‘They forsake their own Mercy,’ that is God.  The phrase is here almost equivalent to ‘His name’; and it carries the blessed thought that He has entered into relations with every soul, so that each man of us—­even if he have turned to ’lying vanities’—­can still call Him, ‘my own Mercy.’  He is ours; more our own than is anything without us.  He is ours, because we are made for Him, and He is all for us.  He is ours by His love, and by His gift of Himself in the Son of His love.  He is ours; if we take Him for ours by an inward communication of Himself to us in the innermost depths of our being.  He becomes ’the Master-Light of all our seeing.’  In the mysterious inwardness of mutual possession, the soul which has given itself to God and possesses Him, has not only communion, but may even venture to claim as its own the deeper and more mysterious union with God.  Those multiform mercies, ‘which endure for ever,’ and speed on their manifold errands into every remotest region of His universe, gather themselves together, as the diffused lights of some nebulae concentrate themselves into a sun.  That sun, like the star that led the wise men from the East, and finally stood over one poor house in an obscure village, will shine lambent above, and will pass into, the humblest heart that opens for it.  They who can say, as we all can if we will, ‘My God,’ can never want.

And if we turn to the alternative in our text, and consider who they are to whom we turn when we turn from God, there should be nothing more needed to drive home the wholesome conviction of the folly of the wisest, who deliberately prefers shadow to substance, lying vanities to the one true and only reality.  I beseech you to take that which is your own, and which no man can take from you.  Weigh in the scales of conscience, and in the light of the deepest necessities of your nature, the whole pile of those emptinesses that have been telling you lies ever since you listened to them; and place in the other scale the mercy of God, and the Christ who brings it to you, and decide which is the weightier, and which it becomes you to take for your pattern for ever.

THREEFOLD REPENTANCE

’And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, 2.  Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. 3.  So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord.  Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey. 4.  And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall he overthrown. 5.  So the people of Ninoveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. 6.  For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7.  And