ment, and the impregnable bulwark of a country. Athens. had a philosophy as splendid as ours, Rome had warriors as brave; but Athens is a wreck, Rome a place of darkness, of despotism, and of daily decline. And if philosophy, art, literature, science, as they climb the wrecks of these cities, like ivy that clasps the ruin that it cannot avert, could become vocal, they would say, "We could only beautify the ruin, we could not prevent it. There is nothing in us that Austria is a country peo ་ can give immortality to a land." pled with as brave men as our own; France is a nation great and heroic as our own. It is not our physical nature that has given us peculiar elevation: there is nothing in our flesh and blood physically superior to the flesh and blood of the rest of the earth. Our safety lies not in our walls, nor our ramparts, nor our navy, nor our army. The secret of England's perpetuity is, God's people in the midst of it, and their prayers and intercessions ever lifted up in the golden censer of the great High-Priest find a response before the throne; and God spares us, not because we deserve it, but because there are so many of his own interceding still in the midst of us. 11 CHAPTER VIII. THE LOST WIFE. "O Thou, who in the garden's shade "Bend o'er us now, as over them, And set our sleep-bound spirits free, "Remember Lot's wife."— LUKE XVii. 32. WHAT our Lord says on this occasion authenticates the narrative of Moses. It not only authenticates it, but it proves that our Lord accepted that narrative as a history of facts, not, as the infidels of Germany view it, as a compendium of myths and fables; and so regarding it, he draws from it the practical lesson, so briefly but so suggestively embodied in these words, "Remember Lot's wife." "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope." Let us notice her punishment. She was arrested in her course, made a fixture on the spot, judgment falling upon her like the lightning in its speed, as fatal as it was unexpected. She partook of the sins of Sodom, she shared in its punishment, and became by that punishment a monument to future ages, that the wages of sin is death; sometimes protracted, sometimes instant, but the sin never, unless forgiven, separated from its penalty. Her crime seems to have been direct disobedience to God's word. He said, "Escape for thy life-look not, behind." She argued, "I am escaping-it can be no great sin to turn my head, and to look round at that dear and beautiful metropolis, where I have spent so many happy and delightful days, in which still are my sons, my relatives, and my friends, the gay company and the brilliant coteries in which I have taken a part. Let me take one farewell look at Sodom before I quit it for ever." That farewell look was the commencement of a retrogression in heart, the issues of which we shall presently see. There might be something of incredulity and unbelief in Lot's wife looking back. Satan so tempted Eve, when he said, “God knoweth that in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die;" and in the same way he may have tempted Lot's wife, -"God has bid you escape from the place with a make believe threat that he will destroy it; but God is not so severe nor so strict as to do it." She may not only have left this city with much incredulity and unbelief, but with great hankerings after it. Men sometimes take their bodies from the place of sin, but leave their hearts, which are themselves, behind them. Lot's wife was outwardly a refugee from the impending judgment, but that which was herself she left behind her. One wonders at her conduct, for there was no great temptation to it. She could not say that her husband tempted her. Adam could say, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat;" and the woman could say, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat;" but Lot's wife had no excuse. There is no evidence that any one tempted her, but her own heart, and Satan, the tempter of all; and her conduct, therefore, seems to be unpalliated by any extrinsic consideration. Her sin, too, was aggravated by this fact, that it was direct disobedience to the word of her Deliverer. God's word, where it is clearly enunciated, is God's law. What God forbids, it is sin to do, though the thing does not seem to us morally wrong; and what God commands, it is duty to comply with, though what he commands does not seem to us morally expedient. And when, in addition to the authority of the Legislator, there is added the claim of the Deliverer and the Benefactor, disobedience becomes not only sin, but the basest and most palpable ingratitude. To sin against God as he speaks in the thunder and reveals himself in the flames of Sinai, is crime; but to sin against him so loving the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him may not perish, is no ordinary or easily exhausted criminality. This was the conduct of Lot's wife. She sinned in the midst of mercy, she flew in the face of her Deliverer. Her crime became more heinous, because committed against a God who was showing her at that moment unasked, unexpected, and undeserved goodness. They are guilty in modern times of the sin of Lot's wife, who cherish longings in the heart after what they have renounced in principle and retreated from in fact. Those, for instance, who have renounced the sins of the world, the scenes of its folly, the places of its dissipation, but do so because constrained by popular sentiment, or by the fear of personal consequences, and would, if they could, return to the spheres they have abjured, are sharing in the sin of Lot's wife, and unless they abandon in feeling as well as in fact the sins they have left, they may share in the judgment of Lot's wife also. Those ministers, or churches, who, having left the awful apostacy in the 16th century, yet are anxious to return, and would if they could, and do not because they cannot afford it; whose hearts are in the Babylon they have renounced, whose maintenance is from the communion they have joined; who themselves would be Romanists, but gauge their purses and cannot afford to be so such persons, like Lot's wife, may physically have separated from the great Babylon, but actually, morally, and spiritually, they are still in the midst of it. And so a church, as well as an individual, that begins to borrow her ornaments from what she has abjured, and her claims to supremacy from the system she ought to renounce, is retreating; and if any Protestant church will look back at the place which in God's mercy she was delivered from, instead of looking upward for direction from her Lord, and onward for the glorious destiny that lies before the true and the faithful, let her not be surprised, if, as a church, like Lot's wife, she become a fixture, a monument of the evil, and the bitterness, and the issues of retreating to what has been abjured, and readopting the sins that were once abandoned. If what we have left was wrong, we ought to have nothing more to do with it; if it was right, we ought not to have left it; in either way, let us be consistent. The time at which our Lord refers to the punishment of the wife of Lot, is in reference to the eve of the present dispensation, when men shall be as it was in the days of Noah, eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, and the Flood came upon them; and as they were in the days of Lot, when the men were eating and drinking, and planting and building, in the same day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven. Thus shall it be in the day that the Son of man is revealed. Now, this passage would seem to indicate that the great cause of the want of readiness of heart for the great day of the Lord, will be the excessive love of the world. I do not mean by the love of the world, the admiration excited by the beauty of the firmament above or by what is fragrant in the fields below; but that excessive attachment to the pos |