THE EXPRESSIONS OF LOVE.

"Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth."-1 John iii. 16-18.

I. THE EXPRESSION OF GOD'S LOVE TO MAN. "He laid down his life for us." This is its expression :-Selfsacrifice. God does love. He has a heart. He is not a being of cold intellect; He has a heart, and that heart is neither malevolent nor callous;-it is instinct with love. Love is the impulse of Omnipotence, the fountain of being, the spirit of the universe. Down at the root of all things is love.

"All I feel, and hear, and see, God of Love, is full of thee."

Now, (1) The highest demonstration of love is sacrifice; (2) The highest sacrifice is life; and, (3) God in the person of His Son gave His life for man. "Hereby

perceive we," &c. This is the gospel,-"the good news."

II. THE EXPRESSION OF MAN'S LOVE TO GOD. "We ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." Our love to God is to be shown in the same way as God has shown His love to us-by self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice for our brother man. What is the true and healthy development The of our love to God? Church has too often acted as if its development was entirely theological;-hence the battling for dogmas. It has too often acted as if its development was devotional,-as if Psalmody and Prayers were the only true expression. It has too often acted as if proselyting was the true development of love to God ;hence the zeal to make converts to its faith. The text teaches, however, that selfsacrificing benevolence is the true development. "Whoso hath this world's good," &c. The case supposed by the apostle is that of a brother in distress, looked on by a brother possessing this world's goods, and rendering no help. John intimates that a man

seeing his brother in need, having the power to help, and not helping him, cannot be a Christian. He may be a great theologian, a great pietist, a great propagandist, but no Christian.

NON-ASKING AND WRONG ASKING THE CAUSES OF SPIRIT

UAL DESTITUTION.

"Ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss," &c.James iv. 2, 3.

DESTITUTION of good is an evil. Physical destitution is an evil, intellectual destitution is a greater evil, moral destitution is the greatest evil of all; and James here gives the causes of this.

First: The cause is sometimes non-asking. There are some blessings that God gives without asking; such as being, faculties, seasons, elements of nature, &c.; others that He gives only for asking. These are spiritual blessings. "For all these things will I be enquired of," &c. What does Prayer do? (1) It effects no alteration in the plan of God. (2) It cannot inform the Almighty of anything of which He was before ignorant. (3) It does not give a claim to the Divine favors. But, (1) It does fulfil a condition of Divine beneficence. (2) It does bring the

mind into vital contact with its Maker. (3) It does deepen our sense of dependence upon God. And, (4) It does fill the soul with the idea of mediation; for all prayer “is in the name of Christ."

Secondly: The cause is sometimes wrong asking. "Ye ask amiss," &c. (1) To pray insincerely, is to pray amiss. (2) To pray without earnestness, is to pray amiss. (3) To pray without faith, is to pray amiss. (4) To pray without surrendering our being to God, is to pray amiss. Brother, wouldst thou be enriched with Heaven's choicest gifts? Then ask rightly. Right asking will open the heavens of love with all their treasures. "We enter heaven by prayer."

LOT'S WIFE. "Remember Lot's wife." Luke xvii. 32.

SKETCH the history of Lot and his wife in Sodom and their departure from it, &c.

First Remember her, and learn the evil of allowing old attachments to deter us from duty. "She looked back." Sodom had much to attract her, and she gave way to its influence, so that she was not prepared to follow fully and heartily the command of God.

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Secondly Remember her, and learn that there is no obedience to the Divine will unless it is rendered from the heart. Her body moved according to the Divine direction, but her soul did not. Mechanical service is useless. Thirdly: Remember her, and learn how absolutely our existence is in the hands of the righteous Judge. In a moment she was struck dead. "Our times are in His hand." "In Him we live, move, and have our being."

Fourthly: Remember her, and learn the power of one human life to teach the race. She has gone; it is ages, centuries ago, since the judgment of heaven destroyed her; but Christ tells us still to remember her, and her history is instructive to our race. We should study the history of our race. God intended the history of one age to enlighten the succeeding. All these things "happen for ensamples.'

DAVID NUMBERING THE
CHILDREN OF ISRAEL.

"And David lifted up his eyes, and saw the angel of the Lord

stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword," &c.-1 Chron. xxi. 16, 17.

THIS passage shews three things:

First: The enormity of sin. The sin which David committed in numbering the children of Israel was pride. And for this pride seventy

thousand men were cut down with a pestilence. One man's sin may be, has often been, the curse of thousands. No man liveth unto himself, "neither for good" nor evil. So linked is man to man and generation to generation.

Secondly: The operations of conscience. "I it is that have sinned," &c. Conscience turns a man upon himself, and without any qualification condemns him. It allows no excuses, suffers no transference of the faith to others. It says, "I it is," &c.

Thirdly: The generosity of godliness. "Let thine hand, I pray thee, O Lord my God, be on me." (1) A truly godly man will take the blame of his own conduct. (2) Will seek the deliverance of others.

THE REV. CALEB MORRIS.

The Cambria Daily Leader reported some very interesting religious services, (the Merthyr and Aberdare Ordinations) which were held on Tuesday and Wednesday, September 24th and 25th. Those services evoked in me certain reminiscences that haunt and heave my spirit in this calm and romantic corner of the world, whither I have retired for a few days to recruit a physical system which the public life of the last six years has sadly shaken and shattered. Though labor is by no means attractive to me just now, something within says, transcribe to paper some of the memories those religious services awoke, and that too, before you leave the solitudes of old Cambria to dash again into the tumult of public life; where the past, for the time, will be engulphed in the surging current of present engagements and anxieties. In obedience to this inner voice I take my pen and "write down quickly" bygone thing or two which those "ordination" meetings recalled, and in which the thoughtful reader will see, perhaps a moral of common interest and general application.

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Now for our retrospectives. On entering the chapel at Merthyr, on Tuesday, the writer's eye fell on the face of one whom he had not seen for many years, but who, in the days of our youth, played with the hand of a master upon the chords of our nature

—who, on the Sabbath morning, struck within us those deep moral thought-notes whose vibrations rang on through the week, and whose echoes float on the atmosphere of our spirits at this hour, though a quarter of a century has passed away since they were first evoked. Who is he?-that portly and royal-looking man that sits there for a time as a listener in his pew, and then, by the earnest request of the minister, ascends the desk, reads a portion of God's holy word; expounds it, so that its divinity flashes on you, and he prays until you feel yourself borne away from the material and the mutable into the presence of the spiritual and the absolute-Who is he? It is the Rev. Caleb Morris, who, for nearly thirty years, was the pastor of that Church of Puritanic renown, known as Fetter-lane Chapel, London. Upwards of a quarter of a century ago the writer, a Welshman, went to London, as green a youth as ever walked beneath the arch of Temple Bar. He had but little cash-less experience, and friends none. He literally knew no one. The sense of loneliness in the teeming streets of the great Babylon became at times intolerable to him. He got into a house of business where there were about thirty young men, most of whom were godless and gay. They ridiculed religion; but the religious teachings of a noble father remained for some time fresh upon the writer's heart. On Sabbath days he sal

lied forth in earnest search of a pulpit, to establish a waning faith. Once or twice at the outset the writer visited Tottenham Court Road Chapel, being the nearest to his residence. He heard the person who was then the minister of the chapel, a Scotchman. He struck him then as a strange and repulsive man. His contracted forehead, his little grey sinister eyes hid under a shaggy brow, his immense nose, his high-boned cheeks well nigh lost in the shirt collar, gave him a most unprepossessing aspect. Nor did we like his preaching at all; indeed, he had not the gift of intelligible articulation; he was wont to shout most furiously, but his ideas, such as they were, were for the most part lost in his mumblings. We remember that "hell and damnation" were his favorite themes. He seemed to revel in these. His bony clumsy frame would move as violently before these dread themes as the great wheel of a windmill in a strong gale.

The

pulpit at Tottenham Court Road Chapel disgusted us, and our belief is that had we not found a better one, we should have been driven into infidelity. For months we searched for one that would suit us, and searched in vain till a young man, at a most critical stage in our spiritual history, took us to Fetter Lane Chapel. On the first visit we paid to this place we heard dear old George Burder. He preached on "A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." In the evening the Rev. Caleb Morris officiated. The chapel was crowded. We remember being wonderfully struck with the preacher's appearance; it charmed us. The countenance open as the day, ruddy and fresh as the first rose in summer; the raven locks turned by nature's

graceful fingers into ringlets; the expanded brow on which there seemed to play the beams of an unearthly light; the eyes, too, not large, but luminous, balls of celestial fire flashing the mingled rays of light and love; and then the voice-very melodious-and set in the minor key; all this apart from the soul-stirring and soul-uplifting thoughts gave him at once a strange power over our young nature. For upwards of four years we attended the ministry of this remarkable man at Fetter-lane. During that period we felt the Sabbath to be not merely "the pearl of days," but the "Queen of the week. Fetter-lane pulpit inspired us with such regnant thoughts on the Sabbath as reigned triumphantly through all the devilism of a London shop-keeper's week. The reader will pardon this unavoidable self-reference.

Mr. Morris is a student of the Bible in the truest sense; he studies it inductively, and in the light, not of human systems, but in the light of nature, moral reason, consciousness, and the world's spiritual history. Hence, as an expounder, he stands alone. He afforded specimens of his expository power in his reading of the scriptures the other day, both at Merthyr and Aberdare.

It

has become somewhat fashionable of late in the public reading of the scriptures for the preacher to make a running commentary. as he proceeds from verse to verse. Some of these exhibitions are very sad displays of ignorance and pedantry. It has been said of one of the most popular preachers of the age, who adopts the practice, that, like a dirty-fingered child, he soils with some Calvinistic excretions nearly every passage he touches. Mr. Morris keeps his