are not heard, sin is every where-is in every man. Be they dug in Arctic snows, or in the desert sands, there is no land without its graves; nor, wherever it stands, a city without its cemetery. Be they monarchies or republics, unaffected by the revolutions that cast down other dynasties, death reigns in them all— a king of kings. Death sits on the world's oldest throne. Suffering the stings of conscience, sin and serpent-bitten, man is condemned by a voice within him; there sits a divinity enthroned in every man's soul, whose voice is the clear, articulate, and solemn echo of this judgment, "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."

This evil is incurable.

Hear the Word of the Lord: "Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord." Again, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye that have been accustomed to do evil learn to do well." Again, "Why should ye be stricken any more, ye will revolt more and more?" Of these solemn and humbling truths I know no more remarkable illustration than that before us. What effect had God's judgments on his ancient people? Some children owe their ruin to excessive indulgence; others are the victims of an extreme severity, which drives them first to falsehood, and then from that on to other crimes. Thus mismanagement may be laid at our door; but who will impute error to God, or challenge the wisdom of his ways? Now, when the scourge was in the hands of a God all wise, what effect had it on his people? Were they cured by their afflictions, trials, and years of suffering? Did

means.

these arrest the malady? Had they even the effect of preventing their sinking deeper into sin? By no As always happens in incurable diseases, the patient grew worse instead of better. "Seducers wax worse and worse. As always happens when life is gone, the dead grew more and more offensive. The more it shines, and the more it rains, the thicker the dews of night, and the hotter the sun of day, the faster the dead tree rots; for those agents in nature which promote the vegetation and develop the beauty of life, the sounding shower, the silent dews, the summer heat, have no other effect on death than to hasten its putridity and decay. And even so, furnishing us with an impressive lesson of the impotency of all means that are unaccompanied by the divine blessing-was it with God's ancient people. He sent them servants, and he sent them sufferings; but, until the Spirit of life descended from on high, their habits only grew more depraved, their condition more desperate, their profanity more profane; they but laid themselves more and more open to the charge-"The last state of that man is worse than the first." Wherever on weary feet they wandered, they dishonored religion, disgraced the faith; and, instead of extorting the respect of their oppressors, they exposed both themselves and their God to contempt.

The heathen sneered and said, "These are the people of the Lord!" and, what is less common, these down-trodden exiles, these debased and degraded sinners, seem themselves to have felt the desperate character of their case; they said, "Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost."

Now, as we may learn from the case of the Jews, the case of every sinner, apart from divine assistance,

is a desperate one. filement is one which neither sorrows nor sufferings can remove. God, in a passage which we have already quoted, says, "Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me;" sorrows have no more virtue than soap, tears than nitre here. Trust not, therefore, in any merely unsanctified afflictions, as if these could permanently and really change the true character of the heart. I have seen the characters of the writing remain on paper that the flames had turned into a film of buoyant coal; I have seen the thread that had been passed through the fire, retain, in its cold gray ashes, the twist which it had got in spinning; I have found every shivered splinter of the flint as hard as the unbroken stone: and, let trials come, in providence, sharp as the fire and ponderous as the crushing hammer, unless God send with these something else than these, bruised, broken, bleeding as the heart may be, it remains the same. You may weep for your sins; and, since all of us have need to seek a more tender conscience, and that this too cold and callous heart were warmed and softened, sorry should I be to stop your weeping. Should a mote of dust get into the natural eye, the irritation induced will weep out the evil; and so, in a way, with sin in a tender and holy conscience. But tears-an ocean of tears-wash not out the guilt of sin. All tears are lost that fall not at the feet of Jesus. But even the tears which bathe a Saviour's feet wash not away our sins. When falling -flowing fastest, we are to remember that it is not the tears we shed, but the blood he shed, which is the price of pardon; and that guilty souls are nowhere to be cleansed but in that bath of blood where the foul

This internal and universal de

est are free to wash and certain to be cleansed.

From its crimson margin a Magdalene and a Manasseh have gone up to glory; and since their times, succeeding ages have been daily and more fully proving, that grace is still free, salvation still full, and that still the blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin.

"There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel's veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.”

Man Sinning.

When the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way, and by their doings.-EZEKIEL xxxvi. 17.

"I HAVE dreamed a dream," said Joseph, "and behold the sun, moon, and eleven stars made obeisance to me." Our earth was once supposed to occupy a place of no less honor in creation. Turning daily on its axis, and performing also an annual revolution round the sun, our globe is in incessant motion; but it was once believed that its state was one of perfect rest, and that, like the small pivot on which some great wheel revolves, it formed a center, around which went rolling the whole machinery of heaven, those suns and planets, both fixed and wandering stars. This dream of science met a happier fate than Joseph's; believed in the credulous ages of the world's childhood, it was obstinately clung to as an article of faith down to no very distant period. It is not so very long ago since the telescope of Galileo demonstrated that our earth, whatever the Pope might say, is a satellite of the sun, and but one of many orbs that roll around him; and he but one of many suns, which, taking millions of years to complete their circle, revolve about some greater center. At some period preceding the philosopher's discovery, the throne of Spain is said to have been occupied by a man who was acute enough to perceive, that if all these vast systems, suns, planets, and comets, were daily turning