body be laid in the grave-my soul will take its rest in the paradise of God. I shall be in the unseen place, along with the saints of God who have departed hence before me, and by His great mercy in Christ I shall be reckoned among them. For it is Thou, Lord, only that hast made me dwell in safety during my life, or enabled me to feel this blessed, faithful safety in my death. Thy will, O faithful God, be done! I am Thine whether in the body or out of the body, and thanks to the unspeakable love of my Redeemer, Thou art mine!

This is, brethren, but a slight and hasty sketch of the riches of this verse; and, believe me, the Psalms will throughout reward your close study and continued devotional use with like riches of Christian meditation. They are all but Christian in their actual words: they are to us who read them by the light of the Gospel really Christian in their hidden meaning, and we make them altogether Christian when, according to the ancient usage of the Church of Christ, we finish each one of them by dedicating it to the glory of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

I will only make one more observation, brethren, on the verse of which I have been speaking.

As it applies, first, to our taking of our natural nightly rest in sleep, and secondly, to the last long sleep of death: —so every time we fall asleep at night, we do rehearse,

as it were, and go over the scene of dying. He who would die in Christian faith and cheerfulness must learn to go to sleep at night in Christian faith and cheerfulness. He who would lie down in the grave in peace, and take his rest in faith that the Lord will make him dwell in the heavenly kingdom in safety and happiness, must learn to lay himself down at night in Christian peace with God, with his neighbour, and with his own heart. Thus only will he prepare for the last great sleep,— which must come before long, which may come at any moment:-for who knows whether the very next time he lays himself down to natural sleep, he may not have his waking in the world of spirits, and his work and trial upon earth be done?

A Christian man, a Christian woman should bear this in mind, and come by God's grace to such habitual preparedness as to lie down at night, in holy Christian peace with God and Man, ready and willing to take the rest which God may give, for a few hours, or till the judgmentday, for it is God only that maketh us dwell, or live, or die in safety.

De have not so learned Christ

EPHESIANS iv.

20, 21. But ye have not so learned Christ; if so be ye have heard Him, and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus.

ST.

T. PAUL in this passage, which stands in the midst of the Epistle for the day, is urging the people of Ephesus to abandon more completely than they seem hitherto to have done, all the unholy and ungodly ways of living, which, like other Gentile people, they had practised before they were baptized into the Christian Church. He presses hard, if I may so speak, upon them. This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentles walk in the vanity of their mind, that is, in the foolish, wicked, selfchosen ways that the Gentiles round you walk in,— having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts, for they, like blind men, not having any clear rule or direction which way to

you,

go, wander wildly about, doing all sorts of things which are vile and unholy, for being past feeling, they have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. I beg you, he seems to say, I conjure I most earnestly implore you, not to go on like them. Ye are Christians-ye have learned Christ-ye have heard Christ, ye have been taught by Christ, ye have been taught the true lesson of Christ, the lesson as it was exhibited in Christ Himself, so that ye, being so taught, must put off the old behaviour, the old man which is corrupt, by following the deceitful lusts, and must be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and must put on the new man, which, after the likeness of God, is created again in righteousness and true holiness.

Now I cannot venture to say for certain that the Christians of Ephesus had really forgotten their Christian instruction, and had fallen far back into their old Gentile ways of living; but I am sure that they must have found it very difficult to keep up steadily and uniformly to the Christian rule of life. Only think how in all their former days they had been going on: how they had grown up as children, and boys, and men; surrounded by people who were living the loosest, most careless, and impure lives; bred up to think all this not wrong, but the regular and universal way of life,-seeing their parents and friends doing so, never learning, nor seeing

anything better,-never warned, never taught, never preached to publicly, nor advised privately,-accustomed all their lives long to do just what their own lusts and likings prompted them to do. You can easily conceive, brethren, what a dreadful state of things it must have been, and what a miserable, wicked, unhappy live they must have led,-for let men say or think as they will about it, a wicked life is an unhappy one, and always will be an unhappy one.

Well, in the midst of all this sad state of things, there comes to Ephesus by ship from Corinth, a man, a Jew, of no particularly striking appearance, nor power of words, and he speaks to them. They crowd round him to listen. He tells them strange things, he tells them that in a land far away from theirs God has prepared a people, for well nigh two thousand years, for His service, whom they have never heard of,-that He has sent them prophets, one after another, that at last He has sent them His own Son in the form of a man, to bring them to repentance; but that these rebellious people, who would not listen to the prophets, have rejected the Son of God, and actually crucified the Blessed Lord of Life. He tells them that this death of Jesus Christ was willingly and knowingly undergone; for that the Son of God did lay down His life, and suffer His precious Blood to be shed, in order to turn and save all mankind from sin and