home in Bethany;
there is the child-like saint, the devout and spiritual John; there is
the repentant woman of Magdala; and there are many others who betake
themselves to that sacred place--"the upper room." One all-engrossing
thought fills their minds. "The promise of the Father which ye have
heard of me. The promise of the Father! The promise of the Father! O,
when will He come? We would know more about our departed Lord. He is
gone from us. Our hearts are torn and bleeding and lonely. Jesus said,
'He shall testify of me.' Would that He would come now!"

WHY ONLY THE FEW?

But why are there only one hundred and twenty? Was it not into
Jerusalem that Christ entered riding over a cloak-carpeted way amid the
deafening shouts of "Hosanna"? Did He not teach and instruct and heal
hundreds, if not thousands, in and about Jerusalem? Was He not lionized
at times by an admiring public? Yea, truly; but one may admire Christ
and yet not love Him. There are many who at some "hard saying" refuse
to walk with Him. Thousands who have a keen appreciation of "loaves and
fishes" shrink from "leaving all" and following Jesus. A great
concourse is drawn and held spell-bound by a naive, graceful, eloquent,
artless preacher who uses "lilies," and the "grass of the field," and
the "sower" of seed, and the "sparrow" in the air to enforce his truth.
But one may be interested, and yet not be saved.

THE AESTHETIC ELEMENT.

In some people religion appeals to the aesthetic nature, and to that
only. They festoon the cross with flowers, but never think of dying on
it. They are charmed by Gothic churches filled with "dim, religious
light." The waves of music from the great; sounding organ awe their
souls and fill them with a pensiveness which they mistake for
repentance. Pointed arches, sculptured capitals, fretted altars,
swinging censers, burning candles, white-robed choir-boys, errorless
order in church service--these auxiliaries influence them so strongly
in their sense of the beautiful that they think, "Surely I love God.
Why, of course I love God." But to love God involves something
practical. It means something more than mere profession. It means
rugged self-denial, Spartan heroism, perhaps the loss of an "arm" or
the "plucking out of an eye." Base must have been the soul which was
not attracted by One who "spake as never man spake"; low-minded the man
who did not see in Him imperishable beauty and refinement of soul; but
ah! discipleshi