But woe to man, guilty man, if he trust his safety to that which has been broken again and again, and which never can be effectually joined together again by human effort. Not to his faithfulness in keeping God's Commandments, can the highest saint look for salvation. He knows that he might as well place his foot on a foam bubble floating on a torrent, and trust to that bubble to keep him from sinking, as rest on the broken Law to save him from being swept away to everlasting destruction. They who have tried most carefully to keep the Law, are most ready to own this truth. Well does the Church of England make her children's response to each Commandment a petition for "mercy." Then at the close of all comes a prayer that God would write His Laws in our hearts, in allusion to His own gracious promise: "I will put My laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts; and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to Me a people." When our Lord sojourned upon earth, a sinner was brought before Him who had notoriously broken the Law. Christ appealed to the consciences of her accusers, and conscience convicted them all of having, likewise transgressed God's Commandment. Twice on that memorable occasion, "Jesus stooped down, and with His finger wrote upon the ground." No action of the Lord recorded in Scripture can be without significance. If we humbly try to penetrate the meaning of this one, may we not find that the Lord would remind man, that though scribe, Pharisee, and those whom they condemned, had all broken the Law contained in the Tables given through Moses, yet that Christ could write that Law so indelibly in dust and ashes, "with the Spirit of the living God, not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart," that it should ever remain there? Thus every true believer becomes, in the forcible language of St. Paul, the epistle of Christ; the Law being inscribed therein by "the finger of God," not as a ground of acceptance, but as a token of adoption. And let us never forget that what is written in the heart will assuredly be read in the life; none will so earnestly endeavour to keep the Commandments in thought, and word, and deed, as he who has received them in the spirit as well as the letter, "whose obedience is the cheerful heart-service of the man whose transgression is pardoned, whose sin is covered." [Illustration] XI. The High Priest's Mitre. A VERY remarkable scene is brought before us in the history of Alexander the Great. During his career of conquest, he had been offended by the Jews, then subject to his enemies the Persians. Unlike the Samaritans, who had sent troops to the aid of Macedon's mighty king, the Jews remained faithful to their allegiance to Darius. Alexander, little accustomed to have his imperious will opposed, resolved that as soon as he should have conquered Tyre, to which he was then laying siege, he would march against the Jews, and let them also feel the weight of his wrath.