t, cannot bring
themselves to seek help from Christ. There are those who do not believe
Christ can deliver them; and there are those to whom deliverance
weighted with obligation to God, and giving health to serve Him, seems
equally repugnant with death itself. But where, there is a sincere
desire for reconcilement with God, and for the holiness which maintains
us in harmony with God, all that is needed is trust in Christ, the
belief that God has appointed Him to be our Saviour, and the daily use
of Him as our Saviour.

In proceeding to make a practical use of what our Lord here teaches, our
first duty, plainly, is to look to Him for life. He is exhibited
crucified--it is our part to trust in Him, to appropriate for our own
use His saving power. We need it. We know something of the deadly nature
of sin, and that with the first touch of its fang death enters our
frame. We have found our lives poisoned by it. Nothing can well be a
fitter picture of the havoc sin makes than this plague of serpents--the
slender weapon sin uses, the slight _external_ mark it leaves, but,
within, the fevered blood, the fast dimming sight, the throbbing heart,
the convulsed frame, the rigid muscles no longer answering to our will.
Do we not find ourselves exposed to sin wherever we go? In the morning
our eyes open on its vibrating fangs ready to dart upon us; as we go
about our ordinary employments we have trodden on it and been bitten ere
we are aware; in the evening, as we rest, our eye is attracted, and
fascinated, and held by its charm. Sin is that from which we cannot
escape, from which we are at no time, nor in any place, secure; from
which, in point of fact, no one of us has escaped, and which in every
case in which it has touched a man has brought death along with it.
Death may not at once appear; it may appear at first only in the form of
a gayer and intenser life; as, they tell us, there is one poison which
causes men to leap and dance, and another which distorts the face of the
dying with a hideous imitation of laughter. Is that not a diseased soul
which has no vigour for righteous and self-sacrificing work; whose
vision is so dim it sees no beauty in holiness?

Of this condition, faith in God through Christ is the true remedy.
Return to God is the beginning of all healthy spiritual life. Faith
means that all distrust, all resentment at what has happened in our
life, all proud and all despondent thoughts, are laid aside. To believe