that we can easily follow and easily feel ;-it is not of a broad provincial dialect that we complain, for the same complaint might have been made of the disciple to whom was given the keys of heaven, and who was most honoured by his Lord in the scenes of the Pentecostal glory ;—we have no sympathy with the complaints of those who despise the unpolished speech of the poor, and whose slight to the prayer-meeting is one of the earliest symptoms of waning love, and of a wish to be openly identified with religion, only when religion itself is identified with education, with wealth, or with social refinement. "We would lend no sanction, however indirectly, to that fastidiousness of taste which often make the Churches so reluctant to educate their less experienced members to the use of their endowments for edification. We have often felt the prayer of the workman from the bench, or the peasant from the plough, so true and simple, so rich with Scripture, and so alive with spiritual fire, that they have helped to kindle and express our own prayers far more than has been effected by the utterances of men renowned for lettered and cultivated thought. "But what we complain of is this:-From acquired indistinctness of voice, from grotesque metaphor, from the sin of excessive length,' from the want of naturalness, from the use of the worst and most deadly forms-the forms that are unwritten-forms of their own, which are but the petrified expressions of old and extinct prayers; from deficiency in sacred awe before God, perhaps leading to language of endearment verging on profanityperhaps to the constant repetition of the Great Name as a mere waste-word of prayer-a word for the mind to rest upon, while it collects itself for the next sentence, like the constantly-recurring phrases in the oldest poetry, used for a similar purpose by the bards-from these and other faults, individual or conventional, those who are called upon to utter our prayers for us may sometimes exhaust our powers of attention, be 'unfruitful to our understanding,' and even tend to keep our minds away from God, instead of aiding us in our approach to him." Miscellaneous Papers. CHASTENING. (Original and Selected.) BY THE REV. WILLIAM C. BURNS. (From a Hearer's Notes.) (CONCLUDED FROM PAGE 251.) THE believer knows that all he can suffer in this world, in preparation for glory, is indeed nothing in comparison of the suffering which will be heaped upon a lost soul. He knows that it is in very faithfulness that he is afflicted; and none but those who have endured great suffering can tell half of what Jehovah can do to support the soul that trusteth in him. If you were desirous to know something of the manner in which saints, since the days which Scripture records, have been tried, there are many lives of such eminent men to which you might be directed, as, for instance, Hallyburton, a very eminent saint of God, who, besides numerous severe temptations, and much darkness of soul, towards the end of his life suffered extreme bodily torture, and yet, in the midst of it all, his soul inhabiting a diseased frame, was made to rejoice in the God of his salvation, and to feel the glory of God already begun within him. Ah, yes, he can make his people say, When I am tried, I shall come forth like gold." "Before I was afflicted, I went astray; but now have I kept thy law." And then he uses this very means to detect the hypocrite who has gone want your religion to be heart-satisfying, on for months or years deceiving himself heart-supporting in every hour of need, and and escaping detection; for when his out- in the day of judgment. ward comforts and props begin to fall away and trials are laid upon him, then he begins to shrink back and creep away to the world, saying, "I must cast in my lot with the world again, and see what is to be gained there, for I can get nothing from the Lord God-there is no profit in religion!" Thus it is that afflictions uncloak the hypocrite; and, instead of bringing him nearer to God, these just drive him the farther away from him, because it is only a Divine work of God in the soul that will ever stand when he comes to purify and scourge his people. Ah, there is many a hollow professor among those who are, to human appearances, the people of God-many a painted face, and much religion, that is only skin-deep, just like false coin that has the king's face forged upon it; the silvering shines as bright as other silver, and the gilding as bright as other gold, but if you cut deep within the tinselled coating, you find base metal there. It may pass man's hurried and superficial glance-may pass through many hands unsuspected; but if it comes to one who is a good judge, the least piercing inward discovers what it is in a moment. Oh, see that there are no such silvered hypocrites among you. What will you do when Jehovah the Son takes to himself his glittering sword on the day when "the sinners in Zion are afraid, and fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites"? When your outside coating is cut through, what will be found within the fair profession ? A black heart, an unwashed conscience, an unrenewed spirit, no image of Jesus, no likeness to God, no spirit testifying with your spirits that you are the children of God! Ah, my dear friends, make sure work. Be convinced of the necessity which lies upon you to give all diligence, and all heed, and all earnest prayerful attention, to the matter of your actual interest in Emmanuel. Be much alone; every day of my life do I become more deeply convinced of this, that real religion is a secret thing between Jehovah and the soul-that there must be much deep heart-searching, selfexamination, piercing in between every fold, and examining every corner of the heart and conscience. Public religion won't do -heart-work alone will do. Oh, I often told you this before-often, often-but I confess I never before could do it with such powerfully strong conviction of the truth of what I then believed as, after a year's experience, I now can do, that there must be more in the closet than out of it-far more. Ah, yes; see ye to that! Guard yourselves from this awful danger. Be much more with God than you are with men, if you I see now, more than I ever could have done before, this truth, that religion in the heart must be Divine or that it is nothing at all; and revisiting this place or other places, after a work has gone on, I always find that among others there are two classes which I ought to mention. One is made of those who, at the time of awakening, spoke much of their religious experience and of the different states of frame and feeling into which they were brought, who lived much in public, and had their feelings kept in a ferment by attending meetings, without the constant meeting with God, which would have kept them close to him all the while; and, like the stony ground hearers, it sprung up and faded away, and now they are back to the world, and to their love of sin and pleasure. You have got fair faces, hypocrites, but within there is no new heart, no love to God, no temple of the Holy Ghost. And I find also another class, of whom indeed I have met several since I last came here, who never at the time spoke of their state of mind to any but to Him who woundeth and healeth again, who killeth and maketh alive, and who then were known only to the Great Physician; and there is a calmness and steadiness, a staidness and meekness about them which many want. They, with many other truly convinced individuals, of whom we did not know at the time, spoke much more to God about the sickness of their souls than they did to man; and while some were running hither and thither, speaking of their cases to all, and running from meeting to meeting, they, once deeply wounded by Jehovah's hand, and with an arrow from the quiver of love sticking fast in their bleeding consciences, retired, like the stricken roe, with their smarting wounds, to some solitary place, where they might seek the Lord and be alone with him. Ah, yes, there is something too solemn, and too awful, and too soul-abasing, and too fearful, in the sinner's first transaction with Jehovah, for human gaze, or for the eye of any but the sinner himself; something too deep in the sinner's first awe at the presence of Jehovah for the intervention of any mortal; something too bitter in the first tears of remorse and alarm that are wrung from the soul for any but Jehovah's hand to wipe them up. Ah, in such a case, the soul shuns society and shrinks away into the solitary place, where he may best meet with God, and weep, and groan out his agony in that ear above. There are many that can't bear such a tedious, soul-humbling, heart-abasing process as this; they must get comfort quickly, and joy quickly; they can't submit to such tears and such mourning; they would like to get an easy conversion, and a short, quick passage to joy and peace; they can't submit to drink the bitter draughts of repentance, and so they go to get comfort the shortest way they can, and then lose it as quickly, and with it all their religion, perhaps, together; or, if they keep it, it is a religion of men-pleasing, and self-seeking, which, please men as it may, will never please God. If you were to give a piece of beautifullycut glass to a silly little child, and to tell him that it was a diamond, the child would know no difference, and would be quite delighted with it, and conceive a high value for it; but then take it to a jeweller and ask him to purchase it, and he would cast it away into the middle of the street, and say, "You're mocking me; while he would sell all for the large brilliant, and keep it by him with the greatest care, as a valuable treasure, worth all beside. And so, when Jesus comes to make up his jewels, and select the brilliants for his crown of glory from the ranks of the professing Church, many a fair professor will be burnt up as stubble in the great and terrible day of the Lord; while you, humble penitents, and, it may be, deeply-tried and desponding souls, who have learnt, from first to last, in the work of grace, in your heart to say, "Save me, save me!" shall he receive into glory. The world may despise you, and Christians may think little of your attainments, but to God you are unspeakably dear-far more precious than aught else in the universe; and you shall be chosen as the royal jewels for the Master's use, to be worn by him for ever, some on the hand, others on the breast, or in the royal crown; for the days of your mourning shall be ended, and his banner over you shall be Love. Ah, yes, be assured, that many who were much talked about, as having had wonderful experiences, who have had delight in talking about them, and who have made a great noise-I mean a great noise in the public ear-many who have done that have been making more noise on earth about their souls than they ever did in heaven, and more in man's ear than they ever did in God's. I trust that not a few among you devoted last night to united prayer. Were you not refreshed in your own souls? If the blessing is to come at this time it will come through the bumbling of God's people: while seeking this let them improve the grace they have already received. Now, although we eannot for one moment act to God's glory independently of the grace and Spirit of God, still it is our bounden duty to employ what has been already given to the Master's use, and not to bury it. Suppose a man got all his temporal wants supplied, and his food carried to him, without taking exercise or using his own powers, he would soon lose his health and strength. Suppose a child kept in its cradle from its birth, would it grow up to maturity? So in heavenly things. If you have got grace already don't abuse it, don't conceal it, let Jesus have his own with usury: abound in the work while you are always asking more. Grace brings awful responsibility. To have God within you, Christ formed there the hope of glory, the Spirit's influences guiding you into all truth, to have that wondrous book, the Bible, unsealed to you, comprehending all that has ever happened, or ever will happen, in the soul or in the Church of God, does not all that bring responsibility? To have a key in your hand to God's hidden mysteries, recorded or foretold, for it's all here, whether it be the creation of a world, or the creating anew of a soul to God, the backsliding of the saints, the fall of a star of the first magnitude, all the future described beforehand with the clearness and certainty of a narrative of something past. Oh! that the Lord's people among you may be now made willing to dig deep into this field of treasure; to be brought nearer to the Lord than they have ever been; to withdraw from mere creature enjoyments more, and be satisfied to lie down this night by the side of the ever-flowing fountain of life-not refusing to be abased at God's will-willing to drink full draughts of repentance and mortification of sin, and so coming to worthy views of Emmanuel's boundless love and promises. Shallow ideas of sin narrow down our sense of these also. "Hence from me, wicked workers all, For God hath heard my weeping cries," And seek, believers, when you are alone, to bear in your minds the wicked in the city, going down to destruction. It is a city at ease and at peace, few in it now inquiring the way to Zion. Oh! then, as you walk its streets, and meet so many hurrying to ruin-some with the very brand of hell stamped on their foreheads-won't you pray for them? Or, even when you look out of your windows, and see them crowding every corner, ask for a heart to retire to your knees to pray and weep over their misery. If there were many such mourners for the iniquity of your town Jehovah would regard, he would hear your cry, he would answer, by bringing some of these very sinners to his feet. Weep, then, for your city's sins; weep over its Sabbath-breakers; weep over its swearers; weep over its theft, its lies, its worldly vanities, and its more open defiance of God and contempt of his law; yea, weep on till you have to rejoice once more over sisters and brothers begun to seek the Lord. And plead, too, for dear Scotland, which he has already begun to water by the effusion us. I do not know this poor old man, though of the Holy Ghost, that the work may yet | increase in power and extent an hundred- I have seen him often as he served in the fold, until it shall embrace the whole land; Church of God; and now, when the story and ask, for this end, that he would continue of his shame is on every tongue, my heart pure ordinances and faithful ministers among bleeds to think of him as, disgraced and I see many children in the galleries to- deserted, he hides in the solitude of his night. Dear children, won't you be the home, moaning and weeping in impotent children of God, too? Wouldn't you like remorse for the sin which has stamped the to think that God was your Father, and Cain-mark on his brow. God help thee, Jesus Christ your elder brother? To-night, as I looked on the crowds of young chil- brother; and in thine agony find room for dren running in the street, I asked myself gratitude, and though thy sinful, erring the question, "How many of these may brethren cast thee off, God, the pure, the reasonably be supposed to be running after Almighty, heeds thy repentance, and will Jesus?" Ah! you run many ways, pursue forgive thy sin. "For I am not come to many things; but few, few of you are follow ing Jesus. Dear children, begin now! I call the righteous, but sinners to repentdon't say, Leave your play, for children ance." can't cease to play while they are children. And you, who join in the hiss which I doubt not but the holy child Jesus him- pierces the lacerated heart, pause and look self took delight in all the harmless things that holy children love; but come to Him first, and get a new heart and a right spirit from him, and then you will run back to your play with a lighter heart and a more joyful step; and you will dwell, like little Samuel, within the temple gates, and cry for Jehovah's blessing on all you do. ALWAYS A HYPOCRITE. YES, that is the cry; he has sinned and fallen, and now you say "he was always a hypocrite." I do not believe it. I cannot believe that through all the years in which he professed to follow Christ he was a traitor to his Master. I pity the heart that can readily credit such a tale. The poor old man has sinned and fallen. God pity him, for man's sympathy is full of scorn. How eagerly they whisper the sad story, and gloat over the shameful details, as though a brother's fall was a cause for rejoicing! The angels-the pure angels weep, while frail man looks on with scorn. True, they close the tale with, "I pity him," yet their sympathy goes no further; and they add, "but I believe he was always a hypocrite." Is not his present shame enough that all the good of his past life should be counted naught, or as the cunning acting of a confirmed villian ? "Always a hypocrite!" David fell, Solomon sinned, and Peter denied his Master thrice; yet who will say these were "always hypocrites"? at yourself. What has kept you from falling? Perhaps you were not tempted. Then thank God for that, and strive to help those who were. Or, being tempted, you fled to the Source of Strength, and found power to resist. Then be grateful, and assist those of weaker faith. Proud Pharisee, despise not thy brother. Look deeply into the recesses of thine heart, and mark well the points of weakness, which, if attacked in an unguarded hour, might prove vulnerable; and humble thyself in the dust, thanking God not that thou art "not as other men," but that he has sup ported thy weakness, and guarded thee from "the sin which doth so easily beset." And ye, young lambs of the flock, who, in your innocent purity, can scarcely believe that such iniquity abounds, and penetrates even into the Church of Jesus, while your tears and prayers are fervently offered for the sinning and suffering, nestle closely to the Shepherd's bosom, and entreat that he will "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." CORA CEDAR. FLATTERY IN PRAYER. THE statement of the case, bare and bald, would make it appear shocking. Yet how often it is heard- flattery in prayer! Says Dr. Porter:-"Suppose. as pastor of a congregation, you make the closing prayer on Sabbath after a brother in the ministry has kindly even in its proper time and place, the preached for you through the day. language of compliment must be well You allude to his sermons in terms looked to. But in addressing Jehosuch as worldly politeness employs on vah, take care how you indulge in percommon subjects; that is, in terms of sonal allusions to those worms and cirect compliment. In thus cancelling sinners like yourself, who are present. an obligation to a fellow-worm, do In this matter especially heed this you not offend against the sanctity of Scripture,-"Be not rash with thy the place and the occasion, and the mouth, and let not thine heart be dignity, so to speak, of devotion? I hasty to utter anything before God; have no doubt that intelligent and for God is in heaven, and thou upon conscientious people often feel, on this earth, therefore let thy words be few." point, a degree of impropriety in the Christ. Advocate. habits of ministers; and the same habits are sometimes carried to a greater extent in more private devotions, such as acknowledging the hospitalities of families." This talking through God at man, this tickling of humanity's itching ears by feathers taken from the wings of the cherubim that overshadowed the mercy seat, done in the act of prayer, too!— prayer is a soft word for it. These abuses of extemporaneous prayer must be guarded against. We once heard a sermon that went before controverted and answered in the closing prayer of the pastor. DEAD YET LIVING. THE cedar is most useful when dead. It is the most productive when its place knows it no more. There is no timber like it. Firm in grain, and capable of the finest polish, the tooth of no insect will touch it, and Time himself can hardly destroy it. Diffusing a perpetual fragrance through the chambers which it ceils, the worm will not corrode the book which it protects, nor the moth corrupt the garment which it guardsall but immortal itself, it transfuses its ara manthine qualities to the objects around it. Every Christian is useful in his life; but the goodly cedars are the most useful afterwards. Luther is dead, but the Reformation lives. The brother who "kindly preached" that day was plainly alluded to; and the arguments were woven into the prayer against his main position. The terms were not complimentary, and the said brother felt very much like asking for an opportunity to reply God's free and sovereign grace will never but the doxology and the benediction choked down discussion. This thing, die. Knox, Melville, and Henderson are we are glad to say, was not done in a dead, but Scotland still retains a Sabbath Methodist church, and the said pastor and a Christian peasantry, a Bible in every was not a Methodist preacher. house, and school in every parish. Calvin is dead, but his vindieation of This is told of the eccentric John Bunyan is dead, but his bright spirit still Randolph-In one of his spells of walks the earth in his Pilgrim's Progress. repentance and sickness, he was visited Baxter is dead, but souls are still quickened by a minister, who, at his request, prayed for and with him. The minister by the Saints' Rest. Cowper is dead, but began on this wise,-"Lord, our friend the "golden apples" are still as fresh as is sick. Thou knowest how generous when newly gathered in the "silver basket" he has been to the poor, and what of the Olney Hymns. eminent services he has rendered to Elliott is dead, but the missionary enterhis country, and how he is among the prise is young. Henry Martyn is dead, but honoured and great men of the earth who can count the apostolic spirits who, -"Stop! stop!" said the impatient phoenixwise, have started from his funeral Randolph ; no more of that stuff, pile ? else the Lord will damn us both." The whole business of compliments is very delicate, and has its tempta- is only commencing its career. Raikes is tions to exaggeration and insincerity dead, but the Sabbath-schools go on. Howard is dead, but modern philanthropy Wil on the part of the speaker, and may berforce is dead, but the negro will find for inflate the vanity and spread snares ages a protector in his memory.-Rev. Dr. for the feet of the hearer. Therefore, Hamilton. |