he
false--"quietness and confidence."

The apostle, closing his beautiful description of charity, says:
"Follow after charity." Ponder its value--meditate on its
beauties--till your heart becomes fascinated, and you press with
longing toward it. But as it is difficult to be occupied with "Love"
in the abstract, can we find anywhere an embodiment of love? A person
who illustrates it in its perfection, in whose character every glorious
mark that the apostle depicts in this 13th chapter of Corinthians is
shown in perfect moral beauty--yea, who is in himself the one complete
perfect expression of love. And, God be thanked, we know One such;
and, as we read the sweet and precious attributes of Love, we recognize
that the Holy Spirit has pictured every lineament of our Lord Jesus
Christ. Wouldst thou be rich, then, my soul? Follow after, occupy
thyself with, press toward, the Lord Jesus, till His beauties so
attract as to take off thy heart from every other infinitely inferior
attraction, and the kindling of His love shall warm thy heart with the
same holy flame, and thou shalt seek love's ease--love's rest--in
pouring out all thou hast in a world where need of all kinds is on
every side, and thus be "rich toward God." So may it be for the
writer, and every reader, to the praise of His grace. Amen.

Where are we, in time, my readers? Are we left as shipwrecked sailors
upon a raft, without chart or compass, and know not whether sunken
wreck or cliff-bound coast shall next threaten us? No; a true divine
chart and compass is in our hands, and we may place our finger upon the
exact chronological latitude and longitude in which our lot is cast.
Mark the long voyage of the professing Church past the quiet waters of
Ephesus, where first love quickly cools and is lost; past the stormy
waves of persecution which drive her onward to her desired haven, in
Smyrna; caught in the dangerous eddy, and drifted to the whirlpool of
the world in Pergamos, followed by the developed Papal hierarchy in
Thyatira, with the false woman in full command of the ship; past
Sardis, with its memories of a divine recovery in the Reformation of
the sixteenth century:--Philadelphia and Laodicea alone are left; and,
with mutual contention and division largely in the place of brotherly
love, who can question but that we have reached the last stage, and
that there is every mark of Laodicea about us? This being so, mark the
word of our Lord Jesus to t