given to them in their Messiah, made lands, and houses, and meat, and drink, all the Messiah they cared for.  Matthew Henry says that when we go to the merchant to buy goods, he gives us the paper and the pack-thread to the bargain.  Well, those children and fools in Israel actually threw away the goods and hoarded and boasted over the paper and the pack-thread.  Our old Scottish lawyers have made us familiar with the distinction in the church between spiritualia and temporalia.  Well, the Jews let the spiritualia go to those who cared to take such things, while they held fast to the temporalia.  And all that went on till His disciples had the effrontery to clip and coin under our Lord’s very eyes, and even to ask Him to hold the coin while they sharpened their shears.  ’O faithless and perverse generation!  How long shall I be with you?  How long shall I suffer you?  Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip?  O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!  And beginning at Moses and all the prophets He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.’

2.  But those who live in glass houses must take care not to throw stones.  And thus the greatest fool in Israel is safe from you and me.  For, like them, and just as if we had never read one word about them, we bend our hearts and our children’s hearts to things seen and temporal, and then, after things seen and temporal have all cast us off, we begin to ask if there is any solace or sweetness for a cast-off heart in things unseen and eternal.  There are great gaps clipt out of our Bibles that not God Himself can ever print or paste in again.  Look and see if half the Book of Proverbs, for instance, with all its noble promises to a godly youth, is not clipt clean out of your dismembered Bible.  That fine leaf also, ‘My son, give Me thine heart,’ is clean gone out of the twenty-third chapter of the Proverbs years and years ago.  As is the best part of the noble Book of Daniel, and almost the whole of Second Timothy.  ’Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and meat and drink, and wife and child shall be added unto you.’  Your suicidal shears have cut that golden promise for ever out of your Sermon on the Mount.  So much so that if any or all of these temporal mercies ever come to you, they will come of pure and undeserved mercy, for the time has long passed when you could plead any promise for them.  Still, there are two most excellent uses left to which you can even yet put your mangled and dismembered Bible.  You can make a splendid use of its gaps and of its gashes, and of those waste places where great promises at one time stood.  You can make a grand use even of those gaps if you will descend into them and draw out of them humiliation and repentance, compunction, contrition, and resignation.  And this use also:  When you are moved to take some man who is still young