are accustomed to look upon the old Jewish religion as a yoke, and we have Scripture for this. But let us not lose sight of this fact: It was a yoke that drew after it a great load of blessings and of prospects. It was a religion of feasts, and carried with it only one divinely-appointed fast-day-the day of atonement. The sacred times were joy times; and these returned and left, came and went, until the Year of Jubilee was reached. Then there was a fresh start to the jubilees beyond. The services demanded by this religion were many; but the spirit which God meant to reign in all was the spirit of the feast-day. Look at the Sabbath of the Jews, which is so discounted by modern public opinion: it is regarded as severe, and grinding, and enslaving. If one judged the Jewish Sabbath by popular estimation, he must conclude that God meant to afflict the Hebrews when He put them under the Sabbath ordinance. Bad as the Sabbath was for the Jew, we must conclude that it was awful for the stranger within the gates, who was compelled to honor the Sabbath law. But what saith the Word? It gives the true reason of the Sabbath: "Six days shalt thou work, and on the seventh thou shalt rest, that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the stranger may be refreshed." In God's sight, the Sabbath meant refreshment; and hence He told His people to call it "a delight." The Passover was not an exception among the religious appointments of the Jews. It was full of thanksgiving memories. It recalled the safety of the Hebrews from the death-angel, who turned Egypt into a house of mourning; it spoke of the omnipotent arm made bare; it lifted to view the origin of the nation and the source of national blessings; and it spoke of the Abrahamic covenant. For fifteen centuries it made the Israelites feel that God's goodness to their fathers was God's goodness to them. To them it made the difference between slavery and freedom, ignorance and knowledge, Egypt and Canaan. When I read the history of the Passover I do not wonder that it

was the one occasion of the sacred year in which the people of God sung the grand Hallel of the Scripture psalter. It was a praise season, and it was fitting that the praise psalms should be used.

II. THE LORD'S SUPPER MUST BE A

THANKSGIVING ORDINANCE BECAUSE OF ITS

GROUPING OF GREAT FACTS.

Men often take the facts which it exalts, and look at them, and place them out of the relations in which the Lord's Supper has placed them. The result is, the whole nature of the institution is changed, and this changed their feelings and moods and expectations. They substitute for joy and thanksgiving the spirit of fear, superstition, legalism. They claim to be Scriptural, because the facts with which they deal are the very facts exalted by the Lord's Supper. We grant that the facts with which they deal are the very facts exalted by this ordinance; but we make this emphatic: they have been wrung from their proper relations as grouped and arranged by the Lord's Supper. A fact taken out of its Scripture grouping and wrongly placed, is like the safety beacon taken from the harbor pier and run up over the rock that wrecks the ship. Truth, out of God's appointed place, is deceptive. The human face, as God has made it, possesses a wonderful charm. It is a thing of beauty, and a joy. It courts study and scrutiny. No one tires of looking into a beautiful face. The reason for this is, God has given to every feature and organ its proper place, and the setting of all is mutually helpful. Separate the face into parts, and look at it in a dissected state. Take the human eye, severed from the countenance, and look at it. Dissection is its disthronement. Its fascinating power has gone: it is a dull, dead, repulsive thing. To appreciate the human eye you must see it reigning in the midst of the beauty of the human face. Like the features of the human face, the facts exalted by the Lord's Supper must be viewed in their divinely-appointed associations.

Let us remember that the Lord's Supper is an ordinance given to the friends of Jesus Christ who have en

tered upon the saved life, and that it is intended to help them realize their privileges. The Lord's Supper takes the most terrible facts of history and experience, and groups them with the grandest of realities in such a way that our souls break forth into hallelujahs. . There are no more terrible facts than these the existence of sin; its hold upon the human heart; man's deadness by nature in trespasses and in sins; the awful wrath of God against sin. These facts, looked at alone, standing by themselves, fill with fear and gloom and despair. They separate us from God as far as hell is separated from heaven. Now all these facts are exalted by the Lord's Supper, but they are not exalted alone. This is what a great many people overlook. These facts are linked to the grandest and most glorious realities in the spiritual realm. The terrible fact of the existence of sin is linked with the fact of a Savior and a completed redemption. Have we

not in this ordinance bread and wine? And are not these bloodless emblems? The bloody emblems of the former econOmy spake of a sacrificial death to be accomplished; but these bloodless emblems of the present dispensation speak to us of that death as accomplished. They repeat the victorious shout of the

ying Christ, "It is finished." The terrible fact of our sentence of death under the law is linked with Christ's substitution and His suffering in our low place "This is my body broken for you." The errible fact of our deadness by nature

linked with the fact that we "take and eat," and thus allow Christ to enter

ato us and live in us. This is the grouping of facts as we have them in the Lord's Supper. The terrible things are linked to glorious things, and the glorious things are first. It is first Jesus, then the sinner. This is the order in which we are to read the facts: The Savior, who has delivered us from our sins; the Savior, who has suffered for us; the Savior, who has completed forever our redemption; the Savior sustaining us in the saved life and living It is your privilege to lift the

voice of thanksgiving and shout, "There is therefore now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus."

Turn to the grouping of other facts in the Lord's Supper, and learn the same lesson, viz.: that the facts, as presented by the Lord's Supper, make it a thanksgiving ordinance. It presents the fact of Christ crucified, but it does not leave this sad fact to stand alone: it joins it with the fact of Christ risen. We not only see the cross, but we see the empty tomb, and the empty tomb means that the crucifixion has accomplished its purpose. The Lord's Supper brings before us the personal absence of Jesus from the world. It recalls the separation at Olivet. As we walk with Jesus and His disciples, we see in the distance a brightness like a burning star. It draws nearer, and the splendor enlarges until it fills the whole dome with a glory beyond the noon-day sun. What is this wonder? It is the majesty of the holy angels whom the Father has sent to take Christ to His reward. Encircling Jesus, they bear Him up through the clear atmosphere and away from His disciples. This personal absence of Jesus, whom we keep in remembrance by the Lord's Supper, is exalted before us by this ordinance; but it is exalted in connection with His personal coming again. "Ye do show the Lord's death till He come." There is no weightier fact than His coming again. It carries in it the prepared mansions, the fulfillment of prophecy, the kingdom of glory, the meeting of departed friends, and the glorious reign as kings and priests unto God. The grouping of these facts can mean nothing else but joy and thanksgiving to those who are in Christ Jesus.

III. THE LORD'S SUPPER MUST BE A THANKSGIVING ORDINANCE BECAUSE OF ITS RELATION TO THE COVENANT OF GRACE. It is a seal of the covenant of grace. Christ's words are, "This cup is the new testament [or covenant] in My blood." These words are a parallel with those He utters when He puts the bread into our hands, "This is My

body broken for you;" i. e., this bread is a symbol speaking to you and assuring you that My body was broken for you. This cup is the seal, the evidence, the assurance of the covenant ratified and made effectual by My blood.

What are we to understand by the New Covenant? Christ represents His people and undertakes for them. He does this because, having violated the covenant of works, they are covenantbreakers and debtors to God, and can no longer enter into covenant upon their own responsibility. Christ, in putting the cup into our hands, tells us that He is our covenant, and that true covenanting at His table is the taking of Him and the hiding of our life with Christ in God. Hence the only acts which He prescribes in the Lord's Supper for us, in our relations to Him, are these: "Take and eat;" "Take and drink." These actions indicate that at the Lord's table we are to be receptive. The covenant-making and the covenant-fulfilling, these Jesus does Himself. He asks us only to accept of Him and His work. This view brings before us and keeps before us the teaching of the Gospel-that God can do nothing but give, and we can do nothing but take; that salvation is altogether of grace. This view strikes a killing blow at that spirit of legalism and self-sufficiency which would make this feast of grace a place of bargaining with God and a medium of offering Him good works at a premium.

Let us awaken to the truth that the Lord's Supper is a seal of the covenant of grace. The use of a seal is to confirm, to attest the truth and value and reliability of that to which it is affixed. That cancelled mortgage which the Father keeps and shows to His children is a seal, a witness of His past sacrifice and labor by which He purchased the home for His loved ones. It assures them of His forethought for them. It is an assurance that all the debt is paid. Like it, the Lord's Supper speaks to us of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, by which He paid the price of our redemption. With the Euchar

istic character of the Lord's Supper before us,

1. Let us celebrate it in the exercise of faith. It is "by faith that we are made partakers of the body and blood of Christ." Faith corresponds to the bodily acts of eating and drinking. Through eating and drinking, food, which is foreign to us, becomes part of us. It beams in the eye, quivers in the lip, throbs in the heart, enters into the mysterious chambers of the brain, and becomes thought and life. Through our faith, Christ, with His thoughts and purposes and spirit, passes into our souls and lives by and in us. Our cause for thanksgiving is, Christ in us the hope of glory.

2. Let us celebrate it in the exercise of joy. The apostle teaches us that there is "joy and peace in believing." We have joy when we dwell under the arch of the rainbow, and feel our safety as we look out upon the retreating storm and hear the mutterings of the distant thunders. We recognize the bow as the token of God's protecting covenant, and without fear and hesitancy we go out to enjoy it. Like freedom from fear should characterize our dealings with the Lord's Supper. It is the bow of the New Covenant.

CULTIVATING THE CONFORMITIES. — I grant the possibility of an over-austere practice, that may fitly be softened; but this study of conformity is a won derfully delicate matter, which none but a man of inflexible tenacity should ever dare to indulge; nor even he, save as he is high enough lifted by his faith in God to suffer no bent downward, but in social recognitions, or Christian pity and tears. Cultivating the conformities is only a plausible way of being mired in them. Buying off the world by taking its manners, shows, fashions and pleasures, turns out, almost certainly, to be a selling off to the world and joining it. A conversation above is the same thing as living above; and whoever undertakes to grade and gauge a smoothly-fascinating, ground-surface road, will, of course, be moving on the ground, and not ascending into faith at all.-BUSHNELL.

OCTOBER 10.-EJACULATORY PRAYER. (Neh. ii.: 4.)

This kind is a short petition, hurled like a dart at its mark.

I. When? In critical junctures.

1. Before choice. (Nehemiah before the King.)

2. Before sudden action.

3. In danger. (The sinking Peter.) IL Why?

1. Because critical junctures admit of no other kind.

2. Because it leads to wisdom. (Prov. iii: 6.)

3. Because it tranquilizes the mind. 4. Because it would prevent sudden action. Bryant inflicted personal chastisement upon an adversary, who had given him the lie direct, on the spur of the moment, as they passed each other on the street, and regretted it ever after. (Godwin's Life of Bryant, Vol. page 258. D. Appleton & Co.)

III How?

1. Do we pray at all?

2. Do we cultivate the spirit of Prayer? (1. Thess. v: 17.)

3. Do occasions arise for ejaculatory Prayer? I had a classmate, now departed, who was always getting into trouble from a hot temper. While in the ministry he had frequent removals, And I think from this very cause-yet ithal a brilliant and generous fellow. 4. Would it help us when buying or elling, when making calls and tempted gossip or tell "white lies"?

4. A whole-hearted man. (2 Chron. xxxi: 21.)

II. Public policy.

1. To rule with justice. (2 Chron. xxxi: 20.)

2. To unify his people.

3. To secure the autonomy of his Kingdom. (2 Chron. xxxii: 22, 23.)

III. Progress of his people.

1. The Levites co-operate with him in the national reformation.

2. The people acquiesce in the overthrow of idolatry and accept the restored religion. (2 Chron. xxix: 35, 36; ib. xxx: 26; ib. xxxi: 1.)

IV. Prominent events during his reign.

1. The revolt against Shalmaneser, the Assyrian King. (2 Kings, xvi: 7; ib, xviii: 7-12.)

2. The payment of tribute to Sennacherib. (2 Kings xviii: 14-16.)

3. Sennacherib's invasion of Judah. (2 Kings xviii: 17.)

4. The destruction of Sennacherib. 5. The Babylonian embassy to congratulate Hezekiah on his restoration to health, and to inquire into the astronomical wonder.

V. Practical remarks.

1. What was his sin? (2 Chron. xxxii: 25*.)

2. A great blessing to live with men of insight and wisdom, of truth and courage-earth has no greater blessing.

* HEZEKIAH DESERTED:

I. The person here spoken of. 1. His personal character. 2. His peculiar necessities. II. The dispensation here described. 1. The suspension of grace. 2. The withdrawment of comfort.

III. The purpose of that dispensation. 1. To discover sin, with a view to its cure. 2. To conduct to greater happiness and honor.

IV. The issue of the trial-he sinned. 1. Wherein was the sin? He neglected an opportunity of proclaiming the true God, and indulged in a vain self-seeking. 2. How small in comparison with the sins of others -of ourselves. 3. How soon repented of. 4. How severely visited.-J. C. GRAY.

The last recorded words of Moses congratulate the people of God upon their supreme happiness (Jeshurun) in having Jehovah for their God and hope.

I. We need a refuge from the greater ills of this life-a refuge that shall never fail.

1. In thought, from doubt.
2. In work, from infirmity.
3. In trial, from falling.

4. In distress, from despair.

5. In sickness, from helplessness.
6. In old age, from desertion.

7. In death, from hopelessness.

II. We need a home in the world to come* a home that shall be eternal.

1. It is a new country.

2. We have never been there before. 3. We shall need a welcome there. "Will some one be waiting and watching for me?"

III. Are we prepared for this home? 1. Promise: "The eternal God is thy refuge." To whom is this given?

2. Command: "Let us labor, therefore, to enter into that rest." (Heb. iv: 1-11.)

3. Fulfillment: "I will come again

GOD OUR HOME.-That word "refuge" may be translated "mansion" or "abiding-place," which gives the thought that God is our abode, our home. There is a great sweetness in this metaphor, for very dear to our hearts is our home.

I. It is at home that we feel safe; we shut out the world and dwell in quiet security. So with God, we fear no evil."

II. At home we take our rest. So our hearts find rest in God.

and receive you unto myself." (John xiv: 1-3.)

OCTOBER 31.-VARIOUS EXHORTATIONS. (Phil, iv: 4-9.)

The epistle verges to its close with several particular admonitions.

I. Rejoice in the Lord alway. This is the key-note of the epistle. Some rejoice only when they make money, have their own way, etc.

1. The nature of this joy. 2. How obtainable.

II. Be moderate before all men. Have sweetness and reasonableness. 1. Be meek under injuries.

2. Use all things as not abusing them. 3. Be master of yourself.

III. Let prayer with thanksgiving be the antidote to corroding care, and so the peace of God shall be yours. 'This is care's cure."

1. "Ask for everything."

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IV. Cherish whatsoever things are good, true, and beautiful; for these things belong to the Gospel, and have in them the peace of God. Dr. J. Edmond outlines this into "A bracelet and rings of gold :"

1. The gold ring of sweet temper, gentleness, and sweetness.

2. The gold ring of readiness to obey. 3. The ring of unselfishness. 4. The ring of tender-heartedness. 5. The last ring of industry. 6. Lastly, the jewelled bracelet of grace.

If you have this bracelet, it will produce all the rings by itself.

NOVEMBER 7.-VICTORY IS CERTAIN. (Is. lii: 10.)

The Church in the prosecution of mission work is engaged in no chimerical scheme.

I. The kind of victory.

1. Moral. This includes the spread of the cardinal virtues.

2. Spiritual. This includes the predominance of faith, hope, and love as essential to salvation.

II. The means of accomplishment.