grace within and under every one of them.  So that, Mr. Ready-to-halt, there is no possible staff you can take into your hand that has not already been in the hand of your Lord.  Think of that, O Mr. Ready-to-halt!  Reverence, then, and almost worship thy staff!  Throw all thy weight upon thy staff.  Confide all thy weakness to it.  Talk to it as thou walkest with it.  Make it talk to thee.  Worm out of it all its secrets about its first Owner.  And let it instruct thee about how He walked with it and how He handled it.  The Bible is very bold with its Master.  It calls Him by the most startling names sometimes.  There is no name that a penitent and a returning sinner goes by that the Bible does not put somewhere upon the sinner’s Saviour.  And in one place it as good as calls Him Ready-to-halt in as many words.  Nay, it lets us see Him halting altogether for a time; ay, oftener than once; and only taking the road again, when a still stronger staff was put into his trembling hand.  And if John had but had room in his crowded gospel he would have given us the very identical psalm with which our Lord took to the upward way again, strong in His new staff.  “For I am ready to halt,” was His psalm in the house of His pilgrimage, “and My sorrow is continually before Me.  Mine enemies are lively, and they are strong; and they that hate Me wrongfully are multiplied.  They also that render evil for good are Mine adversaries; because I follow the thing that good is.  Forsake Me not, O Lord; O My God, be not far from Me.  Make haste to help Me, O Lord My salvation.”

3.  Among all the devout and beautiful fables of the “dispensation of paganism,” there is nothing finer than the fable of blind Tiresias and his staff.  By some sad calamity this old prophet had lost the sight of his eyes, and to compensate their servant for that great loss the gods endowed him with a staff with eyes.  As Aaron’s rod budded before the testimony and bloomed blossoms and yielded almonds, so Tiresias’ staff budded eyes, and divine eyes too, for the blind prophet’s guidance and direction.  Tiresias had but to take his heaven-given staff in his hand, when, straightway, such a divinity entered into the staff that it both saw for him with divine eyes, and heard for him with divine ears, and then led him and directed him, and never once in all his after journeys let him go off the right way.  All other men about him, prophets and priests both, often lost their way, but Tiresias after his blindness, never, till Tiresias and his staff became a proverb and a parable in the land.  And just such a staff, just such a crutch, just such a pair of crutches, were the crutches of our own so homely Mr. Ready-to-halt.  With all their lusty limbs, all the other pilgrims often stumbled and went out of their way till they had to be helped up, led back, and their faces set right again.  But, last as Mr. Ready-to-halt always came in the procession—­behind even the women and the children as his crutches always