strength out of his life, unstrung some nerve, put some pain in ; but the suffering of a decaying body was so far surpassed by the rare joy of feeling his Maker's hands busy on the body and the spirit he had made, and of studying his wondrous ways of working, that his hours of sickness were the happiest that he had ever lived. He saw God glorifying himself, and was abundantly content; that was the well of which he drank.

"Who passing through the vale of Baca make it a well; the rain also filleth the pools." How beautifully the two clauses tell of the responsive positions of God and the human soul in suffering! It is a meeting of water from below and water from above. The wells fill themselves out of the ground and the rain comes from the sky into the pools; yet both from the same original source. Never so much as in suffering does the divinity which God gave to man come out and show itself to meet the new divinity which he sends down to it out of Heaven. Have you never been struck by coming suddenly on the face of a man whom you had known long and well, but who since you knew him had been a sufferer either mentally or bodily; and seeing how his face had grown finer and nobler, so that you almost were awed before him at first? Something had come out from him and something had come into him. His grossness had grown delicate and his brutishness gentle by his sorrow. And as with faces, so with characters.

Here we must stop. The Bible calls the world a world of sorrow; but the same Bible tells us there is a way of making the vale of misery to laugh with

D

springs and fountains. Remember, it is not just compensation, but transformation that you are to seek. Not Heaven yet. That looms before us always, tempting us on; but now the earth, with all its duties, sorrows, difficulties, doubts, and dangers. We want a faith, a truth, a grace to help us now, right here, where we are stumbling about, dizzied and fainting with our thirst. And we can have it. One who was man, yet mightier than man, has walked the vale before us. When he walked it, he turned it all into a well of living water. To them who are willing to walk in his footsteps, to keep in his light, the well he opened shall be forever flowing. Nay, it shall pass into him and fulfil there Christ's own words: "Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

III.

HOMAGE AND DEDICATION.

"And the four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne."- REVELATION iv. 10.

It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a more majestic picture than is presented in this fourth chapter of the Book of Revelation. The Church of Christ, with all her labors done and all her warfare over, stands at length in heaven, before the throne of Him whose servant she has been, and renders up her trust and gives all the glory back to Him. When we hear such a scene described in the few words of John's poetic vision, I think we are met with a strange sort of difficulty. The great impression of the picture is so glorious that we are afraid to touch it with too curious fingers, to analyze its meaning and get at its truth. At the same time we feel sure that there is in it a precise and definitely shaped truth which is blurred to us by the very splendor of the poetry in which it is enveloped. We see on the one hand how often the whole significance of some of the noblest things in Scripture is lost and ruined by people who take hold of them with hard, prosaic hands. Their poetry is necessary to their truth. On the other hand, we see how many of the most

sacred truths of revelation float always before many people's eyes in a mere vague halo of mystical splendor, because they never come boldly up to them as Moses went up to the burning bush, to see what they are, and what are the laws by which they act. Shall we interpret the poetry of Scripture into ordinary language or not? No one reads the commentaries without feeling that often it would be better not to do so; but no one sees how many of the false religious ideas and superstitions have come of an intense and dazzled, but blind, perception of Scripture poetry, without feeling how wisely it needs to be interpreted and studied. There is danger of mysticism and vagueness, if you leave the wonderful Bible images unexplained. There is danger of prosaic dulness and the loss of all their life and fire, if you elucidate them overmuch.

It is seen everywhere. The great New Testament image is the cross of Christ, and any one can see how on the one hand the cross has become a mere object of vague and feeble sentiment to multitudes who have been touched by its beauty without trying to understand its meaning; and how, on the other hand, it has become hard and shallow and commercial, all the mystery and depth and power of appeal passed out of it, as men have torn its sacred agony to pieces, and tried to account on mercantile principles for every pang that Jesus suffered and every mercy that His suffering offers to the world.

In view of all this difficulty, what shall we do? It is not hard to tell what we ought to do, by every Scripture image and poetic description, although it

may be very hard to do it. We want to draw out its truth without forgetting that it is poetry; we want to get out of it a broad and clear idea, which shall still keep the glow with which it burned while it lay still in the fire of poetic inspiration. We want to leave it in heaven, and yet bring it down to earth. We want to understand it more, and yet feel it just as much. Something of this kind I want to try to do to-day, with reference to the great apocalyptic image of the four and twenty elders casting their crowns before the throne of God.

What is the broad idea, then, of this great spectacle? The four and twenty elders have been often considered to represent the Church in its two great series, the Jewish and the Christian orders. Twelve patriarchs and twelve apostles may be considered as representatively constituting that company who came, with all the fruits and honors of successful life, to offer them to Him by whose great strength they had been won. Such an interpretation seems very likely to be true; but in a yet broader way we have here crowned beings, those who had won some victory and possessed some kingship, giving the very badges and tokens of their victory and glory to another greater than themselves, casting their kingly crowns before the kingly throne of a royalty mightier than their own. I believe that the picture has that special reference to the relations of the Christian Church to its great Head; but does it not also suggest to us still broader ideas which are illustrated through all of human history, and which find their illustrations constantly in all our daily life? Those ideas seem to