A Goodly Heritage

 Catharine Smith was a native of Pabay, a small island in Loch Roag, where dwell seven families. From their insular situation and poverty, it has not been in the power of the parents to educate their children ; but little Kitty is an example of the truth that all God's children are taught of him, for when only two years old she was observed to lay aside her playthings, and clasp her little hands with reverence during family worship ; and at the age of three she was in the habit of repeating the 23d Psalm, with such relish and fervour as showed that she looked to the good shepherd in the character of a lamb of his flock. Her parents taught her also tbe I>ord's Prayer, which she repeated duly, not only at her stated times, hut often in the silence of night. She frequently pressed the duty of prayer, not only on the other children, but on her parents, and she told her father that, in their absence, v/hen she would ask a blessing- on the food left for the children, her brothers

The Saviour of men, and the example for all, must be the isolated one, the unparalleled Man in human history. He must be both like us and unlike us — like us in so far as His human nature is concerned: He must be born, He must increase in stature, be in subjection to His parents, and be subject to all the ordinary conditions of human nature as it develops itself from infancy to manhood. In all this He is like us — for otherwise He could not be our pattern and our Saviour. Then, again, He must be unlike us, or how could He be that One whom we are to imitate, and of whose fulness we must all partake? Christ as a Man was unlike all other men. He alone of all great men is the unparalleled One of all history; and the conviction of this truth suggests that more than man is here — more than a great and unparalleled man: it is none other than the " Son of the Highest." ( Bishop Martensen. )

All we know about Mary should appeal very forcibly to the heart and the imagination. The Child, and not the mother, is the chief theme of our talk and our thought, it is true; but no woman, and certainly no mother, can talk of the wonderful events of Bethlehem without thinking with tenderness as well as awe of Mary the mother of Jesus. From first to last she holds our eyes and moves our hearts, presenting us, as she does, with a perfect delineation of womanhood and motherhood; and our lives would probably be more full of love and helpful ministries if we gave more time to the study of her character. It may be asked, Why, when every pious Hebrew matron would have been thankful for the high and unique honour of being the mother of the Messiah, a poor, unknown, and retired virgin should have been chosen. A very little thought will suffice to show the suitability of Mary, and will also direct the mind to the womanly qualities which God honours. 1.  Humility. It was this which made Mary gre

  I.  THE NATURAL LIFE. This is a noble gift, bestowed for noble purposes; our bodies are material, composed of matter, that is, of earthly substance; evidently made from the dust, as to the dust returning. Whence comes it, then, that one portion of matter should be gifted with life, and be endued with faculties which have a living power, whilst another portion lies dull and heavy and incapable, as it was originally created? The Church calls us to thank God for our creation: let us see that it be indeed a blessing. II.  FROM GOD IS OUR PROVIDENTIAL LIFE, the preservation of our existence; and when we consider the numberless casualties to which we are exposed, this preservation is one continued marvel, nothing less than the constant exercise of God's almightiness on our behalf, by day and by night. III.  OUR SPIRITUAL LIFE can be derived only from the Father of spirits, from "the God of the spirits of all flesh": our blessed Lord has placed this upon the clearest possible

1.  If there is one point of character more than another which belonged to St. Paul it was his power of sympathy. He went through trials of every kind, and this was their issue. He knew how to persuade, for he knew where lay the perplexity; he knew how to console, for he knew the sorrow. His spirit was as some delicate instrument which, as the weather changed about him, accurately marked all its variations, and guided him what to do. "To the Jews he became as a Jew," etc. ( 2 Corinthians 11:23-30 ). The same law was fulfilled not only in the case of Christ's servants, but even He Himself condescended to learn to strengthen man, by the experiencing of man's infirmities ( Hebrews 2:17, 18 ;  Hebrews 4:14, 15 ). 2.  Now, in speaking of the benefits of suffering, we should never forget that by itself it has no power to make us more heavenly. It makes many men morose and selfish. The only sympathy it creates in many is the wish that others should suffer with them, not they

  The word is GRACE. "By the grace of God" we have so lived. Particularly "not by fleshly wisdom." No man can ever reach the heights of safety and purity and joy by that way. Yet that is the principle which multitudes of people are adopting for self-development. "The fleshly wisdom" is just "the wisdom of the world," with its watchings, and windings, and insincerities, with its soft speech, and fair appearance, and secret ways. Does any one think he can develop his nature, and do justice to his immortality by that? Oh, miserable mistake! Not with fleshly wisdom, "but by the grace of God" — by its cleansings, its kindlings, its renewings, its growth; by its whole drift and discipline we have "our conversation in the world." And because it is "the grace of God," those who take it, and trust in it, and put it to use, cannot fail in some measure to realise and embody, and cannot fail, ultimately, to perfect the fair idea

. Observe that it is God the Eternal Father who gives the decree for the smiting of the Shepherd. "Saith the Lord of hosts." We have no sympathy with the unguarded language of those who speak of God as an avenging deity, whose wrath can be appeased and propitiated only by offerings of blood. Love is a thing that cannot be bribed. God's love needed not thus to be purchased. That love was the primal cause of all blessing to His creatures. The manifestation, however, of love on the part of a great moral Governor must be compatible with the exercise of His moral perfections. God's justice, holiness, righteousness must be upheld inviolate. While mercy and truth go before His face, justice and judgment must continue the habitation of His throne. As the Omnipotent, God could do anything. So far as power is concerned, He could easily have dispensed with any medium of atonement. But what God, as the Omnipotent, could do, God, as the holy, just, righteous, true, could not do. H

The fulfilment of this prophecy has never yet taken place, and will probably be considerably posterior to our times. Though not fulfilled to the Jews, yet, to us the fountain is opened. I.  WHAT IS THIS FOUNTAIN? The ancient Jews had their sacrifices, and purifying oblations. They have now been long without a sacrifice and a priesthood. We are not to understand that these Levitical fountains will be opened again, as some have dreamed. The blood of animals might be an instituted means of taking away a ceremonial guilt, which yet left the sinner as he was before, in regard to the Governor of the world; but it had no fitness to take away moral guilt, because it failed in the two great principles of a true atonement, — a manifestation of the evil of sin, and a demonstration of God's righteous government. These meet in Christ, who is the true fountain. II.  ITS EFFICACY. In the removal of "sin and uncleanness." 1.  Sin is the "transgression of the law." The law is tr

  What is it to perish? It is to die in our sins, without bright angels to smile upon us as they wait to carry us away from earth; to die without the Saviour's glorious presence to cheer us in the valley of the shadow of death. It is to be turned away from the shut door of our Father's mercy, because, like the foolish virgins, we are not ready when the bridegroom comes. To perish is to lose the smile of God, the company of the redeemed, the society of angels, the glories of the heavenly world, and, with no ray of comfort or gleam of hope, to be driven away into outer darkness, into misery and woe, without deliverance and without end. The thought of this awful perdition made Jesus weep over Jerusalem and say, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem: thou that killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not." ( Rev. R. Brewin. )

James Wells. "The Lord heareth the poor," spiritually poor. Let us notice first what this does not mean, in order to get clearly at what it does mean. I make no hesitation in saying that this consciousness of spiritual poverty is one of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, and none can understand it but those who, are experimentally led into the secret. First, it does not mean literal, mental nor moral poverty, but it consists in our sense of our natural, internal, spiritual worthlessness of character. You may be as moral as an angel, and still be destitute of spiritual life in the soul. Therefore the soul not united to Christ is not united to that that can give it access to God; it is not united to that that can bring upon it the approbation of God; it is not united to that that can save it. "He died, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God." Therefore, while we prize good works, yet none of these things are of any use in the salvation of the soul; salvation

  Bp. Jeremy Taylor. Faith is a certain image of eternity; all things are present to it; things past and things to come are all so before the eyes of faith, that he in whose eyes. that candle is enkindled beholds heaven as present, and sees how blessed a thing it is to die in God's favour, and to be chimed to our grave with the music of a good conscience. Faith converses with the angels, and antedates the hymns of glory. Every man that hath this grace is as certain that there are glories for him, if he persevere in his duty, as if he had heard and sung the thanksgiving-song for the blessed sentence of doomsday. ( Bp. Jeremy Taylor. )

  Faith has many workings, many results, many frets — and some select one of these and call it faith itself. But the text goes to the source when it says, "What faith is this." The word here rendered "substance," means properly the act of "standing under" so as to support something. Thus in philosophical writings it was applied to the essence which forms, as it were, the substratum of the attributes; that supposed absolute existence (of thing or person) in which all the properties and qualities, so to say, inhere, and have their consistence. In this way the word is once applied in Scripture, in the third verse of this Epistle, to the essence of God Himself, and the Divine Son is said to be "the express image of His person" — the very "impress," as it might be otherwise rendered, "of His essence." But there was another use of the word, in which it meant the act of the mind in standing under (so as to support, and bear the weigh

  An unseen and heavenly world is required to correspond to our faith just as much as a material world to correspond to our senses. I stand in the midst of nature on some lovely spring morning. The fragrance of flowers from every bright and waving branch, dressed in pale and crimson, floats to me. The song of matin birds falls on my ear. All this beauty, melody, and richness are the correspondence to my nature of the material world through my senses. Now there are inward perceptions and intuitions just as real as these outward ones, and requiring spiritual realities to correspond with them, just as much as the eye requires the landscape, or as the ear asks for sounds of the winds and woods and streams, for the song of birds, or the dearer accents of the human voice. To meet and answer the very nature of man, a spiritual world, more refined modes of existence, action, happiness, must be, else his nature, satisfied and fed in one direction, and that the lowest, is belied and starved in a

 In the forbidding of images God by parity of reason prohibits all other modes and means of worship not appointed by Him. Every form of worship, even of the true God Himself, which is contrary to or diverse from what the Lord has prescribed in His Word, and which is called by the apostle "will worship" (Colossians 2:23), together with all corruptions of the true worship of God and all inclinations of heart toward superstition in the service of God are reprehended by this Commandment. No scope whatever is here permitted to the inventive faculty of man. Christ condemned the religious washing of the hands, because it was a human addition to the Divine regulations. In like manner this Commandment denounces the modern passion for ritualism (the dressing up of simplicity in Divine worship), as also the magical virtues ascribed to, or even the special influences of, the Lord's Supper, still more so the use of a crucifix. So also it condemns a neglect of God's worship, the le

  For that which I do I allow not. Every Christian can adopt the language of this verse. Pride, coldness, slothfulness, and other feelings which he disapproves and hates, are, day by day, reasserting their power over him. He struggles against their influence, groans beneath their bondage, longs to be filled with meekness, humility, and all other fruits of the love of God, but finds he can neither of himself, nor by the aid of the law, effect his freedom from what he hates, or the full performance of what he desires and approves. Every evening witnesses his penitent confession of his degrading bondage, his sense of utter helplessness, and his longing desire for aid from above. He is a slave looking and longing for liberty. ( C. Hodge, D. D. )

  J. Stafford. The metaphor is taken from a robber who leads a man into some by-path and then murders him. The word principally denotes an innate faculty of deceiving. We read of the deceitfulness of riches ( Matthew 13:22 ); the deceitfulness of unrighteousness ( 2 Thessalonians 2:10 ), which is their aptitude, considering the sinful state and the various temptations of men, to deceive them with vain hopes and to seduce them into crooked paths. Once it is put for sin itself ( Ephesians 4:22 ). Here, as it is joined with sin, it denotes that habitual deceit that is in indwelling sin, whereby it seduceth men and draweth them off from God ( Hebrews 12:13 ). I.  SIN IS OF A SUBTLE AND DECEIVING NATURE. Sin deceives the souls of men — 1.  As it blinds their understandings ( Romans 1:21, 22 ;  Ephesians 4:18 ). This blindness of the mind consists in ignorance of God and of our own interests, giving us light thoughts of sin and extenuating it. 2.  As it presents various false appearances to

  E. J. Jones. For about four months Haggai was employed in delivering prophetic sermons to encourage the people to rebuild the second temple. The people were disheartened. They prepared their own houses, they were ceiled, and painted, and decorated, but the Lord's house was permitted to lie waste. This neglect arose from a principle prevalent in the human heart, which leads men to fancy that an exclusive attention to their own selfish concerns is the only way to promote their interests it does not enter into their narrow calculation that the first interest of man is to glorify God. Indifference to the cause of God has brought many a multiplied sorrow to the person, or community, who have manifested such a spirit; nor has it ever been known that zeal for God and love to His cause have passed unnoticed or unregarded by Him Every effort... of whatever kind it be, for the welfare of the souls of men, will be liable to objection. If we wait until all such objections are satisfied, we s

  This people say, The time is not come, the time that the Lord's house should be built. Haggai 1:3 The people said this, because they thought the undertaking too great, too arduous, too expensive for a nation circumstanced as they were. These returned captives were but a small remnant of the population of the land. They had not yet fully established themselves in their own habitations. They had formidable enemies around them, bent upon impeding their work. They were labouring at present under extraordinary distress, from the failure of their vintage and their crops; and therefore, though they admitted that the work was one needful to be done, they said, "Not yet; not in these days." How many good works are put by by being put off! How much of the business we are sent into the world to do is not done, under pretence that it is too soon to set about it. But the prophet shows this people that their present poverty and distress were sent by God as a chastisement for their pa

I.  That soul advancement is an EVOLUTION - "That ye may grow thereby." That is, the growth of the whole soul — all its faculties, forces, and germs of power. Growth implies — 1.  Inner life. A dead thing cannot grow. Sometimes education is spoken of as if the mind were a vessel into which a certain amount of information is to be poured until the mind is filled. Sometimes, as if the mind were a stone, on which the instructor was to act as a lapidary, and polish it into some beautiful form. Hence we hear so much of accomplishments, painting, drawing, music, etc. Sometimes, as if the mind was arable land, to be ploughed and in which to plant seed to germinate and develop. Philosophically, nothing can grow in the soul. It is the soul itself that grows. 2.  An inner life of latent power. A thing may have life, and nothing within for future development. Not so with the soul; it has boundless possibilities. 3.  A life possessing developing conditions. II.  That soul evolution invol

 "Consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus."—Heb. lii., 1. When a traveller passes very rapidly through a country, the eye has no time to rest upon the different objects in it, so that, when he comes to the end of his journey, no distinct impressions have been made upon his mind; he has only a confused notion of the country through which he has travelled. This explains how it is that death, judgment, eternity, make so little impression upon most men's minds. Most people never stop to think, but hurry on through life, and find themselves in eternity before they have once put the question, " What must I do to be saved V More souls are lost through want of consideration than in any other way. The reason why men are not awakened and made anxious for their souls is, that the devil never gives them time to consider. Therefore God cries, Stop, poor sinner, stop and think. Consider your ways. "O that you were wise, that you understood this, t

The seven operations of the Holy Ghost are — 1.  First as the Convincer of sin. There is a certain consciousness of sin which may be without the Holy Ghost. There is scarcely any man who is not aware that he has done many wrong things. But there are two things in that man's sense of sin which prevent its being real repentance. He does not view his sins as grieving God, still less as having crucified Christ. 2.  Then the Holy Ghost will show that man the real and only ground of all pardon. He will show him that Christ has been to this world to this very end, to bear our sins. 3.  Then comes the great, blessed office of the Holy Ghost, to be our Comforter. First He makes us so to accept God's mercy that we rest in our forgiveness. And when the Holy Ghost has given us this first and chief comfort, then He will continue to be our Comforter every day in all our other sorrows. Other comforters generally try to remove our sorrow by making us forget it, or by putting something in its p

J. L. Adamson. I.  JESUS IS CALLED A LION BECAUSE OF THE UNPARALLELED COURAGE WHICH BELONGS TO HIM. The work which He undertook to execute was one of incomparable magnitude. Had it been proposed to the mightiest archangel that stands before God's throne, he would have shrunk in timidity from the task. For what was it? It was to reconcile things apparently incongruous, and to perform things apparently impossible. It was to satisfy the demands of justice, and yet, at the same time, yield abundant scope for the exercise of mercy. It was to secure pardon to a condemned race, and yet maintain inviolate the honour of the law which had sentenced them to condemnation. And, in addition to all this, it was to combat single-handed the powers and principalities of hell. Who among the sons of the mighty could have presumed that he was equal to such a work? And yet, behold, in the fulness of time, One born of a woman undertakes this mighty office. The difficulties and dangers of the work were no

Principal Tulloch. That there is a higher life which we may and ought to live, all men, in whom there is any religion, feel; and what is peculiar to the gospel is not the bare idea of this life, but the revelation of its character, power, and attainment. I.  THE NATURE of this higher life. 1.  It is "above." But is not this just what has been ob jected to — that Christianity concerns itself with another world rather than with this? And is not this very exaltation a weakness and a delusion. What nobler ideal can there be than to make the present life better. But Christ's ideal was a kingdom, in our hearts, it is true, yet "of heaven," not of earth. It was, in short, a higher Divine life that was to irradiate our poor human life, and to glorify it. It was no development from below, but a revelation from on high, and without this Christianity has no meaning. Cut away its Divine side, and it is destroyed. 2.  This life is not merely in the future, although it embrac

T. Guthrie. The lighthouse tower, that stands among the tumbling waves, seems to have nothing but them to rest on, yet there, stately and stable, it stands, beautiful in the calm, and calm in the wintry tempest, guiding the sailor on to his desired haven, past the rolling reef, through the gloom of the darkest night, and the waters of the gloomiest sea. Why is it stable? You see nothing but the waves, but beneath the waves, down below the rolling, tumbling billows, its foundation is the solid rock. And what that tower is to the house on yon sand-bank Christ's righteousness is to mine, Christ's works to my best ones. ( T. Guthrie. )

 "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."--Psalm 90:12 Casting our eyes back upon the year now past and gone, are there no mercies which claim a note of thankful praise? It is sweet to see the Lord's kind hand in providence, but sweeter far to view his outstretched hand in grace. Are we then so unwatchful or so unmindful of the Lord's gracious hand in his various dealings with our soul as to view the whole past twelve months as a dead blank in which we have never seen his face, nor heard his voice, nor felt his power? "Have I been a wilderness unto Israel? a land of darkness?" (Jer 2:31,) the Lord tenderly asks. Has he been such to us also for twelve long and weary months? What! No help by the way, no tokens for good, no liftings-up of the light of his countenance, no visitations of his presence and power, no breakings-in of his goodness for all that long and dreary time--for dreary it must indeed have been for a living sou