down upon the wreck. Away after that drifting hulk go these gallant men through the swell of a roaring sea; they reach it; they shout; and now a strange object rolls out of that canvas screen against the lee shroud of a broken mast. Hauled into the boat, it proves to be the trunk of a man, bent head and knees together, so dried and shrivelled as to be hardly felt within the ample clothes, and so light that a mere boy. lifted it on board. It is laid on the deck; in horror and pity the crew gather round it; it shows signs of life; they draw nearer; it moves, and then muttersmutters in a deep, sepulchral voice-" There is another man." Saved himself, the first use the saved one made of speech was to seek to save another. Oh! learn that blessed lesson. Be daily practising it. And so long as in our homes, among our friends, in this wreck of a world which is drifting down to ruin, there lives an unconverted one, there is "another man," let us go to that man, and plead for Christ; go to Christ and plead for that man; the cry, "Lord save me, I perish, changed into one as welcome to a Saviour's ear, "Lord save them, they perish.

The Defiler.

Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way, and by their doings.-Ezek. xxxvi. 17.

"THY holy cities are a wilderness; Zion is a wilderness; Jerusalem is a desolation." So low as this had the fortunes of Israel ebbed, when the words of my text were penned. Judah was in chains; the people were captives in the hands of heathen-exiles in the land of Babylon. Jerusalem lay in ruins; the grass grew long and rank in her deserted streets; an awful silence filled the temple; the fox looked out of the window, and the foul satyr had her den in the Holy of Holies. No plough turned a furrow in the field; the vines grew wild and tangled on the crumbling terraces; nor cock crew, nor dog bayed, nor flock bleated, nor maid sang, nor shepherd piped, nor smoke curled up from homestead among the lonely hills. The land was desolate, almost utterly desolate. She now enjoyed what the love of pleasure and the greed of gain had denied her; she rested, and had a long Sabbath; while over an expatriated people, far away beyond the desert, and beside the river, the seventy years' captivity rolled wearily on. A few pious men, who had in vain tried to stem the flood-tide of sin which swept the nation on to ruin, were mourning over the guilt of which captivity was the punishment. Wearying to be home again they cried, "How long, O Lord, how long? Wilt thou be angry for ever?

Shall thy jealousy burn like fire ?" "Be not wroth very sore, O Lord, neither remember iniquity for ever. Behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people; thy holy cities are a wilderness; Zion is a wilderness; Jerusalem a desolation." "Turn us again, Lord God of Hosts, and cause thy face to shine on us, and so we shall be saved."

So they felt and prayed who were as salt in the putrid mass. The larger portion, however, as has too often been the case in the visible church, lived only to dishonor their faith, their creed, their country and their race. Like many still who go abroad, and in leaving their native land leave behind them all appearance of piety, they profaned God's holy name, and gave the scoffer abundant occasion for this bitter and biting sneer-"These are the people of the Lord!" In its application to the contemporaries of Ezekiel, the prophet briefly describes these sad and sinful days, and also refers to that preceding period of deep and wide degeneracy, when the corruption of kings, princes, priests and people, had grown so great, that, to use the words of Scripture, "Their trespass was grown up to the heavens." The patience of God at length exhausted, as he "drove" the man and woman from the garden, he drove Israel from a land which their sins had defiled.

However much we may abhor their crimes, it is impossible not to pity the sufferers-in a sense to sympathise with them. Are we men who, in the case of an invasion, would take a bold position on the shore, and fight every inch of ground, and when driven back would take our last stand in our own doorway, nor allow the foot of foe to pass there but over our dead body? If our bosom burns with any patriotic

fire, if we have the common affections of men for family and friends, it is impossible to look with insensibility at that bleeding fragment of a nation gathered for the march to Babylon, amid the blackened and blood-stained ruins of their capital. What a mournful company! The sick, the bedrid, the blind, old men tottering forth on the staff of age, and plucking their gray beards with grief; the skeleton infant hanging on a breast that famine and sorrow have dried; mothers with terror-stricken children clinging to their sides, or, worse still, with gentle daughters imploring their protection from these rude and ruffian soldiers; a few gallant men, the survivors of the fight, wasted by famine, bleeding from unbandaged wounds, their arms bound, and burning tears streaming down their cheeks, as they looked on wives and daughters shrieking and helpless in the arms of brutal passion; how they strain at their bonds! and bitterly envy their more fortunate companions who lay in the bloody breach, nor had survived to see the horrors of that day! The piety that abhors the sins of this people is not incompatible with the pity that sympathises with their sorrows; and could sit down and weep with Jeremiah, as, seated on a broken pillar of the temple, desolation around him, and no sound in his ear but the long, wild wail of the captive band, he wrung his hands, raised them to heaven, and cried, "Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people."

There was a home-leaving, however, in which we feel a nearer interest. I do not refer to that eventful morning when some of us left a father's house; and the gates of that happy sanctuary opened, amid tears

and fears and many a kind farewell-and when watched by a father's eye, and followed by a mother's prayers, we pushed out our bark on the swell of life's treacherous sea. The turning time of many a young man's history, the crisis of his destiny, that day may have exerted an influence as permanent on our fate as its impression remains indelible on our memory. I refer to a home-leaving of far older date; to one, not of personal, nor of national, but of universal interest. My eye is turned back on the day when our first parents, who had fallen into sin and forfeited their inheritance, were expelled from man's first home. And, recollecting the reluctance with which I have seen a heart-broken mother make up her mind to disown the prodigal, and drive him from her door,-knowing, when with slow and trembling hand she had barred him out, how it seemed to her as if in that horrid sound she had heard the door of heaven bolted against him, and feeling how much provocation we ourselves could suffer, ere a bleeding heart would consent to turn a child out upon the open streets, and believing also that our Father in heaven is kinder than the kindest, and better than the best of us, and that the fondest, fullest heart is to his, but as the rocky pool, -the lodge of some tiny creature-to the great ocean which has filled it with a wave, no demonstration of God's abhorrence of sin (always excepting the cross of Calvary) comes so impressively to our hearts as his expulsion of our unhappy parents from his own blissful presence and their sweet home in Eden. When with slow and lingering steps Adam and Eve came weeping forth from Paradise, and the gate was locked behind them, that was the bitterst home-leaving the world ever saw. Adam, the federal head of his family