he really went into the Holiest of all on the warrant of the
Redeemer's work; for assuredly a sinner is still under wrath, until he
has actually availed himself of the way to the Father opened up by
Jesus. All his knowledge of his sinfulness, and all his sad feeling of
his own need and danger, cannot place him one step farther off from
the lake of fire. It is "he that comes to Christ" that is saved.

Before this period he had received a bias towards the ministry from
his brother David, who used to speak of the ministry as the most
blessed work on earth, and often expressed the greatest delight in the
hope that his younger brother might one day become a minister of
Christ. And now, with altered views,--with an eye that could gaze on
heaven and hell, and a heart that felt the love of a reconciled
God,--he sought to become a herald of salvation.

He had begun to keep a register of his studies, and the manner in
which his time slipped away, some months before his brother's death.
For a considerable time this register contains almost nothing but the
bare incidents of the diary, and on Sabbaths the texts of the sermons
he had heard. There is one gleam of serious thought--but it is the
only one--during that period. On occasion of Dr. Andrew Thomson's
funeral, he records the deep and universal grief that pervaded the
town, and then subjoins: "Pleasing to see so much public feeling
excited on the decease of so worthy a man. How much are the times
changed within these eighteen centuries, since the time when Joseph
besought _the body_ in secret, and when he and Nicodemus were the only
ones found to bear the body to the tomb!"

It is in the end of the year that evidences of a change appear. From
that period and ever onward his dry register of every-day incidents is