Why will you count yourselves unworthy of the place in His eternal kingdom, which His boundless love and mercy have prepared? Why will you shut your hard, cold hearts against this blessed message of the Gospel, "Unto you first," and now, " God, having raised up His Son Jesus, hath sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from His iniquities"?

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II.

THE UNIVERSAL TRAVAIL.

"For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”—Rom. viii. 22.

WE know! Else what mean our tragedies? What mean those ancient shadows of the Fates? Nature is truly, not what is, but what is becoming, what is coming to be, what is about being born. And all birth is by travail. The creation groans as it gives birth to its heir; to-day groans as it gives birth to tomorrow; the old generation groans as it gives birth to the new; earth groans as it gives birth to the kingdom of heaven.

Man shares the groaning. His "state of nature is a state of travail. He too is here that he may be born to something greater. To abide in a state of nature, is to refuse the benign and fruitful anguish which issues in Redemption; it is to become willingly the abortion of this terrestrial sphere. And this is to judge oneself unworthy of everlasting life, and to choose the death which is eternal.

Paul seizes firmly, and utters in one large sentence, the meaning of this tragedy, which, if the end of it be here, is played out under the eye of Heaven. The tears that have channelled, through

all these ages, the worn cheek of humanity, the groans that have burdened the air, the blood that has stained every great pathway that man has trod, are the human form of this universal groaning. From man it comes laden with a deeper sadness than can burden the voice of the Creation; for man knows what he was born for, and what he has missed, when he is dull to the voice that calls him to be redeemed. Surely it is one of the most fundamental truths of a sound philosophy of life which is uttered in these profound and pregnant words.

To all seers, among all peoples, in all ages, this truth has unveiled itself. They seemed to catch the voice of a groaning, and they give it utterance in their tragedies, their sad epics, their litanies and psalms of life. The deep sadness of the Homeric poems is plain to every thoughtful student; it has been indicated eloquently by a master of Homeric lore. Tragedies, or comedies sadder than tragedies, are the masterpieces of the golden age of Athenian literary art. The interest of Greek philosophy centres round a prison cell, where an old man lies numb and cold; cheering his friends with the hope of the welcome which awaits him "in some happy state of the blessed," while the poison steals up to his heart. The wisest seer of Nature in Republican Rome, fairly weary of Jupiter and Juno and all the rout of Olympus, as the groundwork of the order of Creation, thought that a wild concourse and shock of atoms, by some dull chance shaping themselves into an order, might be the key to the mystery of life.

He uttered his thought on the development of Nature in a poem of wonderful power and splendour; but he left life sadder than he found it; to him there was little to live for in such a world.

The next era of human development was founded on the Cross, which has since guided the destinies of Christendom; and must guide them still, through new depths of pain, to the issue in which the travail of man and of Nature shall ultimately fruit.

In the sagas of Northern Europe, the bright god of life dies at last under the stroke of a cruel and inexorable destiny, and the twilight of the gods settles over all. To Goethe, in our modern world, Nature seemed "like a dumb captive, sighing to be delivered." Art with him was the minister of her redemption. Art in all ages, did she understand her mission, has, like her loftier sister, a message to the captive, and should be the eager handmaid of cur higher life. And is not the struggle for existence the one key to the order and progress of life, in the judgment of the keenest student of the living creation who has prophesied to our times? The struggle for existence ! Are there not times when man asks himself madly— Is there anything else, anything higher, at the root of such order or disorder as reigns in the human world?

The struggle begins very low down indeed in the scale of the Creation. The very molecules of matter are in ceaseless clash and conflict, dashing against each other with swift flight and fierce momentum, in the air around us and in the blood within us. Everywhere there is storm and stress, pressure,

conflict, defeat and victory; while everywhere an order, a progress, slowly evolve themselves out of it all. Professor Maxwell, of Cambridge, read at the Bradford meeting of the British Association, a discourse on molecules, in which he gives us a startling vision of the storm of motion which is raging round us in the world.

"If we wish to form a mental representation of what is going on among the molecules in calm air, we cannot do better than observe a swarm of bees, where every individual bee is flying furiously, first in one direction and then in another, while the swarm, as a whole, either remains at rest, or sails slowly through the air."

He tells us that invisible molecules in countless throngs are in rapid motion all round us, jostling with each other, fighting hard to keep their course, but hindered by kindred molecules that are fighting too; the whole resulting in a certain balance and equilibrium, in the midst of which, as in the centre of a cyclone of whirling atoms, we can move and work.

"We have now to conceive the molecules of the air in this hall flying about in all directions, at a rate of about seventeen miles in a minute. If all these molecules were flying in the same direction, they would constitute a wind blowing at the rate of seventeen miles a minute, and the only wind which approaches this velocity is that which proceeds from the mouth of a cannon. How, then, are you and I able to stand here? Only because the molecules