for every human heart which
asks for God, this wonderful Christ, personal, eternal, human, Divine,
is quite immediately accessible. The hands of need and trust have but to
be lifted, and they hold HIM. And He is the SON. In Him we have the
FATHER. We do indeed "_draw nigh_ to God through Him."

Therefore we will do it. The thousand confusions of our time shall only
make this Divine simplicity the more precious to us. We will at once and
continually take Jesus Christ for granted in all the fulness and
splendour of His High-priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. That
Priesthood is for ever what it is; it is as new and young to-day in its
virtue as if the oath had but to-day been spoken, and He had but to-day
sat down at the right hand.

Happy we if we use Him thus. He blesses those who do so with blessings
which they cannot analyse, but which they know. Many years ago a
Christian lady, daughter of a saintly Non-conformist pastor in the west
of Dorset, told me how, in a then distant time, her father had striven
to teach a sick man, a young gipsy in a wandering camp, to read, and to
come to Christ. The camp moved after a while, and the young man, dying
of consumption, took a Bible with him. Time rolled on, and one day a
gray-haired gipsy came to the minister's door; it was the youth's
father, with the news of his son's happy death, and with his Bible.
"Sir, I cannot read a word; but _he_ was always reading it, and he
marked what he liked with a stick from the fire. And he said you would
find one place marked with two lines; it was everything to my poor lad."
The leaves were turned, and the stick was found to have scored two lines
at the side of Heb. vii. 25: "He is able also to save them to the
uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing that He ever liveth to make
intercession for them."

CHAPTER V

THE BETTER COVENANT

HEB. viii.

The Person and greatness of our High Priest are now full before the
readers of the Epistle. The paragraph we enter next, after one more
deliberate contemplation of His dignity and His qualifications, proceeds
to expound His relation to the better and eternal Covenant. We shall
find here also messages appropriate to our time.

The first step then is a review, a summing up, a "look again" upon the
true King of Righteousness and peace (verses 1, 2). "Such a High Priest
_we have_." It is a wonderful affirmation, not only of His existence but
of His relation to "us," His people.