y sin must be a
much greater evil than I was taking it to be.

But especially are we rebuked for all light-heartedness in our
estimate of sin by remembering Him who went without the camp bearing
our reproach. It is when we see Christ rejected of men, and outcast
for us and for our sin, that we feel true shame. To find one who so
loves me and enters into my position that He feels more keenly than
myself the shame I have incurred; to find one who so understands
God's holiness and is Himself so pure that my sin affects Him with
the profoundest shame--this is what pierces my heart with an
altogether new compunction, with an arrow that cannot be shaken out.
And this connection of Christ with our sin is actual. If Paul felt
himself so bound up with his fellow-Christians that he blushed for
them when they erred, and could say with truth, "Who is weak and I am
not weak, who is offended and I turn not?" much more truly may Christ
say, Who sins and I am not ashamed? And if He thus enters into a
living sympathy with us, shall not we enter into sympathy with Him,
and go without the camp bearing His reproach, which, indeed, is ours;
striving, though it cost us much shame and self-denial, to enter
heartily into His feelings at our sins, and not letting our union to
Him be a mere name or an inoperative tie which effects no real
assimilation in spirit between us and Him.

NAAMAN CURED.

There is no Scripture story better known than that of Naaman, the
Syrian. It is memorable not only because artistically told, but
because it is so full of human feeling and rapid incident, and so
fertile in significant ideas. The little maid, whose touch set in
motion this drama, is an instance of the adaptability of the Jew.
Nothing seemed less likely than that this captive girl should carry
with her into Syria anything of much value to anyone. Possessions she
had none. Friends she might have, only if she could make them. As a
captive in a foreign land she might reasonably have put aside all
hope of obtaining any influence, and might naturally have sought only
to benefit herself. But she was a girl with a heart. She at once took
an interest in her new home, and saw with sorrowful surprise that
wealth could not purchase immunity from participation in the ordinary
human distresses, nor guarded gates forbid disease to pass in.
Brooding from day to day over the stories she had heard of Elisha's
power, and listening to her mistress's account of the fa