before you rise from this Christian séance, I want you tɑ promise me you will be satisfied with the Divine revelation until the light of the Eternal Throne breaks upon your vision. Do not go after the Witch of En-dor. Do not sit down at table-rappings, either in sport or in dead earnest. Have your tables so well made and their legs so even that they will not tip and rattle. If the table must move, let it be under the offices of industrious housewifery. Teach your children there are no ghosts to be seen or heard in this world save those which walk on two feet or four, human or bestial. Remember that spiritualism at the best is a useless thing; for if it tells what the Bible reveals it is a superfluity, and if it tells what the Bible does not reveal it is a lie. Instead of going out to get other people to tell your fortune, tell your own fortune by putting your trust in God and doing the best you can. I will tell your fortune: "All things work together for good to them who love God." Insult not your departed friends by asking them to come down and scrabble under an extension-table. Remember that there is only one Spirit whose dictation you have a right to invoke, and that is the holy, blessed, and omnipotent Spirit of God. Hark! He is rapping now, not on a table or the floor, but rapping on the door of your heart; and every rap is an invitation to Christ and a warning of judgment to come. Oh, grieve him not away! Quench him not. He has been all around you this morning. He was all around you last night. He has been around you all your lives. Hark! There comes a voice dropping through the roof, breaking through the window, filling all this house from door to door and from floor to ceiling with tender and overmastering intonation, saying, "My spirit shall not always strive."

SNOW-WATER AND ALKALI INSUFFICIENT.

"If I wash myself with snow-water, and should I cleanse my hands in alkali, yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me."-Job ix., 30, 31.

A

LBERT BARNES-honored be his name on earth and in heaven-went straight back to the original writing of my text, and translated it as I have now quoted it, giving substantial reasons for so doing. Athough we know better, the ancients had an idea that in snow-water there was a special power to cleanse, and that a garment washed and rinsed in it would be as clean as clean could. be; but if the plain snow-water failed to do its work, then they would take lye or alkali and mix it with oil, and under that preparation they felt that the last impurity would certainly be gone. Job, in my text, in most forceful figure sets forth the idea that all his attempts to make himself pure before God were a dead failure, and that, unless we are abluted by something better than earthly liquids and chemical preparations, we are loathsome and in the ditch. "If I wash myself with snow-water, and should I cleanse my hands in alkali, yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me."

You are now sitting for your picture. I turn the camera obscura of God's word full upon you, and I pray that the sunshine falling through the sky-light may enable me to take you just as you are. Shall it be a flattering picture, or shall it be a true one? You say, "Let it be a

true one." The first profile that was ever taken was taken, three hundred and thirty years before Christ, of Antigonus. He had a blind eye, and he compelled the artist to take his profile so as to hide the defect in his vision. But since that invention, three hundred and thirty years before Christ, there have been a great many profiles. Shall I tonight give you a one-sided view of yourselves, a profile? or shall it be a full-length portrait, showing you how you stand before heaven and earth and hell? If God will help me by his almighty grace, I shall give you that last kind of a picture.

When I first entered the ministry, I used to write my sermons all out and read them, and run my hand along the line lest I should lose my place. I have hundreds of those manuscripts. Shall I ever preach them? Never; for in those days I was somehow overmastered with the idea I heard talked all around about of the dignity of human nature, and I adopted the idea, and I evolved it, and I illustrated it, and I argued it; but coming on in life, and having seen more of the world, and studied better my Bible, I find that that early teaching was faulty, and that there is no dignity in human nature, until it is reconstructed by the grace of God. Talk about vessels going to pieces on the Skerries, off Ireland! There never was such a shipwreck as in the Gihon and the Hiddekel, rivers of Eden, where our first parents foundered. Talk of a steamer going down with five hundred passengers on board! What is that to the shipwreck of twelve hundred million souls? We are by nature a mass of uncleanness and putrefaction, from which it takes all the omnipotence and infinitude. of God's grace to extricate us. "If I wash myself with snow-water, and should I cleanse my hands in alkali, yet

shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me."

I remark, in the first place, that some people try to cleanse their soul of sin in the snow-water of fine apologies. Here is one man who says, "I am a sinner; I confess that: but I inherited this. My father was a sinner, my grandfa ther, my great-great-grandfather, and all the way back to Adam, and I couldn't help myself." My brother, have you not, every day in your life, added something to the original estate of sin that was bequeathed to you? Are you not brave enough to confess that you have sometimes surrendered to sin, which you ought to have conquered? I ask you whether it is fair play to put upon our ancestry things for which we ourselves are personally responsible? If your nature was askew when you got it, have you not sometimes given it an additional twist? Will all the tombstones of those who have preceded us make a barricade high enough for eternal defenses? I know a devout man who had blasphemous parentage. I know an honest man whose father was a thief. I know a pure man whose mother was a waif of the street. The hereditary tide may be very strong, but there is such a thing as stemming it. The fact that I have a corrupt nature is no reason why I should yield to it. The deep stains of our soul can never be washed out by the snow-water of such insufficient apology.

Still further, says some one, "If I have gone into sin, it has been through my companions, my comrades, and associates; they ruined me. They taught me to drink. They took me to the gambling-hell. They plunged me into the house of sin. They ruined my soul." I do not believe it. God gave to no one the power to destroy you or me. If

a man is destroyed, he is self-destroyed, and that is always so. Why did you not break away from them? If they had tried to steal your purse, you would have knocked them down; if they had tried to purloin your gold watch, you would have riddled them with shot; but when they tried to steal your immortal soul, you placidly submitted to it. Those bad fellows have a cup of fire to drink; do not pour your cup into it. In this matter of the soul, ev ery man for himself. That those persons are not fully re sponsible for your sin, I prove by the fact that you still consort with them. Your affinities are with them; you stay with them, and there is some prospect that you will stay with them forever. Perhaps you may have adjoining dungeons. Perhaps you may be fastened to opposite ends. of the same chain. Perhaps you may carry different parts of the same groan. You can not get off by blaming them. Though you gather up all these apologies; though there were a great flood of them; though they should come down with the force of the melting snows from Lebanon and the Himalayas, they could not wash out one stain of your immortal soul.

Still further, some persons apologize for their sins by saying, "We are a great deal better than some people. You see people all around about us that are a great deal worse than we." You stand up columnar in your integrity, and look down upon those who are prostrate in their habits and crimes. What of that, my brother? If I failed through recklessness and wicked imprudence for ten thousand dol lars, is the matter alleviated at all by the fact that somebody else has failed for one hundred thousand dollars, and somebody else for two hundred thousand dollars? Oh no. If I have the neuralgia, shall I refuse medical attendance