"GREAT GRACE."

GREAT grace has the great God and Saviour for its Author. Severe battles have been fought and glorious victories won by great grace. What mountains have been removed, sins forgiven, wounds healed, clouds scattered, souls enlivened, comforted, and saved by it! What is it which great grace cannot do? Reader, are you hated by your near relationsyour religion spoken against? Great grace can help you, as in Abel's case. Are you living where ungodliness greatly prevails? Great grace can help you to keep close to the Lord, as it did Enoch, who "walked with God." Are you a labourer in the Lord's vineyard, a preacher of righteousness, and yet apparently labouring in vain? Great grace can help you to go on bearing testimony against sin and unbelief, as it did Noah. Are you tried in family matters-one thing befalling one child, and another thing happening to another child? Great grace can help you, as in Abraham's case, who was tried about Ishmael and Isaac. Are you afraid of man? Great grace can aid you and deliver you therefrom, as it did Jacob, who feared his brother Esau. Are you envied of your brethren? Great grace can preserve you in the midst of their rage and malice, as in Joseph's case. Are you pursued by an envious Saul-hunted about like "a partridge upon the mountain?" Great grace can take care of you, baffle all the hellish schemes of your enemies, and cause you to triumph over them, as in David's case. Are you oppressed by man and devils-urged to do what you cannot do-grounded down in such a way as to force out cries and groans out of your wounded soul? Great grace can render you needful and timely help, as in the case of the oppressed Israelites in Egypt. Are you shut up in prison-your soul sinking in a low dungeon-your prayers seemingly disregarded? Great grace can yield you strength, open a way of escape, and bring your soul out of prison, as in Jeremiah's case. Are you suffering acute internal pain, like, in some respects, to the lost, "cast out of God's sight?" Great grace can effect an escape from "the belly of hell," as in Jonah's case. Are you suffering from the loss of temporal wealth, the loss of bodily health, and the comforts of religion? Great grace can enable you to bear all patiently, and bring you out of the trial, as in Job's case. you despised on account of speaking the truth before those who hate it— threatened-put on low diet? Great grace can blessedly support your soul, as in the case of Micaiah. Are you threatened, by those who employ you, with the loss of your situation, if you do not comply with their requests? Great grace can cause you to determine rather to suffer death than sin against God, and do that which would make your conscience your enemy, as in the case of the three Hebrew children and David. Are you guilty? Great grace can pardon you. Polluted? Great grace can cleanse you. Or fallen? Great grace can raise you. Or sick? Great grace can heal you. Or wandering? Great grace can restore you. Or entangled? Great grace can liberate you. Or tempted? Great grace ean succour you. Ör feeling lost? Great grace can save you. Or burdened? Great grace can ease you. Or dark? Great grace can enlighten you. Great grace can make devils tremble and flee away, as in the case of the man who had his dwelling among the tombs. It can quicken the dead and humble the proud, as in the case of Lazarus, and Saul of Tarsus. How trying it is, when the Lord appears as if He suspended His gracious dealings with the soul whom He has favoured for a length of time by blessing it, and permits it well-nigh to sink into

N N

Are

despair, so that the soul cries out, "Will He be favourable no more? Hath the Lord forgotten to be gracious?" Suppose a tradesman had been favoured with a good customer for many years, and had been much helped in business by him, and all at once the good customer should cease to have dealings with him, how much he would miss him! How anxious he would be to know the reason why he did not deal with him as formerly! Soul-business seems, at times, at a standstill, and, unless the poor sinner is supplied with capital from Him who has unsearchable riches, he cannot continue rightly treading in the Gospel market. Great grace is a good prison companion. It is the best companion for the sickroom; dying-bed; in dark nights; in sad plights; in desperate fights; in the field; coal-pit; grassy wayside; in the pulpit; in the pew; in the hospital; in the workshop; in the kitchen; in the parlour; the magistrate's bench, and the judge's seat; the king's throne, and the peasant's cottage. With great grace for a companion mountains can be climbed ; hills of difficulty overcome; high walls leaped over, and troops of adversaries run through. It is particularly sweet and refreshing to feel great grace as a companion when praying, preaching, reading, or hearing the Word, or writing to a friend, or of one. How well protected is he who has great grace for his hourly companion! Great grace will make good masters and servants. It will make drunkards sober; liars truthful; dishonest persons honest; the lazy industrious; the unclean clean; the covetous contented; the miserly liberal; the proud humble; the lofty lowly; the mean mealy and frank; the malicious meek; the unforgiving forgiving; the hot-headed cool and collected, and the stammerer to speak plainly. Oh, what depths it brings sinners up from! Oh, what heights it rises them up to! How much the Lord Jesus Christ did by great grace when He was upon earth! How much He has accomplished by it since His return to heaven! There are many, both in heaven and earth, who can tell of the wonderful things the Lord has done for them, and in them, by great grace. F. F. Tetbury.

HAVE YOU TOLD JESUS?

A MOURNFUL time was it for the disciples of John the Baptist. He had been taken from them and cast into prison. They had, doubtless, hoped that Herod would relent, and in time release him; but no release was to be his, except the one from a prison to a throne at God's right hand. Herod, at the instigation of the wicked Herodias, had sent and had John beheaded in prison; and, when his followers heard the sad news, that their hopes were no longer of any use, they went and took up the body of him they loved so much and buried it, "and went and told Jesus." They knew how loving and sympathizing He was. Some of them may have been present when He stopped the funeral outside Nain, on its way to the burial-place, and have seen Him restore the only son to his widowed mother. They knew that He who had had compassion on her, and had said, "Weep not," would feel for them in their sorrow in the loss of him of whom Jesus Himself had said, "Among those that are born of women, there is not a greater than John the Baptist." We are not told how He comforted them, but we know how He would not hear their mournful story without doing so. All we are told is that, when He heard of the death of John, "He departed by ship into a desert place."

Perhaps He took with Him the stricken disciples, that, in the quiet of that unfrequented place, He might teach them more of Himself-of Him whose way John was sent to prepare-of Him of whom John thought himself unworthy to stoop down and unloose His shoe. And if, through this sore affliction, they were led to think more highly of Jesus, they would see that there was a wise reason in letting the trial befall them. We have our trials; do they have the same effect upon us? Do they lead us to go and tell Jesus? You may be mourning the loss of a beloved husband; the desire of your eyes may have been taken away, and you are left desolate. Have you told Jesus how sad and lonely you feel? Have you spread your every want before Him, and asked Him to direct and provide for you? Ah! unless you have done so, you know not His boundless store of comfort. He has promised to be the widow's God, the Husband of her thus bereft, and yet He would have you ask Him so to be. Or, perhaps, it is for a child you mourn-a little one it may bewho, by its pretty ways and lovely form, had made you feel it almost necessary to your happiness; and yet it is not, for God has taken it. Now, perhaps, you do not feel that such a sore trial can be well. You long for the little one again; you long for His presence again on earth, who would be able to raise your child, and then you remember He is no longer among men in the form of man, and in the bitterness of your grief you would say, "Call me not Naomi, but call me Marah; for the Lord hath dealt bitterly with me." But, although your child may not now be raised, the same Jesus who raised Jairus's daughter still liveth. He feels for your woe, as He did for that stricken father's. Go and tell Him all your trouble; as He sympathized, we are sure, with John's mourning disciples, so will He with you; and He will also, in answer to your prayers, give you grace to say, "Thy will be done." Whatever may be your trial, oh, bear it not alone, but tell Jesus, and thus feel that He shares that trial or burden. But not only of our sorrows, cares, and burdens may we tell Jesus. He who tells us to "Rejoice with those who do rejoice, as well as weep with those who weep," must surely sympathize with us in our joys. He who wept with Martha and Mary at the grave of their only brother, surely rejoiced with them when at His word Lazarus came forth restored to them, recalled from the land of spirits once more to tread this earth, and care for those who loved him so much. Has God in tender love given you a little one-a tiny darling for your very own? and as you look at the little face you love so much, the little form so beautifully made, have you thanked God for the gift and the joy that comes with it? Or, perhaps, you are rejoicing in a family come to years of companionship the whole left with you, not one taken-all seeming likely to grow up a comfort to you, a blessing in the various spheres in which they may be placed; and, in the joy you feel at being thus blessed, have you poured out your heart in gratitude to God? Have you told Jesus of your happiness? Or, it may be, dear aged Christian friend, that you feel yourself very near the end of life, and you are looking forward with great joy to being for ever with your Lord. When you read in your Bible of heaven, you long to reach that glorious abode of the redeemed, and cast yourself at Jesus' feet, and spend eternity in ceaseless praise to Him through whose death alone you shall have reached heaven's glories. But have you told Jesus of all the joy you feel at the thought of seeing Him, and never more leaving His presence? True, He knows all that we feel; but don't you think He likes us to feel that

He is such a Friend, that we must go direct to Him with all our joys and sorrows? When some great pleasure comes, we long to tell it to our dearest friend; when some sore trial reaches us, we long for the loving sympathy of the friend that is nearest to our hearts. Far more loving, far more sympathizing, than the dearest earthly friend is Jesus. To Him, then, let us ever turn, sure that He will never send us away unheard, uncared for, whether we go in our joy or our sorrow.

SAVING FAITH, NOT SPECULATIVE THEORY.

[We feel that, in days like these, we need not offer any apology for reproducing the annexed. It comes to us from the sister isle in tract form. We rejoice in its dissemination, and are thankful also to know that, although ten years have well nigh passed away since his letter first appeared in the Record, the esteemed writer still lives and labours in the parish where his epistle was dated. Moreover, the subsequent productions of his pen prove he has by no means become dissatisfied with the good old beaten track to the kingdom, in the which "the wayfaring man," though a fool, shall not err. The testimony of the writer of the subjoined letter (the Rev. R. WALKER) is in perfect accordance with that of the venerable Bishop, particulars of whose departure from this vale of tears we give in the present number of the GOSPEL MAGAZINE. Both were men of high intellectual attainment and University standing, even as those whose departure from the common faith is so notorious; but how different the position of these men! We sometimes glance at the portraits (as exhibited in the shop-windows) of COLENSO and DENISON, PUSEY and BENNETT -all men white with age, and rapidly descending the down-hill of life. We contrast them, in all the unrest and dissatisfaction of their wavering and speculative theories, with the simple, child-like, Bible-faith of a departing RODEN and DALY, or those living-but no less venerablewitnesses for God and truth, the DEANS of RIPON, CARLISLE, and GLOUCESTER. How great the difference! how vast the distinction! How to be dreaded the apostacy of the one class; how to be desired the hope and trust-peace and satisfaction-of the other !-EDITOR.]

"FAITH THE GIFT OF GOD."

THE following remarkable letter appeared in The Record of October 20th, 1862. It is the blessed testimony to "the truth as it is in Jesus of a scholar, in every respect the equal of those men who lately have so audaciously assailed God's Word:—

"To the Editor of The Record.'

"SIR,-You well observe, in a recent article, that the public is becoming accustomed to the strange vagaries on the Bible which men of learning and high position in the Church seem so constantly falling into.

"I should be glad to express, through the medium of your columns, what appears to me the secret of all this; and I the rather desire to do so, because I am myself a monument of the delivering power and mercy of God in this very matter.

"It is very observable that almost all the men who have thus notoriously erred from the way of the truth, are men of some kind of eminence in natural ability. Of Mr. Maurice I cannot say I think that even in natural things he excels in distinctness of ideas, or the power of

clearly discerning nice differences. But the errors of such men as Heath, and especially Bishop Colenso, cannot be attributed to any confusion of mind as to things which differ their eminent honours at Cambridge forbid our taking that view. Besides, I know, from past experience in the same gloomy school, that the possession of very considerable natural acumen does not in the least degree aid a man whose mind is perplexed about the foundations of Bible truth.

"As to the objections urged by the above gentlemen to the generallyreceived views of Scripture and the doctrines which flow so immediately from its simple and spiritual acceptance as the Word of God, they know as well as we do that they are hackneyed and as old as our fallen nature, but then that does not remove them; they cannot receive the simple accounts of Scripture because they have not Divine faith. I remember when I first began to read the Bible [and I thought I was sincerely seeking the truth] I was miserable because I could not believe; I dared not reject any statement I found there, but I could not fully believe it was true. The Bishop of Natal just expresses what I felt, and the fact that we took exactly the same University honours [in different years of course] makes me sympathize with him peculiarly. My own history was just this:-I had read and studied deeply in mathematics, had mastered every fresh subject I entered upon with ease and delight; had become accustomed [as every mathematician must do] to investigate and discover fundamental differences between things which seem to the uninitiated one and the same; had seen my way into physical astronomy and the higher parts of Newton's immortal Principia,' and been frequently lost in admiration of his genius till St. Mary's clock warned me that midnight was past three hours ago. I had in fact [as we say] made myself master of dynamics and become gradually more and more a believer in the unlimited capabilities of my own mind! This selfconceited idea was only flattered and fostered by eminent success in the Senate House, and by subsequently obtaining a Fellowship at Trinity, and enjoying very considerable popularity as a mathematical lecturer.

"It would have spared me many an hour of misery in after days had I really felt what I so often said, viz., that the deeper a man went into science, the humbler he ought to be, and the more cautious in pronouncing an independent opinion on a subject he had not investigated, or could not thoroughly sift. Though all this was true, I had yet to learn that this humility in spiritual things is never found in a natural man.

"I took orders, and began to preach, and then, like the Bishop among the Zulus, I found out the grand deficit in my theology. I had not the Spirit's teaching myself, and how could I without it speak in demonstration of the Spirit and of power?'

I

"In vain did I read Chalmers, Paley, Butler, Gaussen, &c., and determine that, as I had mastered all the other subjects I had grappled with, so I would the Bible, and that I would make myself a believer. found a poor, ignorant old woman in my parish more than a match for me in Divine things. I was distressed to find that she was often happy in the evident mercy of the Lord to her, and that she found prayer answered, and that all this was proved sincere by her blameless and harmless walk amongst her neighbours; whilst I, with all my science and investigation, was barren, unprofitable, and miserable-an unbeliever in heart, and yet not daring to avow it, partly from the fear of man, but more from a certain inward conviction that all my sceptical difficulties