be about literature or science, our whole mind will not be absorbed by the cares, the toils, the anxieties of the world. We are made, of course, to be in the world, to take our place in its duties, and never to shrink from them: but we are made also in the world to have in our hearts the spot of sunshine that connects us and ties us to another, a better and a happier world.

If, then, we are the people of God, and being made meet for that blessed state, we shall be anxious to hear of Missionary success, we shall rejoice to learn that the cause and the kingdom of Christ are prospering; we shall weep when Christians weep, and rejoice when Christians rejoice, and look upon the spread of pure, undefiled religion, as God's greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind.

We shall also love the Sabbath. The rest which remaineth for the people of God is, literally translated, (Zaßßarioμos,) a Sabbath-keeping for the people of God. If I address any one anticipating a Mahometan elysium, or a Pagan heaven, he may be assured he is utterly mistaken. What we shall have in the future inheritance is an everlasting, a ceaseless Sabbath-Sabbath-keeping, worship, communion, fellowship, life, light, joy, happiness.

Do you love the Sabbath upon earth? do you hail the dawn of the Sabbath as the day on which you cast off Mammon's chains, and shut your ears to the din and roaring of the wheels of this terrible and intensely commercial world? that enables you to open your heart to better thoughts, and your eyes to a brighter vision, and your ears to strains divine-the tidings of an inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away?

Finally, if we are looking for this inheritance, and are prepared to enter it, we shall give thanks to the Father, who hath made us meet. We made ourselves unfit; God alone can make us fit. God the Creator made us; it is

God the Father that remakes us. By the first act we were made creatures; by the second act we are made new creatures, sons of God, and heirs of Christ. And if we have hearts thus ripening for the rest that comes if we have souls thus being made meet by the presence of heaven for the full enjoyment of heaven, then we shall not only be holier men, but, what those who do not know Christianity suspect and question, far happier men. There will then be a joy spread over our spirit as we walk with God, who is the fount of joy; we shall be raised above the region of storms, and placed amid the sunshine of the blessed; we shall meet death, when death comes, heroically. There is not one face that gazes on this page that within a few years shall not be cold and mouldering in the tomb; and there is not one body in this generation in which there is not a soul that shall live for ever in eternal joy, or writhe for ever in misery it has prepared for itself. What a thought! What earnestness, what anxiety, what inquiry, should such thoughts create within us! And yet, how little do we think of this! how little do we feel this! If we felt aright, would it make us miserable? No. If I am fit for the inheritance, then I meet death, not as the suspension of the continuity of my life, but as the consecrated messenger of Heaven that cuts the cords that bind me to mortality, and helps me, like the insect I have referred to, to unfurl new and glorious wings, and to rise and soar, until I am placed beyond the shadows and the sorrows of mortality and of time.

And now, my dear reader, let me ask you again as I close, Have you any reason to believe that you are going to heaven? It is a plain question; answer it plainly; answer it for yourself as in the sight of God. Every swing of the pendulum carries every moment a soul to eternity. If we had eyes to see what is now invisible, and ears to hear what

is now inaudible, we should see the whole atmosphere that we breathe loaded with immortal souls, rushing from their wrecked bodies to the presence of God; and we should hear constantly the crash of the archangel's trumpet, as they were gathered to the seat of doom, to receive their everlasting sentence. The stumbling of his horse, the other year, let loose from its tenement of clay the most celebrated and accomplished statesman of the age. Our life is a shadow. Its continuance has no guarantee for a single day: the soul is ever ready to escape. The youngest does not know that he may not be summoned the next minute; and with respect to the aged of sixty, seventy, eighty, my dear brother, my dear father, every beat of your heart is the curfew bell that tells you that the day is closing, and the night is coming, when all the fires of human passion should be quenched, and you should compose your souls for the rest of the people of God.

CHAPTER XIV.

SPENT AND MISSPENT.

"It is a season for the quiet thought

And the still reckoning with thyself. The year
Gives back the spirits of its dead, and time
Whispers the history of its vanish'd hours,
And the heart, calling its affections up,
Counteth its wasted ingots. Life stands still,
And settles like a fountain, and the eye

Sees clearly through its depths, and noteth all
That stirr'd its troubled waters."

"The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." JER. viii. 20.

PERHAPS the words of the prophet standing at the head of this chapter, may have reference to a merely temporal deliverance. Nevertheless, they may be fairly applied, ast in all probability they also actually refer, to a spiritual and an eternal salvation. The words embody the deep expression of agony which is often felt by those who have seen successive opportunities of spiritual improvement spent and misspent; or lingering for a season beside them, and afterwards discover, when too late, their souls unblest, their controversy with God unsettled, and their everlasting prospects dark and ominous. In such circumstances, the prophet hears some one exclaim "The harvest, when the corn might be gathered in the summer, when the earth might have been expected to wave with promise, are past; and the great end for which still shine the summer suns, and

"not

wave the golden fruits of autumn- the safety of our souls our fitness for appearing before God-is as much in the background as at any previous period of our life.” The words I have quoted are a commentary upon "too late." "Too late" cannot be said at the close of last year, but many may have to utter it at the close of life—more to utter it in no less bitter agony at the close of this dispensation, when it may be "too late" to pray-"too late" to repent -"too late" for heaven, and only not too late for eternal and irreparable exile from the joy and the presence of the Lord. There are but two great results of this life which are of real, permanent, and solemn importance— these are "saved" or "unsaved." "Saved" or saved" is true of every man. Whatever else, reader, you may be, or in whatever circumstances you may be placed, you too this moment are a saved man, or not saved at all. In other words, you are at this very moment either a son of God and an heir of glory, or a child of the world and an heira deserving heir of everlasting misery. One or other each of us is. Life is the most solemn position in which man can be placed. There is no such thing as an intermediate position of being neither saved nor lost. There is no intermediate character between one who is altogether a Christian, or not a Christian at all. This is a very solemn thought; it is a thought that should make me and you think it ought to provoke in the depth of every man's soul the question Is Christianity any thing to me? am I interested in Christianity? Has the gospel touched and transformed me by its power? or has it left me just where sin and Satan and the world left me? "Saved or unsaved," whether interesting to us or not, interests the inhabitants of both worlds. Patriarchs, prophets, apostles, evangelists, write of this as the burden of their inspiration; the angels in glory are interested in the conflict, for there is joy with