Such to vast multitudes is life, a vain, unreal, fictitious delusion, a succession of wanton hopes and bitter disappointments. Even Solomon found it thus. He mistook the proper use and design of the good things of life. Life is deceitful only as we use it deceitfully. Properly understood and virtuously fulfilled it is a scene of sublime reality, a school for exercise and evolution of immortal powers. "Life is earnest, etc." 2. We spend our years amusively, as if listening to a tale that is told. A tale is usually a momentary trifling amusement. It is followed with no good or permanent results. The story and the emotions excited soon pass and are forgotten. Thus pass many of the years of a large portion of the human race. They waste and con-. sume their years as one who listens to a tale that is told. They are mere butterflies. Absorbed by mere trifles. To such the successive stages of life bring no solemn reflections. How different is this manner of employing the life from that to which it was destined by our Creator! By Him it was intended to be to each one of us a day of probation and of grace, a season in which we were to renounce our sins, accept of the mercy offered us through a Redeemer and secure a title to a happy immortality. Have we spent our years thus ? 3. We spend our years swiftly, as a tale that is told. This confronts us with a serious solemn fact. Hours fly like words, weeks like sentences, months like chapters, and life a tale quickly told. "We die daily," says the Apostle, die as fast as time flies. "Our birth is nothing but our death begun, 66 An 4. How short our past life appears in review. old man can live over all his life again at one sad sitting." Jacob said, "Few and evil have been, etc." He could only remember as it were the leading events, the other parts were as one great undotted blank. III. Another comparison. Years past, like a tale that is told, are useful only for their moral. The past yields food only for solemn reflection. 1. Each year has been a year of prolonged life. 2. Each year a year of great spiritual opportunity and privilege. 3. Each year a year of domestic and social enjoyment. The moral differs according to the position and circumstances of each individual. "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord," for one; "Son, give me thy heart," for another. DIVINE CONSOLATION. J. OSWALD DYKES, D.D. When the Lord saw her, He had compassion and He said unto her, weep not.-LUKE Vii: 13. THESE words were uttered by the Saviour when he met a funeral procession at the gate of the village of Nain. A poor widow had lost her only son. It was a picture of the deepest human grief. His eye read her story, fathomed her anguished heart, had compassion on her, and with a voice which must have trembled with a strange tenderness, said unto her, "weep not." These two words were all he said. They were presently interpreted to the widow of Nain, by the miracle which gave her back her son. They have been since interpreted for us by the resurrection of the Lord himself and by all the light which has been cast on death, and on the state beyond it, and on the day of general rising, and on eternal life; this leads us into the whole of that large consolation, which Christ's Gospel brings to every Christian who sits and mourns beside his dead. We must not misunderstand this dissuasive from weeping, nor misread these words of Jesus, nor repeat them in another sense than his. He gave us love He meant us to live I. It is not Christ's way to comfort by making light of grief and death. Death is not in his eyes a gentle or a slight thing. He made us for life. that we might be happy in living. and love and rejoice in love and life, and when death comes to us through sin, to rend the companionships of love, Christ, who made us and who is one of us, knows what that means. It is in no cold tone of pitiful contempt, with no touch of impatience or upbraiding, that He says to any one, weep not." 66 II. Christ does not think it an ungodly thing to weep. It is not wrong to sorrow. Tears are no sin. "Jesus wept. That is not piety which thinks it pays God a service of dutiful submission when it chokes its sobs and veils the bursting heart beneath a smooth, dry face. Jesus assuages the spring of grief within, but does not chide the overflow of tears. III. Jesus did not mean to fully assuage our grief here and now. He gives us as much comfort on earth as will make tolerable the losses of earth and keeps more comfort for the life to come. When Jesus bade that widow dry her tears it was in anticipation of the deed he was about to do. Words are very impotent without deeds. Till the lost is given back, the heart cannot quite cease to mourn. It is written of another place than earth, that there "God shall wipe away all tears," and there only; and the reason is, that only there God will restore to us our lost and mourned. The chastened and purified sorrow of a bereaved Christian is sorrow still, but it has more of heaven in it, than many things which men call joys. What then is the comfort which even now the Gospel of our Saviour mingles with the mourning of his people? IV. The Gospel has entirely changed the character of death to the departed. The death of an unforgiven one is the knell of hope. If it is thus my friend has died, how shall I be comforted? But the Christian's is a stingless death. Death to such a one is an angel of peace. He comes to loose the prison-bands of clay and set them free to go home to their Father's house. Theirs is the gain, ours is the loss, yet not all, for we must not forget. that Christ's gospel has a power of transmuting present bereavement into gain. Bereavement is often turned for those who live into a blessing. God did two kindnesses at one stroke when He bereft you of your beloved; one kindness to him; another kindness to you. To him, the perfecting of character and bestowal of bliss; to you, ripening of character and preparation for bliss. By such sweet solaces of sorrow as these, Christ leads us forward to the hope of a yet future and still grander consolation, when we shall be reunited in a holy place and forever. It was a prediction of this which Jesus gave that day at Nain by the resurrection of the dead son and his reunion to his mother. The resurrection of Christ Himself is that which guarantees the ultimate unpeopling of every tomb, including that "vast and wandering grave," the sea. His risen body presents the type of every reconstructed Christian body. His glorified life is the source and pledge of their life in glory. For this recall from death by the archangel's voice to Christ's own deathless and transfigured immortality, as for the deepest, grandest and last of our consolations, Christ bids us hope. Now we are sad and weary for we dwell apart; but Jesus has compassion on us as he had upon the widow, and he tenderly encourages us to be patient, and to wait, because with such hopes as these He leads us, greatly longing, forward to a day, when He shall give back our lost beloved to our eternal embrace, and us also to theirs, the glorified to the glorified, to be for ever one. Then He shall wipe all tears from our eyes, and say, otherwise and more effectually than He did at Nain, "Weep not." THE MOURNER'S BEST NEWS. REV. WM. MORLEY PUNSHON. Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection and the life.—JOHN xi: 25. THESE are grand words, though they have often fallen upon hearts bruised and pained, and when the thoughts are more occupied with the cypress than the laurel. But the mystery of life which God has arranged to come out of the mystery of death, is at once the holiest revelation of his glory and the fullest evangel of his love. The text is found in a narrative inimitable for its tenderness. Full of lessons of heavenly wisdom, kindness, compassion, divine simplicity. There is very much in it for interesting and beautiful contemplation, but our text is its central announcement, and our Saviour designed to have it impressed as a Gospel, not for that family only, but for the mourners of all time. I. Think of the authority with which these words are spoken. "I am ;" not, "I will be." Surely no creature could speak thus. He speaks as a king would speak, whose royalty was doubted. The words assume a supreme and essential power over life and death. His was the original gift of life-his the right to dissolve its organization, and the right to confer it again, and |