They are the utterances of a Father's voice, significant of the depth and intensity of his love to us, and his desire to have us. They are written by the Spirit of God, the Amanuensis who never errs, in that precious blood which never perishes. "He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses : of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?"

"And unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass; I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first.”—REV. ii. 18, 19. THE letter I have read describes the duties, the dangers, the excellences of the Church in Thyatira. The address is introduced by our Lord, in a character suitable to the body of the epistle. He proclaims himself to be the Son of God; this the epithet he assumes, the Jews construed to be a prerogative of Deity. He thus demonstrates himself to be, what we know he is, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, the Almighty. He next introduces himself under the characteristic attribute of Omniscience, "whose eyes are like a flame of fire." The flame dissolves the diamond into charcoal, subdues the strongest things, penetrates the closest, and finds access where every other element is interdicted. Our Lord has " eyes like a flame of fire," penetrating all things, removing every obstruction, consuming every opposition, and searching the deepest recesses and most hidden corners of the human heart. But not only has he "eyes like a flame of fire;" but it is added here," he had feet like unto fine brass." The oxen which in ancient times were used for treading out the corn had brass-shod hoofs, designed to enable them more effectually to separate the wheat from the chaff. The idea conveyed in this hieroglyphic symbol is, that our Lord has not only an omniscient eye to see all,

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but also the omnipotent power to distinguish, to divide, to separate all. Christ the Omniscient One! what a solemn thought! In close contact with your heart, the very holiest or the least so in this assembly, is the omniscient eye of the Son of God! We call certain thoughts secret thoughts; we pronounce some feelings to be hidden. They are so, relatively to man; but not so relatively to the Lord Jesus Christ. Those latent propensities to evil, which the holiest occasionally feel -those folded buds that develop themselves into covetousness, pride, ambition, held in abeyance for a time, ripened by circumstances into terrible maturityChrist sees in their commencement and in their consummation. Those unholy thoughts that spring from the depths of our hearts, detected by none, Christ's eye clearly and distinctly sees, those evil habits, the remains of which we yet feel; for it is the penalty of late conversion that we have to encounter a fiercer struggle with the evil within than those have who are early converted to the Lord. The young who have loved the Saviour, gloried in his cross, and held communion with him from their earliest days, have a less hard battle to fight, because the power and the habit of grace within them are mightier and stronger by time; but those who have been turned from the evil of their ways late in life, have the remains of past habits, and the obduracy of inveterate feelings to contend with, and are destined therefore to a fiercer and intenser conflict with evil within than those who in their earliest years were brought to love the Lord. It is a strong reason for early piety, that it will always be followed by the greatest happiness here: the field of conflict will be softest the progress will be easiest. "Remember, therefore, thy Creator in the days of thy youth, before the evil days come," which will be increased and aggravated by late conversion, "when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them." Those habits, then, Christ sees; those schemes of evil which circumstances repress-those sympathies which our condition enables us to conceal-those passions which are not developed,