nful, when we
cannot be at peace with all men--to have enemies without; but his case
is infinitely worse who lodges an enemy in his own breast--in a
guilty, uneasy conscience, in self-reproaches, in terror of death, in
the knowledge that God and he are not friends, nor can be so, so long
as he cherishes his sins. There is no peace, saith my God, to the
wicked. There cannot be. Drugged with narcotics, you may sleep as
quietly on a bed of thorns as of roses. Drugged with narcotics, you
may lie down on the cold pavement, and fancy as you throw your arms
around the curbstone that it is the wife of your bosom. Drugged with
narcotics, you may go to sleep in a cell with visions of home playing
round the head that shall be capped for hanging to-morrow. But no more
than I call these peaceful sights, can I apply the name of peace to
the insensibility of a conscience seared by sin; to the calmness, or
rather callousness of one who has allowed the devil to persuade him
that God is too merciful to reckon with us for our transgressions. The
peace we are to seek, and, seeking to pursue, is not that of death,
but life,--not that the lake presents in winter, when no life appears
on its shores, nor sound breaks the silence of its frozen waters; but
that of a lake which, protected from tempests by lofty mountains,
carries life in its waters, beauty on its banks, and heaven mirrored
in its unruffled bosom. Being justified by faith we have peace with
God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Such is the peace which we are to
seek--a peace which, springing from a sense of reconciliation through
the blood of the Lamb and wrought within the soul by the in-dwelling
of the Holy Spirit, has so raised the saint above all fears of death,
and shed such a flood of glory around his dying head, that wicked men
have turned from the scene to exclaim, May I die the death of the
righteous, and may my last end be like his!

X.

JESUS SHALL BRING PEACE TO THE WORLD.

How many pages of history are written with the point of the sword--not
with ink, but tears and blood? It is chiefly taken up with the recital
of wars. What age has not been the era, what country the scene of
bloody strifes? What soil does not hold the dust of thousands that
have fallen by brothers' hands? Our glebes have been fattened with the
bodies of the slain? On those fields where, with the lark carolling
overhead, the peasant drives his ploughshare, other steel than the
sickle has gla