as many an honest lawyer has been known to say, 'This is not a case for me; you could arrange this without litigation. I should advise you not to come to blows; get a third person to mediate.' Instead of that, there comes a harpy of the law, and says, 'Leave it to me; you must have your rights; we must prosecute ; we must hear of no compromise; we must drive it through the court;' and the consequence is that where 57. would have done the business, you do not come out of it under 500l. And it becomes the moral teacher to say to the lawyer, 'Your profession is the honourable profession of the law and justice, not the dishonourable trade of litigation and swindling.'

113. Wrong tendencies are subtle things, and assert themselves in subtle ways. I have seen where a feeling existed for wrong action long before it culminated. A man says to me, 'You know I am in the medical profession; it would be such a glorious thing if there were a great railway accident close to our hospital, and numbers of human beings were to be brought in maimed to our wards; it would be the making of the place and the medical staff; we are close to the railway, and yet all the accidents happen somewhere else.' Now a coarse joke is a coarse joke and nothing more—but some sentiments reveal the approach of a certain wrong tendency of thought; but if a doctor gets to look at his profession from the strictly professional point of view, what does he do? He entirely loses sight of the relation of the medical profession to society. He is in danger of losing the

sense of what he ought to be as a man as well as a medical man. A medical man ought to exist in order to alleviate suffering, but not to create or desire the creation of suffering in order that he may have the opportunity of relieving it.

Again, we have seen lately some curious instances of the necessity of making war. It was said in the last Franco-Prussian war that war was necessary in order to give the soldiers something to do. What did that mean? It meant that the people who had charge of the army had entirely lost sight of the proper functions of an army. They had got to esteem the army for its own sake instead of for the sake of the country. The country in their minds existed only for the army, so those who ruled by the army were compelled by the army to make war. It was a war invented by military despotism for the sake of military power and profit, and the country was sacrificed to the rapacity of the military interest. That was a selfish interest; and when you act on selfish motives you have a wrong basis of action. The clergyman ought to tell you that. The moral teacher ought to tell you that selfishness is wrong everywhere; that there is no exception to that rule, whether it be the selfishness of a little child who takes away a sugar-plum from another more helpless than himself, or the selfishness of the man who leads thousands of his fellow-creatures to slaughter because he hopes to keep himself and his despotic crew in power. The moral is the same; and, although I know very little about home politics and very little about foreign politics, and still

less about armies, I say that the man who wantonly and without a righteous cause plunges into a long and bloody war has forgotten the right use of armies, and is acting upon an immoral basis.

114. Once more, my brethren, as I am this morning busy with the plague-spots of our modern life, I may as well here allude to something which lies at the root of so much modern misery. I mean idleness. People are wicked, they are miserable, because they have got nothing to do. You say, 'May I not do what I like with my own time?' I say, No, you may not do what you like with your time. time. Your time does not belong to you, any more than my time belongs to me. If God had constituted the world on the principle of every man for himself instead of every man for his fellow-men, then you might do what you like with your own time. But you are owed to society; you have no right to rob society; you have no right to waste your time; you have no right to be idle. I will tell you what, in the divinely-constituted order of things, idleness will bring. It will breed selfishness in every possible form; it will breed all kinds of unbalanced feelings; it will breed backbiting and mischief-making; it will wake dormant lusts and stimulate lying, and malice, and treachery; and there is hardly anything bad which it will not breed ; and yet what do we find? Men and women rejoicing because they have nothing whatever to do; or whining because they have nothing to do; or looking forward to the time when they shall have nothing to do, and

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delighting in the prospect of perfect uselessness. Here is a man who hangs about the house all day saying, 'I have nothing to do.' He is a burden and worry to

himself and to his fellow-creatures. Has not the moral teacher a right to say to such a one, 'Get out, you drone, and go and find something to do?' You may say it more politely if you please, but that is what you mean. That is just what his friends feel about him. Supposing he has been trying to find something to do— say he has looked for work and not found it; well, he must try down lower and lower until he gets hold of some sort of honourable work. Men talk about the indignity of doing work that is beneath them, but the only indignity that they should care for is the indignity of doing nothing. Our Lord in early life was doubtless a poor artisan; was He not the 'Carpenter's Son,' and was He not 'subject' to His parents? Every Jew learned a trade—even kings were tradesmen. Paul made tents and Peter caught fish, but in these days to be simply useful and honest is a poor ambition.

115. But I will frankly confess that the women in this age are more to be pitied than the men, because it is less obvious how a woman who wants to be useful and do work is to find employment or occupation. Women of leisure are asking wearily, 'What are we to do?'

If I were addressing a congregation a step or two lower down in society, I should find that problem very hard to solve; but I do not find it so hard to solve when I look around me this morning. Half your morbid

feelings, half your uselessness, the irritability of your temper, your incapacity to live comfortably with your fellow-creatures, my dear sisters, is because you have nothing to do, and have never been taught that you ought to do anything. You know very well that part of your life was spent in the schoolroom; then you had your tasks prescribed; but when you emerged into the world-after you 'came out '-there were weeks and months together, every year, in which you had practically little or nothing to do with yourselves. That is quite as much the fault of parents as of daughters. My brethren, is not this a subject where the moral teacher may step in and say to mothers, 'See that your children are occupied?' 'What,' you ask, 'is my daughter to do? she must get accomplishments, she must cultivate her mind a little, pay some attention to her body; but what more? The routine of studies and accomplishments leaves my daughter unsatisfied, it is true; she quarrels all day long with her sisters, her occupations and amusements are of the most frivolous and unsatisfactory character; but what is she to do?'

116. Brethren, in the first place, there is one thing which strikes me, and which you are perfectly able to realise, and it is this: that when young women marry they are exceedingly ignorant of their household duties, and of what their husbands are likely to expect from them; therefore one great thing for a mother to do is to teach her daughter the duties of married life. Let her give her what experience she can; and she can do