Jesus; and He gave them to Jesus because He knew what they were. All things were before Him. The past, present, and future, are as one with God. The womb of time gives birth to nothing but God foresaw it. That which is thus brought forth, gives rise to nothing but God foreknew it. O blessed resting place, the consciousness of the omniscience of God. To us revealed the God of all grace. Sin put away in the Person of Christ. Wrath fell upon him to the uttermost; grace abounds unto us. We are launched into His presence by virtue of His work and worth; with the knowledge, too, of our need of it all. Yet assured by the Holy Ghost which is given to us, that His grace has met all our need. We are there by virtue of His blood, and in virtue of our necessity. We are redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, and are passing through the wilderness to our place in the heavenlies; with the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night. We have recorded in scripture the trials of His people Israel in their journey from Egypt; and though in many instances they provoked God to chastisement, yet it must never be forgotten, that they excited His sympathy. Yes, blessed be God, the God of all grace, our trials have His sympathy. "There's not a pang His members bear, But our unbelieving hearts are slow to appreciate the touching tenderness of God's love. Not only the kindness, but the manner of displaying it, as a gift, is doubly precious when graciously bestowed. Our sins provoke God's anger oftentimes; and in judgment our enemy is permitted to assail us, and to gain advantage over us; yet, when conscience is awakened and sin put away, how soon is the kindness of God manifested. A father may be angry with his child, and deservedly so; the child, in its folly, may peril its safety; yet, when awakened to penitence, the suffering of the child kindles afresh the love of the father. There will be tears on the part of the child, but the parent's hand is wiping them away. There will be upbraidings of conscience, but unfeigned parental affection softens their poignancy. The folly of the prodigal son served to reveal the heart of a loving father. We have light into the character of the one by that which was dark in the character of the other. We read in the second chapter of Exodus, "The children of Israel sighed by reason of bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of their bondage. And God heard their groaning, and remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." And again, in the third chapter, in His interview with Moses, God is pleased to announce, "I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey." And God kept His word, and that by signs and wonders and mighty deeds. Pharaoh and his host were drowned in the Red Sea! For forty years he has borne with their manners in the wilderness, and now they are about to " go over Jordan and possess the land." Faith is the substance of things hoped for. Faith accredits God's power to accomplish His purpose. God ever in scripture acts in the consciousness of that power. The book of Deuteronomy is a code of laws for their guidance in the land to which God would bring them. He had revealed His purpose, and His purpose and its accomplishment are one. would place His people in blessing yet. He would also remember their past sufferings. He had made their cause His own, and He entered into their trials as one that shared them. And He dealt with their enemies as His own, too. Indeed, because He had called forth His people whom He had redeemed, therefore Amalek hated them, and sought their injury. And their call of God, and because He had called them, exposed them to trial. Even as it is at this day. "All that will live godly in Christ Jesus, shall suffer persecution." And what is godly living, but seeking after God revealed in His word and by His ordinances. And trials that arise from this are only laurel wreaths-family marks, as one has before designated them, by which His people may be recog nised. But they call forth God's sympathy, and are the occasion of it. They secure His protection. Our object He is good, when we seek to follow after holiness end walk worthy of Him who has called us. Our pursuit of this object may be more or less earnest, our watchfulness more or less vigilant. Supineness may occasion us trial. Rash energy, also. But, whether from sloth or impetuosity we are brought into it, God in His mercy remembers we are in it, and undertakes on our behalf. "The secrets. righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance." Moreover, forgetfulness of God will bring into trial; and easily, also, we can forget the occasion of it. But the love of our God to His people is from everlasting to everlasting; and His remembrance of those who have thwarted the object of that love, is everlasting also. He not only has to remind of those we should love, but also of those we should avoid. "My soul, come not thou into their Unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united." And these principles are developed in the portion of His word under notice-"Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt. How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of them, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary: and he feared not God." Could anything be more beautiful than that which is here displayed of the watchful eye of God over His people? Could motives for sympathy be more happily condensed, or ground for protection be more ably advanced? Was ever the unfortunate victim of undeserved calumny more skilfully defended? Did eloquence ever plead as God here pleads on behalf of His people? Whatever in weakness might provoke to pity is brought to the surface. Whatever increased the odium of insolent audacity is displayed to the advantage of the feeble. May His people not say, in holy exultation, "If God be for us, who can be against us?" Could power be more maliciously exercised than in attacking the hindmost, even those who through very feebleness could not keep pace with the van, faint and weary as well; dropping one by one into the jaws of Leviathan, forgotten by their comrades in the hurry of self-preservation, yet remembered by God; and their enemy ere long to be visited with just retribution? He oppressed God's people, and he feared not their God! "Therefore it shall be, when the Lord thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it." And is it not written (1 Cor. x. 11), "Now all these things happened unto them for types [margin], and are written for our admonition." Surely the God of is our God and Father in Jesus. Alas! how little progress we make in the understanding of His grace, thus testified to us in the records of His dealings with His people of old, and still more fully in the light of His only-begotten Son. "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall He not with him also freely give us all things?" (Rom. viii. 32.) all grace FRAGMENTS. The food which hope gets from the Scriptures is not of the kind which it would have been had we been the authors of the book. We should have stuffed it out with bloated descriptions of the glory. On the contrary, the Scriptures lead us to the knowledge of what God is in Himself, and then to trust Him, with just a few hints and glimpses of what He will do. Jesus is Lord for us, and over us. He is Lord over all for us; all the keys are laid upon him, and we are practically to know Him as our Lord. In the 22nd of Revelations we find a connection between the glory of God and the things standing in the light of it. The Bride having the glory of God, the whole scene savours of a glory not poured out from God, but the glory of God Himself. God only knows the glory or the love of God, but the Spirit teaches us to understand something of it. In our Lord's description of His Father's house, there is no word about glory-nothing of jasper and sardine stone-but just that there is room there, and His personal desire to have us there with Him. It will be His Father's house-our Father's house-and we, brought as adopted sons into the enjoyment of all the affections of God towards His Son. No. XI. THE LORD JESUS, IN JOHN I. 43-II. THE Lord may be traced in this scripture, as One who ranges, if I may so express it, through different regions of divine glory, in the calm and perfect sense of this, that they all belong to Him, and are fully and properly His own. In His intercourse with Nathanael, the Lord Jesus shews Himself to be the One who touches the deep springs that are in man, conversing in power with the spirits of all flesh, re-making man also, re-creating him after His own mind, and stamping a new character upon him, as for eternity. He lets this Israelite know, that He had been with him under the fig-tree, ere Philip had called him, and that He was there with him, re-modelling his mind and character, giving him, as it were, a new condition of being, making him, according to the divine oracle in Ps. xxxii., " an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile." It was the Spirit of God that alone could thus converse with Nathanael's soul, and form him anew, as was done under the fig-tree. And thus it is, that Jesus here rises on the conscience of that Israelite in the glory of God; and under the weight and sense of that glory he worships Him. This is a very wondrous moment. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of Jesus, the power which Jesus uses in divine sovereign grace. The Lord Jesus is before us here, as the Jehovah of the day of Gideon. Jehovah addressed Gideon according to His own counsel about him, or as such an one as His own Spirit was making him. "Thou mighty man of valour," says the Lord to Gideon, though at that time he was but a poor man of Manasseh, threshing wheat in his father's threshing-floor at Ophrah. But, in the counsel of God, and by the energy of the Spirit, Gideon was the leader of the host of Israel against Midian; and the angel spoke in divine intelligence to |