and in the morning the wail of desperation rises from her decks, for she has fallen on the shoal, and the disconsolateness of the dreary twilight, as the breeze springs with the daybreak, and with rude impact dashes her planks angrily against the rock, contrasts strangely with the comfort and peacefulness of the past eve ning. Such was the doom of Judas Iscariot. Blessed with the companionship of Our Lord Himself, dignified with the Apostleship, and adorned with all the high graces which that vocation involved, he was blinded to the undercurrent of his character, which set in the direction of the Mammon of unrighteousness, and which eventually ensured for him an irretrievable fall.

In conclusion, he who prays (as we should all do), "Show me myself, Lord," should take good care to add, lest self-knowledge plunge him into despair," Show me also Thyself." The course recommended in this chapter, if honestly adopted, will probably lead us to the conclusion that our heart, which showed so fair without, is but a whited sepulchre, an Augean stable, full of corruptions and disorders, which it requires a moral Hercules to cleanse; but, blessed be God, the Love of Christ, and the Blood of Christ, and the Grace of Christ are stronger than ten thousand depravities and corruptions, though riveted down to the soul by the chain of evil habit. And when God exhibits to the soul His Love, as mirrored in those bleeding Wounds, and the omnipotence of His free Grace, the energy which is felt there is great enough to crush any and every foe. The gentlest touch of God's finger upon the soul is like the touch of the dawn upon the dark horizon. Birds waken and trill their notes, and leaves flutter in the fresh breeze, and there is an electric thrill of joy and hope through the whole domain of nature

My reader, thy whole soul shall leap up at that touch; holy affections shall lift up their hymn of praise with thee, and thy heart shall flutter with mingled awe and joy, and thou shalt know that thou hast found thy Lord.

CHAPTER VI.

OF THE NATURE OF TEMPTATION.

"Then was Jesus....tempted of the devil."-MAtt. iv. 1. A DEVOTIONAL writer of the present day, in answer to the question, "How are we to overcome temptations?" says, "Cheerfulness is the first thing, cheerfulness is the second, and cheerfulness is the third." It is very true. Faint heart never won any thing that was worth winning,-least of all a spiritual battle. Whereas victories have often been won against fearful odds by some news which have raised the spirits of the troops. Lightness and brightness of heart, and an unfailing elasticity of spirit, must characterize the good soldier of Jesus Christ, if he is to break his way to the heavenly country through the serried ranks of his spiritual foes.

Having considered, then, in our last Chapter how we may meet temptation wisely, the question now arises, an answer to which is scarcely necessary to success, how we may meet it cheerfully. And it will be found, I apprehend, that a want of cheerfulness in meeting temptation is due to a misapprehension either of its nature, or of the support which may be expected in it, or of its salutary effects.

We shall speak in this Chapter of its nature.

It has been said of the eagle,-and if natural history will not bear it out, the piety with which the fable has been applied serves to reconcile us to the fiction,—that the parent bird practises the young to fly by dropping them, when half-fledged, from her wings; and that, when the breeze is proving too strong for them, and their little pinions begin to flag and waver amid the resistance of the air, she swoops underneath them, having indeed never lost sight of them for an instant, and receives them again upon her own person, and sails on with them majestically as before. And the circumstance, real or imagined, has been called in to illustrate that exquisite passage in the song of Moses: "As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings; so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him.”

At all events, whether the eagle disciplines her young or no in the exact manner described above,—and the text does not go the length of saying this, we have in the supposed fact a most true representation of the way in which God proves His children, while they are yet spiritually fledgelings, and of the sense of danger, utter dismay, piteous cries for help, which such probation involves. At the beginning of the spiritual life, when the first fervours of conversion are upon a man, when he has fully declared for Christ in his own mind, or, in other words, has realized in his own experience the conditions on which Baptism was granted, he is almost sure to dream of Heaven at once, and to overlook that long period of struggle, discomfort, and uncertainty through which he must pass on this side the grave, before he can attain a meetness for glory. It is just as if an Israelite had dreamed of entering into the land

flowing with milk and honey immediately after the Exodus, and had overlooked "the waste, howling wilderness" lying between Egypt and Canaan. That history is wonderfully typical; and beginners in religion will do well to bear in mind the arrangement of its several parts. Egypt is a figure of the world, which lies under the dominion of Satan, the spiritual Pharaoh. The passage of the Red Sea is a figure of Baptism, which stands at the threshold of spiritual life. The passage of Jordan is a figure of death; and the earthly Canaan is a figure of the heavenly. Of what, then, is the wilderness, with its arid sand, its barren sunsmitten crags, its fiery serpents, a picture? Of the Christian's pilgrimage through the regions of manifold temptations,-temptations which for the first time awake in all their power, like winds blowing from all the four quarters of heaven, as soon as he becomes an earnest Christian, or, as I have phrased it in other words, as soon as he realizes his Baptism. So long as he moved in the groove of formalism, and contented himself with a religion of stated ordinances, opposition was comparatively asleep; but now, when he stirs him self energetically in the right direction, it seems as if God had given His summons to the winds to sweep over the garden of the soul: " Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden." We are much distressed, like the eagle's fledgelings, when she drops them. At every step, we discover some new corruption of the heart, some new force of sinful passion, or habit, which baffles and beats us back. besetting sin! we flattered ourselves we had but one; but, lo! their name is legion. The effort which it is necessary to make, in order to maintain watchfulness for a day, fatigues us,-is quite too much for our

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strength. A crop of little trials spring up, which there is no sort of dignity in resisting or conquering, resulting perhaps from unevenness of temper in ourselves and those we live with,-teasing trials, though of no mag. nitude, just as flies tease us in the warm weather; they make us lose our equilibrium, and all for a trifle, which is very humbling. Then we secretly hoped to find a resource in Prayer, and looked perhaps to the evening hour of devotion as a period when we would sound the trumpet, and rally our scattered forces. But, alas! we cannot pray without such distractions as render the prayer barren, dry, and apparently profitless. meditation, we find it impossible to fasten our mind to the point, and seem to waste a greal deal of time in making the effort. And then comes the thought, so perfectly familiar to all who have ever sought sincerely to give themselves unto Prayer,-a thought suspected, while admitted, like a foreigner upon whose movements the police are charged to have their eye, but still admitted that if Prayer cannot be offered with fluency and glow of feeling and satisfaction to our own minds, it had better not be offered at all. And when the faldstool is abandoned in a fit of peevishness and disgust, the struggle is over for the day; it is as when the weak pinion of the young bird drops motionless by its side, and a steady descent thenceforth commences. The same feelings of disappointment and despondency, on a larger scale, corresponding to the magnitude of the occasion, beset us frequently after receiving the Holy Communion. We looked for the strengthening and refreshing of our souls, and really wound ourselves up to as much devotion as we were capable of; but, on the contrary, the whole of our inner man seems to collapse with the effort, and to lie open more than ever to the