Here are solemn and practical reflections for us all. Parents! remember your responsibilities-exercise your authority: "if your sons make themselves vile, and you restrain them not," God will visit you for it! Yet train up your little ones in love and tenderness while you make them obey you. Be diligent, patient, persevering, and full of prayer, and God's blessing shall rest on you and yours. not discouraged; "wait thou still upon God." Be Children! "obey your parents in the Lord," (Ephes. vi. 1); yea, "in all things." (Col. iii. 20.) If they be pious parents, reverence them as in the place of God to you here on earth; if unhappily they neglect their own religious duties and yours, still reverence them in all lawful things, and never disobey them, unless their commands are opposed to God's; then "you must obey God rather than man;' but this is, I trust, a rare instance: rather cultivate habits of obedience, respect, affectionate consideration. Cheer and comfort them in old age; cast a vail over their foibles; remember your obligations to them in infancy and youth, and think you can never repay them: so may you expect to be blessed in your turn, if God should place you at the head of a family. Let all promote christian education: see that you extend to the children of the poor the same blessings which you desire for your own children—and prove at once your piety and your patriotism, by upholding all national, infant, Sunday, and parochial schools, connected with your own pure and scriptural Church. XXXVI. CHRIST'S PASSION. Job xix. 21. Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me. MOST plaintive appeal, from the most afflicted and most patient of men! Upright Job had long enjoyed extraordinary prosperity; but for wise and merciful reasons God had permitted him to be involved in deep tribulation. Stripped of his property and his children, reduced to loathsome poverty, and covered with sores, he looks to his friends for consolation, and they mistake his case, and add to his afflictions. "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends," he exclaims; "for the hand of God hath touched me!" But there was none to help-none to comfort him! Apt illustration of a more perfect Sufferer-one more holy than Job, and one involved in deeper sorrow! I. CONTEMPLATE THE SUFFERING SAVIOUR AS AN OB JECT OF PITY. II. CONSIDER HOW OUR PITY SHOULD BE DISPLAYED. I. IN MANY RESPECTS THERE IS AN ANALOGY BETWEEN THE SUFFERERS. 1. Christ was an innocent and benevolent sufferer. He did nothing but good. If Job could say, "When the ear heard me, then it blessed me," &c. (ch. xxix. 11, &c.), how much more the Saviour! Mercy and love sat on his brow at his presence sickness and sorrow and death fled away! Devils obeyed his voice, the grave yielded up its prey, and the widow's heart sung for joy! Wonderful that all did not love and worship him! 2. But when was he not a sufferer? Always a man of sorrows from his cradle to his grave: always endured a great contradiction of sinners against himself:" always an object of pity. 3. How his sufferings increased as he approached his end! He foresaw and anticipated all! "I have a baptism to be baptized with," &c. (Luke xii. 50.) "And they were in the way going up to Jerusalem; and Jesus went before them and they were amazed; and as they followed they were afraid : and he began to tell them what things should happen to him," &c. (Mark x. 32.) Sad were the scenes which followed: forsaken by all; denied by one, betrayed by another; deserted by his sleeping disciples when in his agony, (Matt. xxvi. 37); apprehended, accused, and insulted by the high priest; arraigned before Pilate; sent to Herod; mocked by him and his soldiery; returned to Pilate; condemned, though declared innocent; scourged, buffeted, spit on, mocked, crucified, insulted on the cross, he bows his head and dies; -oh! does he not seem to say, "Have pity on me, have pity on me, O ye my friends?" 4. It was the hand of God that had touched him. Job saw this: men and devils and the physical elements had all conspired against him, but he saw only God's hand in all: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away," &c. (ch. i. 21.) So our Saviour said to Pilate, "Thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above." This is true of all sufferers, and of all afflictions. But in a peculiar sense true of Job and of the Saviour: Job's soul was smitten, and his spirit broken; God gave Satan express permission to buffet him; "the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit: the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me." (chap. vi. 4.) So was it God's own hand that dealt the heaviest blows on his own dear Son! "It pleased the Lord to bruise him: he hath put him to grief," &c. (Isaiah liii. 10.) This wrung from the sufferer the exclamation, "My God, my God! why hast thou forsaken me?” "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself." It was God's own work! 5. Job suffered for himself, and for his own benefit; Christ, not for himself, but for us, and in our stead. (Isaiah liii. 4, 5.) The Jews, the Gentiles, Herod and Pontius Pilate, and the soldiers, were but the instruments of torture; our sins were the hands which inflicted them! In every tear we see our sins, in every groan we hear the utterance of our guilt! Vicarious all! "He bare our sins in his own body," &c. : they planted the thorns on his brow, and thrust the spear in his side! Who then can refuse him sympathy? Unequalled sufferer! sinless substitute for guilty man! "forsaken of God and afflicted"-and all for us! Oh! what heart can refuse to weep for him, when, from the cross, he looks on us, and says, "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me?" II. HOW OUR PITY SHOULD BE EVINced. 1. By the ordinary movement of our feelings. Some object to this; as if our passions and feelings were to be moved only by earthly things; as if our eyes should weep only over fictitious tales, or earthly sorrows, and not with Jesus in Gethsemane and Golgotha! Stoical and Laodicean Christians: surely if we are 66 to weep with them that weep," we should weep with a mourning Christ! Let our natural sympathies be awakened. "Jesus wept," and we will weep with him. 2. We should awaken these feelings by the use of all means: -not by appeal to the senses, and merely carnal affections, as by the crucifix, pictures, &c., but by God's appointed means. Meditation on his holy word: reading the history of his woes. By frequenting his holy supper; in which we "shew the Lord's death till he come." By sacred seasons and services, as Lent and Passion-week-seclusion, communion with God, meditation, much prayer; so may our cold hearts be warmed with his love. 3. Our pity should be evinced by hatred of sin. Without this, sorrow is affectation and hypocrisy. There must be holy indignation against those who wounded and slew the victim; we must hate our sins with perfect hatred ! Where does sin appear so terrible, so hateful, as in the wounds of Jesus? The very flames of unquenchable, eternal fire, display not God's wrath against sin, as it is exhibited in the deep sorrows of Immanuel! Let then all who call him Lord, and profess to pity him, depart from iniquity! 4. If our compassion is sincere, we shall feel a deep interest in the result of his sufferings. We shall desire, "that he may see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied." He prayed for his murderers: we shall long for the salvation of his people Israel; their conversion will be the subject of our prayers and the object of our exertions. He was to be " a light to lighten the Gentiles" we shall labour to communicate the Gospel to the heathen; the cause of missions to idolaters will not be overlooked by us. Greatly shall we desire to make known the efficacy of his blood to all sinners—at home and abroad-in distant colonies, and in crowded cities in our native land. The glory of Christ will be our intense desire; and by our prayers and alms, and disinterested services to promote it, we shall prove that our pity is not sentimentality but principle. Thus mourning with a suffering Lord, we may hope to rejoice with a triumphant one! 1. Let the careless pause! Did ye hear that plaintive voice? "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if ever there were sorrow like unto my sorrow?" "Have pity upon me," &c. Shall the sorrows of Jesus be always disregarded? Will ye never consider-reflect? Oh! "by his agony and bloody sweat, by his cross and passion," we pray you, turn aside and see this great sight-the Redeemer's Passion! 2. Let the afflicted, "whom the Lord hath touched," look unto this mourner, and be comforted! "lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds!" (Heb. xii. 3.) He has drunk of this cup; and shall not you? "Is the servant better than his master?" Be conformed to him in sufferings; for "if you suffer, you shall reign with him." (2 Tim. ii. 11-13.) XXXVII. THE CHARACTER OF DANIEL. Daniel vi. 5. Then said these men, We shall not find any occasion against this Daniel, except we find it against him concerning the law of his God. IN order to estimate the value of this testimony to Daniel's character, the circumstances in which he was placed at the time must be considered. Daniel, of the royal line of David, but one of the children of the captivity, had flourished at the court of Babylon under successive heathen princes. Belshazzar, the impious, had recently been overthrown by Cyrus, the son-in-law of Darius the Mede: he raised Daniel, and placed him first among the three presidents who were over the hundred and twenty princes. The followers of Darius became jealous of Daniel, now a venerable man about ninety years old: they conspired against him (the story is familiar); for a while they succeeded, and Daniel was cast into the den of lions: but, being miraculously preserved, his persecutors were condemned, and perished in his stead; and the king glorified God. Daniel's admirable conduct in these trying circumstances displays his real character for our imitation; and God's mysterious dealings with him are recorded for our instruction and comfort. May the Holy Spirit of God apply them to our hearts and consciences! I. THE CHARACTER OF DANIEL. II. GOD'S MYSTERIOUS DEALINGS WITH HIM. I. HIS CHARACTER :-His consistent integrity-his habitual piety-his special confidence in God. 1. His consistent integrity : -stronger evidence could not be afforded of this, than that |