Tj Do you remember De Quincey's dream — how in his dream he saw the great chariot rushing down the vast aisles of a cathedral, past the storied tombs of kings and warriors, on which were the sculptured forms of the mighty dead, and yet upon the pavement in the very track of the chariot was a little child stooping down and playing with a flower, heedless of the ap- proaching death ? So terrible and imminent was the tragedy, that at the moment when the horse's feet were about to crush the life out of the little one, the figure of a trumpeter that was lying on a tomb started up from his stony sleep and blew a blast of warning, while an angel hand stretched forth to snatch the little one from its awful death ! 1
3. It is the cry of earth to heaven. If the great and good gifts should not be bestowed upon people that have not intelligently asked for them, then what becomes of God's gift of Jesus Christ, our Saviour, to this world ? Did we ask for Him ? Did we send for Him ? Did we clamour till our voices reached Him in the high halls of heaven, and He condescended to come at our call ? Was the Cross of Christ, with all the glory of suffering, of measureless sacrifice, a response to a framed request for such a wondrous manifestation of wisdom and of love ? We know that it was not. " He came unto his own, and his own received him not." And yet I think our Lord would tell us that He saw, in the vision of His infinite love — that vision that interprets and transfigures and disentangles objects from their vulgar limitations
1 J. M. Gibbon.
128 COME OVER AND HELP US
and surroundings — in His high heaven men stretching out hands, and saying, " Come down and help us."
TJ In the year 1896 Dr. Miller, Principal of the Christian College of Madras, was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. An address came from India to the Assembly. It came from persons the great majority of whom had not accepted Christianity. It was a cry, not from the West to the East like the cry of the man of Macedonia, but from the East to the West. In reply to the address Dr. Eainy said in the Assembly: "We rejoice in all good gifts which are peculiarly your own ; and we would be serviceable to you in communicating, so far as you will receive them, whatever good gifts have been bestowed upon us by Him who has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell upon the face of the earth. But, in that spirit, we desire, affectionately and above all things, once more to commend to you, as our missionaries have often done, the Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of G-od, who for us men and for our sake took flesh and died. We men in the West have no better claim to Him than you have. We possess nothing so precious — we value nothing so much — we have no source of good so full, fruitful, and enduring — we have nothing to compare with the Lord Jesus Christ. To Him we must bear witness. And we should gladly consent that you should cease to listen to us, if you would be led to give your ear and your heart to Him." x
1 The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 175.
What must I do to be Saved?
ACTS & ROM. — g
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„ Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, liv. No. 3005.
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xxxix. 17, 33 (Farrar) ; xliii. 337 (Holland) ; lxiii. 168 (Hunter) j
lxviii. 142 (Cuyler) ; lxxiii. 243 (Warschauer) ; lxxv. 74
(Home). Churchman's Pulpit (First Sunday in Lent), v. 418 (Granuis) ;