ises never comes.

III. The self-inflicted loss.

Our text suggests that there are two ways by which we may learn the
folly of a godless life--One, the consideration of what it turns to, the
other, the thought of what it departs from.

'They forsake their own Mercy,' that is God. The phrase is here almost
equivalent to 'His name'; and it carries the blessed thought that He has
entered into relations with every soul, so that each man of us--even if
he have turned to 'lying vanities'--can still call Him, 'my own Mercy.'
He is ours; more our own than is anything without us. He is ours,
because we are made for Him, and He is all for us. He is ours by His
love, and by His gift of Himself in the Son of His love. He is ours; if
we take Him for ours by an inward communication of Himself to us in the
innermost depths of our being. He becomes 'the Master-Light of all our
seeing.' In the mysterious inwardness of mutual possession, the soul
which has given itself to God and possesses Him, has not only communion,
but may even venture to claim as its own the deeper and more mysterious
_union_ with God. Those multiform mercies, 'which endure for ever,' and
speed on their manifold errands into every remotest region of His
universe, gather themselves together, as the diffused lights of some
nebulae concentrate themselves into a sun. That sun, like the star that
led the wise men from the East, and finally stood over one poor house in
an obscure village, will shine lambent above, and will pass into, the
humblest heart that opens for it. They who can say, as we all can if we
will, 'My God,' can never want.

And if we turn to the alternative in our text, and consider who they are
to whom we turn when we turn from God, there should be nothing more
needed to drive home the wholesome conviction of the folly of the
wisest, who deliberately prefers shadow to substance, lying vanities to
the one true and only reality. I beseech you to take that which is your
own, and which no man can take from you. Weigh in the scales of
conscience, and in the light of the deepest necessities of your nature,
the whole pile of those emptinesses that have been telling you lies ever
since you listened to them; and place in the other scale the mercy of
God, and the Christ who brings it to you, and decide which is the
weightier, and which it becomes you to take for your pattern for ever.

THREEFOLD REPENTANCE

'And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the