Comfort of the truest and highest kind will flow in upon all who have had the bitter task of laying children in their graves, if they will only turn to the true view of children's deaths. It was out of love that God suffered the infants at Bethlehem to be slain. It is in love that He now sends His arrows into the young ones hearts and tears them from their mothers' arms. Though His love works in the midst of suffering, and brings suffering, and turns happy homes into places of tears, yet out of bitterness comes forth sweetness; and they who weep over the vacant seat in the earthly home may rejoice that the soul of the beloved has found a better, a happier place, which the evils of this life and its tempters and its poisonous allurements cannot reach.

With great consolation may any who see children's eyes closed in death or stand by children's graves, regard their own lot as they look back at Bethlehem. While they will be able to enter into the feelings of those many Rachels when they were stricken with a sudden and common grief, and while they will know the blessedness of those children whose souls were so swiftly taken into paradise, they can hardly fail to apply the moral to themselves. The same language of comfort with which it would have

been natural and just to have consoled these Rachels of old, is addressed to them; and they in their turn are taught not to look exclusively at the dark side of the picture, but to discern in their own loss the gain of those whom they greatly loved.

We have indeed cause to bless God for such as are taken in early life; there are no graves over which there is more cause to rejoice; we may have warm lively hope for others, but here there is the highest confidence; we know of a certainty that they are blessed. In their elders there may have been secret sins unknown to us; there may have been some features of their character which God has looked upon with grief; but with the young we know that all is well, that there is nothing to come out, no tales of hidden evil, no secret faults; and so we may rejoice over them with the most unbounded, unclouded assurance of their blessedness, and of their acceptance with God through the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ.

JOHN HENRY PARKER, OXFORD AND LONDON.

Sermons for the Christian Seasons.

THE FEAST OF THE CIRCUMCISION.

THE CIRCUMCISION OF THE HEART.

DEUTERONOMY Xxx. 6. The Lord thy God will
circumcise thine heart,

ALL the world knows that to-day is New Year's Day; but it is only a few here and there, one in a hundred, or one in a thousand,-who know, or care to know, that the Church commemorates today the circumcision of her incarnate Lord, that act by which He subjected Himself to the law, in order that having fulfilled to the letter its every behest, He might become the sinless victim offered in sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

It is hardly conceivable that any one, however thoughtless, should enter upon another year of his short life without the feeling that his journey is lessened by a long stage, without some anxious speculation as to what may lie in the distance before him; without some confession before God

of past transgressions and short-comings; some prayers for help and guidance through the future. Hence most men have serious thoughts to-day : they are not indisposed to remember God; but yet, as the commencement of the Church's year in Advent was nothing to them, so now they supersede all meditation on the lessons to be learned from our Lord's circumcision, by dwelling on matters immediately personal to themselves, their hopes and prospects in the new year. Their life is ruled by the habits of society, not by the Church's law. And hence the preacher has often found that on this day his hearers would be better pleased to be addressed on topics connected with the changes and chances of this mortal life, than on that which forms the subject of the Church's festival.

There is, however, a point of view in which both the objects to which I have alluded seem blended together. There I would take my stand, and bid you look forward with me.

In the collect of the day we offer our prayer that Almighty God, who made His blessed Son to be circumcised, and obedient to the law for man, would grant us the true circumcision of the Spirit; that our hearts, and all our members. being mortified from all worldly and carnal lusts.

may in all things obey His blessed will. Now, then, let us, on this new year's day, enquire how far our hearts are in the condition to which, if this year (as very probably it may) should be our last, we should desire them to have attained, before we are summoned into His Presence, upon whom no impure or unholy thing may look.

In that remarkable promise, which I have chosen for my text, the children of Israel were taught that, in time to come, God would do something for them, which they could not do for themselves. And whereas most of the promises to Israel after the flesh were promises of temporal good, of peace and plenty, of the milk and honey of the promised land, of length of days, riches, and honours, this promise was of a strictly spiritual nature. "The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live." As the outward rite of circumcision made its change, and produced an indelible mark by which the circumcised should be known from the uncircumcised, so by a process within, God would set His mark and seal on the hearts of His chosen people, whereby they should be known to be His. And, as the outward circumcision of