which is the most fearful attribute of Death,-all the busy scenery of life melting into shadows around him, as it must in that hour around each of us, but with nothing before him but the blackness of annihilation,he, in his very helplessness of despair, was the symbol of that want the Lord of Life came to satisfy. He has come, and He has shed light upon the grave and beyond it; and shall we not walk as "children of the light" He has given? The humblest pupil in our Christian schools, knowing more of the history and destinies of man than the great teachers of old ever dared even to conjecture, shall not our life be a life beyond their's? And if they could feel that there is that in us, that claims nothing short of God for its object, shall not we, who know this for a fact, surpass them who dreamed it for a possibility, and, rising habitually into the eternal world which is our home, learn, with all the forces of our hearts, human indeed, but exalted to things divine, "to trust not in uncertain riches," not in aught else that is uncertain, unsatisfying, unenduring, "but in the living God?"

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SERMON XVI.

THE REST OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD.

1 CHRONICLES, xxiii. 25.

For David said, the Lord God of Israel hath given rest unto His

people.

Y brethren! these are words of weight to reflec

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tive and feeling hearts. In these simple words we may truly say, that the peculiar and pre-eminent gift which our religion promises to confer, is, in a mystic and symbolical form, set before us. The rest which, externally and nationally, David here congratulates his land on attaining, prefigures deeper realities; it speaks to us of that rest which "the whole creation" naturally "groaneth and travaileth for;" of that rest which our God hath ever proclaimed, as the attribute of His own mighty essence, and the exclusive blessing of His eternal kingdom. The good king of Israel felicitates his subjects on their happy privilege of living under the shadow of the Most High, of being the peculiar people of Him to whom all the tribes of the earth owe allegiance, and, specially, of now possessing that mark of His favour, which is implied in being permitted to close with a period of rest the long and stormy annals of their previous national history. But do you suppose

that his mind, ever illumined with predictive knowledge, and ever glowing with those high-wrought spiritual affections that in good men's hearts are themselves a kind of prophecy of a blessed future, — do you suppose that the mind of him who so often wished for "the wings of a dove, to fly away and be at rest," gave no deeper significancy to his words, when he spoke of the "rest" which "the Lord God had given to His people"? The author of Psalms, which are, to this day, the best expressions the Church possesses of its highest Christian experience,-Psalms which, wherever we go in spiritual feeling, we will find have been there before us;-the man, whose fervent and tender heart gave utterance to such songs as these, we may well believe, had brighter hopes of rest than any national prosperity could ever answer. He must have known and felt that external peace is of little or no value, save as it tends to allow the cultivation of the interior peace "which passeth understanding;" that instruments cannot harmonize together to any purpose, when each is not in tune with itself!

But, besides these holy aspirations and just convictions, which belonged to such a heart as that of David, it is impossible not to feel, that the whole mass of the Old Testament language, in describing national favours, points naturally to higher and better graces. The soul, whose gratitude glorified God for the wealth of a favoured country, was already prepared to glorify Him for the more precious internal riches of His gracious Spirit.

I. In the mysterious polity of the people of Israel, spiritual and temporal blessings were so closely allied,

that the same language might naturally be employed to signify either. To a people who lived under the direct government of God, temporal felicity was the consequence, and thence the indication, of divine favour; and when once the vast conception of immediate divine agency is introduced into the minds of men, it can scarcely lie idle there. When, with the conviction (founded on palpable evidence of sense and experience) of special divine superintendence, was combined the pure and lofty moral nature of the divine governor, as revealed in the law issued by Moses, it is inconceivable but that the higher class of Israelitish minds, the holy and meditative class, must often have felt, that the mass of ordinances which surrounded them were truly meant as types of some more profound spiritual realities, and that their whole national history was intended, in some secret way, to image forth a moral history, wider in its purpose and extent, and more adequate to the power and dignity of a God whom, at the very time they were exulting in his special favour, they well knew to be the God of the whole earth as well as of the territory of Israel, yea, even "a God whom the heaven of heavens could not contain." Among our Scriptures of the New Testament, we possess an invaluable tract, whose especial purpose is to unfold the true purport of that dialect of things symbolical, through which it pleased God to address the people of Israel. I allude, as you know, to the Epistle to the Hebrews. In that Epistle we are taught to understand the prophetic language of ceremonies; and, in the sacrifice of Christ, to contemplate the one substance of so many typical shadows. But we can also read more than this

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in the inspired interpretation of inspired rites, furnished by the Spirit of God in that Epistle. We can perceive that God spoke in a dialect of events, no less than in a dialect of ceremonies; that the history and fortunes of Israel were meant as truly (though not indeed in the same degree) to foreshadow interior truths; and that the Jewish student, who in a fitting spirit meditated over the records of his country, might detect there the laws of God's spiritual, as really as of His temporal, providence, and become, in a manner, an anticipated Christian! Thus it is, brethren, that the Old Testament becomes to us a symbolical history, not only of the facts that secure our justification, but also of the grace that constitutes our sanctification. evince how truly the history of the Old Testament addresses the internal experience of Christians, I might refer you to the eleventh chapter of that interpretative Epistle to which I have drawn your attention. You will there find the radical virtue of Christianity, the grace of faith, made to be the moving principle of the whole Jewish history, as far as it was a history of successful achievements; and the history itself, under God's guidance, arranged in such a manner as to display the reality and power of that principle; so that Christianity shall appear, not so much to require a new virtue, as to present a new object to a pre-existing virtue. But I prefer to turn your attention to another part of the same Epistle, not only because it has direct reference to our immediate subject, but because it carries the value of the Old Testament histories a step-and a very important step-farther. It establishes that they contain not only a series of symbolical representa