lilies.

It is the old story. Everybody tells it. Isaiah told it, John told it, Paul told it, Ezekiel told it, Luther told it, Calvin told it, John Milton told it—everybody tells it; and yet—and yet when the midnight shall fly the hills, and Christ shall marshal His great army, and China, dashing her idols into the dust, shall hear the voice of God and wheel into line; and India, destroying her Juggernaut and snatching up her little children from the Ganges, shall hear the voice of God and wheel into line; and vine-covered Italy, and wheat-crowned Russia, and all the nations of the earth shall hear the voice of God and fall into line; then the Church, which has been toiling and struggling through the centuries, robed and garlanded like a bride adorned for her husband, shall put aside her veil and look up into the face of her Lord the King, and say: "The half—the half was not told me."

Well, there is coming a greater surprise to every Christian—a greater surprise than anything I have depicted. Heaven is an old story. Everybody talks about it. There is hardly a hymn in the hymn-book that does not refer to it. Children read about it in their Sabbath-school book. Aged men put on their spectacles to study it. We say it is a harbor from the storm. We call it our home. We say it is the house of many mansions. We weave together all sweet, beautiful, delicate, exhilarant words; we weave them into letters, and then we spell it out in rose and lily and amaranth. And yet that place is going to be a surprise to the most intelligent Christian. Like the Queen of Sheba, the report has come to us from the far country, and many of us have started. It is a desert march, but we urge on the camels. What though our feet be blistered with the way? We are hastening to the palace. We take all our loves and hopes and Christian ambitions, as frankincense and myrrh and cassia, to the great King. We must not rest. We must not halt. The night is coming on, and it is not safe out here in the desert. Urge on the camels. I see the domes against the sky, and the houses of Lebanon, and the temples and the gardens. See the fountains dance in the sun, and the gates flash as they open to let in the poor pilgrims.

Send the word up to the palace that we are coming, and that we are weary of the march of the desert. The King will come out and say: "Welcome to the palace; bathe in these waters, recline on these banks. Take this cinnamon and frankincense and myrrh and put it upon a censer and swing it before the altar." And yet, my friends, when heaven bursts upon us it will be a greater surprise than that—Jesus on the throne, and we made like Him! All our Christian friends surrounding us in glory! All our sorrows and tears and sins gone by forever! The thousands of thousands, the one hundred and forty-and-four thousand, the great multitudes that no man can number, will cry, world without end: "The half—the half was not told us!"

VICARIOUS SUFFERING.

ToC

"Without shedding of blood is no remission."— Heb. ix: 22.

John G. Whittier, the last of the great school of American poets that made the last quarter of a century brilliant, asked me in the White Mountains, one morning after prayers, in which I had given out Cowper's famous hymn about "The Fountain Filled with Blood," "Do you really believe there is a literal application of the blood of Christ to the soul?" My negative reply then is my negative reply now. The Bible statement agrees with all physicians, and all physiologists, and all scientists, in saying that the blood is the life, and in the Christian religion it means simply that Christ's life was given for our life. Hence all this talk of men who say the Bible story of blood is disgusting, and that they don't want what they call a "slaughter-house religion," only shows their incapacity or unwillingness to look through the figure of speech toward the thing signified. The blood that, on the darkest Friday the world ever saw, oozed, or trickled, or poured from the brow, and the side, and the hands, and the feet of the illustrious sufferer, back of Jerusalem, in a few hours coagulated and dried up, and forever disappeared; and if man had depended on the application of the literal blood of Christ, there would not have been a soul saved for the last eighteen centuries.

In order to understand this red word of my text, we only have to exercise as much common sense in religion as we do in everything else. Pang for pang, hunger for hunger, fatigue for fatigue, tear for tear, blood for blood, life for life, we see every day illustrated. The act of substitution is no novelty, although I hear men talk as though the idea of Christ's suffering substituted for our suffering were something abnormal, something distressingly odd, something wildly eccentric, a solitary episode in the world's history; when I could take you out into this city, and before sundown point you to five hundred cases of substitution and voluntary suffering of one in behalf of another.

At two o'clock to-morrow afternoon go among the places of business or toil. It will be no difficult thing for you to find men who, by their looks, show you that they are overworked. They are prematurely old. They are hastening rapidly toward their decease. They have gone through crises in business that shattered their nervous system, and pulled on the brain. They have a shortness of breath, and a pain in the back of the head, and at night an insomnia that alarms them. Why are they drudging at business early and late? For fun? No; it would be difficult to extract any amusement out of that exhaustion. Because they are avaricious? In many cases no. Because their own personal expenses are lavish? No; a few hundred dollars would meet all their wants. The simple fact is, the man is enduring all that fatigue and exasperation, and wear and tear, to keep his home prosperous. There is an invisible line reaching from that store, from that bank, from that shop, from that scaffolding, to a quiet scene a few blocks, a few miles away, and there is the secret of that business endurance. He is simply the champion of a homestead, for which he wins bread, and wardrobe, and education, and prosperity, and in such battle ten thousand men fall. Of ten business men whom I bury, nine die of overwork for others. Some sudden disease finds them with no power of resistance, and they are gone. Life for life. Blood for blood. Substitution!

At one o'clock to-morrow morning, the hour when slumber is most uninterrupted and most profound, walk amid the dwelling-houses of the city. Here and there you will find a dim light, because it is the household custom to keep a subdued light burning: but most of the houses from base to top are as dark as though uninhabited. A merciful God has sent forth the archangel of sleep, and he puts his wings over the city. But yonder is a clear light burning, and outside on the window casement a glass or pitcher containing food for a sick child; the food is set in the fresh air. This is the sixth night that mother has sat up with that sufferer. She has to the last point obeyed the physician's prescription, not giving a drop too much or too little, or a moment too soon or too late. She is very anxious, for she has buried three children with the same disease, and she prays and weeps, each prayer and sob ending with a kiss of the pale cheek. By dint of kindness she gets the little one through the ordeal. After it is all over, the mother is taken down. Brain or nervous fever sets in, and one day she leaves the convalescent child with a mother's blessing, and goes up to join the three in the kingdom of heaven. Life for life. Substitution! The fact is that there are an uncounted number of mothers who, after they have navigated a large family of children through