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ders and lightens upon Mount Sinai; but between Sinai and us is the communion table, which is to us the sign that these fiery judgments cannot touch us. And therefore believers come to that table, not as crouching slaves to a tyrannical master, who is ready and waiting to scourge them; not as foes trembling to the presence of a terrible king, who is ready and waiting to destroy them; but as children to a father, as the ransomed to a Redeemer; and feeling that if there be one festival in the year, it is a communion Sabbath; and that if there ought to be a bounding heart on any Sunday, it is on that day when we celebrate the love that suffered for us, and look upon the symbol that tells us that the wrath, like the waters of the Deluge, has passed away, and that a new and joyous sunshine gilds the valley where we are sojourners, and sprinkles the everlasting hills with its first beams, beyond which our home, and our heart, and our treasure are.

CHAPTER XV.

THE THREE FOREFATHERS.

"What havoc hast thou made, foul monster, sin!
Greatest and first of ills! The fruitful parent
Of woes of all dimensions! But for thee
Sorrow and slavery had never been."

"And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.'- GEN. ix. 24-27.

NOAH planted a vineyard; discovered that fermentation could produce alcohol; drank of it, and became intoxicated. There can be no doubt from this, that ancient wine, as ancient as the Flood, was alcoholic. It is impossible to escape this conclusion. The assertion of those who contend that ancient wine had no alcohol in it, is not borne out by Scripture. Noah was not condemned for planting his vineyard, nor for fermenting his wine, nor was he guilty in that he drank wine; his guilt lay in drinking to excess. No judgment or censure is pronounced upon Noah for touching wine, but for the excess in which he indulged, some say incautiously, but that I doubt: I believe he drank criminally; and therefore sinned in the sight of God. He awoke from this excessive stupor, produced by the drinking of that which he ought to have used in moderation, and he discovered that he had been made the merriment of one of his

children about him, and pronounced the words prefixed to this chapter.

We have here the three great parents of the whole human family, Shem, and Ham, or Canaan, and Japheth. These are the three great springs of the human race, whose aboriginal distinctions are more or less perpetuated to this day; so universally and so deeply is the original impress struck on the three great families that form the earth's population, that we can still easily distinguish them by certain sharp characteristics; the three races are the Asiatic, the African, and the European. Subdivisions there unquestionably are; modifications of caste, complexion, and feature, unquestionably there are; but still, these three families are to this moment distinct. The American, I need not tell you, is not a distinct family, but an offshoot of the great European family, or the descendants of Japheth, one of the three grey fathers and founders of the human race. It needs very little physiological learning to teach us, that the whole human race has a common origin. There are moral as well as material proofs. We have identity of sorrows and joy; identity of health and sickness; identity of fears and peace; identity of life, and identity of death, to teach us unmistakably that the black skin and the white skin, however much they differ as to outward aspect, cover one common flesh and blood, and belong to one family; and are but the varying characteristics of the great race of mankind.

These three, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the founders of the human race, met together in the ark, emerged from that ark on the sides of Ararat, and went forth from the mountain range to spread the human family from it to the very ends of the habitable globe; the human race, in its founders, met once all together under one roof, and around one altar, and beneath the overshadowing wings of one

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Father; and were upheld and guided together as one crew on the stormy waves to a momentary rest on Ararat. Blessed be God, it is not the last time they shall meetthey shall meet again, emerging from a more awful catastrophe, in a yet more glorious ark, to take possession of a yet more magnificent Ararat - to enter upon a more lasting home; out of which all cares shall be banished; into which all blessings shall flow; and from which we shall never go forth exiles and strangers, like Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, to fertilize the soil with the sweat of our brow, and to water the earth with fast flowing tears; for then there will be no more sorrow, nor tears, nor sighing, nor crying, but all former things shall have passed away.

Noah sinned, and yet his sin, whilst it was his guilt, was overruled of God to be the occasion and the proof of a great and important fact. It is this -the Flood that washed away a vast population from the surface of the earth, did not wash out sin from the depths of the human heart. God said, before he let loose that dread judgment, "Every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart is only evil continually ;" and God said, after that judgment had done its mission, "I will not again curse the ground for man's sake, though the imagination of man's heart is evil. from his youth." We are told by St. Peter, that the Flood was to the antediluvians what baptism is to us; and now, as that Flood only cleansed the outer surface of the earth, but did not cleanse the inner thoughts of the heart, so baptism — for the parallelism is complete — cleanses the outer flesh, but it does not purify the inner heart. Noah emerged from the Flood a sinner; Ham stepped forth from the ark a sinner; and does it need any argument of mine to persuade any, that an unregenerate man baptized in the most canonical way, and by a priestly hand, according to the most exact ritual, under the most plausible circumstances, emerges from

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the waters in which he has been bathed, or from the sprinkling to which he has been subjected, just as he was before? giving proof that as the Flood could not make Paradise again overspread the earth with its glory, and thus anticipate millennial scenes, so ecclesiastical baptism cannot do for man that which is the prerogative and function of the Holy Spirit alone-regenerate, and sanctify, and save the soul.

This sin of Noah teaches another fact. It was overruled by God to show that Noah was not, as it were, a second Adam, by whom and in whom the great experiment of humanity was to be attempted again. He was not the proof that God was starting with a new plan, or a new foundation. The fact that he sinned is the evidence that he was made, or born rather, in the image of Adam, and inherited Adam's sin and Adam's alienation from God. All that was sinful in Noah, was from Adam; all that was holy, beautiful, and true, we are told in a previous chapter, was by grace. We learn, too, the inveteracy of man's guilt, from the fact that ages did not wipe it away, that penalties did not destroy it, that all schemes and plans ever since have all failed to alter it. The whole vessel of humanity is flawed, and marred, and tainted; and the more we know poor fallen man, the more abased we must feel. There is much in man to pity, much to deplore, much to pray for; but it is not our part to set ourselves in conscious and sceptical conceit upon the judgment throne, and fulminate anathemas, and pronounce condemnation, where it becomes. us to bow the knee at the throne of grace, and to pray that the God who made would remake and regenerate mankind.

The more immediate subject of these reflections is the sentence of Noah. Shall I call it the curse? I will rather call it the prediction pronounced by Noah, and fulfilled, as

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