In the Lord I put my trust: why do you say to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?"\par \par Reader! It would be well for you to hear this gentle chid(ing of Christ, too, in the moment of your spiritual depression\emdash when complaining of your corruptions, the weakness of your graces, your low attainments in holiness, the strength of your temptations, and your inability to resist sin. "Did not I say unto you," interposes this voice of mingled reproof and love, "My grace is sufficient for you?" "The bruised reed I will not break, the smoking flax I will not quench." "Look unto Me, and be saved, all the ends of the earth." We are too apt to look to ours)elves, to turn our contemplation inwards, instead of keeping the eye of faith centered undeviatingly on a faithful covenant-keeping God, laying our finger on every promise of His Word, and making the challenge regarding each, "Has he said, and shall He not do it? or has He spoken and shall He not bring it to pass?"\par \par Yes; there may be much to try and perplex. Sense and sight may stagger, and stumble, and fall; we may be able to see no break in the clouds; "deep may be calling to deep," an*d wave responding to wave, "yet the Lord will command His loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me." If we only "believe" in spite of unbelief; hoping on, and praying on, and trusting on; like the great Father of the faithful, in the midst of adverse providences, "strong in faith, giving glory to God," He will yet cause the dayspring from on high to visit us.\par \par Even in this world, perplexing paths may be made plain, and slippery places smooth, and judgments "bright as the noonday;" but if not here, there is at least a glorious day of disclosures at hand, when the reign of unbelieving doubt shall terminate forever, when the archives of a chequered past will be ransacked of their every mystery\emdash all events mirrored and made plain in the light of eternity; and this saying of the weeping Savior of Bethany obtain its true and everlasting fulfillment, "Didn't I tell you that you will see God's glory if you believe?" John 11:40\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } zzC9]14 Unbelief{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par UNBELIEF\par \par Man\emdash short-sighted man\emdash often raises impossibilities when God does not. It is hard for rebellious unbelief to lie submissive and still. In moments when the spirit might well be overawed into silence, it gives -f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE DIVINE PLEADER\par \par The stone is rolled away, but there is a solemn pause just when the miracle is about to be performed. Jesus prays! The God-Man Mediator\emdash the Lord of Life\emdash the Abolisher of Death\emdash the Being of all Beings\emdash who had the boundless treasures of eternity in His grasp\emdash pauses by the grave of .the dead, and lifts up His eyes to heaven in supplication! How often in the same incidents, during our Lord's incarnation, do we find His manhood and His Godhead standing together in stupendous contrast. At His birth, the mystic star and the lowly manger were together; at His death, the ignominious cross and the eclipsed sun were together. Here He weeps and prays at the very moment when He is baring the arm of Omnipotence. The "mighty God" appears in conjunction with "the man Christ Jesus." "His name is I/mmanuel, God with us."\par \par The body of Lazarus was now probably, by the rolling away of the stone, exposed to view. It was a humiliating sight. Earth\emdash the grave\emdash could afford no solace to the spectators. The Redeemer, by a significant act, shows them where alone, at such an hour, comfort can be found. He points the mourning spirit to its only true source of consolation and peace in God Himself, teaching it to rise above the mortal to the immortal\emdash the corruptible to the in0corruptible\emdash from earth to heaven.\par \par Ah! there is nothing but humiliation and sadness in every view of the grave and corruption. Why dwell on the shattered casket, and not rather on the jewel which is sparkling brighter than ever in a better world? Why persist in gazing on the trophies of the last enemy, when we can joyfully realize the emancipated soul exulting in the plenitude of purchased bliss? Why fall with broken wing and wailing cry to the dust, when on eagle-pinion we can so1ar to the celestial gate, and learn the unkindness of wishing the sainted and crowned one back to the nether valley?\par \par It is Prayer, observe, which thus brings the eye and the heart near to heaven. It is Prayer which opens the celestial portals, and gives to the soul a sight of the invisible.\par \par Yes; you who may be now weeping in unavailing sorrow over the departed, remember, in conjunction with the tears, the prayers of Jesus. Many a desolate mourner derives comfort from 2the thought "Jesus wept." Do not forget this other simple entry in our touching narrative, telling where the spirit should ever rest amid the shadows of death\emdash "Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank You that You have heard me. And I know that You hear me always."\par \par Let us gather for a little around this incident in the story of Bethany. It is one of the many golden sayings of priceless value. That utterance has at this moment lost none of its preciousness; that voice, 3silent on earth, is still eloquent in heaven. The Great Intercessor still is there, "walking in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks;" loving to note all the needs and weaknesses, the necessities and distresses, of every Church, and every member of His Church. What He said of old to Peter, He says to every trembling believer\emdash "I have prayed, and am praying for you, that your faith fail not!" "For you!" We must not merge the interest which Jesus has in each separate member of His family, in His4 intercession for the Church in general. While He lets down His censer, and receives into it, for presentation on the golden altar, the prayers of the vast aggregate; while, as the true High Priest, He enters the holiest of all with the names of His spiritual Israel on His breastplate\emdash carrying the burden of their hourly needs to the foot of the mercy-seat\emdash yet still, He pleads, as if the case of each stood separate and alone!\par \par He remembers you, dejected mourner, as if there 5were no other heart but yours to be healed, and no other tears but yours to be dried. His own words, speaking of believers, not collectively, but individually, are these\emdash "I will confess his name before my Father and his angels." "Who touched me?" was His interrogation once on earth, as His discriminating love was conscious of some special contact amid the press of the multitude\emdash "Somebody has touched me!" If we can say, in the language of Paul's appropriating faith, "He loved me, and gave Him6self for me," we can add, He pleads for me, and bears me! He bears this very heart of mine, with all its weaknesses, and infirmities, and sins, before His Father's throne. He has engraved each stone of His Zion on the "palms of His hands," and "its walls are continually before Him!"\par \par How untiring, too, in His advocacy! What has the Christian so to complain of, as his own cold, unworthy prayers\emdash mixed so with unbelief\emdash soiled with worldliness\emdash sometimes guiltily omitted 7or curtailed. Not the fervid prayers of those feelingly alive to their spiritual exigencies, but listless, unctionless, the hands hanging down, the knees feeble and trembling!\par \par But notwithstanding all, Jesus pleads! Still the Great Intercessor "waits to be gracious." He is at once, both Moses on the mountain, and Joshua on the battle-plain\emdash fighting with us in the one, praying for us in the other. No Aarons or Hurs needed to sustain His sinking strength, for it is His sublime prero8gative neither to "faint nor grow weary!" There is no loftier occupation for faith than to speed upwards to the throne and behold that wondrous Pleader, receiving at one moment, and at every moment, the countless supplications and prayers which are coming up before Him from every corner of His Church. The Sinner just awake from his moral slumber, and in the agonies of conviction, exclaiming, "What must I do to be saved?"\emdash The Procrastinator sending up from the brink of despair the cry of importunate9 agony.\emdash The Backslider wailing forth his bitter lamentation over guilty departures, and foul ingratitude, and injured love.\emdash The Sick man feebly groaning forth, in undertones of suffering, his petition for support.\emdash The Dying, on the brink of eternity, invoking the presence and support of the alone arm which can be of any avail to them.\emdash The Bereaved, in the fresh gush of their sorrow, calling upon Him who is the healer of the brokenhearted. But all heard! Every tear marked\emdash: every sigh registered\emdash every suppliant supported!\par \par Amalek may come threatening nothing but disaster; but that pleading Voice on the heavenly Hill is "greater far than all that can be against us!" He pleads for His elect in every phase of their spiritual history\emdash He pleads for their in-gathering into His fold\emdash He pleads for their perseverance in grace\emdash He pleads for their deliverance at once from the accusations and the power of Satan\emdash He pleads for their gr;owing sanctification\emdash and when the battle of life is over, He uplifts His last pleading voice for their complete glorification.\par \par The intercession of Jesus is the golden key which unlocks the gates of Paradise to the departing soul. At a saint's dying moments we are too often occupied with the lower earthly scene to think of the heavenly. The tears of surrounding relatives cloud too often the more glorious revelations which faith discloses. But in the muffled stillness of that death<-chamber, when each is holding his breath as the King of Terrors passes by\emdash if we could listen to it, we would hear the "Prince who has power with God" thus uttering His final prayer, and on the rushing wings of ministering angels receiving an answer while He is yet speaking\emdash "Father, I will that they also, whom you have given Me, be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory!"\par \par Reader! exult more and more in this all-prevailing Advocate. See that you approach the merc=y-seat with no other trust but in His atoning work and meritorious righteousness. There was but ONE solitary man of the whole human race who, of old, in the Jewish temple, was permitted to speak face to face with Jehovah. There is but ONE solitary Being in the vast universe of God who, in the heavenly sanctuary, can effectually plead in behalf of His Spiritual Israel. "Seeing, then, that we have a Great High Priest passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us come boldly to the throne of grace."\>par \par If Jesus delights in asking, God delights in bestowing. Let us put our every need, and difficulty, and perplexity, in His hand, feeling the precious assurance that all which is really good for us will be given, and all that is adverse will, in equal mercy, be withheld. There is no limitation set to our requests. The treasury of grace is flung wide open for every suppliant. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, whatever you shall ask the Father in my name He will give it you." Surely we may c?ease to wonder that the Great Apostle should have clung with such intense interest to this elevating theme\emdash the Savior's intercession\emdash that in his brief, but most comprehensive and beautiful creed, he should have so exalted, as he does, its relative importance, compared with other cognate truths, "It is Christ who died, yes rather, who has risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us."\par \par Climbing, step by step, in the upward ascent of Christian faith and hope, he seems only to "reach the height of his great argument" when he stands on "the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense." There, gazing on the face of the great officiating Priest who fills all heaven with His fragrance, and feeling that against that intercession the gates of hell can never prevail, he can utter the challenge to devils, and angels, and men, "Who shall separate as from the love of Christ?"\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } cqe16 The Omnipotent Summons{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE OMNIPOTENT SUMMONS\par \par The moment has now come for the voice of Omnipotence to give the mandate. The group has gathereAIaA15 The Divine Pleader{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\,Bd around the sepulchral grotto\emdash the Redeemer stands in meek majesty in front\emdash the teardrop still glistening in His eye, and that eye directed heavenward! Martha and Mary are gazing on His countenance in silent emotion, while the eager bystanders bend over the removed stone to see if the dead be still there. Yes! there the captive lies\emdash in uninvaded silence\emdash attired still in the same solemn drapery. The Lord gives the word. "Lazarus, come forth!" peals through the silent vault. The Cdull, cold ear seems to listen. The pulseless heart begins to beat\emdash the rigid limbs to move\emdash Lazarus lives! He rises enveloped in the swaddling-bands of the tomb, once more to walk in the light of the living.\par \par Where Scripture is silent, it is vain for us to picture the emotions of that moment, when the weeping sisters found the gloomy hours of disconsolate sorrow all at once rolled away. The cry of mingled wonder and gratitude rings through that lonely graveyard\emdash "This Dour brother was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found!" O most wondrous power\emdash Death vanquished in his own territory! The sleeper has awoke like Samson, snapping the bands with which the King of Terrors had bound him. The star of Bethlehem shines, and the Valley of Achor becomes a door of hope. The all-devouring destroyer has to relinquish his prey.\par \par Was the joy of that moment confined to these two bosoms? No! The Church of Christ in every age may well love to linger Earound the grave of Lazarus. In his resurrection there is to His true people a sure pledge of their own. It was the first sheaf reaped by the mower's sickle anticipatory of the great Harvest-home of the Final Day "when all that are in their graves" shall hear the same voice and shall "come forth."\par \par Solemn, surely, is the thought that that same portentous miracle performed on Lazarus is one day to be performed on ourselves. Wherever we repose\emdash whether, as he did, in the quiet churchFyard of our native village, or in the midst of the city's crowded cemetery, or far away amid the alien and stranger in some foreign shore, our dust shall be startled by that omnipotent summons. How shall we hear it? Would it sound in our ears like the sweet tones of the silver trumpet of Jubilee? Would it be to gaze like Lazarus on the face of our best friend\emdash to see Jesus bending over us in looks of tenderness\emdash to hear the living tones of that same voice, whose accents were last heard in the Gdark valley, whispering hopes full of immortality?\par \par True, we have not to wait for a Savior's love and presence until then. The hour of death is to the Christian the birthday of endless life. Guardian angels are hovering around his dying pillow ready to waft his spirit into Abraham's bosom. "The souls of believers do immediately pass into glory." But the full plenitude of their joy and bliss is reserved for the time when the precious but redeemed dust, which for a season is left to molderH in the tomb, shall become instinct with life\emdash "the corruptible put on incorruption, and the mortal immortality." The spirits of the just enter at death on "the inheritance of the saints in light;" but at the Resurrection they shall rise as separate orbs from the darkness and night of the grave, each to "shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father."\par \par However glorious the emancipation of the soul in the moment of dissolution, it is not until the plains and valleys of our gIlobe shall stand thick with the living of buried generations\emdash each glorified body the image of its Lord's\emdash that the predicted anthem will be heard waking the echoes of the universe\emdash "O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?" Then, with the organs of their resurrection-bodies ennobled, etherealized, purified from all the grossness of earth, they shall "behold the King in His beauty." "The King's daughter," all glorious without, "all glorious within"\emdash "her clothiJng of wrought gold"\emdash resplendent without with the robes of righteousness\emdash and radiant within with the beauties of holiness\emdash shall be brought "with gladness and rejoicing," and "enter into the King's palace."\par \par This will form the full meridian of the saints' glory\emdash the essence and climax of their new-born bliss\emdash the full vision and fruition of a Savior-God. "When He shall appear, we shall see Him as He is!" The first sight which will burst on the view of the RKisen ones will be Jesus! His hands will wreath the glorified brows, in the presence of an assembled world, with the crown of life. From His lips will proceed the gladdening welcome\emdash "Enter into the joy of your Lord!"\par \par But this will not exhaust the elements of bliss in the case of the "perfected just" on the day of their final triumph. Though the presence of their adorable Redeemer would be enough, and more than enough, to fill their cup with happiness, there will be others also to Lwelcome them, and to augment their joy. Lazarus' Lord was not alone at the sepulcher's brink, at Bethany, ready to greet him back. Two beloved sisters shared the joy of that gladsome hour. We are left to picture for ourselves the reunion, when, with hand linked in hand, they re-traversed the road which had so recently echoed to the voice of mourning, and entered once more their home, radiant with a sunshine they had imagined to have passed away from it forever!\par \par So will it be with the beMliever on the morning of the Resurrection. While his Lord will be there, waiting to welcome him, there will be others ready with their presence to enhance the bliss of that gladdening restoration. Those whose smiles were last seen in the death-chamber of earth, now standing\emdash not as Martha and Mary, with the tear on their cheek and the furrow of deep sorrow on their brow, but robed and radiant in resurrection attire, glowing with the anticipations of an everlasting and indissoluble reunion! Can we anNticipate, in the resurrection of Lazarus, our own happy history? Yes! happier history, for it will not then be to come forth once more, like him, into a weeping world, to renew our work and warfare, feeling that restoration to life is only but a brief reprieve, and that soon again the irrevocable sentence will and must overtake us! Not like him, going to a home still covered with the drapery of sorrows\emdash a few transient years and the mournful funeral tragedy to be repeated\emdash but to enter into thOe region of endless life\emdash to pass from the dark chambers of corruption into the peace and glories of our Heavenly Father's joyous Home, and "so to be forever with the Lord!"\par \par Sometimes it is with dying believers as with Lazarus. Their Lord, at the approach of death, seems to be absent. He who gladdened their homes and their hearts in life, is, for some mysterious reason, away in the hour of dissolution; their spirits are depressed; their faith languishes; they are ready to say, "WhPere is now my God?" But as He returned to Bethany to awake His sleeping friend, so will it be with all his true people, on that great day when the arm of death shall be forever broken. If now united to Him by a living faith\emdash loved by Him as Lazarus was, and conscious, however imperfectly, of loving Him back in return\emdash we may go down to our graves, making Job's lofty creed and exclamation our own, "But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that he will stand upon the earth at last. And Qafter my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God! I will see Him for myself. Yes, I will see Him with my own eyes. I am overwhelmed at the thought!"\par \par One remark more. We have listened to the Omnipotent fiat\emdash "Lazarus, come forth!" We have seen the ear of death rousing at the summons, and the buried captive goes free! Shall we follow the family group within the hallowed precincts of the Bethany dwelling? Shall imagination pour her strange and mysterious queries into the ear Rof him who has just come back from that land from whose precincts no traveler returns? He had been, in a far truer sense than Paul in an after year, in "Paradise." He must have heard unspeakable and unutterable words, "which it is not possible for a man to utter." He had looked upon the Sapphire Throne. He had ranged himself with the adoring ranks. He had strung his harp to the Eternal Anthem. When, lo! an angel\emdash a "ministering one"\emdash whispers in his ear to hush his song, and speed himself backS again for a little season to the valley below. Startling mandate! Can we suppose a remonstrance to so strange a summons? What! to be uncrowned and unglorified!\emdash Just after a few sips of the heavenly fountain, to be hurried away back again to the Valley of Baca!\emdash to gather up once more the soiled earthly garments and the pilgrim staff, and from the pilgrim rest and the victor's palm to encounter the din and dust and scars of battle! What! just after having wept his final tear, and fought the lTast and the most terrible foe, to have his eye again dimmed with sorrow, and to have the thought before him of breasting a second time the swellings of Jordan!\par \par "The Lord has need of you," is all the reply. It is enough! He asks no more! That glorious Redeemer had left a far brighter throne and heritage for him. Lazarus, come forth! sounds in his old world-home, where his spirit had soared, and in his beloved Master's words, on a mightier embassy, he can say\emdash "Lo, I come! I delightU to do Your will, O my God."\par \par Or do other questions involuntarily arise? What was the nature of his happiness while "absent from the body?" What the scenery of that bright abode? Had he mingled in the goodly fellowship of prophets? Had he conversed with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob? Was his spirit stationary\emdash hovering with a brotherhood of spirits within some holy limit\emdash or, was he permitted to travel far and near in errands of love and mercy? Had Bethany been revisited duriVng that mysterious interval? Had he been the unseen witness of the tears and groans of his anguished sisters?\par \par But hush, too, these vain inquiries. We dare not give rein to imagination where Inspiration is silent. There is a designed mystery about the circumstantials of a future state. Its scenery and locality we know nothing of. It is revealed to us only in its character. We are permitted to approach its gates, and to read the surmounting inscription, "Without holiness no man shall see the Lord." Further we cannot go. Be it ours, like Lazarus, to attain a fitness for heaven, by becoming more and more like Lazarus' Redeemer!\par \par "We shall be LIKE HIM," is the brief but comprehensive Bible description of that glorious world. Savior-like here, we shall have heaven begun on earth, and lying down like Lazarus in the sweet sleep of death, when our Lord comes, on the great day-dawn of immortality, we shall be satisfied when we awake in His likeness!\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } Xor Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE BOX OF OINTMENT\par \par "Six days before the Passover ceremonies began, Jesus arrived in Bethany, the home of Lazarus\emdash the man He had raised from the dead. A dinner was prepared in Jesus' honor. Martha served, and Lazarus sat at the table with Him. Then Mary took a twelve-ounce jar of expensive perfume made from essence of nard, and she anointed Jesus' feet with it and wiped His feet with her hair. And tYhe house was filled with fragrance." John 12:1-3\par \par Once more we visit in thought a peaceful and happy home-scene in the same Bethany household. The severed links in that broken chain are again united.\par \par How often in a time of severe bereavement, when some "light of the dwelling" has suddenly been extinguished, does the imagination fondly dwell on the possibility of the wild dream of separation passing away; of the vacant seat being refilled by its owner\emdash the "loved Zand lost one" again restored. Alas! in all such cases, it is but a feverish fantasy, destined to know no fulfillment. Here, however, it was indeed a happy reality. "Lazarus is dead!" was the bitter dirge a few brief weeks ago; but now, "Lazarus lives!" His silent voice is heard again\emdash his dull eye is lighted again\emdash the temporary pang of separation is only remembered to enhance the joy of so gladsome a reunion.\par \par It was on His final Sabbath evening, when Spring's loveliness was[ carpeting the Mount of Olives and clothing with fresh verdure the groves around Bethany, that our blessed Redeemer was seen approaching the haunt of former friendship. He had for two months taken shelter from the malice of the Sanhedrin in the little town of Ephraim and the mountainous region of Perea, on the other side of the Jordan. But the Passover solemnity being at hand, and His own hour having come, He had "set His face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem." It is more than probable that for several days\ He had been traveling in the company of other pilgrims coming from Galilee on their way to the feast. He seems, however, to have left the festival caravan at Jericho, lingering behind with His own disciples in order to secure a private approach to the city of solemnities. They were completing their journey on the Sabbath, just as the sun was sinking behind the brow of Olivet, and, turning aside from the highway, they spent the night in their old Bethany retreat.\par \par Befitting tranquil scen]e for His closing Sabbath\emdash a happy preparation for a season of trial and conflict! It is well worthy of observation, how, as His saddest hours were drawing near\emdash the shadow of His cross projected on His path\emdash Bethany becomes more and more endeared to Him. Night after night, during this memorable week, we shall find Him resorting to its cherished seclusion. As the storm is fast gathering, the vessel seeks for shelter in its best-loved haven.\par \par Imagine the joy with which t^he announcement would be received by the tenants\emdash "Our Lord and Redeemer is once more approaching!" Imagine how the great Conqueror of death would be welcomed into the home consecrated alike by His love and power. Now every tear dried! The weeping that endured for the long night of bereavement all forgotten. Ah! if Jesus were loved before in that happy home, how, we may well imagine, would He be adored and reverenced now. What a new claim had He established on their deepest affection and regard. Fee_lingly alive to all they owed Him, the restored brother and rejoicing sisters with hearts overflowing with gratitude could say, in the words of their Psalmist King\emdash "You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy, that I might sing praises to You and not be silent. O Lord My God, I will give You thanks forever!"\par \par But does the love and affection of that household find expression in nothing but words? Supper is bein`g made ready. While Martha, with her usual activity, is busied preparing the evening meal\emdash doing her best to provide for the refreshment of the travelers\emdash the gentle spirit of Mary (even if her name had not been given, we would have known it was she) prompts her to a more significant proof of the depth of her gratitude. Some fragrant ointment of spikenard\emdash contained, as we gather from the other Evangelists, in a box of Alabaster\emdash had been procured by her at great cost; either obtaianed for this anticipated meeting with her Lord, or it may in some way have fallen into her possession, and been sacredly kept among her treasured gifts until some befitting occasion occurred for its employment. Has not that occasion occurred now? On whom can her grateful heart more joyously bestow this garnered treasure than on her beloved Lord. With her own hands she pours it on His feet. Stooping down, she wipes them, in further token of her devotion, with her loosened tresses, until the whole apartmentb was filled with the sweet perfume.\par \par And what was it that constituted the value of this tribute\emdash the beauty and expressiveness of the action? She gave her Lord the best thing she had! She felt that to Him, in addition to what He had done for her own soul, she owed the most valued life in the world\emdash\par \par "Her eyes are homes of silent prayer,\par Nor other thought her mind admits;\par But, he was dead, and there he sits,\par And He that cbrought him back is there.\par Then one deep love does supersede\par All other, when her ardent gaze\par Raves from the living brother's face,\par And rests upon the Life indeed.\par All subtle thought, all curious fears,\par Borne down by gladness so complete;\par She bows, she bathes the Savior's feet\par With costly spikenard and with tears."\par \par What a lesson for us! Are we willing to give our Lord the best of what dwe have\emdash to consecrate time, talents, strength, life, to His service? Not as many, to give Him the mere dregs and sweepings of existence\emdash the wrecks of a "worn and withered life"\emdash but, like Mary, anxious to take every opportunity and occasion of testifying the depth of obligation under which we are laid to Him? Let us not say\emdash "My sphere is lowly, my means are limited, my best offerings would be inadequate." Such, doubtless, were the very feelings of that humble, modest, yet lovinge one, as she crept noiselessly to where her pilgrim-Lord reclined, and lavished on His weary limbs the costliest treasure she possessed. Hundreds of more imposing deeds\emdash more princely and munificent offerings\emdash may have been left unrecorded by the Evangelists; but "wherever this Gospel shall be preached in the whole world, what this woman has done shall be told for a memorial of her."\par \par Would that love to "that same Jesus" were with all of us more paramount than it is! "Do you flove Me more than these" is His own searching test and requirement. Is it so?\emdash Do we love Him more than self or sin\emdash more than friends or home\emdash more than any earthly object or earthly good; and are we willing, if need be, to make a sacrifice for His glory and for the honor of His cause? Happy for us if it be so. There will be a joy in the very consciousness of making the effort, feeble and unworthy as it may be, for His sake, and in acknowledgment of the great love with which He has lovegd us.\par \par Let it be our privilege and delight to give Him our pound of spikenard, whatever that may be; and if we can give no other, let us offer the fragrant perfume of holy hearts and holy lives. That religion is always best which reveals itself by its effects\emdash by kindness, gentleness, amiability, unselfishness, flowing from a principle of grateful love to Him who, though unseen, has been to us as to the family of Bethany\emdash Friend, and Help, and Guide, and Portion. Mary's honorh was great to anoint her Lord, but the lowliest and humblest of His people may do the same. We may have no aromatic offering, neither "gold, nor frankincense, nor myrrh;" but My son, My daughter, "give Me your heart!" "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise."\par \par Nor ought we to forget our blessed Lord's reply, when Judas objected to the waste of the ointment, "Let her alone; . . . . the poor you always have with you, but you doi not always have Me." Let us seek to make the most of our Lord's visits while we have Him.\par \par The visits of Jesus to Bethany were soon to be over\emdash so also with us. He will not always linger on our thresholds, if our souls refuse to receive Him, or yield Him nothing but coldness and ingratitude in return for His love. "You do not always have Me." Soon may sickness incapacitate for active service! Soon may opportunities for doing good be gone, and gone forever! Soon may death overtake jus, and the alabaster box be left behind, unused and unemployed; the dying regret on our lips\emdash "Oh that I had done more while I lived for this most precious Savior! but opportunities of testifying my gratitude to Him are now gone beyond recall."\par \par Good deeds performed on Gospel motives, though unknown and unvalued by the world, will not go unrecompensed or unowned by Him who values the cup of cold water given in His name. "God is not unmindful to forget our work of faith and our labkor of love." The Lamb's Book of Life registers every such deed of lowly piety; and on the Great Day of account "it shall be produced to our eternal honor, and rewarded with a reward of grace, though not of debt."\par \par Let us bear in mind, also, that every holy service of unostentatious love exercises a hallowed influence on those around us. We may not be conscious of such. But, if Christians indeed, the sphere in which we move will, like the Bethany home, be redolent with the ointment perfumle. A holy life is a silent witness for Jesus\emdash an incense-cloud from the heart-altar, breathing odors and sweet spices, of which the world cannot fail to take knowledge. Yes! were we to seek for a beautiful allegorical representation of pure and undefiled Religion, we would find it in this loveliest of inspired pictures. Mary\emdash all silent and submissive at the feet of her Lord\emdash only permitting her love to be disclosed by the holy perfume which, unknown to herself, revealed to others the remality and intensity of her love. True religion is quiet, unobtrusive, seeking the shade\emdash its ever-befitting attitude at the feet of Jesus, looking to Him as all in all.\par \par Yet, though retiring, it must and will manifest its living and influential power. The heart broken at the cross, like Mary's broken box, begins from that hour to give forth the hallowed perfume of faith, and love, and obedience, and every kindred grace. Not a fitful and vacillating love and service, but ever emittinng the fragrance of holiness, until the little world of home-influence around us is filled with the odor of the ointment.\par \par "I ask You for the daily strength,\par To none that ask denied;\par And a mind to blend with outward life,\par While keeping by Your side;\par Content to fill a little space\par If You be glorified.\par \par "And if some things I do not ask\par In my cup of blessings be,\par I would have my spiroit filled the more\par With grateful love to Thee,\par More careful not to serve You much,\par But to please You perfectly."\par \par Such is a brief sketch of this beautiful domestic scene, and its main practical lessons\emdash a green spot on which the eye will ever love to repose, among the "Memories of Bethany."\par \par It is unnecessary to advert to the controverted question, as to whether the description of the anointing, which took place in the house pof Simon the leper, and where the alabaster box is spoken of, be identical with this passage, or whether they refer to two distinct occasions. The question is of no great importance in itself\emdash the former view (that they are descriptions of one and the same event) seems the more probable. It surely gives a deep intensity to the interest of the narrative to imagine the Leper and the raised dead man, seated at the same table together with their common Deliverer, glorifying their Savior-God, with bodiesq and spirits they felt now to be doubly His!\par \par Simon, it is evident, must have been cured of his disease, else, by the Jewish law, he dared not have been associating with his friends at a common meal. How was he cured? How else may we suppose was that inveterate malady subdued but by the omnipotent word of Him, who had only to say\emdash "I will, be made whole!" May we not regard him as a standing miracle of Jesus' power over the diseased body, as Lazarus was the living trophy of His powerr over death and the grave. The one could testify\emdash "This poor man cried, and the Lord saved him, and delivered him out of all his troubles." The other, "Unless the Lord had been my help, my soul must now have dwelt in silence!"\par \par In order to explain the circumstance of this family meeting being in the house of Simon, there have not been lacking advocates for the supposition, that the restored leper may have been none other than the parent of the household. It is not for us to hazards conjectures, where Scripture has thrown no light. Even when sanctioned by venerated names, the most plausible hypothesis should be received with that caution requisite in dealing with what is supported exclusively by traditional authority. Were, however, such a view as we have indicated correct (which is just possible, and there is nothing in the face of the narrative to render it improbable), it certainly would impart a new and fresh beauty to the picture of this Feast of gratitude. Well might the parentt's heart swell within him with more than ordinary emotions!\emdash Himself plucked a victim from the most loathsome of diseases! He would think, with tearful eye, of the dark dungeon of his banishment\emdash the leper-house, where he had been gloomily excluded from all fellowship with human sympathies and loving hearts. His own children condemned by a severe but righteous necessity to shun his presence\emdash or when within sound of human footfall or human voice, compelled to make known his presence withu the doleful utterance\emdash "Unclean! Unclean!" He would think of that wondrous moment in his history, when, shunned by man, the GOD-MAN drew near to him, and with one glance of His love, and one utterance of His power, He bade the foul disease forever away!\par \par Nor was this all that Simon (if he were, indeed, the father of the family) must have felt. What must have been those emotions, too deep for utterance, as he gazed on the son of his affections, seated once more by his side! A shortv time ago, Lazarus had been laid silent in the adjoining sepulcher\emdash Death had laid his cold hand upon him\emdash the pride of his home had been swept down. But the same Almighty Friend who had caused his own leprosy to depart, had given him back his lost one. They were rejoicing together in the presence of Him to whom they owed life and all its blessings. Oh, well might "the voice of rejoicing and salvation be heard in the tabernacles of these righteous ones!"\par \par Well might the head wof the household dictate to Mary to "bring forth their best" and bestow it on their Deliverer\emdash the costliest gift which the dwelling contained\emdash the prized and valued box of alabaster, and pour its contents on His feet! We can imagine the theme, if not the words, of their joint anthem of praise\emdash "Bless the Lord, O our souls, and do not forget all His benefits, who forgives all our iniquities, who heals all our diseases, who redeems our lives from destruction, and crowns us with loving-kinxdness and with tender mercy."\par \par But be all this as it may, that same great Physician of Souls still waits to be gracious. He heals all our diseases. Young and old, rich and poor, every type of spiritual malady has in Him and His salvation its corresponding cure. The same Lord is rich to all who call upon Him. To the ardent Martha, the contemplative Mary, the aged Simon, Lazarus the loving and beloved\emdash He has proved friend, and help, and Savior to all; and in their several ways they yseek to give expression to the depth of their gratitude.\par \par Happy home! may there be many such among us! Fathers, brothers, sisters, "loving one another with a pure heart fervently," and loving Jesus more than all! Seeking to have Him as the ever-welcomed guest of their dwelling\emdash feeling that all they have, and all they are, for time or for eternity, they owe to Him who has "brought them out of the horrible pit, and out of the miry clay, and set their feet upon a rock, and establishezd their goings, and put a new song in their mouth, even praise unto our God!"\par \par Yes! having the Lord, we have what is better and more enduring than the best of earthly ties and earthly homes. This must have been impressed with peculiar force on aged John, as in distant Ephesus he penned the memories of this evening feast. Where were then all its guests?\emdash the recovered leper, the risen Lazarus, the devout sisters, the ardent disciples\emdash all gone!\emdash none but himself remained{ to tell the touching story. No, not all!\emdash ONE remained amid this wreck of buried friendship\emdash the adorable Being who had given to that Bethany feast all its imperishable interest was still within him and about him. The rocky shores of Patmos, and the groves around Ephesus, echoed to the well-remembered tones of the same voice of love. His best Friend was still left to take loneliness from his solitude. He writes as if he were still reclining on that sacred bosom\emdash "Truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ!"\par \par Reader! take "that same Jesus" now as your Friend\emdash receive Him as the guest of your soul; and when other guests and other friendships are vanished and gone, and you may be left like John, as the alone survivor of a buried generation\emdash "alone! and yet you will not be alone!"\emdash lifting your furrowed brow and tearful eye to Heaven, you may exclaim, "Who shall separate me from the love of Christ?"\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } -I!19 The Fig Tree{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fni=M=18 Palm Branches{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fn}ke17 The Box of Ointment{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generatW~il\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par PALM BRANCHES\par \par The next day, the news that Jesus was on the way to Jerusalem swept through the city. A huge crowd of Passover visitors took palm branches and went down the road to meet Him. They shouted, "Praise God! Bless the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hail to the King of Israel!" John 12:12-13\par \par We have just been contemplating a beautiful episode in the Bethany Memories\emdash a gleam amid gathering clouds. Martha, Mary, and Lazarus! With what happy hearts did they hail the presence of their Lord on the evening of that Jewish Sabbath! Little did they anticipate the events impending. Little did they dream that their Almighty Deliverer and Friend would that week be sleeping in His own grave! These were indeed eventful hours on which they had now entered. The stir through Palestine of the thousands congregating in the earthly Jerusalem to the great Paschal Feast, was but a feeble type of the profound interest with which myriad angel-worshipers in the Jerusalem above were gathering to witness the offering of the True Paschal Sacrifice, "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."\par \par On the morning after the supper at Bethany, the Savior rose from His couch of needed rest to approach Jerusalem. The reserve hitherto maintained as to His kingly power is now to be set aside. "The hour has come in which the Son of man is to be glorified." BETHANY is one of the few places associated with recollections of the Redeemer's royalty. The "despised and rejected" is, for once, the honored and exalted. It is a glimpse of the crown before He ascends the cross; a foreshadowing of that blessed period when He shall be hailed by the loud acclaim of earth's nations\emdash the Gentile hosanna! mingling with the Hebrew hallelujah!, welcoming Him to the throne of universal empire.\par \par Multitudes of the assembled pilgrims in the city, who had heard of His arrival, crowded out to Bethany to witness the mysterious Being, whose deeds of mercy and miracle had now become the universal theme of converse. His mightiest prodigy of power in the resurrection of Lazarus had invested His name and person with surpassing interest. We need not wonder, therefore, that Bethany, "the town of Mary and her sister Martha" should attract many worshipers from Jerusalem, to behold with their own eyes at once the restored villager and his Divine Deliverer! In fulfillment of Zechariah's prophecy, the meek and lowly Nazarene, seated on no lordly war-horse, but on an unbroken colt, and surrounded with the multitude, sets forth on His journey.\par \par The village and the desert were then all alive (as they still are once every year at the Greek Easter) with the crowd of Paschal pilgrims moving to and fro between Bethany and Jerusalem. Had the Redeemer's mission been on (the infidel theory) a successful imposture, what an opportunity now to have availed Himself of that outburst of popular fervor, and to have marched straight to take possession of the hereditary throne of David. The populace were evidently more than ready to second any such attempt; the Sanhedrin and Jewish authorities must have trembled for the result. The hosannas, borne on the breeze from the slope of Olivet, could not fail to sound ominous of coming disaster. So incontrovertible indeed had been the proof of Lazarus' resurrection, that only the most blinded bigotry could refuse to own in that marvelous act the divinity of Jesus. In addition, too, to this last crowning demonstration of omnipotence, there were hundreds, we may well believe, in that procession, who, in different parts of Palestine, had listened to His gracious words, and witnessed His gracious deeds. What other, what better Messiah could they wish than this\emdash combining the might of Godhead with the kindness and tenderness of a human philanthropist and friend?\par \par Is He to accept of the crown? No, by a lofty abnegation of self, and all selfish considerations, He illustrates the announcement made by Him, a few hours later, in Pilate's judgment-hall, as to the leading characteristic of that empire He is to set up in the hearts of men\emdash "My kingdom is not of this world." He will be, indeed, one day to be hailed alike King of Zion and King of Nations, but a bitter baptism of blood and suffering had meanwhile to be undergone. No glitter of earthly honor\emdash no carnal dreams of earthly glory\emdash would divert Him from His divine and gracious undertaking. He would save others\emdash Himself He would not save.\par \par Let us pause for a moment, and ponder that significant chorus of praise which on Olivet arose to the Lord of Glory. How interesting to think of the vast and varied multitude gathered around the Conqueror! Many, doubtless, assembled from curiosity, who had never seen Him before, and had only heard of His fame in their distant homes; others, from feelings of personal love and gratitude, were blending their voices in the shout of welcome. Think, it may be, of Bartimeus, now gazing with his unsealed eyes on his Divine Deliverer. Think of Mary Magdalene, her heart gushing at the remembrance of her own sin and shame, and her adorable Redeemer's pardoning and forgiving mercy! Nicodemus, perhaps, no longer seeking to travel by stealth, under the shadow of night, to hold a confidential meeting; but in the full blaze of day, and before assembled Israel, boldly recognizing in "the Teacher sent from God," the promised Messiah, the Prince of Peace, the Redeemer of Mankind.\par \par Shall we think of Lazarus too, fearless of his own personal safety, venturing to follow his guest with tearful eye, the multitude gazing with wonder on this living trophy of death? We may think of the very children, as He entered the temple, uplifting their infant voices in the general welcome\emdash pledges of the myriad little ones who, in future ages, were to have an interest in "the kingdom of God."\par \par May not Olivet be regarded on this occasion as a type of the Church triumphant in Heaven\emdash Jesus enthroned in the affections of a mighty multitude which no man can number\emdash old and young, great and small, rich and poor\emdash casting their palms of victory at His feet, and ascribing to Him all the glory of their great salvation? Let us ask, have we received Jesus as our King?\emdash have our palm branches been cast at His feet? Feeling that He is alike willing and mighty to save, have we joined in the rapture of praise\emdash "Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord to save us?" Have our hearts become living temples thrown open for His reception? Is this the motto and superscription on their portals\emdash "This is the gate of the Lord, into which the Righteous One shall enter!"\par \par Jesus refused and disowned none of these acclamations\emdash He spurned no voice in all that motley Jerusalem throng. There were endless diversities and phases, doubtless, of human character and history there. The once proud formalist, the once greedy extortioner, the hated tax-gatherer, the rich nobleman, the child of poverty, the Roman officer, the peasant or fisherman of Galilee, the humbled publican, the woman from the city, the reclaimed victim of misery and guilt! All were there as types and samples of that diversified multitude who, in every age, were to own Him as King, and receive His gracious blessing.\par \par We have spoken of this incident as a glimpse of glory before His sufferings. Alas! it was but a glimpse! What a picture of the fickleness and treachery of the heart!\emdash That excited populace who are now shouting their Hosannahs, are before long to be raising the cry, "Crucify Him, crucify Him!" Four days later we shall find the palm branches lying withered on the Bethany road, and the blazing torches of an assassin-band near the very spot where He is now passing with an applauding retinue! "Cease trusting in man, whose breath is in his nostrils."\par \par It does not belong to our purpose to record the remaining transactions of this day in Jerusalem. The shades of evening find the Savior once more repairing to Bethany. The evangelist Mark, in the course of his narrative, simply but touchingly says\emdash "And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple, and when He had looked round about upon all things (the mitred priests, the bleeding victims, the costly buildings), and now the eventide had come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve."\par \par As He returned to the sweet calm of that quiet home, if He could not fail to think of the hours of darkness and agony before Him, could He reap no joy or consolation in the thought, that shortly the redemption of His people was to be consummated\emdash the glory that surrounded the grave and resurrection of Lazarus was to be eclipsed by the marvels of His own!\par \par \cf1\fs23\par } l\fcharset0 Georgia;}} {\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;} {\*\generator Riched20 5.40.11.2210;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\lang2058\f0\fs22\par \par THE FIG-TREE\par \par The next morning as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus felt hungry. He noticed a fig tree a little way off that was in full leaf, so He went over to see if He could find any figs on it. But there were only leaves because it was too early in the season for fruit. Then Jesus said to the tree, "May no one ever eat your fruit again!" And the disciples heard Him say it. Mark 11:12-14\par \par The Hosannahs of yesterday had died away\emdash the memorials of its triumph were strewed on the road across Olivet\emdash as, early on the Monday morning, while the sun was just appearing above the Mountains of Moab, the Divine Redeemer left His Bethany retreat, and was seen re-traversing the well-worn path to Jerusalem. Here and there, were Fig plantations. The adjoining village of Bethphage (lit. "the house of figs") derived its name from the Green Fig. Indeed, fig-trees may still be seen overhanging the ordinary road from Jerusalem to Bethany, growing out of the rocks of the solid mountains, which, by the prayer of faith, might be removed and cast into the distant Mediterranean Sea.\par \par An incident connected with one of these is too intimately identified with the Redeemer's last journeys to and from the home of His friend to admit of exclusion from our "Bethany Memories." These memories have hitherto, for the most part, in connection at least with our blessed Lord, been soothing, hallowed, encouraging. Here the "still small voice" is for once broken with sterner accents. In contrast with the bright background of other sunny pictures, we have, standing out in bold relief, a withered, sapless stem, impressively proclaiming, in unusual utterances of wrath and rebuke, that the same hand is "strong to smite," which we have witnessed so lately in the case of Lazarus was "strong to save."\par \par The eye of Jesus, as he traversed the rocky path with His disciples, rested on a fig-tree. It seems not to have been growing alone, but formed part of a group or plantation on one of the slopes or ravines of Olivet. Its appearance could not fail to challenge attention. It was now only the Passover season (the month of April); summer\emdash the time for ripe figs\emdash was yet distant. And as it is one of the peculiarities of the fig-tree that the fruit appears before the leaves, a considerable period, in the ordinary course of nature, ought to have elapsed\emdash before the foliage was matured. Jesus Himself, it will be remembered, on another occasion, spoke of the putting forth of the fig-tree leaves as an indication that "summer was near." It must have been, therefore, a strange and unusual sight which met the eye of the travelers as they gazed, in early spring, on one of these trees with its full complement of leaves\emdash clad in full summer luxuriance. While the other fig-trees in the plantation, true to the order of development, were yet bare and leafless, or else the buds of spring only flushing them with verdure, the broad leaves of this premature (and we may think at first favored) plant\emdash the pioneer of surrounding vegetation\emdash rustled in the morning breeze, and invited the passers-by to turn aside, examine the marvel, and pluck the fruit.\par \par We may confidently infer that Jesus, as the Omniscient Lord of the inanimate creation, knew well that there was no fruit under that pretentious foliage. We dare not suppose that He went expecting to find figs; far less, that in a moment of disappointed hope, He ventured on a capricious exercise of His power, uttered a hasty malediction, and condemned the insensible boughs to barrenness and decay. The first cursory reading of the narrative may suggest some such unworthy impression. But we dismiss it at once, as strangely at variance with the Savior's character, and strangely unlike His customary actings. We feel assured that He literally, as well as figuratively, would not "break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax." He came, in all respects, "not to destroy, but to save." Some deep inner meaning, not apparent on the surface of the inspired story, must have led Him for the moment to regard a tree in the light of a responsible agent, and to address it in words of unusual severity.\par \par What, then, is the explanation? Our Lord on this occasion revives the old typical or picture-teaching with which the Hebrews were to that hour so familiar. He, as the greatest of prophets, adopts the significant and impressive method, frequently employed by the Prophets of Israel, who, in uttering startling and solemn truths, did so by means of symbolic actions. As Jeremiah of old dashed the potter's vessel down the Valley of Hinnom, to indicate the judgments that were about to befall Jerusalem; or, at another time, wore around his own neck a wooden yoke, to intimate their approaching bondage under the King of Babylon; or, as Isaiah "walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder to Egypt and Ethiopia," so did our Lord now invest a tree in silent nature with a prophet's warning voice, and make its stripped and blighted boughs eloquent of a nation's doom!\par \par On the height of their own Olivet, looking down, as it were, on Jerusalem, that fig-tree becomes a stern messenger of woe and vengeance to the whole house of Judah. Often before had He warned by His words and tears; now He is to make an insignificant object in the natural world take up His prophecy, and testify to the degenerate people at once the cause, the suddenness, and the certainty of their destruction! Let us join, then, the Master and His disciples, as they stand on the crest above Bethany, and, gazing on that fruitless leaf-bearer, "hear this parable of the fig-tree."\par \par Jesus, on approaching it (it seemed to be at a little distance from their path), and finding abundance of leaves, but no fruit thereon, condemns it to perpetual sterility and barrenness. A difficulty here occurs on the threshold of the narrative. If, as we have noted, and as Mark tells us, "the time of figs was not yet"\emdash why this seeming impatience? why this harsh sentence for not having what, if found, would have been unseasonable, untimely, abnormal? In this apparent difficulty lies the main truth and pith of the parable. The doom of barrenness, be it carefully noted, was uttered by Jesus, not so much because of the absence of fruit, but because the tree, by its premature display of leaves, challenged expectations which a closer inspection did not realize. "It was punished," says an able writer, "not for being without fruit, but for proclaiming, by the voice of those leaves, that it had such. Not for being barren, but for being false."\par \par Graphic picture of boastful and vaunting Israel! This conspicuous tree, near one of the frequented paths of Olivet, was no inappropriate type, surely, of that nation which stood illustrious amid the world's kingdoms\emdash exalted to heaven with unexampled privileges which it abused\emdash proudly claiming a righteousness which, when weighed in the balances, was found utterly lacking. It mattered not that the heathen nations were as guilty, vile, and corrupt as the chosen people. Fig-trees they were, also\emdash naked stems; fruitless and leafless; but then the heathen made no boastful pretensions. The Jews had, in the face of the world, been glorying in a righteousness which, in reality, was only like the foliage of that tree by which the Lord and His disciples now stood\emdash mocking the expectations of its owner by mere outward semblance and an utter absence of fruit.\par \par The very day preceding, these mournful deficiencies had brought tears to the Savior's eyes\emdash stirred the depths of His yearning heart in the very hour of His triumph. He had looked down from the height of the mountain on the gilded splendors of the Temple Courts beneath; but, alas! He saw that sanctimonious hypocrisy, and self-righteous formalism had sheltered themselves behind clouds of incense. Mammon, covetousness, oppression, fraud, were rising like strange fire from these defiled altars! He turns the tears of yesterday into an expressive and enduring parable today! He approaches a luxuriant Fig-tree, boasting great things among its fellows, and thus through it He addresses a doomed city and devoted land\emdash "O House of Israel," He seems to say, "I have come up for the last time to your highest and most ancient festival. You stand forth in the midst of the nations of the earth clothed in rich verdure. You retain intact the splendor of your ancestral ritual. You boast of your rigid adherence to its outward ceremonial, the punctilious observance of your fasts and feasts. But I have found that it is but 'a name to live.' You sinfully ignore 'the weightier matters of the law: judgment, justice, and mercy!' You call out as you tread that gorgeous temple\emdash 'The Temple of the Lord! The Temple of the Lord! The Temple of the Lord are we!' You forget that your hearts are the Temple I prize! Holiness, the most acceptable incense\emdash love to God, and love to man, the most pleasing sacrifice. All that dead and torpid formalism\emdash that mockery of outward foliage\emdash is to Me nothing. 'The incense you bring Me is a stench in My nostrils! Your celebrations of the new moon and the Sabbath day, and your special days for fasting\emdash even your most pious meetings\emdash are all sinful and false. I want nothing more to do with them.' These are only as the whitewash of your sepulchers to hide the loathsomeness within\emdash 'the rottenness and dead men's bones!' If you had made no impious pretensions, I would not have dealt so sternly with you. If like the other trees you had confessed your nakedness, and stood with your leafless stems, waiting for summer suns, and dews, and rains, to fructify you, and to bring your fruit to perfection\emdash all would be well; but you have sought to mock and deceive me by your falsity, and thus precipitated the doom of the cumberer. Henceforth, let no one eat fruit of you forever!"\par \par The unconscious Tree listened! One night passed, and the morrow found it with drooping leaf and blighted stem! On yonder mountain crest it stood, as a sign between heaven and earth of impending judgment. Eighteen hundred years have taken up its parable\emdash fearfully authenticated the averments of the Majestic Speaker! Israel, a bared, leafless, sapless trunk, testifies to this hour, before the nations, that "heaven and earth may pass away, but God's words will not pass away!"\par \par "The fig-tree, rich in foliage, but destitute of fruit, represents the Jewish people, so abundant in outward shows of piety, but destitute of its reality. Their vital sap was squandered upon leaves. And as the fruitless tree, failing to realize the aim of its being, was destroyed, so the theocratic nation, for the same reason, was to be overtaken, after long forbearance, by the judgments of God, and shut out from His kingdom."\emdash Neander.\par \par But does the parable stop here? Was there no voice but for the ear of Judah and Jerusalem? Have we no part in these solemn monitions? Ah! be assured, as Jesus dealt with nations so will He deal with individuals. This parable-miracle solemnly speaks to all who have only a name to live\emdash the foliage of outward profession\emdash but who are destitute of the "fruits of righteousness." It is not neglecters or despisers\emdash the careless\emdash the infidel\emdash the scorner\emdash our Lord here addresses. He deals with such elsewhere. It is rather vaunting hypocrites\emdash wearing the garb of religion\emdash the trappings and dress of outward devotion to conceal their inward pollution; like the ivy, screening from view by garlands of fantastic beauty\emdash wreaths of loveliest green\emdash the moldering trunk or loathsome ruin!\par \par We may well believe none are more obnoxious to a holy Savior than such. He (Incarnate TRUTH) would rather have the naked stem than the counterfeit blossom. He would rather have no gold, than be mocked with tinsel and base alloy! "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other!" says He, speaking to one of His Churches at a later time. He would rather a man openly avowed his enmity than that he should come in disguise, with a traitor-heart, among the ranks of His people.\par \par Oh that all such ungodly boasters and pretenders would bear in mind, that not only do they inflict harm on themselves, but they do infinite damage to the Church of God. They lower the standard of godliness. Like that worthless Fig-tree, they help to hide from others the glorious sunlight. They intercept from others the refreshing dews of heaven. They absorb in their leaves the rains as they fall. Many a tuft of tiny moss, many a lowly plant at their feet, is pining and withering, which, but for them, would be bathing its tints in sunshine, and filling the air with balmy fragrance!\par \par Solemn, then, ought to be the question with every one of us\emdash every Fig-tree in the Lord's plantation\emdash How does it stand with me? am I now bringing forth fruit to God? for remember what we are NOW, will fix what we shall be when our Lord shall come on the Great Day of Scrutiny! We are forming now for Eternity; settling down and consolidating in the great mold which ultimately will determine our everlasting state. If we are fruitless now, we shall be fruitless then. The principle in the future retribution is thus laid down\emdash "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still."\par \par The demand and scrutiny of Jesus will on that day be, not what is the number of your leaves, the height of your stem, the extent of your branches! not whether you have grown on the wayside or in the forest, been nurtured in solitude or in a crowd, on the mountain-height or in the lowly valley! All will resolve itself into the one question\emdash Where is your fruit? What evidence is there that you have profited by My admonitions, listened to My voice, and accepted My salvation? Where are your proofs of love to Myself, delight in My service, obedience to My will? Where are the sins you have crucified, the sacrifices you have made, the new principles you have nurtured, the amiability and love and kindness and generosity and unselfishness which have supplanted and superseded baser affections?\par \par See that the leaves of outward profession do not become a snare to you. You may be lulling yourselves to sleep with delusive opiates! You may be making these false coverings an excuse for not "putting on of the armor of light." One has no difficulty in persuading the tenant of a wretched hovel to consent to have his mud-hut taken down; but the man who has the walls of his dwelling hung with gaudy drapery, it is hard to persuade him that his house is worthless and his foundation insecure. Do not think that privileges or creeds, or church-sect or church-membership, or the Shibboleth of church-party will save you. It is to the heart that God looks. If the inner spirit be right, the outer conduct will be fruitful in righteousness. Make it not your worthless ambition to appear to be holy, but be holy!\par \par Live not a "dying life"\emdash that blank existence which brings neither glory to God nor good to men. Seek that while you live, the world may be the better for you, and when you die the world may miss you. Unlike the pretentious tree in our parable-text, be it yours rather to have the nobler character and recompense, so beautifully delineated under a similar figure three thousand years ago\emdash "He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth his fruit in his season. His leaf, also, shall not wither, and whatever he does shall prosper."\par \par Let us further learn, from this solemn and impressive miracle, how true Christ is to His word. We think of Him as true to His promises; do we think of Him, also, as true to His threatenings? Judgment, indeed, is His strange work. Amid a multitude of other miracles already performed by Him, this "cursing of the fig-tree" formed the exclusive exception to His miracles of mercy. All the other miracles were proofs and illustrations of beneficence, compassion, love. But He seems to interpose this one, in case we should forget, in the affluence of benignity and kindness, that the same God, whose name and memorial is "merciful and gracious," has solemnly added that "He can by no means clear the guilty."\par \par He would have us to remember that there is a point beyond which even His love cannot go, when the voice of ineffable goodness must melt and merge into tones of stern wrath and vengeance. The guilty may, for the brief earthly hour of their impenitence, despise His divine warnings, and laugh to scorn His solemn expostulations. Sentence may not be executed speedily; amazing patience may ward off the inevitable blow. They may, from the very forbearance of Jesus, take impious encouragement to defy His threats, and rush swifter to their own destruction. But come He will, and must, to assert His claims as "He who is HOLY, He who is TRUE."\par \par The disciples, on the present occasion, heard the voice of their Master. They gazed on the doomed Fig-tree, but there seemed at the moment to be no visible judgment on its leaves. As they took their final glance before passing on their way, no blight seemed to descend, no worm to prey on its roots. The fowls of Heaven may have appeared soaring in the sky, eager to nestle as before on its branches, and to bathe their plumage on the dewdrops that drenched its foliage. But was the word of Jesus in vain? Did that fig-tree take up a responsive parable, and say, "Who made You a ruler and a judge over me?"\par \par The Lord and His apostles passed that same place a few hours afterwards on their return to Bethany. But though the Passover moon was shining on their path, the darkness, and perhaps the distance from the highway, veiled from their view the too truthful doom to be revealed in morning light. As the dawn of day finds them once more on their road to Jerusalem, the eyes of the disciples wander towards the spot to see whether the words of yesterday have proved to be indeed solemn verities. One glance is enough! There it stands in impressive memorial. One night had done the work. No desert whirlwind, if it had passed over it, could have effected it more thoroughly. Its leaves were shriveled, its sap dried, its glory gone. Ever and always afterwards, as the disciples crossed the mountain, and as they gazed on this silent "preacher," they would be reminded that Jehovah-Jesus, their loving Master, was not "a man that He should lie, nor the son of man that He should repent."\par \par Ah! Reader, learn from all this, that the wrathful utterances of the Savior are no idle threats. He means what He says! He is "the Faithful and True witness;" and though "mercy and truth go continually before His face," "justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne." You may be scorning His message\emdash lulling yourself into a dream of guilty indifference. You may see in His daily dealings no sign or symbol of coming retribution; you may be echoing the old challenge of the presumptuous scoffer\emdash "Where is the promise of His coming?" The fig leaves may have lost none of their verdure\emdash the sky may be unfretted by one vengeful cloud\emdash nature around you, may be hushed and still. You can hear no footsteps of wrath; you may be even tempted at times to think that all is a dream\emdash that credulity has allowed itself to be duped by a counterfeit tale of superstitious terror!\par \par Or if, in better moments, you awake to a consciousness of the Bible averments being stern realities, your next subterfuge is to trust to that rope of sand to which thousands have clung, to the wreck of their eternities\emdash an indefinite dreamy hope in the final mercy of God! that on the Great Day the threatenings of Jesus will undergo some modification; that He will not carry out to the very letter the full weight of His denunciations! that the arm which love nailed to the cross of Calvary will sheathe the sword of avenging retribution, and proclaim a universal amnesty, to the thronging myriads at His tribunal!\par \par No! O man, who are you that replies against God? Come to the fig-tree near Bethany, and let it be a silent attesting witness to the Savior's unswerving and immutable truthfulness! Or, passing from the sign to the thing symbolized, behold the Jewish nation which God has for eighteen centuries set up in the world as a monument of His undeviating adherence to His Word. See how, in their case, to the letter He has fulfilled His threatenings. Is not this fulfillment intended as an awful foreshadowing of eternal verities: if He has "spared not the natural branches," do you think He will spare you? "If these things were done in the green tree, what will be done in the dry?"\par \par Mourners! You for whose comfort these pages are specially designed, is there no lesson of consolation to be drawn from this solemn "memory?" Jesus smote down that fig-tree\emdash blasted and blighted it. Never again did He come to seek fruit on it. Ten thousand other buds in the Fig-forest around were opening their fragrant lips to drink in the refreshing dews of spring; but the curse of perpetual barrenness rested on this one tree! He has smitten you also, but it is only to heal. He has bared your branches\emdash stripped you of your verdure\emdash broken "your staff and your beautiful rod;" but the pruning hook has been used to promote the vigor of the tree; to lop off the needless branches, and open the stems to the gladsome sunlight. Murmur not! Remember, but for these loppings of affliction you might have bloomed into the lush luxuriant growth of mere external profession. You might have rested satisfied with the outward display of Religiousness, without the fruits of true Religion. You might have lived and died unproductive cumberers, deceiving others and deceiving yourselves.\par \par But He would not allow you to linger in this state of worthless barrenness. Oh! better far, surely, these severest cuttings and incisions of the pruning knife, than to listen to the stern words\emdash "Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone!" It is the most terrible of all judgments when God leaves a sinner undisturbed in his sinfulness\emdash abandons him to "the fruit of his own ways, and to be filled with his own devices;" until, like a tree impervious to moistening dews and fructifying heat, he dwarfs and dwindles into the last hopeless stage of spiritual decay and death!\par \par "If you endure chastening\emdash God deals with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the Father chastens not?" "He prunes it, that it may bring forth more fruit."\par \par \cf1\fs23\par }