I had been in high company and had touched the threshold of immortal fame. Now, these are only the lower applications of a principle universal in its operation and influence, and which reaches its highest point in Christian fellowship. I can come to One in the touch of the hem of whose garment there is eternal virtue! Poor though we be and nameless, yet if we be in Christ Jesus, we come to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the first-born, and to the spirits of just men made perfect. Nothing in ourselves, we are yet kings and priests unto God! Our torch is lighted at the sun. Some people have to wait a long time for their blessings. Sarah was ninety years old when Isaac was born. This thing itself is merely accidental, but the principle which is under it is living and beneficent. If we have the true life in our hearts, not one of us has yet seen his best days. Physically, we may be on the wane; but spiritually we may win our greatest victories actually on the day of death. You have not yet got the best your brain can give. There is a finer wine in your heart than has yet been crushed out. Do not close the shutters; rather break out another window, for the light of the sun is yet plentiful. You may bring forth fruit in old age, and be fat and flourishing until the last. You have not got God's best. He keeps the good wine for by and by. I hear your sigh and your groan, and for every one of them you shall yet have a hymn or a loud psalm. Your great prayer shall be answered; the prayer that drags your heart out in passionate entreaty for the runaway boy, for the lost girl, for the healing of a wound in the spirit never told of to mortal ear! Live in this hope, and this hope will keep you young. Sarah laughed at ninety, and made all her friends. laugh in her late-come joy.

And now that Sarah is dead, Abraham came to mourn and to weep for her. But was not Abraham a man of faith? Yes; but he was a man of feeling, too, and his piety did not make his heart hard. But was not Isaac, his son, alive? Yes; but a love ninety years old, and tested in many a sharp flame, was not to be given up lightly. It is a hard thing to part with those we have known longest and best. When such parting comes, "'tis the survivor dies"; memory is quickened into strange vividness; the past life comes up and passes its days before the eyes in all their variety of color and service. I hear Abraham talking to himself: "Oh, how sad is this loneliness; how awful is the stillness of this silence! I can talk to Isaac, but not as I did to his mother: there are some eighty years of life that he knows nothing about. Sarah and I wandered together, talked out our hearts to one another, planned and dreamed and suffered in one common experience, and there she lies, a stranger among strangers, cold and silent forever!

And Abraham wept! The man who slew the great kings wept! The man whose name is to endure as long as the sun wept! Jesus wept! Blessed will those of us be who have not to weep over neglect, harshness, bitterness; over speeches that made the heart ache, over selfishness that hastened the very death we mourn! If you would have few tears by and by, be kind now; if you would have a happy future, create a gracious present. Make your homes happy; banish from the sacred enclosure of the family all meanness, hardness, suspicion and unkindness, that when the dark day comes, as come it will too soon, your deep and tender sorrow may not be mixed with the bitterness of self-reproach.

This is a sharp variety of experience for Abraham. In the last incident how brave he was, and what a kingliness dignified even the stoop of his sorrow as he went with Isaac to the altar! What is the difference between his case then and his case now? It is the difference between doing God's will and suffering it. A wonderful difference, as we all know! So long as we have something to do, something to call us from pensive meditation and set us to hard strife, we bear up with hopeful courage; but when the strife ceases, and we are left alone with the wreck it has wrought, we often express our emotion in tears which never came during all the battle. Such an instance as this goes far toward proving that Abraham's faith was as human as his sorrow. If we can join him in grief, why not in faith? If we thought him nearly divine on Moriah, we may see how human he is in Hebron. As for ourselves, we can fight resolutely; can we suffer patiently? We are heroes whilst the sound of the trumpet is maddening the air; what are we when laid up as wounded soldiers? The patient, uncomplaining sufferer, who for months or years has been waiting for her Lord without ever suggesting that His steps were tardy, may have as strong a faith as Abraham had when he held the knife over his son. All the world's faith is not historic. To-day has its chronicles of trust and patience and hope quite as instructive and thrilling as those which are recorded in the Bible. It is too early to read them through, or to comprehend all their sad yet glorious meaning; but every syllable is accepted and honored of God. We often wish that we were as good as the holy men of old; it will be a poor thing, however, if we are not better than the best man in any earlier dispensation. Among all that were born of woman there had not appeared a greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven was greater than he. So may we be greater than Abraham, by reason of Jesus Christ's promise that we should not only have life, but have it "more abundantly." That some of the older generations might have greater gifts is not denied; but none of them had opportunities of having greater graces. They

had special inspiration, we have the general baptism of the Spiri; they saw the unrisen light, we see the sun in a cloudless zenith. My opinion is that God never had better children upon the earth than He has at this moment; never was there such force of life, never such loyalty to the kingdom of heaven. We do not, then, set forth Abraham as a divine model; we call up his history to see its points common with our own, to study the unchangeableness of God, and to take an estimate of the development of human destiny.

Look at Abraham buying a grave! True, he buys a field and a cave, and all the trees that were in the field, and in all the borders round about; but, expand the list as we may, it was all for the sake of a place to bury his dead. The good man is forced into such commerce as well as the bad; the best man of his age is here bargaining for burial ground. I need not remind a Christian congregation of the advantage which a good man enjoys under such circumstances. To him the place of Christian sepulchre is not a wilderness given over to the desolation of everlasting winter; it is a garden, full of roots, that shall come up in infinite beauty in the summer that is yet to be. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel." The law of mortality will operate until the close of this dispensation; all lower life has been given over to death; but death itself has been devoted by an unchangeable covenant to be destroyed by life. "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." Meanwhile, we require graves. Our houses are overshadowed by a temporary destroyer; we are smitten and impoverished by the angel of death. All this we know as a matter of fact; in talking thus I trouble you with the tritest truisms; but have we turned our knowledge to account? Have we read the meaning of the shadow that lies along the whole path of life? Have we so balanced our proportions as to give to each its honest due? Have we not, on the contrary, forgotten our own mortality even in the very act of talking of other men's death? What need there is then that we should see this transaction between Abraham and Ephron: listen to the words of the covenant, and ponder well that in return for four hundred shekels of silver Abraham gets a burying-place!

"From the stars of heaven, and the flowers of earth,
From the pageant of power, and the voice of mirth,
From the mists of morn on the mountains's brow,
From childhood's song, and affection's vow,

From all save that o'er which the soul bears sway
Breathes but one record—passing away.”

The manner in which the children of Heth answered Abraham should attract the most appreciative notice: "Hear us,

my Lord; thou art a mighty prince among us; in the choice of our sepulchres bury the dead; none of us shall withhold from thee his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy dead." How these incidental strokes of pathos attest the oneness of the human heart! Circumstances test the true quality of men. Irreverence in the presence of grief is an infallible sign of the deepest degeneracy; it marks the ultimate deterioration of the human heart. On the other hand, to be chastened by sorrow, to be moved into generous pity and helpfulness, is to show that there is still something in the man on which the kingdom of Jesus Christ may be built. Never despair of any man who is capable of generous impulses. Put no man down as incurably bad who will share his one loaf with the hungry or give shelter to a lost little one. Poor and crude may be his formal creed, very dim and pitifully inadequate his view of scholastic theology; but there is a root in him which may be developed into much beauty and fruitfulness. For this reason I cannot overlook the genial humanity and simple gracefulness of this act of the Hittites.

Man's final requirement of man is a grave. We may go down to the grave in one of two very different ways. Our grave may be respected, or it may be passed by as a dishonored spot. We may live so as to be much missed, or we may live so as to leave the least possible vacancy; whichever way it be, we should remember that there is no repentance in the grave-the dead man cannot obliterate the past.

Abraham mourned for Sarah. What then? Consecration to God's purposes does not eradicate our deep human love; say rather that it heightens, refines, sanctifies it! Every father is more a father in proportion as he loves and serves the great Father in heaven. We should be on our guard against any system of religion or philosophy that seeks to cool the fervor of natural and lawful love. It may be very majestic not to shed tears; but it is most inhuman, most ungodly. We have heard of Abraham mourning, of David crying bitterly, of the Saviour allowing His feet to be washed with a sinner's tears, and of Jesus Christ weeping; but who ever heard of the devil being broken down in pity or mournfulness? Christianity educates our humanity, not deadens it; and when we are in tears it helps us to see through them nearly into heaven.

PREACHED BY Joseph T. Duryea, D.D., IN the Classon AVE. PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, BROOKLYN,

[Who being] the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, [and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.]—Hebrews i: 3.

THE discourse of the author of this epistle institutes a parallel, and sets forth a contrast, between the revelation of God in connection with the mission of the ancient prophets and the manifestation of God in the last times in the person and by the ministry of His Son. It maintains that both, proceeding from the same source and tending to the same end, are in substantial agreement, and yet abundantly shows that the latter surpasses the former in the fullness of its substance and the excellence of its form. The first was the shadow, the second the reality; the one was the illustration, the other the fact.

The grandeur of the latter discovery of God was derived from two views of a person. This person was not only a revealer, as all prophets were revealers of God, but he was in himself the revelation of God. The prophets spake concerning God and a coming Messiah. He spake concerning God and himself. Rather, he also spake of God when he spake of himself. Nay, more, when he did not speak, but simply stood forth and wrought, so as to be seen and known, even then he most fully disclosed the nature and the character of God. He had only to say, "I and my Father are one," " Whoso hath seen me hath seen the Father," and then to stand still or move along before the eyes of men to be looked upon, in order to make manifest to men all of God that they could comprehend.

This person was known in heaven and from eternity as the Son of God; on earth and in time as Jesus Christ, the anointed Saviour of men. The writer first exalts the gospel above the law by setting forth the exaltation of the Son of God, its messenger and its message. He is above Moses, a faithful servant in God's house, because He is a Son in his Father's house. He is above angels, because He hath a more excellent name than they;