of the
Saviour are no idle threats. He _means_ what He _says_! He is "the
Faithful and True witness;" and though "mercy and truth go continually
before His face," "justice and judgment are the habitation of His
throne." You may be scorning His message--lulling yourself into a dream
of guilty indifference. You may see in His daily dealings no sign or
symbol of coming retribution; you may be echoing the old challenge of
the presumptuous scoffer--"Where is the promise of His coming?" The fig
leaves may have lost none of their verdure--the sky may be unfretted by
one vengeful cloud--nature, around you, may be hushed and still. You can
hear no footsteps of wrath; you may be even tempted at times to think
that all is a dream--that credulity has suffered itself to be duped by a
counterfeit tale of superstitious terror! Or if, in better moments, you
awake to a consciousness of the Bible averments being stern realities,
your next subterfuge is to trust to that rope of sand to which thousands
have clung, to the wreck of their eternities--an indefinite dreamy hope
in the final _mercy_ of God! that on the Great Day the threatenings of
Jesus will undergo some modification; that He will not carry out to the
very letter the full weight of His denunciations; that the arm which
love nailed to the cross of Calvary will sheathe the sword of avenging
retribution, and proclaim a universal amnesty to the thronging myriads
at His tribunal!

"Nay! O man, who art thou that repliest against God?" Come to the
fig-tree "over against" Bethany, and let it be a dumb attesting witness
to the Saviour's unswerving and immutable truthfulness! Or, passing from
the sign to the thing symbolised, behold that nation which God has for
eighteen centuries set up in the world as a monument of His undeviating
adherence to His Word. See how, in their case, to the letter He has
fulfilled His threatenings. Is not this fulfillment intended as an awful
foreshadowing of eternal verities: if He has "spared not the natural
branches," thinkest thou He will spare _thee_? "If these things were
done in the green tree, what will be done in the dry?"

Mourners! You for whose comfort these pages are specially designed, is
there no lesson of consolation to be drawn from this solemn "memory?"
Jesus smote down that _fig-tree_--blasted and blighted it. Never again
did He come to seek fruit on it. Ten thousand other buds in the
Fig-forest around were opening their fragrant lips to d