from disobedient hearts, who reject the Word of God and continue in willful sin. We must be turned from iniquity and saved from sin, or we perish. So Acts iii. 26. From Mr. Moody: Some one has said there are three elements in faith-knowledge, assent, laying hold. Knowledge! A man may have a good deal of knowledge about Christ, but that does not save him. I suppose that Noah's carpenters knew as much about the ark as Noah did, but they perished miserably nevertheless, because they were not in the ark. Our knowledge about Christ does not help us if we do not act upon it. But knowledge is very important. Many assent and say "I believe," but that does not save them. Knowledge, assent, then laying hold; it is that last element that saves, that brings the soul and Christ together. It is the link that binds us to every promise of God-it brings us every blessing. "Faith gets the most, humility keeps the most, love works the most." The faith that is of God,-that is a saving faith, is a faith that works by love; a faith that trusts God's Word. Text for the day, verse 16. Sunday, June 26th. Jeremiah vi. 22 to 30. Verses 22 and 23. This is a description of the army of Nebuchadnezzar advancing for the conquest of Judah and the overthrow of Jerusalem. They were raised up by God to execute His judg ments upon His own people and upon the nations of the earth, and were irresistible while He had use for them. When His purposes were accomplished, they lost their power and were overthrown in their turn. Verses 24 to 26. The Spirit of God that gave courage and energy to the invaders, so that they advanced like the roaring of the sea, had departed from the men of Jerusalem, and they were left to weakness and terror. When God forsakes a man he is a pitiable object. Condemned by conscience, surrounded by enemies, and no refuge in God, he quakes with fear before a blow is struck, and suffers a hundred deaths before death really comes. Here we have the picture of a whole nation thus forsaken. What a word it is! "Wallow thyself in ashes: make thee mourning as for an only son." How changed from the condition described in ch. v., verses 27 and 28. "They are become great and waxen rich; they are waxen fat, they shine." How brief the temporal prosperity of the godless,-how soon it must end. Verses 27 and 28. This is the word of the Lord to Jeremiah, as in ch. i. 18. He is not to spare in his denunciations of judgment, no matter how hardened the people may be against him or how furious may be their rage. God will protect him. Verses 29 and 30. What a sermon Chas. H. Spurgeon has upon this text! The last supreme effort has been made to warn and to turn the people, and to purge the land of evil, and it has failed! "The bellows are burned." The Spirit of God is withdrawn, "the Lord hath rejected them." How solemnly applicable are these words when a faithful and godly minister is called home, and his voice is no more heard among his people. From Joseph Parker: Jesus Christ was despised and rejected of men. We are prone to say, Show true wisdom, and the world will instantly recognize it and obey its behests. History gives a flat contradiction to this supposition. The world has not known wisdom when it has seen it, nor answered the voice of eloquence when it has heard it, nor bowed in the pres ence of beauty when it has been most openly revealed. This must be a pain to the inmost heart of God's prophets, and a source of discouragement which can only be dried up by considerations which lie beyond the line of time. Who could bear to teach constantly a school of dunces? Who would not shrink from being called upon to sing constantly to men who are deaf? Who could stand the wear and tear of attempting to teach blind men the beauty and charm of color? Yet this is what Jesus Christ has undertaken to do in the proclamation of His gospel and the revelation of His kingdom. Text for the day, verse 29. Monday, June 27th. Jeremiah vii. 1 to 7. Verses 1 and 2. God would have His message for the people get to the people. So the angel said to the apostles, "Go, stand and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life" (Acts v. 20). Our great commission reads, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark xvi. 15). Go where men are, get at them, and make them hear our message. "Some will hate thee, some will love thee, Some will flatter, some will slight; Cease from man and look above thee, Preach the word and do the right." Jeremiah had few to love, and many to hate him, as he rebuked sin and warned of coming wrath, but God gave him grace to be faithful, to go where he was sent and speak what he was bidden. O Lord give us the like grace! Verse 3. This man's faith in God gave his words a ring of certainty and a tone of authority. "Thus saith the Jehovah of hosts, the Elohim of Israel." It was no essay on ethics, or lecture on moral culture that he proposed to give them, but a straight out message from the God of truth. So now the man who believes that he has received the Spirit of God to preach Christ, and who depends upon the presence and power of the Spirit when he speaks will have a convicting, if not a converting word. Judgment and grace, exhortation and promise are mingled in Jeremiah's discourse. The people were thronging into the courts of God's house, the Lord of the temple says to them, "Make yourselves fit to dwell here, and I will cause you to dwell here." If they had obeyed, the army of Babylon that was coming, "like a roaring sea," would have no power to cast them out. Verses 4 to 6. Twice the promise is repeated, “I will cause you to dwell in this place" (verses 3 and 7). They are warned not to trust in the words of lying prophets, who told them that the Lord would never destroy the temple. The character of the people in the temple was more to God than the temple itself, and if these were vile, the temple was valueless. From C. H. Spurgeon: Many Christians have not yet learned what they are. It is true the first teaching of God is to show us our own state, but we do not know that thoroughly till many years after we have known Jesus Christ. The fountains of the great deep within our hearts are not broken up all at once; the corruption of the soul is not developed in an hour. "Son of man," said the angel of Ezekiel, "I will show thee the abomination of Israel." He then took him in at one door where he saw abominable things and stood aghast. "Son of man, I will show thee greater abominations than these;" then he takes him into another chamber, and Ezekiel says, "surely I have now seen the worst." "No," says the angel, "I will show thee greater things than these." So, all our life long the Holy Spirit reveals to us the horrid abominations of our hearts. I know there are some here who do not think anything about it; they think they are good-hearted creatures. Good hearts, have you? Good hearts! Go to Jerusalem and see the description of your heart. Text for the day, verse 4. Tuesday, June 28th. Jeremiah vii. 8 to 14. Verse 8. This can be said to any one who puts his trust in any words other than those that God has given us. It is because men want license to sin that they listen to lying words. The singular thing is that, in many cases men will believe what they know to be a lie, rather than give upsin and believe the truth. Verses 9 to 11. Here are two searching questions from the Searcher of hearts. God tells them in detail of what wickedness He saw in them, and of the abominable sins they were daily committing in their lives; and then asks, "Will such as you dare to come into my holy house,-made holy because my name is called upon it,-and coming there will you dare to say that my salvation is so inefficient, and my grace so ineffectual, that you cannot help doing these things?" How plainly we can see the dishonor done to God by these men of Israel: do we see as plainly the dishonor to Christ of a sinful life by any of us who are called by His name? The temple was the one place in all the world where God revealed Himself, pardoning sin, and giving grace to the sinner to overcome its power, all on the ground of the atoning sacrifice. To stand there, claiming to have accepted the sacrifice, and still be under bondage to Satan, was to be in a position peculiarly trying to the God of grace and power. Sooner or later He must drive away such worshipers. See Matt. xxi. 13. Verses 12 to 14. From Josh. xviii, and 1 Sam. iv. 4, we learn that the tabernacle was at Shiloh for about three hundred years. It was thirty miles north of Jerusalem, between Bethel and Shechem, in the land of Ephraim, and was the home of Ahijah the prophet, who so faithfully warned Jeroboam (1 Kings xiv.). Joshua had judged the people there; Phinehas the son of Eleazar the faithful priest, had set up the altar there; Hannah had worshiped and prayed there; Samuel had there talked with God, and had there perhaps instructed David and Jonathan in the law of the Lord. Yet when they ceased to be true in heart, God left them to their enemies; so would He do to Jerusalem. From Andrew Murray: It is a great sin to come before God without faith. You must, therefore, pay especial attention to what the means for coming to faith is, and to what way it has to be used. The means is the Word; but the main stress falls upon the manner in which the word is employed. It is my counsel that you should read the Bible with a definite aim, namely, to find out what promises there are that you have to believe, promises that are available for you, in order that you may be occupied with them, and so take advantage of every expedient for receiving them in faith. Meditate upon them, learn them by heart, remain continuously absorbed with them, bow your knees before the Lord, and say to Him that you are resolved to believe them. Grudge not the time that this exercise costs you. Take time thus to search the Word with set purpose, with that one definite aim of arriving at faith. Text for the day, verse 12. Wednesday, June 29th. Jeremiah vii. 15 to 20. Verse 15. "So the Lord removed Israel out of His sight (2 Kings xvii. 23). "They shall not dwell in the Lord's land" (Hosea ix. 3). This last reference explains the passage. Moses wrote of Canaan, “A land which the Lord thy God careth for; the eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year" (Deut. xi. 12). God said to Solomon, "For now have I chosen and sanctified this house, that my name may be there forever; and mine eyes and my heart shall be there perpetually" (2 Chron. vii. 16). Because taken possession of by sacrifice (Gen. xii. 7 and xxii. 13,14),-conquered by sacrifice (Josh.viii. 30 to 32),-held by sacrifice (1 Chron. xxiii. 30, 31), it was peculiarly "the Lord's land," and those liv ing there were under covenant care and protecting power. This involved on their part purity of heart and obedient lives; failing in these, Israel was cast out of the land,-and Judah was soon to follow. It is a solemn thing to know that God has punished sin. I may be certain that He will punish me, if I am guilty of any sin. Verse 16. This is a most solemn verse. The doom of Judah was sealed. God would no more hear prayer for them, and would no more have His saints offer intercession in her behalf. So there comes a time in the history of the individual transgressor, when God delivers him over to the power of the sin he has chosen, and the influences of His Spirit are withdrawn. "They cast out God, and God gave them over to an outcast mind" (Rom. i. 24). God does not cast out men until they first cast Him out; but when the hour comes that God casts out a man, he goes so far that he never comes back. "Wandering stars, to whom is reserved the biackness of darkness forever" (Jude 13). "O God, cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me" (Ps. li. 11). Verses 17 to 20. The punishment was awful,-the penalty tremendous; but God here draws the curtain and shows the nature of the provocation that He bad endured. Judah and Jerusalem filled with idolaters, the house of God made a den of robbers. The land must be purged by fire. So of the earth in the coming day. 2 Pet. iii. 7. From Thomas Chalmers: The frequenters of the temple, who stole and murdered and committed adultery, made it a den of robbers. But God bids them look at Shiloh, once privileged as Jerusalem now was, yet that prevented not the defeat of Israel in Samuel's time, when the ark was taken, nor the present desolation of the plain and country around it, nor the captivity of the ten tribes. Of Jeremiah it might with special propriety be said, that "he rose up early and spake unto the people." Jerusalem, which answered him not, was therefore made to share in the calamities of Shiloh. There is a point beyond which prayer is vain-a sin unto death (1 John v. 16); after which the cry of the transgressor himself and the intercessions of other are alike unavailing. It marks the consummation of their fate when Jeremiah is forbidden to pray for Israel. Text for the day, verse 16. Thursday, June 30th. Jeremiah vii. 21 to 28. Verse 21. The Lord rejected their offerings because of their sinful lives, and here tells them to bring no more of their bullocks, goats and lambs to His altar but to keep and eat them. Verses 22 and 23. That is, the great purpose of God in His revelation of Himself to the seed of Abraham was to bring them to righteousness and to lead them to love God and holiness. The Jews ignored entirely any heart application of God's commandments, but magnified the ritual appointed for worship and claimed to be acceptable to God on this ground. A Spirit-taught man sees very clearly that "the end of the commandment is love out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and faith unfeigned" (1 Tim. i. 5), but, an unrenewed man does not see this. He thinks he can go on in willful disobedience to God's commands, live under the power of sin in his life, and be impure of heart and that God will overlook it all if he professes the name of Christ, is baptized and performs religious duties. It was just this that brought judgment on the Jews. If we are not honestly willing in our hearts to obey God no amount of religious activity or of lip service can make us a whit more acceptable in His sight than they were. The temple service, with all of its gorgeous ritual, was as nothing in God's sight, as compared with the sincere obedience of one honest soul. Verses 24 to 28. "Backward, and not forward," was the continued trend with the mass of the Jews from the death of Joshua to the times of Jeremiah. From generation to generation God ministered to them in faithfulness sending prophets to entreat them, and judgments to awaken them, but "they hardened their neck, they did worse than their fathers." And now Jeremiah is told that he is the last in the list of God's despised and misused messengers, and that they will fill up the cup of judg ment in their treatment of him. "Thou shalt speak but they will not hearken unto thee; thou shalt also call unto them, but they will not answer thee." He is made a notable type of the Son of God in all of this. "Truth is perished and is cut off from their mouth" is God's word of judgment So 2 Thess. ii. 10. From Mr. Moody: Some men seem to think it is a great misfortune that they do not have faith. Bear in mind it is not a misfortune, but it is the damning sin of the world. The greatest enemy God and man have got is unbelief. It is the secret of all disobedience. Christ found it on both sides of the cross. The Jews did not believe Him, they did not believe God had sent Him; they took Him to Calvary and murdered Him and the first thing we find after He rose from the grave was unbelief again. Thomas, one of His own disciples, did not believe He had risen. God's word becomes a power to us just in proportion as we believe. Text for the day, verse 28. IN HIS STEPS.."WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?” BY REV. CHARLES M. SHELDON Price, in paper cover, 25 cents; in cloth, 75 cents, prepaid "The reading of the book will search many a heart, and ought to lead to simpler, holier, and more fully consecrated Christian life."-Sunday School Times. "Mr. Sheldon's book makes a strong impression as a plea for more simplicity of living, for more economy and more principle in the matter of personal expenditure, and for the application of the laws of righteousness and justice to the methods of business administration."-New York Independent. FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY, Chicago, New York, Toronto Superintendent of the Bible Institute, Chicago. JUST PUBLISHED. What the Bible Teaches. A thorough and comprehensive study of all the Bible has to say concerning the great doctrines of which it treats. Large 8vo, 560 pages, $2.50. This book represents years of study. Its contents have been tested again and again in the class-room-in classes composed, in some instances, of representatives of thirty-six denominations. 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