the wilderness. Such souls must dare to wrestle with God through a long sad night of weariness, and then at last the day will dawn, and God will give them peace. God will show them the infinite depths of His fatherliness, and that will suffice them, though their sins should for a time deprive them of all human sympathy. If we once realise the fact that

God is indeed our father, then we see at once that popular theology errs in asserting that He will ever leave us or forsake us. Then we shall believe and know that He must have made us for some good purpose, notwithstanding all our sinfulness.

And though we cannot perhaps find holiness in this. life, we shall feel sure that God will satisfy the long hunger of our spirits in the life to come. Yea, though God should seem ready to slay us in the next life, we shall still trust in Him. Yea, though mountains of sins should fall on us, and bury us for a time from all human sympathy, still even then to us would penetrate some poor broken rays of the genial light of the Father's countenance, and these would cheer us through the weary vigils of our night of sorrow.

This is the true remedy for despair, to realise the Fatherhood of God; for it goes to the very root of our grief. If ever a time should come in which your soul or mine should be left alone in the most solitary dungeon of hell, even there, I doubt not, that we

should not be alone; even there the Father would still be with us; even there God's most motherly love would still support us; even there, as a wise father comforts his prodigal son, so from time to time would He comfort us, and thus enable us to bear our salutary

woes.

And Thou also, Great Revealer of the Father, Thou wilt not leave us or desert us; in Thine allpitying and tender humanity the sweetness of MAN'S friendship and sympathy will still be ours. In the hour of our saddest and most man-forsaken loneliness, "a Man shall still be to us as a hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest." And Thy still faithful human love shall be to us an assurance of the ultimate restoration of our poor broken human friendships. Then we shall know that our dear river of human affection is not dried up or lost for ever in some vast ocean; into the serene lake of Thy sacred heart it has been gathered, that from it it may emerge enlarged and strengthened!

Thus only can very many of us heal the wounds of our loneliness, viz., by realising God's unchanging Fatherhood, and the simple fact that "in Him we live, move, and have our being." We never can be alone. We should die if we were, for God is the breath of our life and the root and sustainer of our being. Severed from Him we should ere long die,

and the quiet rest of eternal sleep would still for ever the weary cravings of the lonely orphan heart.

This is the true antidote to loneliness, to live ever, even amidst all our sins, in the light of the Father's countenance, and to believe entirely that He will never forsake us, though from time to time our sins may shut us out from the full glory of His presence. A time may indeed come when we shall be bereft of the glad consciousness of the Father's presence. We may indeed mourn for Him as absent; but for all that He will not be really absent, for indeed our whole being would collapse if He withdrew from us entirely. Then for us the loneliness of life will be greatly mitigated; we shall fear death far less than we must fear it otherwise. For by death we shall only migrate to another part of our Father's kingdom.

And as for the sympathy of our fellow-men, we shall know that God will give it back to us some day, even if it is withdrawn from us for a long time. And thus we shall learn to be calm and quiet, and when our dearest friends forsake us for a time, we shall say to them in the spirit of the sorrowing Jesus, "Behold the hour cometh, yea is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me."

V.

A HEAVEN REVEALED TO OUR SPIRITS.

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His spirit.-1 Corinthians ii. 9, 10.

THIS text is, I fancy, very often supposed to teach that men in general can form no idea at all of the future bliss of the redeemed. But in reality the doctrine of the Apostle is very different on this subject. What he says is that our senses and unaided faculties can give us no real idea of future happiness with God; but still he does not teach that we must remain in complete ignorance of all the elements of future joy; for, though eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor the unaided heart of man conceived the things which God has prepared for those that love Him, yet to us, followers of Jesus, God has revealed them by His Spirit. And if God has revealed them, surely it is well for us to meditate on them.

In truth, we all greatly need the aid and stimulus to our moral and spiritual life afforded by a true realisation of those pure joys which for the holy begin on earth and will be perfected in heaven. We cannot be content to drift all our time on earth; we long to discern some faint outline at least of the eternal shore, in order that we may start in earnest on our long voyage towards the harbour of abiding peace. No, we cannot be content to drift, to float hither and thither, without meaning or purpose, over the ocean of life. We need some definite goal, some well-defined aim to give energy and coherence to our moral and spiritual life. We need some "kindly light" from heaven, to give us courage to face all the dangers and difficulties of our pilgrimage.

But since, in former times, men formed too sensuous an idea of heaven-since they supposed that eye had seen and ear heard somewhat of those joys which God had prepared for His people-we are in some danger of giving up the whole theory of a future life as childish. And because the enjoyments of heaven have been described as largely selfish, we are apt to look on the craving for heaven as weak and selfish, and unworthy of the noblest morality. No doubt a paradise for the senses only would inevitably tend to promote selfishness; but not such is our dream of heaven. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the