sinner desires to have his own way and will; to feel free from all restraint, and to exult in the consciousness of this freedom. He wants to originate and carry out plans of his ownto seek, first and last, his own gratification, leaving God and God's authority entirely out of view. And thus he says in his heart there is no God. But not only is the sinner troubled at the thought of God, because of the felt restraint which His authority lays upon him; he is also troubled at the very thought of the divine perfections. The thought of these perfections carries home to the conscience the thought of the sinner's imperfections and guilt. The thought of the divine perfections is like a light carried into the darkened chambers of the soul, scattering all the sinner's false hopes, and awakening a sense of spiritual wretchedness and guilt. Ah, this dreadful sense of guilt! it penetrates to my inmost being; I cannot shake it off, for it is as near to me as I am to myself. Were it merely the sense of shame arising out of the exposure of my folly, I might find some relief at the prospect of one day shaking it off. But how is this burning sense of my guiltiness in the sight of God to be extinguished? The more I see my sins in the light of His countenance, the more intense is the misery which I feel. The calm glance of the Holy One is to me as a consuming fire.

This is the way in which the discovery of guilt acts upon the mind. And it is no wonder that those who see themselves in this light are troubled at the thought of God, because, in their case, they hear the voice of justice telling them that they are unjust, the voice of goodness telling them they are evil, the voice of love itself proclaiming that they are altogether as an unclean thing.

It is a pleasing thing for an affectionate child to look upon the virtues of its parents, and it ought to be an equally delightful exercise for man to contemplate the perfections of the Father in heaven. What joy and peace ought to arise in the mind in thinking of the government of a wise and loving Father! What rapturous feelings ought to be excited at the contemplation of all His glorious perfections ! If it were not for the stain of guilt that rests upon the conscience, we should as truly delight in the contemplation of these perfections as the angels in heaven. But because our hearts condemn us, we instinctively arrive at the conclusion that the Searcher of Hearts must condemn still more. Under the apprehension of His condemnation, therefore, we turn away our view from the contempla

tion of His perfections. The sight of these is attended by alarming thoughts of our own ill-desert. The process which elevates our thoughts of the divine perfections reduces our estimate of the worth of our own character; as the one end of the scale-beam rises the other goes down.

So long as the sinner refuses to submit himself to God, so long does he see all the perfections of God witnessing against him. God is not revealed to him as a Father, but as an incensed avenging judge. Knowing no Father's care and love, he can find no centre of rest; and therefore the Scripture well describes the condition of those who are thus without God as being like the troubled sea, which cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.

It is seen that even the children of God may often be disquieted when they think of Him. But this does not arise from any desire on their part to escape from the sense of the divine presence, but from the desire of being more fully conformed to the divine law. The believer does not wish to know less of God, but to know more; he does not wish to renounce God's way, but mourns that he does not more fully renounce his own way; and the whole cause of his disquiet consists in the discovery that there is still a law in his members warring against the law that is in his mind, and seeking to bring him into captivity to the law of sin and death. He mourns; but his mourning is over his own alienation of heart. He is disquieted, not because the glorious perfections of his Father in heaven are revealed to him, but because he feels so little of the spirit that should char- ¦ acterise those who are sons of God. The most elevating, invigorating, and comforting of all thoughts is to him the thought of the divine fatherhood. It is this that fringes every dark cloud with light; it is this that enables him in his patience to possess his soul; it is this that gives him an earnest of the heavenly inheritance and a foretaste of its glory.

(To be continued.)

REST.-The greatest of all the promises of Christ is the promise of rest. There are many things that make us soul-weary in this world. Sorrow and sin are great burdens, and all must bear them who live long in the world. And there is only one Being who can give us rest from these. It is He who bore our sorrows, and made atonement for our sins.

in Malachi, Haggai, Zechariah, Nehemiah, and Esther; in the Book of Kings, in the reigns of Josiah, Hezekiah, Amaziah, Jehoash, Solomon, and David; in the Chronicles; in Daniel, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Amos, Joel; in Proverbs and Psalms; in Samuel, Judges, and Joshua. He says, with emphasis, no ancient book has such ample, and connected, and explicit proof of its early origin. He gives some suggestive comparisons. In the Book of Judges there are fewer allusions to the Pentateuch than in most other Old Testament books. But even here ten or twelve references may be clearly discerned. Bradford's History of Plymouth, which from its Puritan character might be supposed to be full of allusions to the Bible, and from its size ought to contain eighty times as many as the little Book of Judges, refers to the Bible only sixteen times. He specifies volumes of sermons where there are fewer quotations from the Gospels than may be found from the Pentateuch in most of the prophetical books.

3. Traces of an organised priesthood, of sacrifices and annual feasts, are found in the historical and prophetical books before the Captivity. Dr Stebbins shows clearly that such institutions existed before Deuteronomy was written, for some laws are there quoted and amended, and some ceremonies modified or withdrawn. He finds similar proof in Judges and Samuel and Kings and Chronicles, in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The denunciations of the prophets against formal sacrifices, on which the new critics rely to prove that the Levitical system could not have been given by Moses, is a decisive proof of the existence of a priesthood and ritual. It is easy to understand how earnest spiritual teachers should rebuke a formal worship, into which no true reverence or piety entered. It is impossible to explain these vigorous protests, unless a system of sacrifice was established, claiming a divine authority.

4. Nor is the critical difficulty less than the moral, in accounting for the origin of the Levitical system during the Captivity. It is morally impossible that God would have commissioned Ezekiel to establish what He had once condemned, or would have substituted a ritual service in place of spiritual and personal worship. It is equally impossible that returning exiles, familiar with their national history and institutions, and some of them recalling the glory of the old temple, could have been imposed on by a forgery, establishing new institutions which claimed to be Mosaic. The great religious revival under Ezra and Nehemiah, the tears and remorse of aged exiles over the broken covenant, are inexplicable, unless the new-found law were really the old Mosaic covenant, well known in its spirit and aim to them and their fathers.

5. The contrasts between the different documents used in the Pentateuch, on which great stress is laid, are so slight that no two critics can agree in classifying them.

Kuenen thinks it an easy matter to pick out the portions of the Elohistic documents scattered through Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, and selects some passages in proof. The chief distinction in such passages is that the Hebrew word Elohim is used to denote God, instead of the later word Jehovah. Dr Stebbins examines the passages cited, and finds in one that Jehovah is used fifteen times, and Elohim not once; in another Jehovah forty times, Elohim not once; in another Jehovah fifty-seven times, and Elohim twice; in a fourth, Jehovah fifty-two times, Elohim once. He justly concludes, "If the "chief characteristic" of one of the theoretical documents is found to be almost universally used in the other in practice, either the theory or the practice is sadly at fault.'

One of these critics has said, 'By many marks, and particularly by extremely well-defined peculiarities of language, a Levitical document can be separated out from the Pentateuch.' The table of Nöldeke is generally accepted as careful and correct in essentials.' The worth of a rule is tested by practical success in applying it. Do liberal scholars agree in recognising the 'extremely well-defined peculiarities of language,' and in accepting Nöldeke's table of selections? Dr Stebbins applies the test to thirty-eight passages, selected by Nöldeke. In six of these passages Stähelin, another critic of the advanced school, agrees with Nöldeke, in thirtytwo he differs with him. In the same passage De Wette and Theodore Parker, also of the same school, agree neither with Stähelin nor Nöldeke, nor with each other. One may be pardoned for a lack of confidence in the advanced scholarship, whose critical rule, resting on 'extremely well-defined peculiari- | ties of language,' fails utterly in thirty-two out of thirty-eight test passages.

The Christian world may still cling to its old faith in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, undisturbed by the clamour of the new criticism. Older biblical scholars will hesitate to accept a theory which creates insuperable moral difficulties, and is beset by internal contradictions, more numerous and obstinate than those it attempts to remove. The unity of the New Testament is unharmed by the formidable attacks of Strauss and Baur and Renan; and one may believe without presumption that the assults of Kuenen and Wellhausen on the unity of the Old Testament will have no better success. When the novelty of the newer criticism has ceased to charm, and it assumptions and inconsistencies have been exposed, Christian scholars may hold with a stronger faith to the unity of the divine plan, which connects the Adam of the old covenant with the Christ of the new; which binds together in one historic whole Eden, Calvary, and the New Jerusalem, and leads the redeemed of God along one unbroken path from the typical cleansing of the Levitical lamb to personal holiness before the great white throne.-Boston Watchman.

ON

But I have something to say about this autoda-fe of sermons. The old pleasantry may hold good in many a history even of modern times: sermons there are 'which have given more light in a bonfire than ever they did in the pulpit.' Still, that is not true of everything which has been unfortunate enough to be preached in the shadows. It would have been a pity to destroy the Astronomical Discourses of Thomas Chalmers, or the Theological Sermons of Dr Dwight in Yale College. To come to more modern orators, it would be the poorest sort of spiritual economy to burn the discourses which are found in the five volumes of Dr William M. Taylor, or in the two of Phillips Brooks, or in the six of Frederick W. Robertson. The principle may possibly be strained too far, if this should be the result.

As to the danger of idleness, really that lies in the man, not in the manuscript. I know a full score of ministers who invariably make their two fresh discourses each week, and yet who possess hundreds of old ones fully written, lying in solemn sarcophaguses close beside their desks. Surely these do not harm anybody; they are as aromatic of the good they once did as so many mummies, and now and then from among them an illustration may be taken which would grow if set out felicitously in a new soil. If a sense of this does not hinder effort, the bravery of burning them would not be worth the match it would cost. The princes of extemporaneous speaking, in or out of the pulpit, seem to think it is worth while to have a stenographer to take down their thoughts as they utter them, and we do not hear of their having bonfires. Mr Spurgeon, Mr Joseph Cook, Dr Parker-these masters of speech gather the fragments that nothing be lost, to show to the students what labour they cost. So just now we hear of a volume of President Garfield's orations in the press; and it does not appear that Daniel Webster or Edmund Burke felt so haunted by their unburnt addresses that they left instructions for them to perform suttee when they themselves should need a funeral pyre.

It does not seem to me that the question as to extemporaneous as opposed to written

Our theologues are becoming confused among their counsellors. Most of us have bought the volumes that have been issued year by year since the lectures in New Haven began. Some of our greatest pulpit men say one thing; some equally great say another. When a Senior is just going to graduate, he becomes agitated with a piteous alarm, he asks his perturbed self now in full view of a possible pulpit: 'Shall I follow the directions of the first book or the third, the second or the fourth? If neither, what were they published for? Am I to begin with writing and reading as a custom, or with no writing and rather more talk, or with a wise and modest mingling of the two?' For, you see, my patient Irenæus, the pulpit rabbis advise in diametrically opposite exhortations; which bewilders a young man who has just bought a stylographic pen and now wants a style.

Perhaps he even goes so far as to ask, 'How can I ever become heroic enough for an Observer to praise me, unless I use some years in composing what my self-sacrifice can afterwards burn? And then the thought crosses his mind that such a thing might be best of all; for after the discipline of writing for a while, he would most likely be in condition to get on better by warming himself at a bonfire, than he would now, if he should be bold enough to take so chilly a start with nothing to burn.

When we look around us, it would appear as if any one of an observing turn might draw a few very swift conclusions. The men who, like the late Dr Adams or the venerable Dr Spring before him, have sustained themselves the longest in first-class churches, have been accustomed to write and read their sermons. And the men who make most immediate impression upon promiscuous masses and fitful audiences for a single occasion do not often write what they say in the pupit. It is the unburnt sermons of both these classes which in books comfort and help the people after the busy hand is vanished and the eloquent voice is still.

Moreover, the habit of delivery varies in the practice of the same speakers. I have heard Mr Beecher read a written discourse