We need never be alone if we have this Companion. Besides the natural, necessary solitude in which every human soul lives there are some of us, no doubt, on whom God, by His providence, has laid the burden of a very lonely life. God's purpose in making us solitary is to join Himself to us. He sent His prophet away into the dreadful desert of Sinai, that there, amidst its wild peaks and blasted dreary loneliness, he might see the great sight and hear the Divine voice. "I will bring her into the desert, and will speak to her heart." Oh, brother, if your hand has been untwined from a dear hand-if you look along the long stretch of life, and see no prospect of other companion-learn the lesson and the privilege of your solitude, and take God into it to keep you company. Left alone, nestle close to Him.

Beside the natural and the providential solitudes there is yet another. We must make a solitude for ourselves, if we would have God speaking to us and keeping us company. Solitude is the mother-country of the strong. To be much alone is the condition of sanity and nobleness of life. I know, of course, that domestic arrangements and imperative duties make it all but impossible for many of us to realize to any large extent the outward solitude, which is so calming and bracing and every way desirable. But, for all that, brother, and making all needful allowance, and gladly remembering that God will come to people in a crowd, if His providence has fixed them there, let us not forget that there must be a Mount of Olives in the life of every follower of Jesus Christ. We cannot afford to neglect what He had to attend

to, who the more He was busy in the Temple, the more went out to the mountain-top, and continued there all night in prayer to God. His commandment to us is still, "Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place and rest awhile." Conferences and meetings and congresses and crowds have their function, no doubt-perhaps we could do with fewer of thembut, at all events, no man's religion will be deep and strong unless he has learned to go into the secret place of the Most High, and shut his doors about him, and there receive the fulness of that Spirit.

III.-Lastly, notice the Joy in all sorrow.

"Full of joy and of the Holy Ghost," says the latter of these two texts. That collocation is familiar to the student of the New Testament. You will remember the Apostle's great enumeration of the fruits of the Spirit: "Love, joy, peace." And in another place, still more relevant to our present purpose, he speaks to the members of one of his churches, and tells them that they had "received the word in much affliction with joy of the Holy Ghost." So, then, whoever has this Divine Guest dwelling in his heart, may possess, and will possess, a joy as complete as is Its possession of him.

I need not remind you how that Divine Spirit who enters into our souls by faith brings to us the consciousness of forgiveness and of sonship, nor how It fits the needs of every part of our nature, and brings all our being into harmony with itself, with circumstances, and with God; and how, therefore, the man who thus is truly "good," is "satisfied from himself," because himself is not himself only, but himself with the Holy Spirit dwelling in him; how

such a man needs not to go to the brackish ponds of earthly and outward satisfaction, but has a neverfailing fountain within, springing up, with joyous inherent energy, up, and up, and up into life everlasting.

But I may remind you that not only does this Divine Spirit in us make provision for joy, but that, with such an indwelling Guest, there is the possibility of the co-existence of joy and sorrow. It was no paradox that the Apostle gave forth when he said, "Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." Even in the midst of the snow and cold and darkness of Arctic regions, the explorers build houses for themselves of the very blocks of ice, and within are warmth and light and comfort and vitality, while around is a dreary waste. There may be two currents in the great ocean; a cold one may set from the pole and threaten to chill and freeze all life out, but from the equator there will be a warm one which will more than counterbalance the inrush of the cold. And so it is possible for us, even when things about us are dark and gloomy, and flesh and natural sensibilities all proclaim to us the necessity of sadness -it is possible for us to be aware of a central blessedness, not boisterous, but so grave and calm that the world cannot discriminate between it and sadness, which yet its possessors know to be blessedness unmingled. Left alone, we may have a companion ; in our ignorance we may be enlightened; and in the murkiest night of our sorrow we may have, burning cheerily within our hearts, a light unquenchable.

But remember that this joy from the Spirit is a commandment. I am sure that Christians do not sufficiently lay to heart that gladness is their duty,

and that sorrow unrelieved by it is cowardice and sin. We have no business to be thus sorrowful. There are no unmingled, and there are no irrevocable, causes for sorrow in the lives of any men who can say, God is my Father; Christ is my Brother; the Spirit of God dwells in my heart." "Therefore, rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice."

But remember the conditions. If you and I have that Divine Spirit within us we shall be enlightened, however ignorant; companioned, however solitary; joyful, however ringed about with sorrow. If we have not, the converse will be true: we shall grope in the darkness, however we conceit ourselves to know; we shall have a central sorrow, however we may have a delusive, superficial joy, "the end of which is heaviness," and we shall be alone, however we may seem to be companied by troops of friends. If we have faith in Christ we shall have the Spirit of Christ. If, like the people in one of my texts, we can say truly that we are disciples, "we shall be filled with joy and with the Holy Ghost." He that is full of faith is full of God's Spirit.

"PILATE

XXII.

Pilate washing bis bands.

took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person see ye to it. "-MATT. xxvii. 24.

ILATE'S motives in surrendering Jesus to death were as plain as they were paltry. He had no fear that any danger to Rome would result from

Christ. The characteristic Roman contempt for ideas and ideals which speaks in his cynical question, "What is truth?" led him to look with a kind of almost amused pity at a man whom he thought of as a mere harmless enthusiast. He knew his subjects too well to suppose that they would have been so eager to surrender an effective leader of revolt, and he detected the personal "malice" which lay behind their newborn and suspicious loyalty. Then personal motives came in. He feared being accused at Rome. And so, for his own security, he stifled his conscience, resisted his wife's warnings, and gave up Jesus to their will. The death of one Jew was a trifle if he could keep his ticklish charge in good-humour. That was his sin. He knew that Christ's death would be murder. He knew that he was art and part in it. And yet he took the basin and washed his hands