all that the Lord our God hath spoken." _This_ "word of
the Lord is tried"--"having loved His own, which were in the world, He
loved them _unto the end_."

Believer! art thou troubled and tempted? Do dark providences and severe
afflictions seem to belie the truth and reality of this gracious
assurance? Art thou ready, with Gideon, to say, "If the Lord be indeed
with us, why has all this befallen us?" Be assured He has some faithful
end in view. By the removal of prized and cherished earthly props and
refuges, He would unfold more of his own tenderness. Amid the wreck and
ruin of earthly joys, which, it may be, the grave has hidden from your
sight, One nearer, dearer, tenderer still, would have you say of
Himself, "_The Lord liveth_; and blessed be my Rock; and let the God of
my salvation be exalted." "Thanks be to God, who _always_ maketh us to
triumph in Christ." Yes! and never more so than when, stripped of all
competing objects of creature affection, we are left, like the disciples
on the mount, with "_Jesus only_!"

"THESE THINGS HAVE I SPOKEN UNTO YOU, THAT IN ME YE MIGHT HAVE PEACE."

26TH DAY.

"Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said"--

"I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though
he were dead, yet he shall live."--John. xi. 25.

The Resurrection and Life.

What a voice is this breaking over a world which for six thousand years
has been a dormitory of sin and death! For four thousand of these years,
heathendom could descry no light through the bars of the grave; her
oracles were dumb on the great doctrine of a future state, and more
especially regarding the body's resurrection. Even the Jewish Church,
under the Old Testament dispensation, seemed to enjoy little more than
fitful and uncertain glimmerings, like men groping in the dark. It
required death's great Abolisher to show, to a benighted world, the
luminous "path of life." With Him rested the "bringing in of a better
hope"--the unfolding of "the mystery which had been hid from ages and
generations." Marvellous disclosure! that this mortal frame, decomposed
and resolved into its original dust, shall yet start from its ashes,
remodelled and reconstructed--"a glorified body!" Not like "the earthly
tabernacle" (a mere shifting and moveable _tent_, as the word denotes),
but incorruptible--immortal! The beauteous transformation of the insect
from its chrysalis state--the buried seed springing up from i