e whole world of mankind may all be seized
with this benign, meek, beneficent, beatific, glorious distraction! The
peace of God that passeth all understanding; rejoicing with joy
unspeakable and full of glory; God shining in our hearts, to give the
light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ; with open face
beholding as in a glass the glory of God, and being changed into the same
image from glory to glory, even as by the spirit of the Lord; being
called out of darkness into marvellous light, and having the day-star
arise in our hearts! What a sweet distraction is that! And out of what
a heavenly distemper and out of what a sane enthusiasm has all that come
to us!"

"More I would speak: but all my words are faint;
Celestial Love, what eloquence can paint?
No more, by mortal words, can be expressed,
But all Eternity shall tell the rest."

THE SWELLING OF JORDAN

"The swelling of Jordan."--_Jeremiah_.

"Fore-fancy your deathbed," says Samuel Rutherford. "Take an essay," he
says in his greatest book, that perfect mine of gold and jewels, _Christ
Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself_--"Take an essay and a lift at your
death, and look at it before it actually comes to your door." And so we
shall. Since it is appointed to all men once to die, and after death the
judgment; and since our death and our judgment are the only two things
that we are absolutely sure about in our whole future, we shall
henceforth fore-fancy those two events much more than we have done in the
past. And to assist us in that; to quicken our fancy, to kindle it, to
captivate it, and to turn our fancy wholly to our salvation, we have all
the entrancing river-scenes in the _Pilgrim's Progress_ set before us; a
succession of scenes in which Bunyan positively revels in his exquisite
fancies, clothing them as he does, all the time, in language of the
utmost beauty, tenderness, pathos, power, and dignity. Let us take our
stand, then, on the bank of the river and watch how pilgrim after pilgrim
behaves himself in those terrible waters. We are all voluntary
spectators to-night, but we shall all be compulsory performers before we
know where we are.

1. On entering the river even Christian suddenly began to sink. Fore-
fancy that. All the words he spake still tended to discover that he had
great horror of mind and hearty fears that he would die in that river;
here also he was much in the troublesome thoughts of