A single illustration: Years ago there lived in an Eastern city a physician of eminence, whose practice among the sick and friendless had taught him much with regard to the misery of the world. He was constitutionally a doubter, and his doubts centered upon the person and divinity of Jesus Christ. He saw no other religion worthy of confidence than Christ's, but Christ's he could not accept. He could see the blessing of Christ's friendship and undertaking of one's burdens, but the possibility of it all he could not see. So he wandered on in the dark, without prayer and without peace, the spiritual opportunities and responsibilities of his profession burdening his conscience more and more, but his speculative difficulties growing thicker every moment. One day he met a minister of the gospel, in whom he had confidence, and with the first word began to pour forth his own heart. “I had the most painful struggle of my life this morning." "Ah, how so?" "I was attending upon a poor woman who has but a few hours to live, but her soul seemed in worse case than her body. It seemed to me that such a Saviour and friend as you believe Christ to be was just the Saviour and friend she needed; if I had only believed as you do, it would have been an unspeakable blessing to have knelt by her bedside and commended her to his mercy." "My friend," said the clergyman, "go at once and obey that impulse; whatever Christ may be, he is certainly as compassionate as he was when on earth and as able to help now as he was to heal the sick and hear the beggar's cry." The resolve was formed; the physician made his way once more to the sick-room; he knelt for the first time

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in prayer for another. He prayed Christ to teach her soul the way to God; but as he prayed Christ taught his soul the way to God also, and the peace of God that passeth all understanding streamed down into his heart. The one act of obedience had opened the way for Christ to enter, and with an inward experience of his power to forgive sins and renew the heart, he could doubt no longer as to his divinity, but bowed at his feet like Thomas, crying: “My Lord and my God!"

We all need a heavenly teacher, for we are all children groping in the dark. We must follow something. Shall it be our own reason or the opinions of men, or shall it be the lead of Jesus? I fancy that if he were here in visible form, the calm wisdom of heaven shining in his brow and the sympathy and compassion of a God beaming in his eye, not one of us would hesitate to put our hand in his and say, "O Saviour, be my teacher and my guide in these matters that so puzzle my reason and try my faith." But Christ is just as really here as if we could see him, and he is willing to accept the charge of our souls. He is the Light of the world. If we follow him we shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. Our wisdom is to obey him implicitly, expecting that what we know not now we shall know hereafter. The herdsman in the Alps, removing his family to the pastures above the glaciers, must sometimes, as he crosses the treacherous banks of snow, separate his children. from him and forbid them to approach too near, lest their combined weight prove too great for the thin crust to sustain, and they be precipitated into fathom

less abysses below. The little children wonder that father will not let them come near him. Most of all they wonder when he protects them from the fierce cold of a night upon the glacier by piling snow upon them and leaving them only the smallest aperture to breathe. Strange treatment; yet a father's love prompts it and it is the only way to save them. Is it not folly and madness for the children to refuse obedience because they cannot understand the reasons for the father's conduct? And is it anything but weakness and foolishness in us to withhold our obedience from God's plain commands, because forsooth we cannot understand the reason for them? Obey God, and we shall sooner or later know; disobey him, and we shall add to the misery of our ignorance the greater misery of self-destruction.

Some of you, my hearers, plead in extenuation of your disobedience the fact that there are things you cannot understand. But disobedience is not the effect of ignorance, but the cause. The law of nature is heart first, intellect afterward; submission first, knowledge afterward. You have made no progress in the solution of the mysteries by delaying to obey, and you never will make progress in knowledge of God's truth until you obey the truth. How will you ever get more light without using the light you have already? Ah, it is not knowledge you need, but those neglected duties of secret and family prayer, of public confession of the name of Christ, of inward consecration to the service of God-these are the things you need to perform. Not knowledge, but a heart set to do the will of God, is what is lacking.

Oh, that God would give you such a heart to-daya heart humble, reverent, loving, obedient to God! With such a heart within you, you would learn in a single hour more of God's holiness, of your own sin, of Christ's mercy, of the Spirit's power, than you ever learned in all your life before. Obedience to God, that is the key and the only key to the mysteries of Christian doctrine and of Christian duty. Take that key, I pray you, and enter into true knowledge and eternal life!

XXXVIII

THE GENEALOGY OF JESUS1

The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. (Matt. 1: 1.)

THERE was once a time when the desert of Sahara was thought to be a most uninteresting subject to study. If we had been asked to describe it, we should have called it a vast flat region of drought and desolation, where scorching winds roll on mile after mile their blinding clouds of ever-moving sand, where every living thing dies for want of water and of food, and where the curse of the Almighty seems to rest forever. But modern investigation and explorations are changing all our old notions with regard to this. Barth and Rohlfs have shown that what was thought to be a level plain of sand is wonderfully diversified in surface. The great elevated plateau rises often into mountains three thousand to five thousand feet in height, breaking into huge cliffs and bounded by gigantic walls of rock. There are fields of naked rock where for a hundred miles not a grain of sand is to be seen, and again there are waste regions where marine shells of recent species, countless in number, show that at no remote geologic epoch, the plains formed the bed of the ocean, or where the whole surface is crusted over with salt,

1 A sermon preached before the Ministers' Institute, Granville, Ohio, July 1, 1870.