who have been converted by the grace of God, that he has "taken them from among the heathen."

Without enumerating the misdirected affections of the soul, signified by a union with "idols," suffice it to say, that whatever comes between the soul and God, whatever supplants His love in the heart, is an "idol." It may be the love of what is unlawful to be loved, or it may be the unlawful love of what, in itself, is allowed.

I. THE SINFUL ALLIANCE. 66 'Ephraim is joined to idols." There are several particulars characterising this union.

First: It is illegal. "Thou shalt have no other gods," &c. This is not the interdiction of mere arbitrary power or caprice : it is a prohibition founded on infinite benevolence, as are all the Divine laws. All the inhibitions of God are but the voice of perfect love and wisdom, enforcing the perfect laws of parental government; that voice is never heard except as the voice of love, albeit it is sometimes heard as love speaking with a loud voice and in the "imperative mood." In every properly regulated family there are laws or rules of government; these laws have a three-fold purpose: (1) The good of each individual member. (2) The preservation of one member from the injuries of another. (3) The good or honour of the parental head. Were a member of the family to introduce an element of moral infection, rigorous laws would be immediately administered to prevent the ruin of others, and to vindicate and maintain the family honour.

The Divine laws are thus illustrated by the human. For the good of the sinner himself, the "imperative" claim is, “Do thyself no harm!" For the good of others, the "imperative” claim is, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour!" For the vindication and maintenance of the Divine honour, the "imperative" claim is, "Give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name!" To be "joined to idols," is to be allied with claims which are foreign to the nature and opposed to the claims of God—an alliance that is illegal.

Secondly: The union is unnatural. Redeemed and justified man is among the sublime confederacy of loyal subjects of the Creator. But the sinner has allied himself with the dark forces of hell-he is an alienated being-a prodigal deprived of native

privileges through a forfeited inheritance. Such was Adam, when startled by the Divine voice, "Where art thou? Such was "the prodigal son" in the "far country." In the one we see the sinner in the character of a culprit: in the other we see him as an alien; and in both the unnatural attitude of souls suffering through a terrible moral disjunction-the black tide of sin, like the avenging waters of the Red Sea, in pursuit of the rebel Egyptians, rolling its awful billows, and cutting off the blessed continent of the Divine smile and security. How unnatural is all this!

Thirdly The union is degrading. For a member of a large and noble family to become united with guilt and ignominy, would be to entail upon himself utter disgrace, to cast a shade over the honour of his family name, and to forfeit all claims to the love of kindred or respect of friends. Every sinner, in the eye of purity, is a walking plague, a moral Cain, carrying with him everywhere the branded "mark" of "a fugitive and a vagabond." Like Absalom he is a revolting traitor, a rebel; and while he is the object of Divine pity and mercy, between him and the Father and every loyal member of the family, there can be no fellowship.

Fourthly The union is irrational. There have been instances of marriage alliances where the temperaments and circumstances of the parties united have been of such wide disparity, that no explanation could be given for the union, save in the spell of some mysterious infatuation—a state of monomania. This state of mind is given by Christ to account for the conduct of the prodigal, until " he came to himself." Sin is a disease producing madness; the world is an insane hospital, a moral Bedlam. The sinner knows himself to be without a reasonable excuse, and when, at the great day of the final assize, he is interrogated as to his being morally unfurnished for so momentous a trial, his only response will be that of silence, he will be "speechless!"

II. THE RUINOUS ALLIANCE. "Let him alone." There are several applications of which these words are capable.

Firstly The soul may be said to be "let alone," when it seeks satisfaction apart from God. The loss thus entailed may

VOL. XXIII.

not be realised when the tide of health flows freely, when the sun of prosperity is at its zenith, and the heavens are clear, and all nature seems to smile; but let the silence and the calm come on, of adverse scenes and circumstances; let the sun of prosperity set, and the clouds gather to blackness, and the night set in of domestic sorrow, of personal affliction, of disease and death, then the words of sacred truth will gather their deep and solemn potency, and the soul know what it is to be left "alone," to have "no hope," and to be "without God in the world!"

Secondly: The soul may be said to be "let alone" when the blood of the atonement is "set at nought." The Saviour died to "put away sin." But what if the sinner's sin be not put away? Then, in a sense which affects his responsibility and aggravates his character, he is "let alone;" the accumulated guilt of a whole life remains uncancelled! What startling and appalling arrears thus stand unanswered for in the history of sinners! Yet would one touch of Christ settle the account and make the conscience clean as the cloudless heavens !

Thirdly The soul may be said to be "let alone" when the truth of God loses its wonted power to "convince of sin, of righteousness," &c. The Bible speaks, ministers speak, providence speaks, as usual; but conscience hears not. The heart is hardened-hardened by what was intended to soften it. Sermons have hardened it, religious literature has hardened it, providential voices have hardened it. All these being Divine instrumentalities, it is solemnly and awfully true that the heart, like the heart of Pharaoh, may be hardened by God.

Fourthly: The sentence, "let him alone," will have a future application to the sinner's state. "Let him alone!" is the burning inscription on the walls of hell's prison house. History informs us that a short time before the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem by Titus, at the solemn hour of midnight, while the priests were ministering, there were heard strange rushing sounds and a movement within, and then an audible voice, as of a multitude, saying "Let us depart hence!" A time is coming when, in the history of souls, these words uttered by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, will receive their largest meaning and deepest emphasis-"Let us depart hence," "let him alone!” G. HUNT JACKSON.

Variations on Themes from Scripture.

W

(No. IV.)

SUBJECT: "And he died."

ELL known is Addison's reference to an eminent man in the Romish Church, who upon reading in the Book of Genesis how that all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died; and all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died; and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty and nine years, and he died;-immediately shut himself up in a convent, an absolute recluse from the world, as not thinking anything in this life worth pursuing, which had not regard to another. What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death?

"Dead!-Man's 'I was,' by God's 'I am '

All hero-worship comes to that.

High heart, high thought, high fame, as flat
As a gravestone. Bring your Jacet jam—
The epitaph's an epigram."

So writes Mrs. Browning. And thus writes Barry Cornwall, on the same trite text; it is the last stanza of the History of a Life, and of a successful one :

"And then-he died. Behold before ye

Humanity's poor sum and story;

Life-death-and all that is of glory."

And again, in the same poet's chanson of the time of Charlemagne, the stanza that magnifies that hero-king, and tells how he fought and vanquished Lombard, Saxon, Saracen, and ruled every race he conquered with a deep consummate skill— is followed by one beginning,

"But he died! and he was buried

In his tomb of sculptured stone," &c.

And once again, in one of this author's dramatic fragments is sketched the career of what Mr. Carlyle would call a "foiled

potentiality"-of one who, in favourable circumstances, might have been, but who in prosaic reality, and the matter-of-fact pressure of this work-a-day world, never actually became, great. Had he but lived under better auspices, he would have been—

Death stands everywhere in the background, as the elder Schlegel says in his analysis of the elements of tragic poetry, and to it every well or ill-spent moment brings us nearer and closer; and even when a man has been so singularly fortunate as to reach the utmost term of life without any grievous calamity, the inevitable doom still awaits him to leave or to be left by all that is most dear to him on earth. In the words, most musical, most melancholy, of the laureate,

"The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground;
Man comes and tills the field, and lies beneath;
And after many a summer dies the swan."

Addison, in another essay than that already referred to, describes an afternoon he passed in Westminster Abbey, straying through and lingering in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, "amusing himself," as the phrase then ran—not quite in our frivolous sense-with the tombstones and the inscriptions that he met with in those several regions of the dead, most of which recorded nothing else of the buried person but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another; the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances, that are common to all mankind. The "Spectator could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons, who had left no other memorial of them but that they were born, and that they died. Mr. de Quincey characteristically opened his autobiographic sketches in their original form, with the avowal that nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading