home in our own house; for these may entice us to stop a little longer with them, urging that there is time enough yet to follow the Lord. The only way to bury the father, or to relinquish self-love, is to follow the Lord; for in the same proportion as Jesus is followed in love, faith, and practice, self-love loses its power, becomes dead, and in the mind of the regenerate, sinks into everlasting oblivion!—is buried. In the soul of man, all the affections and thoughts that are evil and false, are, in Scripture language, the dead which are to be buried and forgotten. The only way to bury these in the tomb of forgetfulness is to follow Jesus. He being the way of all, the Truth of all, and the Life of all.
Help us, O Lord God! to follow Thee ih the regeneration, that being bound up with Thee in Life, we may henceforth be obedient to thy command, and let the dead bury their dead.
April Nineteenth.
SPIRITUAL CONSUMPTION.
"Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth."—Zech. xiv. 12.
HERE we observe a consumption or wasting away of all that can give beauty, delight, or pleasure to man, and all this is nothing but an effect rising from fighting against Jerusalem. Let us not, however, suppose that the Lord himself inflicts torment upon the evil-doer, as though punishment and crime were not legitimately and consequently connected; for evil and its punishment are as cause and effect, and may be compared to a poisonous plant, evil being the root or cause, and the flourishing shrub, with its deleterious
