deem their ruined lives. But it is not quite these kinds of liberty of which our Scripture is speaking. It is not freedom from the penalty or the guilt or the burden imposed by sin, but rather freedom from sin itself in its power to fasten upon the soul. It is, moreover, a freedom which Christ secures through the knowledge of the truth that he brings. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

But how and in what respect can the truth liberate a man? It can set him free from one sort of bondage and only one, namely, the bondage of error.

You awake at midnight and are startled to see the crouching figure of a man in your dusky chamber. The figure moves and then you know it is alive. "A burglar!" you exclaim under your breath, and there you lie transfixed with fear, heart thumping, eyes staring, expecting every moment that the man will spring at your throat, until, having collected your wits, you touch a button. Straightway light leaps out from the jet, and lo! your burglar proves to be only a coat flung over a chair, which the unsteady beams of the street lamp made alive. So the truth sets you free from the thraldom of your fear. Suppose, instead of a fancied burglar, it were a witch or ghost of which you were afraid. You are a child, or a savage, who is in truth only a neglected, grown-up child, and are beset and bound by the dark terrors of superstition. You shudder in your lonely hut at the wild cry of the night-hawk. You tremble as you hear the moaning of the wind and bury your head in your blanket lest you see grim and horrid faces staring at you in the darkness. If a neighbor sickens and dies, you hold that he must have been bewitched, and you quake before the gaze of every man you meet, lest he prove the possessor of that power of witchcraft, and you, too, be looked upon with the deadly evil eye. By and by a man comes to that savage camp who knows the truth, a

man who earnestly, patiently and wisely teaches you, and at last persuades you to believe the truth, that there are no witches, no ghosts, no demons haunting the forests, that men die in their prime not from the glance of the evil eye but from neglect of and disobedience to the laws of nature and life; that the only God is the good God, the heavenly Father, made known to men through the Saviour Jesus Christ. Just as fast as these majestic truths gain possession of your mind the bonds of the fear of ghosts and hobgoblins dissolve and disappear, until at last you find yourself free and realize that you had been a slave and the truth has become your emancipator.

Now the cords with which sin binds the soul are always cords of error. There is a lie, a strange and fascinating delusion, lying at the bottom of every evil choice. We have seen that wrong action results in wrong thinking, bad judgment, perverted desire; it is equally true that wrong action springs from wrong thinking, bad judgment and perverted desire. The one great practical question of the world is this: "What is good?" Or in common, colloquial phrase, “What is the best thing for me to do?" When a man sins he is answering this question wrongly. He is choosing the worse thing in place of the better. He is doing what he would better not have done. That which is really less. desirable has in some way been made to appear to him more desirable. He has taken evil for good and has made a miss take. Now if some light shall come to that man's soul clear enough and powerful enough to dispel the illusions of temptation and show things as they actually are, so that what is really best should look best, and what is worst, worst-will not that light emancipate the man from the deceitful bondage of his sin? This is precisely the way in which the Son of God sets us free. He illuminates the life problem with certain great, fresh truths.

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What is best-in view of God, as Jesus shows

God-the holy, the awful God—the living, the loving, the heavenly Father? What is best-in view of my neighbor, as Jesus shows him to me, not a wolf to be robbed of his pelf, but a brother man, child of my Father? What is best-in view of my own immortal nature and eternal destiny, as Jesus sets me before myself?" When you see them in such light the affairs of life have a different look. As the sunbeams pierce the morning fog, so the truth of Jesus will shine through the deceitful illusions of evil until it has dissolved them quite away.

When a fellow with a bright, friendly face began to give his testimony at a certain mission, we were all surprised to hear him say that he had been a thief. "In those days," said he, "I was a thief through and through! I could n't seem to put my thoughts on anything else but stealing. If I walked up Broadway I was always contriving and planning how I could get away with some of the stuff that I saw in the shop windows, and especially the pins and the watches in the jewelry stores. If I saw a woman carrying her purse in her hand I was always looking around to see whether I could run away if I should snatch it. I could n't meet a man without thinking whether there was n't some way that I could rob him, and I never let a chance go by. But since I gave my heart to God," said he, "I do n't want other people's things no more. I do n't want to harm no one, nor rob no one. But I want to do some good, if God will let me, to make up for all the harm I 've done; and now I'm always thinking and planning, 'Could n't I get this one, and could n't I get that one, into the mission here, that they might find the same Jesus I have found?' The man had become acquainted with the truth and the truth had set him free.

It is implied in our Scripture that the emancipating vision of truth does not come, at least not to most men, all in a flash, but slowly, gradually. as night melts into day;

for knowledge of truth comes, as a rule, through the practice of truth. "If ye abide in my word ye shall know

the truth."

Stay with Jesus, watch him, keep on listening to his voice, speak often with him, plant your feet in his footsteps, be swift to do his bidding: then you shall learn, little by little, to look out upon life from his point of view, to see things as he sees them and as they are. Sin will daily become more hideous in your eyes, the beauty of holiness will begin to glow before you, until, at last, he who is the Light of the world shall lead you into perfect liberty.

Samuel Lane Loomis.

CHRIST HEALING THE BLIND MAN

JOHN 9:1-11

"And as he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth,” etc.

John records seven of our Lord's miracles. Three of these are made the occasions of memorable discourses. The address upon the relation between the Father and the Son followed the healing of the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda, the sermon on the Bread of Life came immediately after the feeding of the five thousand, and the miracle under consideration illustrated the words "I am the Light of the world."

The account of this miracle immediately follows that of Jesus' discussion with the Pharisees, in which they became so enraged that they took up stones to cast at him. It was just after his escape from his enemies that, passing by, he saw the blind man and performed the miracle upon him. The incident offers three suggestions which we may ponder with profit.

I. That relating to human sin.

"Who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?"

The question of the disciples was prompted by the old belief that suffering was caused by sin, and the blindness of this man could be accounted for by the disciples only on the supposition of some wrong doing on his part or that of his parents. Just what was in their minds as to the possibility of a man's sinning before birth we do not know, perhaps they did not know themselves, but they must have an ex