trembling man in the crowd says, "Here! It's this lad o' mine." That's right; speak out, you! You with the broken heart, speak out. You with the drunken wife, speak out. You with the unclean heart, speak out. It is you we want to hear; not arguings, and abstractions, and wordy strifes. These men and women know what they are talking about, for sin and the devil to them are awful butchering realities. "See my bleeding breast. See my ruined family— as if a bombshell had landed in the very heart of my home, and scattered death and destruction everywhere."

That is the voice God wants to hear, that is the voice Jesus wants to hear the voice of agony and distress, the voice of reality. For this trouble is real. It is not working up a case, it is not much ado about nothing. There is no

getting over stubborn facts; sin is here, and it is an awful reality; it is no philosophical abstraction, it is a fearful blight in human flesh, in human hearts, in human homes, in a world that God has made.

"Jesus answered him, and said, O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto Me." There is a mingling here of Pain and Power. I have been talking about the father's grief and the lad, and our own griefs: there is a keener and a deeper. All our sorrow was meeting already on the heart of Christ. "Do not limit to three days the sorrows that redeemed the world." Here already He is bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows. But the deepest pang in His pain is the unbelief, the faithlessness. And, alas! what are we saying and doing to free Him from that pang to-day? "O

faithless generation

He meant this for His whole time

and circumstance, and He applies it to us to-day, for far too forceful is the application still-" How long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you?" His was

shall I call it grief, or shall I call it anger, or shall I call it a mingling of both-the anger of a loving heart, the anger that strives with tears, the anger of one who loves to bless us, but is roused by our thrawnness," by our almost invincible ignorance? You remember Coleridge's lines:

66

"To be angry with one we love

Doth work like madness on the brain.”

66

"O Judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason." "O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you?-that is the Pain. "Bring him unto Me" that is the Power. Or, the one is the angry glare of the lightning across the darkened heaven; the other, the descending rain upon the thirsty land. “Bring him unto Me."

"And they brought him unto Him: and when he saw Him, straightway the spirit tare him; and he fell on the ground, foaming." You have also the description, in the 18th verse," He foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away." Again, in the 22nd verse, "And ofttimes. it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters to destroy him." The idea that comes to one here is this: the tyranny of sin. I am thinking of those violent forms of sin that we see all round about us-roaring drunkenness, destroying lust. Ah! we are apt to turn away from these awful sins

with a feeling of loathsomeness. But let me remind you of the tyranny of sin-of that stage to which any of us might come but for constraining and restraining grace. Oh, the men and women in London to-day who are, like this lad, harried by the devil! He has mounted them, he has got the reins in his fist, got the spurs on his heels, got the whip in his hand, and "Now! now! now! To hell with you!" Into the fire! Into the water! What for? TO DESTROY HIM! That is sin, in you, in me, in the world everywhere. Not a thing, again I say, that you can philosophize about; but a Jack-the-Ripper among us here, mad, staring, satanic; more than human; roots in it that we cannot reach or understand. Oh the

tyranny of sin! Am I speaking to any poor soul here lashed with his lusts, mastered by sin? Dear soul, I pity you; from the depths of my soul, I pity you. If a touch of Christ's own compassion was only given to us to-day, with what changed eyes we should look upon those who are "possessed." How our hearts would break out at our eyes in floods of tears as we thought not only of their own share, that was the procuring cause of this last state, but, now the stage of possession has come, at their helplessness. There is a man you know, and you get angry with him, and say, "I thought he was going to change. I thought we had sobered him up. I thought his last outburst would cure him. For it was dreadful. He drank, and drank ; he spent all; he pawned his wife's clothes as well as his 'own; took the boots off the children's feet, and the clothes of their bed, for drink. And I thought that would cure him." And the same thing happened again last week. And you begin to get tired of him. God pity him! He is driven; you do not know, I do not know, none but Christ

knows, how that man turns aside to weep scalding tearstears that come down the cheeks like vitriol, scoring furrows as they descend. He sees it all; he knows it all; he sees what he is doing, he knows what is ahead of him. But the awful thought through it all is, "I will be back again when the dram shops open, even on the blessed Sabbath day." “When I awake I will seek it yet again." 66 More drink! more lust!" at the back of a storm of tears, and of fierce denunciation of himself for being a brute! And he is not a brute; he is a man driven by the devil. Oh, my God! we are fearfully and wonderfully made! 'Tis an awful event when a soul is born. For a human heart is so made that it cannot fill itself, and it will either be filled with God or the enemy. It is not sufficient to itself. It must be filled with the seven devils, or the seven spirits of the Holy God. These are lurid places in the Bible, but they are revealing places. Every wise man will stand in the light of them, and bare his own bosom, and let the light stream in. "If Thou canst do anything, have compassion upon us, and help us." That is how to pray. He bound himself with his child. So did the Syro-Phoenician mother when her opportunity came: "Have mercy upon us." And there was only herself standing there. "Have mercy upon us; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil." "Have compassion on us, and help us," said the father. Sabbathschool teacher, preacher, in this sense, make common cause with the sinner. Take that wild lad, take that dangerously giddy girl, take that drunkard, take that harlot, on your very heart in before the throne of grace. Say, "Have mercy upon us. My brother, my daughter, my son is grievously vexed with a devil." The cold prayer that rises, either from a pulpit or any Christian worker's lips, about sin and

sinners in general, never reaches Christ's ear, nor touches His heart. But it is this that tells: "Lord, that man's trouble is my trouble. Lord, that man's desolation grieves my heart also. Have compassion on us, and help us." And that will come round. Aye, it will come round. Christ's grace will so spread and so leaven, that His disciples hearts will widen. We shall not always need to be told thǝ A, B, C of the tale of the good Samaritan. We will by and bye pick it up and work it out instinctively. The woes of the East End shall be grievously felt by the wealthy in the West; and the woes on the Continent shall be as close to us as our own native-born

English troubles. The grievances of the poor, harried people in Darkest Africa shall tell on our hearts, and bring to Christ's ears our warm prayers, as if they were our own sons, and daughters, and kinsfolk, and acquaintances. The devil is going to overdo it; and, instead of tearing us apart, his very virulence, through the grace of Christ, is going to bind us together. We will make common cause by-andbye. God grant it may be this year as never before. We shall see that a common devil destroys us; and we shall come together in a common, unanimous throb of prayer that shall rise at once from all around the earth. 66 Have pity, have compassion upon us, for mankind is clinging to our skirts, and we are coming with ourselves and them before Thy mercy-seat. And thus shall the whole round world everywhere be bound with gold chains about the feet of God." That is how to pray. Something like that. We ought to be done with the coldness, and the distance, and the abstraction, and to take the full burden. Try it to-day, dear Sabbath-school teacher. Try it all through the week, you who are troubled with that drunken neighbour - try it