of the law resides in the very crime. The consequence of violating moral law is moral degeneracy. There is no need of invoking outward nature. The offender is punished in himself. And all the war and league of outward things against him is but the echo of the sentence that is executing itself within him. He has not any consciousness of impunity. He affects such a dream. He attempts to produce such a philosophy. But there is a living protest against it in his own convictions. And this is the recoil of self-condemnation that falls upon the spirit that hinders the work of God's temple. It attempts to obstruct the work of God's house; it destroys its own. house. That is the moral effect flung back into its own nature. It aims at the house of God and ruins its own. And the work of Providence corresponds with this result. No man can wilfully war against the Church without finding sooner or later that the retribution is in his own house. If his hostility proceeds beyond the mere neglect of his own religious duty-if it be the array of his craft or his influence or his power against the instruments of Christ, the open retort of God will be as manifest as the open defiance-the timbers of his house will be the instruments of his shamehis domestic affections will retaliate torture. The law of Darius was the prophecy of Providence. But the prophecy of David is the law of gracePray for the peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love thee.” XXVII. THE DAY OF THE LORD. 2 ST. PET. iii. 10. "The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein, shall be burned up." THE HE calendar of Christianity expires not till time shall be no more. It throws solemnity over all our days by referring the result of what is daily transacted to the issues of that final judgment-day. God's wisdom could not content itself with holding forth some vague premonition that wrongs would eventually be righted, or that disguises must finally decay, and leave the realities of character exposed. But a positive, defined, and exact period has been determined and announced, within which this riot of wickedness shall be limited, and beyond which our trials and sufferings and uncertainties shall not extend. It is so intimately connected with the full and legitimate development of that government which our blessed Lord is conducting, that it shall appear as "the day of the Lord." It is to be so little indicated by precursors and portents, by addresses to the mere senses of those who darken their sight and corrupt their hearts by immorality and irreligion, that it cometh as a thief in the night. We are not so elated with conceit of our own sagacity as to presume that all the grand preparatives for that sublime conclusion of the world can be measured by our foresight, or depicted in the language of our aspiring fancy. The theme belongs to higher intellects. It asks angelic power to imagine the startling scenery. It demands a spotless purity to put the faithful colors upon the vast picture. We shrink from the temerity of portraying what is so transcendent. • The fact itself suffices for our faculties-the fact that this catastrophe of the globe is impressed upon our attention by Holy Scripture as the marked event, the signal date, the momentous day in our Christian calendar. To dismiss it from our thoughts is to divest all our earthly days of their value and their meaning. This is our day, this life of opportunity, this period of temptation, this lingering of gracious help, this waiting time for us and God; but the Saviour's glory shall be revealed, the triumph of faith shall be celebrated, the heavens and the earth shall be the parchment in the Redeemer's burning hand, and that shall be " the day of the Lord." For this the seasons hasten; for this the hidden fires roll their billows beneath us; for this the meteors display their myriad torches; for this the glorious sun treasures his unquenchable furnace, and the oceans hide their expansive and explosive forces in their cool waves. Earth has gone through its long strange cycles of diversified appearance before it was robed in such beauty and fruitfulness for the gratification of man; it waits the change of purification that shall be ushered by no common day of volcano blistering an island, or flood cleansing a continent, but by the day eminent throughout all time that shall shrivel the skies and turn the seas into steaming clouds, and melt the mountains into streams of flame. Every revolving day, as it leads us towards, so it intimates this last of earth's days. Because it belongs to that order of nature which now gives us the "few and evil” days of mortality, it is put upon the record of man as a day;" but in recognition of Him who makes it illustrious it is recorded as "the day of the Lord." We shall enter with reverent research into the uses of this subject by considering the signification of this peculiar phrase, then its expressiveness, and, finally, the associations it is intended to suggest. An inquiry is prompted in the mention of "the day," similar to that which has interrogated Moses as to his meaning in recounting the progresses of creation on six successive days. Whether both in the beginning and in the ending of this world's history, "the day" comprises merely our measurement of twenty-four hours, or is to be extended over a period of time varying as the subject varies, we may lawfully inquire. Let it be assumed, even, that the "days" of creation were no more than our work-day week, yet are we not thereby concluded to the same narrow sense when St. Peter mentions "the day of the Lord." There might be a presumption in favor of the same usage in both relations. But if we consult the whole description of the earth's conflagration, we shall find the Apostle pausing as soon as he alludes to the day of judgment and destruction, and interposing this cautious sentence: "Beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." He uses it no doubt as a corrective to the impatience which frets at the slowness of God's promises and mocks at the delays of His justice. But it introduces an inspired idea concerning the methods of God's economy. It removes Divine things from our measurements. It leaves us to our dimensions of days because they best serve our moral benefit in this narrow span of life. But shall God be hampered with our short tether? Must He cut His great day to our cramped fashion? When the sun ceases to kindle, and the face of God makes the day; when the globe forgets her motion, and the light is seven-fold, all the glories of the creation being merged in the radiance of the Creator's appearance, our moments of hurried breath shall no longer define the time, but the grandeur of the occasion shall make the throbs of the universe take the place of our feeble pulses, and the movements of God's stupendous plan shall measure out the day. Expand your mind, says the Apostle, into some correspondence with that Eternal Being who scans a thousand years as if they were but one day, and in that elevation above these earthly views con |