often, as parents, straitened, ashamed, and desponding. I hope I have not added to this feeling of discouragement, or if we despair over the ideal which so often rises before us, it may serve to lead us down into the valley of humiliation and prayer. God will help us, when, feeling weak, we cast ourselves upon his strength. He will make some of the failures over which we mourn so bitterly-those unsatisfying, weary Sabbath-days blessed successes.

Some wedded heart here is saying, with a great sorrowfulness, "I stand alone in this formidable effort; the help I most need of all human giving is withheld; it is not help, but hindrance. What I say and do for Sabbath hallowing in my home is unsaid and undone, I fear, by one at my side. How strong, how comforted, I should feel, if this interrupted union could only fill itself out by a harmony offering and example in this sacred observ

ance!"

Oh, lonely wife, I know thee who thou art! Thou canst not bid thy children dishonor their father; thou thyself honorest and lovest him. Thou canst not suffer them to approve; thou art in perpetual dread lest their feet follow after the ways that so grieve thee and that have to them such persuasive sanction. Beseech the merciful One that, through the kindness of thine heart and the weakness of love, thine own feet go not astray. And thou redouble the mother's faithfulness, prayerfulness, and constancy, and doubt not that the strong and living child thus trained will yet conduct down the divine blessing.

Oh, husband, father, who takest thine own pleasure on the Lord's day, shall the seeds of that example grow up in young hearts into hardness and crime, and on some tragic day the child, whose eye follows now your thoughtless Sabbath step, look back out of a stained and blasted manhood to this light pleasuring of yours, as the germ of his awful doom? Do you know how you try the heart, every throb of whose womanly tenderness is yours, and which, keeping reproaches and remonstrances silent, smiles, perhaps, upon you because it cannot grieve you, in that over which it mourns? Are there not gentleness and manliness enough in your soul—if we speak not of the fear of God and the voice of solemn duty to keep you from such a trampling at once upon God's law, a woman's heart, and a child's fate?

V.

KNOWING CHRIST.

FOR I KNOW WHOM I HAVE BELIEVED."-2 Tim. i. part 12.

OW it is that one who walks with Christ, and whose soul is joined to him in a vital and conscious union knows this Saviour as no other soul knows him, it will be difficult so to explain by any language or imagery which can be employed as to make it intelligible to those who have no experience of it. And yet this is just what many an inquiring spirit desires and waits to comprehend. They stand at a distance and look upon him whom the gospel sets forth as the way of life. They walk round about him without seeing how to approach him, and having no confidence in any addresses they may offer to him. He is to them remote, indistinct, almost mythical. Perhaps they have not yet settled it in their thoughts who and what he is. If they attempt communication with him, it is all on their side; they have only their own voices; there are no returning accents; all is silent, motionless, and unresponsive.

"Does he reveal himself to those that believe in him? Does he come to meet them out of this vague and hazy distance? Does he break his silence so that they hear

and recognize his voice? Do they know him as their Friend and Redeemer, and know that they know him, and come into relations of intimacy with him, and exchange with him reciprocities of love, confidence, and sympathy?" So they question.

If now as those to whom Christ is precious, and to whom he has made himself known, we could open to them all the journal of our hearts, introduce them to scenes of an inward personal experience which never can be thrown upon canvas, tell them how it is that we are sure we have seen and felt and touched and embraced him, what it is we know of him, by what process this acquaintance was made and has ripened, and wherein is the daily consciousness of his presence with us, and his power upon us, it would meet perhaps better than any other demonstration the state of mind in which so many now are. True we might answer in the words of Philip to Nathaniel, "Come and see." But they want to be helped to come, and have their eyes guided to that which is to be seen. We might say, "Here's the guide-book ; read and follow the directions." But it is not strange that they should feel that it is one thing to look upon a map of an unknown region, or to study a guide-book, and another thing to hear from one who has been a traveller that way what his own lips can say about it.

So they say to us, "Tell us how you know Jesus, and know that he is such a Saviour." It may be that if we attempt to tell, we shall often break down through poverty of words; that we shall often seem to them as speaking without meaning, because the meaning is beyond them;

that when we lead them out into our experiences, we shall get them presently beyond their depth.

Just as when one listens to two artisans conversing upon the subject of their craft, or a circle of professional men discussing the matters of their profession, he may understand much of what is signified, but every now and then is made to feel that he is off soundings where they easily touch bottom. Still something surely can be said, and said intelligibly, though it be said out of an experience to which the listener is a stranger, of that experimental knowledge of Christ possessed by a renewed heart.

1. We know whom we have believed not simply as an historic personage, just as we know Washington or Columbus or William Tell. It is not simply that we can say where he was born, and of what parentage, and trace, without the omission of one incident, all the story of his life. This you know as well as we.

2. It is not that we have opinions about him which we entertain with entire confidence. Mere opinions might be shaken by some style of argument, some show of evidence, which we have not yet met. But absolute knowledge, of course, nothing can overturn. We have opinions concerning Napoleon Bonaparte and Oliver Cromwell, but not the sort of intimate, experimental knowledge of which we are now speaking. We have opinions concerning our neighbors and acquaintances, the men whom we have seen and mixed with for years, and yet none of these men do we know as we know the Lord Jesus Christ.