to be true, and cannot believe it, and looks up in God's face, God lifts his right hand and takes an oath, an affidavit, saying: "As I live saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth." Blessed be God for such a gospel as this. "Cut the slices thin," said the wife to the husband, "or there will not be enough to go all around for the children; cut the slices thin." Blessed be God there is a full loaf for every one that wants it. Bread enough and to spare. No thin slices at the Lord's table. I remember when the Master Street Hospital, in Philadelphia, was opened during the war, a telegram came saying, "There will be three hundred wounded men to-night; be ready to take care of them;" and from my church there went in some twenty or thirty men and women to look after these poor wounded fellows. As they came, some from one part of the land, some from another, no one asked whether this man was from Oregon, or from Massachusetts, or from Minnesota, or from New York. There was a wounded soldier, and the only question was how to take off the rags the most gently, and put on the bandage, and administer the cordial. And when a soul comes to God, He does not ask where you came from, or what your ancestry was. IIcaling for all your wounds. Pardon for all your guilt. Comfort for all your troubles.

Then, also, I counsel you, if you want to get back, to quit all your bad associations. One unholy intimacy will fill your soul with moral distemper. In all the ages of the church there has not been an instance where a man kept one evil associate and was reformed. Among the twelve hundred thousand of the race, not one instance. Go home to-day, open your desk, take out letter paper, stamp an envelope, and then write a letter something like this:

"My Old Companions: I start this day for heaven. Until I am persuaded you will join me in this, farewell.”

Then sign your name, and send the letter with the first post. Give up your bad companions or give up heaven. It is not ten bad companions that destroy a man, nor five bad companions, nor three bad companions, nor two bad companions, but one. What chance is there for that young man I saw along the street, four or five young men with him, halting in front of a grogshop, urging him to go in, he resisting, violently resisting, until after a while they forced him to go in! It was a summer night and the door was left open, and I saw the process. They held him fast, and they put the cup to his lips, and they forced down the strong drink. What chance is there for such a young man?

Every

I counsel you also, seek Christian advice. Christian man is bound to help you. If you find no other human ear willing to listen to your story of struggle, come to me and I will by every sympathy of my heart, and every prayer, and every toil of my hand, stand beside you in the struggle for reformation; and as I hope to have my own sins forgiven and hope to be acquitted at the judgment scat of Christ, I will not betray you. First of all, seek God, then seek Christian counsel. Gather up all the energies of body, mind, and soul, and, appealing to God for success, declare this day everlasting war against all drinking habits, all gaming practices, all houses of sin. IIalf-and-half work will amount to nothing; it must be a Waterloo. Shrink back now and you are lost. Push on, and you are saved. A Spartan general fell at the very moment of victory, but he dipped his finger in his own blood and wrote on a rock near which he was dying, "Sparta has conquered." Though your struggle to get rid of sin may seem to be almost

a death struggle, you can dip your finger in your own blood and write on the Rock of Ages, "Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." Oh! what glorions news it would be for some of these young men to send home to their parents in the country these holidays which are coming. They go to the postoflice every day or two to see whether there are any letters from you. How anxious they are to hear! You might send them for a holiday present this season, a book from one of our best publishing houses, or a complete wardrobe from the importer's palace-it would not please them half so much as the news you might send home to-morrow that you had given your heart to God. I know how it is in the country. The night comes on. The cattle stand under the rack through which burst the trusses of hay. The horses just having frisked up from the meadow at the nightfall, stand knee-deep in the bright straw that invites them to lie down and rest. The perch of the hovel is full of fowl, their feet warm under the feathers. In the old farmhouse at night no candle is lighted, for the flames clap their hands about the great backlog, and shake the shadow of the group up and down the wall. Father and mother sit there for half an hour, saying nothing. I wonder what they are thinking of. After a while the father breaks the silence and says, "Well, I wonder where our boy is in town to-night;" and the mother answers, "In no bad place, I warrant you; we always could trust him when he was home, and since he has been away there have been so many prayers offered for him we can trust him still." Then at eight o'clockfor they retire early in the country-at eight o'clock they kneel down and commend you to that God who watches in country and in town, on the land and on the sea. Some one said to a Grecian general, "What was the proudest

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moment in your life?" He thought a moment, and said, "The proudest moment in my life was when I sent word home to my parents that I had gained the victory." And the proudest and most brilliant moment in your life will be the moment when you can send words to your parents in the country that you have conquered your evil habits by the grace of God, and become eternal victor. Oh! despise not parental anxiety. The time will come when you will have neither father nor mother, and you will go around the place where they used to watch you and find them gone from the house, and gone from the field and gone from the neighborhood. Cry as loud for forgiveness as you may over the mound in the churchyard, they will not answer. Dead! Dead! And then you will take out the white lock of hair that was cut from your mother's brow just before they buried her, and you will take the cane with which your father used to walk, and you will think and think, and wish that you had done just as they wanted you to, and would give the world if you had never thrust a pang through their dear old hearts. God pity the young man who has brought disgrace on his father's name. God pity the young man who has broken his mother's heart. Better if he had never been born, better if in the first hour of his life, instead of being laid against the warm bosom of maternal tenderness, he had been coflined and sepulchred. There is no balm powerful enough to heal the heart of one who has brought parents to a sorrowful grave, and who wanders about through the dismal cemetery, rending the hair and wringing the hands, and crying, "Mother! mother!" Oh! that to-day, by all the memorics of the past, and by all the hopes of the future, you would yield your heart to God. May your father's God and your mother's God be your God forever.

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE REPROACHFUL OUTCRY.

No man cared for my soul.-Psalm cxlii: 4

David, the rubicund lad, had become the battle-worn warrior. Three thousand armed men in pursuit of him, he had hidden in the cave of Engedi, near the coast of the Dead Sea. Utterly fagged out with the pursuit, as you have often been worn out with the trials of life, he sat down and cried out: "No man cared for my soul!"

If you should fall through a hatchway, or slip from a scaffolding, or drop through a skylight, there would be hundreds of people who would come around and pick up your body and carry it to the home or to the hospital. I saw a great crowd of people in the street and I asked: "What is the matter?" and I found out that a poor laboring man had fallen under sunstroke, and all our eyes were filled with tears at the thought of his distracted. wife and his desolated home. We are all sympathetic with physical disaster, but how little sympathy for spiritual woes. There are men in this house who have come to mid-life who have never yet been once personally accosted about their eternal welfare. A great sermon dropped into an audience of hundreds of thousands will do its work; but if this world is ever to be brought to God it will be through little sermons preached to private Christians to an audience of one. The sister's letter postmarked at the village the word uttered in your hearing, half of smiles and half of tears-the religious postscript to a business letter--the card left at the door