to nihilism; or at best regards the utter loss of all consciousness of personal existence as the only exodus from the ills and the burdens of life: while it is sustained by the parallel fact, that among cultivated peoples, when the sense of the reality of the spiritual world has been weakened by wanton prosperity or vicious indulgence, and all hope concerning the soul and God has died down in human hearts, suicide has been the refuge to which man has fled most eagerly, life has been the burden which he has most joyfully

cast away.

Nor can we fail to note that, even on the theory of those who hold that a bestial savage condition is the earliest estate of our race, as man emerges

1 There is no subject, perhaps, on which there is more unsound dogmatism (always excepting theology) than on the original estate of our race. It would be idle to deny that an immense body of evidence of great seeming weight has been put forth by those who hold that we can trace man back to a condition but a little higher than a brute. But nothing is more easily misunderstood and misinterpreted than the signs of the savage condition. As with childhood, it needs a special and large experience to comprehend all its bearings; and looked at simply from the scientific point of view, there is a very strong body of evidence on the other side. Mr. St. George Mivart in his "Genesis of Species" has some very interesting and able remarks on the subject. Readers of Mr. Wallace's book on the Malay Archipelago will remember his testimony as to the morale of some savage peoples among whom he dwelt so long. But the following passage from Sir H. Maine's "Village Communities" is worthy of special attention, inasmuch as his opportunities of observation were peculiarly ample, and his insight is indisputable:-"It has been strongly contended of late, that by investigation of the practices and ideas of existing savage races, at least two earlier stages of human society disclose themselves through which it passes before organising itself in family groups. In two separate volumes, each of them remarkably ingenious and interesting, Sir J. Lubbock and Mr. McLennan conceive themselves to have shown

from the life of the savage, he acquires ideas, habits, emotions and propensities to action, which seek increasingly to sustain themselves by clasping the objects of the spiritual world. The savage in his lowest condition sends his wife into the field while he takes his ease until hunger or passion moves him to the excitement of the chase or of war. As man becomes developed, that is, as we see in him with growing clearness what is meant by man, not only does he feel after a world of spiritual being around him and above him, and a Father of his spirit to whom he can commit the destinies of his life, but he becomes conscious of burdens, of obligations, of

that the first steps of mankind towards civilisation were taken from a condition in which assemblages of men followed practices which are not found to occur universally even in animal nature. Many of the phenomena of barbarism adverted to by these writers are found in India. The usages appealed to are the usages of certain tribes or races, sometimes called aboriginal, which have been driven into the inaccessible recesses of the widely-extending mountain country in the North-east of India by the double pressure of Indian or Chinese civilisation, or which took refuge in the hilly regions of Central and Southern India from the conquest of Brahminical invaders, whether or not of Indian descent. Many of these wild tribes have now for many years been under English observation, and have, indeed, been administered by British officers. The evidence, therefore, of their usages and ideas which may be forthcoming, is very superior to the slippery testimony concerning savages which is gathered from travellers' tales. . . Much which I have personally heard in India bears out the caution which I gave as to the reserve with which all speculations on the antiquity of human usage should be received. Practices represented as of universal antiquity, and universally characteristic of the origin of mankind, have been described to me as having been for the first time resorted to in our own days through the mere pressure of external circumstances or of novel temptations.” P. 16.

duties, which strain every nerve and fibre of his nature, and which he can bear joyfully only on condition of full citizenship of that spiritual and eternal world.

To take a strong but decisive instance, whatever we may be disposed to think of Christ and Christianity, one thing is patent, that the life of Christ is not only the most pathetic, but the purest, the noblest, the most fruitful chapter of human history. It had been simply impossible for Christ to have lived the life that He lived, and to have died the death that He died, unless from His inmost soul He could have said, Alone, yet not alone, for the Father is with Me." The enthusiasm of humanity will carry a man far; but the Cross and Passion can only explain themselves by the word, "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work."

Redemption means the presence of the Father with the world. "God is in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself," is the marrow of the Gospel. Man, in his creature nature, has to do with the Creator and the Ruler of the world system around him; as he realises the possession of that spiritual nature which has been embreathed into the physical, and which makes him, on the summit of the mere creature development, the first born of a new and higher order of life, Redemption takes him out of the sphere of the natural-which is no longer strong enough, rich enough, deep enough, to nourish him, which must become a grave to the spirit which seeks to live by it and plants him in the sphere of the

Divine love.

"Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual." "The first man, Adam,

was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a quickening spirit." As in Adam all die, even so in

Christ shall all be made alive."

This life of man, when he is conscious of the full burden of his obligation, and is drawn forth in devotion to the higher aims and objects, is so solemn a thing, it costs so much, and it carries in its bosom such tremendous issues-as all will understand who know the full meaning of "I"- that it seems to appeal importunately to God for His living sympathy and fellowship, and for the help of His strengthening and quickening hand. As men rise higher in culture and moral nobility they become more painfully and sometimes miserably conscious of this burden. It was Paul of Tarsus who called himself the "chief of sinners," and who cried, "O miserable man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" So heavy is the responsibility of moral judgment and action, with the issues which grow out of it, that we may well believe that God would not have laid the burden on any human spirit, but for the purpose and the promise that He Himself would take part in our nature, and would make all its solemn and profound experiences the means of drawing His child through Redemption into perfect fellowship with Himself. A world like this, a life like ours, if nothing is to grow out of them when the burden is laid down and the groaning is stilled,

would be a weltering chaos of wrong and wretchedness. But if there is a Hand above us which has hold of us and is lifting us, unveiling to us the vision of a boundless future, then we can understand how all life's strain and agony may be the noblest culture of our freedom; enlarging us, enriching us, and preparing us for the unknown, unknowable developments of eternity.

At the root of the whole, of the whole higher life of man, in which, however he may have come to it, we at any rate find him established, and which lays such heavy burdens on his spirit, lies the gospel of Redemption, the gospel of "the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." You, my readers, live in and move about the world as men and women who were born into the world to be redeemed. The Cross of Redemption is signed upon your brow; the blood of Redemption is on the lintel of your house of life. And yet, how many of you are drawling and slouching through the world, trying to make life a pastime, dreary enough in any case; to empty it of all its deeper meanings; or it may be to turn it into a hotbed of corruption, spreading the taint of a pestilence around you wherever you move. And there is the Lord who died for you, on high, watching it all; marking the waste and wreck of the being whom He redeemed unto Himself at such awful cost; saddening at the sight of the woe and the wrong, with which you are helping to fill the world which He gave His soul to save. Oh, men, men! why will you reject the counsel of your Saviour to your ruin ?