object, she is bid serve Christ, who had thus purified her joy, by going to his brethren and bearing witness to others. Moments such as this are short and fleeting; must be ; should be. It is not good to live on mountain peaks. We must come down again to the low lands to use the strength we have gained. Mary now knew that what is needed for the service of Christ is power from on high. Much work needs to be done in building the temple of God, but we must be his before we can do it. Much has to be done in us; we must first prove faithful stewards of grace received before the fleeting moment will be the eternal day. Dr. BEYSCHLAG, Professor in Halle, By R. V. PRYCE, LL.B., M.A. SUBJECT: Lessons from the Life of Jacob. "And God said unto Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there; and make there an altar unto God, that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother."-Gen. xxxv. 1. THE Analysis of Homily the Seven Hundred and Ninety-Ninth. HE character of Jacob is a strange mixture. Banished early from his home, with a hard life before him, he is a type of many in this age of activity and competition. His life with Laban developed the scheming and bargaining spirit which had previously shown itself. He was absorbed in earthly cares, immersed in the toils of human business; and, thus occupied, some of his doings offend the delicacy of our moral sense, and outrage our feelings of true honour and virtue. Notwithstanding this, his life has its hallowed times, its periods of religious power and spiritual exaltation. He stands before us imperfect, but, with all his failings, a man who as a prince had power with God and prevailed. As is too often the case, prosperity appears to have made him somewhat forgetful of his religious vows. The world insidiously crept into his heart, and filled all his thoughts. But the great crisis of meeting again with Esau re-awakened his religious sensibility; and shortly afterwards the ruin of his daughter Dinah and the fearful revenge of her brethren stirred his soul still more deeply. The time of his trial was a season of revival. The old memories came thronging back, and God, in love and mercy, uttered his voice in the words of our text. Consider I. EVERY SPIRITUAL HISTORY HAS ITS SPECIAL PLACES, WHERE MEMORY LOVES TO LINGER, AND WHERE SPIRITUAL POWER PERTAINS. There is a danger in attaching special sanctity to particular places. The Biblical writers guard carefully against this danger. All the absurdities of "pilgrimages" and so forth grow out of a superstitious regard to localities. But a man must indeed be insensate if a "Bethel" is not to him a holy spot. The real power of such places is the personal experience they recall; and amidst the memories of our own past we tread on holy ground! II. SPECIAL MERCIES DEMAND SPECIAL REMEMBRANCE. Note the tenderness and delicacy of God's dealing with Jacob. The domestic calamity which now lay heavy upon Jacob's heart was, in all probability, the natural result of his own want of right family guidance. The second verse implies that there were strange gods and wrong practices in the household. And the natural outcome of these declensions from patriarchal purity was the disgrace of Dinah and the crime of her brethren. Jacob was reaping the reward of his previous religious neglect. And yet in this sorrow God speaks to him; not to upbraid, but to remind him of previous mercy and the scenes of previous help. Note further that, generally, emphasis is laid more upon remembrance of mercies than of sorrows. Here the emphasis is upon the presence of God at Bethel, with no reference at all to the previous sins of Jacob, and only a casual allusion to the result and natural punishment of those sins in his flight from Esau. So in like manner (as in Ex. xiii. 3) wherever there is any memorial reference to the Passover in Egypt, notice is called to the deliverance, and only in a modified degree to the previous bondage; indeed, wherever the latter is referred to at all, it is simply with a view of deepening the sense of the mercy shown in the former. Sorrows take care of themselves in memory; and a slight present sorrow will often wipe out all remembrance of unnumbered past mercies, and a multitude of present blessings. It has been said that "we write our mercies in the sand, but carve our sorrows in marble." But if human nature makes us write them in sand, let God's grace render this but the needful preparation for casting them in enduring metal. Yea, let them be " 'graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever." III. THE TEXT MAY BE APPLIED TO A DEVOUT REMEMBRANCE OF THE TIME AND CIRCUMSTANCES OF OUR EARLY CHRISTIAN LIFE. In many cases there is no special day of conversion. But whether the conversion be gradual or sudden, the first feelings and the earliest experiences of the Christian believer will be marked off from the subsequent life by special characteristics. Many things in connection therewith we would not wish to recall, e.g., its inexperience and immaturity, its ignorance its onesided views of things, its too frequent tendency to dogmatism and intolerance, &c. These are among the things "that are behind," which must be "forgotten" if we would "go on to perfection." But we do well to remember the freshness and fervour of our first love to Christ, and constantly to recall its power to strengthen us for present duty. Recall, for example, 1. Diligence in searching the Scriptures. Felt ignorance drives the young convert to the Bible. 2. Fervour of private prayer and devotion. 3. Careful cultivation of the public means of grace. 4. Ardour of Christian zeal and Christian work. The strong man grows stronger by exercise; so the robust Christian is always an active one. IV. BETHEL WAS THE SCENE OF "Vows WHICH HAD BEEN PARTIALLY NEGLECTED AND FORGOTTEN. How often are the vows of sickness neglected in health! Of sorrow in time of joy! Of adversity in season of prosperity! Of religious decision and devotion in the stir and whirl of common life! Prosperity has turned more heads than Jacob's; and the vows made in penury have oft been forgotten in affluence. V. "DWELL THERE." A picture of a man of activity and business retiring to spend the leisure of age amidst the contemplations of religion, and the memories of its power. But may not those who are girding on the armour, and those who are in the stress of the battle, also gather a lesson from the words "Dwell there"? Our great problem is to bring up our common life to the level of our best days-to carry the religious power of our "Bethels" into the texture of our daily existence. Let us, too, dwell in those memories and places where heaven descends to earth, and earth rises to heaven. GEORGE DEANE, B.Sc., F.G.S., &c. Variations on Themes from Scripture. (No. II.) SUBJECT: To-day's Sufficing Evil, and To-morrow's W ITH a divine calm fall those words from the Sermon of the Mount-spoken as never man spake-which bid us take "no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Pagan philosophy had, and natural theism has, its approximation to the same point of view. Horace is all for letting the mind enjoy the enjoyable present, and for leaving no room or resting-place for the sole of the foot of Black Care, raven and unclean bird that she is. The morrow may be hers, but to-day at least is his, and the morrow shall take care for the things of itself: "Lætus in præsens animus, quod ultra est Oderit curare." David Hume, again, meets the doctrine that we should always have before our eyes, death, disease, poverty, blindness, calumny, and the like, as ills which are incident to human nature, and which may befall us to-morrow,-by the answer, that if we confine ourselves to a general and distant reflection on the ills of human life, such a vague procedure can have no effect to prepare us for them; and that if, on the other hand, by close and intense meditation we render them present and intimate to us, we realise the true secret for poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering us perpetually miserable. He grieves more than need be, who begins to grieve before he need, is one of Seneca's sententious sayings: Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet quam necesse est. One of Mrs. Gore's women of the world-who might probably be counted by the hundred-is sprightly and smart in her rebuke of her husband and his sister for their delight in perplexing the brightest moments of existence by all the agonies of second sight, and whom she represents as quite indignant when they find her sympathy waiting the actual occurrence of evil. "I hate," she says, "to turn back my head towards the dark shadow that follows me, or direct my telescope towards a coming storm." And herein was she wise, if not with all the wisdom of those Christian morals, of which we have so impressive an expositor in Sir Thomas Browne. "Leave future occurrences to their uncertainties," writes the fine old physician, Religiosus Medicus, "think that which is present thy own; and, since 'tis easier to foretell an eclipse than a foul day at some distance, look for little regular below. Attend with patience the uncertainty of things, and what lieth yet unexerted in the chaos of futurity." Shakespeare's noble Roman, at the dawn of the day of battle on which so much depends, is natural man enough to utter the aspiration: "O, that a man might know The end of this day's business, ere it come!" But he is also stoic philosopher enough to check that prospective yearning, with the reflection, Swift "But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known." opens his Birthday address to Stella with the assurance, "This day, whate'er the fates decree, |