That prodigal son could and the vacant seat until

before, even in your very best days. not be restored to his father's love he set his footsteps towards home. There was no blessing for him in the "far country." Nothing could possibly be done for him while he was in the swine-yards, or holding in his filthy hands the wretched husks. He was a swinish creature while he was there. First it is "I will arise; I will go"; then restoring love meets him outside the gate and brings him in to the fatted calf, the ring and the table. That parable of the Prodigal Son has a world of sound theology in it. No restoration to the prodigal until he himself comes back, and no recovery to the backslider until he comes to pray for mercy and sets his face towards Christ, and with tears begs to be restored again to the love of Him whom he has betrayed!

I might dwell for a moment (as a third illustration) upon the office of a picture-restorer. He takes an old painting, which might have been quite a masterly production, which may have been a masterpiece of Guido or Correggio or Raphael, and which had been cast aside. The colors had lost their brightness and had grown dim, and the painting seemed to have lost all its comeliness. The restorer sets to work and removes the over-laying dust and accumulation of dirt, and he brings out the colors vividly again—a delicate process, and one by which sometimes a valuable picture starts into new life and beauty. Oh, brother! does not the canvas of thy heart and daily conduct need that kind of restoration? Are not the hues getting dim, the colors losing their brightness? Is not the resemblance to Christ overlaid, and to a great degree hidden out of view so that it is not distinguishable? Oh, if Jesus Christ would come in as a Restorer, bringing out again the lineaments of holiness, there would be a great many of you that would need to "sit to Him!"

The sin of backsliding is an awful sin. It figures so prominently in the Word that, turning to a Bible text-book recently, I was startled almost to see the large number of cases recited, and the maledictions pronounced upon it. Then, too, in studying the narratives of backsliding in the Bible, I discover this, that men often break just where they seemed strongest. For instance, Noah was a Puritan; yet Noah lies on his back drunk. Moses is the synonym of meekness and patience; Moses grows enraged, and smites the rock too often. Solomon is the synonym of wisdom; yet he plays the fool with women and the wine-cup! John is the representative of love; and John it was that asked Christ to bring down a shower of fire on the little Samaritan village! Peter is the brave, heroic disciple; but Peter turns coward at the sneer of a servant-girl. All these men broke right where they thought themselves strong. Christians sometimes do the same thing. Where they think

themselves strong the enemy breaks through. All those men I have spoken of were restored. I hope poor old Solomon was. I think he must have written the book of Ecclesiastes after he was restored. But for this restoration the Master goes out on errands of kindness, as the father sent the man to California to seek his son, almost as one would go to a morgue to see if a certain one was alive or dead! It must have been hard for Christ to go out after such lost, sinning children as He did -but he still does it! He goes straight after them and restores them; and if backsliding is a terrible thing, it is a glorious thing that there is a backsliders' Restorer in Christ Jesus. Well, to what does Christ restore the backslider when he is penitent and seeks recovery? He restores him to his true place, which was vacant. He restores him to usefulness. The man is ready again for duty, and feels like living a life of some value to himself and to others. He restores to him peace of conscience. No inconsistent church member ever had any peace of conscience. I tell you, young people, you may run away from a prayer-meeting to a ball if you choose; there will be a sting and a prick the next morning when you wake up and think, "Last night I deliberately denied my Lord and Master, and did what He disapproved." When the sound of the revel has died out, another sound-that of conscience-will come in and say, "You know you did wrong, and Christ knows it." Peace of conscience never comes to a man out of the path of duty. Those fallen men that have been lately brought to the tribunal of civil justice had been tried and punished fifty times before in the court of conscience. That was only the external pronunciamento from the tribunal which conscience had already brought in a hundred times. There is no peace in wickedness to the wicked-doer, whether he be a church member or not; but peace of conscience comes through pardon and a voluntary return to the place once forsaken. Oh, what joy there is in coming back to health when we have lain a long time on the sick bed, until we pitied our own poor thin fingers and pale lips! The street was strange to us, and our deserted place in the counting-room or at the fireside was like a foreign country. The first time we come out in the air what a tingle it has! and when we meet our friends again for the first time we feel as if just introduced to them. We are restored. Would that every backslider that has come to this church this morning sick, sick, sick, would feel so sick of himself that he would put out his hand to Christ and go home again in the first stages of restoration! "Restore unto me the joys of Thy salvation." That is the fourth point I speak of. The restored backslider goes back to his peace of conscience and to his old place of duty, and once more has the joys of salvation. And he has no power for good while in a state of backsliding. He

is of no use while in that state. He not only has no inward peace, but no external influence. The result is that a church full of backsliders is just as inefficient as ten thousand invalids in a campaign. The general may call the muster-roll; he may send orders to "advance"; but if half his men have deserted and the other half are in the hospital, what chance has he in the field? Just so the Master may be calling His people to a life of activity, but if a part have deserted and a part are on their backs in a spiritual decline, there is no response and no outcoming. First of all, there must be restoration. The deserter must come back to his post, and the invalid must stalk out of the hospital; then the army is fit for service. How many deserters are there here this morning? How many that feel the whole head and the whole heart sick with sin? Jesus alone can restore you.

Now, then, I would address a word to those yet unconverted. I have said so much in reference to backsliding members of Christ's Church, because I feel how vital it is that they should realize their need of restoration, and how important that they should be directed to Christ as a Restorer. They should feel also a longing to be restored, which must be bred from deep disgust and dissatisfaction with themselves. If we would direct half the censure which we pass upon the frailty of others towards our own weaknesses and besetting sins, and our own cowardice and neglect of duty, you may depend upon itwe should be the healthier and the happier. I want to turn you in upon yourselves this morning in the attitude of self-condemnation, that you may be ready to say, "Oh, blessed Jesus, come to-day and recover my soul!" The only hope for every unconverted person here for restoration from the ruin of sin and for recovery from the guilt of sin is in CHRIST. Again and again I proclaim this. If you want to try another method, you will try it to your sorrow. You will come back to it finally; and you may as well start with this idea, that Christ only can forgive your sins; that Christ only can give you power to resist sin; that Christ only can save you. And if you are ever restored, it must be in this world. The very word may suggest this idea to you, "May not Christ restore all or any in eternity to heaven? Does not that word have a squinting towards a restoration in eternity?" No! I do not see the faintest grounds for it. A perversion of this text in the direction of that error has, rather more than usual, thrust itself towards the front lately. I know nothing about eternity, and you can know nothing about eternity, but what is revealed in this divine Book. I find the Lord Jesus Christ presented from beginning to end as a Restorer of human souls in this world on the two conditions of repentance and faith. I find not a hint of any restoration from the realm of darkness to the realm

of everlasting glory. Probation is in the fore-front of God's Word for this world. I find no hint of a probationary state in the world to come. If I do not find the doctrine of future probation here, it is of no account to me that any speculative theologian may evolve it out of his own brain. If it is not in God's Word, that is enough. Now, on the other hand, I open this Book and find some very sharply distinct assertions that when death leaves us judgment finds us, and probation is ended. I discover when I look at these pages-(and I think we ought to read them tremblingly as God's loving utterances of warning)-1 discover that future punishment is spoken of invariably as without end. I am not going to speculate this morning on what it is or what its character is, but it is spoken of in the Word as a penalty laid down upon the transgressor as a banishment from God, as the suffering due to the sinner. It is declared that "the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment"; and there are several other passages of the same solemn purport. Not one of them gives any hint that after the banishment cometh a restoration to final blessedness. Nay, more, I find a direct condemnation of that modern theory in God's Word, where our Saviour drew that most pathetic and powerful picture of the wrath of the world to come, and described Lazarus uplifted into the bosom of the Patriarch Abraham, and the man that had the good things of this world (and grew worse by means of them) crying out in torment. The poor rich man is asking that he may be restored to some small comfort. He puts the doctrine of "restoration" there to practical test; but the answer is, "A great gulf is fixed, so that . they who would go from you to us cannot cross." If Jesus Christ knew everything (as He did), He must certainly have known such a tremendous truth as that that "gulf" would yet be bridged, and that He was to bridge it! If this Book is so full of salvation for this world, why is there not one line revealing salvation from hell in the world to come? Can it be possible that a doctrine on which thousands hang their hopes of eternity has not a single line here hinting it, when the Bible is so full of rich offers of restoration and salvation in this life?

But imagine a man restored form hell after he had been punished for centuries according to this theory. He is ushered into heaven. They are chanting the song of redemption. He hears them sing, "Worthy of the Lamb that is slain." He has no word of praise for Christ. Jesus has done nothing for him. He has "served out his time" down there, and Satan has been purifying him for hundreds of years, until he has got him in a fit state for heaven. What does that soul owe to Christ? He owes all rather to him who has been putting him through this purifying process in hell, and making him fit for the "better country, even the heavenly."

Charles G. Finney, in one of those tremendous philippics of his against error, used sometimes to describe a "jail delivery" from the world of woe, when a multitude of spirits blasted and blackened came up to the gate of heaven and clamored for admission! The archangel, looking over the gate, inquires, "Who is there? Why is this uproar?" And they reply, "We are from hell! We have served out our time! Let us in!" That is the doctrine of restoration! Who here expects to hang his hopes of eternity on that? Who will take the cross of Christ that is put right before him, trample on it in his folly and his madness, and then risk salvation in eternity? Oh, brethren, there is a Restorer here! There is a Restorer here! But I know of no restorer beyond the grave.

I sometimes take up and read in that beautiful book of my friend Kennan that description of a scene away off in Kamschatka, where a portion of their company had been lost in the snow for weeks. He and a few others set out on a journey of two hundred miles to find them. Mr. Kennan tells us that the very feet of the dogs left blood prints on the snow. They pushed on two hundred miles toward the Anadyr River, by the light only of the aurora borealis, hoping to find them. He was seeking to save the lost. He tells us, in an Arctic midnight, when the thermometer was 40 degrees below zero, when they had endeavored to get a little warmth around the fire of a few roots gathered by the way, he heard a sharp halloo across the waste of snow. "We quitted the little fire and hastened in the direction of the sound, and we found one of our guides standing by a little iron pipe thrust out of the snow-bank. I hurried up to it, leaned over it and shouted down that pipe. Listen! Up from beneath the snow I heard, in my familiar native tongue, the words, Who's there!' Then," adds Kennan, "when he told us how to find our way into that temporary place in which they were hidden under the snow, and we entered the cavern and saw my companions gathered around the fire in that spot, so near to perishing (where they would have perished if I had not reached them), my nerves had got strung up to such a state of tension during the long journey that in fifteen minutes I was as powerless as a child, and sunk back unable to speak or move. The tide of joy broke him down. There is many a soul whom Jesus has rescued from death, and in his first glimpse of glory he has broken down like my friend Kennan. Why, if you would not think me irreverent, I would say there must be a time when the Lord Jesus Himself would be ready to "break down with joy"! May there be such a breaking in our hearts this morning when we beckon for our loving Lord, until we can exclaim, "Oh, the Restorer is come!" Then each one of us can say, "He restoreth my soul! He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake." To Him, and to Him alone, be all the glory!