yonder. Some one stands watching. He seems waiting for you. As you come up he stretches out his hand of help. His voice is full of tenderness, yet thrills with eternal strength. Who is it? The very one who accosted the mourner at the gate of Nain, and he says, "Weep not." Perhaps it is a worse grief than that. It may be a living home trouble that you can not speak about to your best friend. It may be some domestic unhappiness. It may be an evil suspicion. It may be the disgrace following in the footsteps of a son that is wayward, or a companion who is cruel, or a father that will not do right; and for years there may have been a vulture striking its beak into the vitals of your soul, and you sit there to-day feeling it is worse than death. It is. It is worse than death. And yet there is relief. Though the night may be the blackest, though the voices of hell may tell you to curse God and die, look up and hear the voice that accosted the woman of the text as it says, "Weep not." "Earth hath no sorrow That heaven can not cure." I learn, again, from all this that Christ is the master of the grave. Just outside the gate of the city, Death and Christ measured lances; and when the young man rose, Death dropped. Now we are sure of our resurrection. Oh, what a scene it was when that young man came back! The mother never expected to hear him speak again. She never thought that he would kiss her again. How the tears started, and how her heart throbbed, as she said, "Oh, my son, my son, my son!" And that scene is going to be repeated. It is going to be repeated ten thousand times. These broken family circles have got to come together. These extinguished household lights have got to be rekin dled. There will be a stir in the family lot in the cemetery, and there will be a rush into life at the command, "Young man, I say unto thee, Arise!" As the child shakes off the dust of the tomb, and comes forth fresh and fair and beautiful, and you throw your arms around it and press it to your heart, angel to angel will repeat the story of Nain, "He delivered him to his mother." Did you notice that passage in the text as I read it? "He delivered him to his mother." O ye troubled souls! O ye who have lived to see every prospect blasted, peeled, scattered, consumed! wait a little. The seed-time of tears will become the wheat harvest. In a clime cut of no wintry blast, under a sky palled by no hurtling tempest, and amidst redeemed ones that weep not, that part not, that die not, friend will come to friend, and kindred will join kindred, and the long procession that marches the avenues of gold will lift up their palms as again and again it is announced that the same one who came to the relief of this woman of the text came to the relief of many a maternal heart, and repeated the wonders of resurrection, and "delivered him to his mother." Oh, that will be the harvest of the world. That will be the coronation of princes. That will be the Sabbath of eternity. BARTERING FOR ETERNITY. 66 'Buy the truth, and sell it not."-Proverbs xxiii., 23. HRIST never forgot the occupation of the people to CHRIS whom he spake. His metaphors and illustrations were apt to be drawn from the every-day business of the people whom he addressed. Speaking to the fishermen, he said, "The Gospel is a net let down into the sea." Addressing himself to the farmers, he said, "A sower went forth to sow, and some of the seed fell on good ground, and some on thorny ground." That he might attract the attention of the shepherds, he tells the parable of the lost sheep, and how the shepherd went out in the wilderness to bring it home to the fold. In order that the plainest woman that ever mixed bread might not be in doubt as to what he meant, he said, "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, or yeast, which leavens the whole lump." Indeed, there were no learned allusions, there was no profound disquisition, there was no acute analysis, in the addresses of Christ. They were merely a plain talk from a heart overflowing with love for the people, in a way that all the people understood. There is hardly a style of mind that is not susceptible to illustration. One Sabbath I was preaching on an Indian reservation to an audience of Indians. I was trying, at that time, to impress upon them the fact that childhood generally indicated the character of manhood. They did not seem to understand until I told them that a crooked young tree makes a crooked old tree, and then their eyes flashed with intelligence. When my text says, "Buy the truth, and sell it not," it employs an illustration which ought to attract the attention of all those directly or indirectly engaged in merchandise. Would to God that we were all as wise in managing the matters of the soul as we are in worldly traffic! I want, this morning, to give some of the characteristics of a wise spiritual merchant. In the first place, I remark that the wise spiritual merchant will not neglect to take an account of stock. We are coming on toward the 1st of January, and all our business men will be absorbed. They who ordinarily go over at eight or nine o'clock in the morning to business will go at seven; and if you happen to be on the street some night at eleven or twelve o'clock, you will meet them; and if you ask, "Why are you coming home so late?" they will say, "We are taking an account of stock." Every wise business - man does that. Once a year all the goods must be handled, and every shelf must be ransacked, and the remnants must be unrolled, and the dusty bundles unwrapped, and every thing in the store must be upturned. Once a year the business man wants to know how things stand. He reviews the books, writes them up, and draws out on a fair balance-sheet all his worldly circumstances; so many goods, so many liabilities; so much capital that is comparatively worthless, so much that can be easily turned into cash; so many debts; so many bills out that are perfectly good, so many that are doubtful. In other words, he looks over all the affairs of the year, and knows just what position he occupies. Now, my friends, ought we not to be just as scrutinizing in the matters of the soul? The Roths Can it be Can it be childs or the Stewarts never did a business of such infinite importance as that going on in the heart of every man and woman in this audience. There are the goods-the faculties and energies and passions of your soul. There are the liabilities to temptation, to danger, and death. that we have never taken an account of stock? that we have been running this tremendous business for eternity, and never drawn out our affairs on a balancesheet? I know such a review is not pleasant. Neither does any merchant find it agreeable to take an account of stock. You all put the day off as long as you can. You do not know what it may reveal to you. You say, "There. may come up something in review that I don't want to know, and yet, after all, I must, as a business-man, attend to it." And though you put it off as long as you can, you after a while say, "Boys, we'll go and take an account of stock." Many a man has been surprised, at the close of that operation, to find how poorly he was off. Ah! it is just as unpleasant to review our spiritual condition. The fact is, we are insolvent. We owe debts we can never pay. We have been running this business of the soul so poorly that we have got to be wound up. We can not pay one cent on a dollar. We can not answer for one of ten thousand of our transgressions. There has never, in worldly affairs, been such a miserable failure in Wall Street or State Street as we have made in spiritual affairs. We owe God every thing. We have paid him nothing; some of us have never tried to pay him any thing. But sometimes, when a man is thoroughly cornered in business matters, and he says, "I must stop payment," while he is sitting in his store or office thoroughly discour aged, there is a rap at the door. "Come in," he says; an |