jockies, and knaves, and defrauders, and imposters, and charlatans.

Again, I learn, from this story of the disguised princess of Tirzah, how exact, and minute, and precise are the Providences of God. The prophet told that woman that the moment she entered the gate of the city, the child would die. She comes up to the gate of the city, the child's pulses instantly stop. With what wonderful precision that Providence acted. But it was no more certainly true in her life than it is true in your life and mine. Sickness comes, death occurs, the nation is born, despotisms are overthrown at the appointed time. God drives the universe with a stiff rein. Events do not go slipshod. Things do not merely happen so. With God there are no disappointments, no surprises, no accidents. The designs of God are never caught in deshabille. In all the Book of God's Providence there is not one "if" I am far from being a fatalist, but I would be wretched indeed if I did not suppose that God arranges everything that pertains to me and mine; and as when that woman entered the gate of Tirzah and her son died, the providence was minutely arranged, just so minutely and precisely are all the affairs of our life arranged. You may ask me a hundred questions I cannot answer about this theory, nor can any man answer them; but I shall believe until the day of my death that no pang ever seized me but God decides when it shall come and when it shall go, and that I am over-arched by unerring care, and that though the heavens may fall, and the earth may burn, and the judgment may thunder, and eternity may roll, if I am God's child, not so much as a hair shall fall from my head, or a shadow drop on my path, or a sorrow transfix my heart, but to the very last particular it shall be under my Father's arrangement. He bottles our

tears. He catches our sighs. And to the orphan he will be a father, and to the widow he will be a husband, and to the outcast he will be a home, and to the poorest wretch that to-day crawls out of the ditch of his abominations, crying for mercy, he will be an all-pardoning Redeemer. The rocks will turn grey with age, the for ests will be unmoored in the hurricane, the sun will shut its fiery eyelid, the stars will drop like blasted figs, the sea will heave its last groan and lash itself in expiring agony, the continents will drop like anchors in the deep, the world will wrap itself in sheet of flame and leap on the funeral pyre of the judgment day; but God's love will never die. It shall kindle its suns after all other lights have gone out. It will be a billowing sea after all other oceans have wept themselves away. It will warm itself by the blaze of a consuming world. It will sing while the archangel's trumpet peals and the air is filled with the crash of breaking sepulchers and the rush of the wings of the rising dead.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

HELP FOR THOSE OFF TRACK.

When shall I awake? I will seek it yet again.-Proverbs xxiii: 35 I have thought in the midst of this series of sermons which I am preaching, on the night side of city life, it would be well for me to address a sermon of help to the multitude of people who have got on the wrong track. In the nights of my exploration I found a great multitude of men who had gone astray, and nothing more impressed me than the fact of their great multitude. With an insight into human nature such as no other man ever reached, Solomon, in my text, sketches the mental operations of one who, having stepped aside from the path of rectitude, desires to return. With a wish for something better, he says: "When shall I awake? When shall I come out of this horrid nightmare of iniquity?" But seized upon by uneradicated habit, and forced down hill by his passions, he cries out: "I will seek it yet again. I will try it once more."

Our libraries are adorned with an elegant literature addressed to young men, pointing out to them all the dangers and perils of life-complete maps of the voyage, showing all the rocks, the quicksands, the shoals. But suppose a man has already made shipwrecks; suppose he is already off the track; suppose he has already gone astray, how is he to get back? That is a field comparatively untouched. I propose to address myself this morning to such. There are those in this audience who, with every passion of their agonized soul, are ready to

hear such a discussion. They compare themselves with what they were ten years ago, and cry out from the bondage in which they are incarcerated. Now, if there be any in this house, come with an earnest purpose, yet feeling they are beyond the pale of Christian sympathy, and that the sermon can hardly be expected to address them, then, at this moment, I give them my right hand and call them brother. Look up. There is glorious and triumphant hope for you yet. I sound the trumpet of Gospel deliverance. The church is ready to spread a banquet at your return, and the hierarchs of heaven to fall into line of bannered procession at the news of your emancipation. So far as God may help me, I propose to show what are the obstacles of your return, and then how you are to surmount those obstacles.

The first difficulty in the way of your return is the force of moral gravitation. Just as there is a natural law which brings down to the earth anything you throw into the air, so there is a corresponding moral gravitation. In other words, it is easier to go down than it is to go up; it is easier to do wrong than it is to do right. Call to mind the comrades of your boyhood days-some of them good, some of them bad. Which most affected you? Call to mind the anecdotes that you have heard in the last five or ten years-some of them are pure and some of them impure. Which the more easily sticks to your memory? During the years of your life you have formed certain courses of conduct-some of them good, some of them bad. To which style of habit did you the more easily yield? Ah! my friends, we have to take but a moment of self-inspection to find out that there is in all our souls a force of moral gravitation. But that gravitation may be resisted. Just as you may pick up from the earth something and hold it in your hand

toward heaven, just so, by the power of God's grace, a soul fallen may be lifted toward peace, toward pardon, toward heaven. Force of moral gravitation in every one of us, but power in God's grace to overcome that force of moral gravitation.

The next thing in the way of your return is the power of evil habit. I know there are those who say it is very easy for them to give up evil habits. I do not believe them. Here is a man given to intoxication. He knows it is disgracing his family, destroying his property, ruining him body, mind, and soul. If that man, being an intelligent man and loving his family, could easily give up that habit, would he not do so? The fact that he does not give it up proves it is hard to give it up. It is a very easy thing to sail down stream, the tide carrying you with great force; but suppose you turn the boat up stream, is it so easy then to row it? As long as we yield to the evil inclinations in our hearts, and our bad habits we are sailing down stream; but the moment we try to turn, we put our boat in the rapids just above Niagara, and try to row up stream. Take a man given to the habit of using tobacco, as most of you do! and let him resolve to stop, and he finds it very difficult. Seventeen years ago I quit that habit, and I would as soon dare to put my right hand in the fire as once to indulge in it. Why? Because it was such a terrific struggle to get over it. Now, let a man be advised by his physician to give up the use of tobacco. He goes around not knowing what to do with himself. He cannot add up a line of figures. He cannot sleep nights. It seems as if the world had turned upside down. He feels his business is going to ruin. Where he was kind and obliging, he is scolding and fretful. The composure that characterized