(b) In bereavements while we have stood by holy deathbeds we have felt the aroma wafted from the lovely scenes on the other side. "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise as some men count slackness." The Divine appeal suggests:

IV. The service Christianity renders us.

1. It assures us there is life on the other side the gates. In stepping through them, we do not step into black extinction. So much light as this, the old philosophers never reached.

2. It assures us there is blessedness on the other side the gates. It opens the door of the future and shows us a world of men in heaven, "I saw a great multitude,' &c.

"They live, the beautiful, the dead,

Like stars of fire above our head."

3. It takes away the instinctive repugnance we feel in stepping through those gates.

"It delivers those who through fear of death are all their lifetime subject to bondage." It takes the sting of death away, &c.

Friends, you must soon pass through these gates. You are very near them now. "What is your life? A vapor," &c.—the flitting rays of a meteor. With the

first breath you drew you took a step towards those gates, and thither you have been wending ever since.

"Your hearts, like muffled drums,

Are beating funeral marches to the grave."

I would not lessen the pleasures of young life. I would not cool your blood, nor throw one shade over those bright and glowing prospects which imagination pictures; but I would have you take life as it is and

enjoy it for what it is worth. Enjoy it, as I have often enjoyed, on my native mountains, the setting of a summer's sun. The streaks of glory which played upon the western sky, as the great orb went down in blazing splendor, kindled within me unutterable emotions of delight, yet, I felt, as I admired, that the magnificent scene would soon vanish, and all above and below would be darkness.

"Time is a Prince whose resistless sway,
Everything earthly must needs obey,

The aim of war, and the tyrant's frown,

And the shepherd's crook and the conqueror's crown.
Palaces, pyramids, temples, towers,

With the falling leaves and the fading flowers,
And the sunset's flush and the rainbow's ray
At the touch of Time are passing away."

JOB'S TESTIMONY ABOUT HIMSELF AS A BELIEVER.

THOMAS GUTHRIE, D.D.

And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God; Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me. -JOB Xix: 26, 27.

THIS

HIS is the testimony which the patriarch has to give concerning himself.

I. Job's faith was his own; intensely personal and apappropriating: "I know that my Redeemer liveth"not Adam's, Abel's or Noah's Redeemer, not merely "the Redeemer of God's elect"-but "my Redeemer." Less than this would have been less than the faith "that overcometh ;" and the bearer of a Gospel too stinted to warrant this would have been to him the most miserable of

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all his miserable comforters." Such little words as "my" are the life and nerve of faith's vocabulary. iis health and wealth, &c., were gone. His only hold was then to cling to the Redeemer as his Own, his One, his All; and to Him he clung as with a death's-grasp, with the tenacity of true, appropriating personal faith, while his nearest and dearest abandoned him, while his dependents reviled him, and the wreck of his wonted grandeur lay strewn all around him.

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Thus did Job. Thus let us do. Our warrant is not what we find in ourselves as better than others, or even as better than our former selves, but in the precious Gospel truth that God is to us the God of peace as the God and Father and gracious Giver of that divine-human Redeemer "who gave himself a ransom for all," and therefore for us. In the pure effulgence of this "glorious Gospel of the blessed God," in "words legible only by the light they give," without any reflex or circuitous regard to our own experiences, which would only stir dust before our eyes, faith sees in Jesus all.it wants, and straightway exclaims with Job, "My Redeemer !"—with Thomas, "My Lord and my God!"-with Paul, "He loved me, and gave himself for me!" And with the sweet singer of Israel, and the true and good of all times, who never tire of harping on that same string.

II. Job's faith had a strength and consistency that amounted to knowledge. "I know that my Redeemer liveth," not I trust, I hope, or even I believe, but "I know." "If we receive the witness of man, the witness of God is greater." For this reason, and because that witness, or Gospel testimony, is so self-luminous, and so adapted to our case, the faith of it is called in the Scripture not only the belief but "the knowledge of the truth." And the favorite language of truth has ever been "I know." Thus Martha, "I know," &c. Thus Paul says,

"I know," &c., and in the same way Job here says, "I know that my Redeemer liveth." Of all knowledge that is the deepest, the best, and the last.

Ah, how many, on this vital theme, have failed to rise above the foggy horizon of vague and half-whispered hopes to the spiritual empyrean where faith becomes knowledge. These vague hopes may suffice while fair weather lasts, but the storm, though far less violent than that which beat on Job, will snap them like a spider's web. What will it avail ? "By faith we stand." "By faith we walk.” By faith we run, "looking unto Jesus." By faith we triumph, for the conflict is a "fight of faith," and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." We "overcome through the blood of the Lamb," or through faith in the Redeemer and His ransom. Such power lies in the watchword, "I know in whom I have believed."

III. It is thus already manifest that Job's faith was of a fibre that was proof against all earthly trial, even to the last and worst. Never was man so tried as he, except his Antitype, "the Man of Sorrows." This very chapter contains an effecting recital of his woes, culminating in the most plantiff of cries (see verses 14-19, 21). His barque was fast foundering; but to him, as to the disciples long after, the form of the Redeemer appeared walking on the crest of the billow. With the eye of faith he saw him; with the ear of faith he heard His assuring word, "It is I; be not afraid." And with the grasp of faith he clung to Him; not like the sinking Peter, with the distracted cry, "Lord save me, I perish !" but in the collected repose of his own assured faith, "I know that my Redeemer liveth." He well knew that the hand that smote must be the hand to heal.

IV. It was a faith that triumphed over the fear of death; for, in Job's belief, death was near. The breath

of the grim king was already freezing his vitals. His wasted frame seemed to him as ready for the grave as the grave, he said, was ready for it. It was an outworn vesture of flesh which fell disease had rent. His malady had overspread his body with an envelopment of angry sores, whose corroding action, he here tells us, had left him no skin except the cnamel of his teeth. But his faith remained. His consciousness of integrity"that column of true majesty in man and stable as ever. He knew that his Redeemer lived. and would stand at the latter day upon the earth, Hence he nobly adds: "Though after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God."

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What an animating example. In Job we have the lot of man in its extremes-in its best estate, and in its worst. "Look on this picture and on this:" on Job the prosperous, and Job the abject. Once, kings might have stood awed in his presence, or fallen at his feet, and asked his patriarchal benediction; now, none so poor "to do him reverence." Compare chapter xxix: 7-11 with chapter xix: 13-22. Left alone, yet able to say with his Redeemer, "I am not alone, for my Father is with me," he turns from earth to heaven, from man to God. Such a time must one day come to us all. Happy will it be if it then finds us triumphant with a faith like Job's. "Death's terror is the mountain faith removes.'

V. The patriarch's faith assured him of eternal blessedness with God, beyond death and the grave.

First, it embraced the immortality of the soul, and its separate and happy existence after death. Instead of the expression, "in my flesh," in ver. 26, we prefer the marginal rendering "out of my flesh."

I do not think it is the Resurrection that is here spoken of, but Christ's Incarnation-not His second coming, but His first. The other sense is, that Job, no