"ENTER INTO THY CLOSET." tion to the natural lesson taught by these waters in regard to God's covenant-love and goodness, and consequently rendered it all the more fitting and likely, that such waters might be employed in some peculiar way to lead the hearts of the people to Him, the blessings of whose presence and protection they so strikingly represented. The Lord sought, on one occasion, during the Feast of Tabernacles, to turn them to such a use, when, seeing the people all engrossed with the profitless ceremony of drawing water from Siloam, and pouring it out in the temple, he stood and cried," If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink; he that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of running water." And we have no doubt that it was for the purpose of leading the people to make substantially the same use of the waters of Siloam, that a healing virtue was communicated to these waters, yet so, that even they might be said to confess their Lord. There was a miracle of healing at that time connected with them, to testify that, through such signs, God was returning to visit his people; but being designed only to announce the coming, and discover the glory of Christ, there were limitations belonging to it: First, in regard to the instrument-an angel from heaven, who, though a fit messenger for such a visit of mercy, still was but a creature. In regard, also, to the persons who participated in the benefit-the first always that stepped in, to show that the cure was not an accident, but the result of divine power supernaturally conveyed; yet still only the first, only that one, to show that it was divine power acting under restraint. And when Christ came to that poor and long-oppressed victim of disease, who, in consequence of these limitations, could derive no benefit from the angel's visits to Bethesda, and with a single word loosed him from his infirmity-when he did this, not as a singular thing, but merely as a specimen of that miraculous and blessed working which was every day proceeding from his hand-what could more clearly and impressively prove that he was the grand reality which the waters of Siloam did but faintly represent, and so much better than these, even when stirred by an angel's hand, as he is himself in nature higher than the angels, and his works of mercy surpassed theirs? And as the miracle wrought upon the impotent man was attended with circumstances which arrested the minds of the whole people of Jerusalem, could anything have been conceived more skilfully adapted to constrain them to own Jesus, as Heaven's grand messenger, sent on an errand of mercy to the world? or, failing as they did to discern this, could anything nave served more affectingly to discover their deplorable blindness and hopeless infatuation, than that they should have so readily ascribed one miraculous cure to the interposition of an angel's hand, while they obstinately resisted the evidence of thousands of such cures performed in the midst of them, by the living voice and the outstretched arm of Christ? Thus we see, that when considered in relation to the great points which it was designed to illustrate and unfold, there is nothing incredible, or even apparently out of place, in the recorded circumstances concerning the Pool of Bethesda. The very limita tions were necessary to adapt the whole properly to the end which it was intended to serve; and we do not see how any circumstance could have been materially altered without having so far tended to lessen its suitableness to the peculiar wants of the time. The same may also be said of the manner of the cure performed by our Lord in respect to its being done on the Sabbath, and followed up with an injunction to the restored individual to take his couch along with him. This was not, certainly, intended, as the Jews improperly imagined, to weaken the obligation to keep the Sabbath as a day sacred to the Lord. It was a circumstance obviously chosen for the purpose of arresting men's attention to the case, which might otherwise have passed unheeded, and drawing them in living faith to the Lord of the Sabbath. Not only was the cure itself a work of mercy toward the individual, and as such no violation of the Sabbatical rest, but both that and his thereafter carrying his couch was a work of mercy, if rightly interpreted, to the whole people. It was a great matter-of-fact sermon -a proof and manifestation of the revealed arm of Jehovah--an undeniable evidence that the Most High was in the midst of them; and was, therefore, as fit and seasonable for that day as the labours of God's servants in his temple. For what higher object could any of these have in view than to proclaim the presence, the power, and the goodness of God! So that, in regard to the whole of this, as of every other part of the doings and arrangements of Christ, we may justly say, " He hath done all things well," and divine Wisdom is here also justified by her children. "ENTER INTO THY CLOSET." WE do not need to enter the closet in order to find the Lord. He is ever near to us. But we enter it in order to escape from distractions, and in order to regain those associations, and, it may be, to surround ourselves with those mementoes which we formerly found helpful to our prayers. One who has great powers of abstraction may take refuge from surrounding bustle in the depths of his own spirit, and pass along the crowded streets in the perpetual hermitage of his own self-seclusion, undiverted and undistracted by all that is whirling round him. But few have this talent of inward sequestration—this power to make a closet of themselves; and, in order to find for their thoughts a peaceful sanctuary, they must find for their persons a tranquil asylum. It little matters where or what it is. Isaac went out into the field, and Jacob plied his night-long prayer beside the running brook. Abraham planted a grove, and, in the cool shadow of his oaks at Beersheba, he called on the name of the Lord. Abraham's servant knelt down beside his camel. And it would appear from some of his psalms, that a cave, a mountain fastness, or a cavern in the rocks, was David's frequent oratory. Peter had chosen for his place of prayer the quiet and airy roof of his sea-side lodging, when the messengers of Cornelius found him. would seem that the open air-the noiseless amplitude of the "solitary place "-the hill-side, with the stars above, and the shadowy world below-the fragrant stillness of the garden, when evening had dismissed the labourers, were the places where the Man It of Sorrows loved to pray. It was in the old church of Ayr that John Welsh was wont, all alone, to wrestle with the Angel of the Covenant; and we have stood in the wild rock-cleft where Peden found frequent refuge from his persecutors, and whence he caused his cry to ascend "unto the Lord most high." It does not need four walls and a bolted door to make a place of prayer. Retirement, and silence, and a sequestered spirit will create it anywhere. By the shore of the sounding sea-in the depths of the forest -in the remoteness of the green and sunny upland, or the balmy peacefulness of the garden bowernay, amidst the dust of the dingy ware-room, or the cobwebs of the owlet-haunted barn-in the jolting corner of the crowded stage, or the unnoticed nook of the travellers' room, you have only to shut your eyes, and seclude your spirit, and you have created a closet there. It is a closet wherever the soul finds itself alone with God.-" Mount of Olives." BIBLE COMFORT. WHEN Dr Watts was almost worn out and broken down by his infirmities, he observed, in conversation with a friend: "I remember an aged minister used to say, that the most learned and knowing Christians, when they come to die, have only the same plain promises of the Gospel for their support as the common and unlearned; and so," said he, "I find it. It is the plain promises of the Gospel that are my support; and I bless God they are plain promises, that do not require much labour and pains to understand them; for I can do nothing now but look into my Bible for some promise to support me, and live upon that." This was likewise the case with the pious and excellent Mr Hervey. He writes, about two months before his death: "I now spend, almost my whole time in reading and praying over the Bible." And again, near the same time, to another friend: "I am now reduced to a state of infant weakness, and given over by my physician. My grand consolation is to meditate on Christ; and I am hourly repeating those heart-reviving lines of Dr Young: This-only this-subdues the fear of death. 1. Pardon for infinite offence!-2. And pardon 3. A pardon bought with blood! - 4. With blood divine. 5. With blood divine of Him I made my foe! 6. Persisted to provoke!-7. Though woo'd and aw'd, Bless'd and chastis'd, a flagrant rebel still! 8. A rebel 'midst the thunders of His throne. 9. Nor I alone!-10. A rebel universe! 11. My species up in arms!-12. Not one exempt!- HOW MAY I TEACH MY CHILD SINCERITY? THAT children are naturally indisposed to sincerity must be admitted. A propensity to deceive by word and act is among the bitter fruits of our common apostasy. "The wicked," saith the Psalmist, 66 are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born, telling lies." One of the first things observable in children is an effort to deceive. To exonerate themselves from blame, or free themselves from anticipated punishment, they falsify their word, or cover up what truth and duty demand should be exposed. Very important, therefore, is it to prevent this-to nip this evil propensity in the bud, and cultivate a frank, open, sincere disposition. How may this be done? I suggest four things: 1. Impress them deeply with the criminality and odiousness of insincerity. This may be done by reading and expounding to them portions of Scripture bearing upon this point, and making them commit to memory those portions of Scripture. 2. Always be sincere with them; never allowing yourself to deceive them in any particular, or for any cause. There is often a temptation, on the part of the parents, to do the opposite of this. It is often quite convenient to deceive a child; but he who does guilt. He teaches falsehood by example-the most it, does it to the child's moral injury and his own effective of teaching-and the pupil will most surely learn and practise deceit himself. 3. When your children commit an offence and confess it, commend them for the confession, and forgive them the wrong done. punish him for it. Whatever other offence goes un4. When you detect your child in a lie, invariably punished, let not this. If Jehovah regards lying as a crime, that parent who omits severe discipline in case of falsehood, is certainly deserving of censure. Our Saviour tells us that he who lies bears Satan's image. "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh his Jehovah hath said: "All liars shal Ihave their part own; for he is a liar, and the father of it." And in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone." While the path of sincerity is straight and plain, and the sunlight of heaven rests upon it, and while it leads upwards to the home of God and truth, the paths of dissimulation are dark and crooked, and lead down to the abode of the prince of darkness. Can we be too careful that our children should be kept in the way of the Father of lights, and out of the tortuous, snaky course, of the infernal serpent ?— Mother's Magazine. THE JEWS-" A PEOPLE SCATTERED." "THEIR restless feet are pressing at this very hour the snows of Siberia, and the burning sands of the desert. Our friend Gobat found numbers of them in the elevated plains of Abyssinia, eighteen hundred miles to the south of Cairo; and when Denham and Clapperton, the first travellers that ventured across the great Sahara, arrived on the banks of the Lake Tchad, they also found that the wandering Jew had preceded them there by many a long year. When the Portuguese settled in the Indian Peninsula, they found three distinct classes of Jews; and when the English lately took possession of Aden, in the south of Arabia, the Jews were more in number there than the Gentiles. By a census taken within the last few months in Russia, they amount to two millions two hundred thousand; so that their population in that immense empire exceeds that of our twenty-two cantons. Morocco contains three hundred thousand, and Tunis one hundred and fifty thousand. In the they assemble together in eighteen synagogues. one small town of Sana, the capital of Arabia Felix, Yemen counts two hundred thousand. The Turkish empire two hundred thousand, of which Constantinople alone contains eighty thousand. At Brody, where the Christians, who are ten thousand in number, have only three churches, the Jews, twenty thousand in number, have one hundred and fifty synagogues. Hungary has three hundred thousand. Cracovie twenty-two thousand. In a word, it is imagined that, were all the Jews assembled together, they would form a population of seven millions; so that, could you transport them into the land of their fathers this very year, they would form a nation more powerful and more numerous than our Switzerland."-Professor Gaussen of Geneva. THE CHRISTIAN TREASURY. 37 THE BELIEVER'S AFFLICTIONS; HIS PROSPECTS; THE INFLUENCE OF THE ONE UPON THE OTHER; AND THE STATE OF MIND REQUISITE TO THE EFFICACY OF THAT INFLUENCE. BY RALPH WARDLAW, D. D., GLASGOW. SUCH seem to be the four topics contained in the two closing verses of the 4th chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians: "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." I wish to draw the reader's attention to each of these topics; and having been premonished that brevity, which has been said to be the soul of wit, is to be the soul, too, of the Christian Treasury, I shall not attempt to introduce them all into one paper, but, with the editor's permission, shall distribute them into a series of two or three in succession. I. The first of the four topics is THE BELIEVER'S AFFLICTIONS. What is here said of them?"Our light affliction, which is but for a moment." The sufferings which Paul had here chiefly in his eye were such as he himself and others, his fellow-labourers in the Gospel especially, were called in providence to endure for the name's sake of Jesus-the afflictions arising from the persecuting violence of the "enemies of the cross of Christ." The reader may see this by looking at the preceding context, verses 4-12. In various other places he refers pointedly and largely to this description of trialssetting forth their variety, their amount, and their constancy. Consult, for example, chapters vi. 4, 5, and xi. 23-27, of this same Epistle; and of the former Epistle to the same Church, chapter iv. 9-13. Such, with little interruption, was Paul's own condition; such it had been from the time of his conversion and installation in his apostolic office; and such, from past experience, as well as from his knowledge of the unchanged identity of his doctrine, and of the nature against whose pride and corruption its principles militated, was his prospect for life. He had no ground on which to expect its cessation, but with the cessation of his ministry; and that ministry he could not lay down till his latest pulse had beat. And of such "affliction "all his fellow-servants and fellow-believers No. 4. * had, in their various kinds and measures, their allotted share; and so have many since been called to suffer, in different parts of the world and periods of the Church's history. It has not ceased to be the policy of "the prince of this world” to stir up the enemies of the cross against those who have taken it up to bear it after Jesus-to incite the subjects of his own kingdom against the subjects of Christ's. In the history of modern mission we still have exemplifications of this policy--some of them in no ordinary degree severe and affecting. In our own favoured country we have little to fear. Public persecution there is none, or of a description so negative and limited as to be unworthy to be called by the same name. Let us be thankful. In the enjoyment of religious liberty and civil protection, we here, according to Eastern figure, "sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, no one making us afraid." And yet, while the exterminating sword of legal persecution does not awake against us, it must not be thought that there is no persecution. There are the persecutions of private life-the persecutions of family, of kindred, of friends-the realization of the Saviour's own words in Matt. x. 34–36; and to spirits of affectionate sensibility, these are many a time worse to bear than the proscriptions, and prisons, and banishments, and deaths, of more public opposition. To such spirits, the forfeiture of a father's or a mother's smile, the alienation and loss of relations and bosom friends, may have more in them of the terrific and the tempting than the most excruciating of corporeal tortures, or the worst forms of death. But although, in the passage before us, and in others of a similar description, there may be a primary reference to persecution and its trying effects, there is not the slightest reason for restricting the application of them exclusively to sufferings of this one kind. By such a principle of restriction, the afflicted people of God would be deprived of a large amount of their consolation—no inconsiderable proportion of what is addressed in the New Testament to sufferers having evidently the primary reference that has been mentioned. But in the March 20, 1846. full spirit of it, it is applicable to the children of God universally, in all their varieties of providential trial. And the varieties, in both kind and measure, are without end. There are afflictions in the form of personal diseases; afflictions in the diseases and deaths of near and dear relations-fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, kindred in every degree -friends, companions; afflictions in the losses and the crosses-the baffled schemes, the frustrated hopes, the mortifying reverses, the difficulties, anxieties, and privations, in the affairs of life; afflictions from poverty, with all its attendant train of evils, personal and domestic, bodily and mental; afflictions from the treachery of false friends, and the malice of real enemies; afflictions from the wickedness of the bad, and from the kind intentions, but unwise and imprudent measures, of the good. Enumeration and description, indeed, would be endless-the lot of no one individual being, in this particular, the same with the lot of any other. Some have dealt out to them what we are accustomed to call a hard and heavy lot—such as that of Job in the period of his divinely permitted bereavements and sufferings; and to some there is allotted a scene of trial as long-continued as that of others is varied and accumulated-extending even to the close of a protracted life. And yet, respecting his own troubles, and the troubles, without exception, of his fellowbelievers, what says the apostle here?" Our light affliction, which is but for a moment." 1. In the first place, they are "light." I need hardly say that the term is used comparatively. But comparatively with what? It is not of his own sufferings comparatively with those of others that he speaks, nor of the sufferings of any one individual or class of them compared with those of the rest, nor of their sufferings compared with those of the men of the world. Yet comparison is meant, and must be meant. What, then, may be its implied points? There are, I think, four, which we may naturally presume to have been in the apostle's mind. First, They are light, compared with what we deserve. This is a point of comparison which we do well never to let slip from our remembrance. The habitual presence of it to our minds will make us at once thankful for the very least of God's mercies, and submissive under the very heaviest of God's inflictions. What is our desert? What should our doom be, were that desert to be the standard of our treatment? The apostle, in one short sentence, tells us : "The wages of sin is death." The "second death"-eternal death-is what is due to us on account of our sins. While we have anything whatever short of this, we have it in opposition to desert-we have it from mercy-we have what we have no title to. O how "light" the very heaviest and most accumulated load of woes that can ever be laid upon us in this world, when put in comparison with this! Let the child of God, when tried to the uttermost when "afflicted with wave upon wave," the "billows going over him"-bear this consideration steadily in mind. Let him but put the question to himself, What, and where should I have been, if I had had my desert? and then, when his load is at the very heaviest, he will say, with grateful emphasis-how light! Well Secondly, They are light, compared with what we even now enjoy. How unspeakably rich and various the favours conferred upon us, even in the midst of our most deeply felt privations, and our most overwhelming trials! might the apostle, when he enjoins on be lievers, "in everything by prayer and supplication to make their requests known unto God, interject the phrase, “with thanksgiving;" for when is it, when can it ever be, that they have not good reason to blend thanksgiving with their prayers and supplications? The reason for this consists not merely in the remnant of temporal mercies that are still to be found in their lot-no, nor chiefly; it consists in far better and higher blessings-the present blessings of God's salvation-blessings which, in their convictions and in their experience, they know to be incomparably superior to any belonging to this world it is possible for them either to enjoy or to lose. In the midst of his severest "affliction" -even when all earthly good seems to be failing him-when the apt similitude for his condition is that of a dry and thirsty land, where there is no water"—the believer can adopt the language of those who have passed through the sultry and barren wastes before him, and sing: "Because thy loving-kindness is better than life, my lips! will praise thee. Thus will I bless thee while I live; I will lift up my hands in thy name. My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips, when I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches.” “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ !" While in the heartfelt enjoyment of this love of his covenant God, and of all covenant pro 66 THE BELIEVER'S AFFLICTIONS, &c. mises and blessings, although far from insensible to the pressure of his trials, he will still, with a plaintive cheerfulness, be able to sing -O how light! Thirdly, They are light, compared with what in hope we anticipate. Lighter still-O how unspeakably lighter, when thus compared! What our hopes anticipate is the "far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." But this forms our second topic, of which the illustration must be reserved. We shall then see how all the afflictions of the present life, when laid in the balance against this "weight of glory," "fly up, and kick the beam." Meanwhile, I can only observe, that the Apostle Peter makes this very use of the Christian's prospects-I mean, for lightening the burden of his present sorrows :-" Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, according to his abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: that the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ."1 Pet. i. 3-6. I only add, 39 distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, Fourthly, They are "light," when compared with the spirit and strength pledged in divine promise to enable us to bear them. Light and heavy, you are well aware, are relative terms relative to degrees of strength. What to a powerful man is like a feather for lightness, may by a feeble man be felt an oppressive load. Now, what is the strength of the believer? Not his own. Were that the case—had he no power to trust to than what lay in himself-well might he dread even the lightest burden. But divine strength-the strength of God-is his. He is "strong in the Lord and in the power of his might." Under every trial, his gracious Lord says to him: "My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness." There is no case of trouble imaginable to which this assurance does not extend; and what can be too heavy to be borne in the strength of the Lord? It is this that enables the believer to say: "Wherefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in All દ easy," and the "burden" of trial "light.” All are aware how widely different are our feelings, whether in discharging difficult and self-denying duties, or in bearing up under the pressure of heavy trials, when, on the one hand, the mind is at ease and happy, and when, on the other, it is oppressed and disturbed. In the latter case, nothing is either done effectually and to purpose, or endured with manly patience and cheerfulness. is languor and listlessness. Every difficulty looks insurmountable; every affliction incurable. Whereas in the former there is a vivacity, a nerve, a vigour, infused into everything. Trials seem comparatively as nothing. There is an elasticity of mind that overcomes their pressure; an upward spring, more than equivalent to the downward gravitation. There is a light within that penetrates and cheers the gloom without. Such appears to be the import of the words of Nehemiah to the restored captives of Israel: "The joy of the Lord is your strength." Thus, when Paul experienced the inward delight that sprung from a sense of God's pardoning mercy and paternal love, he could smile amid suffered and impending calamities, and of even his heaviest burdens say—O how light! But there is a second epithet here applied to the afflictions of God's people-they are "but for a moment." And here too, I need not say the epithet is comparative. Long and short, like light and heavy, are relative terms. The afflictions of one man may, in direct comparison, be longer than those of another; even, in proportion to the duration of their respective lives, very much longer. But the point |
