we prayed for him; I felt deeply the awful position in which he stood-dying fast, and, by his own confession, on the way to hell; and, whether from natural feeling or spiritual influence, I cannot tell, but I was enabled to wrestle with God for mercy on his behalf. I called to see him after, but he appeared to be very weary, and I did not much question him. On the next day (Friday) I heard from his landlady that about eight o'clock on the preceding night he had become very quiet, and professed to have found peace. I knew nothing was too hard for the Lord, and could but thank Him for the hope that He had heard and answered our prayers. I saw him in the evening; his voice was very muffled, and I could not understand what he said. I begged him to say yes or no, and then I should know what he meant. "Do you feel that your sins are pardoned ?" "Can't say that." 66 Do I rightly understand that you do not feel your sins are pardoned ?" He shook his head, and said, "No." This is all I can say from personal observation. I called on Saturday morning, but, as one of our city missionaries was with him, I did not stay. In the evening, as I was going to our prayermeeting at the wooden church, a message came that he wished to see me, but as I did not anticipate so speedy a change, I did not give up my intention of going to the prayer-meeting, and promised to see the poor man early in the morning. About eight o'clock, however, the message was brought that he was gone. I went to his friends, and one I found was full of hopes that he was gone to rest, because in answer to a question twice repeated during the night, Are you happy ?" he said, "Yes." But the others were very silent. He had confessed to them such continual deceit; going into other rooms and taking money out of the pockets; and just because, when offended, he did not choose tol That state is surely best which keeps you dependent on God, and thankful to Him; and so you shall find it in the end. Reader, trust thou in the Father of all mercies, and the God of all com give vent to his passion in words, that he had cut up the wearing apparel of those living with him, and sat by, not only hearing others suspected and blamed, but giving sentence himself that they ought to be punished. As to his being happy, or saying he was happy at the last, although it may satisfy those who vainly hope that nearly everybody goes to heaven, it will not satisfy a child of God jealous for his Master's glory; his intellect was, of course, weak, and Satan knows well how to blind his slaves. As to the peace he obtained whilst we were praying, I must say, that if his after-life had given evidence of it, I should have hoped that our gracious God had visited him in mercy; but as he told me he could not feel his sins were pardoned, and did not appear to be exercised about it, I conclude that it was an effort of nature, thinking we were praying for him gave comfort, and not the answer to our prayer. And as to the fear and distress which he felt on Thursday, we know that poor Judas "repented himself," and yet was lost; if he had been wrung with agony on account of the dishonour which he had brought upon the cause of Jesus, it would have been different; but the bare fear of going to hell is nothing to build our hopes upon. For my own part, I feel it is a solemn warning. If knowledge of Scripture truth and Scripture expressions would save, he had plenty; if attendance at a place of worship was of any avail, he was most regular; if an outside morality and apparently consistent walk and conversation could deceive the heartsearching God, then he would have hope; but the secret sins, the hidden love of revenge, and all the evil-the allowed, unjudged evil-of his heart was all known to God. Reader, may you and I never have the hand-writing against us, "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." Bristol. H. W. THE SCHOOLBOY'S RETURN; OR, THE PARTING WORD, REMEMBER ME! THE holidays were long-too long-and my boy had become restless and unruly. Play, like everything else, has its day; and the loss of a regular course of occupation will tell upon the heart and conduct even of a child. You may seek to occupy, and interest, and amuse; still, after all, it is neither one thing nor the other. You want him to have relaxation. You want home to be home, and school to be school. The vacation you wish really to be a holiday. Still, as I have said, the holidays were too long; and, after going the round again and again of amusement, he became listless and weary. At times he would express a wish to be at school again. This I overheard, and felt it to be childlike. not the pain which the cord had put him to. "Tis love that breaks the bone." Time passed on until the day before he was to take his departure. That day he was sick. I knew why. He felt his disobedience; he knew his severance from home again was at hand, and he sorrowed at heart. He ate nothing, or next to nothing, all day; his head ached; but I felt sure that, of the two, his heart ached most. He wished to go to bed, and there lay the greater part of the day. Poor fellow! my bowels yearned over him, and I felt half disposed to wish I had no children, that I might be saved these acute feelings. At length, however, he became On the morrow we set out; and, inboisterous with the servants, and un-asmuch as he had his parents with him, amiable with his brothers and sisters. he was most cheerful the whole journey. He took advantage of my temporary He had yet two days before he finally absence, and was guilty of some two or went to school, and, during that time, three acts which I could not possibly had another little brother to see, and pass by unheeded. I strove to show much to interest and amuse. him the impropriety of his conduct, and urged, in particular, the speedy termination of his holidays, and his again being separated from his home, with all that he held near and dear. All was without effect. He pouted his lips, and was exceedingly pert, going so far as to say, "He did not care.' Argument I found to be in vain; appeals were equally in vain. His conduct had now assumed that of defiance. I durst not pass it by. If he got the mastery once, that mastery I knew he would maintain, and the evil influence would possess my other children. I felt I must chastise him. With a cord I laid upon him sundry stripes; those stripes made a slight impression upon his back and shoulders, but they cut deep into my very heart; so much so that I was completely unmanned. A sight of this seemed to do tenfold more in bringing the child to repentance and a plea for forgiveness than the stripes. It was the wound he had inflicted upon me that touched his heart, and brought him to tears, and At length the parting hour arrived. He had taken leave of his mother, and, as I was taking him to the railwaystation in a cab, he suddenly looked up, and with a tone and look I shall never forget while Reason retains her seat, said, "Give my love to mamma, and tell her to REMEMBER ME!" Oh! that appeal; oh! that, "Remember me;” and after, too, what had so recently occurred, it pierced like an arrow to my heart. It seemed to harrow up my very soul. "Remember me!" Instantly my thoughts were carried from the busy, bustling, noisy London, to the summit of Calvary, and there in a moment was pictured before me that wondrous scene of nearly two thousand years ago. Between two thieves my Lord and Saviour hung; and, 'mid the jeers and the scoffings of those guilty gazers, I beheld a mighty change suddenly pass over the countenance of one of the malefactors. Smitten to the very heart's core by Him whose sacred province it is to convince of sin, he is of a sudden awakened to a con sciousness of his sin, his guiltiness. He, dear son? is he a pleasant child? for turns, he rebukes his fellow-sufferer since I spake against him, I do earnestly with," We indeed suffer justly, but this remember him still. My bowels are man hath done nothing amiss.' Then troubled for him. I will surely have with plaintive look and bleeding heart, mercy upon him, saith the Lord." He he cries, " Lord, remember me when who hath said, "How shall I give thee thou comest into thy kingdom.' "Re-up, Ephraim ? how shall I deliver thee, member me—even ME, poor, vile, guilty Israel? how shall I make thee as as I am; Lord, remember me, even Admah? how shall I set thee as ZeME." Oh! the power of that word. Oh! | boim? mine heart is turned within me, the condescension, the grace, the love my repentings are kindled together. of that precious Saviour, as, turning to I will not execute the fierceness of mine that previous railer, he exclaims, and anger, I will not return to destrou that without NOW READY, A SERMON, PREACHED at "THE CIRCUS," On Sunday Evening, July 1, 1860, BY THE REV. DAVID A. DOUDNEY, Incumbent of St. Luke's, Bedminster, Bristol. LONDON: W. H. COLLINGRIDGE, CITY PRESS, 117 to 120, PORTSMOUTH: T. BATCHELOR, HIGH STREET.; He was whole-so despised the Physi--Extracted from an Old Magazine. cian. THE TEMPTATION OF CHRIST IN THE WILDERNESS. WE come, then, to the second tempta- 66 In tracing the parallelism, however, which I have pointed out as existing between the temptation of Christ and the temptation of our first parentsboth of which exactly correspond with the apostle John's analysis of sin into "the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," the least obvious point in the parallelism undoubtedly has reference to the present temptation. How closely the first temptation, which we have been considering, and in which the suggestion of the tempter is that our Lord should command stones to be made bread for the purpose of satisfying His hunger, answers to his first word to Eve, "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" need hardly be pointed out; nor, further, how this word, taken in connexion with the fact that the woman saw that the tree was good for food," involved an appeal to "the lust of the flesh." And equally plain, in this second temptation, is the parallelism between Satan's second word to Jesus, "Cast thyself down (a temptation to presumption) and his second word to Eve, "Ye shall not surely die," which must, like the former, be taken in connexion with the fact, that she saw that the tree was “pleasant to the eye," thus involving a similar appeal to "the lust of the eyes." But how, it may be asked, does Satan's suggestion to Jesus, "Cast thyself down, involve any appeal to "the lust of the eyes?" There is confessedly a difficulty here, and one which has, with some commentators, weighed so heavily that, while allowing the existence of the general parallelism, they have felt constrained to adopt St. Luke's order of the temptations; thus making the last temptation address itself to “the lust of the eyes," and this second temptation rather to "the pride of life." This expedient, however, I am not at all prepared to fall in with; not only because it is a departure from the true order, but also because the last temptation seems to me to be most obviously an appeal to "the pride of life," or the passion of ambition and worldly glory. Besides, though not indeed obvious at first sight, I nevertheless think that the parallelism holds good here as truly as in regard to the other temptations. We must remember that, though" the lust of the eyes" exists in ourselves, it is for the most part fed through the eyes of others. It is not, for example, nearly so much to gratify their own eyes that the votaries of fashion spend so large a portion of their time and money in rich attire, as that they hope it will render them objects of admiration in the eyes of others. It is not merely to gratify their own tastes that the rich and great have their "ceiled houses tuously furnished, their troops of servants, and their splendid equipages; but because, for the most part, they have no other, no better claim upon the homage and respect of their fellowmen. No; "the lust of the eyes," I repeat, exists in ourselves, but the altar of its idolatry, before which all its so sump 66 to the test, show me that thy confidence is not misplaced; and instead of waiting and hungering here in the wilderness, cast thyself down from the pinnacle of the temple, in the sight of all the people, so shall they and I be alike constrained to acknowledge that thou art indeed the Son of God. For is it not written, He shall give His angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone?'" 6 sacrifices are laid, are the eyes of others. I ever thou shalt need it?—then put Him Now, when Satan would have had our Lord cast himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, we must bear in mind that, be that "pinnacle" what it may,—whether "Herod's royal portico, | overhanging the valley of Kedron," as ALFORD thinks, or, as WORDSWORTH maintains, "the apex of the tympanum of the temple," it was doubtless some eminence from which a person thereon standing would be visible if not audible to a large concourse of people below. Hence, as OLSHAUSEN correctly observes, Mark, in this quotation of Scripture, "The point of the second temptation the vile hypocrisy of Satan. In what lies in the thought of parading the gift visible form he first appeared to our of working miracles." "Cast thyself Lord we are not informed. Some have down," that is to say, Spring down supposed that he came in the form and from this pinnacle, as if thou camest semblance of a venerable hermit, some down from heaven, and thus announce as a doctor of the law, and some again thyself with becoming dignity." And as a celestial messenger. But whatever thus we may, I think, discover "the may have been his outward form, it is at lust of the eyes" in this temptation as least certain that he here assumes the truly as in either of those instances of moral disguise of an angel of light. He ostentatious display and worldly vanity surrounds himself as it were with holy to which I have alluded. things; he conducts Jesus into the holy city, places Him on a pinnacle of the holy temple, and even encourages Him by God's holy word. Yet his object is altogether unholy; he turns these holy things to an unholy use, he would cast Jesus from the height of the holy temple into the depth of his own hell, and he wrests God's holy word for the purpose of destroying His holy child. Well does Jesus say of him, "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him." Even when he speaks God's words they become a lie on his false lips; "for he is a liar, and the father of it, But to return from this digression. If Satan had failed in his first temptation in other respects, he had not at least failed to learn that the weapon with which Christ had so successfully resisted him was "the sword of the Spirit;" and he now, therefore, like a bold and determined combatant, closes with Him, and endeavours to wrest it from His grasp. Hence he does not, as on the former occasion, simply offer a suggestion, but pretends to support it by a quotation from Scripture! Cast thyself down, for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning thee and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone." Well may good Bishop HALL exclaim, "What is this I see? Satan himself with a Bible under his arm, and a text in his mouth?" Yes, beloved, so true is the old proverb, that "the devil can quote Scripture when it suits his purpose." It is as though he had said, "Dost thou intend to abide so strictly by what is written? Is thy faith in God so firm and unshakable?-then I know yet another word that will suit thee well. Dost thou, strong in faith, rely implicitly upon the help of thy God, even as a man? Art thou so assured of His assistance when " The Mark, again, Satan's boldness. very psalm he quotes, the 91st, is emphatically faith's defence against his own hellish might; by which doubtless, in times past, his kingdom had again and again been shaken; and yet he dares in his malice and presumption to turn this well-known promise of angelprotection for mortal man, to the destruction of this wonderful Son of man, who in this conflict will assume to be nothing more. And thus, while in his first temptation Satan displayed a serpent-like cunning, in this his lionlike boldness is equally discernible. Happily both are in vain; and what is |