how inadequate they are to support his steps; and yet he is not destitute; he is guided by one who will never leave him nor forsake him. Behold he comes "up out of the wilderness, leaning upon his beloved."

This leads to the second portion of the subject, which was to show, in a more definite manner, who they are that forsake a parched wilderness for green and refreshing pastures.

And, first, they are those whom the Holy Ghost has enlightened. Whilst the vail was upon their hearts, they could only see earthly objects through a glass darkly; they saw them not as they really were, but set off by the father of lies with a rich and captivating appear

ance.

There is a light which is possessed by every one that has the gift of reason; it is common to all people and languages: they walk by it, who have only heard of Christ by the hearing of the ear, and it is found also in those who have never heard of him at all. God forbid that I should undervalue this noble faculty, which sets man at so immeasurable a distance above the animal creation; but so far from this being the case generally with mankind, they are too apt to give it a disproportionate value, and to imagine that it can do a work which exclusively belongs to the Spirit of God. It was this attribute of nature that the disciples them

selves so often vainly applied as a key to high and spiritual matters. Thus, when Jesus cautioned them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees, "they began to reason among themselves, saying, It is because we have taken no bread;" which when he perceived, he said unto them, "Oh ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves?" And in the same spirit, and with the same success, the scribes and Pharisees began to reason when Jesus uttered his word of mercy-" Thy sins are forgiven thee;" "Who is this," they exclaimed, "that speaketh blasphemies; who can forgive sins but God alone?"

The eye of the husbandman, that sees where and in what proportion the seed is sown, whether it comes to an earing and a harvest, or dies at the root and comes to nothing, may have no more than a confused vision, when the seed is to be considered as a spiritual seed, and the earing, and the harvest, as spiritual. The wilderness of thorns satisfies the natural man, who knows nothing of an orchard of pomegranates with its pleasant fruits; all his thoughts are in unison with the barrenness that lies about him: the serpent's and the sinner's curse are yet fastened upon each, and therefore, as long as he can enjoy an existence in the dust, and gather in, like the serpent, the dust and vanity of this world, he neither wishes for another

home, nor desires to be clothed upon, with that house which is from heaven.

We must have a more than historical knowledge of these things; we must confess their superiority over the things of sense, before faith will become "the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen."

Again: they who come up from the wilderness in the way described to us in the text, must be sanctified as well as enlightened. Demas, we may suppose, understood the importance of drawing water out of the wells of salvation; he made an attempt to climb the hill that led out of the wilderness, but because he was not stayed upon the arm of Christ, he was beaten back by the first storm that fell, and drawn down again to the pit from which he seemed to be dug, and the rock from which he seemed to be hewn. Let a Christian's heart be once established with grace, let him perceive the true nature of sin, and the impossibility of the law bringing him nearer to God, and he will not be easy until he has fled unto him who "is the end of the law, for righteousness, to every one that believeth."

Upon this point there is a silent, but a very forcible instruction to be drawn out of the vegetable world. Observe herbs, and trees, and flowers: there is an attraction in the light and heat of the sun, which lifts them upwards, and

they keep their position even in the cloudiest day and when we have begun to be exercised in all holy conversation and godliness, we too shall be attracted by the force of constraining love towards the Sun of Righteousness; the root of the matter will be firmly lodged in the soul, but the branches will rise up, in the midst of clouds and vapours, even to the heavens.

As long as we are held fast by Satan, prisoners in trespasses and sins, we sit willingly in the regions of the shadow of death; but as the chains fall off, and the slumber leaves us, our first longing is for a door to escape; the darkness is hateful to us, and the deeds of darkness insupportable: then may we be likened to the hart in its pantings after the brooks of water. Of such as these, my brethren, and in their very state of transition from captivity to freedom, David draws a faithful picture, when he says, "Let the redeemed give thanks unto the Lord, whom he has gathered out of all lands, they wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way, and found no city to dwell in; hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them; so they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses." This is the interesting moment when the sinner is most alive to the perfections of Christ, when he "cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon his beloved."

And here, in the last place, I am to inquire

what this expression of leaning on a Saviour implies. First, it implies that the liberated prisoner has a just sense of his dependance. He carries all the weakness of his former condition into his new creation. The glorious freedom he has obtained does not alter his circumstances as a child of Adam. He requires, as much as before, to be nourished with the bread of life, and to have his head covered in the day of battle. There is indeed an alteration, but it consists in the right estimate he now has of his own nothingness, in a consciousness of his inability to move a step in the race, or to gain one advantage over the enemy, by the mere power of nature. Hear what the king of Israel says in this matter: "I will say of the Lord, he is my refuge, and my fortress, my God, in him will I trust." Our dependance will be always in exact proportion to the saving knowledge that we have of Christ, and according as it is more or less clear, will be the coldness or the fervour of our hearts towards him.

Again: a leaning on the Lord implies weariness. It is a wearisome thing, my brethren, to serve many masters-to be tossed to and fro at the will of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Not that the poor slave has any sense of this, whilst his eyes are smitten with blindness; but as the disease leaves him, he gets a full view into the secret places of his soul, and trem