every day; more love to God laid up and learnt; more humility of heart exercised. But that opportunity has now gone by for ever; the time seems now as if it had been but for a moment, while looked back upon from the countless ages of eternity. There is a great gulf fixed between great, so vast the difference; a gulf, so deep and impassable; and fixed, as for ever unchangeable, for the barriers are in the deep foundations of eternity.

O blessed Saviour, these are Thine own words! we cannot explain or speak of them, for everything falls short, and all that we say seems but idle words compared with the dread reality. Do Thou, by Thy Holy Spirit, write them on our hearts. Teach us to know them in this our day, as Thou wouldst have us to understand and profit by the sad warning.

Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house: for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. His torment is increased by thinking of others; natural affection seems still to remain; nay, it might almost seem brotherly affection, a desire for their spiritual everlasting welfare; he would become, as it were, a preacher of the Gospel, and send an Apostolic message unto them; but these desires are fruitless and unavailing, and now only tend to increase the bitterness of regret and sorrow. Dear Christians, how much reason have we all to fear that good desires, if not acted upon and carried out when opportunity is given, may come back to us when it is too late, knocking at the door of the heart with everlasting sorrow! Have we not all of us some relative whose spiritual good we may promote now, by our prayers at all events, if in no other way? O opportunities of great price; seeds that are scattered about, as

it were, on the winds, which may on all sides be found by us, wherever we look; seeds of imperishable good or evil, which may be taken home by us, and cherished, and made to bear fruit, and be an endless comfort to us when we have left the body.

Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. Moses and the Prophets ! God and the love of our

they both teach the love of neighbour; they both look forward to the everlasting life which is in God, sufficiently for an obedient heart to understand. Here we have our Lord's own declaration for this, expressed by the mouth of Abraham himself.

And he said, Nay, father Abraham; but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. Here we cannot but remember that there was once a man named Lazarus raised to life from the grave; and the Jews, the children of Abraham, went in great numbers from Jerusalem to Bethany, in order to see him; but the chief priests, in consequence, held a council to slay Lazarus, the witness from the dead, and with him to slay his Deliverer, the Prince of Life. They were not rendered the better, but the worse for that miracle. They repented not, they were "not persuaded" by one that rose from the dead; but more confirmed in unbelief and wickedness.

Thus was it with these Pharisees, to whom this awful parable was delivered. They brought to its height and fulness this unlovely temper of the rich man; they saw and hated their Brother of the seed of Abraham Whom they had seen, and knew not that in seeing and hating Him they saw and hated their God.

And now again, in conclusion, let us consider the loving

precepts of the Epistle, and the sad narrative of this day's Gospel together: how do light and darkness combine in one picture, each to heighten the other! Both speak the same doctrine. What a wonderful mystery of probation surrounds us all! How searching, how inscrutable! We shall never know with what exquisite wisdom our trial has been adapted and constituted until it is past. We go on with very little sense or knowledge of the ultimate consequence of things, till all of a sudden in its fulness and reality it stands before us; so it is with us, one by one, one after another. So was it with the rich man in the parable; so was it with poor Lazarus whom he despised; so was it with all those Jews who saw Christ and loved Him not. How little did they know or think of what they were about, until death stripped the veil from their eyes, that the "outcast of the people," "the despised and rejected of men," He that had "not where to lay His head," was their God, and that He their God was Love! Moses and the Prophets testified of Him; but as Abraham said, they heard not Moses and the prophets; and He Himself rose from the dead, but as Abraham said, "neither" were they "persuaded though one rose from the dead."

Many expressions of Holy Scripture imply, that we, in this our short time of trial below, are enveloped in the same kind of cloud-a cloud which conceals from our view the very near Presence of God. For the Jews, after their trial was over, could scarcely have been more amazed and surprised to find that the poor Galilean, the carpenter's son of Nazareth, was the Everlasting Son of the Father; that He, their Brother Whom they had seen, was their God also Whom they had not seen; they could scarcely have been more astonished than those accepted persons

will be in the Great Day of Terror to whom He shall say, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me."

O awful season of short-lived time! "Clouds and darkness are round about" us; for "clouds and darkness are round about" our God, and our God is with us; though, alas! we know it not, or but feebly at best understand; but all we know in this our darkness is, that he that now walketh in love walketh in light, and by so doing shall come to that everlasting light in which God is, Whose Name is Love.

SERMON XLIX.

The Second Sunday after Trinity.

1 St. John iii. 13-24. St. Luke xiv. 16—24.

THE GOSPEL A FEAST OF LOVE.

And this is His commandment, That we should believe on the Name of His Son JESUS CHRIST, and love one another.—1 ST. JOHN iii. 23.

ERY beautifully does the Church at this season con

VERY

tinue and carry on her note of Divine love; taking up her lesson again from St. John, the disciple of love, and from that part of his Epistle where he seems to be dwelling in memory on our Lord's own words at the last Supper before He left them. "Much," says St. Augustin,

"as the Scripture commends the power of love, I know not that it ever does so more fully than here."1

Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you. Our Lord Himself had said, "If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you.

of the world, but I have chosen you

Because ye are not out of the world,

therefore the world hateth you." By "the world" is meant those who love anything in this temporal state of

1 In Joan. Ep. Hom. v.

2 St. John xv. 18, 19.