conceive a sweeter or a holier joy, than that which animates a believer's bosom, when he perceives he has been to any one a messenger of peace. To any one-but it may be more, far more than this. It may be to our dearest, to our best-beloved. It may be to the child over whom we have yearned in patient sorrow through years of godlessness and folly. It may be to the parent, the wife, the husband, the more than self, whose steps we have watched and counted one by one, with throes of intensest anguish, as each step brought them nearer to the precipice they could not see, and we had no power to stop them. If it be one of these we are employed to save! Children of this world, you cannot taste this joy, but you have the means of conceiving what it may be. You have pitied, you have loved, you have tasted the pleasure of rescuing some fellow-creature from temporal ruin, restoring some distressed one to temporal prosperity. You do know the pleasure of doing good. And you know what it is to watch expiring life in your own best

beloved; to dread a separation for what you call for-ever, and by a blessing on your cares to receive the dying back again. You remember that sentence-" Out of danger." Stretch the idea from the finite to the infinite: think of the danger as everlasting, of the ruin as endless, the separation as eternal. You may then compass something of an idea of the believer's joy in the spiritual regeneration of those he loves; they are "out of danger." If there is a joy worthy to have filled and satisfied the Redeemer's bosom in the days of his humanity, it surely might be this.

There is still much more. I do not know if Jesus ever tasted the delights of human sympathy. In most things He could not, for He could not be understood. There are those among men whom deeper-toned feeling or intenser intellect condemns to walk alone; for ever spending what no one pays them back : capable of administering to others' wants, but obliged to go to Heaven with their own like a stream of water from which all may drink,

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but none can supply the current when it fails. Their joys, and sorrows, and thoughts, and feelings, if they attempt to express them, are not understood; and like the planetary spheres, they seem so bright to others, no one conceives the cold opaqueness of their isolated spirits. Christ, above all others, was so circumstanced. From the time He quitted the bosom of the Father, He had no equal, no companion; his disciples, they who loved him best, wondered at him and knew not what he meant. a time of extreme necessity, angels were sent to minister to him because mortals could not, and they perhaps were insufficient. I do not know if ever Jesus sat down with those He loved, to talk together of their eternal hopes, and hold communion of the things unseen, for mutual consolation; it is likely not. There is, nevertheless, a passage in a psalm applied to Christ, that might imply it; where, speaking of him who betrayed Him, he says, "We took sweet couns together," &c. But whether Jesus tasted it or not, He has left the com

munion of the saints to be a blessing and a solace to his church. Dissensions and divisions among ourselves have so made void this blessing, it scarcely can be said to exist any longer among the church at large. But between individuals whom circumstances bring together, and the bonds of Christ unite, there is a sympathy of most exquisite enjoyment, quite separate from the intercourse of earthly friendship; although the strongest cement to it and its best ingredient when they are found together. And because a believer's hopes, and joys, and expectations, and desires, are common to all believers, and their object of deepest interest is the same, the language of his heart will be understood, and his feelings find sympathy, where by nature there would have been no bond of union. From our great defectibility, this enjoyment is not what it might be; perhaps never so little what it might be as at this time. But there are those still, who fear the Lord and speak often one to another; and there is a sweetness in such intercourse, a holy joy in such communion, to

which Christ is a party, and God himself a listener, which cannot be equalled by anything in the ordinary intercourse of life. It makes, indeed, as every experienced Christian knows, the intercourse of common society seem very palling and insipid. Accustomed among themselves to communications of such deep and heart-touching interest, the children of God are very sensitive to the littleness of all common talk; and in contact with the world are thence exposed to be sometimes thought offended, when they are really only uninterested.

"If any man be in Christ Jesus, old things are passed away, all things are become new.” From this renovating process flows a perpetual current of increasing joy into the bosom of God's people. Their possessions are all new possessions. Their house, their lands, their friends, their children, the common air they breathe, the bread they put into their mouths; O it is all new, when sanctified by the blessing of the Lord, when divine love has taken pos

*Mal. iii. 16.