Articles, Sermons and Letters by Others

My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness (Psalm 63:5). It is a great mercy to enjoy divine ordinances in their purity; but it is a greater mercy to have our souls feasted in them. And we should not content ourselves with an external attendance, without drawing near to God in the institutions of his grace. The pure ordinances are precious to believers, and a day in his courts is better to them than a thousand; but they are not satisfied with the enjoyment of these ordinances, without enjoying their God and their Redeemer in them; and this is one thing by which they are distinguished from hypocrites and formalists. David was in a wilderness, and deprived of the public institutions of religion, when he composed this Psalm: he was detained by persecution from the courts of God; and we find him expressing his high esteem and vehement desire of them. But it was not merely the external ordinances his soul desired; he thirsted after that communion with God which he had formerly ...

James Hamilton wrote a letter to McCheyne’s father which is recorded in Smellie’s life of McCheyne. In it, he said this about McCheyne: ‘This is the most solemn event which has happened since I became a minister. It has made the last two days days of darkness and gloominess. For besides your loss and his people’s, and the loss to us who loved him as a brother, it is a heavy stroke to the Church and land. The removal of so bright a light at such a time, is a righteous but terrible judgment. I do not wish to lose the personal in the public warning; for I feel that I greatly needed it. Indolence and levity and unfaithfulness are sins that beset me; and his living presence was a rebuke to all these, for I never knew one so instant in season and out of season, so impressed with the invisible realities, and so faithful in reproving sin and witnessing for Christ. His feeble frame made his labours the more wonderful, and his sensitive spirit made fidelity more difficult to him than it would ha...

Beauty is captivating to many. The beauty of the Lord is so to all by whom it is seen. Zechariah, struck with the display thereof, exclaimed, ‘How great is his goodness, and how great is his beauty!’ To behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple, was the one thing which David desired and sought after. I wish it may be the same with the writer and every reader of this paper. The beauty of the Lord cannot be expressed. The eloquence of men and angels is utterly inadequate to the task. To set it forth no metaphor is, or ever can be found, no, not among the brightest glories, nor the greatest beauties of this transitory dying world. Everything in God is the perfection of beauty. There is, saith an apostle, one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; to which I may add, there are many other glories and beauties in the wide creation; but let it be remembered, they are not originals, they are all derived, and have no beauty but what Go...