Dead or unconscious sin is still sin. The fire in a cave discovers reptiles and stirs them, but they were there before; the light does not create them. Let a beam of light, says Jean Paul Richter, through your window shutters into a darkened room, and you reveal a thousand motes floating in the air, whose existence was before unsuspected. So the law of God reveals our hidden faults, infirmities, imperfections, evil tendencies and desires, which cannot all be classed as acts of transgressions."

Rev. A. H. Strong, D. D.

"We preach more on the love of God, than on his holy rigor, (how natural that in this day!) on sins against the social state like theft, lying and adultery, more than on the sins that are purely spiritual, and an injury against God." Rev. N. J. Burton, D. D.

"We might go freezing, ages, give us fire, Thereafter we judge fire at its full worth,

And guard it safe through every chance, ye know!"

Robert Browning.

"So belief cometh of hearing, and hearing by the Word

of Christ." Rom. x. 17.

ANALYSIS OF CHAPTERS. (NEW TESTAMENT.)

THE difficulties of Bible reading increase as we come into the hallowed precincts of New Testament revelation. The conversations of the Son of Man, the pictorial beauty and rapidly changing scenes of the Acts of the Apostles, as the planting and training of the Christian Church is unfolded; the comprehensive and varied themes treated in the epistolary portions, each require most thoughtful and loving study, and in the last analysis will leave us in an attitude of wonder and worship at the unexplored tracts which stretch beyond our ken.

The first verse of the first Epistle of the beloved disciple, suggests more than it reveals: That which was from the beginning, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life.”

We can only give expression in human tones concerning Him. The deep sea-soundings of the fourth gospel: the abysses and altitudes of the veil-removing book which closes the sacred canon, we can utter but in part, and that a small part. Our Lord was a man of infinities. Ever and anon His words carry us

over into the vastness and uncircumscribed

Says a Chris

fullness of the invisible world. tian pastor, who recently passed away to his reward, from the city where these lines are written, "In many a word of Jesus given us, especially by St. John, it has sometimes seemed to me for the moment, that I could scarcely endure them, they are so fraught with seriousness, and tenderness, and foreboding, and moral firmness and majesty and I know not what besides; as a man speaking out of an infinite meditativeness; and out of infinite agitations of sensibility." Elsewhere he speaks of the conversations of Christ in this wise: My convictions of the Divinity of the Scriptures have been gained by these realistic touches, these imaginative reproductions of scenes and conversations in Jesus' life, more I think than in any other way. I shall never be able to describe the impression I have sometimes received of the depth, tenderness, and grandeur of Christ as a spiritual teacher, and a more than man, when I have been simply reading and listening to Him in His frequent dialogues with the people He happened to meet."

66

Our problem is to get out these effects in tone, to enrich others with their affluent, measureless freight of meaning. Let us not despair, at least until we have looked well and deeply into the possible adaptations of the

human voice, supplemented by the color-giving property of other portions of the human organism. What memories come to us of cadences now hushed forever here! It was like my mother's voice," said a friend, as a stranger's word touched a chord in his heart, which brought a dear but vanished personality back to him.

As in the selections from the Old Testament, we have given a series of readings upon Sin, in those which are added from the New, we shall arrange a similar number of passages upon Redemption, the conspicuous theme of this portion of the Bible.

I. Redemption as the Father's joy. Luke xv. chapter.

The two-leaved portal to the main parable of this chapter, is made up of the smaller parables on the lost sheep and the lost piece of money, both uttered in connection with the one on the prodigal son, by our Lord, as His answer to the charge of the Pharisees and Scribes that He was receiving sinners and eating with them. "The first two," says Trench, "set forth the seeking love of God, the last His receiving love." What depths of love in both these aspects are revealed in the brief compass of these heavenly gospels! For gospels in brief they are. The title Evangelium in Evangelio" which has been applied to the parable of the prodigal son, might with pro

priety be given to those which immediately precede it, and which, like the "porch of the throne" in Solomon's house, lead up to the height and summit of Divine love in the heart of God. The parabolic form of instruction reaches its culmination here.

Tennyson, in verses cast in the mould of perfect rhythm, has written of Christ's gift to us in this mode of teaching: :

Though truths in manhood darkly join,
Deep-seated in our mystic frame,
We yield all blessing to the name
Of Him that made them current coin;

For wisdom dealt with mortal powers,
Where truth in closest words shall fail,
When truth embodied in a tale

Shall enter in at lowly doors.

And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought;

Which he may read that binds the sheaf,
Or builds the house, or digs the grave,
And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef.

A

The eye of the Son is glancing deeply into the Father's heart in each of these parables. When the sheep is brought home, and the piece of money found, in both cases there is a calling together of friends and neighbors to share in the festival of rejoicing, but here the Father is in the background, as