too many have, that we could do very well without God's help, if God would let us alone; then we are heaping up ruin and shame for ourselves and for our children after us. Ruin and shame, I say. We are apt to forget how easy and common it is for God to turn the wisdom of men into folly; to frustrate the tokens of the liars, and make the prophets mad. How men blow great bubbles, and God bursts them with the slightest touch. How, when all seems well, and men cry peace and safety, sudden destruction comes upon them unawares. How, when men say, 'Soul, take thine ease, eat, 'drink, and be merry thou hast much goods laid up for many years,' God answers, Thou fool, ' this night shall thy soul be required of thee.'

My friends, we see God doing thus in these very days, by great nations, by great branches of industry. Look at the American war, look at the Manchester cotton famine, and see how God can confound the strong and cunning, and blind their eyes to the ruin which is coming, till it is come in all its might. And then think, if it be so easy for him to confound such as them, is it less easy for him to confound you and me, if we begin to fancy that we can do without him, and ask, Doth God perceive it? Or is there knowledge ' in the Most High? We are they that ought to speak. Who is Lord over us?'

6

Yes, in this sense God is, indeed, a jealous God, who will not give his honour to another. And a blessed thing for men it is that God is a jealous God, that he will punish us for trusting in anything but him,-will punish us for trusting in ourselves, or in our wisdom, or in wealth, or in science, or in armies and navies, or in constitutions and laws; in anything, in short, save him the living God.

For if he left us alone to go our own way without trusting or fearing him, we should surely go down and down (as the Chinese seem to have gone down), generation after generation, till we became only a mere cunning and spiteful sort of animals, hateful and hating one another. But when we are chastened for our folly, we are chastened by him that we may be partakers of his holiness; that we may be his children, looking up to him as our father, from whom comes every good and perfect gift; the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness or shadow of turning; and who therefore will and can give us his children light, more and more to understand those his invariable and eternal laws, by which he has made earth and heaven; who has given us his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and will with him likewise freely give us all things.

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SERMON XVII.

THE GOD OF THE RAIN.

(Fifth Sunday after Easter.)

DEUT. xi. 11, 12.

The land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven. A land which the Lord thy God careth for the eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year.

I

TOLD you, when I spoke of the earthquakes of the Holy Land, that it seems as if God had meant specially to train that strange people the Jews, by putting them into a country where they must trust Him, or become cowards and helpless.; that so they might learn not to fear the powers of Nature which the heathen worshipped, but to fear him the living God.

In this chapter is another instance of the same. They were to be an agricultural people. Their very worship was (if you can understand such a thing now-a-days) to be agricultural. Pentecost was a feast of the first fruits of the harvest. The Feast of Tabernacles was a great national harvest

home. The Passover itself, though not at first an agricultural festival, became one by the waving of the Paschal sheaf, which gave permission to the people to begin their spring harvest ;-so thoroughly were they to be an agricultural and cattlefeeding people. They were going into a good land, a land of milk and honey and oil olive; a land of vines and figs and pomegranates; a rich land: but a most uncertain land; a land which might yield a splendid crop one year, and be almost barren the next.

It was not as the land of Egypt,—a land which was, humanly speaking, sure to be fertile, because always supplied with water, brought out of the Nile by dykes and channels which spread in a network over every field, and where-as I believe is done now-the labourer turned the water from one land to the other simply by moving the earth with his foot.

It was a mountain land, a land of hills and valleys, and drank water of the rain of heaven. A land of fountains of water, which required to be fed continually by the rain. In that hot climate, it depended entirely on God's providence from week to week, whether a crop could grow.

Therefore it was a land which the Lord cared for—a land which needed his special help, and it had it. The eyes of the Lord God were always

'upon it, from the beginning of the year unto the 'end of the year.'

Beautiful, simple, noble, true words-deeper than all the learned words, however true they may be (and true they are, and to be listened to with respect), which men talk about the laws of Nature and of weather. Who would change them for all the scientific phrases in the world?

The eyes of the Lord were upon the land. It needed his care; and therefore his care it had.

Therefore the Jew was to understand from his first entry into the land, that his prosperity depended utterly on God. The laws of weather, by which the rain comes up off the sea, were unknown to him. They are all but unknown to us now. But they were known to God. Not a drop could fall without his providence and will; and therefore they were utterly in his power.

'And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I com'mand you this day, to love the Lord your God, ' and to serve him with all your heart and with 'all your soul, that I will give you the rain of 'your land in his due season, the first rain and ' the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy 'corn, and thy wine, and thine oil. And I will 'send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full. Take heed to your