spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloak for their sin. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father" (John xv. 22-24). The knife in the hand of the surgeon is an instrument to save life, but the patient may use it to kill himself if he be so minded. A candle may be used to give light and comfort to all in the house--this is its use with regard to honest men--but the same light may be the means of the discovery and punishment of a thief. The light and heat of the sun, falling upon a bed of flowers fills the air with fragrance and the spirit of man with delight, but if it fall upon a noisome stagnant pool, or a dead body, it will hasten decomposition and spread the seeds of disease and death. It is not the nature of sunlight to destroy, but the objects upon which it falls turns the blessing into a curse. So with "the grace of God which bringeth salvation" (Titus ii. 11). "It is not true," says Maclaren, "that every man that rejects Christ does in verity _reject_ Him, and not merely _neglect_ Him; that there is always an effort, that there is a struggle, feeble, perhaps, but real, which ends in the turning away. It is not that you stand there, and simply let Him go past. That were bad enough; but it is more than that. It is that you turn your back upon Him! It is not that His hand is laid on yours, and yours remains dead and cold, and does not open to clasp it; but it is that His hand being laid on yours, you clench yours the tighter, and _will not_ have it. And so every man (I believe) that ever rejects Christ does these things thereby--wounds his own conscience, hardens his own heart, makes himself a worse man, just because he has had a glimpse, and his willingly, almost consciously, 'loved darkness rather than light.' The message of love can never come into a human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection. . . . If there were no judgment at all, the natural result of the simple rejection of the Gospel is that, bit by bit, all the lingering remains of nobleness that hover about the man, like scent about a broken vase, shall pass away; and that, step by step, through the simple process of saying, 'I will not have Christ to rule over me,' the whole being shall degenerate, until manhood becomes devilhood, and the soul is lost by its own want of faith" (See Sermons, Vol. I. p. 7). And so it is all with man, and in no degree with God, that "His way," which He intends to be the fortress, the strength of every human soul, becomes a destruction to "the workers of iniquity." _OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS._