Here is a strange confusion—people talking one moment like St. Paul himself, desiring to be with Christ and God for ever, and then in the same breath talking like the Gadarenes of old, when, after Christ had visited them, and judged their sins by driving their unlawful herd of swine into the sea, they answered by beseeching Him to depart out of their coasts. Why is this confusion?—Because people do not take the trouble to read their Bibles; because they bring their own loose, careless, cant notions with them when they open their Bibles, and settle beforehand what the Bible is to tell them, and then pick and twist texts till they make them mean just what they like and no more. There is no folly, or filth, or tyranny, or blasphemy, which men have not defended out of the Bible by twisting it in this way. The Bible is better written than that, my friends. He that runs may read, if he has sense to read. The wayfaring man, though simple, shall make no such mistake therein, if he has God’s Spirit in him—the spirit of faith, which believes that the Bible is God’s message to men—the humble spirit, which is willing to listen to that message, however strange or new it may seem to him—the earnest spirit, which reads the Bible really to know what a man shall do to be saved. Look at your Bibles thus, my friends, about this matter. Read all the texts which speak of God’s visiting and God’s visitation, and you will find all the confusion and strangeness vanish away. For see! The Bible talks of the Lord visiting people in His wrath—visiting them for their sins—visiting them with sore plagues and punishments, about forty times. But the Bible speaks very nearly as often of God’s visiting people to bring them blessings and not punishments. The Bible says God visited Sarah and Hannah to give them what they most desired—children. God visited the people of Israel in Egypt to deliver them out of slavery. In the book of Ruth we read how the Lord visited His people in giving them bread. The Psalmist, in the captivity at Babylon, _prays_ God to visit him with His salvation. The prophet Jeremiah says that it was a sign of God’s anger against the Jews that He had not visited them; and the prophets promised again and again to their countrymen, how, after their seventy years’ captivity in Babylon, the Lord would visit them, and what for?—To bring them back into their own land with joy, and heap them with every blessing—peace and wealth, freedom and righteousness. So it is in the New Testament too. Zacharias praised God: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His people; through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the day-spring from on high hath visited us.” And that was the reason why I chose Luke vii. 16, for my text—only because it is an example of the same thing. The people, it says, praised God, saying: “A great Prophet is risen up among us, and God hath visited