Pharisees, scowling upon Him in the cruel hatred of unveiled hypocrisy and crushed pride and fathomed shallowness, and hear His burning words of conviction, recrimination and doom: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

Do you remember that "God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil"? Then remember also that it is the Son of man who is to come in His glory and sit upon His throne, and gather all nations and separate them one from another as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats. It is He who shall say, Depart, ye cursed. Do you feel that God will pour out His wrath upon the ungodly on the great day? You may read in the gospel of Jesus Christ of the wrath of the Lamb and of the great and terrible day of the Lord.

In a word, there is no manifestation of the nature of God in opposition to sin and in retribution against the incorrigibly ungodly so calm, determined, decided, severe and awful as that which is made in the words and yet will be made in the person of that Man by whom He will judge the world.

And in like manner, on the other hand, the Father is in fullest sympathy with the Son in every expression of His divinehuman mercy, compassion, tenderness and grace to repenting, returning and pleading souls. If the Son of God from the beginning longed for the salvation of men, God the Father from eternity loved the world. If the Son of God so loved the world that He gave His life a ransom for the many, God the Father so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten, that whosoever believeth on Him might not perish, but might have everlasting life. If Jesus suffered unutterable agonies on the cross for us and our salvation, God the Father witnessed and felt the sacrifice. If Jesus Christ spoke words of ineffable kindness and gentleness, how often and how emphatically did He declare, "The words that I speak I speak not of myself," but "as my Father has taught me, I speak these things"? If Jesus Christ wrought innumerable works of mercy and grace, how constantly and decidedly did He affirm, "The Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works," "I do always those things that please Him"? If His life of teaching and example and suffering was one continuous surrender and employment of Himself for our eternal salvation and blessedness, did He not close it to ascend to His Father, crying, "I have glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the work thou gavest me to do"?

Yes, in the person and mission of Jesus Christ, whatever in God is arrayed against the sinner, and whatever is patient, and long-suffering, and merciful, and gracious, and helpful, and saving for the sinner, is manifest equally and as fully in Jesus Christ.

But we are not yet exposed to the severity of justice; we are invited to the leniency of grace. Let us behold, then, the grace of God in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Can you even doubt the willingness of God to save you when you behold the Son, in human flesh, humbled by the fellowship of our nature in its narrowness and feebleness, exposed to the penalty of our sin in its guilt and shamefulness, agonizing in the garden of Golgotha, mantled with shame in Pilate's hall and dying on the cross? Can you doubt the willingness of God to receive you when you hear his Son inviting, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest "; telling with divinely human pathos the story of the prodigal son; when you see Him looking with sad reproof on the erring Peter, and behold the smile of pardoning love illuminate the face shadowed with sorrow as it turns to the penitent thief? Can you doubt the gentleness of God when you behold His Son sitting at Bethany with Mary at His feet, and at supper with John on His bosom; when you gaze with wonder on the submissive surrender of His feet to the tears and kiss of the woman which was a sinner, and hear His benediction on that other woman who touched the hem of His garment, and His eulogy ever memorial of that other one still who would not ask the children's bread, but the waste and fallen crumbs of blessing? Can you doubt God's readiness most freely to forgive when you hear echoing forever through the gospel those eager words of Jesus, "Son, daughter, go in peace, thy sins be forgiven thee"? Can you doubt God's willingness to forget the past guilt and shame of your sinful life when you see the Son of man appearing to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, and hear his call to the chiefest dignity of the apostleship, and see him thenceforth the most cherished and blessed among His servants, and regard him now as the immortal teacher of the truth, the equal of the beloved evangelist, and second only to the Lord in the memory and reverence of all spiritual souls?

If you have ever risen from the perusal of the gospel, saying to yourself, I could go to Him, if He were only here I would dare to confess to Him all my sin and shame, and hope in His mercy and grace, expect His sympathy and support; then know, that as you would come to Him were He on the earth, so may you come to Him now, and when you come to Him, you come to God by Him. There is nothing concealed, there is nothing partially revealed in Him. He is the brightness of the glory, the character of the person, of God.

Who, then, conscious of his sin, judging his ill-desert, ashamed

of his defilement, will yet be afraid of God? Who need be afraid of Emmanuel, God with us? Who need reluctantly approach the Lord of Mary and the Syrophenician woman, of Saul and the penitent thief?

Is there one trembling soul in this place to-day thirsting after God and yet striving to hide from His face for fear of Him? Is there one orphaned spirit here longing for the Father's love and the Father's house, and in sad misgiving still wandering in a far country? Oh! look into the face of Jesus Christ and be reassured, and make haste to rise up and go to your Father, and say unto Him, Father, I have sinned! I have sinned!

And with the glowing picture which our Lord has lined upon the imagination of man forever, radiant with promise and welcome in your view, believe that, while yet a great way off, the Father will have compassion on you, and be swift to meet you and ready to cover you with the new robe of the Saviour's righteousness, and put upon your feet the sandals of prompt obedience, and set upon your uplifted hand the signet ring of heirship, and spread before you the festal board of welcome and of joy!

I seem to hear the voice of Jesus saying, Come! As an ambassador for God I stand, beseeching you in Christ's stead, and echo, Come! The Spirit in your heart is whispering, Come! The bride, the Church, is crying, with myriad tongues, Come. Hark! there are voices in the air, as of the multitude of the redeemed, shouting, Come! Floating on outspread wings around this hallowed place, ten thousand thousand angels are singing, Come! We pause, we wait, we listen! From the stillness of your yet reluctant soul shall we not hear the plaintive but confident response, I come, I come?

The Crowning of the Year.

A SERMON

By J. H. Rylance, D.D., NEW YORK, ON THANKSGIVING DAY, Nov. 29, 1877.

Thou crownest the year with thy goodness.-Psalms lxv: 11.

WE have been called once more by the joint authority of the State and National Governments to acknowledge through the public offices of religion "the good hand of God" which is still over us for good. With many, perhaps, the occasion will be observed merely as an hereditary custom, while by others the day will be spent, probably, in merely pleasurable indulgence or in riotous dissipation. Yet, in its ultimate moral effect, Thanksgiving Day never fails, I believe, to exercise a salutary influence upon the public temper and conscience, regarding it simply as a national proclamation of our faith in God and of our dependence upon His goodness and power; while its influence as a witness to our common Brotherhood as a people, is every year more widely felt, there is good ground to hope.

The recurrence of the festival carries our thoughts back to a period of Christian faith and simplicity with which our own age compares unfavorably, I fear. God was very near to men, and their sense of dependence upon His power and goodness was deep and real, when they instituted thanksgiving days and observed them in the spirit they did. I question if the political and philosophical faith of our own day would ever give birth to such an institution. Professing to believe in God in a polite and conventional way, we have come practically to deny Him by placing between Himself and us so many second causes, which we endow with an independent efficiency, and in which we place our trust rather than in God. Of course, no one can deny the presence of such second causes, for the Divine Being does not work visibly and directly in the government of the universe. There is a mysterious chain of dependence running up through every department of creation, the course and subtle connections of which it is the office of science to discover. All that the Theist or the Christian believer holds more than this, is the faith that the first link of that chain is anchored in the throne of God. To fix our gaze upon what are mere instrumentalities, and to revere and worship them as God, is a blunder we should pity in the savage, who, on beholding the busy whirl of a vast and complicated machine, ignorant of the skill that planned, constructed, and still controls it, should take the shafts and levers and pulleys to be so many automatic powers. But

all who substitute the laws of nature for the God of nature are guilty of such a folly. They are atheists in word, at least, if not in faith and conviction.

"The philosophy of the Holy Scriptures is of another character. Does the rain fall? It is our Father in heaven' who sends it upon the just and upon the unjust'! Is the earth robed in the garments of a varied beauty? It is God who so' clothes the grass of the field! Do day and night succeed each other? It is He that turneth the shadow of death into morning, and maketh the day dark with night'! Do the elements rage? 'Flames of fire are his messengers, and stormy winds fulfil His word'! Am I sick? His rod is upon me.' Am I in health? He healeth all my diseases.' All things serve Him, run on His messages, fulfil His commands, execute His counsels."-Watson.

The text recognizes this immanent presence and power of God in all the economy of nature. "In Him we live and move and have our being." "Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from the Father of lights." We cannot pause to vindicate such an assumption now, nor need we attempt it. Our presence here this morning, in the attitude of worship, declares our faith in the fatherhood and providence of God, who "crowneth the year with His goodness."

And since Thanksgiving Day was instituted first and chiefly as a sort of national "harvest-home" celebration, and considering the importance of our varied agricultural produce to our well-being as a people, we may fittingly mention, as the first occasion or ground of gratitude this morning, the abundant rewards with which Providence has again blessed the labors of the husbandman. We may fail to be moved by such benedictions, dwelling as we do amid the whirl of mechanical industries and the activities of commerce; yet these are very intimately and vitally dependent, as we know, upon what, after all, is the deepest fountain of our wealth and welfare-namely, the culture of the soil. For wheat, or bread, is emphatically "the staff of life," as we call it in familiar speech; insomuch that if famine, only in this one item of public sustenance, should ever visit us, wailing would go up from every cottage and mansion in the land at the overwhelming calamity. If we had ever beheld maddened crowds of men and women and children clamoring for bread when the supply had failed or been cut off; could we have seen, for example, the misery and the desolation which famine wrought of late in certain sections of India, where the soil was almost literally covered with the emaciated forms of those who had perished through want, we should have learned that bread is that one simple, permanent, universal necessity without which all our wealth were but rubbish; while in its social relations, this question of bread underlies every other. You cannot proceed to consider a second till this is provided for. All other material comforts and necessities even wait upon this; for you must feed the body