at you the finger of scorn. The fair alabaster pillar may be stained with some crimson transgression. Or if there be no special blot to which they can point, there may be a lamentable spiritual deterioration in your daily walk. They may have observed your love to God waxing cold-your love of the world waxing strong. They may have heard you murmur at your Lord's dealings, question His faithfulness, and refuse to hear and to bear the rod-manifesting tempers, or indulging in pursuits sadly and strangely unlike what would be sanctioned by the example of your Divine Redeemer. Up! and with determined energy resolve henceforth to repair the breach,henceforth to make a new start in the heavenly life. The shrill trumpet sounds-"Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee life!" We cannot say, like the King of Nineveh, "Who can tell if God will turn and repent?" He has never turned! You have turned from Him, not He from you. Where is now thy God?" He is the same as ever He was;-boundless in His compassion-true to His covenant-faithful to His promises; "the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever!"

Reader! if He be afflicting you as He did David ;—if with an exile spirit you be roaming some moral wilderness, the flowers of earth faded on your path, and the bleak winds of desolation and calamity sweeping and sighing around, let these times of affliction lead to deep searchings of heart. Let your tears be as the dewdrops of the morning on the tender leaves, causing you to bend in lowly sorrow and self-abasement, only to be raised again, refreshed, to inhale new fragrance in the summer sun. If, like the weeping woman of Galilee, you are saying, through blinding tears, "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him,". -if, like the Spouse in the Canticles, you are going about the city in search of your Beloved;-seeking Him, He will be found of you. The watchmen may smite you-repel you tear off your veil-and load you with reproaches;--but "fear not! ye seek Jesus who was crucified!" He will meet you as He did the desponding Magdalene, and, listening like her to His own tones of ineffable love, you will cast yourself at His feet, and exclaim, "RABBONI-MASTER!"

V.

The Taunt.

"He wounds, and hides the hand that gave the blow;
He flies, He reappears, and wounds again;
Was ever heart that loved thee treated so?
Yet I adore Thee, though it seem in vain.”

-Cowper.

"Because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my face. I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children. Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none."-Ps. lxix. 7, 8, 20.

“My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God ?”— Verse 3.

V.

THE TAUNT.

THE Great Accuser of the brethren in a variety of ways attempts to insinuate the same dark doubts in the minds of believers, which we have spoken of in the preceding pages. He tries to shake their confidence in God, in the veracity of His word, and the faithfulness of His dealings. He would lead them to discover in His providential dispensations what is inconsistent with His revealed character and will. In seasons particularly of outward calamity and trouble, when the body is racked with pain, its nerves unstrung, or its affections blighted and wounded—when the mind is oppressed and harassed, the soul in darkness-the Prince of this world, who times his assaults with such consummate skill, not unfrequently gains in such seasons a temporary triumph. The shadow of a cold scepticism passes over the soul. It is silent under the cry, "Where is thy God?"

Have any of you ever known this acutest anguish of the human spirit, those appalling moments of doubt, when for a moment the whole citadel of truth seems to rock to its foundations,-when the soul becomes a dungeon with grated bars, or in which the light of heaven is transmitted through distorted glass, and the finger of unbelief is pointed inwards, with the old sneer, "Where is the God you were wont to boast of in your day of prosperity? Where is there evidence that one prayer you ever offered has been heard-one blessing you ever supplicated been granted-one evil you ever deprecated been averted or removed? Where one evidence of His hand in your allotments in life? These heavens have never broken silence! Hundreds of years have elapsed since His voice was last heard. Moreover, you have only some old parchment leaves written by converted Pharisees and Galilean fishermen to tell that Deity ever gave audible utterances out of the thick darkness. May not His very being be after all a fiction, a delusion-His Bible a worn-out figment which superstition and priestcraft have successfully palmed upon the world? Or if you do believe in a God and in a written revelation, have you not good reason, at