and colour, and outline; or the intense and overwhelming emotion which some feel in listening to beautiful music, is very deafness to the bounding ecstasy of the faultless appreciation of every minutest grace of harmony imagine senses thus expanded, and refined, and perfected in the midst of scenes and forms of infinite beauty and sounds of sweetness inconceivable, and you are trying to understand something of the bliss of heaven. : And do not these thoughts in some sort help to ennoble and sanctify both our bodily senses, and those arts which minister to their purest enjoyment? Do not eye and ear become more sacred to us when we think that they shall be fitted, the one to behold the glory, and the other to listen to the harmony, of heaven? If they be the germ and rudiment of powers so great and glorious, should they not be jealously guarded from all that is unworthy of their high destiny? Shall the eye that hopes to see God, delight itself in vain and wanton looks? Shall the ear that may one day hear the angels sing, drink in greedily "filthi ness and foolish talking?" Nay, God has given to these senses ample enjoyment apart from sin. We are not to deem (as some of old deemed) that all that is in the world is of Satan and not of God. The beauty of nature and of art, the concord of sweet sounds, these are God's gifts; and in enjoying these, fearlessly, happily, thankfully, we are surely acting more like loving trustful children, than in morosely refusing those bright things which our Father has sent us to tell us something of the unutterable blessedness of heaven. God "giveth us all things richly to enjoy." O Christian people, what is your hope? Are ye longing for that day when "the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first," (that is, before the living): "then we which are alive and remain it so be that we are alive at that day) "shall be caught up together with them. in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord ?" Do ye ever "comfort one another with (if these words?" Oh, stir up your dim, faint hope! It is a Christian grace, even as faith and love. Kindle it to new life and fire. Often think of the day when your incarnate God, His human frame instinct with the living glory which on earth He laid aside, shall descend in the clouds of heaven clouds radiant with, if not perchance composed of, countless angel forms,—to “change your vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body," and then to take you home. Oh, if it cost His allprecious Blood to redeem our souls, through that Blood do we also wait for "the redemption of the body." We share in a fallen nature, we bear "the image of the earthy," now. But we share in a nature which has been raised to heaven-aye, and "above all heavens," in the God-Man Christ Jesus. 66 "We have borne the image of the earthy" our hope is that "we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." Amen. Tracts for the Christian Seasons. TWENTY-FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY. THE TEMPLE REBUILT. "THERE is a wheel within a wheel”— a secret, sacred wheel of providence, as Izaak Walton explains Ezekiel's vision, most of all visible in the chequered history of the Church of God, whether under the old or the new dispensation. True indeed it is that His "never-failing providence ordereth all things in heaven and earth," so that not even a sparrow falleth to the ground without Him; much more, then, might we expect to trace His guiding hand in all that concerns the destinies of His elect people, the very hairs of whose head are all numbered, and to find that the whole course of this world is so ordered and guided by His governance as may best conduce to their welfare, and to the accomplishment of those No. 77. THIRD SERIES. 4 H 1577 all-wise and gracious purposes for which He has ordained and constituted that divine polity in the midst of this sinful world. In no passage of Divine revelation is this marvellous action of God's hidden providence more manifest to the eye of faith than in that episode of the Babylonish captivity, (which must have appeared to mere reason to threaten the extinction of the Hebrew polity, and the consequent failure of all those anticipations so fondly cherished by the devout Israelites throughout the whole period of their eventful history,) and in the circumstances by which the restoration of the Jews was brought about. God, who had seen the necessity of that sharp chastisement for the correction of His people, (and which did in effect so entirely wean them from their inveterate propensity to idolatry that they have never since relapsed into it,) yet here, as ever, tempered His judgment with mercy, and even before the captivity was fully accomplished had exalted Daniel and his fellows to the highest offices in the province of Babylon, in which they would have the power, as we |