lived? Where were you brought up? Out of what nest did you come? I am reminded of the grotesquely-mingled humour and pathos of Bret Harte's miner, who seemed to think everybody should know “ Flynn of Virginia." And why? Simply because Flynn had saved that miner's life at the expense of his own. The man who "didn't know Flynn" was to him a weary ignoramus indeed. I tell you, that of all "ferlies as they say across the Tweed-all wonderful things, the wonder will fade away if the wonder of the wonder-the centre of the interest is not this: "A Stanley's wonderful tale, it will go into

man called Jesus."

the dust of ages and never be heard of, unless, somehow, there is in the middle of it this light that never dims, the Name of Jesus.

"Jesus! the Name high over all,

In earth, or hell, or sky,

Angels and men before Him fall,

And devils fear and fly."

Now, I want to

Yes, this blind beggar strikes the great KEY-NOTE OF ALL HISTORY: "a man that is called Jesus." bring it close to you and myself, to this collection of individuals gathered from all over London. Begin to tell your story; take up the pen; there is a clean page; could you write one page of lasting interest without coming on something like this: "The day of your conversion; the day of the upper light breaking in; the day when the weariness, when the beggary and hopelessness, when all that was adverse, lifted and shifted, and you began to be a man, and to go ahead?—and the explanation is: "A man

that is called Jesus came into living contact with your

self, and history, and destiny.

"A man that is called Jesus." And we will never get to the end; eternity will not exhaust the tales that that Jesus has made to be told. It will be one of the delights up yonder; there will be a sameness, and yet a perpetual variety that will for ever prevent monotony. There will be a monotone, the monotone being Jesus, Jesus, JESUS. But just as my voice is different in timbre, and resonance, and register from yours, even so will your way of telling His name be different from mine. All music, let it be the simplest ditty or the greatest anthem, is written and composed upon the usual lines and spaces of the stave. But what wonderful variations music has! So that man gives us the lines and spaces of all music that is worth singing. right on to the anthems that in cyclones burst about the heavens. A man that is called Jesus." That is the clef, and the key-note, and the staff. Up and down, in there, somehow, it is bound to ring and swing. that is called Jesus made clay, and anointed mine eyes, and said unto me, Go to Siloam, and wash and I went and washed, and came seeing."

"A man

Further, notice in this man's story, not only the great central figure, the Lord Jesus Christ, God's Son, here among us to undo all the mischief that was born in us, and born with us; hereditary, inveterate evil, to undo it where it is most terribly done and felt; but, see how :— "He made clay, and anointed mine eyes." That is one of the wonders, the strange way in which Jesus saves us.

"He made clay," ordinary clay; He moistened it with the saliva of His own mouth, and He smeared it over those blind eyes. Only, perhaps, a little of the wonder dies out of it for some of us, just because, after all, it is so like our own. There was a time when, with us, this Gospel that has brought the daylight, increased the darkness. When we see this man rubbing his eyes, and telling his vivid story, we feel just like that farm-servant-woman in Ayrshire, of whom you may have heard. Somebody came in making a great fuss about the poems of one Burns, a ploughman; "The Cottar's Saturday Night" especially, and read it-that masterpiece of the poet's genius. She saw nothing in it. She said, "Dear me, they did that in my father's house every night." And did not Jesus just deal with you much like this? Was there not a time when Jesus Christ focussed the darkness of your mind, if I may use a paradoxical expression? Was there any name more hopelessly opaque than the name of Jesus? Every time you looked at the Gospel, the Bible, or every time you listened to a preacher, you were just gazing into darkness, vacuity, emptiness. The preacher preached, "he hummed away," as Tennyson's Northern Farmer puts it that was all. Of all intellectual exercises to which you brought your mind, this was the one wherein the curtain-folds dropped thick and heavy between your understanding and the matter in hand. You were not a fool; you prided yourself in those days, maybe, on your intelligence; you read the hundred best books, and with a certain amount of luminousness; but tell me the truth, how much did you read the Bible? And why did you

turn away from it, and away from the Bible in the Bible, the Gospel, and away from the Preacher? A certain amount of mental luminousness everywhere, but when you came to the preacher of the Cross and listened to him, tell me truly, was he not just making clay, and plastering up your eyes? It is a somewhat vulgar expression where I came from, to be "clayed up"; but it is not vulgar either, it is very vivid—the Gospel simply plastered you up; you never felt so hopelessly dense. Ah! God works with wonderful consistency, when He seems to be somewhat outraging common sense and nature. When He seems to be increasing our darkness, that is His way of preparing us for the light.

Dear friend-I speak to some Christian now-you have found Christ; you never forget His first dealing with you when at the first He was a "stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence"-and most of us nearly broke our shins over Him. Then there came the healing wand, the strengthening. But, mind you, He does that all through. If you are getting again into a time of extra darkness, it is, depend upon it, coming round to the same thing that you experienced in conversion; there is an extra light coming. Clouds and darkness are always round about Him. He maketh darkness His pavilion, thick clouds of the sky are the curtain, the canopy round about Him. He is inside the cloud always, and if the darkness seems to come down, if, perhaps, you are in great trouble, or in great trial, He is very near. It is so in the natural world; a little before the morning breaks the night was never so

thick, as you have found out if you have travelled by night. So is it in Christian experience, as well as in conversion; often at the thickest darkness new revelation comes. And so will it be at the very end; just when we are about to enter into heaven itself, into the floods of perfect light, the clay will be on our eyes again.

Robertson of Irvine was not only a great preacher, he had a wonderful, mystic, poetic vein in him.

"It darkens," he said; and I cannot help thinking of his lines as illustrative of much that this man's eyes smeared with clay suggests to us :

"It darkens to the dawning

More than in all the night,
Earth's shadows cast an awning
Across the doors of light;

"O'er the horizon nearest,

Lie balanced light and shade;
And where the light is clearest,
The dark is darkest made.

"It darkens to the dying,
As ne'er in life before,
The shadows blackest lying
Around the heavenly door.

"The heavenly light sheds glances

On pilgrims' eyes afar,

But he finds who advances

How dark the shadows are."

And casting still deeper glances into our subject, he

says:

"Our light's a veil that hides us,

And hides all from our sight;

It none the less divides us

Although the veil be white.