We would second the Spirit's voice, and call to you in the wilderness to arise and eat. It becomes you to-day to heed the call. There is reason for the Spirit's rousing you, for you are yet away from home, and the journey is too great for you. Perhaps you may feel no pressing need. Perhaps, like the Tishbite, you have tasted a little, and you would lie down to sleep. But the prophet knew not what was before him, as the Angel did; and hence he is again aroused with the warning, "The journey is too great for thee." Christian, you know not what awaits you. You need these ordinances. You need this Lord's table spread before you. You need these means of grace, for you are in the wilderness, and the desert must be crossed. Your strength and patience will be sorely tried, and your provisions will be short. Arise and eat, for you will have no other supply but this. You must take up with a pilgrim's fare. The remainder of life's journey is before you, and it will be too great for you unless you prepare in time. You may stand aloof from this our table, and despise our humble ministrations as though they were not good enough for you. We do not pretend that our supper is equal to the one above. We can give you but travellers' fare, but such as it is it will sustain you on your journey. Our entertainment to-day is as simple as the prophet's rude meal which he ate beneath the juniper-tree; but remember, that but for that water cruse and baken cake he would have perished in the lonely solitudes. And we lay as high a claim for the gospel institutions to-day. Without them you must faint and die. Underrate them as you will, God has appointed them to sustain his children in the desert. Your neglect of them will be followed by exhaustion, for "the journey is too great for thee." We cannot indeed anticipate the circumstantial history of any one of you. We cannot trace out in the wild desert sands the pathway over which each one of you must wander. No, we cannot discover where one of us will be to-morrow. Our experiences may be far different from each other. We shall each have our peculiar difficulties, and no two of us will travel with the same footstep and the same burden. But though we cannot tell the future to a single one of you, though we cannot calculate your reckoning at all, still we can assure you that "the journey is too great for you." We shall all of us need the cruse of water and the cake ere we get through, for we have no abiding place here. There will doubtless be many days when this world will look more desolate than ever, days of temptation and of conflict. The adversary will doubtless harass your wanderings, and hedge up your way; you must yet fight "the world, the flesh, and the devil."