erlasting burnings some
day. It will do us good to ask ourselves why it is that, with a promise
like this for every Christian soul to build upon, there are so few
Christian souls that have anything like realised its fulness and its
depth. Let us be quite sure of this--God has nothing to do with the
failure of His promise, and let us take all the blame to ourselves.

'I will be as the dew unto Israel.' Who was Israel? The man that
wrestled all night in prayer with God, and took hold of the angel and
prevailed and wept and made supplication to Him. So Hosea tells us; and
as he says in the passage where he describes the Angel's wrestling with
Jacob at Peniel, 'there He spake with us'--when He spake, He spake with
him who first bore the name. Be you Israel, and God will surely be your
dew; and life and growth will be possible. That is the first lesson of
this great promise.

II. The second is, that a soul thus bedewed by God will spring into
purity and beauty.

We go back to Hosea's vegetable metaphors. 'He shall grow as the lily'
is his first promise. If I were addressing a congregation of botanists,
I should have something to say about what kind of a plant is meant, but
that is quite beside the mark for my present purpose. It is sufficient
to notice that in this metaphor the emphasis is laid upon the two
attributes which I have named--beauty and purity. The figure teaches us
that ugly Christianity is not Christ's Christianity. Some of us older
people remember that it used to be a favourite phrase to describe
unattractive saints that they had 'grace grafted on a crab stick.' There
are a great many Christian people whom one would compare to any other
plant rather than a lily. Thorns and thistles and briers are a good deal
more like what some of them appear to the world. But we are bound, if we
are Christian people, by our obligations to God, and by our obligations
to men, to try to make Christianity look as beautiful in people's eyes
as we can. That is what Paul said, 'Adorn the teaching'; make it look
well, inasmuch as it has made you look attractive to men's eyes. Men
have a fairly accurate notion of beauty and goodness, whether they have
any goodness or any beauty in their own characters or not. Do you
remember the words: 'Whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are
of good report, whatsoever things are venerable ... if there be any
praise'--from men--'think on these things'? If we do not keep that as
the guid