and with voices of anguish that pierce the heavens, they calm the awakened wrath, and do much to heal the havoc and the ruin of man's iniquity. Oh! if indeed you hate sin, and desire to be delivered from its slavery and from its stain-if indeed you are not an insolent rebel and a hardened offender-the means of grace are open; there is yet a white robe for you in the holy land—your foot may still traverse the streets of gold— your lips drink of the clear river which flows out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. For the love of God still pleads with you; His Holy Spirit still strives to wean you from your living death. Be humble, be sincere, be in earnest; and then, if you resolve, if you watch, if you pray, if you strive, if you believe-you may be divinely restored, progressively sanctified; and though now your sins are hateful to God, and odious to man, and degrading to yourselves-though you feel, however you brazen and brave it out, yet, at every better and truer moment, that sin is misery and that sin is weakness-yet even you-for His sake who died that you may live-by His power, whose word released the demoniac, and whose touch purified the leper-even you, like God's fairest and holiest saints, may by repentance become now, and may be more and more hereafter, "blameless and harmless, the sons of God without rebuke."

Sept. 26, 1875.

SERMON XXXIII.

HANDWRITINGS ON THE WALL.

DAN. v. 25.

"And this is the writing that was written, Menê, Menê, Tekêl, Upharsin."

THE Book of Daniel, which now enters into the cycle of Sunday First Lessons, presents a series of pictures so solemn, so stately, so striking, that I think even the dullest imagination must be somewhat stirred by them. In chapter after chapter, like Titanic frescoes in some Eastern temple, you have scenes, set side by side with marvellous contrast, of youthful temperance and regal luxury; of tyrannous insolence and intrepid faithfulness; of colossal sacrilege and sweeping retribution. In the first chapter, four young Jewish boys, glowing with modesty and hardihood, refusing the wine and the dainties of the palace, grow up fairer and sweeter on pulse and water than the pampered minions among whom they live. In the second, one of these Jewish boys interprets the dark dream-secrets which baffle the Chaldæan sages. In the next, the other three of those four boys stand steadfast, even to the fire, against the worship of the golden image in Dura's plain; and in the fourth, the great Nebuchadnezzar, at the moment of intoxicating exultation, is smitten suddenly with

shameful madness; but is restored to grandeur when the lesson of humility is learnt. In the fifth, which we shall read as the Evening Lesson, the deadly warning flashes on the walls of the banquet-house; and after it, as lightning follows thunder,-the stroke of ruin falls. Are not these plain lessons which he who runs may read? Lessons that health is granted to selfdenial, and that beauty is the sacrament of goodness :that God sends a glistering angel, if need be, to keep virtue safe; that there is laughter in heaven at human pride; that there is joy in heaven at human penitence; that there is vengeance in heaven for human crimes. And how full are these chapters of memorable utterance valuable to all boys who aspire to live a noble life? May they not be specially valuable to you, the sons of an heroic island, and of a school which must be above all a school which was meant to be the stern yet tender nurse of manly simplicity and self-denying work? "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us out of the burning fiery furnance; but if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up"-there rings the glorious trumpet-note of undaunted obstinacy and defiant faithfulness. "Hew the tree down, and destroy it; yet leave the stump in the tender grass of the field;"-there is the stern Nemesis of self-• satisfaction, and the last chance for utter penitence ;Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin-" Numbered, numbered, weighed, and they shall divide;"-there is the doom that fellows neglected warning.

II. You know the story. "Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand." So, as with a crashing overture of orchestral music, the tale begins. Imagine the

following splendour for yourselves;-that vast Babylonian palace, with its kiosks and fountains, its hanging gardens, and long arcades; every wall glowing with its weird images of Pagan symbolism; every portal guarded by colossal forms of winged cherubim, halfanimal, half-human, staring through the dusk, with calm eyes, on the little lives of men; and everywhere, sweeping through court after court and chamber after chamber, the long and gorgeous processions of Chaldæan conquerors, portrayed with vermilion, exceeding in dyed attire; and gathered there the princes, the wives, the concubines,-all that the satraps could display of magnificence, and all that the harems hid of loveliness, as though in scorn of the enemy without, vainly thundering at those brazen gates. And, at last, as though sacrilege were needed to fire the mad festivity, they pledged their gods of brass and stone in those great cups of consecrated gold which Solomon had made for the Temple of the Eternal. And then the awful disturbance of the feast that ghastly apparition; that something which looked like the spectral semblance of the fingers of some gigantic hand, moving slowly along the wall where the central lamp flung its most vivid light; and those seeming letters, which, as it moved, passed from under its dark shadow into a baleful glare; and while it moved, and when it went, the king, with fixed eyes, and ashy looks, and knees that smote together, staring in the very paralysis of fear, not, as before, on the crimson annals of Chaldæan conquest, but on some awful decree of an offended God recorded in hieroglyphs of undecipherable fire. The wild cry which summoned his magicians; the entrance of the queen-mother, to tell her son of the Jewish boy-an old man now-whom his father had taken captive, and

in whom was the spirit of the holy gods; and how Daniel came, and read those fearful letters into the four words:

"Menê, Menê, Tekêl, Upharsin

Numbered, numbered, weighed, and they shall divide ; "

1

all this you know. Short was the space for repentance. In that night was Belshazzar, king of the Chaldæans, slain. That night," as an English poet has written it

"That night they slew him on his father's throne,
The deed unnoticed, and the hand unknown:
Crownless and sceptreless Belshazzar lay,

A robe of purple round a form of clay.

III. You must not think that this was the only warning which Belshazzar had received. If it came too late, that was because it was the warning of retribution, not the warning of mercy; it was only because all previous warnings had been neglected and despised. His father's dreams of the shattered colossus and the felled tree; the brute madness which had afflicted him; the besieging of his own city; the fact that the shouts of an enemy might have mingled with the very songs of his banquet;-these were all warnings to this crowned fool, but they had all been fruitless. Do not similar warnings come to every sinner, long before the warning of his doom? If any of you are living a life of sin, have they not come to you? Have there been for you no dreams in the darkness? no voices in the silence? no hauntings of fear? no burdens of remorse? no memories of innocence? no aches of shame? no qualms of sickness? no echoing, as of ghostly footfalls, in the far-off corridors of life? And later on, if these have all been neglected, are you conscious now of no deriding, deadly enemy doing siege to the golden Babylon of life? 1 Dividentes (sc. erunt).