h we have nothing to do, sometimes
sent more and sometimes less of His spiritual gifts upon a waiting
Church. It is not so. 'With Him is no variableness.' The gifts of God
are without repentance; and the Spirit that was given once, according to
the Master's own word already quoted, is given that He may abide with us
for ever.

Therefore we have to come back to this, which is the point to which I
seek to bring you and myself, in lowly penitence and contrite
acknowledgment--that it is all our own fault and the result of evils in
ourselves that may be remedied, that we have so little of that divine
gift; and that if the churches of this country and of this day seem to
be cursed and blasted in so much of their fruitless operations and
formal worship, it is the fault of the churches, and not of the Lord of
the churches. The stream that poured forth from the throne of God has
not lost itself in the sands, nor is it shrunken in its volume. The fire
that was kindled on Pentecost has not died down into grey ashes. The
rushing of the mighty wind that woke on that morning has not calmed and
stilled itself into the stagnancy and suffocating breathlessness of
midday heat. The same fulness of the Spirit which filled the believers
on that day is available for us all. If, like that waiting Church of
old, we abide in prayer and supplication, the gift will be given to us
too, and we may repeat and reproduce, if not the miracles which we do
not need, yet the necessary inspiration of the highest and the noblest
days and saints in the history of the Church. 'If ye, being evil, know
how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your
Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?' 'Ask and ye
shall receive,' and be filled 'with the Holy Ghost and with power.'

CHRIST THE BREAKER

'The Breaker is come up before them: they have broken up, and have
passed through the gate, and are gone out by it: and their king
shall pass before them, and the Lord on the head of them.'--MICAH
ii. 13.

Micah was contemporary with Isaiah. The two prophets stand, to a large
extent, on the same level of prophetic knowledge. Characteristic of both
of them is the increasing clearness of the figure of the personal
Messiah, and the increasing fulness of detail with which His functions
are described. Characteristic of both of them is the presentation which
we find in this text of that Messiah's work as being the gatheri