མཔ་ མཔཔཔ་ and then despair, and hope again. At last they tell us that the end is drawing on; we do not dare to be away; we linger by the bedside, and watch, and pray, and listen to every sound, and count each long-drawn breath. It comes and goes; it grows feebler and more difficult. There is a silence; we hear it again. There is a longer pause-and all is still. The cold, still form of what was once our hope and stay, parent or child, wife or husband, lies before us; but the soul we loved, the personality of the dear one, that which made him what he was we know it is not there. The dust has returned to the dust as it was, but the spirit is gone to the God who gave it. Nor do we know the immortality of the soul alone. Whether we have the power to analyze its emotions, or are only conscious of them by the longing pain they cause, through hope and fear, love and hate, through every one of its varied desires, the invisible and immortal soul pleads, and longs for, and demands, and knows that it possesses and is possessed by an invisible, eternal, almighty, personal God. Beyond the tangible and the earthly, beyond the real and the material, the personal existing soul, because it is the creation of God and is made in His image, though that image be marred, reaches out to Him who made it. It sees the invisible. And yet this must be noted it not only sees God, it sees itself. It finds itself polluted, foul, incapable of good, with longings after holiness, and no strength to do right. It has a vision of God's justice, and purity, and righteousness, and knows that it is fallen and lost, and the opposite of all this. Hence, while the belief in God has been as universal as the human race, and there live no people so besotted that they have not in 102 some sort acknowledged Him, false religions and varied misbeliefs have expressed, at the same time, the longings of the soul, and the mists and the darkness which, because of the Fall, have come between it and God. But this is not all. If it were, then we might be Deists, but could not be Christians. God has answered the longings of the soul. "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth." The Eternal God has revealed Himself to man in the person of Jesus Christ. Brethren, I preach Christ unto you to-day. He has been manifested to take away our sins. He was born, He lived, upon the Cross of Calvary He died for all; He conquered death, He rose again, He ascended into heaven, He lives for evermore. Nor in heaven alone-He lives on earth as well. He is in His Church; it is His Body. He speaks in His priests; He is with them all the day. He is in His Eucharists; they are His Body and Blood. The Lord Jesus Christ, whom the Magdalen touched, and St. John loved, and St. Peter denied, and Pilate crucified, and Roman soldiers spat upon, our Own, our God, is with us now. Moreover, just as each human soul, because it is made in the image of God, longs for and beholds-though it be but to tremble-the Invisible God, so to every soul whom He calls to holy Baptism the Lord Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Ghost, gives Himself, and, with Himself, the gift of faith. We can believe, and we do believe, and see by faith the Eternal God, in the face of Jesus Christ-now, indeed, through a glass darkly-but behold Him still. As the Apostle says, "We all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, as by the spirit of the Lord." Brethren, I say-I appeal to your own consciences to confirm it-that each baptized person before me has seen the Lord Jesus Christ-not with the bodily eye indeed, but with that which sees as clearly, the eye of faith. More than this, I say that he who before me is the least devout, the most unworthy, the most careless, has had this vision. Is there one in this congregation who does not know that at some time or another, once or twice or more—when, I can not tell, but he knows-Christ has stood by him? Did He not call to you? Did He not speak to you? Did He not plead with you? Did He not show you His wounded hands? Did He not stand and wait when you bade Him go away? Was it when your mother or your father died? Was it when you were sick? Was it when you were bidden to Confirmation? Was it before the altar when the Mystical Presence flashed upon you? Was it in the stillness of the night, or at some time when nothing masked it except that He was there? Is it now, perhaps, my child on this Ash Wednesday-as this Lent begins?> But perhaps you answer, "It is true, but I can not see Him now. Sin, and pleasure, and self-indulgence, and want of prayer, or some dark deed have driven Him away." I answer then, it was for this that the Church appointed the Lenten season. Faith, and prayer, and fasting, and tears, and self-denial, and confession, and kneeling in His courts-these are the Gates of the Invisible. Once, with His help, open them, and within, patient and loving still, your Lord will stand. The mists that hide that Form, beloved, from you are of your own making. Deeds of faith, and mortifying the flesh, will drive them away, and the Sun of Righteousness appear. Then, when once you really behold the Saviour, in the words of the text, you can and will endure. The temptations of the passions, the assaults of unbelief, the opinion of the world, the snares of the devil-nay, sorrow, calamity, afflictions, poverty, and death-can be borne and resisted, in a strength and power which is not your own. The light of that countenance will illumine all things, and make you strong in your very weakness. Over these daily temptations, these hourly falls, this prayerlessness and weakness and want of love, will come the victory. Nay, as days grow darker, and the gloom increases, when the feet stumble and the valley of the shadow surrounds, with the eye fixed on Him, and an ever clearer vision of His perfections, we shall see Him as He is, and, awaking up after His likeness, shall be satisfied with it. "Know ye not, your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?"-2 COR. xiii., part of verse 5. 66 THE words of St. Paul are very startling. He says except ye be reprobates." What is a reprobate? The word is only used a few times in the New Testament, and in every case denotes the sad result of long-continued indulgence in sins of the flesh, and in the unbelief which seems to be the spiritual consequence of such sins. At the end of that fearful list of abominable crimes which St. Paul enumerates in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, as the sins of the heathen, he says: "Therefore God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient: being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of murder, debate, deceit, malignity," and a still further catalogue of sins which make the soul tremble. But this was the estate of the heathen, and of heathenism in its most corrupt condition. In the text it is affirmed as a possibility for Christians. In another of his epistles |