VIII.

DEPARTED TROUBLE AND WELCOME REST.

"There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.' JOB iii. 17.

HE day was when it was thought a fit thing that the Christian's last restingplace should be surrounded by gloomy and repulsive associations, and when it was thought right that around the grave there should be gathered the sad emblems of mortal decay, rather than the memorials of immortal hope. In the gloom of cathedral vaults, where the sunbeam would never fall nor the daisy grow, the dust was given to the dust from which it came; and the dark fancy of the sculptor ran riot in devising ghastly tokens of the degradation of that which was the human body, now under the dominion of decay and death. It was not of peaceful rest, not of the glorious deliverance from sin and sorrow, not of the Saviour's blessed face seen without a veil at last, that the burying-place of the Middle Ages would remind you, but rather of mouldering bones and dreamless heads, as though that had been most, or all.

And most of us can remember how, in our early days, the churchyard of the parish we knew was like anything rather than what a Christian burying-place should be made by people who believe that the believer's breathless body is "still united to Christ,” and is waiting for a glorious resurrection. We remember the locked-up, deserted, neglected place, all grown over with great weeds and nettles, and looking not like God's Acre, the holiest place in the parish, but rather like an accursed spot, which no little child would willingly go near. I see something more than improved taste and judgment in those quiet, beautiful, carefully tended spots with which we have grown so familiar, and where faces and forms, often missed from our firesides, have been laid to their long repose. It is not merely better judgment, but sounder faith, that is here; it is a thoroughly Christian thing to scatter the beauties of nature around the Christian grave; it is fit and right that there flowers should spring up and die, with their silent reminder of death and of resurrection; it is fit and right that the survivor should often visit the place where rests the mortal part of one who, though far away, is a member of the family yet as much as ever; and there, perhaps, remember, more vividly than ever elsewhere, His blessed words who said, "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die!'

I see something, my friends, in the most beautiful text to which you have listened, that is like turning the ghastly, neglected, nettle-grown graveyard which we may remember in childhood, into the quiet, sweet, thoughtful sleeping-place which we find so commonly now. Surely, very like that pleasant change is the change which passes upon our conception of our last resting-place, when we think of it, not as man has often described and often made it, but as the ancient patriarch Job sets it before us here. I have many times thought of preaching from these memorable words; but I remembered what was said by a great divine as the reason why he had never preached from another very familiar verse of Holy Scripture. He said that really he could only repeat his text, if he were to seek to discourse upon it; that he could add nothing to its force and beauty. Yet let us try to-day to rest in the contemplation of these words we all know so well, and which, in many a time of weariness and trouble, have come so welcome to the Christian's heart. There are few words, indeed, that fall more pleasantly upon the ear. How gently, how graciously, amid the fever and the toils of life, our blessed faith seems to take us by the hand, and to point us to a place where all these are done with, saying, "There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary are at rest!

This text speaks to us over nearly four thousand years. Isaac was but a youth in the days when Job

lived. But the oldest book in the world, this book of Job, has never been surpassed for beauty and sublimity by any of all that came after it; and even it never rose to higher strains than in those verses of which the text is one. Yet we are to remember this: that Job lived in days when the light of truth was dim; the Sun of Righteousness had not yet risen above the horizon; and Jesus had not yet brought life and immortality to light; and thus it is possible that we are able to understand Job's words more fully and better than he understood them himself. The text may be read, first, as of the grave; but in its best meaning, it speaks of a better world, to which the grave is the portal. Now, many of you know, that, while all are agreed in believing that a future life was not revealed to Job as plainly as it is revealed to us, some have maintained that Job had no knowledge of a life beyond the grave at all; and so, that in the text he speaks not merely of the grave first, but of the grave only. It is not needful now to discuss the question as to Job's knowledge, which has been discussed already not only very much, but very bitterly. It is plain that we are entitled to read those verses in the light of present revelation; and after looking at the text in the sense which it first bears, we shall go on to its completion in a farther and a higher. Let us think, then, first, of these words, as spoken of the grave; which, as you know, Job elsewhere calls "the house appointed for all living.”

It is not needful that we should seek to justify the impatient burst in which Job wished, as many others have wished since, that he had never been born. You will think of a great man in former days, who regularly, as his birthday came round, thought he could not better observe it than by reading by himself this chapter of the Book of Job. Jonathan Swift, a Christian divine and a great deal more, in the review of a wasted and disappointed life, took up the ancient story of the patient patriarch in his impatient day; and many a one beside, in the bitter conviction that all life has proved a failure, has done the like. You remember how trouble after trouble came upon that home in the land of Uz: how first the patriarch's worldly wealth was taken; then all his children were reft away together; then loathsome bodily anguish laid upon himself: how his three friends came to comfort him, and when they saw him did not know him, so changed was he in that little time. Not a word had they of consolation; the easy commonplaces with which the cheerful and well-to-do commonly condole with the suffering, would not do in a case so extreme as that. And it was after seven gloomy days of silence, that Job broke forth into this passionate, desolate cry, wishing the day of his birth had never been. He had not our gospel light, nor our strong consolation; the Blessed Spirit of all comfort was not known to Job as He is known to us; yet of course Job's impatience is a thing that cannot be fully