cay, to invigorate failing powers, and restore the rose of health to pallid cheeks. His aim is not to inflict pain, but relieve it--not to destroy a father, but--standing between him and death-to save his trembling wife from widowhood, and these little children from an orphan's lot. And if, although they be wove round no coronet, those are fairer and fresher laurels which are won by saving than by slaying; if it is a nobler thing to rescue life than destroy it, even when its des truction is an act of justice; then, on the same principle, God most glorified himself when revealed in the flesh, and speaking by his Son, he descended on a guilty world,--this his purpose-"I came not to judge the world, but to save it,"—and this his character-"The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth."

Apart, however, from this general consideration, I remark that the scheme of redemption is eminently illustrative of the attributes of Jehovah. For example

I. His power is glorified in the work of salvation. Its path is marked, and its pages are crowded with stupendous miracles. At one time God stays the waves of the sea, at another he stops the wheels of the sun, and, now reversing the machinery of heaven to confirm his word, he makes the shadow travel backwards on the dial of Ahaz. Heaven descends to earth, and its inhabitants walk the stage of a world's redemption. Here one angel speaks out of a burning bush, and there another leaps on a burning altar, and, with wing unscorched, ascends to heaven in its flame. Here a prophet, exempted from the law of death, goes up to glory in a fiery chariot, and there another in the

belly of a whale goes down into the depths of ocean. In contradiction of the laws of nature, a body that should have gravitated to the earth, floats, from the top of Olivet, upward into the ambient air. Across a lake which frost never bound, and winter never paved with ice, walks a human form, stepping on from billow to billow. The tenant of the grave becomes its conqueror, and, laying by its cerements as night-clothes left in bed, he walks forth on the dewy grass at the break of day; the prisoner has bound his jailer and carried off the keys. Over Bethlehem's fields, angels with the light of their wings turn night into day, and shepherds, who watch their flocks, are regaled by voices of the skies-the song of heaven over a babe, who has a poor woman for his mother, and a stable for his birth-place. Nor less remarkable, the deaf are listening to the songs of the dumb, and the blind are gazing on the dead alive; a dumb beast takes human speech and rebukes the hoary sage; ravens leave their young to cater in the fields for man; and angels abandon heaven to hold sentinel watch by the grave. of One whom God forsook, his country rejected, friends repudiated, and none but a thief confessed. And amid these wonders and thousands more, acted before men's eyes on the stage of redemption, and all so illustrative of the presence and power of God, the greatest wonder -the wonder of wonders-is He that works them; the Son of a virgin! dust and Divinity! Creator and creature! "the mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh." Truly, "This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes."

But to glance at the change wrought in redemption on man himself, what amazing power does it display! What a glorious combination of benevolence and om

nipotence! Punishment is confessedly easier than reformation. Nothing is more easy than to rid society of a criminal by the hand of an executioner; but to soften his stony heart, to get him to fall in love with virtue, to make him an honest, honorable, kind, and tender man, to guide his erring steps from the paths of crime-ah! that is another thing. Hence, by men callous of heart, and deaf to the groans of suffering humanity, the preference given to prisons over schools, to punishment over prevention. Well, then, since it is confessedly easier-easier, not better; easier, not in the end cheaper-to punish than reform, I say that God's power is more illustriously displayed in pardoning one guilty-in purifying one polluted man, than if the law had been left to take her sternest course, and our entire family had been buried in the ruins of the fall. We honor justice when she holds the balance even, and before a land that cries for blood, brings out the murderer to hang him up in the face of the sun: "whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." Yet, like the Romans, who decreed a crown to him that saved a citizen, we would hold him worthy of highest honors who brings forth a criminal from his cell, so changed as to be worthy, not only of being restored to the bosom of society, but of holding a place in the senate, or some post of dignity beside the throne. That were an achievement of brilliant renown-a victory over which humanity and piety would shed tears of joy.

To compare small things with great, something like this-but unspeakably nobler and greater-God works in salvation, For example-In John Bunyan, he calls the bold leader of village reprobates to preach the gospel; a blaspheming tinker to become one of

England's famous confessors; and from the gloomy portals of Bedford jail, to shed forth the luster of his sanctified and resplendent genius to the farther limits of the world, and adown the whole course of time. From the deck of a slave ship he summons John Newton to the pulpit; and by hands defiled with Mammon's most nefarious traffic, he brings them that are bound out of darkness, and smites adamantine fetters from the slaves of sin. In Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he converts his Son's bitterest enemy into his warmest friend. To the man whom a trembling church held most in dread, she comes to owe, under God, the weightiest obligations. In Paul she has her boldest champion, her greatest logician, the most gallant of her defenders, her grandest preacher, the prince of Apostles, the largest contributor to this imperishable volume. How much better for these three stars to be shining in heaven, than quenched in the blackness of darkness. Better for the good of man-better for the glory of God. In them, and in all the sainted throng around them, has not God more illustriously displayed his power, than if he had crushed them by the thunders of his vengeance, and buried them in the depths of hell? The power of Divinity culminates in grace. Oh, that we may become its monuments, and be built up by the hands of an eternal Spirit, to the glory of the cross! And why not? Look at these men! Think what they were; behold what they are! and, addressing your prayers to him whose ear is never heavy that it cannot hear, nor his hand shortened that it cannot save, be this your earnest, your urgent cry, "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord. Awake, as in the ancient days in the generations of old.”

The Wisdom and Holiness of God,

ILLUSTRATED BY SALVATION.

And I will sanctify my great name which ye have profaned.
EZEKIEL XXxvi. 23.

THE effect of the wind is visible, not the element itself. The clouds scud across the sky, the trees swing their arms wildly in the air, aerial waves chase each other in sport across the corn, and the boat, catching the gale in her flowing sheet, goes dancing over the billows. So although in a sense infinitely higherthe Invisible is visible; and in his works we see a God, who, seeing all, remains himself unseen. He is lost, not in darkness, but in light; He is a sun that blinds the eye which is turned on.its burning disc. Angels themselves are unable to sustain his glory. They cover their faces with their wings, and use them, as a man his hand, to screen their eyes from the ineffable effulgence.

Suppose that we ascend the steps of creation, from matter in its crudest form to nature's highest and most beautiful arrangements; from the lichen that clothes a rock to the oak that stands rooted in its crevices; from the dull coal to the same mineral crystalized in a flashing diamond; from a dew-drop, lying in the cup of a flower, to the great ocean that lies in the hollow of its Maker's hand; from a spark that expires in the moment of its birth, to the sun which has risen and set with unabated splendor on the graves of a