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our years are running on like the river in its wintry tides; hasten then, brethren, to the Lord, and then in due time will the door of the heavenly house be opened to you, and your place be among the redeemed through the mercies of Jesus Christ.

JOHN HENRY PARKER, OXFORD AND LONDON.

Sermons for the Christian Seasons.

TWELFTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

CHRIST SORROWING OVER THE WORLD.

MARK vii. 32—35. And they bring unto Him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech Him to put His hand upon him. And He took him aside from the multitude and put His fingers into his ears, and He spit, and touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven He sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.

WHEN our blessed Lord was about to unloose the tongue of him that had an impediment in his speech, He first looked up to heaven and sighed. When He was about to raise Lazarus from the grave and to restore great joy to his afflicted house, He first wept at the grave of Lazarus. In both these instances sorrow crossed the soul of the Holy One, though He was about to heal the infirmity and to overcome death. We may

well meditate upon these sighs and tears of Christ, from the very mysteriousness of His grief at such a time. When He was about to relieve those that believed on Him from pain and grief, then He grieved Himself. One would have thought that He would have come with joy to the grave of Lazarus when He was minded to raise him from the grave, that while others wept He would have exclaimed as on another occasion, "Weep not," or that in touching the tongue of the stammerer He would have joyfully spoken His "Ephphatha;" but He sighed when He was about to untie the tongue; He wept when He was about to raise the dead.

Now it may be that in beholding this infirmity and this death, though they were instantly to be removed, He thought of the general sentence of sorrow and death passed upon the world. The whole wide view of the tribulation of mankind might have come before Him with awful vividness through these particular instances. Though doubtless He rejoiced to work the cure and to conquer death, the fact that there were sicknesses in the world and that there was death, was before Him in terrible distinctness. And as when He was looking at Jerusalem, closely observing the temple, then He wept over it, so the immediate

spectacle of the sorrows of the world might have thus caused Him to weep and to sigh; the disease was remembered in the cure, and death was remembered in bringing back life. And as on this so at all other times His miracles of healing must ever have reminded Him of the condemnation of the world to pain and death; the blind, the sick, the lame, the leper, these crowds of afflicted men that were brought to Him and pressed about Him, what were they but so many witnesses before His eyes of the fulfilment of the curse that fell on Adam? The sight of pain, so contrary as pain. is to the Divine nature, which is the fountain and perfection of all joy, must have always saddened the blessed Jesus, the Son of God. Though He caused the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to leap as the hart, the leper to be cleansed, and even the dead to be raised, yet His course thus lined with all these varieties of sufferers, with the sick, infirm, and dying on all sides of Him, must have needs been a course of grief. All the cries for help, all the prayers for mercy, all the tears of afflicted men, what must have been such sounds in the ears of the Son of God even though it was His will to say "Arise and walk," "Be thou clean," Depart in peace ?"

Well may He have looked up to heaven and

sighed when He beheld all these griefs representing as it were the varied and general sorrows of mankind. When He considered His own manhood by which He was linked to this suffering house, when He thought upon the blessedness and perfect joy of that heaven from which He had come down, He might well have wished Himself back in His own kingdom and among His angels. To stand in the midst of the tribulation of the world, to consider what the world was designed to be, and what it was before Adam's fall, to hear the groans of His creation, His own workmanship, which He had framed by His excellent power, and all the works and parts which He had declared to be "very good," to see the mutilated and ruined forms of this His best work which He had made even in His own image, what grief must this have been to the Son of God!

There He stood amid the ruins; there He looked around Him and saw a blight, a heavy cloud and darkness brooding upon all earthly things. There He saw the flaws and blemishes of His own once perfect work; man, the noblest creation of His hand, designed to live and to rejoice in His works, to live without painful labour, to feast his eyes and soul with the good of the world, stood before Him with mis-shapen limbs,

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