twined with Christmas garlands, telling the people that Jesus is born, and every man has a chance for heaven. Oh, the place was all crowded with memories; days when Jesus rode through with dyed garments from Bozrah, smiting down our sins and discomforting our sorrows. On the last Sabbath night I preached in that blessed place, inviting men to the hope and joy of the Gospel. If I had known it was the last time, I could have kissed the old place good-bye. It seemed to me that when the roof went in, and we felt that all was gone, that the tears on the cheeks stopped, and the sighs ceased, and as if there went through the street on that cold morning one great groan. But do not mourn the loss of that; Jesus is worthy of the most precious gift. Was it a waste? Are all the joys we felt there a waste? Are all the comforts that brooded over our souls in days of darkness, when trouble came to our souls and families; were the hundreds and hundreds of souls who in that building first found the peace of the Gospel, a waste? No, no, no; the building did its work, and it is gone! Let not the woman of Bethany begrudge the box or begrudge the perfume. Let her rather go and get a better box, and put in it a sweeter odour, and come with another offering.

I have been bothered all this morning with a snatch of an old hymn, which I cannot quite catch. I wish some of you would hunt it up, and tell it to me. I get only two or three lines

of it:

"Her dust and ruins that remain,

Are precious in our eyes;
Those ruins shall be built again,
And all that dust shall rise."

You remember that, Father Waterbury; find it for me some time.

God means something by this disaster. If such a torch be lifted, it means to light us somewhere. I wish that that fire had burned up all our sins. I wish that it might teach us what poor foundation man builds on when he builds in this world; and that iron, and brick, and granite, are wax when God breathes on them. We see that there is nothing of an earthly nature safe. Does not the telegraph flash from all parts of the earth now, bringing baleful things. You are not safe on land or on sea. Witness the Portuguese bark driven the night before last on Peaked Head Bar, and the bark Kadosh on Alderon point. Aye, you are not safe on the other side of the sea. Witness the

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hurricane that last week swept over London; witness the floods that swept through Derbyshire. You are not safe on the rail train. The "lightning express" last week rolls over an bankment in Pennsylvania and thirty lives are ground out. last Tuesday night the floor gave way under a festival, and the mangled children were dragged out on the snow for fathers and mothers to look at. God, by fire, and earthquake, and storm, is crying to all the earth, saying: "Build higher, build firmer, build on the rock!" I am glad to hear that there were some of our people who in the presence of that raving, thundering ruin, last Sabbath morning, resolved to be the Lord's. They started for heaven. They say: "Is this the way things go on earth? Give me something better, something stronger, something that will last."

My friends, all these flames in Brooklyn, and in Chicago, and in Boston, are only prefigurements of a great day of fire which you and I will see just as certainly as you sit there and I stand here. That day the fire will test us thoroughly. It will show whether our religion is a reality, or whether it is a false face. When that fire comes over the fields, it will come swifter than an autumnal fire across the Illinois prairie. Before it, beasts will dash from the rocks in wild leap. Coming over the precipice, it will be a Niagara of fire. The continents of earth will wrap themselves in a winding-sheet of flame, and the mountains will cry to the plain, "Fire!" and the plain will cry to the sea, "Fire!" and the sea will cry to the sky, "Fire!" and heaven will answer back to earth, and the caverns will groan it, and the winds will shriek it, and the thunders will toll it, and the storms will wail it, and the nations will cry it: "Fire! fire!" And the day will burn on, and away will go all the churches you ever built, and away will go all your storehouses, and away will go all your cities; but what will become of those who have no Christ, no sins pardoned, no heaven secured? Oh, I wish that this morning, in our first service in this beautiful place, the hour might be signalized by a great stampede for heaven. I wish that you would all come in, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, friends, and neighbors. In the presence of the great sorrow that has come upon us can you not do that? Do you believe that if this morning, with all the solemn surroundings of the past week, you reject the Gospel of Christ, you will ever feel? Do not some of you think that this is the last opportunity? Do you not feel that if you drive away the

Spirit of God, He will never come back? Do you not think that God is speaking to me, and speaking to you all? Oh, that this house, set apart for secular song, might, this morning, hear sweeter music, namely, the angelic minstrelsy that sounds when sins are pardoned, and God is glorified, and Jesus sees the travail of His soul, and is satisfied. Strike all your harps, ye spirits blest, the prodigal is come home. Clap your hands, all ye people, the lost is found.

OLD WELLS DUG OUT.

"And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them."-Genesis xxvi. 18.

IN Oriental lands a well of water is a fortune. If a king dug

one, he became as famous as though he had built a pyramid or conquered a province. Great battles were fought for the conquest or defence of wells of water; castles and towers were erected to secure permanent possession of them. The traveller to-day finds the well of Jacob dug one hundred feet through a solid rock of limestone. These ancient wells of water were surrounded by walls of rock. This wall of rock was covered up with a great slab. In the centre of the slab there was a hole, through which the leathern bottle or earthern jar was let down. This opening was covered by a stone. When Jacob, a young man of seventy years, was courting Rachel, he won her favour, the Bible says, by removing the stone from the opening of the well. He liked her because she was industrious enough to come down and water the camels. She liked him because he was clever enough to lay hold and give a lift to one who needed it.

It was considered one of the greatest calamities that could happen a nation when these wells of water were stopped. Isaac, you see, in the text, found out that the wells of water that had been dug out by his father Abraham, at great expense and care, had been filled up by the spiteful Philistines. Immediately Isaac orders them all opened again. I see the spades plunging and the earth tossing and the water starting until the old wells are entirely restored; and the cattle come down to the trough and thrust their nostrils in the water, their bodies quaking at every swallow, until they lift up their heads and look around and take a long breath, the water from the sides of their mouths dripping in sparkles down into the trough. I never tasted such water in my life as in my boyhood I drank out of the mosscovered bucket that swung up on the chains of the old well

sweep; and I think when Isaac leaned over the curb of these restored wells, he felt within himself that it was a beverage worthy of God's brewing. He was very careful to call all the wells by the same names which his father had called them by; and if this well was called "The Well in the Valley," or The Well by the Rock," or "The Well of Bubbles," Isaac baptized it with the same nomenclature.

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You have noticed, my Christian friends, that many of the old Gospel wells that our fathers dug have been dug up by the modern Philistine. They have thrown in their scepticisms and their philosophies, until the well is almost filled up, and it is nigh impossible to get one drop of the clear water. These men tell us that you ought to put the Bible on the same shelf with the Koran and the old Persian manuscripts, and to read it with the same spirit; and there is not a day but somebody comes along and drops a brick or a stone or a carcass in this old Gospel well. We are told that all the world wants is development, forgetful of the fact that without the Gospel the world always develops downward, and that if you should take the religion of Christ out of this world, in two hundred years it would develop into the "Five Points" of the universe. Yet there are a great many men and there are a great many rostrums whose whole work is to fill up these Christian wells.

You will not think it strange, then, if the Isaac who speaks to you this morning tries to dig open some of the old wells made by Abraham, his father, nor will you be surprised if he call them by the same old names.

Bring your shovel and pickaxe, and crowbar, and the first well we will open is the glorious well of the Atonement. It is nearly filled up with the chips and débris of old philosophies that were worn out in the time of Confucius and Zeno, but which smart men in our day unwrap from their mummy-bandages, and try to make us believe are original with themselves. I plunge the shovel to the very bottom of the well, and I find the clear water starting. Glorious well of the Atonement. Perhaps there are people here who do not know what "atonement" means, it is so long since you have heard the definition. The word itself, if you give it a peculiar pronunciation, will show the meaningat-one-ment. Man is a sinner and deserves to die. Jesus comes in and bears his punishments and weeps his griefs. I was lost once, but now I am found. I deserved to die, but Jesus took the lances into His own heart until His face grew pale and

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